Bornfreund 鈥� a senior fellow at New America, where she previously was director of early and elementary education policy 鈥� shines a light on academic pressure on young children. In her book, she digs into the history of kindergarten and how it鈥檚 changed, chronicles her visits to over 50 classrooms in 13 states, and speaks to education and policy experts about ideas for transforming kindergarten to prioritize how kids learn best.

Kindergarten is regarded as the connector between pre-K and early elementary grades, but Bornfreund views the entire journey from pre-K through third grade as critical for young children鈥檚 development. 

In order for these years to lay a sturdy foundation for everything that follows, the kindergarten experience should , including connections with peers and teachers. Over the years, however, kindergarten has become increasingly according to Bornfreund, particularly in the aftermath of the No Child Left Behind Act, which became federal law in 2002. 鈥淭he new emphasis on testing and accountability under the law put pressure on schools and teachers to achieve at higher levels for each child,鈥� she wrote.

The book laments the state of kindergarten today, where classroom experiences are overly scripted and funding is insufficient in many communities. At the same time, Bornfreund finds teachers who are providing meaningful experiences for young learners against the odds. In the conversation below, she shares her perspective on what a strong kindergarten experience looks like and offers insights on how schools, families and policymakers can reshape kindergarten to help children thrive. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are children entering kindergarten with such a wide range of abilities?

That kindergarten year is the first accessible-to-all opportunity into formal public education. Even as widespread as pre-K has become, not everyone has access to that public opportunity, but every child does have access to kindergarten. If they attended a high-quality pre-K, the kindergarten year can often be somewhat of a repeat for them. If they were in childcare or any other kind of early childhood environment, it’s going to be pretty jarring. Or if they didn’t have any formal preschool experience at all, it can be fairly jarring. And so there does need to be more attention to 鈥� all the different types of experiences that children have before they get into kindergarten.

What are the key differences between children who have had some kind of formal experience before kindergarten and those who have not?聽

While pre-K often does build early literacy and numeracy skills, it’s also focused on the whole child. So the executive function that helps students to be able to sit and listen and line up and understand what it means to wait their turn, but also the social and emotional development. And that is one of the areas that is lacking in a lot of kindergarten [classrooms], not because teachers don’t understand that it’s important or don’t want to be able to focus more on the whole child, but because the schedule in many places 鈥� is so rigid, and the expectations of what teachers should be doing with students in kindergarten classrooms don鈥檛 allow for time to focus on those whole-child areas. 

Where did you find school districts that draw upon the research with the most fidelity?

The really transformed, starting with pre-K, and built their own curriculum. It’s called the focused on preschool, pre-K, kindergarten and they’ve also gone up to second grade.聽 鈥� It engages students in a lot of playful learning practices, and it has a heavy focus on not just building those reading skills, but also building the background knowledge opportunities for children to talk and interact with each other. Boston has really transformed the majority of their elementary schools now, and that has spread. Those approaches have spread to other parts of Massachusetts as well as Maine. The Focus Curriculum is open source, so anyone can take and use it or adapt it for their state specifics or regional differences.聽

Is it a more rigorous academic program or is it more play-based?聽

Both. It’s aligned with Massachusetts standards, and it incorporates within the curriculum these play-based approaches. 

And that’s something you’d like to see spread more widely?聽

Yes. Or other curriculum materials like that. And I would just say [that] for young kids, including kindergarten through at least second grade, the play-based approach is the rigor for those kids, because it’s how they learn best, when looking at the science of early learning and development. And it doesn’t mean free play, that kids are just doing whatever all day 鈥� Looking at Boston, that play-based learning is guided play. Teachers are curating the kinds of materials that are in different center activities. They are moving around the room when children are engaged in those activities, asking probing questions to 鈥� support children in using different vocabulary or getting at the specific standard that teachers are wanting to focus on in those particular centers. So it’s structured, it’s guided by the teacher and it’s rigorous. 

What鈥檚 your perspective on delaying kindergarten, as some experts recommend, especially for boys?

I would say that the problem isn’t that 5-year-old boys aren’t ready for kindergarten, or that some kids aren’t ready for kindergarten. It’s that kindergarten has become unready for 5-year-olds. Five-year-olds are active social learners, particularly young boys 鈥� and kindergarten teachers aren’t able to 鈥� or, in some cases, aren’t sure how to 鈥� deliver those active social learning opportunities. That’s the real challenge. So red shirting 鈥� or holding kids back a year isn’t going to solve that problem. 

Why is relationship-building so important in kindergarten classrooms?

Before children can learn from their teachers, they have to be able to trust them. That鈥檚 not a nice-to-have. Those relationships have to be in place between the teacher and the student, regardless of the grade, but it’s particularly important in kindergarten, when many children are coming together for the first time with another adult or with other children. They’re a core piece of that learning. 

How does technology support relationships and play? Or does it interfere?

I visited several classrooms in different places where children are on tablets 鈥� for much of the day or for too much of the day. There’s a place for technology. I think some of the programs that children are using are suited for supporting differentiation or just meeting specific skills that children are developing. 鈥� But the technology doesn’t build relationships. They’re a tool, not a teacher, and we shouldn’t treat them in schools as if they can replace a teacher and a relationship. 

Were there classrooms you walked into while writing this book and you were like, “Aha, this is it. This is what it ought to be like”?聽

There were a lot where I felt like I just wanted to stay all day, but in this one particular room [in Maine], I got into the classroom before students started coming in, and as students were coming in, the teacher was greeting them and asking them questions. This was a Monday. One question she asked was, “How did that softball game go this weekend?” 鈥� She was just picking up on things that she knew about students and digging in and asking them how certain things went and following up on that. And then students, during their morning work as everyone was coming in, there had been strong routines built because they knew exactly what they were going to be doing. They got their 鈥� morning STEM toys out, and they were sitting at tables and doing different things with their table mates. And that was just more of a before the day started free activity, a lot of choice in that, but kids were talking, they were working together. 鈥� Then they came together for their morning meeting. 鈥� That start of the day is a really important way to help children feel welcome and ready to learn and ready to be in a community with both their teacher and fellow classmates.

What else stood out from your travels?

I visited a classroom in Oklahoma [and] the teacher noticed the energy of her class was dipping. Her kids needed a break. So she called [for] a little dance party 鈥� two minutes to help everybody reset 鈥� and then got back to what her instruction was. In Ferndale, Washington, the superintendent has made play-based learning a priority for the whole district in kindergarten, and they鈥檙e moving it up to first grade too. The way that works is, there’s an hour of dedicated time that follows reading instruction. The students are essentially taking what they’ve learned in that reading block and then applying it to play-based learning. 

What鈥檚 one recommendation for making the transition from pre-K to kindergarten smoother?

One thing I would say is to give pre-K through first grade teachers dedicated time to plan together. 鈥� Having that dedicated time to think together and to plan together is one of the most high-leverage things that schools can do. Teachers appreciate it too.

What advice do you have for parents?聽

Ask questions about what kindergarten looks like. What opportunities are there for play-based learning, for building relationships, for science? One of the things I point out is that science is almost all but gone from a lot of kindergarten classrooms because there’s just not the time for it. So really probing and asking those kinds of questions of the teacher, but also of the principal is important for parents to be doing. 

What about policymakers?

Kindergarten is really the only grade where we fund it like an afterthought, but then [we] call it this important foundation. We should invest in what it takes to deliver on the teaching and learning that aligns with how we know students learn.

The author of books, Barnett has become a key evangelist for high-quality children鈥檚 literature, particularly the picture book. As the Library of Congress鈥檚 ninth , his “Consider the Picture Book” initiative invites adult conversations about the form. And Barnett scored a rare feat for a children鈥檚 book author, this spring publishing , a best-selling book of essays about writing for children. 

Barnett marvels that two experimental children鈥檚 books from the last century, Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd鈥檚 Goodnight Moon (1947) and Maurice Sendak鈥檚 Where the Wild Things Are (1963) remain best-sellers. It鈥檚 as if James Joyce鈥檚 Ulysses and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson were among the books most widely read by American adults, he writes.

Yet when he looks out on the modern publishing landscape, Barnett most often sees books that simultaneously do too much and too little: books that seek to instruct and impose morals and manners on children, while others aren鈥檛 quite rich and strange enough for the 鈥渇lexible, unpredictable, sublime, and untamable鈥� imaginations of young people. 

Many readers likely learned of Make Believe due to the controversy surrounding Barnett鈥檚 tongue-in-cheek assertion about the overall quality of children鈥檚 literature. Amending science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon鈥檚 that 90% of sci-fi writing is 鈥渃rud,鈥� Barnett suggested that perhaps 94.7% of kids鈥� books are likewise crud 鈥� a higher percentage, he wrote, because they鈥檙e made by people 鈥渨ho are not members of their intended audience.鈥�

His fellow children鈥檚 authors were not amused, with hundreds signing an urging the Library of Congress to drop him as an ambassador.

“How do you measure the expansion of a child’s soul? We don’t have that ruler, but that is the stuff that we’re talking about.”

Barnett later apologized and now tells 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo that the point of the comparison wasn鈥檛 to paint children鈥檚 books as worse, statistically speaking, than other types of fiction. Rather, he was pointing out that it鈥檚 comparatively harder to write good children鈥檚 books 鈥渢han almost any other kind of art-making that we do.鈥� 

Toppo and Barnett recently sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about the controversy, children鈥檚 books and the importance of reading aloud, among other topics. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with Goodnight Moon. You call it this 鈥渕asterpiece of experimental literature鈥� and say its ubiquity obscures its strangeness. I reread it the other night, and you鈥檙e right: It is a very strange, very dark book. It didn’t have to be that way, and I wonder: Why is its strangeness so important?

It’s funny 鈥� it didn’t have to be that way. There’s a communication Margaret Wise Brown had with Clement Hurd: She sent a Goya painting, a very strange Goya painting, to Hurd, and said, “This is what the book should feel like.” She knew that that was in her manuscript, and nothing that Hurd had ever done or did afterward really looked like that. And I think that strangeness, that darkness, that eeriness, is because it has a strange and dark and eerie subject. It’s bedtime, right? Going to sleep is really one of the first hard things we ask children to do all by themselves. It’s mysterious. It’s a little scary, and ultimately, it’s this solitary thing. There is an old lady in a rocking chair next to that bed who sort of appears and disappears throughout the story. We can be there, but ultimately, you’re alone in the face of this huge mystery, and you have to surrender to sleep and a completely altered state of consciousness that no adult can really describe well. There’s mystery, the void. All of these things are part of that experience.

It can also be really cozy and warm, and I think that the book gets both of those things. There’s a warm fire. There are these comforting cadences, and I think it’s beautifully matched not just to its subject, but what its subject, going to sleep, means for kids. Great art for kids is like great art generally. It tells the truth about what it means to be a person in the world, but it means something different to be a kid. And I think that that book is so alive to bedtime for children. 

Let’s start with the pictures: Things disappear and reappear off the drying rack. That balloon, that famous red balloon, is sitting in the most aggravating, unnerving place possible on the page. There are all of these weird, uncomfortable, eerie things that happen that for me kind of culminate in maybe the most famous part of the book, deservedly 鈥� I think it’s one of the most exciting pages in the history of picture books. We’re bidding goodnight to everybody. “Goodnight, comb. Goodnight, brush.” There’s a picture of a comb. There’s a picture of a brush. “Goodnight, nobody.” And then there’s not a picture of anything. It’s an empty page. 

Somehow the two of them figured out a way to depict nothingness, depict absence, conjure the void, and not just to conjure it, but to acknowledge it, to bid it goodnight, to treat it as maybe not a friend, but as as something that you can be polite to. You can use language, and say goodnight to it. And after that moment, Margaret Wise Brown’s language becomes very regular, very metered. You get these repeating “Shhs.” It’s a book that acknowledges that this is very scary, very strange, very weird, but that also it’s going to be O.K., and both of those things are true. That’s a paradox. Bedtime, going to sleep 鈥� it’s scary. It’s also restorative. It’s mysterious. It’s also quotidian, and that book, without saying it explicitly, just by arranging words and pictures in the right way, captures that complicated truth. That is why it endures. That is why that goodnight book is still the goodnight book. It’s probably the most widely read, commercially successful experimental poem ever published in America.

The weirdest goodnight book is also the best-selling one.

Yes.

I’ve been writing a lot about the crisis in young people’s reading for pleasure, and I’ve taken it as a given that we’re in this golden age of children’s books. You’re making me think that perhaps there’s a bigger problem, that maybe the books themselves aren’t as rich as they need to be, or that a lot of them aren’t rich enough for the task.

This is a super-rich time for children’s books generally, for the picture book especially. But I also think that there is never a time in which there aren’t many adults who see a children’s book as merely a tool, either an educational or a behavioral tool, or both.

So you don’t see the problem as much about the books themselves as about our approach?

Children’s literature is not monolithic, just like adult literature is not monolithic. I think that sometimes the book is an expression of an adult’s desire to teach or even control a kid. But in general, for me the problem starts before you even get to the book: How do adults conceive of their relationship to children? And so often when we encounter kids, we are in a position of authority 鈥� and understandably so. I have a five-year-old. As a father, it is my job to sometimes create order, make a set of rules, be an authority. Keep him safe. Teach him things. It’s not the only aspect of it. It’s a multifaceted role.

I was a substitute teacher and then I taught writing at a nonprofit that I ran for a while. Being a teacher, that is a position of authority mostly, but there are shades to it too. It’s all multifaceted. But basically, we’re used to being in charge, and we’re used to thinking of kids as people merely to be taught, to be improved, to really be more like us. And I think that there are other ways to be around kids. Literature, poetry, story for story’s sake 鈥� that vein of children’s books, which is just one thing that a book can do, is something very exciting that I think only a book can do. It鈥檚 liberating. It’s a chance for adults and kids to set aside this hierarchy that normally governs our interactions, especially in the school day, and to just have a group art experience and to talk about it. 

The story rug, to me, is this space in school that is unlike any other. It’s in school. It’s part of school. Your teacher is there reading to you, and then you are having a discussion. But the discussion is open. It can get personal in ways that you’re not really at liberty to be in other parts of the school day. Sometimes your teacher cries. Sometimes your teacher laughs really hard. Sometimes your teacher messes up and mispronounces a word or gets a rhyme wrong. That’s thrilling too! And then also you’re talking about taste and preference and interpretation, which you don’t always get to do at school. But really pretty quickly, we’re doing civics too, because let’s say I loved the book that you just read, and the kid next to me, she hated it. Well, how do she and I talk about it with each other without making each other feel lesser? I watch kids do that. I watch kids do that so often in ways that I’m like, “Adults don’t know how to do this.” Book clubs will end up looking like a fight scene on Bravo, whereas these kids are having just the most beautiful discussion of their distinct viewpoints.

At one point in Make Believe, you imagine an adult talking to a kid about reading, saying: “You know, this thing that we’ve been doing together, now you must do it alone and enjoy it.” There are lots of people thinking about different ways to make reading more social. Do you have a vision of a better way?

We have these two things, ideally, we do with reading, and they sit alongside each other and feed each other, but they’re really separate. How do we teach kids to read? How do we help them acquire this skill, which is very difficult? But also, this is our moment to show them the joys that a book can bring, to make them love this. And in fact, if we’ve only done the first thing, I think we’ve lost. But if we manage to do the second thing, that will underpin not just the acquisition of reading, but the rest of your life of curiosity, of learning things from books. Getting kids involved in that way 鈥� it is making sure that a story, a poem, an artwork is not just an avenue to a set of standards, but also is something that can be enjoyed in its own right. And giving kids the freedom both to say what a book means to them and even what they think about a book 鈥� also giving them the freedom to pick some of their reading at school 鈥� obviously this is tough, especially at a time where measurement and measurable outcomes are so important. 

The hard thing is that although you do learn from art, it can be hard to mount a defense of the value of art and literature in a system that only responds to data. How do you measure the expansion of a child’s soul? We don’t have that ruler, but that is the stuff that we’re talking about. It may sound lofty, but to me it is at the center of what education is in the first place. We’re trying to learn to be humans in the world.

You told The New York Times in an last spring, “I’m interested in launching a cultural reevaluation of the picture book as an art form.” I wonder if you could paint us a picture of what that would look like.

The picture book is one of the great literary forms, and it’s a unique literary form that belongs next to the novel, the short story, poetry, plays as one of the great ways that humans have come up with to tell stories, to share ideas, to capture feeling, to preserve histories, to explore the natural world, the interior world. It’s got everything. It can do all of those things. It’s a unique form. It is actually the only one of those forms that I mentioned right there that is native to children’s books. 

There are great children’s novels, great children’s comics, great children’s songs, poems. But we took all those forms and figured out how they would work for kids. Children’s literature came up with the picture book, and it is our great contribution to world literature. I think that we underestimated it, though. We underestimated it for two reasons, and one is we don’t talk a lot about how picture books work and why they work. And the other reason is because we underestimate kids, and we especially underestimate young kids 鈥� and that is the picture book’s audience. How do you change our view of children? That’s a huge project and a necessary project. But how do we change our understanding of how the picture book works? There’s work that we can do there. 

It’s now on pause, but for a while I had a newsletter with , the illustrator, that was called , and as soon as we launched it, it went onto the Top 10 art Substacks on the platform, and way bigger than just kids’ book people, because people were hungry for this. They did want to read about it. We were like, “Wow, there are a lot of people curious about how picture books work, and they’re not able to find the kind of coverage in mainstream organs.” And I think so much of that is because a lot of us remember picture books that we loved as kids. We still remember them. It’s also because a lot of adults, whether they’re in the classroom reading to kids or at bedtime, putting a kid to bed with one, two, three stories, you see how powerful this thing is, not just for the kid, but also you’ll be loading up the dishwasher an hour later, still thinking about that story too. You know that something profound is happening in these books, but what is happening and why? 

“That adult reading out loud is an equal collaborator with author and illustrator. They are deciding how quickly to read or how slowly to read. They are making cuts and adjustments to the story on the fly. They are choosing what the characters’ voices sound like.”

Reading aloud is this rare moment where all kinds of adults do it. And when they do it, they are part of the artwork. There’s the author, the illustrator, and the adult who reads these books out loud. And that adult reading out loud is an equal collaborator with author and illustrator. They are deciding how quickly to read or how slowly to read. They are making cuts and adjustments to the story on the fly. They are choosing what the characters’ voices sound like. They are showing you with their own face how to feel about this story. You’re an actor who has been cast in every part. You are like a musician who is handed this instrument that is also the score. You’re an artist. 

I want to ask you about this unpleasantness you had last spring with your amendment of Theodore Sturgeon鈥檚 “90% of everything is crud” law. A lot of people were upset and hurt, and I wonder: It鈥檚 a couple of months later. Do you have either a more accurate percentage or another way to think about it?

I’m really sorry that I hurt people with what I wrote there, and it wasn’t my intention. I would definitely write it differently now. The point of that passage was not the percentage. It was to say that it was harder to write and succeed at a book for kids than almost any other kind of art-making that we do. It’s always hard to make a work of art. There are so many things that can go wrong. I can tell you from this desk right here. But what making a book for kids asks us to do is to, as an adult, cross this experiential chasm and make something that ultimately is not about reflecting our own lives as adults or serving our own interests, but to really make something for kids that is authentic and relevant and recognizable to them as a truth about the world. It’s a really hard thing that we have to do, and it’s worth doing. But oh man, is it so hard.

Multiple surveys of American parents over the past few years have revealed that pressures are mounting. In Stress in America 2023, an annual survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, parents were more likely than other adults to report certain stressors; reported that on most days, their stress is completely overwhelming. In April 2025, more than of parents of young children indicated experiencing emotional distress, according to data from the RAPID Survey Project. A survey published in May by New America found that who have children under age 6 expressed that they wished they had more quality time with their children. 

With this reality for parents, it鈥檚 no wonder that debates over the American childcare sector are intensifying as the midterm elections approach. 

A recent report, , reveals that in the absence of a functional childcare system that meets their needs, many families rely on a patchwork of informal and formal care for their babies and young kids. More than two-thirds of children under age 5, the analysis found, receive care from a relative and grandparents play a large and growing part in this picture, with nearly half of children under age 5 cared for by a grandparent.

Authored by economist Sarah Jane Glynn and published by the Roosevelt Institute, the report draws upon 2023 data from the U.S. Census Bureau鈥檚 , a longitudinal survey that provides detailed information on families鈥� childcare arrangements as well as income, employment, household composition and government program participation. Over the years, the U.S. Census Bureau has released reports on childcare using data from the survey, but the most recent version was published in 2013 with data gathered in 2011. Glynn鈥檚 analysis compares the data from 2023 with the data from 2011. 

: 鈥淔amilies are assembling care from the options available to them. A week of care might include a grandparent, an after-school program or a parent watching a child while trying to work. Some arrangements fit a family鈥檚 needs. Others reflect a more difficult reality of formal care that may be too expensive, too far away, or unavailable when parents need it.鈥�

In the interview below, Glynn, whose career includes time with the U.S. Department of Labor and the Center for American Progress, highlights how the current childcare economy differs from the more traditional center-based model often reflected in legislation and political debate. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When analyzing the data, what are the big patterns you noticed?

The biggest change has to do with mothers reporting that they’re caring for their children at the same time that they’re doing other things. More than six times as many moms are saying that in 2023, relative to 2011. 

Do you anticipate that this trend will continue?

I think some of that is going to be sticky, honestly. We have seen some shifts in terms of expectations and the ways that people are organizing their work lives and their personal lives. And you can spin that in multiple ways. Whether it’s viewed as a positive or a negative, I think depends on perspective. 

Does this obligation of simultaneous work and caregiving represent a new way of balancing the economy on the backs of women?

Absolutely. And I think the age of the children really matters a lot here too, because if you’re thinking about a parent who’s a mom in her home office working, and her 8-year-old or 9-year-old is at the kitchen table working on homework in the afternoon after they’ve come home from school, technically, that mom is still supervising her child in some way. She’s still in the house. It’s what time-use researchers would call 鈥渟econdary childcare.鈥� You’re sort of supervising the kid and that you’re home if there’s an emergency or something, but you’re not actively engaging with them in the same way you would with a younger child. But we still see really high rates of moms reporting that they’re caring for their kid while they’re working or otherwise busy for children who are under 5. 

When you’ve got over a quarter of mothers saying that they’re watching their child who is under 5 while they’re working or doing something else, that is, to me, a very striking finding and is showing just how incredibly stretched those moms are, because that’s a lot to be juggling at the same time. You’re working, you’re going to school, you’re doing something else that requires your full attention and you’re taking care of a baby, a toddler, a preschooler. 

What other pressures are parents of young children facing?

Childcare prices have gone up at rates that are higher and faster than overall inflation. Everything has gotten more expensive, but childcare has gotten even more expensive in ways that are not just about what’s been happening across the economy more broadly. And there’s just extreme shortages in a lot of places where there are not enough slots. 鈥� Those waitlists can be really long. And anecdotally, I know people whose kids were entering pre-K when they finally got a call from the daycare center that they’d been on the waitlist for for three or four years.

What are the consequences of this situation?

Nobody wants children to be in an unsafe environment where there aren’t enough teachers, where the ratios are really bad, but that’s the scenario that we’re creating when we continue to erode job quality. Why would somebody want to enter into this field 鈥� even if they are passionate about it, deeply skilled and have a background in education 鈥� if people get burned out and leave because they can’t afford to continue working as early childhood educators? 鈥�

There’s a million different reasons why this is a market failure, but there has to be government intervention, in terms of funding, or we’re never going to be able to solve this problem. 鈥� I am heartened because there are multiple bipartisan bills in Congress right now. This is a bipartisan issue. Folks across the political spectrum understand why it’s a problem, that it requires a lot of money and that we鈥檝e got to figure out where that will come from.

Between 2011 and 2023, the years you analyzed data from, there were a number of factors that shaped your findings, including the pandemic and the rise of remote work. What else do you think comes into play? 

Some of them are what I would argue are more overall positive shifts, [including] heightened labor force participation among women, and among mothers specifically. 鈥� There were also some negative factors that were pushing folks into the labor force, like increased inflation and rising costs, but we had women and moms who, in other times might not have worked 鈥� who might have stayed home 鈥� going into the labor force during that time period. But you also have, at the same time, a lot of issues in terms of accessing childcare. We saw the number of childcare centers decline during the pandemic. A lot of those rebounded. There were a lot of efforts and a lot of money that was pumped into childcare as a result of pandemic spending to try to fix that problem. 

But the funding didn鈥檛 last.

No, it wasn’t sustained. So that’s part of the problem, too. Do folks have access? How uneven is that access? And so much of this depends on where you live, because there’s so much variation state to state in terms of the investments that are made in childcare access.

Which data trends surprised you?

One of the things that shocked me was how high the rate of grandparent care was. I did not expect to see such a large share of children being routinely regularly cared for by their grandparents. 鈥� I think about this in terms of people I know. My parents are not providing day-to-day care for my niece and nephews, but they do end up providing a good amount of childcare. And that’s great for us because my parents are retired. They are healthy and active and able to do that. That is a beneficial choice that my sister and my brother are making for their family when they have grandma and grandpa watching their kids. But for other families, maybe grandma doesn’t want to watch the kids or maybe she’s not in great health or doesn’t have great mobility, but she’s around and she’ll do it for free. And so it may not be the optimal choice that a family would want.

What kinds of research need to happen to build upon the data presented in this report? 

In this research, we’re really focused on the children. The kids are the focus. Where are they? Who’s watching them? The [next step] is looking at the parents and looking at work disruptions as a result of childcare problems. Who’s experiencing a work disruption 鈥� whether that’s having to take a day off, having to cut their hours, or having to leave work entirely because they don’t have access to reliable childcare? There were much higher rates of disruption than I expected to see. It was common in a way that really surprised me, even as someone who’s been studying this for over a decade, it still surprised me how frequent this was. The less surprising piece is that it’s mostly moms who end up experiencing those disruptions far more than fathers do. 

What鈥檚 the one big takeaway from 鈥淲ho鈥檚 Minding the Kids These Days鈥�?

If you care about the economy and the ability of people to work, then you should care about access to childcare and other forms of care as well, because it prevents people from being able to participate fully in the economy.

Joe Biden that he will soon release a memoir of his time in office. That volume follows on the heels of Jill Biden鈥檚 , which triggered controversy when some Democrats was attempting to gloss her husband鈥檚 delayed decision to not to seek reelection. And recent polls have toward the former president, with voters favorably comparing his economic record to his successor鈥檚.

So far, however, only one published retrospective has provided deep insight into the education legacy of the Biden White House. Written by New School Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the account appears as a chapter in , an essay collection featuring contributions from over a dozen historians. 

The author of , Petrzela examines President Biden鈥檚 K鈥�12 efforts within the longer context of a political life stretching back to the 1970s. At the outset of that half-century career, the 30-something senator was billed as a different kind of Democrat, and doubtful about the benefits of directing more money to schools. 

That early record stood in contrast with the first few years of his presidency. In early 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a gargantuan spending bill, while also backing off from the education reform goals of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither that local schools move away from virtual learning as the COVID pandemic wound down. Perhaps the boldest executive move on education came in the form of a failed bid to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. 

After four years, the result was a muddle, Petrzela concludes. The increasingly embattled president advanced some ambitious K鈥�12 priorities, from massive ESSER expenditures to a revision of Title IX around LGBT rights in schools. But his education initiatives largely unfolded far from public attention, and the absence of assertive messaging allowed .

In an interview with 社区黑料鈥檚 Kevin Mahnken, Petrzela spoke about the recurrence of cultural conflicts in schools, the public鈥檚 COVID-era frustrations with Biden鈥檚 party, and why the president seemed to dart left on education and other issues.

鈥淒uring Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader,鈥� she said. 鈥淗e was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit.鈥�

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

社区黑料: You do a great job examining the Biden administration’s education priorities in the light of Joe Biden’s early political career, which began during the busing controversies of the 1970s. Was there anything about that period that surprised you during your research?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: I knew something of Joe Biden’s political evolution. But when I went back to the primary sources, I was actually surprised at about Great Society programs, and about this abiding faith 鈥� which others in his party had 鈥� that Big Government could fix really thorny social issues. 

When you already know that his presidential administration oversaw this huge outlay of money called the American Rescue Plan, and that his whole career was really about expanding federal spending in education, it was really something else to read . I’m paraphrasing, but he was essentially saying that America can’t spend its way out of its problems, and that Democrats shouldn’t see government spending through rose-colored lenses.

Biden’s reputation for being a new kind of Democrat 鈥� implicitly contrasted with the Great Society consensus, as you say 鈥� is ironic because, once he became president, the predecessor he was most often compared with . So he seems to finally end up in the same place he departed from.

If you think about what happened in both parties across the intervening decades, you really see the lines harden in terms of who’s onboard with expanding government spending and who comes down against it as the root of all evil. 

But early in the 1970s, the jury was still out on how this would fall. You had hardcore right-wingers in the John Birch Society, who thought that the New Deal was one step away from socialism. But it still wasn’t totally clear that the Great Society would establish the political architecture of the Democratic Party until today, or that the Republicans would define themselves against it. For that reason, it would be increasingly untenable for Democrats in the mainstream of the party to resist it in the way that Biden raised those questions early on.

So in the scope of that long political history, his trajectory makes perfect sense. But it’s still jarring to look at the primary sources and see how that shift happened.

Conservatives seemed to acculturate themselves to the New Deal in ways they never did to the liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement has usually pushed to shrink the government, even if Medicare was here to stay.

And we thought the Department of Education was here to stay! One of the things we teach in the history of education is how Ronald Reagan vowed to get rid of the department, and instead, under his administration, it was expanded. That’s a moment that is often used by political historians to show the enduring power of these agencies, and how they have a kind of permanence to them. But under Trump II, we’re seeing that they’re not so permanent.

But that move isn’t just a Trump-era relic. The era of big Washington-led initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the commitment to education reform that they embodied, petered out during President Obama’s second term. In retrospect, the Biden administration seems like the first glimpse of a post-reform Democratic Party. 

I agree with that. But the big turning point we’ve got to think about, especially in terms of what my chapter was responding to, was COVID. More than the end of NCLB, COVID redraws the lines of politics and discourse around education. 

Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t say education was off to the side 鈥� because we’re always fighting about education 鈥� but there was a lot of stuff that came into being, largely through Democrats during the Great Society and its aftermath, that people were not fundamentally questioning. Everyone wants their kids to read and write at school, and they want special education to be available at their kids’ schools. 

I’m a cultural historian, so I’m not trying to underplay the conflict that existed, but in 2020 and beyond, you have a series of converging circumstances that really put schools at the center of lots of people’s concerns about what’s going wrong in society. And it’s very easy to point at the Democrats as the villains who created those circumstances.

You point to a handful of major education pillars of the Biden education agenda, all grouped under the general theme of equity: Close to $200 billion in federal funding to states and districts to cope with the pandemic, and an overhaul of Title IX, but no real action on NCLB-style accountability and no immediate pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning. Would you agree that these pillars largely reflected the growing influence and importance of teachers’ unions in Democratic politics?

That’s very accurate. You see the disappearance of the accountability agenda, which, to be clear, had some major problems. But there was a combination of a long-term push to loosen accountability, often led by the heads of unions, with the move to keep schools closed. And added to that was an emphasis on social justice content that a lot of people would say is both politically biased and irrelevant to fundamental academic skills.聽

At the same time, due to the school closures, a lot of parents had a much closer perspective on what their children were learning or not learning. That made it a complete powder keg, and one that seemed to have been created by Democrats 鈥� particularly because of the role of unions at the heart of things.

During the 2020 primaries, you might have predicted that a Biden education platform would resemble that of President Obama, to whom he closely tied himself. But right after becoming the nominee, he’s naming an education task force with two teachers’ union heads and no notable figures from the party’s reform wing. I’m wondering whether a decision like that reflects coalitional politics, Biden’s authentic beliefs, or some combination of the two.

Early in his career, Biden really cared about education and made it a big part of his politics. Jill Biden is obviously an educator, which may have contributed to that. So it’s kind of a surprise that he turned away from it in some ways, to the extent that I don’t think there really was a coherent educational agenda under the Biden administration. Democrats, in general, were really struggling with the issue, so who’s going to step in to create a unified agenda? It’s going to be the teachers’ unions, and they make it their agenda. 

In the article, I give the unions credit for some things. In other places, I think they’re totally off-base. There are a lot of different interest groups that find a way into policy conversations through union advocacy, and not all of those union priorities are working to improve education or to make Democrats look particularly good on education. 

And all of this is part of why you saw the Biden administration not really saying much about schools. You could say they were actually doing a lot, especially with the American Rescue Plan, but they’re not saying much. It’s a passive or surreptitious cession of power, and not a lot of control over messaging. If you think about it through the left-right perspective, it did allow the parts of the left that were aligned with unions to have a ton of latitude. But it also allowed the right to paint the Bidens as the vanguard of this radical leftist takeover of America. That’s totally unfair and over the top, but the administration didn’t do much to resist that characterization.

How much do you think these developments were accelerated by the first Trump term? Following the deep resistance to the views and policies of Betsy DeVos, it would have been really hard for President Biden to enter office in 2021 as an unreconstructed advocate for high-quality charter schools, for example.

Just think of how the discourse moved around education policy during that time. It really accelerated throughout the Biden administration because they didn’t do anything to change course. There was such a push-back against standardized tests, accountability, and charter schools, and a determination to attack “white supremacy culture” 鈥� with that term used to encapsulate all of these ideas that had been central to the education reform movement, from hard work to punctuality. There was no way Biden could come back and align himself with that agenda.

I think this gets at why Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after she’d been so critical of his views on school busing. I’m not saying he was insincere in making that selection, but it was an important political move to show, in a very efficient way, how he’d changed his tune on education and race.

The exchange between those two during the Democratic primary debate, on an issue that was last relevant to national politics in the 1970s, seems even more significant in retrospect than it was at the time. Are there themes from that era of liberal politics that dovetail with similar debates today? 

Yeah, it’s bizarre in some ways that policies from 50 years ago can play such a central role in politics today. But and its aftermath 鈥� both the boldness of that idea and its unfulfilled legacy 鈥� kind of remains the central fulcrum point of educational politics, especially as it relates to race. 

When the LBJ was in office, there was an ongoing debate on the left about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. The Great Society, I would say, still came from the opportunity side of that spectrum. It’s shifting through the ’60s, but you had a lot of mainstream Democrats talking explicitly about opening the doors to opportunity. 

On the other hand, you’re just starting to see commitments to differential funding to achieve equal outcomes. Even though Title I exists by that point, it’s not as much a part of the discourse as today, when there’s so much talk about equity 鈥� and not just that, but lots of arguments that equality of opportunity, or meritocracy, or a level playing field, are just fantasies. That’s not how people were talking about these issues at the beginning of Biden’s career, even as they were creating the infrastructure for equity-centric policies.

I’m reminded that, in his Senate career, Biden was a kind of bellwether of the Democratic mainstream, always managing to . Maybe the simplest explanation for his migration on schools is that, rather than any kind of personal conviction, he moved with the party away from what had become an uncomfortable position in the 2010s.

I think so. 

I’m going to sound pretty critical saying this, but during Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader. He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit. Particularly on education, which was at the center of the intense political discord of that moment, he wasn’t really staking a claim to move the discourse in a new direction. 

And that was in spite of the fact that these were big policies: the American Rescue Plan, which was a very big piece of spending, the equity agenda, the focus on racial justice, the willingness to put union leaders front and center. In the article, I highlight the moment when Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle [presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, respectively] were brought as kids were still learning from home. As a parent, I remember that felt like a huge slap in the face.

You also write a little about the “,” which has seen college-educated voters move left and non-college-educated voters trend rightward. I wonder if that phenomenon has seen both sides polarize against the kind of liberalism Biden represented.

Biden found himself in a difficult position during his presidency. It was the culmination of his political career, but it came at a very awkward moment for someone of his age and background and beliefs. The last 10鈥�15 years have just been a very strange moment in thinking about the Democratic Party’s positions on all these things. Particularly for a lifer like Biden, who cares about party, it’s very hard to navigate all of that.

I’m critical of Biden in this article because I wish he’d done some things quite differently. But I also think he was in a very hard position, and playing it safe on education might have been an understandable move politically. 

Another objection that many parents raised during the COVID period was that schools were slipping political content into classroom lessons, particularly around “culture war” issues. Where did that come from?

Issues like sexuality, morality, and race are not necessarily about schools. But they are often framed through curricular or educational sites, with the school 鈥� I use that term generally, but it could be teachers, administrators, or whatever 鈥� being the promoter of radical, leftwing, elitist values. Schools and educators are very often characterized as out of touch with everyday people.

That is a remarkable thing. Public schools are a bedrock, free institution that most American kids go through, and it takes a lot of skill to present them as being in the thrall of an elitist project. But Democrats, and the cultural left more broadly, have sometimes made it too easy to paint that picture, and a lot of that has to do with the effect of education schools. There’s a lot of good work that comes out of ed schools, but it’s another institution that is way too easy to caricature as peddling wild, progressive thought about children that is immoral, probably un-American, and taking over U.S. schools. 

This distrust of schools has been a long-running divide in U.S. politics. And sometimes, some of these critics are right! I wrote my first book about culture wars in America, focusing a lot on sex education. And if you’re asking me, I think rightwing people who believe you should never talk about sexuality in school are wrong. It’s actually important to educate kids about these things. 

But they were making pretty good points sometimes, like when they pointed out that a lot of teachers of this newfangled sex education curriculum had no training themselves. It was true; there was no training at that time. People wanted to know what their kids were being taught, and they thought it was inappropriate for a teacher to be able to go off-script about these intimate things. Those are all legitimate questions to raise.

But it was easy to take those legitimate concerns and spin them into much larger, unfounded claims, like the idea that sex education was a Communist plot to turn children into sex slaves. That was something that got national coverage, and it’s not so different today from the “groomer” discourse that we hear about all the time: Radical, leftwing indoctrinators are grooming your kids.

And of course, some of this stuff does exist because the teaching force is massive, and we have a media environment that spreads all this stuff. But the idea that most teachers are like this, or that you should pull your kids out of public school, is crazy.

Does it surprise you that this suspicion of public schools has been such a consistent narrative for President Trump? As you mentioned, there’s nothing necessarily new about this distrust in the history of American politics, but it seems odd that a populist movement would position itself against the schools that 90 percent of American kids attend.

You’re right that it’s not a new thing, but there is something different about this moment of right-left polarization around education.

You could point to a lot of parallels with today’s education politics in the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s different about that time is that both right and left were fighting over public schools. They both want to control this institution that they acknowledge is really important for American society. So there’s a question of who will win and take over.

That’s basically gone right now. You have people on the right 鈥� Trump, but also lots of bloggers and podcasters and various other folks in rightwing media 鈥� saying that “government schools,” as they call them, are completely ideologically unsound and a systemic overreach of government power. Their view is that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for these things, and you shouldn’t have to send your kids somewhere where government appointees will have control over them eight hours a day.

The solution that a lot of those folks offer is, yes, under the banner of privatization. But it’s not in the Mitt Romney way, or even the broadly understood way of advocating for private schools. There’s also been a big boom in homeschooling, and there’s a growing sense that education is a family responsibility for people to educate their own kids.

The way that is presented by Trump and other followers, is not to say, “Let’s find a way to get your kids an elite private school education.” It’s more like, “This is a time for the family to take control of raising their kids again, not outsourcing it to government bureaucrats, who are either lazy or scheming and nefarious.”

The research-grounded guide aims to help teachers intentionally select books for their students, centering age-appropriate books that present Black, Latinx and Asian culture as wellsprings of understanding. It also highlights titles that explore complex issues such as homelessness and poverty, and those that can help educators teach about historical topics like the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement. One chapter explores how scented books can be used as a vehicle for multisensory literacy development. 

Lacina鈥檚 book arrives at a critical moment, in a critical state. Texas ranked second in the nation for school book bans during the 2024-25 school year, with 1,781 instances of censorship, . 

The book features contributions from a number of early literacy experts on a variety of relevant themes. Jonda C. McNair, professor at the Ohio State University, wrote a chapter on the significance of African American children鈥檚 literature. 鈥淎spects of identity can and do impact early literacy development, and teachers should be encouraged to think critically about them,鈥� McNair wrote in an email. 

Natalia Kucirkova, who leads the , added, 鈥淭his book responds to an urgent need in an age when texts are increasingly manipulated by technologies, generated by AI and shaped by algorithms for specific audiences and preferences. It reminds us that children need authentic literature that connects them to genuine human experiences beyond their own.鈥�

In the conversation below, Lacina discusses the book, the challenges posed by censorship and the power of children鈥檚 literature. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this book originate?

Years ago, I developed a class when we did not have a children’s literature class at TCU, and my dean at the time wanted it to be a way to attract individuals from throughout the university into the College of Education. So I came up with this idea of a critical literacy and children’s literature class. 鈥� I wanted to develop a class where students could learn more about just being good human beings from reading through children’s literature that’s reflective of society. Sometimes those are very sensitive topics, like 鈥� homelessness and immigration. [We asked] how can we develop empathetic and kind college students and future teachers? We can do that by learning about other people and recognizing them not as the other, but as someone of value within our community 鈥� There’s never been a textbook that really addressed that particular topic. 

What does research show about the importance of inclusive literature and the role stories play in child development?

There’s been a lot of research published over the last 30 years, and I have an article coming out this summer in [a journal published by the International Literacy Association Children鈥檚 Literature and Reading Special Interest Group]. [The research] really came to the forefront more than 30 years ago, with a professor at the Ohio State University, Rudine Sims Bishop, who coined the term as a metaphor. Mirrors reflect your own culture, identity and personal life and we need to read books that reflect our own experiences 鈥� but just as important are the [books] that are like windows that help us understand other people’s experiences in life and that help us build more empathy and understanding.

Reading helps us identify with the protagonist 鈥� with their feelings, with their actions, and it’s important to read about experiences that are similar to our own, whether they鈥檙e positive experiences or challenges we might face in life. Children in our schools are dealing with challenges, too. That could be divorce; that could be dealing with not having enough money. In preparing our young children, we want them to be able to face life’s challenges and problem solve and be resilient and also be joyful. 

How does children鈥檚 literature, especially for the youngest readers, function as a tool for learning and development?

It helps children at all ages as they move into the workforce as adults, because we’re not going to work with people who are necessarily exactly like us, from our own socioeconomic background, our racial background, our religious background. And it helps us better understand other people, so that we can be a productive member of the workforce and get along with others to solve problems in the workplace. 

Why do you think people get worked up about children’s literature? Why is this an issue at all?聽

There are various reasons why, and this is nothing new. 鈥� We can look back through history and see that there’s always been censorship, and I think books have historically been targeted over a long period of time for anti-intellectual censorship efforts. Books are primarily a source for people to learn new ideas and to critically think about a variety of topics within our society. So books are powerful, and that’s what scares people.

What do you recommend for responding to censorship in our schools and libraries?

We need leaders in education to have policies and procedures, which many school districts do. However, what’s interesting is that the , and this is not surprising at all, but who is censoring books? It’s not necessarily parents at all; 92% of all books that are challenged were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers. And that was up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of the challenges originated from individual parents. So I think that tells us maybe we don’t need to publicize [censorship] any longer. We need these pressure groups to listen to parents and families. 

Another thing that makes early reading so powerful is that when books are read over and over again, the ideas and pictures really stay with children right at the time when their brains are forming.聽

That’s a very good strategy for developing phonemic and phonological awareness, that reading over and over with a very young child. That’s really helpful for oral language and understanding how language works. 

In the book, there鈥檚 a surprising chapter about the role of smell in early reading, and the importance of offering children multisensory early reading experiences. How did that come about?聽

Natalia Kucirkova, who I met many years ago at the United Kingdom Literacy Association, is an international powerhouse scholar. 鈥� That chapter is about a novel approach in Europe, and I think we need to listen to our European peers. They focus a little bit more on creativity and multisensory approaches, where we are focusing on different things here in the U.S. What Natalia talks about is that reading is much more than decoding a text. It’s about an affective and embodied experience. 

An educator I really admire, Nichole Parks, said something recently about how readers are built on laps and that reading to a child is a gateway toward them reading for themselves.聽

That’s a beautiful way to phrase that. We lose so much when we focus too much on tablets and technology. There’s so much more to reading than just reading words on a screen. It’s that entire experience 鈥� the human interaction with a child, the interaction with a book 鈥� to be able to hold the book, turn the pages and, in some instances, smell the book. A robot can鈥檛 replace that. A robot can’t replace the interaction between a teacher or a parent or a beloved family member lovingly nurturing a child during their reading process. 

Though it was only a few years ago, the fancy gadgets have gotten a lot more advanced since then, and now Suskind is back with her next (and, she promises, her last) book, addressing the promise and perils of the technological revolution coming for every element of society, including young children. 

In 鈥�,鈥� which will be released on July 14, Suskind acknowledges that technology is swiftly mastering endeavors that were once considered uniquely human. 鈥淎rtificial intelligence is eroding our supposed superiority in each area one by one. 鈥� It generates language with fluency that surpasses most humans. Al turns out art, music, poetry, software. It uses existing tools and builds new ones.鈥� 

But she zeroes in on a distinction that matters: Unlike humans, 鈥淎I does not care.鈥�

Suskind鈥檚 new book guides parents, caregivers and educators through navigating how to raise children in the age of AI by offering the HOPE framework, which offers four principles: human connection, owning imperfections, protecting the early years and enhancing adult-child interaction. She called it HOPE, she said, because 鈥淗aving a child is an act of hope for the future, and the future is not predetermined, as much as it feels like it is.鈥� 

A pediatric surgeon and the founder and co-director of , Suskind has been a prominent voice in early learning since the publication of her 2015 book, 鈥溾�� which popularized the concept of linguistic 鈥渟erve and return鈥� between babies and their caregivers. 

In the conversation below, Suskind describes her nuanced stance on AI and shares her thoughts on how AI shapes child development as well as what parents and early educators should consider when deciding how and when to use technology with young children.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does 鈥淗uman Raised鈥� fit in with your other books? 

My whole journey has been about the power of talk and interaction and relationships 鈥� to allow children to not just learn, but to become human. A couple years ago, when AI started building momentum, I was like, “Oh my gosh, wait a second.” Suddenly we have technology that can mimic the human interaction that builds a child’s brain, which has been the focus of my entire research. I was like, “Oh, we really need to be thinking about this in a really deep and thorough way.” Because not only was it going to come so fast and furious, but parents have no guidelines or guidance. There are no policy guardrails. And so I felt I needed to write one more book 鈥� I swear this is my last one! I wrote it to think through this whole thorny issue myself. 

What particular insights do you bring as a surgeon?

I’m a cochlear implant surgeon. The way I got into this field was [by examining] differences in early language environments among children who are deaf and hard of hearing and got cochlear implants, [versus] typically developing children. I saw interaction and language 鈥� as modalities for building cognitive skills, language and literacy. 

I’ve always been cognizant that and nurturing interactions are important for socioemotional development, but so much of my work has been focused on those hard skills. And in writing this book, [I see] that human connection is a way to become human, to build the social brain, to build our ability to connect with other humans and navigate the human world. 

How can parents and educators tell when a technology is enhancing connection versus replacing it?

The frictionless experience is what makes it so seductive, and so different than what we’ve met before. I mean, we’ve had technologic innovation throughout all of human history, but it’s always been sort of a one-way street. Even social media and the engagement economy has been about sucking our engagement, but it hasn’t been building an intimate relationship and that is what generative AI [does].

AI is not a monolith. 鈥� The generative AI and that intimacy building aspect of it is what is seductive for adults, and for young children and very young children. The younger you are, the more likely you are to both anthropomorphize this technology, to project thoughts and feelings onto these entities. So they’re more at risk. 

At the same time, I am not anti-technology. 鈥� I believe in the power of technology that allows human flourishing. And I do believe that if we use it in the right way, it could do the things that we want. Allow opportunity gaps to close, allow people to have more presence. So let’s use it to enhance the human condition, not to replace human connection. 

I love tech, but I don’t love tech to replace the powerful role that parents and caregivers play in building children. 

In your book, you talk about the importance of owning our imperfections. How does that make us more human?

One really amazing experience in writing this book was reflecting back on the imperfections of humans and our relationships. We’ve always looked at them as bugs. How can we be better and more perfect parents? But the truth is that 鈥済ood enough parenting鈥� is an evolutionary gift that actually teaches kids how to be human. 鈥� Those missteps and ruptures and repairs help us learn how to be good partners with other humans. 

In your new book, you wrote, 鈥淎I has the keys to unlock the social gate,鈥� which you define as 鈥渢he biological filter built into the infant brain that evolved to allow a particular type of teacher: a human one.鈥� What are the ramifications of this breach? 

We may not know everything about the technologies that are being built, but we know a whole heck of a lot about how children develop and how they can best develop to their full potential. In some ways, this book was about understanding the interaction between technology and children and adults, but also understanding how the human brain is built. 

In some ways, evolution gave us a mechanism to ensure that baby’s brains develop through human connection. Kids don’t learn from TV. It affects their language development and social development, but it doesn’t actually teach them. The social gate has made sure that babies only learn from human interaction. It opens it up and allows the learning to happen. And now that AI can mimic that human interaction 鈥� it has the passcode to the social gate, and whatever flows through from that technology is actively wiring that child’s brain. 

Patricia Kuhl [professor at the University of Washington and co-director of the university鈥檚 ] is a goddess of early brain development. Her research 鈥� is probably one of the most important things [for understanding] how to navigate AI in the early learning space. The basic science of human development is incredibly important not just for parents to understand, but policymakers and the people who are building this tech. They need to understand how we develop, so that they build tools that don’t inadvertently lead humanity in the wrong direction. 

And how much faith do you have in the people building these AI tools? 

I’m not going to answer that question, other than to say that I wrote this book primarily for parents and caregivers 鈥� for anyone who loves children. But I want desperately for those who are building technology 鈥� to read and understand it, so that they can more intentionally design with developmental science in mind. 

How could you see AI technologies supporting the early years? 

Number one, don’t displace that human connection that supports the parents or teachers in the children’s lives. We know about the administrative burden and the invisible labor that makes caring for young children so hard, so let’s build tools to make it easier for parents and teachers so that they can be more present. Let’s build tools that allow us to understand better how children are developing when [they] are exhibiting delays, so that we can more quickly ameliorate those issues. And there are scientifically driven tools that support the early learning process, but I don’t think that they should be used as replacements for teachers. 

What are some promising areas of research?

Brian Scassellati, who’s a computer scientist at Yale [and director of the ], showed that social robots can help teach children with autism spectrum disorder to learn social cues and become more connected with other humans. In the same vein, [that when] children read to social robots versus humans, they were less anxious. Using the science to help guide us in understanding the best ways to support children’s learning is great, but [we should] never forget that it must not replace human connection, it must only support it. 

I’m a physician, I come from the world of medicine. When we create new biologics, let’s say a vaccination, it’s not like we say, “Okay, we’ve created it. Let’s see how it does out in the real world and then go back and tweak and fix it.鈥� No, we do really rigorous studies to make sure it’s safe for the population. And right now everything is being put on parents like, “Oh, you decide 鈥�” It’d be like saying, “Here’s your car seat 鈥� let us know if it’s safe and we can go back and tweak.鈥� These are really powerful technologies. We need a lot more science, not to stifle innovation, but to make sure our humans remain safe. 

We can’t wait for the research to happen to get guardrails in place so that no harm is done. We need longitudinal data in understanding children who are growing up with generative AI as a significant presence, in understanding the impacts on language, socioemotional development and attachment. We don’t have these. I want research on protective factors. What are the conditions in which AI tools generally support human connection rather than displacing it? It’s not just an academic question, it’s a design question that will shape the field. 

What are the skills that children are going to need to succeed in the future? 

Now that AI can do all the things that we were trying to optimize in our kids 鈥� like be the best at math and science 鈥� and all these hard skills now can be done by AI a million-fold better than humans, it’s those distinctly human edge skills that matter. The critical thinking, the social connection, the curiosity, creativity, resilience 鈥� those are going to be the skills that allow children to thrive in the age of AI. 

But educator and author Stephanie Malia Krauss says ditching devices isn鈥檛 enough. If we want to improve young people鈥檚 academic results and well-being, we must focus on how schools can actually meet their needs. Removing devices without addressing stress and safety, among other issues, will be an empty gesture.

An expert on , Krauss began her career as a Teach For America teacher in Arizona and founded a competency-based high school in St. Louis. She has since led national youth readiness initiatives and consults widely. In her new book, “,” Krauss argues that schools have let addictive technology, stress and chronic busyness strip kids of basic human needs like sleep, play, wonder and connection.聽

She has coined the term to describe what schools can do to protect these needs. 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo talked to Krauss about how the current tech backlash offers the opening educators need to focus on a version of school with students at its core.聽

Their conversation is edited for length and clarity.

You begin the book by observing that wherever you go, you ask people how they’re doing. The answer is always the same: “Everyone’s overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted.” Is this just a COVID hangover, or is something else happening?

I started asking the questions, “How are your kids?” “How are your families?” and “How are you?” as a way to understand the impacts of COVID. I was doing a book tour in my basement, and I couldn’t fly to be with the schools and youth programs I was speaking to. And at that point, the overwhelm, overload, stress and exhaustion that people were reporting made sense. I felt it. We were all experiencing the existential dread of a global pandemic.

But I decided to keep asking the questions, and six years later it’s hard to still consider COVID as the consequence for what’s driving the overwhelm in our lives. Having surveyed tens of thousands of adults caring for kids personally and professionally across an incredible variation of communities and contexts, the results have shown that people are more overwhelmed and overloaded and stressed and tired than they were six years ago. There’s only been one exception, in one community. And that was when I asked a group of hundreds of early childcare educators how the kids were. And the answers were: “Full of joy, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, unending energy.”

Something is changing between the early childhood years and the start of school.

Well, maybe we should be talking to them! Are they doing something right, or is something happening with four-year-olds that we need to focus on?

What is interesting to me is that at the bookends of our life, the early years and the elder years, the responses are often the same. Young kids start out as curious, joyful, full of energy, contributors. They want to help. They鈥檙e playful, creative. And when researchers study centenarians, people who live to be 100 or older, you often hear the same thing: These are people who have found ways to contribute, stay playful, keep moving, be curious. And in my mind, that’s a reflection that the overwhelm we are feeling today is not a personal failure, it’s an environmental one.

Let’s talk about classroom technology. You’ve said that digital apps and algorithms “exploit students’ developmental vulnerabilities, and that schools need concrete strategies to prioritize human essentials.” It seems like schools are starting to get this message 鈥� see recent phone bans and the nascent anti-screen movement. But you think this isn’t going far enough?

Toxic tech 鈥� tech that hooks and harms our kids 鈥� is what I call one of the “dangerous weather conditions” of modern life. Addictive, manipulative tech is often designed in ways that restrict some of the best parts of being human. So young people go on addictive platforms, for example, and they’re looking to have their normal developmental needs met. They’re curious, they want to connect with somebody, they’re bored and looking for entertainment. A teacher or adult told them to, and then they end up on a platform that’s designed to keep them coming back.

I think about this as 鈥渦ltra-processed content,鈥� designed to be hyper-palatable. But it’s fake, and kids are less likely then to want to socialize, play or experience recreation outside of something designed to be available 24/7 and feel much more fun and connecting. In the classroom, computers can sometimes be brought in to address capacity issues, cost issues and burnout issues 鈥� and they are, like ultra-processed food, a convenience and a cost saver. It’s still a level of ultra-processed content. 

Any time that we have technology that is keeping kids from the very things they need to be healthy and happy, and also to learn and develop, I consider that toxic tech. And any time we have technology that actually assists or amplifies the ability to tap into the essentials that keep us healthy and happy, that’s humane tech. It’s technology that should stay. Right now, many schools are moving in the direction of seeing the antidote to addictive tech being the absence of technology. I would say the antidote to addictive tech is the abundance of healthy developmental opportunities that promote human essentials like play and creativity. We don’t have to remove all tech, we need to remove toxic tech.

So, what would be an example of tech that is not just non-toxic, but humane?

I interviewed boys at a private middle school in Richmond not too long ago, and they told me how technology is used for research, for projects, for really exploring things that young people are interested in or curious about. Kids can explore their capacities for wonder and creativity and or focus. They can learn something new, they can think about their personal interests, explore their identity 鈥� and then the technology goes away, and they’re reading books and talking about books and doing things outside. Technology is an enabler and encourager of essentials, rather than prohibiting the essentials in the first place.

How do you read the current anti-tech moment we鈥檙e in?

My worry is that the removal of devices will address symptoms that we’re seeing that sometimes relate to the consequences of harmful toxic tech, but also have roots in other places. When I was writing the book, the first question I had was, “Why are we all overwhelmed at such an intense level, and why is it getting worse? Hard lives are harder, and times of stability are still stressful.” And what I found was that there were four universal forces at play, toxic tech being only one of them. If we go into schools and remove computers and other digital devices without attending to the other “dangerous weather conditions” that I talk about 鈥� being overtapped, overworked, and overwrought, really afraid for our lives, safety issues that students feel 鈥� we’re going to see the persistence of the problems that right now are sometimes being exclusively attributed to technology use.

The idea that people are overwhelmed more broadly is not something that I hear discussed in this context. The only thing people are saying is, “My kids are overwhelmed by screens, so we need to remove the screens.” 

Yes.

You’ve been on this listening tour, and I gather that kids are really interested in talking to adults about cellphone bans. What do they want us to know?

I’m wrapping up a statewide listening tour of Virginia middle schoolers on behalf of the , which is a statewide partnership of youth development organizations, school districts and education groups. And in every conversation with middle schoolers in Virginia 鈥� a state that did statewide phone bans 鈥� they have wanted to talk about it. And the answer is almost always the same, which is nuanced, and we have to give kids credit for the nuance they bring into conversations about devices, computers and AI. 

What I鈥檝e heard over and over is, “I like not having my phone when I’m learning. It’s easier to focus, it’s easier to pay attention. I’m not as distracted.” And then, from Appalachia to Alexandria, I have heard, “I don’t feel safe.” And what I have come to understand is that for kids, phones aren’t only communication devices, they’re comfort objects. If I have my phone and something terrible happens 鈥� a school shooting, a disaster, something scary 鈥� that is my way to get in contact with my family and to be safe. And when phones were removed from classrooms, schools either did too little or did not attend at all to the safety needs that crept in.

Aside from students saying, “OK, you took my comfort object,” what is the upshot? Are there behavioral consequences? Are there bigger mental health consequences?

I think so. In conversations with kids, it is clear that every day they come to school worried that something bad and dangerous can happen to them. Without addressing that safety concern, kids will be more dysregulated in the classroom. And we often confuse dysregulation with discipline. The signs of dysregulation look nearly identical to how we would characterize a misbehaving student or a lazy, disengaged student. Teachers receive little to no training on the science of dysregulation, but it’s possible that some of the problem behaviors that they are seeing are really dysregulation and not discipline.

You write about the behaviors that get kids into trouble at school 鈥� to your point about dysregulation 鈥� and you say, “These kids don’t need detention, they need a nap.” Are we missing a key success factor here? Do high school kids need a nap? 

The is absolute that tweens and teens should not do school or anything before 8:30 in the morning, because their body clocks shift the moment they hit puberty. They are wired to want to go to sleep later. It has ancestral origins of young people staying awake later at night to protect their families, which means we wake them up hours before they’re ready and deprive them of the types of sleep they need for learning, memory, emotional regulation, and a whole bunch of other really vital things for learning behavior and future success. As the mom of a high schooler who starts school too early and who is also learning to drive, I will say personally this feels very consequential and even dangerous. We would be amazed at the improvements in adolescent mental health, adolescent learning and motivation if kids simply felt more rested, in the same ways that we feel profound impact as adults when we feel well-rested.

You write about the importance of play and movement, even suggesting that older kids need recess too. I’m guessing without their devices?

Yes. Whether we’re talking about sleep and regulation, or we’re talking about play and movement, this is all a part of a broader move to say it’s really time to “rehuman” schools, to have a version of human-centered schools and education that really protect and prioritize our natural human capacities to learn and develop, but also to endure and enjoy life, to thrive. Across millennia, humans have relied on play, for example, to prepare, to heal and to learn. So, when we look at studies of hunter-gatherer communities, we see that young people up until the time they transitioned into adulthood spent about a third of their time playing. So when humans are kind of left to their own devices, play becomes a really primal need that we share with every other social species. And groups like the National Institute for Play have shown that we need play at every age and stage of life, from the early years through elderhood. So adults in schools also should be asking, “How can my work be more playful? How can my engagement with students be more playful?” And when play is prioritized, there are physical and psychological benefits, in addition to quality-of-learning and work benefits. Movement? Same thing: In the studies that I looked at, for “How We Thrive,” they call sitting the new smoking, saying that if you sit for six hours or longer in a day, the health harms are equivalent to a pack of cigarettes a day. And yet we tell students that a good student sits in their seat, doesn’t get up, stays seated, and then moves quickly through the hallways in a pretty controlled way. But by injecting small moments of movement or small moments of play, we improve not only the culture of our classrooms, but also, ironically, the performance and quality of work that students can do.

Speaking of play, it strikes me that what happens after school, after the bell rings, is worth paying attention to.

In doing the statewide listening tour of middle schoolers, I heard from young people every time about the vital importance of their afterschool and summer programs. And there were instances of schools that bring that kind of youth development programming into the regular school day, and in those cases that was what I heard the most about. These are activities and experiences that lead with young people’s abilities to engage socially, to engage in play, to engage creatively, to celebrate each other. In this moment where we鈥檙e talking about screens and devices and what to take away, I want us to talk about what to give back. Too many kids can鈥檛 afford or access these afterschool and summer programs, and they matter more than ever. 

To bring us to the beginning of the conversation, the antidote to addictive, toxic tech is not the absence of devices, it’s the abundance of healthy, positive developmental experiences, which are often found in afterschool and summer programs and experiential project-based learning in the classroom.

The word 鈥渄iscipline鈥� barely appears in the books, which invite adults to learn more about what drives a child鈥檚 behavior and to gain a deeper understanding of how the nervous system works. Campbell鈥檚 approach suggests that traditional consequences and rewards used by many parents and educators often address behavior at a surface-level, but lasting change comes from strengthening adult-child connections, fostering emotional security and providing consistent supportive experiences that drive growth. 

Along with one of her co-authors, Lauren Stauble, a colleague she met earlier in her career, Campbell developed a framework called Collaborative Emotion Processing, which helps adults and children navigate emotions together. She described it as “a way to teach and learn how to feel stuff with other people that builds long-term skills for emotional intelligence.鈥� It was designed to help children and their caregivers learn from each other and grow together, she said.

The popularity of her books and the CEP method has led Campbell to develop a number of other resources for caregivers and educators, including an for families and educators, a (which elaborates on the themes in the books) and a professional development for early educators.

In the conversation below, Campbell shares the origin story behind the CEP method and why parents and caregivers need to understand how the nervous system works in order to foster healthy development.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Collaborative Emotion Processing is rooted in understanding what behavior is and what it isn鈥檛. Can you describe the approach?

When we created the CEP method, we designed it to help us understand behavior as communication, really from the nervous system and not reflective of a kid鈥檚 character or a choice that they鈥檙e making in the moment. Folks often see behavior as a choice 鈥� that a child is choosing to be defiant or they鈥檙e choosing to throw something across the room or yell something in the moment. And we aim 鈥� with the CEP method 鈥� to focus on supporting kids through co-regulation, connection and skill building instead of trying to control or correct their behavior in isolation, with timeouts or things like that. And really shifting from “How do we stop the behavior?” to “What is this behavior telling us about what this kid needs right now?”

How did your experience as a teacher give rise to CEP, and is there research to support the approach?

Lauren Stauble and I were both early childhood educators at Lemberg Children’s Center, outside of Boston. She came to me at one point and she was like, “I feel like we鈥檙e doing something different in our classrooms than is happening in the rest of our school.” We started taking videos of one another teaching and interacting with students to see what we were really doing. We didn鈥檛 set out to create the CEP method and then research it. We kind of created a loose framework around what we felt like we were doing, and then set out to find that framework out in the wild. And we found bits and pieces of it in different spaces. Attachment research really informs that relationship space of helping kids feel safe and seen and supported, [and research] in relationship and interpersonal neurobiology helps us understand the brain and the nervous system. But we couldn鈥檛 find anything 鈥� that really encompassed everything we were doing. 

We reached out to Brandeis University 鈥� which our child care program was attached to 鈥� and connected with the psych department there and got to dive in and do the Institutional Review Board process of applying for research and navigating it, which is a beast in and of itself, as it should be. We weren鈥檛 trying to actually dive into research at first. We were just hoping to find a framework that encompassed what we felt like we were doing. In absence of a complete framework, we created the CEP method.

Why do you think the method resonated? What need is it filling for parents and educators?

I think it finally explains what they鈥檝e been experiencing. So many adults are told to manage behavior and just stay consistent and use consequences. And that doesn鈥檛 work for kids who often need the most support. And then we get the frustration, the burnout, the sense of like, 鈥淲hat am I missing? What am I not doing?鈥� I feel like CEP gives them a lens that makes behavior make sense and helps them understand a kid鈥檚 unique nervous system, which helps them see what鈥檚 driving this behavior. And it allows you then to shift your response out of that compliance state into a collaborative state. Recently, I was presenting to a group of parents and educators in Middlebury, Vermont, and afterward, a mom came up to me and she was like, 鈥淚鈥檝e read so many parenting books.鈥� And this is the first one I read where I was like, “Oh, actually now my kid makes sense to me.鈥�

What鈥檚 one thing that can help a parent use the CEP method with their child?

Focus on you. Start with you. Everyone [asks], 鈥淲hat do I do with my kid?鈥� And it鈥檚 why 鈥淭iny Humans鈥� is laid out the way it is, where you鈥檝e got to go through part one of the you stuff and the neuroscience and the why behind it before you get to part two about how to respond to your kid.

What does it look like when kids pick up on behavior modeled by adults? 

I had this little girl when I was teaching pre-K, one of my first years of teaching. She was 3, and this tiny little peanut. And her dad was dropping her off one day and he said, 鈥淗ey, last night she said the F-word to her brother. Do you know where she may have heard that?鈥� And I was like, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not a word we use at school, but did you ask her?鈥� And he was like, 鈥淣o.鈥� 

I called her over and I was like, 鈥淗ey, I heard last night you said the F-word to your brother when you were feeling mad. Where did you hear the F-word?鈥� And she was like, 鈥淲hen daddy drives.鈥� And he was like, “Yep, and goodbye.” What we model is so crucial. It鈥檚 why the CEP method has five components, and four of them are about the adult. When we are modeling this work, when we are showing up with our own self-awareness and self-regulation and empathy and social skills and intrinsic motivation, kids learn from it.

Bren茅 Brown comes up a little bit in your book. She has done such a great service by helping the word “vulnerability” enter the culture. Has her work shaped yours?

I agree. She is my queen. I鈥檝e had the privilege of diving into so much of her work, and I think she has shifted so much for us, with the understanding of vulnerability. The ability to see it as a strength and not a weakness is so crucial for emotional development.

What gives you hope? What are you hearing that should make people feel optimistic?

I am so stoked that we live in a time period when we鈥檙e even talking about emotional intelligence 鈥� It is so cool that we are talking about how nervous systems work. 鈥� The fact that this is part of the zeitgeist gives me so much hope. 

We just got some data back looking at our work in elementary schools, and we鈥檙e seeing a 60% reduction in behavior support calls in the first quarter. 鈥� It gives me hope that when we talk to kids about how their brains and bodies work, they鈥檙e so open, and they鈥檙e so curious, and they鈥檙e so receptive, and they want this. They鈥檙e hungry for it. And now we have the tools, the knowledge, the ability to talk to them. We know how to do that. And I feel really hopeful about that.

New Mexico has recently launched the United States鈥� first model, followed by Vermont and that are working to build capacity to support similar systems.

A national spotlight has also been cast on New York City鈥檚 efforts after promises on the campaign trail from Mayor Zohran Mamdani to expand free care for children as by the end of his term in late 2029.

The conversation is growing at several different levels, with some states focusing on pre-K access and others looking into providing care even earlier. But, most are grappling with major roadblocks in scaling larger 鈥� and universal 鈥� initiatives, including questions on funding models and accountability.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, a former chief academic officer at the New York City Department of Education, and the current president of Bank Street College of Education, spoke with 社区黑料 about childcare trends and what it鈥檒l look like to create higher quality programs as states look to expand access.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

To kick off our conversation with the idea that there is a lot of movement around early childcare right now and accessibility to it, what are we seeing across the country and what are states investing in or considering legislation around?

We’re not getting any help right now from the federal government. During the Biden administration, it was the opposite. There were federal funds flowing to states specifically to do this work, and that’s part of how you got some really interesting, innovative stuff happening in states not that long ago.

Vermont is one of, I think, only two states now that have a really strong program to for early educators. Kentucky guaranteed for childcare workers that their own children or deeply subsidized care. 

New Mexico is one of the most interesting examples right now because in November 2025, they launched universal childcare. 

One of the things that is striking about their strategy is that they created a dedicated permanent revenue stream for it, 鈥� so it’s not conditioned on the federal government being able to support it, or an annual tax appropriation. That makes it stable in a way that’s unusual. They have also specifically said that competitive educator compensation is a goal which is really different.

D.C. is the other place that has done something similar to this. In 2018, they created a that had an explicit call around pay parity [for early care workers], and it gave people initial one time payments [up to $14,000]. Then, they created a salary scale based on educational attainment. They were also trying to push people to get the training that they needed to deliver at a high quality, and during the phase of that project, the employment in the sector grew by 7% and retention rose to over two thirds.

In most places, including New York City, early childhood folks鈥� turnover is five times the rate of what you see in K-12 settings. That turnover is a function of the low wages and and sometimes the lack of training as well, because if you’re not doing well in your job, you don’t want to stay in it.

In New York, a lot of our workforce is actually in poverty. More than half of New York’s early educators are relying on public assistance. We have more than 16,000 children statewide who can’t be served because of vacant positions and this is where we actually have state funding for childcare seats, but we don’t have people to fill those positions. So I think those models of D.C. and New Mexico are really worth looking at other states.

What about missed opportunities that aren’t being considered when lawmakers are drafting legislation or proposing new funding?

When you think about elected officials and who they’re accountable to, the most clear promise you can make is X number of seats for X communities. 

We’re going to have for 2-year-olds in New York City, 鈥� that is the thing that will stick in the minds of the public. That other layer, on quality, is harder to boil down into a sound bite.

When you create access, you could create a system that actually does damage if you don’t have quality. Quality is defined by what are the adults able to do with children once they have this time with them? We want it to be something that has real educational impacts, 鈥� and taking advantage of this incredible moment of brain development where 90% of your brain architecture is built by the time you turn 5.

What does high quality care look like? What are signs for parents to look for?

A quality learning environment for early childcare allows kids to move around freely and explore and interact with each other and with adults and the materials that are in the space, whether it’s blocks, or art supplies, or a dress up area, or a water or sand table.

In low-quality settings, a lot of times what’s happening is kids are in some way, physically restrained from moving, and this is done in the name of safety. In that low-quality setting, you don鈥檛 have enough adults, the physical layout of the space isn’t totally safe for a toddler to be wandering around and the kinds of things that are going to be interesting for that toddler to pick up and stick in their mouth are not available.

In a low-quality environment, that child is maybe sitting in a high chair or in a playpen, and there’s an iPad going that they’re looking at which is not able to interact with them and is not supporting that development. You may be keeping the child physically safe, but if they aren’t able to interact and move, their brain development is not going to progress the way it needs to.

You want to set up the physical space, and you want to have the staffing to support that flexible movement and exploration, because that is how our brains develop 鈥� through those types of interactions with people and with materials. If the person is so stressed, either because their own life is so stressful because they’re not able to make ends meet and or their work environment is so stressful because they’re understaffed and working really long hours, that connection is lost.

When we talk about opening seats across the country, what are the odds that these seats are going to be low quality care programs?

There’s been research done over the years that has looked at the quality of early childhood settings and in general, that number of really good settings are like 20 to 30% of what we have. That doesn’t mean that the other 70% are low quality 鈥� it’s a spectrum. My guess is probably only 10%, maybe 15%, fall into that low quality bucket, but there’s a lot in between that high quality and low quality that needs work.

How can states and lawmakers take more accountability when they are considering opening more spots up to ensure that it is leaning toward the highest level of care for the youngest kids, especially developmentally?

Building a living wage is the most important thing because that brings people into the workforce. It encourages people to stay in the workforce. And as people stay, they develop experience and relationships with children. You can’t do that without training. So that’s the other big piece of this, what are we doing to train people well?

From birth to 3, there’s not a requirement anywhere in the country that you have to have a teaching license to teach at that level and there can’t be that requirement given the current compensation structure. So then, what is the requirement? If you’re not going to ask people to have a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, 鈥� how do you provide them with training and support that will enable them to accelerate learning and development for children?

The goal is that you build in the resources for professional development for the existing folks who are already in the field, and then resources for people to get trained as they enter the workforce as well. 

I’ll give you one example. Bank Street has partnered with New York City during the pre-K initiative because the state actually does require a master’s degree for pre-K teachers here and that’s a relatively new requirement, so there are a lot of teachers who were working before that requirement went into place, and are now out of compliance with that law.

The city asked us at Bank Street to design something specifically for that group that would be attuned to the fact that they already have lots of knowledge and skills and they don’t need to start from the beginning. 

We created something called the Advanced Standing Program, which is a mastery based program for teachers who are already pretty experienced, and so they can do it much more quickly than a normal master’s degree. They get credit for their experience, so the cost is lower, and it’s historically been paid for partially by the city or by nonprofits where the folks are working. 

So, creating those kinds of programs that are really responsive to the real needs of folks in this workforce, as opposed to a compliance requirement that pushes a lot of people away.

There’s some examples now of universal childcare, but in most states, it is pretty limited to low-income families or at a pre-K level. So, when we’re talking about this quality issue, I want to get into equity also. Childcare programs may be getting some of the highest needs students. How does the issue of quality play a role in development and readiness by the time these students enter the K-12 system? 

The achievement gap that we see in K-12 schools between wealthy and low-income students 鈥� which is usually like a 20 or 30 point spread in achievement when you look at third grade or eighth grade test scores or high school graduation rates 鈥� is visible beginning at 18 months.

If you study toddlers, the same exact graph shows up between upper-income and low-income children. So why is that? 

We know that’s exactly that moment where language development is happening in the brain, and so if a child is sitting in front of a TV all day by themselves, or iPad or and no one’s talking to them, no one’s interacting with them, then they’re going to be really low scoring around that language development.

There’s not much that’s different between upper income and lower income children except for the fact that upper income families have much more access to quality care. If we can provide that quality care across the income spectrum, there’s a shot at closing those achievement gaps later on.

We’ve talked about New York City a little bit, and I know through several decades, there’s been a push and pull around expanding this early childhood care access under each mayor. Can you talk a little bit about the history of what New York City has tried, what’s new now under Mamdani’s proposal and whether that will be effective or not?

One of my big regrets, I was senior deputy chancellor under Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg for his third term in office, and it was around that time that we started to expand pre-K, but it was a very modest expansion. As someone who came up as an educator in middle schools and high schools, I didn’t really know what I know now about the power of early childhood. I don’t think any of us at the DOE in those days, other than folks working in the early childhood division who weren’t at the decision making table, understood how powerful the impact on educational equity is if you invest in early childhood. 

It took Mayor [Bill] de Blasio making the pre-K commitment as part of his first mayoral campaign to make that the focus for the Department of Education and for the city as a whole. They added 60,000 new seats in pre-K, then expanded pre-K as well in the second term. 

Mayor [Eric] Adams made lots of promises about working on this but really didn’t move the ball. 

What Mayor [Mamdani] campaigned on is that there’ll be free childcare for kids from birth to 5. It鈥檚 beginning with expanding the number of seats for 3-year-olds and expanding 2-year-olds. It鈥檚 a fairly modest expansion in this first year, and I think the question that will face the mayor over the rest of this term is how do you get to that larger goal where everyone has access and and how do you do it in a way that pairs access with quality? 

I think they’re off to a good start.

I want to pose the question you said Mamdani鈥檚 team will have to answer. How do states lead large scale expansion and ensure quality as they try to expand to everyone?

One of the lessons that we learned from the pre-K expansion is that you need to pay attention to the existing ecosystem and not lose capacity as you build capacity. 

One of the downsides of the pre-K expansion during de Blasio’s term was that they put a lot of the seats into public elementary schools, and the teachers became part of the UFT. They got regular salary the same way any K-12 teacher, which is great, but then the nonprofits that were running childcare programs as part of the initiative didn’t have the funding to match those salaries, and so a lot of people left the nonprofit daycare centers 鈥� and even worse, family childcare, which are small businesses run out of people’s homes that usually serve children birth to 5, were not initially included in the strategy.

We actually saw a loss of childcare seats in the birth to 3 space when some of those folks went out of business. 

I think part of the solution this time around, particularly because we’re working with younger children, is how do you support family childcare as part of this? How do you help improve the quality and the economic viability of that? 

Last question just to wrap us up. What you had talked about during your time at the NYC Department of Education with not paying attention to childcare, I think is something that was universal for lawmakers early on too. This conversation has really picked up in the last five years or so. How likely is it to continue seeing such acceleration in this movement?

I think one of the interesting things about childcare is it’s a bipartisan issue in most places in the country. 

The governor of Ohio, a Republican governor, has done massive investments in early childhood. Nebraska, Louisiana, lots of red states have really prioritized this, and the reason why is that more than three quarters of families have both parents in the workforce, so people need childcare. They need a place for their children to be. They need to be able to afford it, and they want it to be safe, and they want their children to be learning.聽

From an educational equity standpoint, we need that quality in order to sort of solve our broader problems in terms of achievement gaps in our school system. 

We haven’t seen as much investment in the second Trump administration, but the first Trump administration actually saw the biggest increase in early childhood funding since the Clinton administration. Biden went even further. Those were both a Republican president and a Democratic president actively investing in this. We have Republican governors and Democratic governors actively investing in this.

This is something that really speaks to people, and so I think for that reason, we are going to continue to see new public funding flow to this. It may not come as fast as I would hope, but we’re on the trajectory in the right direction.

It would be nearly fifty years later before the country would again seriously consider building such a system, as proposed in the 鈥� though that attempt ultimately stalled when the childcare provisions from the final package that passed.

In the intervening decades, even as most families came to rely on and , childcare largely remained something families had to sort out on their own, with limited state and federal assistance.

But polling data shows that for publicly-funded childcare exists, even as federal legislative efforts have waned. In pockets of the country, there has been state-supported investment in childcare, often due to frustration with low wages, high turnover, poor outcomes and unworkable conditions. In the past three years, for example, New Mexico and Vermont have passed groundbreaking childcare policies, strengthened infrastructure and increased access. 

Childcare has gained visibility and some political leaders, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vice President Kamala Harris and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have elevated childcare as a key economic issue for voters. But childcare has more often been a secondary issue in political campaigns, rather than a career-shaping priority for candidates. It鈥檚 typically a bullet point for family policy or affordability, rather than the key legislative accomplishment vaulting a candidate to public office. 

That may be starting to change.

As more early care and education policies are enacted, the leaders involved in those endeavors have an opportunity to use their experiences to run for higher office. 

In Vermont, Aly Richards 鈥� who led a statewide advocacy organization focused on improving access to high-quality childcare for nearly a decade 鈥� this month that she is running for governor. She will compete in a Democratic primary in August, and the winner will face Republican Gov. Phil Scott in the general election this fall.

The organization Richards spearheaded, Let鈥檚 Grow Kids, drove efforts to pass Act 76, a landmark legislation that brought to Vermont鈥檚 early care and education system, funded largely by a new payroll tax. The state raised reimbursement rates for early childhood programs, and provided breaks to most families to cover the cost of care.

Could Richards鈥� success in passing childcare policy translate to support from voters in her run for governor? 

In a conversation with Rebecca Gale, Richards explains why childcare is an ideal upstream issue to tackle affordability for families, why other states keep calling her to ask for advice on their own childcare systems, and how the governor鈥檚 office might be the best next step for someone who knows just how central quality childcare is for families 鈥� and states 鈥� to thrive. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You began with Let’s Grow Kids a decade ago. What was the intended goal at the time, both for the organization and for you personally?

The only focus was the mission. I really had no thought of what I was going to do with myself afterward, because I’m a really mission-oriented person and it was such a gift for me to have a goal and a deadline.

I like to think about what is the one thing a human can do to make the biggest positive impact in the world. And when I realized early childhood education was that lever just sitting there 鈥� where our inaction is causing all this detrimental harm to our society and the action [needed] is very clear and concrete 鈥� it felt obvious. It’s within our power to [change]. And when you do, it has this immeasurable impact downstream on all these things that we care about.

So the mission was to make that impact through Let鈥檚 Grow Kids 鈥� like an entrepreneurial-minded enterprise that would do whatever it takes to meet this deadline and this mission of putting in motion a system of high-quality, affordable childcare for the whole state. And we did that.

And while the job is not completely done, we set it in motion in the machinery of the state government. So we really were able to back away having done exactly what we hoped 鈥� creating the machinery, the dedicated funding, the ecosystem that will carry it forward and an aspirational model. We showed it’s possible to do this.

What are two or three key changes that you view as central to the state’s early care and infrastructure system?

The No. 1 change is dedicated public investment, because the problem with childcare in this country, since the beginning of time, is that there’s not enough money in the system from parents, who are the only payers.

To fund the system to be functional, to pay early childhood educators a livable wage, to have enough supply to meet the demand 鈥� you need a dedicated permanent funding stream. You can have more childcare, it can be higher quality, it can pay wages and it can meet the needs of your community. But that’s the No. 1 thing.

Two and three are the mechanism by which we did it. We basically took a system that already was in place and pushed the public investment into the hands of Vermonters through reduced childcare costs. By going up to that [the threshold in which a Vermont family can now qualify for childcare subsidies], you’re making and you’re seeing reduced childcare costs, which is making life more affordable. We also increased the reimbursement rate to programs.

It put money in the hands of Vermonters to make it more affordable. It put money in the hands of early childhood education programs so they could actually run their programs, pay higher wages and meet the needs of their families. And that’s why I think we’re seeing the implementation work so well. It’s adding more spaces, adding more businesses and reducing costs for families at the same time, which is what’s spurring our economy. It’s the one area of growth we’re sort of seeing in Vermont right now.

There are still very few leaders who鈥檝e built their careers around childcare policy. Do you see this as a structural roadblock to progress? I envision it as sort of a 鈥淟ego ceiling鈥� 鈥� a barrier built piece by piece through fragmented policy and underinvestment, that could be taken apart if priorities shift. What would change if more leaders made childcare a signature issue?

Yes, yes and yes. Let’s bust that Lego ceiling into a million pieces so they’re on the floor when you step on them accidentally, like in my family all the time.

Look, it is exhilarating for me to be moving into this new world of politics from that background in early childhood education and policy, because it’s not just early childhood education. It’s problem-solving in a dynamic way for the issues we face in the 21st century.

I spent my last decade working to solve this deep crisis that dogged Vermont and has dogged the rest of the country. I grew up in Vermont. I went out of state to change the world, working on Obama’s first campaign. I was so excited by his leadership potential, and yet I was so dismayed by the lack of action in D.C. because people who didn’t agree with each other didn’t speak to each other anymore.

I know enough to know that’s not how real change happens. You have to be in the room together. You have to be able to have reasonable agreement and disagreement.

So I raced home to Vermont and started working for the governor, and started realizing 鈥� talking to Vermonters from all walks of life 鈥� that what was broken in D.C. was not broken here in Vermont. We still talk to each other, and at the end of the day we can get pizza together and a beer even if we disagree. I quickly realized that early childhood education was one of these rare things where if you go upstream, it will solve all these other problems. It’s a way of viewing the world that I think we must focus on in the 21st century. We have real structural issues in Vermont and in this country. We have to go upstream, understand what those structural issues are and change them.

Childcare is a perfect example. Take Vermont. We have jobs. It’s a misconception that we don’t. We just don’t have anyone to fill them. A large reason is because we can’t find or afford childcare.

I paint this picture for you because to me that is the whole basis of the answer to your question. [Childcare] needs to take the country by storm, and it’s starting to in places like Vermont. 

You鈥檝e mentioned that other states have reached out to you about making childcare more affordable. How do you see this conversation changing if you become governor?

Well, it puts it out in the universe in a very different, meaningful way. Affordability will make or break this country right now. And here’s a concrete example of making life more affordable tangibly for your citizens.

So I’ve been all over the country, honestly 鈥� in person and on webinars in the past couple of months 鈥� spreading the model of what we did in Vermont through Let’s Grow Kids.

Can you imagine the National Governors Association having a childcare meeting where we all say: What’s worked in your state? What hasn’t worked in your state?

Who are the leaders? Get them together, accelerate this 鈥� because it’s great for your citizens and great for your economy. And it’s now a low-risk proposition because states have already done it and showed it’s possible.

I think there’s an amazing opportunity there.

Recently named as Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Conway brings extensive experience improving early childhood systems, studying teacher-child interactions and leveraging data to drive performance.

Before coming to Virginia in 2018, she helmed the closely watched early education efforts in Louisiana, and played a key role in redesigning the state鈥檚 approach to measuring early childhood education quality. As the assistant superintendent of early childhood in Louisiana, Conway led implementation of (CLASS), a rigorous national measure of classroom quality that evaluates the quality of teacher-child interactions in real time, and contributed to significant improvements in the state鈥檚 early childhood system.

When Conway became a leader in Virginia鈥檚 school system, she was determined to build a common framework for measuring the quality of early childhood programs but knew the state required its own approach. The early childhood landscape was fragmented: family childcare providers, Head Start programs, early childhood special education services and school-based pre-K programs were all operating largely in isolation. Conway helped change that.

Working with providers, community members and legislators, she helped in 2020 that moved oversight for all early care and education programs to the Board of Education and the Virginia Department of Education, laying the groundwork for what would become the (VQB5).

The VQB5 system is, in Conway’s words, an “apples to apples” way of measuring early childhood experiences across every type of provider. Twice a year, about 1,200 certified individuals from the local community gather data on Virginia’s early learning environments by observing those settings in person; additional observations are conducted by contractors from Teachstone, the company that developed CLASS.

Conway also implemented the , which exemplifies her data-first orientation. This statewide framework for assessing children’s preparedness as they enter kindergarten gave Virginia a clearer picture of where children stood at the threshold of formal schooling. It also exposed the gaps that early childhood investment needed to close. 

The literacy and math results that Conway sees across Virginia’s 131 school divisions are not where she wants them. Her response is characteristically collaborative. As she puts it, the task is to “roll up our sleeves and work with 鈥� our school division leaders, our principals, our educators and all of the support staff and coaches to get kids the education that puts them on track for success.”

In Virginia, where the governorship regularly flips between parties, bipartisanship is essential to enacting policy change, Conway said. She consistently works across party lines, making the case that school performance, workforce participation and long-term economic competitiveness all depend on early childhood progress. 

As she settles into her new role, Conway discusses school readiness, teacher-child interactions, bipartisanship and how her personal experience has shaped her views on education.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How does Virginia define school readiness?

I have been working in Virginia for nearly eight years with different governors and with stakeholders across the state to improve school readiness. And that has been the True North for the entirety of my experience here. And really, by focusing in on improving school readiness, it allowed us to think very differently about how we work with all of the places that kids are served before kindergarten to improve school readiness outcomes. If you can improve school readiness outcomes, then you then open up all sorts of opportunities for kids throughout school and beyond. 

There is no single birth to 5 provider that could serve all kids. You need family childcare and [center-based] childcare and Head Start and Early Head Start and early childhood special education and the schools which offer preschool and pre-K to work together to offer opportunities to families 鈥� that put them on track for success. Although Virginia had taken some steps to measure readiness for all kids entering kindergarten, we didn’t have good information about the quality of those experiences. 

To what extent are you applying the Louisiana playbook to Virginia?

There are two things that we learned from Louisiana. The first is that 鈥� kids who were in classrooms that had higher quality teacher-child interactions learn more over the course of that year. We don’t ever standardize test toddlers 鈥� it’s not appropriate. It would be a little bit of a fool’s errand to try to test a 2-year-old in that way, and we certainly would never want to do it with stakes. [The second] is that [CLASS] could be used regardless of a teacher’s credential or curriculum use. It provided a way to compare the thing that matters most 鈥� the kind of secret ingredient: these teacher-child interactions. But it鈥檚 less input focused than something that says, 鈥淵ou have to use this particular curriculum鈥� or 鈥淵ou have to have this particular credential.鈥� In fact, more than 10 years [later] it is still the system of measure in Louisiana. And if you look at some research done by the University of Virginia, you see tremendous gains in quality of interactions across the board, including in very low-income and historically underserved areas from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta.

How does this approach play out in Virginia?

We realized Virginia had different community members, different parents, different perspectives. And so we worked with the to pilot an effort to think differently about how we might organize early childhood funding. We rolled VQB5 out statewide two years ago. So we have two years of results [from] over 12,000 classrooms. And in each of those classrooms we look at 鈥� the quality of teacher-child interactions. We completed 31,000 classroom observations last year, about 2.2 million minutes of insight. These are 60- to 80-minute observations, very rigorous. There’s an infant tool, there’s a toddler tool, and there’s a preschool tool. All of that data goes into determining their ratings, and all of that information is put on a website for families to be able to use. 

Have priorities in Virginia shifted with the Spanberger administration, or was it more of a continuation?

It has been a very intentionally bipartisan effort across different administrations. [Democratic Gov. Ralph] Northam [who served from 2018 to 2022] and first lady Pam Northam were really intentional as they worked on a potential early childhood law. When [Republican] Gov. Glenn Youngkin [who served from 2022 until Spanberger took office on Jan. 17, 2026] came on 鈥� improving K-12 outcomes was part of his vision for Virginia as well as supporting workforce participation.

During the pandemic, Virginia had some of the lowest [employment] rates, so the biggest drops in terms of moms participating in the workforce. So there was a real bipartisan effort at the time that he came in around investments in making sure that parents can access care so that not only will the kids benefit, but that parents can come back to the workforce. And over that period, you saw some of Virginia’s very low unemployment and very historic workforce participation. 

Virginia has made historic investments in early childhood. When I started [in 2018], it was . This year, the initial proposed budget has us at . Virginia is not getting full credit for it, relative to other states. Most people think of childcare as being federally funded. Virginia’s program is now two-thirds state funded.

What motivates you? You’re a mom yourself, you’re from Virginia. What鈥檚 a story you think about that helps to center you when you’re doing this work? 

My ability to be a working mom is because of childcare. Growing up, my mom did work, although part-time, and many people in my family are in education. My mom is a Ph.D. and was at the University of Virginia School of Education. 

As I became a mom, I realized that there’s just no greater act of trust than leaving your child in the hands of an early childhood [provider]. Across three children, I did everything from home-based childcare to pre-K in a school. And I had such tremendous respect for what was being provided to my children and that it enabled me to be successful at my career and to be able to earn money for my family.

I felt so grateful that I didn鈥檛 have to face this trade off of: I’d like to be able to work and also be able to know that my kid is well taken care of. And that is the trade-off that we often hear from folks who are working very hard, but whose salaries do not cover the cost of care.

And the thing that sort of struck me more than anything else coming out of the pandemic is that 鈥� human beings learn in the context of relationships with adults.

The ruling came about nine months after the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups filed a lawsuit against longtime vaccine skeptic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.,  and the department he leads, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  In it, the plaintiffs argued that Kennedy Jr.鈥檚 advisory committee appointments 鈥� and the panel鈥檚 subsequent votes to roll back childhood vaccine recommendations 鈥� were unlawful.

David Hill, a pediatrician who has been practicing for over 30 years, serves as a spokesperson for the AAP. He recently told 社区黑料 that while he and his colleagues are 鈥渧ery happy鈥� with this latest development, 鈥渨e’re also all still holding our breaths.鈥�

鈥淭his is one moment in a lengthy process,鈥� he added. 鈥淚t is an encouraging moment, but I don’t think any of us are under the impression that this is over yet.鈥�

Most of Hill鈥檚 work centers around hospitalized children and newborn care, which means he is often the first pediatrician a family meets and the one parents talk to about vaccinating their kids. He recently started practicing in Seattle after spending years working in North Carolina, where he served a widely diverse group of patients.

The families he works with, he said, have 鈥渧astly different socioeconomic backgrounds and value systems and understandings of health,鈥� which has given him a unique perspective into on-the-ground impacts of shifting vaccine policies.

While not new to public discourse, vaccine skepticism has significantly swelled and gained greater footing since Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the nation鈥檚 health care system last February. Following his appointment, he swiftly fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also known as ACIP, replacing them with hastily hand-picked advisors who largely shared his views on vaccines. 

The committee has since voted to overturn a recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine; change policies surrounding the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) combination vaccine; and roll back recommendations around 2025鈥檚 COVID- 19 booster. Then, this January, officials announced a plan to overhaul the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, significantly reducing the number of shots routinely recommended for all kids 鈥� all amid already falling vaccine rates, measles outbreaks and The AAP and other groups were also cut off from their long-standing liaison roles. 

It was in response to all of these decisions that the AAP, a trusted source of information for pediatricians and families for nearly a century, began boycotting ACIP meetings, released a competing vaccination schedule, filed their lawsuit and effectively severed ties with the committee.

March鈥檚 preliminary injunction halts the changes to the pediatric immunization schedule, and stays Kennedy Jr. ‘s 13 appointments to the committee, essentially rendering it unable to meet. All votes made by the now-stayed ACIP appointments are also overturned 鈥� at least temporarily. 

When asked to comment, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said this week that the department looked forward to the judge’s decision being overturned, but would not say whether it had filed an appeal.

社区黑料鈥檚 Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Hill about his organization鈥檚 lawsuit and how childhood vaccine sentiments have shifted over the past three decades. The impacts he鈥檚 seen in his own practice are particularly illuminating.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is the most common question that parents ask you about vaccinating their newborns? Is there one vaccine they’re particularly concerned about?

I have the most experience in my current role with the first hepatitis B vaccine, but I think it is a fantastic model for the questions that we get about other vaccines. For example, I recently admitted a child at the hospital with an infection and breathing difficulty at age 2 who had not yet been vaccinated against Haemophilus influenza B (Hib) and pneumococcal pneumonia. 

And we had to think about this child very differently, because these are complications of viral illnesses that used to be absolutely horrendous 鈥� with meningitis, aggressive pneumonia, severe ear infections, infections of the bone around the ear or behind the ear. And really, because of the effectiveness of the vaccines against these illnesses, we have been lulled into not worrying about them very much anymore. And so we had to make sure that the team was aware that this was a possibility 鈥� these complications with this baby. 

But most often I’m talking about hepatitis B, and usually I’m the one who begins with the questions, and I say, 鈥淗ey, I noticed that your child has not had the hepatitis B vaccine we usually give. Do you mind sharing with me your thoughts about that?鈥�

How have those conversations shifted, if at all, over the past three decades that you鈥檝e been practicing medicine?

Well, they used to be vanishingly rare. And not a 鈥渘ever鈥� event, but a rare enough event that if it occurred, it was remarkable. It might be the first thing I would tell my wife when I came home that evening, or something I would comment to my colleagues about when I went into the office. 鈥淵ou’ll never believe this, but we had a patient turn down [the] hepatitis B vaccine today.鈥�

And that is because there was a widely shared understanding that this was an important intervention to keep children healthy for the rest of their lives, and that it was an extraordinarily low-risk intervention with a very high degree of reward. 

And it wasn’t a never event. It’s always been there, but it was remarkable. It was unusual, and the script has flipped to the extent now that when I’m first reviewing a newborn’s chart before I go into the room, I actually breathe a sigh of relief when I see that they have gotten their vaccine, because a really significant proportion of my patients 鈥� especially just in the last five or six months 鈥� have decided that they are going to delay it or maybe not get it at all.

How much of that do you attribute to this current administration and to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.鈥檚 leadership of HHS?

I think that there’s a very apropos chicken-and-egg question here. The wellness industry has put an enormous amount of money and effort into undermining confidence in traditional medicine, and that, of course, allows them to expand their market. It’s a market which is extraordinarily profitable. 

But if patients have trust in traditional medicine, then they’re less likely to purchase those products or to go to those providers. So there has been a decades-long effort 鈥� in terms of marketing, in terms of influence 鈥� that has been well funded and extraordinarily successful. 

It certainly did not start with the election of Donald J. Trump, either the first time or the second time. It definitely was accelerated by the success of a number of proponents of these efforts to achieve power within the United States government, to achieve federal power. 

And as much as people distrust the government, they really do listen to what the government says. So when the message coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or from the Department of Health and Human Services, are messages undermining confidence in traditional medicine 鈥� whether we like it or not 鈥� that really does have a bearing on the decisions that people make.

Last July, the AAP sued HHS and Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies. Then, in March, a judge issued a stay, which essentially means that a lot of the votes that ACIP made are overturned 鈥� at least for now. One of those involves the Hep B vaccine birth dose. Can you talk a little bit about the initial decision that was made by ACIP to delay that birth dose, and how you saw that impacting patients on the ground?

I think the really good news for those of us in public health and those of us striving for child health is that the initial decisions made by the ACIP 鈥� the ones that were recently stayed by the court 鈥� had not yet come to affect what vaccines were available to children. And so the stay has also not changed that, because payers were still paying for the vaccines, suppliers were still supplying them, manufacturers were still making them, hospitals and offices were still stocking them. 

So I think it’s very good news that we had not yet seen our worst case scenario of some of these vaccines becoming unavailable or unaffordable. We, on the ground, are very happy to see a court agreeing with our professional opinion that there was no scientific basis for making these changes, and yet I think we’re also all still holding our breaths, because this is not done. There will be appeals. This is one moment in a lengthy process. It is an encouraging moment, but I don’t think any of us are under the impression that this is over yet.

You mentioned that the judge鈥檚 ruling luckily came before some of the worst case scenarios were able to play out. But are you aware of any pediatricians on the ground who had started shifting any of their practices based on ACIP votes?

I am not. I am quite involved in the American Academy of Pediatrics, and listen to a lot of lines of communication. And I think we were all trained to follow the best evidence. And the American Academy of Pediatrics, and scores of other medical organizations, endorsed an evidence-based vaccine schedule that was very similar to the prior vaccine schedule, and that is, as far as I know, what all of my colleagues were referring to.

If the judge had not issued this preliminary injunction, do you think providers on the ground ultimately would have shifted their practices to match the new ACIP guidelines? Or would they have stuck to the evidence-based practices regardless?

You know, I have great confidence that my colleagues would have continued to follow the evidence wherever it leads. I think the fear would have been that some other barriers to following that evidence might have arisen 鈥� in terms of reimbursement, manufacturing, liability 鈥� that would have made it more difficult for us to do what we know is right for children.

I would imagine that the majority of parents across the country are not keeping super close tabs on this lawsuit or tuning into ACIP meetings, but they are reading the headlines, and they’re seeing these rulings go back and forth and practices being implemented and then rolled back. I’m wondering what impact that back-and-forth messaging is having on parents. Is that leading to confusion?

Oh, I know that it is leading to massive confusion. When you look at a marketing campaign, as this has been, people don’t have to be convinced that a message like this is correct, they just have to have some doubt. And so the fact that these conflicting announcements or decisions are sowing doubt is really enough to dramatically change the landscape that we are looking at at this point in terms of communicating with parents, in terms of following the best practices for public health and in terms of protecting children.

So what is your big takeaway of the judge鈥檚 latest ruling then? What impact will this stay have for parents and providers on the ground?

I think the most important shift that I’ve seen 鈥� and as a professional medical communicator, it is a shift that I welcome 鈥� is that pediatricians and health care providers as a whole, and scientists and public health officials are coming to terms with a new understanding of how critical our communication is. And it is across the board revolutionizing the way that we communicate, both individually and in public.

Can you talk a little bit about how that communication is revolutionizing, specifically when you鈥檙e talking to patients and parents of patients?

Yeah, absolutely. My dad is still a practicing pediatrician at age 84, and throughout his career he could count on the fact that he was the doctor being enough for most people. He walks in the room in a white coat with years of experience and an absolutely spectacular education at the best institutions the country has to offer, and has a wall of diplomas behind him, and people will be like, 鈥淥K, you know a thing.鈥� It’s just like when I walk onto my airplane and I see the pilot with all the gold bars on his epaulet. I’m like, 鈥淥h, this guy probably knows how to fly an airplane. I’m going to take my seat.鈥�

The relationship between doctors and patients and doctors and the public has changed in a way that I don’t think is going to change back. No matter what happens, we can’t just sit down in the chair and say, 鈥淗ey, I’m the doctor. Here’s what you need to do. Trust me, I studied, I know some stuff.鈥� Patients are really demanding 鈥� and appropriately so 鈥� that we show first that we care and that we can listen and that their value system, their understanding, their goals for their child’s health are the most important thing in that room 鈥� that we are servants who can bring our knowledge to bear to further this family’s goals for their child. 鈥� 

My mentor for many years, Dr. Tom Blackstone in Wilmington, North Carolina, used to sit me down early in my career and say, 鈥淒avey, they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.鈥� And those are the very wise words of someone who’s been doing this for a long time, and I think those are words we all have to live by.

I love that 鈥� that鈥檚 a beautiful sentiment. Well you talked about how there have been shifts in medicine you don鈥檛 necessarily foresee going back. I鈥檓 going to ask you to look into a crystal ball here, if you will, and tell me if you foresee this moment as a shift in policy moving forward. 

In other words, might this be a time the administration moves away from the attacks on vaccine policy and perhaps more towards other elements of the MAHA movement, like nutrition? Or is this stay merely a brief pause before the vaccine battle continues?

I would tend more toward the brief pause, and I would be thrilled if MAHA acted aggressively on some of their (other) priorities. There is more common ground between the stated priorities of the MAHA movement and the priorities of pediatricians. We would love to see kids get more fresh, healthy food in their diets. We would love to see aggressive measures taken to reduce pollutants in the water, in the air, in farming practices. We would love to see efforts toward increasing family activity and generating safe green spaces for exercise and play really put at the forefront of policy.聽

I think, in a very sincere way, there are a ton of common goals that pediatricians and the MAHA movement share. I am disappointed that on many of these fronts, it appears that this administration is actually taking steps backwards rather than forwards. Taking steps to allow greater degrees of pollution that we know harm children; taking steps to allow greater use of chemicals in farming; taking steps to decrease the availability of fresh, healthy food in schools, for example. 

And people have done this 鈥� there are forums where pediatricians and MAHA advocates sit down and find that they agree on a lot. So I think we would love to see any of those priorities move to the forefront of the movement. 鈥� The attack on vaccines, unfortunately, is very much an attack on public health, and so I think we are still waiting to see what the next steps are going to be before we relax.

The AAP has always been a highly trusted organization and leading authority on children’s health, but I would imagine that role has been pretty seriously magnified over the past year or so with this shift in leadership. Can you talk a little bit about what that feels like from inside the organization and how that’s impacted some of your public-facing actions?

Past administrations have certainly cooperated in more concert with the American Academy of Pediatrics, regardless of whether the leadership was Republican or Democratic. We are a nonpartisan organization, and we have enjoyed close working relationships with pretty much every administration. I believe it is unprecedented since we began working with the ACIP to terminate that relationship. So that certainly would appear to be a flash point. 

However, as a pediatrician of a certain age, I also recall that this is very much in continuity with the American Academy of Pediatrics taking positions in favor of child health that were at times quite unpopular with the public. We were out there early talking about tobacco-free spaces and tobacco-free homes. Those of us who are old enough to remember when people smoked in restaurants and airports and pretty much anywhere they wanted to also recall that there was a tremendous backlash on that. 

When the American Academy of Pediatrics came out in favor of taking lead out of gasoline and paint that was dramatically unpopular. The fuel industry and the paint industry, the builders, really protested quite loudly against that. Even car seats, bike helmets, things that we all take for granted as public safety measures 鈥� like who would not have their baby in a car seat right now? 鈥� were incredibly controversial when they began, and the American Academy of Pediatrics always stood up for child health and safety first and understood that if children’s health was benefited, eventually the public would understand. 鈥�

So to some extent, we are just following in the footsteps of those who came before us, and I certainly hope that when I’m not working anymore, there will be another generation to continue in that path, because it’s the right path.

Is there anything I haven’t asked about 鈥� having to do with this current administration and vaccine policy 鈥� that you think is important for readers to understand, given the news of the past couple of weeks?

I think first of all, that the public is wise enough to see where these attacks on vaccines could lead, and to make good decisions regarding child health moving forward. I don’t think we’re going to be having the same conversation in 10 years, or even five years, because as we see measles sweep through certain states, we’re also seeing people in those states recognize what a danger it is. And part of what we’re seeing is parents asking if they can have their babies vaccinated against measles at six months of age, which they can, it just doesn’t keep them from needing the next two vaccines. 

I think that the public is really very intelligent, and that people are already waking up to what these changes mean for public health, and I think for the most part, they don’t like it. One truism that I’ve witnessed as a pediatrician throughout my career is that parents love their children. They want the best for their children. Everybody holds their baby, imagining what that little being is going to turn into, how they’re going to grow, what they’re going to accomplish, and knowing that, I know that societally, we are going to ultimately make good choices, because that’s what it means to love our children.

While teachers of all grades shape their students鈥� lives, kindergarten teachers play a unique role in that they build a formative early bridge from home to school. They introduce fundamental academic skills, build foundations for social and emotional development and help young learners develop confidence, curiosity and a lifelong love of learning. 

鈥淎s an educator, my mission has always been clear: to ensure every student, regardless of background, zip code, or circumstance, has access to a high-quality education,鈥� Gray wrote in a published by the NEA Foundation. 鈥淚 see my work as an act of justice.鈥�

Gray has started a number of programs at her school to support students in need, including working with classes to raise funds to donate to peers and creating opportunities for families to volunteer as tutors. She has also participated in various teacher advocacy efforts. Gray has testified before her state鈥檚 legislature about issues such as mentorship and compensation, and has participated in the , which aims to improve the teaching profession and student outcomes.

In the conversation below, she reflects on her career, the importance of mentorship in education and what drives her to make change 鈥� whether launching a new initiative at her school or using her voice to advocate for change across her profession. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m curious about your career and how you got to this point.

I have been an educator for 13 years in the public school system in Texas. I have [spent] the majority of my years teaching kindergarten in Temple ISD [Independent School District] in Temple, Texas … but I have taught at multiple campuses with different demographics.

One campus I was at was all about teaching students social-emotional skills … I got a chance to build relationships, and I learned a lot [about] emotional growth.

I had an opportunity to teach my first year at a campus that had 鈥� a lot of attendance issues. On my first meet-the-teacher night, I had maybe three parents show up. By the end of the year celebration, every single parent and grandparent showed up. That was probably the turning point to let me know I was in the right space. 

What has mentorship meant to you in your career?

Before I started as a teacher, I was working at a day care, and I was in a pre-K 3 class, and that was really my first official class, but it wasn鈥檛 at a public school. When I had the opportunity to get my certification, I got a chance to teach in the school district with my mentor, Leah Suchomel, who taught kindergarten. She taught me so many things that I didn’t get in the books or in the classroom. Yes, I learned a lot about 鈥� the different theories and Harry [and Rosemary] Wong鈥檚 but until you鈥檙e actually in a setting with a teacher that is willing to trust you enough to teach her class 鈥� and just that compassion that she showed, not only to me but to her students 鈥� I still take [that] to this day.

How have you paid that forward as a mentor?

My mentee came from Texas A&M. Her mom was an assistant principal. Her grandma was a teacher. Her aunt was a principal. So she came from a long line of educators, but when she told them she wanted to be a teacher, they asked her, 鈥淎re you sure?鈥� Because it is different from when they were teachers. 

I thought about what my mentor taught me, and I tried to see what my mentee needed to be successful for when she would become a mentor. It鈥檚 like a torch being passed.

How did the pandemic change your experience as a teacher?

During the pandemic, you could see a difference in the social-emotional status of our students. Before the pandemic, we were trying to get kids to learn how to use technology, but after the pandemic, I noticed my students wanted to have me read them big books. They didn’t want to just always be on a tablet to learn. I mean, that’s a tool as well, but they really craved that attention. 

Right now, I feel like we have so many students that are having to learn how to regulate their emotions. When they are playing 鈥� or working with classmates, they have to learn, How does this person feel before I react? If they’re on an iPad, nobody is there to tell them, 鈥淗ey, you’re being rude on this game.鈥� They have to learn 鈥� the body language of someone who needs space. They missed a lot of that during their first years of growing up.

You鈥檝e started a few programs and clubs at your school. Why did you start the Stars Helping Stars program?

I started that program when I began here at this school. I saw one of my students that was kind of struggling. I overheard him tell one of his classmates that he had slept in his car last night. And then his mom had called me and let me know that they had lost their housing. So, what I did with our kids 鈥� since it’s a STEM campus 鈥� we repurposed items from recyclables such as snowglobes, jewelry boxes, guitars, water guns and containers and sold them in order to get gift cards for homeless families at our school. 

The next year, that effort evolved into a tutoring group. Parents would come in and tutor kids on Tuesdays before school or after school. 鈥� And we saw a significant increase in our students’ accountability. 

What about the Breakfast Club program?

Once a month I’ll have mentors that will come through and just do different activities with about a group of 25 kids that range from kindergarten all the way to fifth grade. The high school volleyball team volunteered to come in, and they played volleyball. A group of soldiers came, including my spouse, and they did different stations where they had to talk like a soldier, act like a soldier, sound like a soldier鈥�. Maybe one day they want to grow up to be in the military. We don’t know, but just planting those seeds so they can see things outside of their home and outside of the classroom, that鈥檚 the whole point.

Do you think being someone who gets things off the ground is part of why you won this award? 

I do believe that it plays a big role. 鈥� That and also just being a person of action. That picture behind me 鈥� that is me signing with the governor of Texas. (House Bill 2 authorized $8.5 billion in new . A portion of that funding went toward teacher and staff pay raises.) And that day, I sat at the table speaking for 384,000 teachers that are in Texas that needed that extra pay. There were other teachers in different parts of Texas 鈥� who had to work pick-up jobs during Christmas just to make ends meet. And I wanted to do something about it. And so just being able to tell our stories together, bring our stories together 鈥� to sit and pass a bill of one of the largest allotments that has been passed in Texas. 

As the only elementary school teacher to win this NEA Foundation award, what do you have to say about the early years?

I think that early childhood sets such a big seed 鈥� for our students to have character, to have work ethic, to understand the importance of [this] journey. 鈥� I always have kids that end up being best friends, and I have at least one or two that end up being best friends all the way up to high school.

I’ve been teaching long enough to have those memories. Thanks to Facebook, I can see where they tag [me in photos from when] they were in kindergarten and now they are getting ready to graduate. It’s like, 鈥淭his all because of you, Ms. Gray.鈥� 

How do you cultivate friendships and relationships that last a lifetime? 

Part of it is the atmosphere in a classroom. It’s just everyone uplifting each other. And if someone doesn’t, if you don’t like what someone else said, it’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to just totally not listen to that person.

That鈥檚 what some of it is. Also, just being able to have 鈥� relationships with families. 

Whenever we have parent conferences 鈥� I don’t just do the beginning of the year, I do the middle of the year as well because I want [parents] to know that we are partners. The majority of the time they’re here with us, with the teachers, not at home. And so just building their relationship 鈥� you can understand like, 鈥淥h, I understand the reason why he may need the extra hug today.鈥�

Decades of research in developmental psychology and neuroscience reveal that early stress, particularly in the first few years of life, can influence brain development, behavior and well-being. 

Megan Gunnar has dedicated her career to understanding the relationship between stress biology and neurobehavioral development in children. As a professor at the University of Minnesota鈥檚 and director of the 鈥� which studies how children and adolescents regulate stress and emotions 鈥� she has influenced and mentored generations of researchers. 

After earning her doctorate in developmental psychology from Stanford University in 1978, Gunnar completed postdoctoral training in psychoneuroendocrinology at Stanford Medical School before joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1979. Over the years, she鈥檚 authored studies, including research on the intersection of , and has been a leader in for parents and caregivers. 

鈥淢egan Gunnar is a force of nature,鈥� says Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute and author of The Breakthrough Years and Mind in the Making. 鈥淲ith a rare background in psychology and developmental psychoneuroendocrinology, she has broken new ground in research on the effects of stress on infants, children and adolescents. She is a gifted communicator, known for phrases that make her findings unforgettable, and a true field-builder.鈥�

As Gunnar prepares to retire at the end of this academic year, she reflects on what decades of research suggest about how early stress shapes the developing brain. In the conversation below, she discusses how her field has advanced, the challenges of modern stressors on children and families, and what parents and caregivers can draw from her field to support infants and young children today. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are the earlier years so important for brain development? 

The brain is in the process of getting itself organized during those years. When you add to the development of the brain, it’s on top of the brain that’s already been developed. There are such things as sensitive periods when things get established and then get solidified. 鈥� Nature decided to have these sensitive periods.

What can change during these periods?

Things like executive functions, being able to learn to have inhibitory control. These begin to be established early, but we can work on them. You can work on self-regulation throughout your life. It’s harder later than it is earlier, but it never completely closes off. 

How can adults recognize stress in children?

Parents are not going to run around taking measures of cortisol. Signs that a child needs help are often that they start misbehaving. The canary in the coal mine is misbehavior.

Any parent knows this. A kid is going along fine. They start acting [out] all of a sudden. What’s going on? Bad kids? No, they鈥檙e probably hungry. Or maybe something else is going on that鈥檚 troubling them, especially if it lasts longer. It might be that they’ve had problems with friends at school. They might be worried about something. When they get more clingy or more crabby than usual, that’s a sort of sign that they’re a little stressed and they need some support of some kind.

What鈥檚 the best way to respond?

One of the things that we do so frequently with kids is say, “Don’t do this,” but then we don’t tell them what we want them to do. Any good preschool teacher will tell them what they’re supposed to do. They don’t say, “Stop making loud noise.” They say, “Use your indoor voice.” One of the misconceptions that we have is that kids know how they’re supposed to behave. And if we want to change the behavior, it鈥檚 often easier and better to tell them how we want them to behave.

When a child is feeling stressed and upset, asking what’s wrong can be sort of tough because sometimes they don’t really know what’s wrong. But [saying] 鈥淐ome, let’s sit together and let’s breathe together,鈥� and modeling the behavior of calming down and getting them calmer before you try to probe to figure out what’s going on is a wise thing.

There’s a lot of parenting advice on the internet, especially on Instagram. Where can parents and educators of young children turn for quality information?

Zero to Three鈥檚 is wonderful. If you’re an educator or a parent who likes to read complicated things, then the puts out working papers that go in more depth. [Gunnar is a founding member.] 

I wouldn’t look at any influencer. I just would go to Zero to Three or the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development if it’s more of a health question, and the if it’s more of a mental health question, absolutely not to the influencers. They’re just there to catch your attention.

You were a pioneer in treating child psychology as a science related to other sciences. Can you unpack the term 鈥渂iobehavioral鈥�? Do you think of it as an approach or as a field of study?

Psychology used to be about behavior and how we think 鈥� how we conceptualize and talk about thinking, right? But not about the body that all that was happening in. We’re not a disembodied brain. That’s been the biggest change since I got in the field 50 years ago. 

Now you hear the term 鈥減sychological science,鈥� and that is the shift 鈥� to move from just looking at behavior to looking at the processes and the mechanisms underlying behavior, including how the brain acts and so on. It’s also other endocrine systems, immune functioning, how all of that plays together to influence the way people behave.

So it’s everywhere. And you either talk about it as 鈥減sychobiology鈥� or 鈥渂iobehavioral,鈥� putting words together, but it’s a whole system.

Given your work as an educator, professor and mentor, are there promising avenues or researchers on the horizon?

I think many of us feel now that we鈥檝e filled in enough of the pieces of the mechanisms for how things happen, not that we see the association, but we understand the mechanisms 鈥� and we can continue to do that, but it’s really time to stop admiring the problem and to move upstream and try to change the conditions that are leading to the problem. 鈥� I think around the globe, that is the movement 鈥� to understand how to link the work we do to the policy, and show that certain policies are providing for better health outcomes through mechanisms that we now understand. 

I think there are some really amazing people out there that are doing some really phenomenal work. Many of them are actually my former students, but there are others as well. 鈥� The work is getting more interdisciplinary. The lines between disciplines are just fading, which is really lovely. And I tell students: You don’t want to be a dilettante. You don’t want to know a little bit about a lot of things and not much about anything. You need to be somebody who is an expert in X so that you can be at the table, but you really do need to broaden your scope and be able to work with people from different disciplines. 

If what we’re going to do is not only understand what the problem is, but what are the mechanisms for it, and how do we link that to policy, you’re going to need to be able to talk to economists who want to know the return on investment.

Can you say more about the consequences of not investing enough in early education and early educators? 

I really feel for those educators. They’re not paid enough. And we expect so much of them. And the ones who are laying down the fundamentals are paid the least, and they are often the least trained and the least supported. We just have to get to the point where we recognize that the best investment 鈥� as we’ve been saying for years, as the economists have helped us say 鈥� is in high-quality education available to all children from birth.

How has the science in your field advanced? 

The science has advanced in that we understand more and more about what’s happening inside a kid, biologically and in the brain. But the basic understanding of what children need in order to feel safe and secure, we’ve known for a long time. Now we understand a lot more about the how and the why of it.

The capacity to look at the physiology and how the brain responds has been just unbelievably exciting and illuminating. It has certainly helped us understand the importance of the earliest years in terms of the programming of the biology of stress.

What do you recommend for parents in this moment? 

Are we talking about normal life stress, or are we talking about buffering the children who are living in the areas where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is swarming and whistles are blowing and people are being dragged from their cars? Those are two related but somewhat distinct issues. 

Given that you鈥檙e living and working in Minnesota, I鈥檓 curious what your thoughts are on the latter.

I am envisioning what it would be like for a child 10 and under, or maybe 7 and under, living in those houses in the Longfellow neighborhood, where periodically, there are . There are men terrifyingly dressed, marching with guns in your street. 

I think the best thing [a parent can] do right now is to spend their evening watching old [episodes of] Mister Rogers鈥� Neighborhood because he was amazing at listening to children talk about their fears without adding to them. If you remember, one of the things he said, about when terrible things happen, is to look for the helpers. If I were a parent with a small child living in those neighborhoods, I would help my child reframe the whistleblowers as helpers coming, rather than emphasizing the scary guys. 

The other thing that I think is really important for parents to remember is that when a child asks a question, and we hear that question with our adult mind, like, “What are those bad people doing?” 鈥� the next step always with a young child is, “Well, what are you thinking might be happening?” So that you come in with your answer where they’re at, rather than this big thing that may be way beyond what they were thinking. 

Disclosure: Ellen Galinsky was Chief Science Officer of the Bezos Family Foundation from 2016-2022. The Bezos Family Foundation provided financial support to Early Learning Nation.

Nivens鈥� commitment to leadership, communication, professionalism and community involvement helped him achieve the on Thursday at The School Superintendent Association鈥檚 national conference in Nashville.

The organization selected Nivens from three other finalists in Maine, Kentucky and Maryland. He鈥檚 led a district of nearly 50,000 students west of Houston since 2021, part of his 30 years of education experience that began with teacher and principal roles in Dallas.

鈥淚f you’re smart, you realize you don’t get here by yourself,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a lot of people 鈥� 49,000 kids back home, 6,500 staff are working right now doing a phenomenal job. But it’s a tremendous honor.鈥�

Nivens spoke with 社区黑料鈥檚 Lauren Wagner on Friday at the conference. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What initiatives and developments are you most proud of during your tenure at Lamar Consolidated?

We are opening an in-district charter school for kids with autism spectrum disorder. The traditional setting works for some, but not for all. So what can we do to support a group of students who want that support? I sat with a parent back in November, and they were paying $40,000 a year to get their child support outside of school. So we want to try to support kids and families. That’s our purpose. It鈥檚 opening in August, but we’ve been planning this for two years.

I would also say we’ve increased the number of students who are thinking about post-secondary [plans]. I secured private funding for a college superintendent trip. So I take two juniors from every high school 鈥� 14 kids who are first-time college goers 鈥� and I take them out of state. It’s fully funded by private donors. Those kids haven鈥檛 even been out of the county. We’ve done it three years in a row now. The first year was Louisiana, last year was Arizona and then North Carolina.

We鈥檙e opening a brand new career technical education center in August. Lamar didn鈥檛 have a CTE center when I got there 鈥� we were partnering with different colleges. I don’t believe kids should have to decide what they’re going to do so early. The system is built where you have to say, 鈥極kay, child, you have to choose advanced academics or advanced band or athletics. Pick and choose.鈥� Give them options. You know, they鈥檙e 14 years old. We wanted to make sure everybody had options on what they wanted to do. 

Your district has rapidly grown since you started your role in 2021. What challenges have you dealt with to keep up?

We’ve added about 14,000 kids. There are 49,000 now and when I got there, there were around 36,000. I’ve opened 15 schools in five years, and that takes planning. My chief operations officer and his team do a great job helping me and bringing me data, and we think about where schools would go and when they need to go. 

Another challenge is that since we’re growing so fast, we have to rezone schools. We’ve had a lot of resistance from parents. Finally, I publicly intervened, because we may take students out of one historic school and put them in a brand new campus, and parents are like, 鈥楴o, I went to that school.鈥� But that’s not fair. I was like, 鈥楯ust because you went there 50 years ago doesn鈥檛 mean these kids should still be in that school.鈥� Our first bond issue in 2022 was $1.5 billion, and the one in 2025 was $1.9 billion. And the community supported it. 

What鈥檚 your favorite part about your job?

Definitely campus visits. I love listening to our babies. I taught elementary school and didn鈥檛 like it because they were too small 鈥� I was a high school guy. But now when I have a tough day, I go to a campus and go see some pre-K babies, some kindergarten babies. They’re the sweetest. And they don’t judge anything. One kid was like, 鈥榊ou’re as big as a truck!鈥� And I said, 鈥楾hat’s the laugh I needed today, man.鈥� By far, that’s my best part of my job.

Did you want to become a superintendent when you first began teaching?

No. I didn鈥檛 want to. I wanted to be a head football coach. That was it. I worked with a lot of great people, but I worked with a few who were not good with kids. I would have my [students] call me and say, 鈥楥oach, I don’t have a ride.鈥� Or, you know, 鈥楳y mama’s high.鈥� All kinds of stuff. And I would go pick them up or whatever I needed to do. After school, I would take them home, and I would buy them food. And I didn’t see [some teachers] doing that. And I was like, 鈥榃hy are you in this job if you’re not doing that?鈥� They always would talk bad about the job and I was like, 鈥楧o you hate kids?鈥� So I would go home and talk to my wife about it, and she would say, 鈥榃hat are you going to do about it?鈥� And I said, 鈥榃ell, I’m their peer. I can’t do anything about it.鈥� She said, 鈥榊eah, you can. Become a principal.鈥�

So as a principal, I did all the hiring, and if you didn’t know how to teach math, that was fine. If you’re a good person and you love kids, we could teach you how to teach math, right? Then I started working with other principals who I thought weren’t doing as much as they could for their campuses. So it was kind of the same mindset 鈥� you know what, I’ll become a superintendent.

What keeps you up at night right now as a superintendent?

In general it鈥檚 the contrast between COVID and now. When COVID hit, all the parents had to teach their own kids and their teachers were heroes, right? Now it’s like the world has forgotten that, and the reverence for the job and for the profession is gone. You know, give teachers an opportunity. It’s an automatic, 鈥楳y son said this.鈥� And, 鈥榃hy did you do that? I’m going to get you fired.鈥� It’s a cancel culture. So I talk a lot in my community about grace. We’re all human. The teacher might have done something wrong, and I’m not saying we’re always right, but let’s have a conversation about it. I don’t think anybody has bad intentions, right? But let’s have some grace with each other. Let’s be more kind to each other.

A focused on computer science and artificial intelligence aims to teach young kids to build, program and prototype together. In essence, students build their own machine learning models, solving problems, inventing characters and telling stories connected to their interests. The program, designed by Lego Education to be used in K-8 classrooms, offers project-based experiences for kids to work on in small groups. The lessons use Lego bricks, and some are screen free, while others require access to a device, such as a laptop or tablet, so kids can access an app which has a 鈥渃oding canvas,鈥� with icon-based coding.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commends Lego for using the science of playful learning to teach computer science. 鈥淲hen children learn to solve problems with hands-on materials,鈥� she states, 鈥渢hey are more likely to not only learn material but to be able to transfer what they have learned. In my experience, the Lego team has always worked with scientists to develop teaching tools that are aligned with the very best science on how children learn. It is one of the few companies committed to this way of doing business.鈥� (Hirsh-Pasek has collaborated with the Lego Foundation on other projects but did not take part in this initiative.)

In a significant departure from many other AI products, data from the children never leaves the computer. 鈥淎 really strong perspective that we had was that we don’t want anybody else to have the data 鈥� we don’t even want the data. We want that to stay in the classroom and on the computer, said Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience for Lego Education. From a technical and design perspective, Sliwinski said, 鈥淚t’s much easier to just send data to the cloud or use one of the big APIs [Application Program Interfaces], or one of the big companies that are out there. But when you do that, you sort of betray that principle of being able to guarantee privacy and safety to the child, and to the parent and to the teacher.鈥�

Maybe Big Tech could learn a thing or two from Big Toy.

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Sliwinski explains his role, the evolution of the curriculum and his hopes for AI more broadly. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you do at Lego Education?

My team is responsible for product strategy, design, engineering and, most importantly, the educational impact of our product. So really the development of our learning experiences from end to end. Lego stole me from the , where I worked on creative tools for children for many years, including, most notably, , which is a programming language for kids. 

Were you in the classroom before that?

I started working in education in 2002. I was living in Detroit, working as a tutor, and I was invited to support students in Detroit public schools with the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, the state鈥檚 big standardized test [at the time]. I’ve basically been working in some way, shape or form in education ever since. 

What do you see as the through line between that work, and what you鈥檙e doing now?

When I showed up in Detroit all those years ago, my biggest reflection was: These are kids that don’t see the purpose in mathematics. They don’t feel connected to it. They don’t understand how it connects to their lives. And so for me, it was like, 鈥淲ell, let’s solve that problem.鈥� And yeah, the rest is history. 

Were you a Lego kid yourself? 

We didn’t have Legos, but we had all manner of other building materials at our disposal, like cardboard boxes and wooden blocks and access to hammers and screwdrivers and all of that fun stuff. So I grew up building things and learning through making. 

Why is it important for children to understand what鈥檚 behind AI?

The phrase AI literacy is being used a lot, and I think it’s being used in a very general way that is sometimes unhelpful. AI literacy is about more than how children use AI. It’s about those foundational literacies that help children understand what AI is, because I’m not just interested in children developing an understanding of how to use ChatGPT to do a specific project or a specific location. I want children to understand what probability is. I want children to understand that machines reason differently than humans do 鈥� and why that is. I want children to understand that AI learns from data, and that data can have biases, and that data can have ethical considerations, and that data output is only as good as the input, right? Garbage in, garbage out. 

What does responsible AI education look like for young kids?

What we’re moving forward with with Lego education is really focused on 鈥� those foundations. The way that I sometimes like to talk about it with the team is: So much of what is being put in front of kids today is like learning how to use the black box of an AI model or an AI tool 鈥� I鈥檓 much more interested in giving the kids a screwdriver and letting them take the box apart. 

But that last analogy is figurative. 

Yes. There are no screwdrivers that come in the box, but not as figurative as you might think. In the tool, the kids actually get to train their own machine learning models 鈥� So a bunch of kids will work together in a group of four. That’s something that’s different. It is collaborative. 

What lessons can we draw from the use of earlier technological developments, such as TV and the internet, in building products for young kids?

These technologies are most effective when they serve as a catalyst for joint engagement between children and adults together, rather than sort of acting as a digital babysitter, whether that’s cartoons or whether that’s Club Penguin [a Disney game that ran from 2005 to 2017]. 鈥� 

One of the most powerful things that you can say to a child is, “I don’t know. Let’s go figure it out together.” And I think that there’s so much that parents and teachers and kids don’t know about AI, but that kids are curious about. And us expressing our own curiosity, and supporting that curiosity and engaging together is a really powerful thing. 

What guardrails has your team put in place for young children? 

When we started working on this, one of the things that was really important was to have a set of principles and a set of lines 鈥� we call them red lines, lines that we will not cross 鈥� because I think it’s so easy when you’re working in technology development to sort of lose track of some of those principles. We established that way, way early in the project. 

Some of the ones that are maybe less apparent are things like [how] no data from the children will ever leave the computer. It is never transmitted over the internet. It is never saved to disk. It is never sent to Lego. It is never sent to any third party. And if you look at the predominant paradigm and a lot of the tools that are out there, that is not the case. 鈥�

鈥e’re the Lego Group. If we don’t care about child safety and well-being, who does? And so I think it’s been this huge responsibility, but also like this really great opportunity for us to put forward something that we feel lives up to our values. 鈥� People are always surprised by how much my team goes around the world testing in classrooms, testing with children and talking with educators and experts. We even have child developmental psychologists that are on staff. And so much of what we do is about developing the right things in collaboration with young people and educators. 

How did you test the experience with young children?

One of the most recent tests that I [did] was testing some of the AI features for the very young kids 鈥� the kindergarten to second grade group [in Chicago public schools.] One of the things that we do as the product matures is we stop being the teachers in the classroom and we actually just give the box to a 鈥� teacher in their normal day-to-day classroom and we say, “Good luck.” And then we watch, because it’s not enough for the kids to have a great experience when we show up knowing the product and we teach it. 鈥� It has to work for the teachers, otherwise it doesn’t matter. 

One of the most interesting, but also humbling things that you do as a designer for children and teachers is taking it into the field, right? Because all of the assumptions and ideas and intentions that you have, they go out the window when you put it in front of a 5-year-old. That process is just so rewarding.

Did anything surprise you about how they put it to use? 

I was observing a group of 4- or 5-year-olds, and they were working on this lesson where they had to build a toothbrush for a dinosaur. Part of that was figuring out how motors work and how sensors interact, but it was kind of a funny setup 鈥� the dinosaur mouth that we had built had these big teeth in it. 

The 5-year-olds didn’t see a dinosaur. They saw a swimming pool, because the bottom of the dinosaur鈥檚 jaw had these big teeth around it, and they were like, “Oh, it’s a swimming pool.” So then they designed dinosaurs that went into the swimming pool. 

You kind of come in with these stories and intentions of what you think kids are going to connect to. 鈥� And then you get there and it’s just one little detail of how the model was designed just throws the whole lesson out the window.

How are educators responding?

We’re doing this in a way where the teacher is able to come along for the journey, where we’ve prepared all of the materials that are necessary for a teacher, who often feels less confident about computer science and AI than their students do, giving them everything that they need to feel not just prepared, but to feel confident. 

There’s this kind of power dynamic that’s happening with AI today, where we’re more focused on what computers can do than we are on what children can do right now. And I think that’s really fundamental to our approach 鈥� When you get a bunch of kids together to train a Lego robot how to dance, this kind of fear dissipates. They see the cause and effect between the model that they trained and what’s happening in the world, and they realize that the machine only knows what they taught it. 

The AI is no longer the smartest thing in the room. They’re the smartest thing in the room, and the AI is a tool. 

As of last month, had enacted phone restrictions in K-12 classrooms, with 27 banning phones in classrooms outright. In many cases, schools are asking students to drop their phones in Yondr pouches for the school day, at a cost of about $30 per student annually. 

What you may not know is that the pouches have been floating around for more than a decade, first appearing in an Oakland biker bar 鈥� and that the man behind them had thinkers like French philosopher and English novelist on his mind as he developed the idea.

More than a decade later, Graham Dugoni sees the pouches as a low-tech, countercultural way to help young people begin to see unexplored frontiers in their own lives.

Born in Oregon in 1986, Dugoni briefly played professional soccer in Norway and the U.S. before taking his first real 鈥渁dult鈥� job in finance in Atlanta. He recalls a 鈥淜afka-esque鈥� experience toiling away in a windowless office 鈥� in his free time, he began immersing himself in philosophy and teaching himself jazz piano. 

Philosophers like and got him thinking about technology and society, while jazz 鈥� with its improvisations and emphasis on self-expression 鈥� pushed him to explore broader themes of personal freedom.

A pivotal moment happened in 2012, when Dugoni, by then based in California鈥檚 Bay Area, was enjoying a music festival. He watched in shock as an intoxicated concertgoer danced uninhibitedly while a perfect stranger filmed him with a smartphone, then uploaded the video to social media. Dugoni began searching for a way to make such interactions impossible, wondering how he could create phone-free spaces that foster genuine connection 鈥� and a measure of privacy.

鈥淭o see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online,鈥� he said in an interview, 鈥淚 just followed it out logically. Where does that go?鈥�

He鈥檇 read enough about the corrosive effects of technology to know that while tech can help create a more open, democratic society, 鈥淵ou don’t get something for nothing.鈥� He knew that giving up privacy in the public sphere could have 鈥渁 tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment.鈥�

In 2014, Dugoni developed the first magnetic pouches out of materials from his local hardware store and began selling them door-to-door 鈥� his first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that wanted to dissuade patrons from filming its burlesque shows. Around the same time, he signed his first school.

Then, in 2015, he got a call from comedian Dave Chappelle鈥檚 manager, who wanted to at his shows to enforce a no-phones policy. That helped push Yondr into public consciousness, with schools, artists and venues soon queuing up.

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic began shifting parents鈥� attitudes around mobile phones and schools. And Jonathan Haidt鈥檚 2024 book , which urged schools to go phone-free, pushed the company to even bigger prominence. Yondr now boasts about 150 employees. The company, which is privately held, doesn鈥檛 share revenue figures, but a spokeswoman said it has seen 鈥渟ustained triple-digit growth鈥� over the past three years. Its pouches are used by about 2.5 million students in all 50 states and 45 countries, and the company said the figure could triple once total sales are tallied by the end of the year.

TIME included the pouches as their 鈥溾�� 鈥� under the 鈥淪ocial Good鈥� heading, which also included a new malaria vaccine and a 3D-printed resin water filter for people without access to safe drinking water. 

By now, many students understand the importance of going phone-free, even if the locking pouch impinges on their social life. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not the best, but I think it鈥檚 for the best,鈥� one student last spring. 

社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo recently chatted with Dugoni, 39, to ask him about the company鈥檚 origins, his philosophy and why he considers phone-free schools as spaces where kids can be kids, focus on their studies and develop vital relationships.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to ask you about that 2012 music festival where you came up with the idea for the pouches. What was on your mind? 

I was looking at the smartphone, and the fact that everyone had a recording device, but also access to the Internet. I knew that that was a fundamentally new human experience, and that, from a pure sociology standpoint, there are going to be questions asked because of that that have never been asked before. No one’s had to ask questions about what degree of privacy can you assume in the public sphere. No one had to think about what effect would the ability to be recorded or show up online in any context do to social interaction, to the idea of privacy, to the idea of intimacy. 

This new tool, I felt, was ushering in these questions. But I was walking around San Francisco in my waking life, and no one else was aware of them. In an education setting, it was happening in a different way to the same degree: the push to put more tech into the classroom, faster, which was really nonsensical in a lot of ways. But at a music festival, to see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online, I just followed it out logically. Where does that go? 

I had read enough of people like Foucault and things like that to understand what that ultimately leads to. In a lot of tech society, there’s this idea that transparency in all things is going to create a more open society and more democratization. And like anything, you don’t get something for nothing. You give something up. And that’s how I saw it playing out. If there’s no degree of privacy in the public sphere, I saw it having a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment 鈥� things that are deeply valuable for an individual’s psychology, but also the collective consciousness and experience of civil society.

You guys strike me as a privacy company, first and foremost, but also a tech company that’s turning back the clock, in a way. Is that the way you see yourselves?

Not really. I would say we’re a bit of a counterculture company, really. And I would say we’re definitely not a tech company.

I purposely, early on, did not go with early venture capital money because there’s a certain profile that those companies have to follow. What I’m about, especially for young people in a school setting, but also people in daily life, is a sense of choice and a sense of freedom, and especially showing this younger generation that there is a way to walk through the world that’s not completely mediated by screens and the Internet. 

It’s not poo-pooing technology or what it can do. The question is, really, how do you integrate it into our lives? And I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for it. But I’ve always felt that phone-free schools and spaces, that Yondr started 鈥� we created that concept 鈥� is a really good way to give people some sense of what that is, because people have to experience it. 

How quickly did you start thinking about schools as users of these pouches?

Our first customer was a venue, and we got a lot of notoriety early on from working with certain artists, like Dave Chappelle. But really, at the same time that we started working with a few venues, we got our first school customer around the Bay Area. So from the very beginning, the two pillars of the company have been centered on those two 鈥� that’s been lost in the general story a bit. Now, going around the Bay in 2014, talking about a phone-free school, you can imagine how many doors got shut in my face. But even then, from talking to teachers, I knew it was a huge problem 鈥� it just hadn’t floated up into general awareness enough for superintendents to take any notice of it. But teachers knew, even back then.

So where was this brave new school that came to you and said, “We need to do this”?

Well, they didn’t come to me. I went to them. I was going door-to-door. The first school that said Yes was Peninsula High School in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

And what did they see that nobody else did?

I would say principals and teachers fell into two camps, for the most part, around phones. One group saw it as so far gone that this was a bell that could not be unrung. On the other side, you had teachers and people who knew it was a huge deal, but they were trying to figure out a solution. For a lot of reasons, it’s a difficult thing to unwind. It’s wrapped up with social behavior, social psychology, habits, all of those things. So this principal fell into that camp: someone who had the gusto, the energy and wanted to try to do something. I came to them and said, “Look, I think there’s a way to do this, and I think I can help you do it.” Now, I didn’t know anything about how to actually make it work, so it didn’t work so great in the early days. But we’ve spent the last 11 years figuring out all the things that have to go with it to make this work for a school, a district, and now whole states.

As you said, the ethos at the time was to get more tech in schools, not less. I can see what you were up against.

The drive, at the end of the day, to make things faster, easier, cheaper and more available, it’s very tantalizing. You’re turning kids and people in general into information-retrieval machines, which is very different than critical thinking.

What changed? Obviously COVID had a hand in this. What else? 

Eleven years ago, everything was different, and our team was out on the ground, going into schools. And basically the way we’ve grown as a company to where we are now 鈥� we operate in all 50 states, we’re in 45 countries and millions of students use Yondr every day 鈥� we did it brick-by-brick, school-by-school. We went in and helped them actually do it, figure out a policy, help them implement it, learn from them how to do it. We’ve had a huge ground game over the years. Up until COVID, we were building that out. We were building around pockets of teachers at first, who helped us figure it out, and then we realized we had to expand into the whole school to make it work. Then it started to grow. And we’re building up just by word of mouth, teachers and principals saying, “Hey, this works, and this company has helped us.” 

Then COVID hit, and that basically flattened out our business. We almost went under. But it also had an incredibly positive effect in the aftermath, because so many teachers 鈥� and parents especially 鈥� saw what it meant for their kid to be behind a screen for that long. They saw what was happening. So out of COVID, the conversation completely flipped. Whereas before our team was out kind of evangelizing, saying, “Hey, here’s what a phone-free school is, a phone-free space is” 鈥� we invented the term 鈥� we have people kicking it back to us now and saying, “Yeah, we get it. There’s a problem here, and we’re looking for a solution.” The zeitgeist really changed and people’s awareness clicked over. 

I guess Jonathan Haidt’s book didn’t hurt.

It added a lot of fuel to the fire, but it was, in terms of us, all the schools mentioned [in the book], they’re Yondr schools. So we already knew it. But the general awareness that it generated was tremendous.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a school in Boston that’s using these pouches. My favorite comment from a teacher was, “My students are laughing at my jokes again.” What are some of the reactions that you remember?

Those are the little stories we look for. We have the case studies that show improvements in academic performance, teachers getting more teaching time back, students feeling safer on campus. But the way I see what we do is that it’s a broader cultural shift inside of a school. And so stories like you just mentioned, we hear that all the time: Teachers are seeing the students鈥� eyes again. We hear a lot that the body language, the posture of students inside the hallways, totally changes. We hear a lot of times that more books have been checked out in the first three weeks at a library than the entire previous school year.

One that’s most interesting to me, in a way, is we’ve heard from a lot of schools that more lunches are being eaten at the cafeteria. It’s not because the kids are less distracted. It’s because a lot of kids are afraid of eating lunch in the cafeteria because they don鈥檛 want to be filmed or recorded in an embarrassing moment and posted online. 

What I like about those stories is they help people who are not in the day-to-day, like teachers are, realize what an existential situation these young kids are stepping into. And it reframes that: A phone-free school is not taking something away from students. We’re trying to give them a space to be kids and to focus on their studies, develop the social relationships, a sense of identity that they’re going to need. And phone-free space is part of that.  

Speaking about technology, you recently said it has “this total neutralizing effect on people’s ability to express themselves, because there’s no such thing as intimacy without privacy.” That seems like a big part of this project.

It’s very difficult to find frontiers in modern society anymore: Places you can go where there’s unexpected things, there’s adventure, there’s a sense of unexplored territory. That鈥檚 especially hard for this younger generation, which has grown up always being able to look around corners. Things are curated and manicured, and they know where people are at all times. You can look at it through the lens of privacy, which is real, but also through that lens of just what’s unexplored. And when you go to a show that uses Yondr, it’s unexplored. What happens there is for the people who are there. And it makes the experience richer. It leaves a deeper impression on the people there. 

What about the ways students try to get around these pouches? How do you view that? Do you view that as helping you problem-solve or rethink the pouches themselves?

Of course it happens. We’ll talk to principals and be super candid: “You know the students who are going to buck against a new policy, and you know there are going to be students who smuggle a phone through their sock, or whatever.鈥� 

I always want to hear the stories. I smirk a little bit, because it’s good to see that students are using their ingenuity and being creative. But it’s not really about that. The broader message is that it precipitates a cultural shift in the school, where the expectation is that the school is phone-free, bell-to-bell. What we found is that after two or three weeks, that becomes the new normal. Once you establish that inside a school, and a culture that supports it, that’s the point. So if a student finds a workaround, or they want to bring in a phone, the important thing is that the community is ready to deal with that in a way that is appropriate for them. If you reinforce the benefits of a phone-free culture, eventually you win everyone over as they start to see the results.

So we’re not naive about it. We know we’re not going to win over every 16-year-old overnight. But we can convince them and show them that they might enjoy it once they’ve experienced it.

I was listening to a call-in show about phone-free schools the other day, and one of the panelists pointed out that if school is a training ground for students’ real lives, the only jobs where they’re going to have to put away their phones are low-paying service jobs. I’d never thought about it in those terms. Does that give you pause?

There’s something much more fundamental than that happening. I’ve talked to a lot of people in different state agencies. I can tell you they’re having an extremely difficult time hiring young people right now, and a lot of that comes down to their ability to focus, to think critically and to just socialize. Those are skills that you’re less likely to develop if you have a crutch in your pocket that makes those things less risky or easier. A lot of modern technology, it ultimately makes something easier. Now, that’s fine. We do a lot of trade-offs in our life for convenience. But when you get down to what education is about, it’s not just about using a tool. You have to be able to build up critical thinking muscles and some of the aptitude that’s going to carry you through life. 

People say, “Well, we should teach kids how to use these devices.” Absolutely. How do you plan to do that? If you have something in your pocket soliciting your attention all the time, that becomes basically wired into your central nervous system and always offers you a path of least resistance when anything difficult comes along, how do you plan to educate someone, especially a digital native who has no experience of the world without it? So it’s more, “How do you believe human psychology works, and how do you actually develop habits and patterns of thinking?” 

The pouch is more of an impulse disrupter. A student feels the phantom vibration in their pocket. They reach for it. Hand feels the pouch. You’re allowing a new pathway to emerge and develop that leads to a new habit. Because it’s hard to make the argument that young people are not going to have enough exposure to the Internet and their phones to learn how to use them. You can make a lot of arguments to say that six to eight hours a day without it to focus on their studies and being a kid is probably a good thing, given what we know. 

Last question: Talk about your tech habits.

I’ve had a flip phone for 10 years. I’m not saying everyone should do that. That’s my own choice. It makes a lot of things in life very inconvenient, very difficult. But on balance, it helps me because I have fewer inputs than the average person. My morning, I’m not flipping open the news and getting carried away to some place about things I can’t affect in any positive way, which is a big part of the modern world as well. If you allow everything to solicit your attention and your empathy, what are you left with to affect the things positively that you can control? 

That’s a funny effect of digital media in general: There’s a lot of important things, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them, but what can you affect? For me, that’s a choice I have. So I operate in front of the computer, or I do phone calls. It slows my world down. I place a big emphasis company-wide on writing, on clarity of writing, and clarity of thinking that comes out of that. 

And then in my own home life, it’s all about boundaries. Technology as a theme 鈥� this is not just the Internet 鈥� it’s not totally neutral. Albert Borgmann and Martin Heidegger write about this: It’s not something that knocks at the door and asks permission to enter. You have to create boundaries. And to me, boundaries are best created in a physical way. So I use a computer in one room in my house. That’s it. So my mental associations are, if I’m here, I’m doing work. 

In the 21st century, the scope and complexity of issues have piled up, constituting what Ariella Cook-Shonkoff refers to as a 鈥減olycrisis鈥� 鈥� which she defines as a 鈥渁 confluence of overlapping existential stressors鈥� in her recent book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times.

The book guides parents and caregivers through navigating difficult conversations about  topics like climate change, racism, pandemics, gun violence and political polarization. 

A 鈥渄oomer mindset,鈥� as Cook-Shonkoff describes it, is a psychological barrier that 鈥渄eflates your energy, and squashes your sense of purpose and meaning in life. It can feel like a quick knee-jerk emotional response that overcomes you, or it can gradually eclipse you until one day you wake up under a blanket of depression.鈥� The antidote, in a word, is hope.

Cook-Shonkoff draws from her experiences as a marriage and family therapist and as a former member of the executive committee of the , which promotes climate-aware therapy. Here, she shares parenting insights from her book and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear-eyed view of what鈥檚 at stake for children, families and the planet.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Many of the parents you quote in the book said they feel isolated and ill-equipped for the challenges they鈥檙e faced with. How did we get to this point?

What we see again and again is a failure of adults in charge 鈥� whether in government or private sectors 鈥� to protect kids’ best interests and consider their healthy development and safety. Be it common-sense gun safety laws, digital-free school environments, restrictions on social media accounts, and so on. Wherever there was bipartisan compromise or regulatory bodies in the past to protect children’s health, it’s nonexistent now. So unfortunately the onus 鈥� and immense burden of raising kids 鈥� has shifted fully onto parents.

What made you want to make this more than just a book about climate change?

The book really was born out of some of my personal experience in grappling with raising kids while the wildfires were starting to intensify in Northern California. It was originally going to be a climate-focused book, and then my publisher and I decided to expand that. 

It’s hard to separate climate from all the other layers of existential stress. For example, I’ve worked with undocumented families, and for children, there can be real fear in leaving behind their parents and going to school. They hold that anxiety, and it manifests, often as a stomachache or a headache.The book also addresses gun violence and school shootings. It’s absolutely traumatic to be in school, a place of learning and curiosity, and to have to do active shooter drills again and again. 

How young is too young to talk about these topics?

People want an easy formula for this, but it comes through trial and error. I don’t think you necessarily need to introduce the tough subjects at a really young age. There’s a protected time when you’re filtering out a lot of the realities and letting your kid grow up into the world and make connections. As they get older and more curious, kids are asking questions and hearing things at school, and you have less control over what they’re exposed to. That鈥檚 when it becomes important to think about how to bring up a subject that is not maybe the most pleasant. There鈥檚 an expression, 鈥淣o fear before fourth grade,鈥� which means not introducing really scary stuff before they’re able to get support and think through issues in a slightly more sophisticated way. 

Sometimes, the subjects come up before fourth grade.

Parents don’t always have a choice, depending on different factors, about when they have difficult conversations with their kids. But I think how you talk is what makes the difference. If you speak in a gentle voice, and you’re calmer, and your own nervous system is regulated, that鈥檚 very different from if you鈥檙e on edge, sad, depressed. Do you have a lot of unprocessed emotions yourself? Those can transfer onto your kids. 

Beyond acknowledging the polycrisis, it sounds like taking care of yourself is one thing you want parents and caregivers to come away with. What are some other words of wisdom parents need right now?

Yes, taking care of ourselves and just continuing to regulate our nervous systems because we have to remember that it filters down to the kids. That’s really critical. I think that “the parent club” [a tool Cook-Shonkoff uses in her book to describe a community including parents, guardian, caregivers, foster parents, involved family or community members] is a way that parents can support each other. Parent groups have enormous potential for developing community and resilience in the face of toxic politics and culture.

How do parents move from self-care to social change? 

We do have to do emotional processing, or, as I call it, emotional metabolizing, and we can’t squash or deny and keep pretending life is a certain way. We have to just be real about it. And from there, we can raise healthier families and take action and have some society-level impacts. If you develop those capacities early in a child, by the time they鈥檙e in high school, they鈥檙e ready to be advocates for themsleves and to be part of their communities. 

What else have you seen that works?

My book explores spending time in the more-than-human world [a phrase coined by ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram]. We can see our place in the world or just understand things differently when we’re out in the natural world. Spending time in communities, creating these little intentional communities, making music, writing lyrics, writing poems, creating art, making a mural 鈥� all that stuff is more powerful than people realize. 

Who or what gives you hope?

Two women who influenced my work recently passed. One of them was Jane Goodall. Meeting her in my hometown when I was 17 years old was pivotal for me. She started a youth program in our town, and I was a president of the environmental club in the high school and was on this panel with her. Her steady advocacy around animal welfare, the environment and human rights countered my frustration with the adult world. It showed me that some adults did care. There was both a gentleness and firmness to her demeanor, and I could tell that she was a quiet force to be reckoned with. Joanna Macy, an eco-Buddhist philosopher-activist, also meant a lot to me. When I first came across her work, as a mom with my own eco-anxiety, it felt relieving to have my intense feelings of hope and grief so well articulated. And that she had a clear program 鈥� and a literal path forward through all of my pain and fear 鈥� was a lifeline for which I remain grateful for today.

Bill McCallum, a lead writer for the Common Core math standards, and Kristin Umland, then a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, led the effort, which was supposed to last a year or two. 

At first, Umland said, the organization was focused on helping other groups, including the and testing companies, improve their products to meet the more rigorous standards. 

Eventually, she said, the group shifted to creating the curriculum 鈥� including lesson plans 鈥� that it felt best served students as they strove to achieve both a conceptual understanding of math, the why of how math works, alongside procedural fluency, the ability to solve problems. 

Illustrative Mathematics now encompasses 90 employees 鈥� all are remote workers 鈥� with no central location. For those states that still use it, the curriculum is aligned to Common Core standards 鈥� and there are also state-specific versions for those states that don’t.

鈥淥ur goal is to change outcomes for students, regardless of the standards they are using,鈥� Umland said. 鈥淢ath is math, and all states agree that kids should learn math.鈥�

Select schools within the New York City system have been using Illustrative Mathematics for half a decade. A recent, massive rollout across hundreds of campuses has been met with sharp criticism from many teachers and  

Some said the curriculum and for students to practice what they鈥檝e learned. One educator acknowledged these initial growing pains but said , one that helped students more easily understand abstract concepts.  

Umland has heard all of the complaints. While she acknowledges these early days struggles,  it doesn鈥檛 mean the move is a failure. Only that it needs more time, she said. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 no magic bullet,鈥� she said. 鈥淚f there was, somebody would have figured it out by now.鈥�

Los Angeles, which adopted the curriculum in its middle and high schools in 2023, meanwhile, .

社区黑料 talked with Umland recently about the math wars, how her organization鈥檚 approach stands out from the rest and about Illustrative Mathematics鈥檚 bumpy New York City rollout.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does Illustrative Mathematics fit into the math wars? And by math wars, I mean that push and pull between teacher- and child-centered learning? 

We always see ourselves as a third way. There’s no-one-size-fits-all for all students in all contexts. There are times when students need to understand and hear a direct explanation. And there are other times they should be given a chance to think about it for themselves, make sense of it, grapple with it and discuss it. So, it’s not either or. It’s what’s appropriate for what you’re trying to help students learn in the particular moment.

What type of lesson would require a direct explanation? 

So, a perfect example is when kids are learning to count. There’s no way they can figure that out on their own. Numbers are different in different languages. That’s a completely cultural thing. That’s something you have to learn by hearing other people say the number to you. 

But when you’re starting to do addition, once they understand what three is and what two is, you can say, 鈥淚f I have three marbles and two marbles, how many marbles do I have altogether?鈥� 

The things that are cultural have to be taught directly. But once you understand what the meaning is, you can figure it out. 

How does Illustrative Mathematics鈥檚 approach to teaching and learning compare to most other curriculum methods?

A lot of folks learn mathematics from an 鈥淚 do, we do, you do model,鈥� where the teacher does an example question, then they work together with the students, and then the students go practice.

Our method sort of flips that model on its head, allowing students to think about a problem so they can get oriented to it. And then there’s discussion where they make sense of it. 

And, finally, the teacher brings it all together. It gives students a chance to think for themselves before being shown something. 

I can show you how to do two plus three by counting it all myself, or I can say, 鈥淗ere’s a picture that shows two marbles and three marbles. How many marbles do you see altogether?鈥�

Some kids will know how to count it and will do it. And some kids won’t. They’ll talk about it, share their strategies, and then the teacher can make sure that the student who does it correctly shows their solution. Or if none of the students do it, they can show them how.

Illustrative Mathematics had a rough rollout in New York City. What went wrong for some teachers/schools? 

A lot of the complaints weren鈥檛 necessarily about the curriculum itself, but about the rollout or the implementation. 

Teachers need to have professional development where they get oriented to the design structure and they get a chance to experience what a lesson feels like. They need a chance to practice.

Ideally, they have opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues on planning and they have coaching support as they go. It鈥檚 just sometimes hard to coordinate all of those pieces.

A lot of teachers, in the first couple of months, are still trying to understand how it works. But once they get to the second or third month, then they start to see how it works. When something is new, it’s harder. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. And it takes time for people to get oriented to it. 

We’re seeing the best success in the places where they’ve been doing it longer. They鈥檝e put in a lot of time to support it and when they get to that phase, then they’re really seeing the outcomes for students.

What do you want to fix about mathematics education in this country?  

A lot of school districts have come to realize that they need high-quality instructional materials. They’ve made that commitment. Then they start to ask themselves, 鈥淥K, so what do we do for (struggling students)?鈥�

In a multi-tiered system of support, tier one instruction is the core instruction that all students receive. Students identified as needing additional support will receive tier two instruction. Often, this means they will be pulled for small group instruction or additional instruction.

One of the problems is that for many of these students, it’s like they’re on a highway and then they get pulled off onto the frontage road 鈥� only they never find a way back. They end up on a parallel track. What we want is to figure out how to support these students.

How might you help kids stay on track? 

Right now, we’re really focusing on early math. We are currently developing a pre-K math curriculum. It will be available next school year. If you can get to students early, it has an exponential impact on them before they head on to later grades. If we can do a better job with the youngest math learners, they won鈥檛 have the problems that we see at the secondary level in the future. 

For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia. 

Now the vice president of policy for the education group , Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: .

She explores 鈥渢he accidental experiment鈥� that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called 鈥渉igh-dosage tutoring鈥� but has come to be known as 鈥渉igh-impact tutoring.鈥� 

Its four pillars, according to Stanford鈥檚 : 

1. It must take place at least three days a week.
2. Sessions last at least 30 minutes.
3. Sessions are with a consistent tutor.
4. There are no more than four students working in a group. 

The moment couldn鈥檛 have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K鈥�12 schools more than tripled, with districts slated to get at least 90% of the new funding. Federal rules eventually dictated that they reserve at least 20% of the largest pot of money to treat pandemic-related learning loss. Tutoring, Cohen writes, 鈥渜uickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.鈥�

Cohen interviewed everyone from Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the movement, to Katreena Shelby, a Washington, D.C., middle school principal who somehow found a way to get a tutor for every student in her school.

Ahead of the book鈥檚 publication, Cohen spoke to 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo about her findings and her belief that, despite the bleakness of the past few years, educators 鈥渨ant to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things.鈥�

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

I want to start with a kind of impertinent question: I believe it was former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett who said that many schools serve up what he called a “14-egg omelet.” Have you heard of this?

No, but I like where it’s going.

When what they’re doing doesn’t work, they just do more of the same. I’m guessing you would say that high-impact tutoring does not resemble one of Bennett’s lousy omelets. Are schools truly doing something different?

It’s, of course, impossible to answer universally for every school and every tutoring program. And there have been tutoring programs that haven’t been super additive. But at this point, the schools that have implemented high-impact or high-dosage tutoring within the definition of what that is 鈥� and to the gold standard that the evidence suggests 鈥� are offering something different. Whether that’s home fries on the side of the omelet or a salad, you can choose, but it’s something else.

You write that a couple of places have done better jobs than others. New Mexico, for instance, seems to have made a few missteps. What’s the difference between places where tutoring is working and where it’s not?

Where tutoring works the best is where it is a strategy in service of a broader goal. Sometimes in education we make the mistake of thinking the thing is the goal, and tutoring isn’t the goal. I don’t want people to do tutoring just to do tutoring. I care if kids are learning in school, and so the places that are doing a great job with tutoring, first of all, are doing tutoring in service of the goal of improving learning, and that means it’s often connected to lots of other pieces around instruction, curriculum and all sorts of other things. One is being strategic. Two is recognizing that to do this kind of program well requires a lot of effort on the implementation side, and being willing to put in the resources necessary. Literally assigning someone at a district or at a school a role of high-impact tutoring manager 鈥� who a significant part, if not all, of their job for some period of time is making sure this program is working 鈥� is another hallmark of places that have had success as well.

When you were in Louisiana, you looked at this Teach for America Ignite program, and you mention that it’s become a strong pipeline for TFA Fellows and, by extension, teachers. Should we look at tutoring as a pipeline for teaching?

I think so. We have an evergreen population of college students, even if fewer than we used to. We’re always going to have some amount of college students. And what’s generally true about those young adults is that a lot of them are looking for ways to make some money, and a lot of them are not sure what they really want to do with their lives. So one of the interesting things 鈥� and the TFA program highlights this 鈥� is that when you create opportunities for young people to be involved in education, as a tutor, for example, they start thinking, “Oh, maybe this is a career that I would want to do.”

I like to joke that teacher unions have done such a great PR job that they’ve actually convinced people that they shouldn’t want to be teachers. They’ve convinced the American public that teachers don’t get paid enough and aren’t respected. And if you look at parent polls, more than 50% of parents in this country say they to become teachers.

But what we’ve learned from some of the tutoring with college students is that when you actually give them a positive framework to enter the education space and interact with young people in this way, they start thinking about it. It’s not just the TFA program 鈥� I would say also the in charter schools in New York and New Jersey, that also has had partnerships in D.C. and other places. Similarly, they’re using college grads through the AmeriCorps program. A lot of those young people end up sticking around and becoming teachers.

At a school in D.C., you met Delilah, who you say could easily pass for a high school student, but she’s doing this great job leading students on a lesson about Homer鈥檚 Odyssey. It made me think that tutoring could blur the boundaries between who is an effective teacher 鈥� and how we find them. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don’t know about 鈥渂lur,鈥� but it certainly broadens how we might think about who can play effective roles in the learning of young people. And we see that in a few places. This isn’t in the book, but in Chattanooga, Tenn., they had a that started during COVID where they actually hired high school students to tutor elementary school students. And those high schoolers, I believe, were getting school credit, and were getting paid. I spoke with this young woman, and she would literally walk down the hill from her high school to the elementary school, where she worked as a tutor and got real-world experience. She said she felt like she was treated like one of the staff at the school, and it was an incredibly positive experience. She is now graduating high school a year early and enrolling at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to become a teacher, and she’s the first person in her family to go to college. 

The other thing that I did write about is the way that education schools are rethinking the role of tutoring in teacher prep. We have all these college kids or young adults that we might want to expose to education. But then what about those who already think they want to work in education? The dean of the ed school of Bowling Green State University, which is the biggest teacher prep program in Ohio, has always been committed to giving kids as much field work and experience as possible, because she says, “I want to make sure before I send these students as graduates into classrooms, that that’s really where they want to be. How many different kinds of opportunities can we give people who think they want to be teachers to actually play teacher-like roles?” And so they’ve really leaned into tutoring. They think that the experience of me, Liz, trying to really just help Greg master how to read or how to do third-grade math is going to help me in the classroom, but also gives me more touch points to make sure this is really what I want to do. 

Another way to think about that: A principal in Alexandria, Va., told me, “The one thing I’m always looking for is how do I get my kids more time? More time learning. How do we give our kids more time?” And it wasn’t just him that I heard this from. This is a repeated theme that school leaders and teachers feel: Tutoring helps them add time. Time on task, quality learning time. And time is often the most precious resource we have in education, and that is how a lot of folks are thinking about this.

One of the things you say is that if tutoring is woven into a school culture, the relationship that the student has with the tutor can be this “fulcrum that changes the student’s trajectory.” You’re imagining that tutoring could really transform schools at a very basic level, that the student-tutor relationship is transformative for a lot of kids.

That’s right. What made this story so powerful was the power of the relationships. To me, the big takeaway is that young people are really hungry for meaningful adult relationships in ways beyond what even the best classroom teacher can possibly give to a full classroom of kids. Even when I interviewed some of those TFA college tutors, the thing they would tell me that surprised them about their experience was that kids were willing to open up to them even after just building a relationship on a Zoom call and doing tutoring. And I don’t know if it’s because after the pandemic there had been so much disconnect and isolation that people were hungry for a reconnect, or if it’s just a truism of human nature that we like to have relationships with other humans.

There’s something really powerful about bringing more people in to interact with young people in education, in an educational setting, in a variety of ways. And that’s why, even though generally I’m pretty bullish on tech 鈥� I don’t write in the book at all about AI because the stuff’s being built too rapidly 鈥� while tech can inform and empower, what’s happened, at least in the last five years, is really a story about human relationships, and it’s worth telling in a time when people feel more separate.

Near the end of the book, you talk about one way to make tutoring work on a large scale, something called outcomes-based contracting. Would you like to talk about that?

I wrote a whole chapter about contracting, and tried to make it so you wouldn’t fall asleep while you read it. Partly why I dedicated so much space to it is because I actually think that we spend a lot of money on education in this country 鈥� we really do 鈥� and we don’t often get a lot for it. And so it’s interesting that we have this model now. Tutoring is the perfect case study to do an outcomes-based contract, because we have potentially clear outcomes that we’re trying to measure: We want kids to grow a certain amount, and then we can actually link the money to what we’re getting from it. 

Especially now that federal COVID funds are gone, district and state budgets are tightening. I hope we don’t throw the success of tutoring that we’ve had to the wayside and instead think about how do we continue helping it deliver on its promise? And so if you can measure it and then pay only for getting the results that you want, that seems worthwhile, and something that we probably haven’t spent enough time exploring.

Speaking of ESSER funds, that’s a lot of money that’s basically gone. You mention AmeriCorps as well 鈥� AmeriCorps is either. Going forward, where can schools turn if they want to fund these sorts of things? What’s out there that is not at so much risk?

First of all, some districts are using their Title I funds. Now, those Title I funds might have been used for something else, and so you have to maybe make some tough choices 鈥� and I’m not going to say you should definitely do tutoring. I’m saying you should look at the evidence: What are you getting out of whatever it was you were doing? If you’re already doing tutoring and it’s going well, I’d rather a district keep it and give up something else that’s not working as well.

Ector County, Texas, has kept their tutoring program going to some extent, using Title I funds. Some other districts have done some similar work, even as districts like Guilford County, N.C., are having to scale back. But they are repurposing existing Title I funds, often to do this. One reason it’s really important to continue making the case for tutoring鈥檚 impact is that you can convince state legislatures, in some places at least, to fund tutoring. Louisiana put , both for last school year and this current year, into high-impact tutoring. And the funny thing about Louisiana is I didn’t even end up writing about it because it was happening so quickly last year while I was trying to finish the book.

I was like, “Wow, it’s a lot of money. Is this really going to happen?” And this year, 2025-2026, Louisiana is tutoring something like 240,000 kids using $30 million from their state budget, and I think some other district funds too, in a pretty effective model tied to their Science of Reading and their math work. And they have funded a lot of other pieces too, around curriculum, teacher professional development and instructional coaches. So for them, tutoring is that exact thing I said earlier about being a strategy within their broader goal of how to overhaul core instruction 鈥� and the state’s put in real money for it.

Connecticut passed to continue some high-impact tutoring work. But then in other states, we aren’t seeing that. Where to look for money? Can you convince your state legislatures to support tutoring because it works? Some places are able to do that.

And also some city budgets: The mayor in D.C. has . And the mayor in Nashville has into tutoring. 

At the end of the book, you lay out these three truisms from your reporting: “1. Public schools are hungry for new ideas that work. 2. Tutoring works. 3. Nothing is perfect.” It sounds like you’re a bit impatient here, and just want us to sort of get on with it. 

I do! Every single day you have kids showing up to school, and those kids either want to learn or it’s our job to help them want to learn, and we need to figure out the tools to do that. If you look, for instance, at continued problems with chronic absenteeism, we flipped a switch during the pandemic, and we thought we could just flip it back on.  That’s not what’s happened. So I believe we have to continue the sense of urgency that we had in 2021 and 2022, because there are kids every day in our schools. But the other thing I really want people to know is that in all of these places I went, people want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things and implement new programs and make big changes.

That’s not the reputation that K-12 public education has overall. And I want people to believe that that is part of the story of public education in the United States in 2025. I want us to get on with it, because it’s what people want to do. So let’s just do the thing.

As the largest school improvement effort in U.S. history matured, so did the energetic transplants. Wanting kids of their own and more sustainable jobs, many moved back home, bringing their experiences to bear in classrooms in places where life is easier.

Patrick Dobard has been there the whole time. He was born in New Orleans, grew up in the city and cut his teeth there as a teacher. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, he worked for the Louisiana Department of Education, trying to figure out how to address the decay of New Orleans鈥� schools 鈥� beloved but crumbling, scandal-ridden and some of the lowest-performing in the country. 

In 2012, Dobard became head of the Recovery School District, the state agency that took control of most of the city鈥檚 public schools in the wake of the flood and steered their overhaul. There, he oversaw the district鈥檚 conversion to the nation鈥檚 first all-charter school system, as well as the return of the schools to the control of the local school board starting in 2016.

In 2017, he became CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the district鈥檚 nonprofit partner. Today, he is a partner at the City Fund, which helps districts engineer their own school turnarounds. 

What follows is a conversation in which Dobard reflects on the first two decades of the largest 鈥� and most controversial 鈥� school improvement effort in U.S. history, and outlines his hopes for the next 20 years. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among education wonks, discussions about public education in New Orleans can feel like a Rorschach Test. Some people are laser-focused on academics, some on policy innovations that might transfer to other school systems and still others on privatization conspiracy theories. Locally, though, one of the most enduring conversations involves popular perceptions of a takeover of a Black-led school system by white outsiders who valued test scores more than the city鈥檚 culture. This is true 鈥� but also not the capital-T truth. Can we start there?             

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989 at Gregory High School, which was a junior high school, grades 7 through 9, located in what at the time was a pretty middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood, Gentilly. Most high schools then started at 10th grade. Junior highs were extremely important as athletic and band pipelines.聽

The workforce for the most part at Gregory represented how the workforce across the city鈥檚 schools looked at that time: predominantly Black middle- to upper-middle-class individuals teaching kids.聽

The schools that had really stringent enrollment criteria, like what was then named Lusher [now the Willow School] and Ben Franklin High School, more white students went to those schools. They had majority white staff.

By 1999, the state had created an accountability system under which a large number of the schools in the city 鈥� I believe about 60% 鈥� were identified as academically unacceptable. At that point, I was working at the state Department of Education. 

There was a lot of corruption in the air in New Orleans. There were conversations about the district being bankrupt. There was a Federal Bureau of Investigations [probe] going on. 

In 2003, the state created an agency called the Recovery School District. In the spring of 2005, the initial plan was for it to take over about three schools in New Orleans. We didn’t really know what that was going to look like. But then Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, and all those plans were put on hold. 

We were getting phone calls weeks and months after Katrina from teachers trying to get a hold of their teaching certificates so they could work other places. There was just mass displacement of teachers.

And that’s where I think people’s knowledge of what happened gets told in different ways. The district was bankrupt. There wasn’t a way for it to pay teachers, so it was forced to lay them off. The state didn’t step in to try to offset that. So it was the district that had to fire the teachers and not the state. 

People were setting up the modular trailers and all the things people did after Katrina to get their lives back on track. There were schools 鈥� mostly the selective-enrollment schools that I mentioned earlier 鈥� where people were able to come back a little bit more quickly. Those schools were bringing teachers back and hiring.

The Recovery School District was trying to recruit back New Orleans teachers, but a lot of the Black middle class didn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to come back to New Orleans those first few years. 

Once the state decided that they were going to try the chartering model, the RSD started to recruit from Teach For America. A large number of TFA folks from all around the country wanted to come help. A number of those individuals were white. They didn’t look like the kids that ultimately were in front of them in schools.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I don’t think TFA leadership at that time had lots of conversations strategically thinking about race. They were just functioning the way they normally functioned. 

Data shows having kids in front of teachers that are really strong and that look like them helps make for much better educational progress for young people. Once John White came in [as state superintendent in 2012], we were hearing a lot about the lack of diversity in the teaching force. 

John and I talked to TFA leadership about diversifying. While the number of Blacks and other minorities in TFA increased, it didn鈥檛 match the number of teachers of color that were there before the storm. 

Seven or eight years ago, I brought that awareness to the teacher work that we were doing at New Schools for New Orleans [where Dobard was then CEO]. We wanted to help schools build a corps of teachers that reflected the kids in the classrooms. Schools just took that on. They owned up to where they fell short, and then they actively recruited to make sure those numbers improved. 

I don’t think anyone had intentional ill will. It was a series of unfortunate circumstances that folks were reacting to after Katrina: the bankruptcy of the district and the uncertainty of people coming back to the city at different times, which was skewed to more white and affluent Blacks coming more quickly than others. 

And yet the narrative persists. 

Yeah, the narrative persists. I think what’s been missing is no one from the Orleans Parish School Board who was part of the decision to lay off the teachers to my knowledge has ever publicly acknowledged the firings. Or apologized for having to do that. Or for what transpired in the years before 2005, with the FBI having to be there and how bad it was. 

There’s no closure. There should be a moment of healing. The times that the district leadership over the years was approached, nobody really wanted to acknowledge it that way. Some felt like it was on the state for not stepping in. So maybe the state leadership at that time should apologize.

It feels like in terms of the school governance experiment, you’re at an inflection point. There’s continued improvement, but there are also tensions over whether an accountability-driven system is still something the community is lined up behind.

I think the governance contract is working well. Around 2016, I was leading the work on behalf of the Recovery School District. School leaders and advocates like the Urban League, New Schools for New Orleans and a number of other groups were working together on what the unification structure would look like. A number of legislators at the time helped to codify in law the governance construct that was created over the years as Act 91. 

It’s no longer an experiment. It’s really how schools function in New Orleans. The district has fully embraced it, maintained it and actually improved upon it. It’s a different role than any other school board in the country, but it’s also an extremely important one that’s proven to have spurred tremendous gains.

Yes, there are some people who would like to see the district go back to the way it functioned prior to Katrina. But I don’t think those individuals are but a small minority who are for the most part consistent and persistent in their viewpoint. 

When things are working well in New Orleans, you don’t hear from people. Nobody’s going to say, 鈥淗ey, the governance structure of this school that my kids have been at for the last 15 years and my grandchildren have gone through is great.鈥� When I was state superintendent, I used to ask kids and parents, “Do you know if this school is run by the Recovery School District or by Orleans Parish?鈥� And they鈥檇 just look at me, like, “No.鈥� 

The average citizen, what they want to know is, is my child getting a good education? Do we have good extracurricular activities? Does the transportation work well? 

I’ll tell you one quick story. Dana Peterson, who now is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, was involved in some sessions with parents. He had this parent who was just railing against charter schools. Like, 鈥淲e need to go back to what was before.鈥� 

Dana was like, 鈥淒o you realize your kid鈥檚 in a charter school?鈥� The parent was at a loss. She was happy with where her child was, but she was indoctrinated that charter schools are bad. I think for some of the critics, that’s what it is. 

If you don鈥檛 really know what the governance construct is, at the end of the day it鈥檚 all about who鈥檚 working with the kids. There’s more proximity when it’s a charter network, with the urge to improve all the time so they can continue to have the privilege to teach kids. Versus a bureaucracy that’s expected to do it but that doesn’t have strong accountability to make sure it’s not year-after-year failure.

And that鈥檚 what it was before 2005. 

Reams have been written about the rapid academic improvements, the all-charter model and, more recently, the racial upheaval. What about the fact that you had to rebuild 鈥� as in, rebuild the buildings 鈥� 85% of the schools?   

Prior to Katrina, the buildings said to our kids and families, 鈥淲e don’t care about you.鈥� Those dilapidated buildings are no longer there. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Being a young boy that grew up in New Orleans, I’m extremely proud of the facilities. The price tag came to a little over $4 billion, if I’m remembering correctly. About a billion came from the disadvantaged business enterprise program that we started at the Recovery School District.

My first months as superintendent, there was an article in The Times-Picayune where they followed me as I rode the bus the first day of school with some kids to see what their experience was. I met the kids across the street from Dooky Chase鈥檚 Restaurant on Orleans Avenue. 

I was talking to the kids and a mom, and I pointed to Dooky Chase and right behind Dooky Chase there was a school. It was [what is now] Phyllis Wheatley Community School. There was a debate whether or not to rebuild it. 

I said, “We’re going to rebuild this school right here. And if we did, would you have your kid come here?鈥� She’s like, “Absolutely I would.” We demolished the building and built new.

I’m extremely proud of that because my father was a part-time electrician and I could remember when I was a young boy, him getting work with one of his friends who was a subcontractor on large jobs. As I got older, I understood how important it was to be able to have subcontractors that were often minorities to work on large construction projects.

When I took over the RSD, New Orleans didn’t have a disadvantaged business program. And once I realized what that was, I felt it was important that we try to implement one. I was told that state agencies couldn’t have a DBE component. 

But we had legal take a look into it, and they advised me that the law was silent. It didn’t say whether you could or you couldn’t. I felt like it was important for us to at least try. And if we were challenged in court, we would see what a judge would say.

Once we launched it, I received maybe one or two emails from, like, the carpenters union saying we couldn’t do that. But they never followed up. We generated over $10 billion of revenue for local businesses and I’m extremely proud of that.

To this day, every now and then if I look at the placards on the front of a school I see my name and those of the folks on my team that helped make that happen. It brings me a great sense of pride and joy to know we played a small part in making sure that we have facilities where, when children and families walk in, they say to themselves, 鈥淭his district really cares about me.鈥� 

Do you have a wish for the next 20 years? 

I wish that we continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid. I would love for us to eliminate all D-rated schools, to have a true system of good-to-excellent schools. 

That we would have a much more robust early childhood system where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are entering kindergarten and first grade on grade level. Today, we still have kids that enter all grades not reading on grade level, so schools have to keep almost starting over with kids. 

The last thing that I would hope for is that the school board in New Orleans more vocally embrace the structure that’s been created. To be unambiguous about its power in being a manager of a system of schools, versus being a traditional school district. That they fully understand and embrace that role and lead the way on that evolution. 

If you had a do-over, what would you change?

I would have intentionally built the next generation of leadership to think more about the system as a whole and to prepare for inevitable transitions 鈥� everything that we did 15 or so years ago. We had this rare confluence of strong leadership at almost every level: the schools, the state.

We leveraged everything in our power. For every metric evaluated by external entities, the growth was really powerful. We virtually eliminated F-rated schools. The on-time graduation rate is hovering close to about 80%. It was about 54% around 2005.

I wish we would have started to build that next cadre of leadership in real time. But it’s hard to be in the midst of something so unique and try to think 15, 20 years ahead. I was literally trying to think eight hours, one week, one month ahead. Things were just always coming at us, and we were constantly building and adjusting. 

We get these great leaders, and they do great work 鈥� almost like a meteorite or something that comes and then goes away just as quickly. People move on. 

The work is so hard. This is generational work.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to 社区黑料.

As a young person living in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000s, she stumbled into teaching at Stanford University鈥檚 experimental , working with Patrick Suppes, an early innovator in ed tech. His work, reaching back to the 1960s, popularized the notion of computers as 鈥渁utomatic tutors,鈥� a vision now playing out with AI tutors from , and others. 

Trumbore openly admits that she 鈥渒ind of backed into this business,鈥� working in the entertainment field when she landed a summer job teaching writing at Stanford. 

鈥淚 didn’t have preconceived notions of what technology could or should do in education,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he animating question was, 鈥楬ow can we use this tool?鈥欌��

Trumbore eventually joined the Stanford-led team that launched and ushered in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the 2010s. 

In her new book , Trumbore calls herself an 鈥渆nsemble player in the transformation of online education from experimental and low status to 鈥榠nnovative鈥� and 鈥榙isruptive.鈥� I have also helped make wealthy institutions, venture capitalists, and more than a few professors even wealthier,鈥� she writes.

Trumbore introduces readers to Suppes and to two other key ed tech pioneers of the mid-20th century: MIT鈥檚 Seymour Papert and Don Bitzer of the University of Illinois. 

Bitzer created , a groundbreaking, networked course distribution system that could educate up to 1,000 people at once. He and his team developed interactive touch screens and learning management systems, among other innovations. 

Papert, a South Africa-born mathematician who studied with the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, applied the latter鈥檚 groundbreaking work to education, popularizing the idea that children should learn about computers by programming them. A co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he created , a programming language for children that served as an inspiration for the computer language and countless young people鈥檚 .

Despite all the hype surrounding new, AI-enhanced products, most can be traced back to these three pioneers and their teams, Trumbore said. 鈥淲e make the same discoveries about online education decade after decade because we do not acknowledge 鈥� or know 鈥� the history of the field,鈥� she writes. 鈥淭here is evidence that this ignorance is not an accident.鈥�

Trumbore, who worked at the University of Pennsylvania and now creates professional certificate and degree classes at the University of Virginia, recently talked with 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo. She warned that 17 years after the first MOOCs appeared, they鈥檝e failed to bring education to many of the students who most need it: low-income, nontraditional students who could use extra help focusing and mastering difficult material. 

Trumbore sees the same dynamic playing out with generative artificial intelligence, warning that universities must be 鈥渕ore clear-eyed about their business partnerships with technology companies, more thoughtful about their motives in distributing education 鈥榯o the masses,鈥� and ultimately take inspiration from the past鈥檚 successes and failures in order to create more equitable educational experiences that provide more returns to learners than to edtech investors.鈥�

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I want to actually start with talking about Stanford鈥檚 Online High School. So you were an actual teacher? 

Yes.

Live classes, obviously projected over many thousands of miles? 

Yes.

Was the original conception that it was a high school that just happened to have students throughout the world? Was everybody there at the same time for class?

It was synchronous. The idea came in 2004. We got a grant from the to start thinking about this. There’s a series of schools still called the Malone Consortium, and they share content because not every private school can have a Chinese literature course. And this idea of providing access, connecting students to great instructors, was something Malone had been thinking about and servicing for a while. And in its model there were similarities to what the Education Program for Gifted Youth [now Stanford鈥檚 program] was doing with its calculus courses.That whole unit evolved to provide access to students who couldn’t take a calculus course because they lived on Martha’s Vineyard or in Alaska, or someplace where they didn’t have access to it. And so this just was an extension, in some ways, to see if we could do it. 

You say the technology wasn鈥檛 very good at the time.

It was early, and folks didn’t even have broadband. So that was also a really interesting challenge. Actually before we did the Online High School we started teaching synchronous college classes in the summer, and so that was our beta test case, and I did that for a while. The success of those programs became the basis for the grant application to Malone, which became the basis for, “Let’s do a high school.” And then we formed the full high school, and then we went and got accredited, and it’s thriving today.

That led, in short order, to the phenomena of Coursera and edX. And as you say, you were there as it was taking shape. More than a decade later, what does the MOOC space look like to you? Has it fulfilled its purpose, or has it got the same illness as a lot of ed tech, which is that it sort of lost its way?

I think the answer to both questions is “Yes.” 

If you were an idealistic, super empathetic, early proponent and ed tech evangelist, we were opening up the gates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford and Penn and all these wonderful places. It is true that today, which was not true 15 years ago, anybody with an Internet connection can log in and see what’s being taught, or a pretty close version of what’s being taught, at some of these schools. And we forget how amazing that was to have access to that. So in that case, the answer is Yes.

The answer is also “Yes” that it’s lost its way, because the business model behind it is a traditional free-market business model: Scale quickly, make profit, follow users, drive engagement. Don’t worry about making it the best learning experience. Worry about making it the biggest, most appealing learning experience and let the customer decide what it is they’re interested in 鈥� let the customer drive the content. 

I guess that’s where I’ve ended up: I believe in the promise of ed tech. I don’t think that the promise of ed tech and the free-market business model are compatible.

I’m taking a Coursera course. It seems perfectly fine to me. It sounds like you would make the case that it could be better if there wasn’t a focus on profit?

There’s a lot that gets lost when we focus on frictionless delivery of content and not on an education experience. Education is difficult. It’s expensive to provide. That’s why we invented Coursera. I think that for educated folks, or for super agentic, bright kids, it’s wonderful. You don’t need much else. I think the problem comes when we say that Coursera is sufficient as an education. And the folks at Coursera would say it’s not sufficient as an education.

Early in the book, you say, “Just beneath the shiny surface of the latest ed tech marvel is the work of Suppes, Papert and Bitzer and many people on their teams who’ve worked, sometimes unknowingly, to extend the past of educational technology into the future.” 

I mean, these were, by our standards, primitive forays. The computers, literally you were having to dial into the mainframe on campus. I guess I want to just make sure I understand the lessons those three have to teach us.

It’s two things at the same time. One is that the goals they had are very similar to what we have today. So one, they’re worthy goals. And two, we haven’t invented the technology to achieve those goals. 

We’ve been talking about individual tutors for almost 70 years, 60 years for sure, quite publicly. So this idea that these are necessary pursuits, that this is going to improve education, I think, is a foundation no one questions. No one questions why we would want a computerized tutor. Believe me, I’ve searched. I did find, I think, three articles that are like, “Hey, hold on here.” Folks are all in on this. 

For Bitzer, what was amazing about him 鈥� and he was the true engineer among the group 鈥� was using, literally, duct tape sometimes, putting together this system. But the vision of that system and what it enabled, that it enabled communication among students who were learning at the same time 鈥� that’s how we now measure success. 鈥淗ow many people do you have on the platform?鈥� That did not exist. That was like, “What are you kidding me? In 1962?” Really revolutionary. 

And with Papert, this idea that we shouldn’t let the computer program the child, but the child should program the computer, I think, is probably the most relevant to the tidal wave or avalanche of ChatGPT in education, that we need to train all these kids to have AI skills. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but what are we teaching them? Why are we teaching them this? And is this really the right thing to do? And are they using it as a tool, or are they being used as a tool? 

I think these questions are highly relevant, but we forget to ask them, because there is this cycle of funding and social capital for being an innovator and all this stuff that gets really exciting if you’re brand new and chasing the bright, shiny object. Nobody wants to hear about the past. 

I want to drill down on Papert. I think he’s the most interesting of the three in a lot of ways, mostly because he had this fascinating background, studying with Piaget. Explain to me how his thinking about “the child programming the computer” is playing out now with things like ChatGPT. 

It’s different, obviously, school to school. In some schools, students are using ChatGPT as a tool to create things that are useful to them, not to create an assignment: “Hey, you guys need to get together and design a water pump.” Or “Design a Pixar character and build it with our 3D printer.” And it’s a group of kids working together in a team. And they use ChatGPT to come up with some models. They do that, then they send it to the 3D printer. I think that’s a great use of these tools. And there’s someone guiding them. That’s the children using it as a tool. “Kids, today we’re going to do Lesson 4 of OpenAI Academy,” that’s less good. That’s not using it as a tool.

I firmly believe in what Papert was saying, and I think technology is used best when you use it to empower a learner to be more human and to unlock creativity, and that is very possible with these tools. It really isn’t how we deploy them. The way they’re being marketed, sold and consumed, it’s faster to just say, “Watch out: You’re not going to get a job if you can’t master these tools. You鈥檝e got to get ahold of these tools and watch some videos and learn some stuff.” Rather than the more time-consuming, “Hey, try this thing. Try this thing. Use it to make this. Use it to make that.”

It strikes me that the public conversation around ed tech has a weird format. It’s binary, which maybe is appropriate: People want to talk about things like MOOCs and such as either the most amazing thing ever or a total failure. I’m curious if you have a thought on why that is, and how we can emerge from that?

That dialogue, which always cracked me up as well, part of it is innovation, “the violence of forgetting.” I love that phrase, and I end with it in the book. In order for this to have been brand new and amazing, there’s this narrative that’s fueled by cash and investment and people’s eyeballs and all this stuff, that it was a huge success, and then the binary of that, to your point, is that it was a huge failure. Once you add that much money and power into these things, people are not interested in a more nuanced answer, I would argue, to anything. But it’s especially true here. 

Again, I think MOOCs have done a lot of good. It’s amazing that they exist. It’s awesome. But they didn’t cure cancer. They didn’t lift the continent of Africa out of the educational attainment that it currently has. At the time, when people were layering on these hopes for MOOCs, we were like, “This is hilarious.” I mean, we were more stunned and like, “Oh my God, more work.” But in retrospect, it was like, “This is kind of nuts that these folks are flocking to Coursera’s offices, and we’re having lunch with Tom Friedman, and he’s , and you’re so busy making it.鈥� This label gets attached to it, it鈥檚 like, “Is this what we’re doing?” And it’s intoxicating to believe that.

I have to apologize, maybe not on behalf of Tom Friedman, but on behalf of journalism. I think we’re part of the problem. I take your point that, on the one hand, it’s amazing that these things exist, but on the other hand, they didn’t cure all these ills. What was the accomplishment? I think there was a lot of hope during the pandemic that this was a world that was going to save us from that catastrophe, and it didn’t turn out to be true, mostly.

So two parts: One, I do think certainly in America we really love to give our power away to technology. We just love it. It’s over and over and over again, starting with the camera. You can look back to anything: the washing machine, cake mix 鈥� any of these efficiency-solving technologies that come out, particularly during the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. We tend to take a pretty passive stance toward them and imbue them with all these characteristics that they’re almost God-like. They’re going to save us from ___. And that’s great marketing copy. And those two things are interlinked. But we love doing it, because look at any article about ChatGPT on any given day, and it’s the same idea. So there’s something in our national consciousness that really wants to believe that there’s this amazing technological solution just around the corner that is going to cure everything. Twitter was supposed to democratize democracy. So I think that’s part of the problem. 

But what MOOCs did, and why they’re great, is that if I want to know about something, and I want to know more than just asking ChatGPT or doing a Google search or looking at Wikipedia, I can log on and for free, or for a relatively modest fee, I can learn about this stuff. I mean, just even seeing the modules mapped out, if you’ve never taken Python, and you’re like, “I don’t even know what Python is,” and then you look at Chuck鈥檚 [University of Michigan professor Charles Russell Severance鈥檚] , and you see, “Oh, now I kind of know what a computer science course looks like.” 

Right.

That’s amazing. And I think the nearness of it is also really interesting, that people feel like it’s so much more approachable now, and not as exclusive. I think that was some of the good that came out of it; and the fact that companies are offering these to employees so that they can learn how to do things better or use them for their own self-actualization or to make themselves better at work, I think is great. 

And then from some work I did when I was at Penn: People were something like 600% more likely to say “I think I’m going to apply to a higher ed program” after completing one of these courses. People’s conception of themselves changed after they were able to complete a course.

I don’t want to rain on that parade, but I do want to bring up a point you make in the book, which is that a lot of times the people who take advantage of this or benefit from it are people with a lot of agency already.

One hundred percent. They give additional agency to those who have it.

How do we solve that?

I think that providing education in a format that worked for people at the top, say 20% of intellectual distribution and access to higher education 鈥� I mean, the first MOOCs were modeled on courses at Princeton, on courses at Stanford 鈥� that is not, by definition, accessible education to everyone. Letting everyone into the classroom doesn’t mean they’re going to get it or understand it. And that, I think, underlies that idea, because the inventors, the funders, many of the initial employees, are all part of that group. They all went to the same collection of colleges. They all know people who know people from there. So this is a way of education that works. It’s great to scale that. 

So maybe you catch some people who truly are excluded only because of geography or finances, but they know how to learn that way. That doesn’t begin to address the vast number of people who don’t learn that way, who by the time they’re in the third video, they’re texting or asleep or bored or checked out. It can’t possibly solve the problem. One thing I often say in talks is that if access to education were to solve the world’s education problems, we wouldn’t have all these institutions of higher education, because libraries would have solved everything. Andrew Carnegie .

That includes examining the intellectual and cultural foundations of the holiday: the people, places and events that often get overlooked or erased in social studies curriculums.

Juneteenth, the federal holiday in American history, holds special significance for many educators as it was championed by one of their own. , a former teacher 鈥� well into her nineties 鈥� led the charge for national recognition. While many schools across the country are off on June 19 in observance, the reason why is not as often taught, says Knowles.

Knowles, CEO and founder of the educational consulting firm Teach Heal Build, focuses on creating culturally affirming classrooms and communities. In April, he published the latest installment in the BOLDLY BLACK workbook series 鈥淢athematics and Science in Ancient Africa.鈥� The set was designed for third graders to explore topical principles and practices tied to Black culture 鈥� offering lessons they may not encounter in a traditional school setting.

Ahead of this year鈥檚 Juneteenth holiday, 社区黑料鈥檚 Trinity Alicia spoke with Knowles about what鈥檚 shifting in social studies instruction 鈥� particularly in Florida, the power of culturally responsive curriculums in today鈥檚 political climate and what motivates him in today鈥檚 sociopolitical climate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

社区黑料: This year marks the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth, but it鈥檚 only been recognized as a federal holiday since 2021. Why is it so important, from an educator鈥檚 perspective, that Juneteenth became a national holiday?  

Juneteenth allows both teachers and students to explore some of the deeper, more despondent areas of American history that are often avoided. It helps us step outside traditional narratives and unpack the multiple perspectives and experiences that different people, particularly within the African-American and African diaspora communities, have had throughout American history. In this way, it gives students a chance to better understand the ongoing process of freedom.   

For example, Juneteenth is often seen as the definitive end of slavery, but that’s an oversimplification. In reality, it represents a moment in a much longer and more complex journey toward emancipation. This perspective encourages both teachers and students to engage with history in a more nuanced and meaningful way. 

It was also, for almost as many years, largely left untaught in schools. What impact does that have on America鈥檚 students and our society as a whole?  

Having been in education for almost two decades, I鈥檝e seen that when we don鈥檛 talk about important historical events 鈥� like those highlighted and signified by Juneteenth 鈥� we miss the opportunity to open up meaningful conversations in the classroom.   

I鈥檝e witnessed how this silence can lead to the creation of a generation of students who are apathetic, especially when it comes to social justice and socio-economic issues that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. However, when we engage with authentic stories and histories, it gives students the chance to develop empathy, compassion and a broader understanding of others鈥� experiences. This helps create more open-minded individuals who are better equipped to contribute positively to the diverse society we live in today. 

An educator named Opal Lee, known to be 鈥渢he grandmother of Juneteenth鈥� was a key advocate for the national recognition of the holiday. What significance does this hold for you knowing a fellow teacher led that charge?

Within the framework of American capitalism, we often fail to give educators the honor, respect and homage they truly deserve. Educators are the ones who mold the minds of our children 鈥� they have the power and potential to shape not only students鈥� academic paths but also their overall life trajectories. When educators are empowered to lead conversations about topics like Juneteenth 鈥� and when we recognize that the push to make Juneteenth a national holiday was led by an educator 鈥� it highlights the strength and influence we possess as a profession.   

It shows that our impact extends far beyond the walls of the classroom and can resonate throughout society as a whole. We have the ability to unlock the minds of the next generation and to use our knowledge, especially historical knowledge, as a powerful tool for change. By doing so, we not only inspire other educators but also challenge our country to examine all aspects of its past 鈥� even the ones that don鈥檛 neatly fit the traditional narrative of American history.  

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, over 10 years ago on Juneteenth, 鈥淲e’re in denial of the African holocaust.鈥� Malcolm X would鈥檝e been 100 years old last month, and we鈥檙e also 60 years from his assassination. On this Juneteenth, what do you want students to remember most about Malcolm X that they might not get from learning about other civil rights activists?  

As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, we must also reflect on civil rights activists beyond the immediate historical context of the holiday 鈥� especially when you think about figures like Malcolm X, who are usually misunderstood. His ideals and philosophy were labeled radical when taking a look at what he鈥檚 done overall for American history and the Black community in terms of uncovering darker truths as well as the denial of the American government and the experiences of African-Americans.

We live in a landscape right now and we鈥檙e told to move on and forget about those things we鈥檙e literally still dealing with as a community, but Malcolm X would want us to continue to advocate for our people and our students to be able to share our authentic experiences. And some of those experiences weren鈥檛 happy and joyous. But they have perpetrated so much psychological violence, which continues to happen in the classroom. And it was Malcolm X who stated that 鈥渙nly a fool would allow his oppressors to educate his children.鈥�  

What Juneteenth does within Black communities forces us to step up based on the sentiments that Malcolm X expressed within that quote to be able to affirm and be able to become more self-reliant when it comes to our economic issues and social issues. But when it comes to educational issues and being more responsible and more accountable for teaching our history, we鈥檙e no longer contingent on systems to be able to teach the truth and history in the United States. 

From the bans on AP African American History courses to the pushback against DEI policies in schools nationwide, how have you navigated this climate as an educator in Florida?

Florida is one of the most prominent hotspots for controversy in education and arguably an epicenter of these debates. We鈥檝e seen significant pushback against inclusive and truthful historical narratives, and it forces educators in schools to sanitize history and continue to perpetuate a fairytale traditional narrative of American history. This sort of censorship disproportionately impacts social studies instruction, which creates a sense of frustration and a disconnect, which leads to a disengagement with students.   

Throughout my work in public education, I have continued to push back and resist by looking at some of our state standards and benchmarks when it comes specifically to social studies and ensuring that I can tie in our stories and tie in those things that people label 鈥渃ontroversial鈥� or 鈥減olitical.鈥� I have weaponized the language itself and weaponized some of the state standards so we can continue to tell our stories unredacted. 

Why is it important that Black parents, teachers and administrators are well represented in the decision-making process for schools?

One of the aspects of American history I don’t think that we unpack enough as a community is just some of the deleterious impacts that integration had within the Black community. A lot of the institutions, specifically the educational institution after integration, was absorbed by the dominant, more prevalent society. 

It is important, even within the current state of the system we鈥檙e in, that our voices are heard, our perspectives are heard especially when it comes to policies, processes, practices and procedures in education. Those who live in the community can have better, more viable solutions to some of the issues that we contend with within a community. I鈥檝e seen processes within education when people outside of our community are making decisions, and those decisions are not necessarily meeting or accommodating the needs of the community. 

It is beyond critical that Black educators and educational leaders are given space to represent the issues and also the authentic, lived experiences and even some of the cultural norms that exist within those communities so they can be in a position to represent and also advocate for the things that are needed within the Black community.

In your years as an educator and advocate, what surprises you the most about trends and interests among Black students now versus when you were a kid in America? Do Black students and educators come into school 鈥� and specifically social studies classes 鈥� thinking, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the point?鈥�

Many children, especially those who are informed, are becoming activists around current events tied to identity. Students who are becoming outspoken, specifically a lot of our student-led organizations such as like Black Student Unions, for example, are able to take charge against the racism and bigotry here in Florida and amplify their voices around some of the injustice that is taking place in curriculum, which essentially violates our First Amendment.

You just a new workbook for students, 鈥淏OLDLY BLACK: Science and Mathematics in Ancient Africa.鈥� What do you hope to achieve by releasing this series?

Information is widely more available than it was during my high school era in the 1990s simply due to the digital age we live in today. Sometimes we look at technology as being a destructive force, but it influences me to maintain a working knowledge of it in order to effectively show students how to access the information that we couldn鈥檛 when we were their ages.

Part of my activism and my solution-based approaches to things we鈥檙e dealing with within the Black community, specifically regarding American history that focuses on our experiences, is creating [this] Afro-centric workbook series that is geared towards students from grades three through 12. My third grade title is 鈥淢athematics and Science in Ancient Africa,鈥� and my goal is creating a curriculum that is concise and also digestible within the hands of parents and also community members.

In states where legislation is trying to restrict what we can say and do within the classroom, communities 鈥� and specifically Black communities 鈥� need to start building their own infrastructures and using some of the space within the Black communities. For example, community centers and also churches are safe, liberating spaces that can be found in Black communities that teach our history. 

Community members and those who may not be experts in pedagogy and pedagogical approaches can pick this up and share this information with their children. Some of those gaps and things that may be missing within the public educational system are now within the hands of the community to be able to educate and affirm all our children.

Thinking about classrooms and curriculums across the country 鈥� what keeps you up at night, and what are you most hopeful for?

In this current climate, I have such hope and optimism. I understand that Black communities have gone through far worse. Our whole experience within just the United States even before it became the United States and colonial America has been turmoil. 

But us as Black people have had agency and power to resist the oppression and repression of our voices and our experiences as well as our humanity in this country in the most profound ways. We鈥檝e found ways to resist, push back and also provide for ourselves in order to achieve self-sufficiency in many points within our history. 

I feel hopeful moving forward that even if a public educational space is under attack, we will start to create those liberating spaces in solidarity like we鈥檝e done throughout history in order to rebuild those institutions and infrastructures that were either destabilized or lost through integration. 

Considering all of those variables, there is very little pessimism within me around the things that have taken place and very little fear because, as Kendrick Lamar , 鈥渨e gon鈥� be alright.鈥�

A trained doctor, he spent 26 years working in pediatric infectious disease and studying the rotaviruses before ultimately creating the strain that became the RotaTeq vaccine. That breakthrough saves 165,000 lives globally each year, he said, and has essentially eliminated the 70,000 annual U.S. hospitalizations caused by the contagious diarrhoeal virus common in young kids.

Now the director of the and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Offit also serves as a member of the Food and Drug Administration鈥檚 . And about 20 years ago, he spent half a decade on the committee responsible for making recommendations on the safety, efficacy and clinical need for vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That committee, also known as the , or ACIP, experienced an unprecedented upheaval earlier this month when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 advisory members via a Wall Street Journal 鈥� after promising he would leave the committee鈥檚 recommendations intact.

鈥淭he committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,鈥� wrote Kennedy, the head of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and a longtime vaccine skeptic.

In a statement released by HHS, Kennedy said he was 鈥減rioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,鈥� and later promised via that none of the replacement members would be 鈥渋deological anti-vaxxers.鈥� Public health experts are now disputing that claim in light of his eight recent appointments.

鈥淭his is a slate that lacks a balanced viewpoint,鈥� said Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert. 鈥淎nd it’s deeply concerning that many of them are outright anti-vaccine and have their own very concerning conflicts of interest, despite the fact that the secretary claims that he鈥檚 trying to avoid conflicts of interest on the committee.鈥�

This could be particularly dangerous for children, some warn, as the committee鈥檚 recommendations often dictate which vaccines are covered by insurance and which are mandated for school-aged kids. Programs that provide free vaccines for kids could also see their funding cut.

社区黑料鈥檚 Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Offit to better understand the implications of the mass firing, what kids and their families can expect moving forward and how future administrations might work to rebuild trust in the public health vaccine system. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

社区黑料: Are you in touch with any of the folks who were fired from ACIP? If so, how did they receive that news and what was the mood among the members?

Offit: Well, they found out about it, typically, from reading the newspaper and learning that they had been fired from that position. The mood was one of sadness, because obviously there was no good reason to do it. 

The reason given by Robert F Kennedy Jr. was that all the members were horribly conflicted with pharmaceutical companies [and] that their financial ties to pharmaceutical companies made it such that they couldn’t give advice that would be beneficial to the American public, and that wasn鈥檛 true.

I mean, they have very strict conflict of interest rules at the ACIP whereby you have to make it very clear that you have no association with the pharmaceutical industry and no association with the government, which then allows you to be an independent advisor. And should there be a conflict 鈥� then you can’t vote on that company’s product, and you can’t vote on any product that that company makes. That’s very clear. That’s been clear ever since I was on the committee back 25 years ago.

So it sounds like there was confusion, disappointment and a feeling that the reasons given for the firing weren鈥檛 based in reality? 

They were angry. They were angry that they felt that they’d been dismissed for no good reason and that their willingness to serve the American public had been set aside. I mean, it’s not like you’re paid to do this. It’s just a voluntary position for the most part.

In your knowledge, has anything like this ever happened before?

No, but we’ve never had a secretary of Health and Human Services that was an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist before.

Zooming out a little bit, what鈥檚 the significance of these firings? And what impacts can we anticipate?

I think we can anticipate that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will put people on that committee who are like minded to him. We’re already seeing evidence of that with the first eight people that he picked. 

So I think what’s going to happen is that there are going to be groups that look elsewhere from the ACIP to try and get information that they think is reliable and up to date and informative. 

What I imagine is that, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics has its so-called Red Book committee, or . I would imagine that that committee will start to speak with insurance companies to make sure that their recommendations would then have kind of the force of law 鈥� Because I can’t imagine the insurance companies are going to be looking to ACIP, given its current members.

My understanding is, up until this point, insurance companies and states 鈥� when they’re trying to determine school vaccination policies 鈥� have looked to ACIP for guidance. You’re saying that maybe insurance companies will look elsewhere for that information, but is there any concern that this will just mean vaccines are no longer covered by insurance, or that school-age vaccine policies are undermined altogether?

Yes, there’s concern, but it is to the financial advantage of insurance companies to pay for vaccines. I mean, you’d much rather pay for an HPV vaccine than to pay for the care of a woman who has cervical cancer. You’d much rather pay for a measles-containing vaccine than to pay for measles hospitalization.

So there isn’t necessarily concern here that suddenly these vaccines won’t be accessible to families from lower-income backgrounds?

I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s a frantic, chaotic time, and it’s really hard to know. Everything that you sort of counted on to make sense doesn’t make sense anymore. 

It used to be that solid, good science was how we made decisions, and that’s not true anymore with the ACIP. You can tell when Robert F Kennedy Jr. says we want gold standard science, that’s not what he means. What he really means is he wants quote, unquote scientific studies that support his fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause more harm than good.

In a post on recently Kennedy wrote, 鈥淭he most outrageous example of ACIP鈥檚 malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.鈥� Has there been an unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials for new vaccines for children in America?

The opposite is true. I had the fortune of working with a team that created the rotavirus vaccine. Before that vaccine was put on the infant immunization schedule, it was tested in a prospective, placebo-controlled trial of more than 70,000 infants. It was done over four years in 11 countries to prove that that vaccine was safe and effective. That was a 70,000- person prospective, placebo-controlled trial that probably cost $350 million. 

I don’t know what he’s talking about. Name the vaccine. Name a new vaccine that hasn’t been tested in a large, prospective, placebo-controlled trial. They all are. 

The problem is that when they’re shown to work and they’re safe, he doesn’t believe it, because he’s a science denialist. That’s what he really means.

Are there any other ways this could impact school-aged kids in particular?

Now what worries me is, I think if RFK Jr. really wants to bring down vaccines, he can do it through the What he could do is he could hold up a paper and say, 鈥淟ook, aluminum adjuvants cause autism or multiple sclerosis or diabetes or asthma, and now I’m going to add that to the list of compensable injuries.鈥�

So anybody with asthma who’s gotten a vaccine that contains an 鈥� and there are seven different vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants [an ingredient that helps create a stronger immune response] 鈥� is now on the list of compensable injuries. 

Or [he could say] 鈥淚’m going to take these vaccines out of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and then just subject them to civil litigation.鈥� That would really disrupt vaccines in this country. I think companies would then do what they did in the 1980s 鈥� They’d leave the market. We had 18 companies that made vaccines in 1980. By the end of the decade, we only had four. 

So does that mean that while this ACIP move might introduce anger and distrust there are no real trickle-down effects that you think we’ll see yet in terms of what vaccines are available or what vaccines are covered?

I think you’ll know a lot when you watch the June [advisory committee] meeting, to hear that discussion, and to hear how pharmaceutical companies react to that discussion and how insurers react to that discussion. I think you’ll learn a lot in the next couple of weeks.

Can you tell me a little bit about the folks who replaced the 17 members? Eight people have been announced so far.

They’re who you would most fear. 

You have people like Robert Malone, in front of Marjorie Taylor Green’s committees 鈥� that the mRNA vaccines cause cancer and heart disease and autoimmune disease. Robert Malone has been an expert witness on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against the mumps component of the MMR vaccine. 

You have somebody like Martin Kulldorff who has represented 鈥� for 鈥� Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against Merck鈥檚 Gardasil [HPV] vaccine. 

You have people who have published papers claiming that the mRNA vaccines caused heart attacks and sudden death in healthy, young people. You have Vicky Pebsworth, who is a member of the , which is an anti-vaccine group that has lobbied against state vaccine mandates for years. 

This is exactly the cavalcade of stars that you would expect RFK Jr. to feel comfortable with: people who are 鈥� like him 鈥� anti-vaccine activists, who are science denialists. 

It’s the worst of all worlds. It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit.

During Kennedy鈥檚 HHS confirmation hearings back in January, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy 鈥� a former physician 鈥� expressed a lot of trepidation around the nomination, but ultimately voted to confirm, citing various commitments he had received from the administration. One of those promises, Cassidy was that 鈥渋f confirmed [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention鈥檚 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes.鈥濃��

Critics have since argued that Kennedy鈥檚 move to fire all members amounts to a broken promise, a claim Cassidy himself has since disputed. Is this a broken promise?

He鈥檚 been breaking promises right from the beginning. I think Cassidy put out a list of 10 or so things [Kennedy] promised he wouldn鈥檛 do. And he proceeded to do it.

I鈥檓 reading: He has committed that he would work within current vaccine approval on safety monitoring systems. That he hasn’t done. 

He’ll maintain the CDC Advisory Committee Immunization Practices recommendation without changes, and he hasn’t done that either. 

He’s already, for example, changed the recommendation on pregnancy, changed the routine recommendation for young children to get COVID vaccines. And now Cassidy also put out saying that for those of you who think [Kennedy] may just put vaccine skeptics on [the committee], he’s not gonna do that. Then he proceeds to do that. 

What Cassidy does is he draws a line. He says, 鈥淒on’t cross this line.鈥� Then Kennedy crosses the line, and he doesn’t do anything 鈥� just draws another line. I think he is weak and ineffectual. And I think his legacy will be the harm that’s caused to children and adults in this country because of this massive disruption of the public health vaccine system. I think that will be Sen. Cassidy’s legacy.

Have you spoken to Sen. Cassidy? If you could speak to him today, what would you say to him?

I spoke to him four times before that second confirmation hearing, and once afterwards. I said to him exactly what you would think I would say to him, which is, 鈥淒on’t hire this guy. She knows. She told you exactly who he is.鈥�

It鈥檚 really frustrating. I was sure [Cassidy] was a 鈥渘o鈥� vote. He clearly had problems with him. But in the end, politics trump science. I think when you mix politics and science, you always get politics.

My last question is around this idea of trust. Kennedy has said that he removed all these members and is replacing them in response to a 鈥渃risis of public trust.鈥� On the other side, there are folks who do not at all trust Kennedy. Looking forward, what will it take to rebuild trust in these systems?

I think there was a tremendous loss of trust in the first two years of the pandemic 鈥� I think people saw [many COVID-era policies as] a real impingement on their freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

I think that RFK Jr. represents the disdain that people ended up having for the CDC and for Dr. Fauci, unfortunately. I think that’s what happened 鈥o the point that there were states that were trying to ban mRNA vaccines. The term 鈥渕RNA vaccines鈥� has become a dirty word, even though it probably saved 3 million lives and probably cost more than 250,000 people their lives when they chose not to get the vaccine. But somehow that all got linked with sort of stepping on our medical freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

So what’s it going to take to get that back? I think slowly, we’re just going to have to make sure that we 鈥� as scientists and clinicians and academicians and public health people 鈥� explain in careful detail why we do everything.

But public health is also about the public. I mean, you have to care about your neighbor in order to have public health. I think right now, we’re sort of at a point where people go, 鈥淒on’t tell me what to do. If I want to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection, that’s my right.鈥� And I don’t think we used to be like that.

Is there anything else I haven’t asked you that you want readers to understand, specifically through an education- and child-centered lens?

What’s that line from Bette Davis in All About Eve? 鈥淏uckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night鈥� 鈥� although everybody says bumpy ride.  鈥�

I think it is going to be a bumpy ride for a while, and then we’ll just see. I believe that the forces of good will prevail. I do. 

I think that there’s a basic feeling among virtually everyone that vaccines are a good thing, and that as people see them erode or maybe become less available or less affordable or more feared that people will rally on behalf of children. I do.

In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and minimally contagious when they caught it. He envisioned a magazine piece arguing for reopening schools, and began pitching it to major outlets. 

No one was interested.

Eventually, WIRED agreed to run it, and as he reported it, the evidence only seemed to build. In New York City, out of more than 14,000 deaths at the time were reported in people under 18. He remembers thinking: 鈥淭his is a major, major story.鈥� As the magazine took its time with edits, he was in a panic, 鈥渨aiting to get scooped鈥� by other media. 

It never happened.

He soon realized that most major outlets had little curiosity about the science 鈥� or lack of it 鈥� underlying COVID remediations. 

His piece, , appeared in mid-May and instantly went viral. But its premise 鈥� that the U.S. was following 鈥渁 divergent path鈥� on reopening 鈥� got lost in the larger debate swirling in major media. And Zweig, a former magazine fact-checker who had always entertained the notion that health authorities and journalists in legacy media took science seriously, began to wonder what he鈥檇 missed.

A year later, with his two kids still not back to school full time despite mountains of evidence that it could be done safely, his sense of who the 鈥済ood guys鈥� were had been thoroughly shaken. Social isolation, masking and hybrid schooling were taking an enormous toll on his kids and millions of others nationwide, even as most schools in Europe opened early and stayed open, often without the dogged reliance on masking and distancing that American schools employed.

鈥淭he sense that all of this suffering for them and millions of other kids was for naught consumed me,鈥� he writes. 鈥淚 could not silence the voice in my head that this was gravely stupid.鈥�

By 2021, he was testifying as an expert witness before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on reopening schools, as well as a House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Five years after the first school closures, Zweig鈥檚 third book, An Abundance of Caution, out Tuesday, looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: 鈥渁 country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.鈥�

He finds bad decisions everywhere, with experts basing assertions about the virulence of the virus on that themselves were based essentially on guesswork. Media outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite that children were not major carriers 鈥� and schools .

The media perseverated on the effectiveness of remedies like masking, social distancing and isolation, Zweig finds, despite that any of them made a difference. For months, they credulously transcribed experts鈥� predictions, often relying on the loudest, most overwrought voices, who often brought questionable credentials to the task. In one instance, an expert quoted on reopening was actually a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies.

Lawmakers dropped the ball as well, he says, prioritizing 鈥� perhaps even fetishizing 鈥� 鈥漵afety鈥� over normalcy, even when there was little evidence for keeping schools closed beyond the few weeks in which public health experts urged Americans to 鈥渇latten the curve鈥� of COVID cases.

Zweig has found a receptive audience for his reporting on the center-right 鈥� the book this week was excerpted in the conservative online publication 鈥� but his work has also bolstered arguments in left-of-center publications, from and to and .

Ahead of the book鈥檚 publication, Zweig spoke to 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo, further exploring its themes of a false medical consensus amid America鈥檚 鈥渦niquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment.鈥�

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe? 

That is a very good question, which I spend 500 pages discussing [Laughs]. I’m saying that jokingly, but I’m not joking. The answer to that is long and complex. A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason. It’s not the only reason, but it is a significant reason.

You bemoan the politics surrounding the pandemic, but in one instance you quote on mitigation efforts. Early on, in March 2020, he  talked about wanting to act aggressively. DeWine invoked the example of St. Louis, which did so in the and had a death rate of just 358 per 100,000 people, while Philadelphia was slower to respond and suffered 748 deaths per 100,000. “We all want to be St Louis,” he said. Part of me wonders: What’s wrong with that? Motivating people to not be the bad example makes sense, doesn鈥檛 it? 

The example that so many politicians and so many media outlets used from the 1918 pandemic, where they often compared St. Louis to Philadelphia, was a deeply flawed misunderstanding of what the data actually showed over time. This was a misrepresentation and misunderstanding about what school closures can actually accomplish over time.

What鈥檚 the basic flaw in that approach?

A core flaw in the entire pandemic response, and in particular school closures, was the assumption that everyone was going to remain home and sequestered from each other for a lengthy period of time. While these interventions could be effective for a week or maybe two weeks or so, over time there is no way of effectively stopping the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus in a free society, and in particular a society as economically and professionally stratified as America.

From the beginning, a significant portion of people in our country continued to move about because they had to. So while the laptop class sat home, and their children were home in a comfortable room, possibly aided by tutors or maybe a pod teacher, or maybe they were in private school, a significant portion of our country were delivering food and goods and other services from warehouses and restaurants and  slaughterhouses to the wealthier Americans who sat at home on Zoom. 

This was one of the most class-based, inequality-thrust decisions in our recent history. And to make matters worse is the idea which was continually perpetuated, that if you didn’t comply, that you were immoral, that there was a tremendous amount of virtue attached to the notion of staying home. Yet a significant portion of society could never comply with that. Beyond professional obligations, there are many millions of children who live in homes that are not safe, that are not conducive to being sequestered in a room for hours upon hours and sitting in front of a screen that they were supposed to learn from.

This whole idea that closing schools was going to have any impact was just manifestly absurd from very early, and there is just an endless amount of evidence, much of which I observed myself as a parent over time: Kids are going to interact with each other no matter what, and particularly when you think about kids whose parents had to work. What happened with them? Did they stay home alone? Some did, but many of them went to a grandparent’s house, a neighbor looked after them, or they went to a daycare or other situation where they were intermixing with children from a whole variety of nearby neighborhoods and towns. What I show is that this whole hybrid model, where schools were only open two days a week for some kids, or less, with the idea that that was going to mitigate transmission, was nonsensical, and there are tons of data that show this. 

You can look at cellular phone data, and you can see the mobility of American citizens began to increase over time. What we can see is that this completely is in line with what scientists had known for many, many years: People’s ability to comply with unpleasant or difficult directives understandably wanes over time, and there was never any inkling that human beings, by and large, were going to all just imprison themselves and be hermetically sealed. Only the most motivated and financially capable people could and would actually achieve that.

It sounds like you’re saying that we were asking schools to do something that virtually no one else could do.

Even if schools were closed, the point is that children were still mixing with people, and the adults themselves were mixing as well. Lockdowns in a free society do not work over time. There’s some evidence that perhaps they could work if they are absolute and total, where every single thing is closed for a very brief period of time. But the idea that children were locked out of a school building while adults could go to restaurants and bars and casinos and offices and stores 鈥� the idea that that logically was going to have any impact 鈥� was absurd. Yet it continued for more than a year for many children.

Including yours. At a certain point in summer of 2020, it seemed as if schools might reopen in the fall. And then on July 6, President Trump tweeted, all caps, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” As you write, four days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out . They had argued “forcefully and unambiguously” for opening schools before this. How much of this disaster was, as you say, Newtonian physics in the political realm? 

The equal and opposite reaction. 

Trump is for it? I’m against it.

It’s quite stark. The example from the American Academy of Pediatrics is quite stunning. The about-face was so obvious that even NPR . But that’s just one example. Throughout the book, I show over and over how people on the left were just reactive against Trump, and even those who wanted to talk about what they thought was wrong often generally didn’t do so. 

I had doctors, many of whom were at prestigious institutions around the country, reaching out to me, talking 鈥� always off the record 鈥� about how they vehemently disagreed with what was going on in schools: Mask mandates with kids, if the particular schools were open, or quarantines, or barriers on the desks, the six feet of distancing 鈥� all of these things that we were told were critical and that there was a consensus, and that this is “what the experts say.”

All these things were a manufactured consensus. This was artificial, and unfortunately, I couldn’t talk about it that much because all of this was off the record. 

Many of these doctors and others, including former CDC officials who would reach out to me, were simply afraid of being cast out amongst their peers. But many of them also were very explicitly told by their administrators, by their bosses at their university hospital or whatever institutions they were with, that they were not allowed to say this. They were not allowed to go against the narrative of the CDC. To me, that鈥檚 a far more frightening form of censorship, that the American public was misled in part because there was a false story about a medical consensus. I had access to this information, knowing it was a false narrative, but I was constrained in what I could say. But I will say this: That sort of false narrative continued, not just from doctors who were contacting me and other health experts. 

All we had to do was look at Europe: Tens of millions of children were in school there. But by and large, the media ignored this 鈥� not just the media, but our health officials. Or they contrived a variety of reasons that were false about why those kids were in school there.

That actually leads me to my question about journalism: You seem to hold a special disdain for the coverage of the New York Times, which you feel set the tone for fearful, expert-based coverage that largely ignored evidence. What happened, and how did things go wrong so quickly there?

Well, I single out the Times only because they were particularly egregious in their misleading coverage about the pandemic in general and in particular about children in schools. It’s not exclusive, I talk about all sorts of media outlets, but there’s extra focus on the Times because arguably it is the most influential news outlet in the country, certainly amongst the elite decision makers in our culture, whether in politics or other fields. It’s very important for how policy gets made in our country. The framing that The New York Times puts on certain topics is very important. 

If you think about Israel and Palestine, people already have kind of baked-in positions on that largely, so the framing of the Times will probably just anger one group or another, depending on the story. But something like the pandemic, this was new. So people didn’t come at it with a preconceived idea. They came somewhat blank-slate, at least among the broader kind of political left who reads The New York Times. The Times is telling them, “Don’t look over there. Don’t look at what’s happening here,” and if you do look then they give you a about a school in Georgia without providing any context, or a about Israel without providing any context. 

So one of the important things that I hope readers come away with after they finish my book is an understanding about how media can be incredibly misleading without necessarily publishing errors or facts that aren’t true; that you can write something that’s fact checked, and it still can be incredibly misleading by the way the story is framed, by the information that’s left out, by who you choose to interview and quote. All those things are incredibly important regarding how people perceive reality, and you can do all of it without having any errors.

I want to ask about your kids. How are they doing five years later? I guess they’re now in eighth and 10th grade?

That’s right.

How do they see this period of their lives?

They’re like any other teenagers. It’s impossible to have specific correlates for most circumstances, to say, “Pandemic school courses now have led to X in my child.” We, of course, can look at broader data, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of focus on “learning loss” and test scores. And there are a number of studies that clearly show a direct correlation: The less time that kids were in school during the pandemic, the worse their educational outcomes and scores were. We know that it’s directly linked to that. There’s no ambiguity.  

But what I talk about in the book is that there’s so much that happens in life that you can’t quantify. If you just think about what happened to the high school football player who was relying on a scholarship in order to get into college, but the senior year season was terminated. Never happened. What happened to that kid and so many others like him? What happens to the kids who relied on their school theater program or arts programs? 

What happened to the kids who relied on teachers to report abuse at home, because teachers and educators are the No. 1 reporter of child abuse. When schools were closed, those kids had nowhere to go and no one to see what was happening. So a perverse thing happened during the pandemic: Child abuse reports actually went down. But it’s not because there was less abuse. It’s that children lost this important vehicle to actually bring what was happening behind closed doors into the light. Harm is incurred whether there’s a lingering effect or not. 

I’m glad you brought up abuse because that’s one of those things people don’t necessarily see right away.

This was known immediately. In April 2020, they already could see this. The data were already coming in. So to be very clear, health officials knew harm, great harm, was being done to many children, and they continued with the school closures nonetheless. 

A lot of “blue” parents say that COVID radicalized them. And I wonder how you鈥檇 describe what it did to you?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been radicalized, but I would say as someone who, generally, for my whole adult life, had positioned myself pretty far on the left, I have always been an independent thinker. I’m not one to go with the crowd. I’ve been independent politically. But observing the way our health authorities behaved in conjunction with legacy media, both of which are predominantly on the political left, and observing the complete disconnect from science, from following evidence, from a clear-eyed, honest view of empirical reality, was incredibly destabilizing. You can never go back from that once you observe that type of behavior. 

These were supposed to be the good guys. I’m not saying this was purposeful, necessarily, or conscious, but people’s hatred for Trump and hatred for Republicans or people on the right so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality. One of the great ironies of that era was these lawn signs, “In this house, we believe in science.” These people with the lawn signs generally had absolutely no clue what the science said. They had no clue what they were talking about.

What I’m left with after reading the book is just this kind of sick feeling about what’s going to happen the next time, in the next pandemic. I wonder if you have a sense.

It’s so hard to know. I would just close by saying that I hope my book can do a small part in trying to reveal how the views of society, and in particular, of elite society, spin. My book is essentially one giant case study, composed of a series of case studies, of how health officials and the media operated. And by reading through this narrative of these case studies, you gain a deeper understanding about how things actually work, how individuals and societies make decisions with limited information. Hopefully, people will be armed with that awareness and knowledge. So whatever the next crisis is 鈥� it doesn’t need to be a pandemic 鈥� you鈥檒l have a more clear-eyed and educated view about what’s actually going on around you. And perhaps that will be able to ultimately change what’s going on around us.