Education Policy

Healthy homework? Legislation for student well-being

Olivia Peterkin — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:29:45 +0000

Healthy homework? Legislation for student well-being Olivia Peterkin Mon, 04/21/2025 - 12:29

Education Policy | K-12 | Research and Practice

In this episode of School’s In, California Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo discusses the pros and cons of homework, its effect on youth mental health, and the Healthy Homework Act.

May 1, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

When students look back on the most stressful part of their K-12 careers, homework is often the first thing that comes up. Hours spent solving problems and writing papers, on top activities like sports, mean students have little time left for hobbies or down time with family and friends.

When California State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo looked at the research showing homework both before a certain age and over a certain amount decreased in efficacy and negatively affected student mental health, she decided to act. She co-authored Assembly Bill 2999, also known as the Healthy Homework Act, to encourage California schools and districts to develop a homework policy.

“The bill really starts a conversation,” said Schiavo, who previously worked in education for a Tribal Head Start program. “It doesn't create a requirement, so it's not a required policy. That's one of the amendments we had to make. The goal is to have homework policies in place by the fall of 2028.”

Schiavo joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss the Healthy Homework Act, youth mental health, and the pros and cons of homework, among other topics.

“I think it's an opportunity for us … to really make conscious choices about homework. And really take a step back and look at the homework policies and see, is it really working for people?,” Schiavo said. “I think that there's a lot of work that can be done and that sometimes you do things by habit, or because this is what I experienced, or this is what my mentor taught me.”

They also discuss key takeaways for parents, teachers, and schools, including questions of how much homework is beneficial for student learning, and students’ need for downtime as part of healthy development.

“I really think that this (bill) can be a useful tool for parents, students, and educators to bring to their administration and school boards and to start this conversation,” Schiavo said. “They can reach out to our office if they need help doing it. We are going to try to do that ourselves and start some of these conversations with some of the bigger school boards in the state, and see if we can get the ball rolling on moving this policy forward.”

Transcript

Pilar Schiavo (00:00):

Can you write a law that bans homework?

Denise Pope (00:06):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:30):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:40):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Today we are talking about a subject that has been so controversial for years and years and years, and it's probably going to surprise you. It's not what we would normally think as controversial, but for years and years and years, homework has been not only the bane of students' existence, but a topic that is hotly contested by parents and teachers as well.

Dan Schwartz (01:17):

So Denise, I know where you come down on the debate about homework, given that you just said it's the bane of kids' existence. So how did you treat homework for your kids? Did you give them M&Ms for every right answer? What did you do?

Denise Pope (01:34):

Oh my God, no. No, no, no. You know me, I'm not about extrinsic motivation and bribing. But I will say as an educator, it's really hard because my kids had homework in elementary school and my kindergartners would come home with a bunch of homework and I'd have to sort of bite my tongue and say, "Don't spend a lot of time on it," or "maybe we should just throw it away and I'll talk to your teacher." But it's really hard to find that balance as a parent because you want to be respectful of the teacher. But I also had all this knowledge of the research that showed there's really not a huge correlation between homework, particularly in the early, early grades like kindergarten and student achievement.

Dan Schwartz (02:14):

Wow. So now I know the reason for homework, it's to teach the parents restraint.

Denise Pope (02:18):

Yeah, exactly.

Dan Schwartz (02:18):

I always wondered what it was for, and now I know.

Denise Pope (02:21):

That's it, that's it.

Dan Schwartz (02:23):

I sort of passed along my attitudes towards homework to my kid, so I'd watch TV and shout at him to do his work. That was kind of the sum total of it.

Denise Pope (02:33):

So was he also watching TV? You were both watching TV and he was supposed to do his work at that time or?

Dan Schwartz (02:38):

Maybe, maybe. Okay, so today we are very lucky to have, uh, State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, and she is in southern California and introduced a very interesting bill called Healthy Homework. And so welcome, Pilar. Thank you for coming.

Pilar Schiavo (02:58):

Thank you for having me.

Dan Schwartz (02:59):

And it'd be great to hear sort of what motivated you to create the bill. Did you channel Denise and decide this is something to do, or how'd this happen?

Pilar Schiavo (03:09):

I channeled her and I didn't even know her yet. You know, I was channeling my child really. I have a now 12-year-old in seventh grade, but when I was running for office just a couple of years ago, I had picked her up from school and we were driving home and she said, "What can you do..." We were kind of talking about what I could do when I got elected. And I said, "Well, we get to write laws." And she said, "Oh, can you write a law that bans homework?" And, you know, I think probably every fourth grader's dream. And it got me thinking though, obviously the bill does not ban homework, but it did get me thinking about, you know, what are things that we could do about homework? Because like Denise, when my kid was in kindergarten, she was coming home with a huge packet of homework on Monday and it was due on Friday.

(04:01):

And my first job out of college was early childhood education, I worked for a tribal head start program. And so I learned a lot about early childhood brain development and how play and socialization and all of those things were so important for brain development. And so it really, uh, when she started coming home with this homework, I started researching what's normal homework for kindergartners and what do other countries do? And I started seeing that other countries are emphasizing play and all the other ways that kids learn. And so when I finally got elected, you know, I wanted to do it my first year, but I knew it was a controversial bill and we had to do a lot of legwork and conversations to do it. So we did a lot of that that first year. And then I was so excited to find Denise and partner on the bill in my second year and be able to get it across the finish line.

Dan Schwartz (04:54):

That's great. So Denise, just to give some broader contextualization, do we know where homework came from? Like was this something the Ancient Greeks did? Where did this idea of homework come from? It's really diffuse, the number of reasons people give homework are sort of poorly defined and generally, well, because I did homework. Who started this?

Denise Pope (05:16):

Well, that's a very good question. I can't point to the exact person who started homework, but it started to come when there were certain things that needed to be covered in terms of the people who were setting curricula way, way, way, way back when. And this idea of coverage and what makes someone a full human being. And so if you, kind of jokingly, but going back to the Greeks, right, there's a conception that a full human being has both mental and academic capability, but also physical capability. And so schooling was really kind of the whole day, right. You would do these things, you would read, you would enter into debates and sort of town hall meetings, but you would also do physical activity. So you couldn't fit it in just the time that you needed to work. And if you kind of fast-forward to the Agrarian calendar where there was only certain times of the day that kids were in school and the rest of the time they were actually out helping working the fields, et cetera,

(06:20):

your time for schooling got shorter and shorter. And so this idea of we have to fit it in, when are you going to do it? You're going to do it almost as a third shift. And that's what Pilar and I talk about all the time. The first shift is what you do in school. The second shift is if you have a job or you work, which back then everybody was doing, now you have extracurriculars or a job or you have home responsibilities. And then kids have this third shift which is doing homework.

Dan Schwartz (06:49):

I see.

Pilar Schiavo (06:50):

And that was really powerful when you said that to me, Denise, because I come out of the labor movement where we fought for an eight-hour day and the weekend. And so kind of putting that lens on it to think about you know, yeah, we're not asking anyone else to do this, to do three shifts a day where they go to school all day and then they go to an after-school day program, and then they come home and they sit at the table and they do homework until it's time to go to bed. We're not asking other people to do that. We see the value of that downtime and time with your family and time to pursue your interests.

Denise Pope (07:28):

Yeah, one of the biggest things that we find with homework is the interference with sleep and the interference with what we would call playtime, downtime, family time, really time to spend with family which we know is a protective factor. Time to play, which as you said, Pilar, that is how people learn. It's actually the job of a child is to play. And downtime, like the last thing you want to do when you come home from work is to sit down and do homework. Even though Dan, I know in your job you probably have to do that and I have to do that and Pilar has to do that, but you know, it would be really nice if kids did not have to do that. And the impact on sleep is huge, absolutely huge.

Dan Schwartz (08:09):

So this is the against homework argument. So when you brought the bill forward, were there people who stood up and said, "No, kids still need to do homework because..." What came after the because?

Pilar Schiavo (08:23):

I was really surprised at how few people actually said how important homework is, because I literally talked to anyone who said they were an educator. I talked to them, I said, "Hey, I got this bill I'm working on, want to know what you think about it?" Because I really wanted to hear from people. And a lot of people were talking about how, especially educators about how they don't give homework anymore. They give very little homework just if you don't finish something in class. And you know, I think I ran into a teacher when I went to speak to some students at a school, a sixth grade teacher and she was saying that, "Well, if we don't give them homework, then they're just going to be on their screens all evening. And that's not any better." Which I get and as a parent I struggle with that too. But also it felt a little bit like micromanaging kids' time after school. The arm of the educator can come through into after school and kind of control what's happening all evening at home, which I think all teachers and educators have their kids' interest at heart, right?

(09:33):

They're trying to make sure kids are learning and they're making their learning goals that they need to make. And it's coming from a really sincere place. But I think that there does have to be that downtime. I see my kid just come from school exhausted and how important that downtime is after school for her. And we know we have a mental health crisis right now. And that was the other really big impetus for me to do the bill, is that when we talked about Dr. Pope's research and how it's one of the top stressors in kids' lives. And we literally overnight could do something about it if we wanted to you know, and take one of the major stressors off kids' plates, it just seemed like it was time for us to have a real conversation about it.

Denise Pope (10:17):

One of the biggest things that I hear is "We've always had homework, there must be a reason for it. It's not sort of real school if you don't send homework home." Right? We've been doing it for years, so there must be a good reason for it. And there's also people who feel that it builds and teaches responsibility, right. Well, you should know to take the paper home and then sit and fill out the paper and then bring the paper back and turn it in. But what I always say is if we were going to design a curriculum to teach responsibility, that would not be how we design the curriculum. Just take the paper home, do this thing, take the paper back. We would have a whole different curriculum around responsibility. So that didn't work for me. I do hear the, "Well, we need to keep kids busy because otherwise they'll get into trouble."

(11:02):

Kids are going to get into trouble or not get into trouble with or without homework, right, is what I usually say. So I sort of have heard every excuse in the book for homework with one exception, which is we can't send a non-reader to third grade or there's certain things we need to cover. And if I don't send them to this next grade or class with that information, that teacher's going to come back and say, "Hey, you're handicapping me. You're making this really hard for me." So the coverage excuse comes up a lot. There's a whole equity issue that we talked about when we were putting the bill together as well, which is one in five students actually don't have the technology at home to be able to do their homework. So already we have an equity issue. Think about people whose parents don't speak English, who literally don't know how to do something and don't have the resources around them to get the help. So that raises a whole bunch of other problems with homework.

Pilar Schiavo (11:59):

Yeah, they don't have parents to help them or kids who take care of their younger siblings. That's what I did growing up when my mom was working outside the home. Luckily later they had a home-based business and my mom was around. But yeah, I was watching my brothers and had to help them with homework.

Dan Schwartz (12:17):

But you were thankful they had homework, so you didn't have to entertain them.

Pilar Schiavo (12:22):

No, because if they didn't do homework, they'd be outside playing and that was much better because they were out of my hair.

Dan Schwartz (12:27):

Okay, okay.

Denise Pope (12:27):

Nice.

Dan Schwartz (12:30):

What was the substance of the bill?

Pilar Schiavo (12:32):

The bill really, I think like I said, starts a conversation. It doesn't require school districts to do anything. It still preserves local control. And I think one of the important things that we also did in the bill is that we require input from everyone who's kind of involved in students education, from parents, from students, from teachers obviously administrators, school counselors or social workers, mental health workers, educators who work with students with disabilities, that they all have to have input into that policy. It doesn't create a requirement, so it's not a required policy. That's one of the amendments we had to make. But we did say that it's optional for them to take on and then they can update the policy every five years. The goal is to have homework policies in place by the school year that starts with 2028, in the fall of 2028, but could have model or draft plans that they're working on the year before.

(13:33):

And at this point, I think it's an opportunity for us to start a conversation with school districts, with educators, with parents, with students to kind of really make conscious choices about homework. And really take a step back and look at the homework policies and see is it really working for people? Through this process obviously, I looked at different homework policies and some of them are just how do you make up missing homework, was basically the policy. And so I think that there's a lot of work that can be done and I think that, you know, just sometimes like you're saying, you do things by habit or you do things because this is what I experienced or this is what my mentor taught me. Or one of the interesting things when I was talking to all of these teachers about homework is that I don't think not one of them said that they were taught about what was effective homework in their teacher training when they were getting certified.

(14:33):

And so it was kind of whatever their mentor, teacher did was what they did or what they experienced that they thought was fair. Or what it says at the end of the book in the chapter that they're teaching to give for homework. And so it's really kind of willy-nilly all over the place a little bit and seems like a lot of people don't even know about the research on homework, what's effective, what's not, when is homework actually detrimental?

Dan Schwartz (14:59):

I didn't know that one could do legislation that's designed to teach people rather than regulate them and enforce them. It's really interesting. You look at this bill and it's basically saying, you need to think about these things and learn about these things and then you go make your decision. I thought that was a really effective way of, it's a very educational way of getting people to change behavior as opposed to saying, you must do this.

Denise Pope (15:25):

I mean I have to say I was frustrated by this because the original bill had things that were actually required, Dan. And then in order to get it passed, we had to water it down. And I was a little bit bummed about it, and then Pilar really put the spin back on it and said- and made me feel so much better, that you know what, we are educating people. It's exactly what you're saying, Dan. And that's the first step to change, which we know. And as part of it, they do have to educate themselves on the research about homework. It's not required, but it's highly encouraged that before you put together a policy, you will probably do some research or look at other policies and get educated.

Dan Schwartz (16:07):

No, I think it's brilliant. No offense Denise, but I think more school administrators are going to pay attention to legislation than the papers you write.

Denise Pope (16:13):

Oh, for sure.

Dan Schwartz (16:15):

But they don't have a choice. So what a great way of dissemination. Everything I've ever discovered I'm going to try and legislate so that people have to actually learn what I've done. It's a brilliant idea. I really liked it.

Denise Pope (16:26):

I like the optimism.

Dan Schwartz (16:33):

So Denise, I know your attitude towards homework now. What was it like when you were a kid? Like, did you, couldn't wait to get home and do homework and you sat at the table and had cookies and milk? What was your homework experience?

Denise Pope (16:49):

No, no, not like that, no. Usually honestly when I would come home from school I'd be exhausted. And there are actually many pictures of me lying on the couch, falling asleep to Gilligan's Island in the middle of the day because I just... Which dates me, I know, but I just wasn't ready to start homework. And I went to a school that actually had quite a bit of homework. It was a very intense school and I did it. I would do my homework. I was pretty diligent about doing my homework. I was a nerd. We've sort of established that on this show before. Did I love it? Was I excited? Was I like, "oh my gosh, I'm so excited for homework?" No, but I will say this, I love to read. And when the homework was reading and we read a lot of fiction at my high school, I have to say I did like it, like I looked forward to it.

(17:39):

And so that wasn't a chore. I was not a math person, and we've talked about that before too. So that homework took me a long time and I did not love doing it. And sometimes I would have to call a friend and say, "Help."

Dan Schwartz (17:54):

Well, not to probe too much. Help means what?

Denise Pope (17:58):

Not like tell me the answers.

Dan Schwartz (18:00):

You do it for me?

Denise Pope (18:01):

No, because I was such a goody good right? Such a goody good. Every once in a while maybe, I don't know, maybe I would copy an answer here or there. But most of the time, no, I wanted to learn but it was hard for me. And luckily I had friends in better math classes than me and who could help me. But yeah, I was sort of a nerd, I did my homework. Are you going to tell me that you didn't do any homework when you were growing up, Dan Schwartz?

Dan Schwartz (18:26):

I can tell you what I learned from homework.

Denise Pope (18:27):

Okay

Dan Schwartz (18:29):

Procrastination. I really got good at it. I'm going to put it off, I'm doing it on the bus to school if I have to. So I did this straight through college. I just managed to do as little homework as possible. So the great irony, the heavens have punished me so that I have a job now where it's all homework. I'm like always doing homework, I can't get it done at the job.

Denise Pope (18:55):

Your procrastination skills have not served you well, is that what you're saying?

Dan Schwartz (18:58):

No, the world had revenge on me for procrastinating. And so now I have a job where basically I'm working until 11:00 PM every night doing homework.

Denise Pope (19:07):

To prepare for the next day?

Dan Schwartz (19:09):

To answer all the email that we get about School's In that say how wonderful it is. And I want to respond to everybody personally.

Denise Pope (19:17):

The fan, the fan mail, you're responding to the fan mail?

Dan Schwartz (19:20):

Yeah, I got to keep the fan base going.

Denise Pope (19:21):

Okay well, if I had fan mail as my homework growing up, it would've been a much different thing. Forget Gilligan's Island, I'd just go right to the fan mail, man.

Pilar Schiavo (19:37):

Another piece of the bill Denise started to talk about is that you have to consider impacts to mental health, to students with learning disabilities, to students with IEPs or 504s. And one of the interesting things that I heard from after-school education program director that I spoke to about it, is that parents are getting so overwhelmed. And I saw it in parents' faces when I would talk to kids and parents about it, you know, they're begging for relief in a lot of ways. They're like, when does your bill go into effect? But parents are figuring out a way around it. They're getting 504s for their kids to address homework and try to do it that way. And that was really interesting that they brought that up and they said basically more astute parents, parents who are more aware of it. But it brings up this equity issue there too, that only some people are having access.

Dan Schwartz (20:34):

What's a 504?

Denise Pope (20:35):

Yeah, I knew he needs to know what a 504 is, Pilar. Go ahead.

Dan Schwartz (20:38):

I didn't do my homework. Sorry.

Pilar Schiavo (20:41):

So a 504 is basically a plan you can come up with for student if they need help getting access to their education. So maybe they have ADHD or some other kind of learning disability. You can do it for depression, anxiety, other kind of mental health issues as well. And then an IEP is kind of a higher level mandated accommodations that are required to do to help students learn with supportive services and things like that to come along.

Denise Pope (21:13):

What was becoming crazy is kids were being so stressed about homework and falling behind, or it was becoming such a source of tension in people's homes that they would actually go and beg someone, a doctor, a therapist or whatever to allow them to get a 504 that would allow accommodations and kind of lower the pressure and maybe reduce the homework for that particular kid. And you know, the surgeon general just put out a report on the stress of being a parent of young kids. And homework is a very big source of tension. And parents, as Pilar said, they didn't want to be the homework police. Everyone's exhausted at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is fight with your kid over what they need to do. And especially when they think it's busy work or as a parent, you don't even know how to help them.

Pilar Schiavo (22:04):

Yeah, my kid had a meltdown in fourth grade over, as you can imagine, I have had busy lives and evening events and stuff like that. And so I'm trying to get her to do homework in the back of the car while I'm driving to an event, that didn't work out. And then it definitely didn't happen at the event. And so we get home, you know, when it's time to go to bed and she needs to get sleep. And so I just said, "Just don't do your homework tonight." And she started bawling and just was like a puddle of tears and afraid her teacher was going to be disappointed in her, that she was going to get in trouble, that she was going to be kept in for a recess. And it was fourth grade. And I'm like, what is going on? Why is homework so stressful in fourth grade? It really blew me away.

Dan Schwartz (22:52):

So there's one side of this which is homework's stressful and another side of it that the homework's just not achieving any goal. So I have a great example of both simultaneously. So my son goes to high school and it's his first class, and the teacher assigns some incredible amount of homework that's due like the next day. And I look at this and later on I get a chance to talk to the teacher. I said, "Why'd you sign that? That was like 12 hours of homework." She said, "I didn't expect them to do all of it." And it was just sort of like, "Well, how are they supposed to decide what...?" So that was a stress model and a very bad pedagogical model.

Denise Pope (23:37):

Yeah, that's not okay.

Dan Schwartz (23:38):

But I bet I could come up with homework that's actually fun and useful. Like, can I do that? And if it's fun, it'll not be stressful or I can make it fun and stressful.

Denise Pope (23:49):

No, you don't want it fun and stressful. Here's the thing, here's the thing. It's always going to be when can I fit this into my life as a kid, as a parent, how does this all fit in with all the daily responsibilities and what we know kids need? They need time for exercise and outside time. They need time to spend with family, they need sleep, all of that stuff, right, how to find that balance. But we're not saying all homework is bad, we're just saying if kids think it's busy work and they have too much to do or they don't have the resources to do it, right, it is not being effective. So what is effective, right? There is such a thing as effective homework, is finding the right amount. It's showing them the purpose behind it and making it engaging and fun. There's actually really good research that if the homework is engaging to the students, they're more likely to do it and not cheat on it.

(24:42):

And whatever they're having them do, it's more likely to stick. So it doesn't mean that all homework is bad, it just means that as you're designing homework, really think about from the student's point of view, which is why I'm so excited that the bill says, "We encourage you to include students as part of this conversation." Because they'll tell you if it's boring or if I think it's busy work or whatever. And I think most kids know that not all homework is going to go away. Certainly as you get into the older years, you have to do things to prepare for class. It makes sense to read a chapter of a book in order to discuss it in school. So as we think about the takeaways from all of this, I do want to just say that Pilar's daughter played a very key role in the making of the bill.

(25:30):

And it was so hard for me because I would have to speak after her. So she would go and she would give the students view of homework and why it really affected her life and why she was an expert witness, because she was living through it right, as to why the bill should happen. And then they'd be like, "Oh my gosh, that was so amazing. Wonderful. Oh, Dr. Pope, do you have anything to say?" And it was like, who's going to follow that? She said it all. So Pilar, that was amazing, really amazing.

Pilar Schiavo (26:02):

Yeah, it was a really incredible experience to go through to have my kid and I running this through the process, and her there every time and all the education committee hearings. And it was a really memorable experience I think we'll remember forever.

Dan Schwartz (26:18):

Oh, that's awesome.

Denise Pope (26:20):

I love it, I love it. So as we think about takeaways for the listeners, Pilar, what's one thing you want them to leave with?

Pilar Schiavo (26:28):

I really hope that people will take this as a tool to their school boards and start conversations there. I'm hoping, as I said, I come out of the labor movement, I think about things as an organizer. And I really think that this can be a useful tool for parents, for students, for educators to bring to their administration, to bring to their school boards and to start this conversation. Say, "Hey, you know I think we should look at this. We should think about what is our homework policy? What kind of impact is it having on our kids? Is it really having the kind of impact on their education we want to? Is it negatively or positively impacting their mental health? You know, is it creating inequity?" All of the things that I think a conversation like this can really help to address.

(27:13):

And so I hope that people will use it as a tool. They can reach out to our office if they need help doing it. We are gonna, you know, try to do that ourselves and start some of these conversations with some of the bigger school boards in the state, and see if we can get the ball rolling on moving this policy forward.

Denise Pope (27:29):

Super exciting. Dan, you want last word on homework?

Dan Schwartz (27:34):

I think the thing I learned which may be true of education in general, is that people want homework to do too many things simultaneously. So it's not being optimized for anything in particular. And so that leads to all these, that's the way we've always done it kind of responses. If you really knew why you were doing it, you'd probably make it effective, shorter, fun, things like that. So the bill, which is intended to make people do exactly that, is a great idea.

Denise Pope (28:05):

Great. That's the part that I'm leaving with, first of all for Dan Schwartz to be an optimist about policy, you don't even know how amazing that is, Pilar. But this idea that policy is to teach and to educate is just something that I'm going to leave thinking more about. So I appreciate that from this conversation very much. So pilar, thank you so much for joining us. We know you're so busy. Thank you for all you're doing and all the legislation that you're working on these days, education related or not, because I know how much you do. And thank all of you for joining this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (28:45):

And I'm Dan Schwartz who learned that he should close the blinds before we start recording.

Pilar Schiavo (28:52):

Homework for next time.

Dan Schwartz (28:53):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (28:54):

Exactly.

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Faculty and Research

Financial literacy in school: Skills for the 21st century

Olivia Peterkin — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:56:43 +0000

Financial literacy in school: Skills for the 21st century Olivia Peterkin Mon, 03/10/2025 - 12:56

Education Policy | Poverty and Inequality | Students

In this episode of School’s In, GSB Professor Annamaria Lusardi discusses what financial skills are most useful for young people, and a new bill that is working to get students where they need to be.

March 20, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

Last year, California became the 26th state to make coursework in personal finance a graduation requirement for high school students, with the passage of Assembly Bill 2927.

But what does it mean for a young adult to be financially literate in America? And what role can schools play in preparing students for the world outside the classroom?

Annamaria Lusardi, a senior fellow at the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and professor of finance at �� Graduate School of Business (GSB), says that making personal finance mandatory is a step in the right direction.

“When you look at the proportion of young people who are financially literate, we see that it's disproportionately the white male college-educated young people who are financially literate. And so by making this course mandatory and accessible to everybody, we can give this access to those students who otherwise would not have it,” said Lusardi, who is also the faculty director of the Initiative for Financial Decision-Making, a collaboration between the GSB, the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research, and ��’s economics department.

“One of the most important determinants of financial literacy is, unfortunately, socioeconomic status, so we need to have it in the school to provide access to everybody,” she said.

Lusardi joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss the complexities of financial decision making and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)' s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a financial literacy test for 15-year-olds.

They also discuss financial literacy’s impact on well-being and wealth.

“Financial literacy is linked to a variety of behaviors that bring happiness,” Lusardi said. “We don’t save just to save, we save to achieve an objective like sending our kids to college, having a secure retirement, or taking a trip. So it is that knowledge that allows us to better navigate the financial system, and therefore be able to be savvy in making financial decisions.”

“I always say (my personal finance course) is a happiness project,” she said. “It teaches you the things that are important so you can make the decision that allows you to achieve some of the objectives that you have.”

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Annamaria Lusardi (00:00):

Financial literacy is an essential skill to thrive in the 21st century.

Denise Pope (00:10):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of [00:00:30] Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:33):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the Faculty Director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:43):

Together we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

(00:52):

Hi Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:53):

Hi Denise.

Denise Pope (00:54):

Dan, today we are talking about something I think really important like a life skill, [00:01:00] financial literacy, and specifically financial literacy for high school students.

Dan Schwartz (01:06):

Right. So it turns out that a lot of people never learned about credit card debt accumulation or how to figure out are the terms of this loan good or even what's inflation due to the amount of money you have. So did you learn these things? Do you know about these things?

Denise Pope (01:24):

My god, I don't even know what I don't know. Right? I did not take financial literacy in high school or college. [00:01:30] I'm sort of embarrassed. I didn't even take econ in college. Did you?

Dan Schwartz (01:34):

No. My goal in life was to get enough money that I could hire someone to do my finances for me.

Denise Pope (01:41):

That's good.

Dan Schwartz (01:41):

Thank you.

Denise Pope (01:42):

That seems very financial literate.

Dan Schwartz (01:44):

I'm still waiting. But yes, that is a sort of type of literacy. So today we are very fortunate to have Professor Annamaria Lusardi who's speaking with us today. She's a professor of finance at the �� Graduate School of Business and she's one of the world's most cited [00:02:00] authors on financial literacy and she's advised the Office of Financial Education at US Treasury. So she's here to help us understand a new bill that's been signed in California that requires high school students to complete a course on financial literacy before they graduate.

(02:16):

So welcome Annamaria.

Annamaria Lusardi (02:20):

Very happy to be here today.

Dan Schwartz (02:22):

Good. So here's the first question. What counts as financial literacy and how did you decide that's [00:02:30] a thing?

(02:30):

Well, that's what people need to learn, I know income and expenses, am I done?

Annamaria Lusardi (02:37):

Well, you are not done yet. Financial literacy includes a few more topics, and this is what we hope also this new law will establish what we need to have in the schools are a set of knowledge and skills that we think define financial literacy. And we know those because for [00:03:00] example, already in 2012, the Program for International Student Assessment already had added financial literacy into the list of topics, at 15 years old need to know in order to participate to society. So it is a long and important list and it includes the many skills that young people need to have today.

Denise Pope (03:26):

I can only imagine because other countries always [00:03:30] outscore us on the PISA in so many other ways that we were probably really outscored on this in terms of the US. Is this, are we way down there? Is this part of the problem?

Annamaria Lusardi (03:41):

We are not down there in a sense that we are at the OECD average and we have been mostly at the OECD average. But this is not a good score.

Denise Pope (03:51):

Being average is not good, right? Being average is not okay.

Annamaria Lusardi (03:54):

Being average is not good. The US is the country with the most advanced financial [00:04:00] markets. And so we need to do and we need to do better. But also what the result shows is that it's not because you are born in a country with well-developed financial markets that you acquire financial literacy by yourself. That's a language you need to learn and you need to speak because nobody is going to explain it to you. And so if you are going to make financial decisions, that's the language or that's the term you are going to face.

Dan Schwartz (04:27):

What are some of the other terms? Stock, a mutual [00:04:30] fund, compounding interest would be ...

Annamaria Lusardi (04:32):

Absolutely. Inflation is another word we have used. And of course, for example, insurances, managing risk. So making a budget, managing expenses, planning for the future, these are some of the words we have used.

Dan Schwartz (04:49):

So this financial literacy course could be very intense mathematically. So risk diversification is an evaluation of probabilities, right?

Annamaria Lusardi (04:59):

So [00:05:00] when I teach personal finance at ��, we have a course here, we use a bit of math and I think students appreciate it because we also have a lot of students from the sciences and from computer science.

(05:13):

But I have to say you can teach personal finance with very little math. And how can you explain risk diversification? You use this example, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. You try to explain how growth can really be very fast, can be nonlinear. [00:05:30] But I've done the course in very simple ways and with very little math. I also teach one unit course during the summer. So you can do it with as little math as possible because we know that math can be an obstacle for many students to take this course.

(05:47):

And also I want to repeat, many people think while we teach math and therefore it is like teaching personal finance, but personal finance is its own topics. For example, you need to know the rule and regulation. [00:06:00] You need to know where it is useful to get information and so on.

Denise Pope (06:05):

I feel like I should hire Anna right now to teach me these things without math. Like compound interest, when you say compound interest, literally my heart starts going ... I mean I know to pay off my credit card every month because there is this thing that if I don't pay, it's actually way more money and it gets more. But again, I don't know the math. So what do you think about that?

Annamaria Lusardi (06:28):

I think I'm going to have you in my classes [00:06:30] as well because you have already explained in simple way many of the things we tell to the students. We try to explain what the concept is. We can explain it in simple ways.

(06:41):

One of the things I tell my students in the first class is you are going to learn the language of finance, but we start with plain English and we build that knowledge up so people learn little by little. And then we explain this concept in pure English. Sometimes we put [00:07:00] some of the formula on the whiteboard or the blackboard or on the slides, but we also explain it in very simple way. We explain the intuition behind it, things like the interest rate, which is how much your wealth can grow.

(07:13):

And so given that the interest rate is so high and it compounds, it builds over the interest, then it's really important, as you've said, to pay off your credit card quickly, or it is very useful to start saving as soon as possible. [00:07:30] So you can explain these things in simple ways.

Dan Schwartz (07:33):

I agree. I think it is important for people to learn these things.

(07:37):

So the military has very sophisticated equipment, and the first move was to train people to handle the sophisticated equipment. And that turns out to be very consuming. So what they did is they just made it easier to use the equipment. So here's an Obama-era law on credit card statements that they include [00:08:00] sort of the cost that you would pay, but if you paid the minimum amount, they show you how much it would cost you over like 15, 30 years. So why can't we just do that for everything? Just make it simpler for people?

Annamaria Lusardi (08:12):

Yeah. We can and we should, but it's not enough. It's not enough. We need also now for example, to make decisions about our pension, our responsibility to save and to invest our pension has been shifting upon us. And these are not simple [00:08:30] decisions. Also, decisions are interrelated. I have to decide not just how much to save for my pension, but also whether I want to buy a house and the down payment whether to pay off my credit card. And so if you simplify one decision, I still have to make decisions across different options.

(08:51):

The financial market, the world has become much more complex than in the past. So I cannot I think stop [00:09:00] that complexity. And I think this is what happened also for education. We need to increase and have a higher level of education because of the changes that we see around us. And this is precisely why we need to add this additional topic. The world around us are required to have that knowledge. We are not able to operate under just simplifying some of those decisions.

Denise Pope (09:29):

That is a great answer. [00:09:30] Really appreciate that.

Dan Schwartz (09:38):

So Denise, I don't know how you learned financial literacy 'cause you never took the econ course, but maybe it's there. So my question is what have you done to help your kids become financially literate?

Denise Pope (09:49):

Oh, that's a very good question. We have talked as a family about savings. And I know this sounds crazy, but early [00:10:00] on, so I was always told, don't pay your kids for chores. Okay? Stick with me on this. Don't pay your kids for chores because they should be doing them out of the kindness of their heart, out of being part of a family. This is what we do to help others. But I was told you should give your kids an allowance because giving them an allowance not tied to anything in particular, but giving them an allowance helps them learn financial literacy.

(10:28):

And so one of the things that we were told [00:10:30] is to have something where you give them an allowance that they get to spend a little bit, but they also get to save a little bit. And then also think about when we give to charity like helping others. So we get together right around Thanksgiving, we figure out where we want to put some charitable funds and we would always include the kids in that and they would put, when they were little, it was like I can give 25 cents, but you make a big deal out of it. So that's what we did in my family.

Dan Schwartz (10:58):

Wow.

Denise Pope (10:59):

What? How about- What?

Dan Schwartz (11:00):

[00:11:00] Nothing. I didn't give an allowance. He would have to ask for money. But then in college his roommate was the world's best online poker player.

Denise Pope (11:11):

Oh, well that helps.

Dan Schwartz (11:12):

And that's where he learned it all, right, from this guy who really understood sort of taking bets and risk and where do you invest, so.

Denise Pope (11:24):

Well, we need him to teach the financial literacy classes.

Dan Schwartz (11:28):

If I can just point out, [00:11:30] even though I did nothing, he's now a certified public accountant. So I don't know where it happened. It wasn't me. I didn't give him a credit card or something like that and say, "You have to pay off your debt, kid." I don't know where he got it.

Denise Pope (11:43):

Although that is interesting because that's the other thing that we were told, is have them have a credit card early on that you're a cosigner on 'cause they don't have enough to get their own, but they will learn. And then that's how you teach them about always pay off your credit card in full.

(11:59):

My [00:12:00] dad taught me that. My dad taught me how to balance. I used to have to balance my checkbook to the penny because that's what my dad taught me. I mean literally to the point I would just go through. Remember in the old days you'd have your checks and you'd go through and you'd check them off and see. Yeah, that's what I was taught.

Dan Schwartz (12:17):

I've never done any of that. I just look at my bank account and I say, "I'm not broke. It's okay."

Denise Pope (12:23):

It's okay.

Dan Schwartz (12:25):

That's about as far as I get, but ...

Denise Pope (12:27):

I will say this though, we do have students [00:12:30] who will think like, "Oh, I still have checks in my checkbook." I'm dating myself. "I must have money in my account." Right?

Dan Schwartz (12:38):

Ooh, I like that mis- I like that one.

Denise Pope (12:40):

There's problems. There's problems. It sounds like we do really need to invest in financial literacy, and the more, the better at this point.

(12:52):

Okay, so you have me convinced, Annamaria. We need this. Talk to me a little bit more about the bill itself [00:13:00] and what it's requiring and why high school and what this all means.

Annamaria Lusardi (13:04):

Yeah. So the new bill requires a semester-long personal finance education course to graduate. So the schools have to offer the course by the 2027 and '28 school year and make it a graduation requirement by 2030 and '31. So it has to be a standalone personal finance [00:13:30] course. And that's I think what makes it unique, and California will become the 26th state to require this standalone personal finance course to graduate.

Dan Schwartz (13:44):

So Denise, do you think students are going to love it? I mean it's so practical and relevant.

Denise Pope (13:49):

I mean, I think it's to be determined, right? How is it taught? Is it taught in the way that Anna just did with me? Yes. Can we clone Anna and send her out to every high school in [00:14:00] the California? That would certainly help. I worry, and I can just tell you from my own experience, sometimes these classes get the reputation of the dumb math class. So you're not taking algebra one. You're not taking algebra two. You're in the dumb math class.

(14:16):

What I love about requiring everyone to take it is I think that that stigma is going to go away. And personal finance is not going to be considered sort of math for dummies, for lack of a better word, but it's going to be like, "Oh wait, this is really [00:14:30] important. This is how I buy a car. This really affects my future."

(14:34):

And I will say this, the fact that it became a full semester is really incredible because I've seen other things passed – there has to be some mental health education – that are short, maybe unit-long type things or you kind of cover it in, it's a checklist and you can check it off. But to make this a full semester long class shows you just how important the government thinks it [00:15:00] is for us to learn this. So well done, well done, Anna.

Annamaria Lusardi (15:05):

Well, I think the same. And I want to say judging from the students here at ��, I know these are not high school students, but when the course was first offered here, 362 students signed up.

Denise Pope (15:19):

Wow.

Annamaria Lusardi (15:20):

It became the most popular course within economics. And even now that we are teaching it, I'm teaching it also in the summer. We have had more than 400 students during [00:15:30] the spring and the summer term and we had to raise the cap four times. It's very, very popular among the students. So hopefully it doesn't have that stigma.

(15:40):

I actually want to mention something that people don't mention enough, which is the importance of making this course mandatory is because we made it accessible to every student. So when you look at the proportion of people, young people who are financially literate, and I've studied [00:16:00] for example, younger people but older than the high schooler, we see that it's disproportionately the white male college-educated young people who are financially literate. And so by making this course mandatory and accessible to everybody, we can give this access to those students who otherwise would not have it.

(16:24):

Our study finds something really interesting, which is that if you look at these young people that [00:16:30] have studied 23 to 27 years old, we can link that financial literacy to the wealth of the parents when they were growing up, when these people were 12 to 17, and in particular, if the family had retirement savings and stocks. In other words, young people today learn these topics at the dinner table, but only if they come from families which are well-off and which are college-educated.

(16:58):

We see this in the PISA data [00:17:00] as well. One of the most important determinant of financial literacy is unfortunately socioeconomic status. We need to have it in the school to provide access to everybody.

Denise Pope (17:14):

So important, so important.

Dan Schwartz (17:16):

I think that finding is not surprising, but it's incredibly important.

Denise Pope (17:20):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (17:20):

If you don't have money in your household, you don't spend a lot of time talking about your mutual funds.

Annamaria Lusardi (17:25):

Right. And also money becomes a source of anxiety, of worries. [00:17:30] We see this in the adult population as well. And also money is taboo. And so we don't discuss this easily and this is why eventually people will never learn about it. But it's better to have this knowledge before you make financial decisions than after and learning in school rather than learning by mistakes.

Denise Pope (17:55):

Totally. And that actually makes me think of this whole concept of money as taboo as a whole, [00:18:00] right? No one talks about how much they make. You're not supposed to say these things in public and at dinner parties or whatnot. It's just mystifying to me because another thing that I read that you said is it's not necessarily wealth that is connected to happiness, it's actually financial literacy connected to happiness.

(18:18):

Can you say a little bit more about that? I think it plays into what we're talking about right now.

Annamaria Lusardi (18:22):

Yes. What we say and the reason why we make the statement is that we have seen that financial literacy [00:18:30] is linked to a variety of behavior that is bringing that happiness. I would say that financial well-being, that financial security. We don't at the end save just to save. We want to save to achieve an objective, to, for example, send kids to college, to be able to have a secure retirement, to be able to do the things we would like to do, maybe take a trip, maybe help others. And so is that, I think knowledge that [00:19:00] today is so fundamental. Every decision we have to make is relatively complex. So it’s that knowledge that allows us to navigate better the financial system and therefore be able to be savvy in making the financial decisions.

(19:18):

I always ask my students in the first class what the course is about, what they think the course is about. And most of the students, I have to say – similar to I think what the [00:19:30] average person thinks – they think the course is about investing because of personal finance, you feel like, well, it has to be about investing. And I always say, no, this course is a happiness project. It teaches you the things that are important so you can make the decision that allows you to achieve some of the objectives that you have.

Denise Pope (19:54):

Well, there's your hook for high schoolers right there, especially given the mental health issues of kids right now [00:20:00] and the state of economy and the real wealth gap that we're seeing, right?

Annamaria Lusardi (20:05):

Yeah. Think how daunting it can be for a high school student today to think about a decision to go to college and how to finance that education. So that in itself is a complex decision. So right there, young people have to make important and consequential decisions very early on.

Dan Schwartz (20:26):

So I want to get back to one of the findings that [00:20:30] I saw, which I found kind of stunning. And so the claim is that 30 to 40% of differences in net worth are due to financial literacy. So that's pretty stunning. And I'm sort of thinking maybe the causal direction's the other way, that if you have a lot of money, you become more financially literate. So tell me, because 30 to 40% based on financial literacy is huge.

Annamaria Lusardi (20:56):

Yeah. This is actually part of a study that we did, but like [00:21:00] you were suggesting, we actually argue that financial literacy can also be an investment and that people who have a lot to gain from financial literacy will potentially invest more in financial literacy. And this is actually what we see as well in the data, that there is a little bit that endogeneity as well, as you have correctly indicated.

(21:25):

But our result at the end is indeed stunning and I think [00:21:30] is very much in line with, I think even a simple example. Suppose as we do, we both have a PhD, but I invest in the stock at age 30 and you don't invest in the stock market. 30, 40 years later, we are going to look very different just because of that decision. And that decision is often very much led by financial literacy. So financial literacy can really influence our wealth [00:22:00] much more than it influences our income.

Denise Pope (22:03):

I mean, I do want to point out though, you have to have money to invest in the first place. So if you're constantly living paycheck to paycheck, that's not even a reality for you. Right?

Annamaria Lusardi (22:14):

Right. But in our story as well, financial literacy helps in smoothing some of those shocks. So financial literacy is not just to accumulate for retirement, it's also to accumulate to smooth some of those shocks that [00:22:30] you might have. And so that ability, for example, to have a buffer stock of savings, putting aside a little and particularly early on if you can, is going to bring a lot in the long term.

(22:45):

I myself have to say, have regrets of not having invested and invested earlier on, for example, in this type of tax favor asset like a Roth IRA that really allows people [00:23:00] to grow in their wealth very early on. So there is really a lot we can learn and we can benefit from the financial market, the opportunity offered by the government and the employer, but we have to be aware of it and take advantage of them. And this is what financial literacy does.

Dan Schwartz (23:18):

So here's a complicated financial literacy issue that I had. So I had a job before I went back to PhD and I liquidated all my retirement to pay for my doctoral studies. [00:23:30] And so now I'm sitting here thinking, "Should I have left it? Would I be happier if I had not liquidated my retirement, which was age 30, or was my investment in a college education, advanced college education better?" I decided to get the PhD.

Annamaria Lusardi (23:49):

It's another investment I think you have chosen, but again, I don't know to know what is best. And I think that's also what we normally say, right? It depends [00:24:00] on you, what your decision are and what your knowledge is. But this could have potentially been a better investment because you have invested in education that has brought, I'm sure a very satisfying career and the things you wanted to achieve. So that's what money is for. That's the main lesson of financial literacy, use money for what is best for you.

Dan Schwartz (24:26):

So Denise, I liquidated my retirement so I could reach the [00:24:30] culmination of doing School's In with you.

Denise Pope (24:31):

I was just going to say-

Dan Schwartz (24:33):

That's how it cashed out.

Denise Pope (24:33):

You wouldn't be there if you hadn't have done that. So of course it was the right decision. Right?

(24:38):

Okay, as we wrap up, Anna, what's sort of one takeaway that you want people to get out of the show today?

Annamaria Lusardi (24:44):

The takeaway is that financial literacy is an essential skill to thrive in the 21st century. I am quoting the title of the first report of the Program for International Student Assessment [00:25:00] by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the OECD, who added financial literacy into PISA already in 2012. It recognized that that's a very important skill. And so my suggestion to young people is, while you are in school, take this course if it is offered. My suggestion to parents is talk about money to your children as soon as possible when the Tooth Fairy comes.

Denise Pope (25:30):

[00:25:30] Yes.

Annamaria Lusardi (25:31):

And my suggestion to an adult person is to try to acquire this knowledge because it's a good investment for the future.

Denise Pope (25:39):

I love that. Can I just say the Tooth Fairy, on that topic, talk about inflation. We gave our kids maybe a quarter. Maybe my third kid got up to a dollar a tooth. I hear it's like 20 bucks a tooth these days. Talk about ...

Annamaria Lusardi (25:54):

Inflation has gone up. We need to adjust that little money, right? In particular, remember inflation [00:26:00] was 8%, so please adjust the money accordingly.

Denise Pope (26:04):

I love it.

(26:04):

Dan, any last words?

Dan Schwartz (26:06):

Well, I think the answer is you need to explain to your children why they should put it in the piggy bank.

Denise Pope (26:11):

Instead of spending it on candy.

Dan Schwartz (26:13):

And you add 3% to the piggy bank every year.

Denise Pope (26:15):

Exactly. Nice.

Annamaria Lusardi (26:17):

So you can see and they can see how much it grows.

Dan Schwartz (26:17):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (26:20):

I love it. I love it.

(26:21):

Well, thank you so much Annamaria for being here. We learned so much. I personally learned a lot and I know our listeners did too. Thank all of you for joining [00:26:30] this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (26:38):

I'm Dan Schwartz. I will go back and look at my investments this evening.

Podcast

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GSE area

Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope

Cell phones in schools: Is banning the answer?

Olivia Peterkin — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:13:23 +0000

Cell phones in schools: Is banning the answer? Olivia Peterkin Mon, 02/24/2025 - 18:13

Education Policy | Technology

In this episode of School’s In, GSE Associate Professor Antero Garcia discusses cell phone bans in schools and opportunities for educators to integrate tech in the classroom.

March 6, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

When it comes to cellphone usage in schools, the negative effects of its overuse — including distractions to learning and decreased social interaction among students — get most of the attention, causing many educators and policy makers to consider bans.

However, in doing so, are we missing an opportunity to support young people’s growth and learning?

�� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Associate Professor Antero Garicia, who has studied the pros and cons of technology in the classroom, believes that a more complex approach could help minimize harm while improving learning outcomes.

“(Getting rid of cellphones) might fix something for some people, but I think there are some long-term consequences to doing that, that schools are not willing to think through, and I think that parents, with good nature, are also not willing to engage with,” said Garcia, who is also the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, where he works with leadership to improve the teaching and learning of English and language arts for students at all levels.

Key to striking a balance, Garcia says, is asking questions that shed light on its benefits, as well as its pitfalls.

“What are the relationships that are aided by cell phones and by digital technology? What are the academic uses that are aided by technology? And where are the places where it might hinder my ability to make meaningful connections with people?,” he said. “I think there are some ways where we need to think through, what is the world that we’re creating as a result of our relationship and our policies with technology?”

Garcia joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss technology in classrooms, practical considerations and policies, and parenting in a generation shaped by screens.

“Screen time is a whole conversation and it’s very complicated,” he said. “And part of this is recognizing that kids care a lot about the relationships they have with other people, and these devices are playing a role in that. Part of this parenting conversation and part of how we move forward is to think through and value what young people are doing.”

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Antero Garcia (00:00):

The reason we're going towards banning is because we don't have another alternative, and because we haven't thought about, "How do we prepare the teaching profession around cell phones?"

Denise Pope (00:12):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:35):

I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the dean of the Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:45):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

Denise Pope (00:54):

Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:55):

Denise, it's good to see you.

Denise Pope (00:58):

Good to see you. I'm super excited about our show today. We have a hot, hot topic. It is cell phones. The use of cell phones at school. I know that a bunch of parents and caregivers are also thinking about cell phone and cell phone usage, and social media time, and screen time. All of those things that everybody's all up in arms with, as Dan is looking at his phone right now.

Dan Schwartz (01:22):

Sorry, were you saying something, Denise?

Denise Pope (01:24):

Very clever.

Dan Schwartz (01:25):

I was checking my-

Denise Pope (01:26):

Very clever, Dan. Anyway, Dan, I have heard you talk about this before. I've actually been present when people have come up to you and said this question, which is, "How do I know when my kid is on their phone for too long?" You have a great answer, so I want you to go ahead and share that.

Dan Schwartz (01:47):

If you're asking me that question, it's probably too much.

Denise Pope (01:50):

Right? This is such a good answer, Dan, right? Because obviously-

Dan Schwartz (01:54):

Why?

Denise Pope (01:54):

This is why, because something is nagging at them. One of the things that we say at Challenge Success, we have a whole thing that we roll out for parents on this, is if it's interfering with sleep, if it's interfering with play, if it's interfering with learning or getting your homework done, if it's interfering with family time, all the things that we know developmentally kids need, then it's probably too much. But I don't want it to sound like it's negative, because there's also a lot of positives, and so we're really lucky to have an expert with us today.

Dan Schwartz (02:24):

Yes, we are. We have a three-peat guest, Professor Antero Garcia of the Graduate School of Education, who is also the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English. He was a longtime English teacher in South Central LA. Welcome, Antero. It's good to have you back.

Antero Garcia (02:43):

Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Denise.

Dan Schwartz (02:45):

Antero, I remember there were efforts to get each kid a laptop in school. This was a big push. Now most kids have cell phones, which are way more powerful than the laptops back in the day and everyone's trying to ban them in schools. The irony's good. So how should we think about cell phones in schools? I know you've put some thought into this.

Antero Garcia (03:08):

One, I appreciate the, "If you're asking this question, it's probably too much," in the sense of interference, Denise. That if it's interfering with our ability to be human beings, I think those are probably some good heuristics for us to just kind of move forward with. I guess, I will just start and say it is incredible. We're talking two and a half decades, a quarter of a century into the 20th century and we're still having the cell phone debate. My preliminary research about cell phones was conducted in 2010. We're a decade and a half away from when that work was collected and we're having the exact same conversation. We could go in a time machine and 10 years ago we would be having this conversation, including the one laptop per child kind of conversation tied to it. We could probably go a decade in the future and have this exact same conversation. We would just update it with the-

Denise Pope (04:02):

No. No. Tell me that's not true, Antero, because you're going to solve the problem.

Dan Schwartz (04:04):

Sorry. There's more people talking about it now, though.

Denise Pope (04:08):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (04:08):

That's probably a change,

Antero Garcia (04:09):

Who do you think those people are, Dan? If I can ask a question around here.

Denise Pope (04:14):

That's not allowed on the show. Okay. Sorry, Antero.

Dan Schwartz (04:17):

I would guess parents.

Denise Pope (04:19):

I actually was going to say we haven't had schools talk about it as much as we've seen now. Parents for sure have always been asking and are worried. We actually have kids who will say, "Can you ban it during recess and lunch? Because everyone's just looking down on their phones. We're not talking to each other anymore." School buses are silent. How bizarre. School buses are ... I'm sure the bus drivers are happy, but-

Antero Garcia (04:48):

Yeah, that's the dream for the bus driver.

Denise Pope (04:49):

Yeah. Even the kids I think are talking about it more now. Even they realize something's not right. I don't want it to sound too negative, Antero, because you usually do bring up a lot of the positives, too. So help us understand this.

Antero Garcia (05:02):

I think there's a lot of positives. My concern is the short-sighted nature of what happens when we ban a device. I think it is a similar concern we're having around AI right now. AI is going to do all of our homework, therefore we need to get rid of AI and figure out cool tools to make sure that we can eliminate AI in everybody's writing, or whatever other work they're doing.

(05:22):

I think that's the same conversation that's happening with cell phones. There's a lot of bad things happening with cell phones, kids are distracted, they're not paying attention to teachers, there's issues of power and authority, and therefore, we should just get rid of them. That might fix something for some people, but I think there are some long-term consequences to doing that, that schools are not willing to think through, and I think that parents, with good nature, are also not willing to engage with.

(05:44):

I think those kids that you're speaking about are really offering some sophisticated thinking of, "I'd love to get this device banned because of what it's doing to me and my relationships," is actually a really nice starting place for us to think about this. "What are the relationships that are aided by cell phones and by digital technology? What are the academic uses that are aided by technology? And where are the places where it might hinder my ability to make meaningful connections with people?" I think in the same way that when I'm having a face-to-face interaction with somebody, my cell phone is going to get in the way. Or if I'm at the dinner table and I take a peek at my phone, I'm both reinforcing a kind of message to my kids about my relationship to them. And there are places where that cell phone, that same device, allows me to stay connected with family who aren't at the dinner table with me. I think there's some ways where we need to think through, "What is the world that we're creating as a result of our relationship and our policies with technology?"

Dan Schwartz (06:36):

Do you think reason discourse is going to be enough? I mean, the way people use cell phones strikes me as the way they go gambling. They're sort of hoping for a reward signal. So they keep using it, waiting for the reward signal. Rewards are really powerful. If you do research with young kids, you're not allowed to use food rewards, even love and praise because they're such powerful shapers of behavior. So if I had a conversation with my kid about, "Don't use the cell phone, it's going to interfere with your ability to get a girlfriend 10 years from now," is it going to work?

Denise Pope (07:17):

Okay, that is not going to work. Let me just tell you that. That's not going to work. Okay. Reason discourse, meaning ...

Dan Schwartz (07:27):

I thought Antero was suggesting that we have a conversation about this with the cell phone users, being the kids.

Antero Garcia (07:33):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (07:33):

Yeah.

Antero Garcia (07:34):

I think there's a thing to unpack before that, and that is, as adults ... I mention my own poor behavior with cell phones sometimes as a thing that happens. As adults, we don't have very good use in general with our cell phones. And then we place that as a way to distrust young people, because they both learn from us how to use cell phones. They learn from each other. And we don't have good protocols on what to actually do with them, which is, as a result, because we don't have, as adults, a good plan, the best plan we can come up with is, "Well, let's just do the blanket statement, 'Let's ban them all,' then figure out as a society, 'What are meaningful ways to use cell phones?'"

(08:11):

As an example, every day when I pick my kids up after school, in order to check them out of their after-school program, I scan a QR code on my phone, I enter a whole bunch of ... It takes forever. It is the longest process. But given that, my cell phone, every day, aids me. Allows me to stay connected. Allows me to engage in my responsibilities as a dad, in my responsibilities as a worker. I regularly am engaging with my students, my doctoral students in the School of Education. I connect with them all of the time over research projects. I answer their quick questions as they are trying to figure out what classes to take and I have no idea how to guide them around that. All of those kinds of questions are mediated on cell phones, both on Slack and on text messages. I reply to emails. There are lots of different kinds of things. Maybe that's all kind of bureaucratic glut, but it's also the ways that people know where and how they can rely on me, and the ways I know I can rely on other people. Cell phones play a role.

(09:02):

When we ban them, what are we telling people about the role of these devices in their workplace and in their learning context? I think there's some really big missed opportunities. We should think through, "What are the meaningful ways where we can pull these in?" At every age group. My five-year-old twins don't have cell phones, so it's not a concern there. I imagine this will be a conversation with them when they enter middle school. That is my guess of kind where we are.

Denise Pope (09:24):

Oh, yeah.

Dan Schwartz (09:27):

Denise, Antero, do we know, are teachers doing units on cell phone use? Is this being taught explicitly?

Antero Garcia (09:34):

There's a smattering of teachers who use cell phones in curriculum, but not curriculum on cell phones. So it might be a, "Scan this QR code," or, "Go ahead and use your device," if that's a tablet or a laptop or your phone, to look up information or to record or make something. There is that kind of stuff.

(09:51):

But in terms of curriculum, I actually think the closest we get to that is kind of across these is the intersection of media literacy. So you get people thinking about, "How do you validate the quality of information?" That is only one slice of what cell phones do, but it's probably an important slice. Some of our other GSE colleagues have done a lot of work thinking through online reasoning, the role of mis- and disinformation and how we understand that. But again, I think that oftentimes only precludes one form of what kinds of civic and personal responsibilities can come up with these devices.

Dan Schwartz (10:22):

Right. Well, it's also not cell phone specific.

Antero Garcia (10:24):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (10:25):

You know?

Denise Pope (10:25):

Right.

Dan Schwartz (10:26):

The cell phone has special properties.

Denise Pope (10:27):

Although, I have seen, with the help of the kids actually, designing a ... just in a few places, "This is how the phone was developed. This is how the social media was developed." There's a reason why there's a ding or a notification. It's going back to Pavlov's dogs. There is a reason why the color is red of this. There's a reason why they have a continuing ... You don't come to the end. I don't even come to the end of the New York Times anymore. You could just keep reading. We found that when you bring students into that conversation and help them understand how they are being manipulated, how we all are being manipulated by these, it helps them to understand maybe why they're not able to self regulate.

Antero Garcia (11:14):

Yep. Yeah, that meta awareness I think does a lot. Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (11:16):

It's so intellectual. I mean, shouldn't it be in your health classes? It seems like a health thing rather than a cognitive thing.

Antero Garcia (11:23):

But it won't get into your health classes if we ban the devices in every school, right, we miss that opportunity.

Denise Pope (11:28):

Well-

Dan Schwartz (11:29):

No, you get a big fake plastic one at the front and you say-

Denise Pope (11:32):

No, wait. Let me push back a little bit. Just a little bit, Antero. Because you know I'm usually on your side, and I am on your side. But I did do a little bit of research and there are a couple of studies where ... I haven't seen the US ones. Maybe you have. I've seen one in Norway, one in Sweden, one in England, where they have studied schools that have banned, or classrooms ... that have been banned in classrooms or haven't been banned, and the effects were interesting. Sometimes an achievement goes up or grades go up. That's a whole other conversation we can have. Sometimes the mental health goes up. Sometimes the kids are saying, "Don't bring them back." They might be banned except for educational reasons at these schools, and the kids appreciate that. But then there's also kids who are like, "Hey, when it's recess or lunch, that's when I need to get a hold of my boss or my mom or my orthodontist appointment has been changed," or whatever. So they don't like the ... It's all over the map. What do you say to that?

Antero Garcia (12:33):

I think, one-

Dan Schwartz (12:35):

Yeah, what do you say to that?

Denise Pope (12:38):

Help us. Help us, Antero.

Antero Garcia (12:42):

As we're recording this online, am I being cyberbullied? Is this what's happening?

Denise Pope (12:44):

No. I'm saying it like it's all over the place, right? There's full bans. There's partial bans. There's just your teacher bans it when you come in.

Antero Garcia (12:53):

But I think in general, our relationship around this policy is ban or not ban, and there might be a little bit of opacity around what banning it means, can you use it during breaks or not? Again, when I did this work a decade and a half ago with young people in my own English classroom, the ways the young people talked about it is ... We can see this as a kind of cultural shift, but that was oftentimes lunchtime was when they were catching up with their friends. That was the place where they would see each other and make these person to person interactions because they would actually use the social time in hallway breaks when they could sneak a look at their phones and their teachers weren't looking to actually socialize with each other on their devices. That little bit of time during lunchtime is when you're going to put your phones away and actually spend time making meaningful interactions, which I think is a reflection on how young people were valuing their learning experience, particularly in the school that I was teaching at.

(13:45):

To go back to this banning idea, I think you're right that in the short term, maybe mental health goes up and maybe focus goes up because we've taken away the thing that young people actually want to do. But what are the long-term effects of doing that? We have kids who will then leave school, and then down the road, what are the ways where those young people essentially only have one alternative to using cell phones? And that is, "When I'm at work, I need to put it away." I think there's some real class and social class-based assumptions about what that does for the preparation of kids in America.

Dan Schwartz (14:17):

You got to say what those are.

Antero Garcia (14:21):

I think, and maybe briefly, the only place where you have to put away your cell phone when you're at work are places like McDonald's, are working class jobs, are the places where your phones are banned during work hours. As a professional, in a place where I'm empowered to make my own decisions and empowered to work with other people in meaningful ways, my cell phone plays an integral role in what I do. So our schools in planning to ban kids from using cell phones is preparing kids for working class jobs rather than preparing kids for the other ways that we might use technology responsibly.

Dan Schwartz (14:56):

It's an interesting claim. I'm not sure I buy it. I'm in a position where I make a lot of decisions, but I'm in meetings the whole time and I don't take out the cell phone because it would be incredibly rude. So I'm not sure. Of course it's not a hard ban. I could take out the cell phone, but then I wouldn't do very well at the job. The other part that I'm not so sure about is there's a lot of things that kids don't get to do that adults do, like kids don't get to drive. I think that's okay. It doesn't teach them that when they grow up, they're not allowed to drive. There's a time and a place. But it is interesting to think, "Do the rules of school set you up for the rules of life in cell phone use?"

Denise Pope (15:35):

Okay. Dan?

Dan Schwartz (15:35):

Yes.

Denise Pope (15:45):

I am going to put you on the spot right now. I want to know what is your relationship with your phone?

Dan Schwartz (15:54):

I've named it Michael.

Denise Pope (15:57):

You've named your phone?

Dan Schwartz (16:00):

No. I haven't even personalized the voice that talks to me. I use the cell phone for work for the most part.

Denise Pope (16:05):

Do you scroll?

Dan Schwartz (16:07):

No.

Denise Pope (16:08):

Do you have any social media?

Dan Schwartz (16:09):

You have to remember that when people check their cell phones, they're looking because they're going to get something that's interesting, exciting, rewarding. Most of the stuff I get is people that are angry at me. I don't want to open my cell phone and look at it. I don't want it. No, I use it. I have relatives that I call while I'm driving and things like that. And then I have texting, which I'm not a huge fan of just because I have to stop walking to text back.

Denise Pope (16:38):

I don't think anyone should be walking and texting, and yet they do. They do.

Dan Schwartz (16:41):

Yeah, riding bikes and texting is one of my favorite things to observe at ��.

Denise Pope (16:46):

Oh, my God. Scares me.

Dan Schwartz (16:46):

How about you? What's your relationship? Have you named it Fluffy?

Denise Pope (16:50):

I have not named my phone. But I will say this, the iPhone has a thing where you can track usage. It will tell you how many times you've picked it up, literally picked up your phone, and how many hours reading the New York Times or whatever. It is very eye opening. It says I average ... I mean, I'm going to admit this on ... It says I average like six hours a day, which sounds crazy.

Dan Schwartz (17:17):

Six hours a day.

Denise Pope (17:19):

But what you have to understand is a lot of that is emailing for work. Or yesterday, I did a walk and talk meeting. It counts that, right? It counts that I'm on the phone as ... So it's not a fair ... That six hours a day is not a fair thing because a lot of that is work. But then some of that is, yeah, I'm scrolling, I'm looking at pictures.

Dan Schwartz (17:43):

I think we need to put a cell phone lock on your thing. After three hours, you're done.

Denise Pope (17:47):

An intervention? We should ban it.

(17:54):

I want to bring in something that's really interesting, which is in the state of California there's a new law that's going into effect, not saying that schools need to ban cell phones, but mandating that schools have a policy where cell phones may or may not be restricted for either all or part of the day. What do you think of that, Antero?

Antero Garcia (18:13):

I think policies are great. That sounds great. We should have some kind of policy. I think that policy should probably be tied to meaningful practice of the ways we're supporting young people. Again, the reason we're going towards banning is because we don't have another alternative, and because we haven't thought about, "How do we prepare the teaching profession around cell phones?" The people who are training in teacher programs, like the �� Teacher Education Program, are for the most part in their early 20s. They've grown up with cell phones their entire lives, their entire lives as adolescents, as a known fact. So they know the good and bad about cell phones, and are incredibly vexed as soon as they walk into a classroom and all of a sudden, something much more interesting than teaching American history is happening on their cell phones.

(18:56):

As a result, we probably need to have a meaningful look at the ways we're preparing teachers, who are also on their cell phones during the classes I teach them in our �� Teacher Education program. We should probably think meaningfully about the ways we're preparing teachers, and the ways teachers are interacting with kids in schools. Some kind of policy guidance would be helpful. I'm not convinced that a ban is what that policy guidance should be, but I think there's useful guidelines that we could be creating together.

Dan Schwartz (19:23):

I'm going to go teach a class. I've got these undergraduates in there, maybe some graduate students. Give me a tip, Antero.

Antero Garcia (19:31):

Give us some names, Dan. Who are these-

Dan Schwartz (19:34):

No, give me a tip to the bunch of kids. I'm in the middle of the best lecture of my life. I'm feeling it. And then three kids open up their cell phone. What's a tip? Or if I just wanted to do a lesson on it. This is really actually a practical question. I'm a teacher, give me a place to get started given that I didn't get that curriculum because-

Antero Garcia (19:54):

I think there's two forks that we could go ... two paths, two spaces, two roads, not even diverging, but two roads that we could go-

Dan Schwartz (20:01):

One fork.

Antero Garcia (20:02):

Yeah, one fork. One is when we have students, and maybe we're not planning to do curriculum on cell phones that day and you've got the students who start texting in the middle of class, is a good opportunity to say, "As we're talking about this, I'd like for everyone to put your phones away for this period." I think if you said it every day at the beginning of every single class, you're going to lose your effectiveness.

(20:24):

But if you pull out the personal stakes of, "Hey, the thing we're talking about is actually meaningful and important, here's why we're going to talk about it. I need you to put away your phones for this next period," or, "I need you to be using your phone for X reason," to take notes, to ... if you feel comfortable with them recording the conversation, if it's a lecture. Whatever the case may be. That feels like a good way to bring in, to call in young people to work with you with their devices. It also means, though, in order to do that, that you probably need to have a good rationale of why you're teaching the thing you're teaching. If you want to say, "This is really important, it's more important than your phone," you should be able to articulate why. So that maybe is a ...

Denise Pope (20:59):

But wait-

Dan Schwartz (21:00):

You'll need it later in life. That's always the answer.

Denise Pope (21:01):

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Antero Garcia (21:03):

Oh, no.

Denise Pope (21:05):

Teachers around the country are rolling their eyes right now, what we are teaching is important. Now, there's definitely fluff. There's definitely busy work. I think that for those of us who are really trying to engage kids and have innovative, interesting lessons, and aren't going to just lecture, we still have issues with kids pulling out their phones. Teachers around the country are saying, "I'm tired of being the phone police. Like, help me."

Antero Garcia (21:30):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (21:31):

But Antero's suggesting you can use these as educable moments and have a conversation with them about the reasoning. I suspect the response for older kids will be, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. My parents told me that."

Denise Pope (21:43):

No, I think kids ... we need to get kids in the middle of creating policy. I mean, that's what we do at Challenge Success. They will tell you why they're on their phone and why they're not, and, "I just don't see the meaning in what we're learning right now."

Dan Schwartz (21:56):

I can just see the kid running for president of the school on the platform of, "Let's have reasonable cell phone uses, everybody."

Denise Pope (22:06):

Okay, you can laugh, but that would totally get the kid elected. Yes.

Dan Schwartz (22:11):

Really?

Denise Pope (22:12):

Yes. I mean, if you think about ... Instead of just banning, "Where should it be allowed? How can we help people self regulate? How can we teach some cell phone media literacy?" The kids, they're on it. They know. They know. The older ones. I do think, just to wrap things up, though, what would you tell parents of young kids? Your five-year-olds don't have cell phones. Is there an age? From your work, what are you thinking?

Antero Garcia (22:36):

My five-year-olds don't have cell phones, but every day, they get to watch about 30 minutes of TV. They get to pick what it is. But lately, they have not been picking the same thing and it has created all sorts of strife. We have one child who's a big proponent of Peppa Pig and one who's a big proponent of always watching the movie Frozen over and over. The way we've solved this is through giving one of them an iPad with headphones. That is creating peace and calm in our house, for better or worse. I just want to recognize that mobile media devices are playing a role in our parenting, for better or worse, right?

Denise Pope (23:10):

Oh, 100%.

Antero Garcia (23:10):

Screen time is a whole conversation. It's very complicated. We held out as long as we could. And then once the social pressure of their classmates started talking about the shows that they're watching at school, our kids felt left behind because they weren't on the same platforms, knowing the same shows and knowing who their favorite character on Spidey and Friends was. Those are important factors of how young people get accultured into peer social networks.

(23:35):

Part of this is recognizing that the reason this is such a complicated issue is because kids care a lot about the relationships they have with other people, and these devices are playing a role in that. Part of this parenting conversation and part of how we move forward is to think through and value what young people are doing. I think so much of this policing of kids in schools is kids experiencing the tail end of policies and draconian things coming down to them rather than having meaningful inputs throughout the process.

Denise Pope (24:00):

I would agree with you with that. I will say there are certain things, because your prefrontal cortex is not fully formed, that you need some guardrails.

Antero Garcia (24:08):

Me, personally. Is this about me?

Denise Pope (24:09):

Yes, yours, Antero. No, but if you think about a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old, there's a reason why they're only allowed a certain amount of TV and it's not a free-for-all. We tell parents to really think about, "When is appropriate use of the phone? Where does the phone or any kind of device live at night?" We want it to be out of the bedroom because there's very good studies that show that that is affecting kids' mental health. So at dinnertime, during family activities, when you're talking to grandma on Zoom or whatever, you're not going to then also be on your phone. This is just stuff that naturally happens in the family. I think if we modeled some of that same kind of conversations at schools, when is time to use it? When is it helpful? When is it harmful?

Antero Garcia (24:52):

And when, in the words of Elsa from Frozen, do we let it go?

Denise Pope (24:55):

When do we let it go? Yeah, when do we let it go?

Dan Schwartz (24:57):

Nice. Nice.

Denise Pope (25:00):

We're going to have to have a whole other show on this, when Antero's kids turn 12, because-

Dan Schwartz (25:06):

We'll check back in-

Denise Pope (25:07):

... I'm very interested to see. Also, you said in a decade from now, we're going to be talking about this. I hope that we have much better answers. But I like how you have made this, it's not an easy "ban it". It's not an easy, "Anything goes. Let them all use it all the time." Conversations with kids, with parents, with caregivers, with teachers. A lot more needs to be done. We have a lot of work to do, but really good conversation. Thank you, Antero.

Antero Garcia (25:33):

Thank you.

Denise Pope (25:37):

Thank you all for joining us, this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (25:48):

Oh, wait. Sorry, I was texting. I'm Dan Schwartz.

Podcast

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GSE area

Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Antero Garcia

�� initiative reveals racial, gender, other disparities in Brazilian schools

Carrie Spector — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:36:40 +0000

�� initiative reveals racial, gender, other disparities in Brazilian schools

Carrie Spector Tue, 10/29/2024 - 10:36

�� researchers are adapting digital reading and math assessments for use in Brazil, to provide teachers with more timely feedback on learning differences. The research is part of an initiative to identify inequities in Brazilian K-12 schools. (Photo: Diego Lima)

Data Science | Education Policy | International Education

A team led by �� education professor Guilherme Lichand surveys students and educators in Brazil, identifying inequities in the school system.

October 31, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Earlier this year, when the Brazilian government reported its official data on the number of K-12 students nationwide with disabilities or learning disorders, �� education scholar Guilherme Lichand thought the figure seemed off.

According to data from Brazil’s annual school census, less than 4 percent of K-12 students have some type of physical or learning disability. But Lichand expected the actual number would be much higher, given U.S. rates and the international average.

Lichand, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) who is originally from Brazil, runs an initiative called Equidade.info (Portuguese for equity), which collects data on K-12 schools in Brazil through interviews with students, teachers, and administrators across the country.

Spurred by the dubious census figures, the team recently investigated the prevalence of physical and learning disabilities in the country's K-12 schools – arriving at a rate of at least 12.8 percent, more than three times the official statistic.

“There are differences in socioeconomic backgrounds that make it less likely for some kids to get a medical diagnosis,” said Lichand, who also co-directs the �� Lemann Center, a center housed at the GSE that supports Brazilian scholars at �� and initiatives to improve the Brazilian educational system. “But the government data is what determines how school resources are allocated. If you’re a policymaker making decisions based on incomplete data, kids are not necessarily going to get the support they need.”

Equidade.info, a project of the �� Lemann Center, analyzes data from a representative sample of schools throughout Brazil on a variety of issues, from chronic absenteeism and reading proficiency to racial relations and students’ sense of belonging.

GSE Assistant Professor Guilherme Lichand

Some of the initiative’s findings so far:

About a quarter of K-12 students report being a victim of bullying during the previous 12 months. Females report higher rates than their male peers, and non-white students report higher rates than white respondents.
Students’ sense of feeling welcome at school decreases as they progress from elementary to high school, with Black students reporting lower rates overall than their white classmates.
The prevalence of child labor among the student population is eight times what official statistics indicate.
Internet speed in schools is much lower than official data indicates, with a significant disparity between public and private schools.
More than half of teachers report witnessing cases of racial discrimination in schools – data cited in a recent push by Brazilian legislators urging the Ministry of Education to address racism in the country’s educational system.

In the country’s annual school census, information on many key markers of inequality is absent or incomplete, said Lichand, who is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Center on Early Childhood and the �� King Center on Global Development, and a fellow at �� Impact Labs and the �� Institute for Advancing Just Societies.

“Without precise information about differences along dimensions like race, gender, and disability status, education policies often magnify inequalities instead of alleviating them,” he said. “We need better data to design more equitable policies. So we established a different system for collecting it.”

Marta Vitória, an enumerator for the state of Sergipe, conducts a survey with a student for Equidade.info.

What the school census doesn’t capture

In Brazil, most of the Ministry of Education’s information on the state of K-12 schools comes from the annual school census, which solicits information on all 49 million students at 160,000 schools nationwide. Census responses are supplied by school staff, ideally but not necessarily drawn from information provided by students and their families.

“The only way you can get that much student-level data is to sacrifice quality in the way that you collect the data,” said Lichand. “One can only hope that what the schools are providing about these 49 million students is accurate.”

Given the lack of oversight for the process, Lichand questions the reliability of the data, especially where factors like race and disability status are concerned. These are complicated constructs by any measure, he said, particularly if the designation isn’t self-reported but determined by a school official or other figure.

With race, for example, Lichand said Equidade.info has found a discrepancy for 30 percent of students between what they report their race to be and what the school reports. Schools also have the option of not reporting students’ race in the first place, an option that’s prevalent in the data, Lichand noted.

“Until 2014, there was no information on race for half of the students in the country,” he said. “More recently, the government has made efforts to have schools provide this information, but still at least a quarter of students are missing race data.”

Lichand’s data collection model for Equidade.info goes deeper than the school census with in-person surveys of a representative sample of more than 200 schools from all of Brazil’s 27 states. The sample reflects key characteristics of the school population nationwide – urban and rural schools, public and private, technical and academic – serving students of all backgrounds, including indigenous populations. The researchers use statistical methods to ensure the results mirror the universe of K-12 students, teachers, and schools.

College undergraduates in each state are recruited and trained to serve as enumerators, visiting local K-12 schools every two months to conduct tablet-based surveys or run tests.

“Our enumerators can collect data that the school census doesn’t capture,” Lichand said. “They can ask students to self-identify their race. They can have students do tasks that indicate certain abilities, like reading fluency and comprehension. They can measure the school’s internet speed objectively, by connecting to the wifi network and running a speed test app.”

Because the enumerators visit the schools every two months, the surveys can include questions related to issues of the moment, like a mass school shooting or the wildfires currently raging in Brazil. “We can ask principals how many days of school they’ve lost to climate events, what kind of adaptation measures they have in place,” said Lichand. “We can be really responsive to what’s going on, and generate timely data that’s useful for policy and the public debate.”

The initiative’s website provides dashboards to visualize key insights from the data, particularly around gender, racial, and regional disparities, and all of the information is shared with the Ministry of Education.

Timely feedback on learning differences

Lichand is also working with other GSE researchers to adapt new U.S. digital reading and math assessments for use in Brazil, not only to support research but also to provide teachers with timely, personalized feedback on learning differences so they can more quickly support students who fall behind.

A Nov. 8 conference at the GSE will explore the potential of using the two ��-developed technologies in Brazil: the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), led by Associate Professor Jason Yeatman, and the �� Mental Arithmetic Response Time Evaluation (SMARTE), led by Professor Bruce McCandliss.

Lichand, an educational economist and entrepreneur, hopes to replicate the model he created for Brazil with Equidade.info for other low- and middle-income countries in the Global South, especially in Latin America and Africa.

“We know that high-quality data is in demand,” said Lichand, who is frequently featured in Brazilian media discussing Equidade.info’s findings. “As researchers, the nature of our work is to put knowledge out there and hope that it makes its way to change policy. Now we are starting to work closely with officials to be sure we can meet their specific data needs, creating pathways to support equitable policies.”

Júllia Kessia (in forefront), an enumerator for the state of Alagoas, poses for a photo with a group of young students she surveyed for Equidade.info.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Guilherme Lichand

�� GSE’s POLS program celebrates 20 years of producing leaders in education

Olivia Peterkin — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 20:13:19 +0000

�� GSE’s POLS program celebrates 20 years of producing leaders in education

Olivia Peterkin Tue, 10/29/2024 - 13:13

Alumni | Education Policy | Impact

The Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies program was started in 2004 to fill a need for leaders in collaboration.

October 29, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

When former �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Dean Deborah Stipek worked with faculty to create a new master’s program back in 2004, the goal was to fill gaps in the training needed for emerging roles in education.

“In the olden days, if you wanted to be in education as a practitioner, you were either a teacher, a principal, or a district leader,” said Stipek, who is also the Judy Koch Professor of Education, emerita. “When we looked at the terrain of education at the time, the master’s-level positions were now very varied and diverse.

“You had all kinds of layers in the field of education that hadn’t been there before, at least not in large numbers,” she said. “Suddenly you had school reform organizations, state governments, charter schools, and other programs all looking for leaders with strong educational backgrounds.”

Their answer to supplying this growing demand? The GSE’s Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies (POLS) program, which started as a way to produce leaders who could collaborate across sectors for the betterment of education.

First led by founding faculty director and professor emeritus Debra Meyerson, along with associate professor emeritus Steve Davis, the program has gone on to produce more than 500 professionals working at the intersection of educational policy, organization, and leadership.

“We founded POLS because we thought it was important for there to be explicit programming for students at the GSE to focus not just on individual and organizational leadership, but also the policy efforts required to influence systemic change,” said Meyerson, who is now the co-founder and co-chair of Stroke Onward, a nonprofit that provides resources for stroke survivors and their families.

Ann Jaquith, POLS’ current director and a senior lecturer at the GSE. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

The program has evolved over the years to include a project that gives students the opportunity to specialize in an interest, and create a community of graduates that network and support one another.

“I see the POLS program as one that’s about teaching students how to lead change in education and become the sorts of leaders the education field needs now,” said Ann Jaquith, POLS’ current director and a senior lecturer at the GSE.

“What’s really powerful about that is that everyone in the program shares this strong passion and commitment to do better for some group of people in the education field.”

This year POLS celebrates 20 years by looking back at the accomplishments of past graduates, and modernizing its vision to equip leaders of the future.

Creating systemic change

When Jodi Anderson, Jr., BA ‘21, MA ‘22, enrolled in the POLS program he was trying to figure out how to effect change that would impact entire organizations and institutions, like the United States education system.

“There’s a lot of discourse around the problems that affect the educational system, and you need that critique, but until you have a more nuanced understanding of how those systems interact with each other — from finance, to how school systems are set up, to how governments interact with those systems, who the key decision makers are — you can’t identify points of entry,” said Anderson, who is the co-founder of Rézme, an edtech platform that supports economic and social mobility for socio-economically disadvantaged citizens.

“POLS puts you into direct contact with the people who can pull levers,” Anderson said. “And our cohort consisted of people who were actual operators, people who had been in the school system.”

Anderson found that the program’s combination of knowledge, theory, and practical skills aided his cohort in discovering their best approaches to being changemakers.

“POLS students are very much about systemic change and are individuals driven to learn how systems work,” said Nereyda Salinas, who was POLS’ first staff program director, and is currently assistant dean for professional development at the GSE.

“It’s a really unique program because students take these history courses from a practical perspective to understand and appreciate the past, and avoid repeating the same mistakes, while being hopeful for the future,” she said.

Jodi Anderson, BA '21, MA '22, is the co-founder of Rézme, an edtech platform that supports economic and social mobility for socio-economically disadvantaged citizens. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

A spirit of entrepreneurship and problem solving

In addition to the shared purpose of creating positive systemic change, the “L” in POLS often attracts students looking to start new businesses.

For Sean Mendy, MA ‘10, joining POLS meant finding a way to lead in a way that creates educational opportunities for under-resourced students.

“I grew up here in Silicon Valley and saw the amazing things that were happening, and also saw there were a lot of people who weren’t accessing the things that made this place special,” said Mendy, who is the founding partner of Westbound Equity Partners, an investment platform that invests in companies serving underrepresented consumers. “Some of the more talented people I knew floundered because they missed out on certain supports, and I became obsessed with addressing that.”

His firm, which he co-founded in 2019 with three other partners, including two �� Graduate School of Business alumni, commits 50% of net proceeds to causes that support opportunity gaps for underrepresented U.S. talent.

“I went to POLS thinking reform was the only path to addressing social issues, but learned about the role of nonprofits in this work and I zeroed in on addressing the racial wealth gap through venture capital,” Mendy said.

“I think what was special about POLS was the variety of people who want to effect change in education in different ways, whether that be through policymaking, school leadership, finance, or starting a business.”

The multidisciplinary program is focused through the POLS project, a requirement that allows students to work with organizations and nonprofits to address a specific issue in education that connects with what they plan to do after graduation.

“We consider difficult, multi-faceted problems that lack a single, simple answer,” said Jaquith, who’s led the program since 2021. “Using conceptual lenses from multiple disciplines, POLS graduates understand complicated educational challenges more completely and ask important questions.”

Former GSE Dean Deborah Stipek says POLS students have created a "pretty deep and broad network of people in various fields.”

A global network of leaders

Graduates of the program have gone on to fill an array of roles, including those in consulting, business, finance, higher education, government, and policy, among others.

“The POLS graduates take care of each other, because there’s a strong sense of affiliation with the program,” Stipek said. “So many POLS graduates have been hired by previous graduates because they’ve created this pretty deep and broad network of people in various fields.”

Each year POLS students develop strong relationships within their cohort and connections to educational leaders and alumni, a tradition Jaquith plans to develop moving forward.

“Every year I meet some POLS graduates who are cooler than the years before,” Mendy said. “It’s great to know there are people who care about education, but are committed to being leaders across industries and approaching the issue from many different angles.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Debra Meyerson , Deborah Stipek , Ann Jaquith

Finding education on the ballot

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:40:36 +0000

Finding education on the ballot

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 10/25/2024 - 15:40

Two students hold up "Vote for Education" stickers at an Oct. 8 teach-in hosted by Undergraduate Programs at the GSE (UP@GSE). (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Campus Life | Civics and History | Education Policy

�� GSE senior lecturer Jennifer Wolf discusses ways to help empower students to use their vote to advocate for their beliefs.

October 28, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

For many college undergraduates, this presidential election marks the first time they’re eligible to vote. But there are many barriers to entry, said Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and director of undergraduate programs at the GSE (UP@GSE).

“Oftentimes students are away from home and from all the different resources that they might typically draw on,” she said. “On top of that, they’re encapsulated inside of a fast-moving, high-demand university setting where they have to think about studying for finals,” let alone dealing with a thick ballot and deciding how to vote.

On Oct. 8 Wolf hosted a teach-in at �� to help prepare students for the upcoming election, with nonpartisan information on voting and a particular focus on finding ways to advocate for education through the ballot.

“Voting is not easy,” said Wolf, who hosts a teach-in for education every presidential election year. “I tell my students that voting is like studying for finals, only more important. You don’t just go in there and decide willy nilly — you have to study,” Wolf said.

Here, Wolf discusses the importance of civic education, offers tips for teachers, and suggests how voters can look for education on the ballot.

Jennifer Wolf is a senior lecturer at the GSE and director of undergraduate programs at the GSE. (Photo: Sofiia Kukhar)

What is a teach-in, and why do you host one on voting for education?

A teach-in is a brief, designed, exchange of information on a critically important current issue in the education democracy. UP@GSE hosts a variety of teach-ins — we’ve also conducted them on book banning, curricular freedom, and rampage school shootings, to name a few.

We exchange information freely on these topics, not related to a grade or credit, because we veer into political territory where people are welcome to bring different opinions.

My hope is that people come to the teach-in already solid in their own beliefs about education and what’s important to them. How they feel about school choice, teacher salaries and unionization, freedom of speech across the school sphere — those are their beliefs to form themselves.

Our job with the teach-in is to identify how to vote for those beliefs on a ballot, because it’s not super clear. And especially with education, you raise your voting power as you go lower down on the ballot.

What are some misconceptions people might have when it comes to “voting for education?”

There’s a long distance between who we vote for president and how that’s going to affect our local school district. If I want to have power over the local school district, I need to vote for my school board members and my state legislators.

Sometimes an issue of education makes it onto the votable state ballot, but more often a bill is put forward in the state legislature that you as the citizenry writ large aren’t going to vote on. The state assemblyperson and senator that you vote for are going to vote on that.

On a ballot you will see bonds for schools, but that’s almost always a funding thing. Bonds, because they’re collected through tax dollars, have to be brought forward by voters.

Almost everything else with regard to education goes through the state legislature, because in the United States, each state, protectorate, and tribal nation is responsible for its own education governance. For example, Massachusetts set up public education in 1852, but it wasn’t until 1917 that Mississippi did the same. We need to pay attention to our state legislatures with regard to education because each state has its own take.

How can we help students make informed voting decisions?

One of the things we do at the teach-in is to give people questions to ask their local legislators when it comes to their stances on issues. We also connect them with nonpartisan voting resources like Ballotpedia, where voters can enter the zip code where they’re registered to vote and see their ballot, as well as a summary of every candidate, initiative, and bond in three sentences.

There’s also �� Votes, Secretaries of State Voter Guides, State Policy Network, and the National Center for Education Statistics, among many others. We’re not doing this work alone. I also encourage students to look into recommendations from news outlets and organizations they trust to see why they support a particular candidate.

At the teach-in I share a matrix I use that lists all of the candidates and initiatives I’m interested in, what the recommendations are, and the stances of candidates on both sides.

We also cover education bills in play, by state, public K-12 spending per student, and some people, places, and races they may want to watch.

Some might find that level of research daunting. How can we make it less overwhelming?

I tell people to do it communally, to find other people you care about and do it together. Every year I sit with my mom and my daughter and we do it together. We have some issues where we have different beliefs, but we say this is the night when we’re going to do this, and we get out the drinks and the hors d’oeuvres.

Voting is a tool for your citizenship at the federal, state, and local realms, and each of these contributes to democracy.

What tips do you have for teachers who want to teach students about voting in a nonpartisan way?

For me, the primary thing I’ve done is lead teach-ins and take the civics education outside of the classroom. I never want a student to feel they need to meet, mimic, reflect, or agree with my political ideas in order to earn a grade.

Students need to feel free to come into a classroom and learn with their own belief system in place. I mean, we’re going to challenge it, and we’re going to talk about it, but I don’t ever want students to think they need to agree with me.

By putting this in a teach-in setting, we remove that. It’s completely voluntary and it’s not transactional in any way. You come to the teach-in and you get knowledge, a sticker, cookies, and an apple. There’s nothing else to be gained.

For me that’s one thing that’s really important in teaching civics education. We just want to empower students to vote, not in a specific way or for a specific person.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jennifer Wolf

Educational inequality: Post-pandemic patterns and trends

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:58:48 +0000

Educational inequality: Post-pandemic patterns and trends Olivia Peterkin Wed, 08/28/2024 - 11:58

Education Policy | K-12 | Poverty and Inequality

Sean Reardon talks about educational inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic, and what’s needed to chart a path forward.

August 29, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

Pandemic-related learning loss has been a hot-button issue for educators, parents, and students as researchers work to navigate its consequences. Part of the recovery process means identifying how far-reaching the effects of learning loss are, what can be done about it, and who was hardest hit.

“Declines in test scores were more than twice as big in the poorest communities in the country than they were in the most affluent,” said Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE).

“And so that means that kids in those communities are much, much further behind.”

On this episode of School’s In, Reardon joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope as they discuss educational inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic and what’s needed to chart a path forward.

Reardon’s research sheds light on key issues including the impact of poverty and inequality on educational opportunities and how parents can work with teachers to advocate for their children.

“I think we owe some gratitude to teachers and principals who I think really have helped students out a lot post-pandemic, and we've made real progress,” Reardon said.

To keep up with our research, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads.

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Sean Reardon (00:00):

Declines in test scores were more than twice as big in the poorest communities in the country than they were in the most affluent. And so that means that kids in those communities are much, much further behind. They already were further behind, and now they're even more behind. So there's sort of a widening inequality as a result of the pandemic, not just an overall decline.

Dan Schwartz (00:23):

Today we're discussing the impact of poverty and inequality on educational opportunities, specifically focusing on learning loss during the pandemic and the gains, or not, that we've made since.

Denise Pope (00:34):

It's kind of crazy that we are still talking about the impacts of the pandemic. And that's the main reason why we're tackling it in several episodes. The data is coming in and it's sobering. The pandemic impacted all learners no matter the income level, and the recovery has been uneven at best. It's more important than ever to address these gaps and find ways to support all learners. So let's dive in.

(00:59):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting edge insights in learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners.

(01:08):

I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at �� GSE and co-founder of Challenge Success. And I am here with my wonderful co-host, Dan Schwartz, dean of the �� Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Dan Schwartz (01:30):

Hi, Denise. It's good to see you again. One of our big questions today is, what happened with learning loss since COVID?

(01:36):

Now, when we talk about learning loss, we're not talking about forgetting some things over the summer; what's typically called "summer melt." What we're talking about is students not having a chance to learn, and that's what happened in COVID.

(01:49):

We're incredibly fortunate to have a leading scholar on this topic join us today. It is Professor Sean Reardon. He's a professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at ��. He looks at causes, patterns, trends, consequences of educational inequality across the nation. He has a very unique database that basically has the standardized tests of every child,, and so he's been the go-to researcher on pandemic recovery.

(02:16):

So Sean, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Denise Pope (02:19):

Sean, we would love to start by having you walk us through exactly how we measure learning loss in the first place and recovery.

Sean Reardon (02:27):

Yeah. First what we do is we look at ... For example, we look at eighth graders in 2019 before the pandemic, and we see across the country and in every school district in the country, "What was their average scores in math and reading?" And then we're able to look again at eighth graders three years later, after the pandemic, spring of 2022, and see what their average scores are in math and reading. And then we can compare where the eighth graders were in 2022; those kids were in fifth, sixth, seventh grade through the pandemic and so didn't have the opportunity often to learn all the material that one would typically learn; and we compare them to what the eighth graders three years before knew who went through fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade under normal conditions.

(03:15):

And what we find and what all the national data shows is that in 2022, students were about a half grade further behind in math and about a third of a grade further behind in reading than where their counterparts were in 2022. What that means is that over those three years of the pandemic period, kids missed out on a half year of instruction of math essentially. They just didn't get the opportunity to learn as much math as they would've without the pandemic.

Dan Schwartz (03:46):

So Denise, would that have been your prediction? That of all the disciplines that we measure, math would take the biggest hit?

Denise Pope (03:53):

I think that would have been. A half year is a lot. That's bigger than I would've guessed. A half year ... I mean, that's a half a year, right? That's a lot. I was thinking a couple months maybe, but six months?

(04:07):

Well, how do you measure a year? Is it six months? Because it's a nine-month school year.

Sean Reardon (04:12):

It's half of a nine-month school year. So think of it as four and a half months. It was really a little more than a half, so call it five months.

Denise Pope (04:19):

Okay. That's a lot. That's higher than I thought.

(04:20):

But yeah, I would've thought math because that's what empties out of my brain the quickest, so ...

Dan Schwartz (04:26):

No, no, that's not the reason.

(04:29):

Sean, do you have a good theory for why math?

Sean Reardon (04:32):

Yeah, I mean, I think the reason is likely that during the pandemic when kids weren't getting as much instruction in school, either they weren't in school or they couldn't concentrate as much, or there's a lot obviously else going on in the world, that at home kids are more likely to read, or if they're young kids, their parents might read to them, but it's much less common for kids to sort of sit down and do some algebra in their spare time at home or have their parents sit down and work through multiplication tables with them at home.

(05:04):

And so most math learning typically happens in school as a result of what happens in math classrooms, but kids learn to read both at school and at home. And so I think that's why we saw a little bit less of a hit in reading than in math, because the missing out on school hurts math more.

Dan Schwartz (05:23):

I have to describe this study, because it's sort of outrageous.

(05:28):

So there was someone who took five-year olds, English speaking five-year olds, and they had them memorize a passage in Greek from Homer.

Denise Pope (05:36):

Oh my ... These poor babies.

Dan Schwartz (05:38):

Yeah, they just memorized the Greek. You know, just meaningless symbols.

Denise Pope (05:42):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (05:42):

And 10 years later, he came back and he had two conditions, and in both of them, he tried to teach the same poem in Greek. In one condition was these kids who had learned it when they were five and probably had no memory that they ever learned it. The other condition were kids who had never been exposed to it. So the ones who had been exposed and memorized it when they were five learned it like five times faster than the ones who had never been exposed.

(06:09):

What does this have to do with learning loss? You never really lose it. It's just sort of there waiting for you to come back and get it.

Denise Pope (06:15):

So that gives me a little bit of hope. Right?

(06:18):

But I will tell you, there are some things that I still remember from high school that I have no need for whatsoever. I mean, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote," right? Like Chaucer, the first lines of Chaucer. What is that doing in my head? I have all the kings and queens of England memorized in order. Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve, Harry, Dick, John, Harry 3, 1, 2, 3 Ned, Richard 2, Henry 4, 5, 6, then who. Why is that in my brain?

Dan Schwartz (06:43):

I don't know.

Denise Pope (06:43):

It's like that guy with the Greek. They put that in there and I can't get it out now.

Dan Schwartz (06:47):

I don't know, but just hearing you do that, I like you more. That's why.

Denise Pope (06:56):

And obviously there are other subjects that you learn in school, but you only have data for math and reading. Is that right?

Sean Reardon (07:03):

That's right. For the last 20 years, we have tested in this country every third through eighth grader every year in math and reading. So yeah, we have data going back to 2009. So we have about 500 million test scores from every kid in the country over that time period. That tells us a lot about math and reading. But we don't test how well kids are doing in the arts or in history or things like that, and so we don't know as much about what the pandemic did to kids' other sets of skills.

Denise Pope (07:37):

And we may never know.

(07:38):

Part of that is what you assess is what you care about too. So that also says something about sort of the lower level status of some of these subjects that don't get assessed.

(07:49):

Dan, you don't think that's lower level ... I'm not saying they do have lower level status.

Dan Schwartz (07:53):

They're so special that we don't bother to measure them.

Denise Pope (07:56):

Okay, you could look at it that way too, but we still won't know what got lost.

Dan Schwartz (08:00):

Okay, Sean, so your database tells me something about the regions the tests are coming from, the social status, the economic status.

Sean Reardon (08:09):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (08:10):

Before we talk about the bounce back, like how people are coming back, did the hit to math and English, was it even?

Sean Reardon (08:18):

No, that's maybe the biggest concern. I mean, obviously the kids didn't learn as much is a concern, but that fell disproportionately on kids in the lowest income communities in the country. And so the declines in test scores were more than twice as big in the poorest communities in the country than they were in the most affluent. And so that means that kids in those communities are much, much further behind. They already were further behind, and now they're even more behind. So there's sort of a widening inequality as a result of the pandemic, not just an overall decline. That's particularly concerning.

Dan Schwartz (08:54):

Sometimes people bash schools, but when I hear that, I realize how important school is as a lever of equity, and when it gets disrupted, the inequities really ... They get bigger, more rampant. Is that a fair conclusion on this, or ...

Sean Reardon (09:11):

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. We often hear that schools are unequal, that schools in poor communities don't have the same resources or don't have the ability to attract skilled or experienced teachers, they don't have as good facilities, and so schools are worse in poorer communities and better in affluent communities. And so people say, "Oh, the schooling system's really unequal." Which there's some truth to that, but schools aren't nearly as unequal as families. The difference in growing up in a poor family and in a rich family is an orders of magnitude of income difference. And the differences between schools in rich and poor communities aren't nearly that big.

(09:47):

So while schools might be somewhat unequal, they're much more equal than family environments are in terms of the kinds of resources available. So schools tend to act like an equalizing force in society even though they're not completely equal. Sort of an interesting paradox.

Denise Pope (10:05):

Sean, what did you find out when you looked post 2022, I guess that's what it was, at how kids were doing now?

Sean Reardon (10:13):

What we found was actually pretty surprising, I think, and better news than I would've expected or many would've expected. What we found was that even though there had been a half grade of lost learning in math, kids recovered a third of that loss in just one year; which might not sound like a lot, but what it means is that the average student learned about 15 to 20% more in the '22 to '23 school year than a typical student learned before the pandemic. If we could increase national productivity or GDP by 20% in a year, we'd be bouncing off the walls, right? So a 20% increase in how much kids learn in one year is big.

(10:55):

It's also really big in historical terms. If you look back over the last 30 years at the rates at which scores have improved nationally, and they have improved nationally a lot over the last 30 years, the rate at which they improved in this last year was as big or bigger than in any time in the last 30 years.

(11:14):

So the good news is, while there was a big decline, the first year after the pandemic shows real signs of a strong recovery. We're not all the way back, but we made really good progress, and I think a surprising amount.

Dan Schwartz (11:28):

Is that because people are just pedaling faster, or ...

Denise Pope (11:33):

You mean teachers are working harder?

Dan Schwartz (11:35):

And students.

Denise Pope (11:36):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (11:37):

Do we have some explanation for how this happened?

Sean Reardon (11:40):

So I think what likely accounts for it is that school systems and teachers really focused on helping kids catch up with some of the material they lost. And not just in their regular math class, but a lot of school districts invested in extra tutoring programs for kids, after school academic programs for kids, extended summer school programs. So a lot of extra resources went in to try to help kids recover.

(12:09):

Some of that was funded by funds from the federal government that were intended to help school districts recover. But in fact, the recovery was much larger than you would've guessed just based on the amount of money that the federal government put in. I think we owe some gratitude to teachers and principals who I think really have helped students out a lot post-pandemic, and we've made real progress.

Denise Pope (12:31):

No, agreed. Shout out to all the educators and teachers out there who are working their butts off. Oh my gosh. It is so great to hear that all those efforts have really affected the students so positively. Yay.

(12:44):

Okay, now I'm curious, because we've discussed learning loss in the under-resourced schools; please tell us, what about the recovery?

Sean Reardon (12:52):

Recovery hasn't been unequal. That is kids in poor districts and rich districts have recovered about as much as each other. But that's not enough to undo the inequality that was exacerbated by the pandemic. So kids in low-income districts fell behind further during the pandemic, and then everyone recovered about the same amount during the pandemic. So the kids in the low-income districts are still further behind.

(13:18):

In lots of affluent districts, test scores are back up equal to or above where they were before the pandemic. So there's been near complete recovery in the richest places, but because the poor places saw such a large decline, the recovery hasn't yet been enough to kind of get them back up to where they were before the pandemic.

Dan Schwartz (13:39):

My biggest concern on COVID was actually for the youngest kids, that this is an important window for social emotional development, for developing a taste for what schools have to offer. Are they sort of starting to show up in your database? I heard you started with third grade, but are they beginning to show up and can you get a fix on it?

Sean Reardon (14:01):

So far, we haven't seen much difference across grades and how big the lost learning was, and not much difference in the size of the recovery. But those third graders were kids who were sort of coming into kindergarten or just in kindergarten at the beginning of the pandemic. The other group of kids that I worry about are the kids even younger than that who were sort of in early childhood, in preschool during the pandemic. And we don't know a whole lot about what's happened to those kids. My team and I are starting some research, we're collecting data that's going to help us to answer what happened to those very young kids during the pandemic, but we'll have to come back and talk about that another time.

Dan Schwartz (14:40):

They're going to start showing up in your database next year, is that right?

Sean Reardon (14:44):

They're starting to come into third grade, and so we'll be able to see more of them over the next few years.

Dan Schwartz (14:50):

Do you have a prediction, Denise?

Denise Pope (14:51):

Well, I was just going to say, are you worried? Because we know there's certain windows where ... Even language learning, for instance, there's a certain window where it gets much harder as you get older to start something new. Is that why you both are holding this tight with the young kids and worried?

Sean Reardon (15:06):

I'm worried about it for a couple reasons. One is, yeah, there's sort of critical periods in early childhood, and early elementary school are key periods, but also, places that were not in-person schooling for a while, that's particularly hard for a first grader. First grade Zoom school is not super effective, both at socialization into how to be in school and also just in terms of learning. You can't do all the stuff and you can't have the one-on-one attention from the teacher. So I think it's likely that remote learning was more harmful to the very young kids than it was to the older kids who could adapt more easily to the Zoom modality.

Denise Pope (15:49):

So I'm a parent, I'm listening to this. I want to do something to help, right? This is making me very sad. What can an average person do in terms of helping, advocating? What can we do?

Sean Reardon (16:02):

I think one of the things, we looked at survey data, and we found that a lot of parents during and right after the pandemic period didn't really have a sense of how far behind their kids were. Most parents sort of said, "I think my kid's doing fine." And the reason why they say that is because imagine that you have an eighth grader in 2022; well, you don't really know what an eighth grader in 2019 knew in terms of math unless you happen to have a child three years older, right? So it's very hard for a parent to sort of know from their one child, "What does a typical eighth grader know and can do in terms of math or other subjects?" So it's very hard for a parent to assess whether their kid's on track or behind where they should be.

(16:46):

The school district is in a better position, and teachers and the data the district has is in a better position to sort of help parents do that. But I don't think there was a lot of communication always of that. And so I think one of the things parents can do is really talk to the teachers and the principals to sort of understand where is their child at and where are kids at in their community? And then think about, what resources can they bring? How can they advocate for their child? How can they advocate for another child to make sure that the kids who are behind are really getting the resources they need?

Denise Pope (17:18):

I know there's also ... You talked about the federal funding, right? ESSR, other funds like that. And I know that they're ending right now. But it sounds like even though you said it wasn't all about money, some of it was about money. So is there a way that an individual can rally their congressperson, or ... I don't know. How can we get this money back?

Sean Reardon (17:40):

Yeah. The federal government provided school districts with 190 billion dollars starting early in the pandemic, and it'll end this year. That sounds like a lot of money, but that actually is only about less than one third of the annual budget we spend on education. So spread out over four years or so, it's not a ton of money per child. And that money has mostly been spent, and the rest of it needs to be spent in the next six to nine months, and we're not going to be fully recovered in lots of these districts, particularly the low income districts, by then.

(18:15):

So I think it's important for states to step in and fill the void a little bit, carry the baton, and figure out how to provide extra targeted resources to those kids and those schools and districts that still have a long way to catch up. And parents can really help advocate for that because they can talk to their state congressperson, they can talk to their superintendent, and they can help keep the pressure on to make sure that people are paying attention to those kids who need it the most.

Dan Schwartz (18:42):

So Sean, there's probably a lot of people who want to know which state's approach to shutting schools work the best; at least for educational outcomes, maybe not for mortality rates. So do you know this?

Sean Reardon (18:57):

Well, we have data actually for every school and school district in the country. And what we generally find, and other research has shown, is that the longer a school district was in a remote or hybrid instruction mode, the further behind kids fell.

(19:13):

But really, remote schooling only explains a small part of the learning losses. I mean, you have to remember, the pandemic was an all encompassing global event. It wasn't just that kids were suddenly learning on Zoom. They were also not able to see their friends, not able to participate in extracurriculars.

Denise Pope (19:32):

Yes, exactly. These kids' lives really were disrupted in every way possible during the pandemic, and it's all playing a part in where we are today.

(19:42):

Thank you so much, Sean, for being here. We learned so much. Thank you, thank you. We learned so much about learning loss, and we're really glad to hear about the recovery underway.

Dan Schwartz (19:52):

Yes. Thank you, Sean. Your research makes it clear that the most vulnerable students are also the ones who suffered the most during this time. It's a stark reminder of how crucial it is to address inequality and educational opportunity.

Denise Pope (20:07):

Agreed, Dan. Agreed. But all hope isn't lost here. And I think there is a lot we as educators and as parents can do to help. For parents, get involved as much as you can; connect with teachers to see how your kid is doing, offer resources if you have that ability, and ultimately just continue to advocate for your child.

Dan Schwartz (20:26):

And for educators, keep showing up for the kids like you have been. I know this is a lot of extra work, it's hard work, but it makes a difference. So connect with parents, keep them informed as much as we can, have patience, and help these kids climb back.

Denise Pope (20:42):

100%, Dan. I could not agree more.

(20:44):

Thank you again to our guest, Sean Reardon for this really enlightening conversation. And thank all of you for joining us on this episode of School's In. Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in.

(20:58):

I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (20:59):

I'm Dan Schwartz.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope , sean reardon

Post-pandemic learning: Where are the kids?

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:45:30 +0000

Post-pandemic learning: Where are the kids? Olivia Peterkin Wed, 08/28/2024 - 11:45

Education Policy | Faculty and Programs | K-12

Tom Dee discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected student learning and school attendance and how schools can help them recover.

August 15, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

Researchers are still studying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote schooling on student learning. Learning loss, the effects of the disruption on the youngest learners (PK–2), and the sustained increase in chronic absenteeism among K–12 students all pose serious challenges to schools going forward.

On this episode of School’s In, Tom Dee, the Barnett Family Professor of Education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) joins hosts Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope as they discuss what research tells us about these challenges.

“Basically an additional six and a half million kids in K-12 public schools are now chronically absent” compared to before the pandemic, says Dee, who defines chronic absenteeism as a student missing 10% or more of school days for any reason.

Despite the high rates of students still out of school, Dee says all hope is not lost.

His research sheds light on key issues including low-cost, scalable strategies to improve school attendance, and the importance of using targeted, evidence-based strategies and teaching methods to improve student achievement in subjects like reading.

To keep up with our research, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads.

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Tom Dee (00:00):

Basically an additional six and a half million kids in K-12 public schools are now chronically absent.

Dan Schwartz (00:08):

Today we're tackling one of the most significant challenges post-pandemic, learning loss and chronic absenteeism. Our guest is Tom Dee. He's a professor at the Graduate School of Education and he's an expert in education policy and economics. He's also been deeply involved in researching the impact of Covid-19 on students' academic performance and their attendance.

Denise Pope (00:29):

Welcome to School's In, [00:00:30] your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at �� GSE and co-founder of Challenge Success, and I'm with my co-host, Dan Schwartz, Dean of �� Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Dan Schwartz (01:00):

[00:01:00] Denise, so good to see you. I hope you're doing well. It's good to be here and I'm looking forward to our show today, as always.

Denise Pope (01:08):

Me too, Dan. I'm so excited. It's going to be a really good one. If you were long-time listeners, we are so glad to have you back. We are so appreciative. And if you're new, we're glad you found us.

Dan Schwartz (01:21):

Denise, it is so good to hear the dulcet tones of your voice yet again.

Denise Pope (01:25):

Oh, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (01:26):

I'm so glad we're back together.

Denise Pope (01:27):

It's very exciting.

(01:29):

Tom has [00:01:30] been spending a lot of time looking into what's happening in schools post-pandemic, and in today's episode we're going to hear about his research on learning loss and absenteeism, and we're going to discuss what schools and parents can do to help students get back on track. So important.

(01:45):

Tom, we are thrilled to have you here. So we're going to just go ahead and dig in with the big question, just how much learning was lost during the pandemic?

Tom Dee (01:54):

Thank you, and thanks for having me. So in terms of learning loss, pretty substantial. So [00:02:00] basically 20 years of test score gains have been wiped out with particularly large losses in math and smaller ones in reading. For those in the audience who used to listening or reading about education research, on the order of 10 to 15% of a standard deviation. So pretty substantial. But those gains over 20 years were more modest than we would like.

(02:23):

But I also think there are important dimensions of the pandemic learning loss that we have yet to understand. [00:02:30] In particular, what a lot of my work done in collaboration with journalists and collecting data on enrollment has shown is that the kids who experienced the most substantial disruptions missing pre-K, skipping kindergarten, switching schools, were our very youngest learners who are just beginning to age into testing windows where we'll really know about how their trajectories have changed.

(02:54):

So we're going to learn a lot more in the next few years about that as those kids grow up. And [00:03:00] I've argued in some of my writing too, it creates a kind of bias in our discourse because we look where the light shines, we look at the older kids in tested grades, but there may be very serious harm to the kids who aren't yet in the penumbra of that light. It's not shining on them yet.

Denise Pope (03:19):

That's a little scary.

Dan Schwartz (03:22):

No, I've been worried about this. In particular, is there a developmental window that closes that there was some kinds of learnings that you can't get [00:03:30] at another age? Language acquisition gets a lot harder as you get older. I'll be interested to see the results.

Tom Dee (03:37):

Also though, I want to stress a kind of historical-minded perspective on this because anyone who's studied education knows that crisis rhetoric comes up as regularly as the sun. And so I have that in the back of my mind as I'm sitting here saying, this feels very much like a crisis, that we've said this before, but we really mean it this time.

(04:00):

[00:04:00] But I think it is serious both because of that learning loss, because of the enrollment disruptions, but even more disturbingly what we're seeing about how kids are readjusting to a kind of return to normal and in-person instruction. And with some of the most recent work I've done in collaboration with the Associated Press has underscored this, that we've seen a near doubling of chronic absenteeism among students in the '21 - '22 school year. And all the data available [00:04:30] to us suggests that has persisted into the '22 - '23 school year, and to suggest a large scale failure of many kids to fully reintegrate into schooling as we knew it before the pandemic.

Dan Schwartz (04:43):

Yeah. So tell us more about that research. Part of my reaction to learning loss if I'm feeling jaded is does it really matter if kids graduate with one year less of schooling? At 12th grade you're not doing anything anyway, so [00:05:00] I can be sort of jaded. But then, if there's this part where there's sort of these lingering effects that are just going to keep cascading through the system, I start to get very, very worried. So say more about how you found out.

Tom Dee (05:12):

Yeah. Well, on how we found out, I mean this was really my work and my collaborators at the Associated Press most recently trying to infill the deep inadequacies of the data systems that the pandemic has exposed. Because I had been hearing scattered anecdotal accounts from districts [00:05:30] and a state or two that my gosh, chronic absenteeism has really spiked. And so there was a kind of folk wisdom among the cognoscente that this appeared to be a problem, but nothing like comprehensive data.

(05:43):

So I mounted this effort to go state by state and collect, verify and draw together those data, and that was the substance of the report that I put out in August. And the linked reporting from the Associated Press have documented that doubling, basically an additional [00:06:00] six and a half million kids in K-12 public schools are now chronically absent.

Denise Pope (06:06):

Tom, can you define chronically absent, because I don't know if people understand what that actually means?

Tom Dee (06:11):

Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks, Denise. It basically refers to kids who are missing 10% or more of school days for any reason, excused or unexcused. The typical school year has about 180 school days, so we're talking about kids missing typically 18 days or more. And this is a metric [00:06:30] that's really come into broad use as a kind of index for barriers to learning under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Because schools were given a lot more flexibility to move beyond test scores and thinking about how they were meeting kids' needs, and chronic absenteeism became kind of instantiated as a very widely used measure.

(06:51):

And that's why I was able to collect these data because for the last five or six years, virtually all states have been reporting that. So we were able to get data covering [00:07:00] 92% of school kids across the US.

Denise Pope (07:04):

So it's missing 18 days. They don't have to be all in a row, just 18 days-

Tom Dee (07:09):

That's right-

Denise Pope (07:10):

... the course of a school year. What was interesting is you said excused or unexcused absences.

Tom Dee (07:16):

That's right. And it's very intentionally meant to be this sort of very broad index for, could be in school, out of school factors that are just inhibiting kids opportunities to learn.

Denise Pope (07:27):

Because you get Covid and [00:07:30] you can't go back when you're testing positive. That's practically in the old days, that was 14 days. I know it's less now. I think it's like five or six at schools, but still, you're like a third of the way there, you get Covid once.

Tom Dee (07:41):

I think that's right. And that raises the questions of how do we understand this sharp rise in chronic absenteeism? And I tried to engage that in my analysis. I think we're going to need richer, more disaggregated data to do this really definitively.

(07:54):

But basically I linked the state level growth in chronic absenteeism to a variety of candidate [00:08:00] factors that might explain it, the prevalence of Covid infections during that year kids were returning to school, the presence of bans on wearing masks or requirements to wear masks, information on CDC data on the deterioration in student mental health over this period, enrollment change. We might think that the differential exodus from public schools during the pandemic could mechanically create changes in the chronic absenteeism rate.

(08:30):

[00:08:30] None of these seem to explain the state level growth. Only one thing really did. And that was the extent to which during the previous 2020 - '21 school year, schools had been in remote only instruction. If the schools had been closed during that first full school year during the pandemic, predicted much higher chronic absenteeism when kids returned to school in fall of 2021.

(08:58):

So again, this is just [00:09:00] correlational, it's not definitive evidence, but it's consistent with the idea that the major factor was kids falling out of the habit of going to school or maybe parents no longer seeing the value in regular school attendance.

Dan Schwartz (09:14):

So Tom, the threshold of 10% is interesting to me. How do you choose it? I guess the question behind it is, is there a strong linear slope between absenteeism and school grades [00:09:30] or school achievement tests, or is it more of a dogleg that suddenly when you hit 18 days, test scores start to get affected?

Tom Dee (09:38):

Yeah, I don't think there's anything sacrosanct about that particular threshold. The way researchers commonly do, they alight upon it for a variety of reasons. But we see similar reductions in attendance. And all the evidence I've seen is that across all margins, attending school more is beneficial to kids on a variety of outcome indicators. [00:10:00] But there's nothing particularly sacred about the way we've chosen to define.

Dan Schwartz (10:05):

I'm worried about parents out there. If their kid misses four days, are they going to do worse, like six days or should the parents relax?

Tom Dee (10:14):

I think first they should relax 'cause being relaxed probably makes them better parents, but they should also try to make sure their kids are in school as much as they can healthfully be.

Dan Schwartz (10:29):

When [00:10:30] you were a kid, did your parents let you skip school and did they force you to make it up?

Denise Pope (10:36):

I was a kid a long time ago, Dan. That's asking me to really think back. I can tell you, it's sort of funny that you're asking this because we have this story in my family that my grandmother tells about missing school. So I'm going to sidestep that question and just tell you the grandma story for a second, which is I don't know why, but this comes up at family dinners where she'll say, "You know, I was absent on the one day that they [00:11:00] were teaching square root," and she always would say square root. And she said, "And I've regretted it my whole life."

(11:07):

So when any of our kids or at this dinner would say, "Oh, they weren't excited to go back to school," or whatever, she would say, "You know, be careful 'cause you could miss the one day where you learn square root." And so it's like ...

Dan Schwartz (11:19):

I had that experience.

Denise Pope (11:21):

What do you mean?

Dan Schwartz (11:22):

Oh, it was statistics in graduate school and there was one day where I was tired too much and I missed it. And it's turned out every year a graduate [00:11:30] student asks me exactly about the thing I missed. And I bluff. I do a good job of bluffing, but it is pretty amazing. It was that one, one day.

(11:44):

Tom, time to recover. How are schools doing? Anything working especially well?

Tom Dee (11:51):

I think we've got a few bright spots. I mean, there's a great deal of enthusiasm, for example, around providing tutoring opportunities for kids, though I think [00:12:00] real challenges in doing that well and at scale.

(12:03):

I think I'm also encouraged by the fact there's really good evidence on tier one initial strategies to promote school attendance among kids and tactics that are low cost and scalable with fidelity. In particular, there've been a number of carefully designed experiments that simply will communicate to parents through texting or through postcards, personalized information about how their child is [00:12:30] doing, that they might be missing too much school.

(12:33):

And there's some interesting design elements that are kind of psychologically informed that can enhance the impact of that. So for example, what in the literature is called social norming, saying this is where your kid is and this is where their classroom peers are. Adding that little bit of social context can be impactful.

(12:50):

And also attending to the language used in that communication, making it less judgmental and instead kind of underscoring shared purpose around having kids [00:13:00] attend school regularly. But getting that communication out is low cost, can be done at scale with great fidelity. And I think any school district that's not doing that now should really look into making that happen.

Dan Schwartz (13:13):

Tom, you're going to get a postcard from me pretty soon about the social norms of faculty.

Denise Pope (13:19):

Who else is showing up?

Tom Dee (13:20):

I don't think I'll be alone.

Denise Pope (13:23):

Is part of this just making it more attractive to go to school, making school more fun and exciting? Is part of this just like [00:13:30] school seems like boring and they took all the fun stuff away?

Tom Dee (13:34):

Well, I don't know that the school has changed per se, as much as just people's sense of engagement with it. I think we really, this is purely subjective on my part, as I said again in my home office, but we fell out of the habit of regularly going to the place of work or study, and I think that's proved enduring for kids in ways that are going to be problematic.

Dan Schwartz (13:57):

So Denise, you underestimate habits. [00:14:00] I'm wearing pajamas now at the office so..

Denise Pope (14:03):

We got out of the habit of coming in every day. That was our kids that were the adults. That was a bunch of us. Right? That's one theory.

Dan Schwartz (14:13):

So Tom, you did some interesting work on a reading curriculum or an interesting approach that showed some catch up effects. So talk a little bit about this study and intervention.

Tom Dee (14:24):

Yeah. And this is part of the Science of Reading debate, which I just think is one of the most fascinating issues in education [00:14:30] research and policy right now. Many listeners may be familiar with the decades-long reading wars, which basically had researchers and policymakers sparring over the best way to teach, in particular young learners how to read. And it pitted an older tradition of more phonics-based instruction against a newer tradition based on whole language and then a kind of middle ground called balanced literacy that purported to combine the two.

(14:59):

So there's been [00:15:00] that long-standing debate, but a shift in recent years I think, and a sense that the science of reading, which includes for young readers more phonics-based instruction is really the right way to go. Now the problem we have is that efforts to really make that happen in the classroom simply haven't worked.

(15:20):

There was a major federal initiative as part of No Child Left Behind that had no effects on student outcomes. And there've been a variety of state level initiatives that purport [00:15:30] to push out and encourage teachers to use science of reading practices and haven't really worked.

(15:36):

Now, we studied a California initiative that targeted the 70 lowest achieving elementary schools in California and came out of a legal settlement. The state had been sued for violating its constitutional obligation to educate children and to provide them with early literacy skills. As a result, they took around $50 million and directed it towards science [00:16:00] of reading pedagogy in these schools. And in a recent study with a �� doctoral student, we found looking over the first two years of that program that it really appears to be working. It's moving the needle on reading achievement in meaningful ways.

Denise Pope (16:14):

Okay. I have a hypothesis about this, and you can shoot me down, Tom 'cause you're the expert, but here's my hypothesis. When I was reading about this, they said they weren't just handing people a curriculum to use saying, "This is the Science of Reading curriculum, use it." But that money was going toward professional [00:16:30] development for educators, it was involving parents in this, and maybe you can say more about that, but it was doing a lot more than just saying, "Go back to those boring phonics instruction books."

Tom Dee (16:45):

Yeah, this is such an important question Denise, because I think generally in education, when we see a policy effort that appears to have been impactful, we have such trouble replicating it and doing it a second time. So I think it's really important to pay attention to the unique design and implementation [00:17:00] details of what went on with this money. And it was this, seems like this delicate balance between being prescriptive and also providing school flexibility.

(17:08):

So just to sketch it out briefly, they began by offering eligible schools money to develop school level literacy action plans and support in the contours of that, making it consistent with the science of reading.

(17:23):

Then they provided oversight of those plans and looked at the proposed budgets before approving them. They gave [00:17:30] schools, it was over half a million dollars for three years to implement those plans on average and gave them broad spending guidelines, four different categories that could include professional development for teachers, additional instructional support staff, strategies for family and engagement, money for new textbooks and things of that sort. So broad guidelines, but then flexibility within them for schools to kind of design their own plan.

(17:56):

So I think these kind of design features are probably really critical [00:18:00] for the early success of this program. That balance of being prescriptive in evidence-based ways and flexible in ways that engage substantive change within the school and ultimately critically within the classroom.

Dan Schwartz (18:15):

So is it possible that the gains were just because the school got aligned as opposed to the science of reading? Everybody's lined up, right? They're consistent. They're coherent. There's an agreement. Is it possible this is what's driving these results [00:18:30] as opposed to the science of reading?

Tom Dee (18:32):

Well, that might be because there is that embedded in it, but there's always this challenge in understanding the impact of these kinds of policy initiatives because they're so multifaceted. And so there's often this effort when we see it's having an effect to say, "Okay, I see it was doing seven different things." It probably compelled some instructional coherence and alignment as you're describing along with the science of reading.

(18:57):

And so people will commonly ask what the special [00:19:00] sauce is. And I'm at a point where sometimes I think that question is too reductive and to think that there could be one singular silver bullet within it because they may interact in ways that aren't additive and they really have to be there together as complements.

(19:18):

But if we were to learn, it was really about forcing instructional coherence and alignment, I'm happy to claim that is the reason for the success. I have no history in the reading wars, [00:19:30] but I'd be curious what perspectives you guys have on that long-standing debate.

Denise Pope (19:35):

Well, there's actually an entire School's In show on the reading wars where Dan and I enter into a debate with Rebecca Silverman here, who's at the School of Education. So our listeners can find that one. It's a very juicy, interesting debate that if my memory serves, Dan and I completely lost to whatever the competition was that Rebecca was setting up about is it this or this? And we always [00:20:00] chose the wrong one. So I don't know. Dan, do you have a strong opinion, phonics versus whole language?

Dan Schwartz (20:05):

I'm a math science guy.

Denise Pope (20:08):

Way to skirt.

Dan Schwartz (20:09):

How's that?

(20:09):

Way to skirt the issue.

Denise Pope (20:10):

The thing I always wonder is how these wars get started is a war between ... I mean, it's like two faculty member quibbling with each other. How did it become a war?

Tom Dee (20:19):

Well, I think this is actually really fascinating. For all the attention that reading wars and the science of reading has received, at some level I feel it's as if it's not enough. Because when I think about [00:20:30] if you believe the science of reading and phonics-based instruction for early readers is important, the scale at which we've been failing is at some level mind-numbing 'cause surveys indicate that something like 80% of teachers are using three cueing methods in the classroom and have been doing so for something like four decades.

Denise Pope (20:50):

Three cueing. Tom, you want to just tell, again, tell our listeners-

Tom Dee (20:53):

Oh, sorry. Three cueing is an instructional method sometimes associated with balanced literacy, but really grounded [00:21:00] in whole language. And the idea is you don't have to be didactic in teaching students phonemic awareness, the sounds of words and their components and how to sight read. Instead, you have them draw clues from the context, the sentence, any graphical images available, et cetera.

(21:17):

And so the science of reading would emphatically discredit that type of three cueing instruction. Yet we've been doing it at scale for decades, and my rough calculations suggest in our nation of over 300 million [00:21:30] people, that implies that something like 200 million people have been taught a foundational academic skill the wrong way. So that's really striking, and-

Dan Schwartz (21:40):

Okay, maybe I do have an opinion...

Denise Pope (21:43):

Okay. I was waiting for this. Go ahead, Dan.

Tom Dee (21:45):

I knew I could draw him out.

Dan Schwartz (21:46):

Yeah, yeah. So meaning-based approaches where you're trying to figure things out and connect them are really important. You need to learn to interpret a passage, and that's meaning making. You can do it at the word level. What must this [00:22:00] word be?

(22:01):

On the other hand, there is some value at just memorizing routinized things like recognizing that BR is a blend and this is how you pronounce it. So I would've assumed that the blended would've won, except there's probably a mistake in the execution of the blending.

(22:16):

But you need both. I mean, I haven't memorized every word that exists. I have to look at some and figure it out, and I may not use context. I may sound it out.

Tom Dee (22:26):

So I think part of the confusion here too though, is that people think the science of reading [00:22:30] is just phonics.

Denise Pope (22:31):

Yes.

Tom Dee (22:32):

It's phonics at early stages, but there are different science of reading for the kinds of comprehension and fluency you're describing. But it's just that the phonemic awareness and sight reading and all of those foundational skills are where you need to begin.

Dan Schwartz (22:47):

The number of times someone, I try to explain to someone that there's a different way to learn that might be more effective. And they say to me, "No, no, no, no. I learned that way. I did just fine." And my response to them is, "You [00:23:00] may have other people didn't work so well for."

Tom Dee (23:03):

I would just quickly note how we got here too, because based on what I've read about the evolution of the reading wars, at some level the villain is siloed academic scholarship. The fact that these different intellectual traditions were able to persist in isolation because intellectual communities within the academy were not talking to each other and engaging with each other sufficiently. And so that allowed those who were closer [00:23:30] with teacher training to have one view and another community to have a very different view. And we need to do better collectively, I think.

Denise Pope (23:38):

So important. So true. Thank you so much, Tom. What a great show.

Dan Schwartz (23:43):

I agree. Thank you, Tom.

(23:47):

The past year or so, we've finally started learning how consequential Covid was for our students and where the effects are taking place. So thank you.

Denise Pope (23:55):

100%. Now, as good educators, we like to end our [00:24:00] lessons with some tangible takeaways. So Dan, I'm going to put you on the spot. Are you ready for this? What stood out to you?

Dan Schwartz (24:08):

What stood out to me is that Tom's research just clearly shows that absenteeism is a problem that we need to get under control. You know some districts have had successes, but overall, getting kids back to school has been harder than everybody anticipated.

Denise Pope (24:20):

Oh my goodness, way harder than people anticipated.

(24:24):

You know another thing we heard was that schools need better communication strategies with parents and students. So [00:24:30] I'm thinking when Tom mentioned things like getting in front of parents more with text messages or other interesting low cost ways to just inform them and nudge them, it's really about ditching the judgment and together focusing on the shared purpose.

Dan Schwartz (24:50):

Okay, so that gets folks back in. Now we need to catch them up.

Denise Pope (24:51):

We absolutely do. Tom mentioned that a lot of schools are having success with tutoring, and I know there's a lot of research to back that up. Also, [00:25:00] we probably need to shed old ways of teaching and really be open to adopting more evidence-based approaches.

Dan Schwartz (25:06):

Tom did mention a recent study on a reading program that's boosting student achievement. It's a great example of how targeted evidence-based strategies can make a significant impact.

Denise Pope (25:16):

Well said, Dan. Thank you again to our guest, Tom Dee, for this thoughtful conversation. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of School's In. Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your [00:25:30] podcasts. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (25:32):

And I'm Dan Schwartz.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope , Thomas S. Dee

70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, new research shows rise in school segregation

Carrie Spector — Sun, 05 May 2024 15:53:27 +0000

70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, new research shows rise in school segregation

Carrie Spector Sun, 05/05/2024 - 08:53

A new report from researchers at �� and USC shows that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in large school districts over the past 30 years — an increase that appears to be driven by policy decisions, not demographic changes. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Education Policy | Poverty and Inequality | Race and Equity

Researchers at �� and USC launch the Segregation Explorer, a website providing data on segregation trends and patterns across the United States.

May 6, 2024

By Carrie Spector

As the nation prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, a new report from researchers at �� and USC shows that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in large school districts over the past three decades — an increase that appears to be driven in part by policies favoring school choice over integration.

Analyzing data from U.S. public schools going back to 1967, the researchers found that segregation between white and Black students has increased by 64 percent since 1988 in the 100 largest districts, and segregation by economic status has increased by about 50 percent since 1991.

The report also provides new evidence about the forces driving recent trends in school segregation, showing that the expansion of charter schools has played a major role.

The findings were released on May 6 with the launch of the Segregation Explorer, a new interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University. The website provides searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in U.S. states, counties, metropolitan areas, and school districts from 1991 to 2022.

“School segregation levels are not at pre-Brown levels, but they are high and have been rising steadily since the late 1980s,” said Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at �� Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project. “In most large districts, school segregation has increased while residential segregation and racial economic inequality have declined, and our findings indicate that policy choices – not demographic changes – are driving the increase.”

“There’s a tendency to attribute segregation in schools to segregation in neighborhoods,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC. “But we’re finding that the story is more complicated than that.”

Assessing the rise

In the Brown v. Board decision issued on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and established that “separate but equal” schools were not only inherently unequal but unconstitutional. The ruling paved the way for future decisions that led to rapid school desegregation in many school districts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Though segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, the researchers found that over the past three decades, both racial and economic segregation in large districts increased. Much of the increase in economic segregation since 1991, measured by segregation between students eligible and ineligible for free lunch, occurred in the last 15 years.

White-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation, while lower on average than white-Black segregation, have both more than doubled in large school districts since the 1980s.

Racial-economic segregation – specifically the difference in the proportion of free-lunch-eligible students between the average white and Black or Hispanic student’s schools – has increased by 70 percent since 1991.

School segregation is strongly associated with achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups, especially the rate at which achievement gaps widen during school, the researchers said.

“Segregation appears to shape educational outcomes because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools, which results in unequal learning opportunities,” said Reardon, who is also a senior fellow at the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research and a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Policies shaping recent trends

The recent rise in school segregation appears to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions, the researchers said.

Both residential segregation and racial disparities in income declined between 1990 and 2020 in most large school districts. “Had nothing else changed, that trend would have led to lower school segregation,” said Owens.

But since 1991, roughly two-thirds of districts that were under court-ordered desegregation have been released from court oversight. Meanwhile, since 1998, the charter sector – a form of expanded school choice – has grown.

Expanding school choice could influence segregation levels in different ways: If families sought schools that were more diverse than the ones available in their neighborhood, it could reduce segregation. But the researchers found that in districts where the charter sector expanded most rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, segregation grew the most.

The researchers’ analysis also quantified the extent to which the release from court orders accounted for the rise in school segregation. They found that, together, the release from court oversight and the expansion of choice accounted entirely for the rise in school segregation from 2000 to 2019.

The researchers noted enrollment policies that school districts can implement to mitigate segregation, such as voluntary integration programs, socioeconomic-based student assignment policies, and school choice policies that affirmatively promote integration.

“School segregation levels are high, troubling, and rising in large districts,” said Reardon. “These findings should sound an alarm for educators and policymakers.”

Additional collaborators on the project include Demetra Kalogrides, Thalia Tom, and Heewon Jang. This research, including the development of the Segregation Explorer data and website, was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: sean reardon

New report shows historic gains in pandemic recovery for many U.S. school districts

Carrie Spector — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:26:41 +0000

New report shows historic gains in pandemic recovery for many U.S. school districts

Carrie Spector Tue, 01/30/2024 - 13:26

A new report by researchers at �� and Harvard finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. (Photo: iStock)

Education Policy | K-12 | Poverty and Inequality

Students exceeded a typical year’s progress in math and reading, but slower gains among poor students have widened the achievement gap.

January 31, 2024

By Carrie Spector

A new report by researchers at �� and Harvard shows that U.S. students achieved historic gains in math and reading during the 2022-23 school year, the first full year of recovery from the pandemic.

The report, which measures the pace of academic recovery during the 2022-23 school year for school districts in 30 states, finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. These gains significantly exceed what students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends.

Students in one state, Alabama, returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while students in three states reached 2019 levels in reading. But students in a majority of the states in the study remain more than a third of a grade level behind pre-pandemic levels in math, and students in almost half of the states are that far behind in reading.

“Students overall haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels of achievement,” said study co-author Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University. “But clear progress is being made.”

The new data also reveal that achievement gaps between high- and low-poverty districts have widened since 2019, the result of larger initial losses in poor districts and the slower recovery of poor students within the average district.

The report was published Jan. 31 as part of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a collaboration between researchers at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Center for Education Policy and Research (CEPR) at Harvard.

The researchers followed up on findings they released last year showing that, between spring 2019 and spring 2022, the average student in grades 3 through 8 had lost the equivalent of half a grade level in math achievement and a third of a grade level in reading.

“We should thank teachers and principals and superintendents for what they’ve done for American schoolchildren in the last year. Their efforts have led to strikingly large improvements in children’s learning,” said Reardon. “But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the recovery has been uneven, and we have a long way to go.”

Measuring losses and progress

The report draws from the �� Education Data Archive (SEDA), a comprehensive national database run by the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University that includes reading and math test scores from every public school in the United States. The database, first made available online in 2016, has been used by researchers and policymakers to study patterns and trends in educational opportunity across the country and by race, gender, and socioeconomic conditions.

For this analysis, the researchers used standardized test results from roughly 8,000 school districts in 30 states. The remaining 20 states were not included either because they changed their state assessments since 2022 or because they did not provide sufficiently detailed data on their websites.

To measure the original losses from the pandemic, the researchers compared test scores from spring 2019 and spring 2022. To measure the recovery, they compared scores from spring 2022 and spring 2023. Across all 30 states in the study, students recovered about 30 percent of the original loss in math and 25 percent of the loss in reading.

While students in Alabama returned to pre-pandemic levels in math by spring 2023, students in 17 states remained more than a third of a grade level behind their 2019 achievement levels. Students in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi returned to 2019 levels of achievement in reading, but students in 14 states remained more than a third of a grade level behind.

During the 2022-23 school year, students recovered on average about one-third of the pandemic loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. The gains are significantly more than students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Chart courtesy of the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University)

An uneven recovery

The report illustrates disparities in the impact of both the pandemic and the recovery. Achievement gaps between high- and low-poverty districts widened during the pandemic, with students in high-poverty districts losing the most ground.

The researchers found that the recovery so far has done little to close these gaps. “In many states, the recovery is being led by wealthier districts, which lost the least during the pandemic,” said Reardon, who is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning and a senior fellow at the �� Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Students in poor districts are, on average, well behind where they were in 2019.”

States in which achievement gaps have widened the most are Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Michigan, according to the report.

Congress provided a total of $190 billion in federal aid to K-12 schools during the pandemic, with most of it targeted at high-poverty districts. The funding program is set to expire in September 2024, and according to the U.S. Department of Education, roughly a third of the funds remained unspent as of fall 2023.

The report recommends ways for state and local agencies to allocate the remaining funds, including expanding summer learning opportunities this year and contracting for tutoring and after-school programs.

“Despite strong gains last year, most school districts are not on track to complete the recovery this spring,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and a co-author of the report. “District leaders should use these data to check their progress and rethink how they spend the remaining federal relief dollars.”

Additional collaborators on this project include Erin Fahle, Sadie Richardson, Julia Paris, Demetra Kalogrides, Jie Min, and Jiyeon Shim (Educational Opportunity Project); Daniel Dewey, Victoria Carbonari, and Dean Kaplan (Center for Education Policy Research); and Douglas Staiger (Dartmouth College). The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin and Griffin Catalyst, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

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