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<\/p>\nIf your house crumbles in a storm, your first instinct probably goes something like this: Rebuild your house exactly as it was.\u00a0Get a roof over your head and return to your normal life as soon as possible. Never mind that the foundation was cracking, the roof was riddled with holes, and the air conditioner was broken.
\n<\/p>\n
After the devastation of a crisis, the drive to return to the \u201cnormalcy\u201d of the time right before the crisis is a powerful (and understandable) desire. But like the house that was deeply broken before the storm ever hit, American education right before the COVID-19 pandemic and before the second Trump Administration\u2019s dismantling of the Department of Education was badly in need of transformation. The system we had normalized by 2019 was already failing too many of our nation\u2019s students, and the pandemic in many ways heightened existing achievement and opportunity gaps and deepened inequities that had been growing for years.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why, as secretary of education under President Biden, I often urged my colleagues not to let a crisis go to waste by rebuilding education exactly as it was in 2019. Now, though the immediate crisis of the pandemic has passed, we face a new crisis\u2014and a new opportunity. Public education is under attack. The Department of Education is being gutted. But when we rebuild after this crisis, we can (and must) also reimagine.<\/p>\n
I see an opening for three big national movements. These are areas where, if we step up at both the national and state levels, work across party lines, and focus our efforts, we can deliver truly transformative and lasting change.<\/p>\n
One thing that\u2019s been conspicuously absent from many education transformation proposals over the years is a recognition of the central role teachers play in education. At the end of the day, success in education comes down to quality core instruction: the relationship between the teacher, the student, and the content. It doesn\u2019t matter if the curriculum is fantastic or the class has the coolest new technology if you don\u2019t also have the expertise and dedication of the teacher at the front of the classroom. There are no great outcomes in education without great teachers, period.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, in recent years, we\u2019ve seen significant teacher shortages in our country. But when we talk about the teacher shortage issue, what we\u2019re really talking about is a teacher respect <\/em>issue. Too often, the conditions teachers work under do not reflect respect for a profession that is expected to change lives and set young people up for lasting success.<\/p>\n We can address this through state and national efforts that target what I call the ABCs of teaching: Agency, Better Working Conditions, and Competitive Salaries. Agency means treating educators like the professionals they are and empowering them to make decisions based on their expertise and experience. Better working conditions encompass everything from refusing to normalize long hours of teaching in 95-degree classrooms to ensuring enough planning time and professional development opportunities.<\/p>\n Competitive salaries are critical. Currently, 70 percent of states and 65 percent of school districts offer average starting salaries for teachers below <\/em>$50,000. The average salary for a public-school teacher nationwide is $74,495. These salaries cannot compete with those in other professions requiring a college degree. Teachers are taking second and third jobs just to survive. Educators do not do what they do for the money, but we cannot normalize martyrdom as a prerequisite for serving students. Legislative action to raise teachers\u2019 pay, backed by state efforts and smart approaches like registered teaching apprenticeships, can help drive the movement to respect and support educators.<\/p>\n As part of this work, especially when it comes to increasing the agency of educators, we must also revisit how we approach educational assessments. To be clear, this does not <\/em>mean that we should not have high standards and expectations for our students, or that we should never have assessments. Well-designed assessments play a crucial role in identifying gaps, underlying potential, and progress in learning. High-quality formative assessments that connect to high standards taught by great educators have the power to drive instruction and curricular decisions that better serve students.<\/p>\n The reality many teachers face across America, though, is an avalanche of assessments that eat into instructional time, incentivize teaching to the test, and limit educators\u2019 agency to apply their knowledge of good pedagogy in their classrooms. Countless students have missed out on proven practices like project-based learning or hands-on, experiential learning because teaching was reduced to test prep.<\/p>\n At their best, assessments are like headlights, showing us where to drive instruction and support. But at their worst, and particularly as used in the top-down federal education initiatives of the past, they have instead functioned as hammers to slam down on certain teachers or schools.<\/p>\n I experienced that myself as an elementary school principal during the No Child Left Behind era. Our Connecticut school served a large population of immigrants and English learners receiving bilingual education. These students, guided by their tireless bilingual teachers, were needing to learn twice as fast as anyone else as they worked hard to adapt to a new language and culture. But in that era, these incredible bilingual students and teachers saw their worth reduced to their level of mastery on a standardized test in a language the students didn\u2019t even know.<\/p>\n The next administration should drive a high-level initiative to encourage all states to pioneer innovative assessment systems that demonstrate clear value to educators and students. This process must include eliminating unnecessary assessments. Where necessary, Congress and state legislatures should enact legislation that provides political cover and reduces bureaucratic obstacles for these actions.<\/p>\n I have often said that investing in education is no different from investing in national defense: Both protect our tomorrow. But to date, we have not funded education in this country at a level that can deliver the lasting transformation our young people deserve.<\/p>\n What would happen if we made a significant nationwide effort to invest in education at a whole new level? The impact on education of the American Rescue Plan (ARP), the 2021 stimulus bill to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows us what might be possible.<\/p>\n The $123 billion investment that went to states and school districts as part of the ARP helped us swiftly and safely reopen schools. But more than that, we saw what schools and districts could achieve when they were empowered to invest in their specific needs and focus on what works in education rather than on implementing mandates and standards from Washington. Some schools hired counselors and social workers who helped address the national youth mental health crisis. Others expanded tutoring, built up afterschool programs, or recruited and retained educators to address the much-needed recovery after the pandemic disruption. These targeted investments fueled visible academic growth, especially in large urban school systems, demonstrating that students rise when we seriously invest in public education.<\/p>\n But data from the Education Recovery Scorecard<\/a>, a project of Harvard University\u2019s Center for Education Policy Research, shows that two distinct groups of districts recovered best after the pandemic: the highest-income districts, which already had significant resources, and the lowest-income districts, which received more targeted support. The districts in the middle struggled the most to recover, remaining well below their 2019 achievement levels. This suggests that, though a federal funding boost can accelerate learning, when that boost is temporary and targeted, there are limits to who can benefit and how sustainable those benefits are.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to move beyond temporary emergency programs and establish a bigger, better plan for education\u2014one that invests in districts and schools across the country more broadly and sustainably. We must treat sustained federal investment not as a one-time crisis intervention, but as a bold and lasting strategy to protect public education and ensure every child can achieve their full potential.<\/p>\n The ARP served us well in recovering from the pandemic. Now, we need a new ARP: an American Reimagination Plan to transform education for the future.<\/p>\n Transforming federal investment in education, of course, won\u2019t solve all the challenges we face in funding education. After all, the vast majority of education funding comes from the state and local levels. In many places, there are factors\u2014such as the reliance on local property taxes to fund schools\u2014that create inequities in resources between districts. Some states have worked to address these through funding models like the \u201cguaranteed tax base\u201d approach<\/a>, which works to equalize the minimum amount of local tax dollars available for education across districts. A national effort to identify a \u201cgold standard\u201d education funding model and encourage states to make reforms that align with that model could go a long way toward making investment in education more sustainable and equitable for generations to come.<\/p>\n If there is one factor that is decisive in whether education leaders succeed in overcoming a major challenge or achieving a lasting transformation, it is intentional collaboration. I saw that as Connecticut\u2019s commissioner of education during the height of the pandemic. The districts that handled the pandemic best weren\u2019t necessarily the most well-resourced districts; they were the districts that partnered most effectively with others. As commissioner, I worked closely with many key partners in Connecticut to get their \u201cfingerprints on the plan\u201d for school reopenings. Our plan was not going to please everyone, but because we collaborated intentionally, our imperfect plan achieved quick and lasting success on an issue where tensions could sometimes run high, and it became the model for our reopening work when I became U.S. secretary of education.<\/p>\n Some of our worthiest goals in education urgently require intentional collaboration. Take the effort to transform high schools\u2014something my former Department of Education colleague James Kvaal writes about in depth in his piece in this symposium\u2014so that students can have more pathways to upward mobility through hands-on, career-connected learning, internships with nearby employers, and dual enrollment with local colleges.<\/p>\n Similarly, the work I focus on today as an independent education adviser is about creating interdependent ecosystems that provide options for students when they graduate high school. By creating statewide systems that connect K-12 schools, colleges, industry partners, labor, community-based organizations, legislative and governmental agencies, and student groups, we build a shared movement that improves college and career pathways that lead to student success and upward economic mobility.<\/p>\n The next administration should do much more than restore the work the Biden-Harris Administration was doing on pathways. It should come in with a national plan for intentional collaboration to reimagine high schools, and the White House should use its convening power to hold an annual White House Education Pathways Summit that serves as a lever for collaboration inside and outside of government.<\/p>\n Another area where leadership from the highest levels of the next administration can encourage intentional collaboration is community schools. The community schools model reimagines schools as hubs for their local communities where families can get health and other services\u2014a lifeline in many rural communities and areas with large immigrant populations. This transformative model, too, requires intentional collaboration with local partners, government agencies, health organizations, and others.<\/p>\n During the Biden-Harris Administration, we more than quintupled funding for full-service community schools and helped create 2,000 new community schools. A new administration should immediately establish a National Partnership for Community Schools that creates a mechanism for intentional collaboration among all the partners who could take the community schools movement even further.<\/p>\n When President Biden set a national goal to bring an additional 250,000 caring adults into schools as mentors and tutors to students, we set up the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS). This was a public-private partnership between the Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University that ultimately far exceeded the President\u2019s 250,000-person goal. Perhaps most significantly, this partnership outlasted<\/em> our Administration. With a new name, this partnership, now led by Johns Hopkins, continues to bring together a coalition of school districts, higher education institutions, and champion organizations.<\/p>\n In education, we\u2019re used to federal initiatives with splashy names that garner big headlines, promising magic solutions imposed from the top down. Inevitably, these initiatives disappear after the administration that launched them leaves office. Initiatives structured around intentional collaboration may not get as much attention, but they have greater potential to drive lasting changes in education that don\u2019t rely on who leads the federal government. The next administration should come in ready with intentional partnership initiatives in education like NPSS, with the incoming President\u2019s education transition team already having done significant leg work with potential partners.<\/p>\n A focus on intentional collaboration must also apply to the next administration\u2019s Department of Education. At a time when the department is being dismantled and undermined piece by piece, it\u2019s tempting to focus on restoring it as it was in 2024 as quickly as possible. That would be a wasted opportunity. The department can, and should, be much faster, more collaborative, and more responsive to the needs and expertise of educators than it was before.<\/p>\n As secretary, I found that actions as seemingly straightforward as creating new recognition programs to highlight great schools (like the Blue Ribbon and Green Ribbon Schools programs) or issuing nonbinding policy guidance to states and districts got caught up in paperwork and endless cycles of review. Interagency collaboration was often even more daunting. Meanwhile, although President Biden appointed me as secretary because he believed a public-school teacher should lead the Department of Education, there were still insufficient opportunities for educators to lead and influence the policy process within the department.<\/p>\n To restore public trust and confidence in the department as soon as possible, the next administration, together with Congress, should reimagine it with more fast-track processes to get things done rapidly. Political appointments, new hiring authorities, and fellowship programs should all be on the table to bring more educators into the reimagined department. For example, national and state teachers of the year could be given the chance to serve as fellows within the department and go on temporary assignments to other agencies, building their teacher leadership and capacity for interagency collaboration.<\/p>\n To be clear, no part of this vision for transforming education is partisan. As secretary, I visited all 50 states and heard from students, parents, and educators in so-called blue and red states alike. Amid all the national noise around education, I found that there is far more common ground than the headlines suggest. At the end of the day, people across America want what\u2019s best for students.<\/p>\n While there will always be disagreements, true education transformation cannot happen when we are politicizing schools and classrooms. We must work together. If we can do so, we have a chance to reimagine education for years to come. Let\u2019s not waste the opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If your house crumbles in a storm, your first instinct probably goes something like this: Rebuild your house exactly as it was.\u00a0Get a roof over your head and return to your normal life as soon as possible. Never mind that the foundation was cracking, the roof was riddled with holes, and the air conditioner was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1571,1019,1017,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-department-of-education","tag-education","tag-features","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16531,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16528\/revisions\/16531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16546,"date":"2026-09-15T20:18:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16546"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:18:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:21","slug":"tapping-the-brakes-on-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/tapping-the-brakes-on-devices\/","title":{"rendered":"Tapping the Brakes on Devices"},"content":{"rendered":" We are in an era of massive disruption. Artificial intelligence is triggering seismic shifts in virtually every aspect of society. The affordability crisis is squeezing working- and middle-class families and pushing those living in poverty over the edge. Addictive technology and social media platforms are deepening anxiety and depression\u2014especially among our youth. People with enormous resources and power are stoking division. And the democracy we have built over 250 years is being assaulted from within. Teachers are no strangers to disruption; we\u2019re often the first responders to it. Time and again, teachers provide stability amid chaos and help our students navigate a changing world. But this turbulent moment requires a concerted national response to prepare our young people for life\u2019s opportunities and challenges.<\/p>\n Public education in the United States has always been a state and local responsibility. But the federal government has a unique and vital role to play. When the federal government is doing its job, it helps level the playing field by providing funding and support for low-income students and those with disabilities; it enforces civil rights laws, supports college- and career-readiness programs, and oversees research into the best education practices. But the Trump Administration is walking away from those core responsibilities. And by slashing funds children rely on for food, health care, housing, and mental health services, it is not only undermining students\u2019 well-being: It is threatening the survival of untold thousands. This Administration is more focused on erasing history, punishing people with student debt, and stripping the Department of Education for parts than on helping every child thrive.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the President and his fellow Republicans who are to blame. Too few Democratic leaders speak clearly about the fundamental importance of public education as a national priority. And too many want to resurrect the failures of high-stakes testing, are pushing privatization, or are frankly AWOL from efforts to make public schools, which over 80 percent of American children attend, the very best they can be.<\/p>\n I offer a vision for America\u2019s public schools to provide a strong foundation for our children in this changing world. It\u2019s informed by listening to and learning from parents, educators, students, researchers, and business and community leaders, as well as by countless school visits here and abroad. It\u2019s one I hope both Democrats and Republicans will adopt. Whatever the future holds for students, they need:<\/p>\n These basics equip students for the deeper learning and problem-solving that will be crucial throughout their lives. They help make students more confident and more engaged learners. They\u2019re how we promote curiosity and critical thinking and ensure all our students have the agency and persistence they need to confront challenges.<\/p>\n I want to underscore why laying this foundation is urgently needed. Our students are already feeling the impacts of social disruption. Young people are resilient, but too often, the kids are not all right. A major reason is that they are drowning in tech.<\/p>\n When I started teaching in the 1990s, education technology was just being introduced. School computers were glorified typewriters with no internet connection. Students had to go to the office to make a phone call. In the 2010s, many schools began providing laptops to students. In this decade, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the tech takeover. Today, many school systems provide every student\u2014some as young as five\u2014with a device. More than half of 11-year-olds have a smartphone ever-ready at their fingertips. That number soars to 95 percent for 13- to 17-year-olds. Nearly half of teens say they are online \u201calmost constantly.\u201d The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast, and kids are getting burned.<\/p>\n As professor and author of The Anxious Generation<\/em> Jonathan Haidt says, cellphones and social media have made childhood sedentary and solitary, and our kids anxious and depressed. On top of that, there are growing concerns about the adverse effects of all this tech on students\u2019 cognition, attention, and achievement.<\/p>\n Jared Cooney Horvath, a leading neuroscientist, recently analyzed how reading and math trends shifted after state-by-state expansion of education technology. Prior to large-scale digital adoption, fourth and eighth graders\u2019 scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been rising steadily for years. After adoption, the trajectory shifted, often sharply, toward decline. Correlation is not causation, but Horvath cites research indicating that this pattern appears across states, countries, grade levels, subjects, and years.<\/p>\n In this era of TikTok and YouTube driving rapid shifts of attention, there is also growing concern about students\u2019 ability to sustain focus and to persist through challenging learning tasks. In a 2025 international survey of 3,000 teachers, 88 percent reported that their students\u2019 attention spans were getting shorter. Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham notes that it\u2019s not that students can\u2019t pay attention, but likely that they are less willing to pay attention. They are so accustomed to the immediate rewards they get online that they find schoolwork comparatively boring.<\/p>\n But before we turn to solutions, we need to talk about artificial intelligence. We are at a crossroads that will define the future of work and society. Without proper oversight and strong guardrails, there will be real dangers to our safety and privacy, to the climate, and to the very fabric of society. One thing the AI revolution does not change is the essential purpose of education: to teach students how to think and connect, and to give them enough knowledge to do both well.<\/p>\n In fact, the ubiquity of AI makes critical thinking and applying knowledge even more important. Students need to go beyond memorizing facts and learn how to verify them, challenge them, and synthesize them into new ideas. Some of the most valuable skills in the AI age\u2014like problem-solving, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and ethical judgment\u2014depend on the ability to apply knowledge. But AI is increasing so-called cognitive offloading: Rather than working through a challenge, students can turn to an AI chatbot for an effortless answer.<\/p>\n Research has established that less tech can produce better outcomes. For example, people learn more from hard copy than digital text and by taking notes on paper. And learning is a deeply human endeavor; the student-teacher relationship produces one of the largest effects in educational research. Yet best practices in education, brain research, and the science of learning too often take a backseat to market forces and political influence. The global education technology market was estimated at $187 billion in 2025, and the industry is seeking more. That\u2019s just ed tech, not all tech.<\/p>\n And they have friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Trump Administration has given Big Tech carte blanche. Melania Trump\u2019s White House stroll with the humanoid robot to tout using robots to replace teachers spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There\u2019s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers\u2014real human beings, not robots and not chatbots. Remember Michelle Rhee? She couldn\u2019t reduce teachers to algorithms, and Melania Trump will not replace teachers with robots.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not calling for a Chromebook bonfire. What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I\u2019m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people\u2019s lives. But that\u2019s not enough. It is equally essential to make sure educators understand AI and have a say in its use in education and our profession.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) created the National Academy for AI Instruction last year, to help teachers master AI so that AI doesn\u2019t master them. It\u2019s a training hub designed and run by educators, grounded in trust, safety, and people-first technology. It builds on the work our members did starting after ChatGPT was first announced to develop and continuously update the AFT\u2019s \u201cCommonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools.\u201d<\/p>\n Parents must have a real say as well. They know firsthand the impacts of social media and other technology on their children. Together with parent groups, we released our \u201cLikes vs. Learning\u201d report in 2023 with clear principles to keep children safe on social media and protect their privacy. And we continue to work with these groups for policy changes to protect children.<\/p>\n In May, I proposed a ten-point plan addressing all of this, to boost student learning and success in the age of AI:<\/p>\n Ten points. To ensure our students are prepared for the future, we need a \u201cdevices-down, eyes-up, hands-on\u201d strategy.<\/p>\n We are on the threshold of a staggering shake-up of society. Who will pay for this massive AI disruption? The workers that could have filled the 16,000 jobs that would be created each month but for AI? Retirees whose spiking energy bills eat up more of their fixed incomes? Who will pay for the harms to the environment\u2014from toxic waste to greenhouse gas emissions to grid strain to water shortages that threaten to make our taps run dry? A tech tax would ensure that Big Tech companies pay their fair share for the adverse consequences of AI. The tax could be on earnings, some business operations, hardware, or data processing.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence is accelerating the steepest upward transfer of wealth in modern history. Tech titans are amassing mind-blowing wealth, while ordinary people are paying enormous costs for living in the AI age. Tech kingpins and corporations can afford to pay a fair tech tax; workers, communities, and the Earth can\u2019t afford for them not to.<\/p>\n The guardrails and other protections that can help cushion the disruption are vital. The safety and privacy concerns are obvious, as is (or should be) the need to protect intellectual property and academic freedom for faculty and so many others. The federal government must update intellectual property laws to protect human-generated work, and employers must protect workers\u2019 intellectual property in contracts they negotiate with AI companies.<\/p>\n No less an authority than Pope Leo XIV warned in May that AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few. Leo condemned the use of AI in warfare, and he underscored that teaching and learning are human endeavors. He wrote that schools offer what \u201cthe digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n That vision underscores key aspects of our devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on ten-point plan. Some of what I\u2019ve laid out is already starting to take hold.<\/p>\n Take the bans on phones during the school day, which we support and which 22 states and Washington, D.C., have implemented. What are educators seeing? That kids are noticeably more engaged, and hallways and lunchrooms bustle with chatter and laughter again now that students aren\u2019t heads-down, eyes on their phones.<\/p>\n One year into their bell-to-bell cellphone ban, Dallas schools are seeing a 24 percent increase in library book checkouts. Imagine if kids started reading whole books again.<\/p>\n After years of promoting classroom technology, in June the Los Angeles Unified School District initiated a sharp reversal. Screens are prohibited for students in kindergarten and first grade, and usage is capped for older students. New York City\u2019s public schools then followed suit<\/a> with bans on individual screens for younger students and on student-facing AI before high school.<\/p>\n Several countries that pioneered the shift to ed tech are reversing course after precipitous drops in student achievement. Sweden is shifting back to printed textbooks and limiting screens. Italy has returned to emphasizing handwriting, paper materials, and traditional teaching methods. And now at least some Trump Administration officials, like the acting surgeon general, are issuing warnings that too much screen time for children is a public health concern.<\/p>\n Intentional or not, all this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong. We need to take stock so we can do what we know is right. But teachers, parents, and school districts cannot manage the tech juggernaut on our own.<\/p>\n Yet with this Administration, we are on our own. I\u2019m not a detective, but I see some clues that there\u2019s a connection between the Trump Administration\u2019s laissez-faire approach to addressing the harms of technology and the tech titans who are funding the President\u2019s ballroom, presidential library, and political action committees.<\/p>\n Laissez-faire doesn\u2019t cut it, given the shockwaves AI is setting off. That is why, in the absence of federal legislation, we are working through our AI Academy to negotiate a gold standard that sets out industry best practices for safety and privacy in the use of AI in schools. We are seeking a binding agreement between America\u2019s K-12 schools and any provider that offers AI-driven services to educators or students. Companies that refuse to abide by such a standard must be prohibited from working in our schools.<\/p>\n Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic\u2014our partners in the AI Academy\u2014have agreed in principle to our overarching tenets and standards. But as any negotiator knows, it\u2019s not done until it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n Our ten-point plan also calls for a research consortium. It simply does not make any sense for the 50 states, or the more than 13,000 public school districts in the country, to each research the most effective reading strategies, or how much and what type of screen time is appropriate for children at various ages. It does make sense for the federal government to do this\u2014as it has historically in health care, science, and, at times, education\u2014but the Trump Administration refuses. It has decimated the research arm of the Department of Education. It has even refused to distribute $289 million appropriated by Congress for education research.<\/p>\n We need deep research to guide us to scalable and sustainable solutions. So why not launch a research consortium, independent from politics and industry? Maybe it\u2019s a brand-new entity with pooled public and philanthropic funding. Or maybe it\u2019s the Institute for Education Sciences as President George W. Bush originally conceived, giving contracts to high-quality researchers and projects. I\u2019d put studying the impact of screens, tech, and AI at the top of that list.<\/p>\n The crux of this ten-point plan is what this will look like at the school level. What happens when we put devices down? What does \u201ceyes up, hands-on\u201d really mean?<\/p>\n It means prioritizing active learning through meaningful projects, which can range from students creating an eco-friendly garden, to planning and budgeting for a school event, to developing a policy solution to a local issue and presenting it to town officials, to keeping a diary from the perspective of a historical figure. Play for our littlest ones, debate for older kids, and music and art for all\u2014this is meaningful learning.<\/p>\n When I was a civics teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York, my students and I delved into all sorts of lessons\u2014about the Bill of Rights, efforts to change the Constitution such as the women\u2019s suffrage movement, and lessons about street law. They memorized plenty of important information. But where they really shined was in applying their knowledge and collaborating with each other, like in \u201cWe the People\u201d debate competitions.<\/p>\n This kind of learning is the opposite of drill-and-kill, of students memorizing and regurgitating content. And active learning is the antidote to cognitive offloading\u2014that is, outsourcing thinking to AI.<\/p>\n Where active learning is the norm is in career and technical education (CTE). CTE is learning by doing. It prepares high school students for both higher education and in-demand career pathways. They do this in places like Thomas A. Edison CTE High School and the Harbor School in New York, RioTECH in New Mexico, the New Lexington School District in Ohio, and the countless other great career-connected learning programs I have visited. Students engage in programs from skilled trades to health care to advanced manufacturing. They take part in internships and work-based learning, they receive industry certification in their areas of study, and many earn college credits.<\/p>\n I recently had an incredible full-circle moment. In 2016, the AFT, through our Innovation Fund, gave the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers a grant to work with the district to start an emergency medical services (EMS) program at Westinghouse Academy. I recently returned to Westinghouse and saw that today the program is thriving and offering students pathways into firefighting, law enforcement, and EMS.<\/p>\n CTE students build things. They troubleshoot and fix things. They work in teams. They can explain what they\u2019re doing and why they\u2019re doing it. No wonder they have great job prospects, whether or not they go to college. This is why the AFT is such an evangelist for career-connected learning. A full 93 percent of students who concentrate in CTE graduate, and 91 percent of graduates who earn two or three CTE credits continue on to college. This pedagogy prepares students as much for college as it does for careers. Let\u2019s make it the norm for all students.<\/p>\n The ten-point plan I laid out today is grounded in what I\u2019ve witnessed firsthand over the last three decades. The plan addresses the enormity of the tech earthquake by dealing with screens and student-facing AI; creating an enforceable privacy standard for the use of AI in schools; calling for deep, classroom-relevant research in education; insisting on protections for intellectual property and academic freedom; and demanding a tech tax to compensate the country for AI\u2019s consequences.<\/p>\n We need a relentless, intentional focus on what our young people need: greater literacy, numeracy, and civic engagement, and active learning that excites and engages them, as well as social and mental well-being and the ability to form healthy relationships. Devices down, eyes up, hands-on.<\/p>\n Parents want their kids to be engaged and well prepared. Young people want school to be relevant and interesting. Employers are desperate for talent. And America is crying out for a unifying vision.<\/p>\n America\u2019s teachers\u2014as they always have\u2014are doing noble work. They\u2019re showing up every day to help young people realize their potential and build our collective future. Today\u2019s students will be the ones who heal, help, and lead us. They will be the environmental stewards, the innovators, the artists, the first responders, and the teachers of tomorrow. The other side is trying to exploit the current crisis to destroy public education and pluralism as we know it. We have a different vision: to revitalize and reimagine public schools so every one of our students can harness their future and build the country they dream of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are in an era of massive disruption. Artificial intelligence is triggering seismic shifts in virtually every aspect of society. The affordability crisis is squeezing working- and middle-class families and pushing those living in poverty over the edge. Addictive technology and social media platforms are deepening anxiety and depression\u2014especially among our youth. People with enormous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1845,1019,1017,1554,1061,1051],"class_list":["post-16546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-education","tag-features","tag-schools","tag-symposium","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16546"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16627,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16546\/revisions\/16627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16524,"date":"2026-09-15T20:18:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16524"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:18:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:14","slug":"tell-america-the-truth-about-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/tell-america-the-truth-about-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tell America the Truth About Literacy"},"content":{"rendered":" Historically, Washington\u2019s primary approach to improving literacy has been grantmaking. Congress appropriates money. The Department of Education launches a new initiative with a name like Reading First, which eventually gives way to Striving Readers, which is followed by Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants. Advocates lobby feverishly over curricula and methods. States compete for funding. Then we all wait for the next round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results to learn whether any of it worked. In most cases, little of it has. Reading achievement has fallen for students of all ages. In 2024, 40 percent of fourth graders performed below the NAEP Basic level, a benchmark for functional literacy. In 2015, that figure was just 32 percent. Among eighth graders, the share of readers below the Basic level rose during the same period from 24 percent to 33 percent. Among high school seniors, it increased from 25 percent to 32 percent. Millions of young people are graduating from our schools without the reading skills necessary to thrive in college, careers, or civic life.<\/p>\n The next President should reject the idea that literacy is just another issue for sloganeering and photo ops. It is a democratic fundamental. Citizens must be able to evaluate competing arguments, distinguish facts from misinformation, understand laws, and participate thoughtfully in public discussions and elections. Reading is the foundation upon which self-government rests.<\/p>\n The next administration should make literacy its defining education priority\u2014not by creating another federal grant competition or prescribing a national curriculum, but by changing what national leadership looks like. The President should set clear goals for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade reading; report progress to the country every year; publicly recognize states and communities that make exceptional gains; and build the information infrastructure needed to understand why reading achievement rises or falls. Washington should not tell every teacher how to teach. It should make literacy impossible to ignore, success impossible to miss, and failure impossible to explain away.<\/p>\n American presidents have long used the White House to define our national ambitions. John F. Kennedy challenged us to land on the moon. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Ronald Reagan promised a new era of economic growth. More recently, presidents have rallied the country around cancer research, domestic manufacturing, and energy independence.<\/p>\n Literacy belongs on that list.<\/p>\n Compared to just a decade ago, our country has many more struggling young readers. They will likely grow into adults who struggle to identify locations on a map, understand instructions to report for jury duty, or follow steps to fast before a medical test. They will live in fear of being asked to read in front of others. They will know some words by sight but will be unable to read sentences fluently.<\/p>\n Reading is often framed in economic terms. Strong literacy improves earnings, expands opportunity, and strengthens the workforce. On the other hand, over 40 percent of low-literacy adults live in poverty<\/a>. But beyond ensuring its people can earn a living, a constitutional republic relies on an even more demanding premise: Ordinary citizens must be capable of governing themselves.<\/p>\n The founders understood this. Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry was indispensable to liberty. Horace Mann later described education as the \u201cgreat equalizer.\u201d They shared a belief that democracy works only when citizens possess the intellectual tools to exercise judgment.<\/p>\n Reading is the most critical of those tools. Civic participation requires more than decoding words. Informed voters must compare claims from different sources, recognize when evidence supports a conclusion, and distinguish reporting from advocacy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)\u2014a test of how well 15-year-olds can apply reading, math, and science knowledge to real-world problems\u2014defines the highest-performing readers as those able to comprehend lengthy texts and distinguish fact from opinion using cues about content and sources. Only 14 percent of American students demonstrated that level of performance on the 2022 exam<\/a>.<\/p>\n Strong literacy does not guarantee good civic judgment. But without it, citizens will be poorly equipped to recognize when, for instance, a seemingly legitimate piece of writing has been generated by artificial intelligence specifically to manipulate them. This will be an even larger problem in 2029 as material produced or refracted by AI becomes cheaper and easier to proliferate at a large scale.<\/p>\n The next President will inherit a country drowning in information. Opportunities to mistake propaganda for truth will abound. Literacy will be our first defense against manipulation.<\/p>\n The United States is not starting from zero. On PISA 2022, American students scored above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average in reading. But having an \u201cabove average\u201d score compared to other member countries in the international group is not the proper ambition for the world\u2019s first constitutional democracy. If our GDP were merely \u201cabove average,\u201d our economic heft would be closer to Italy\u2019s than to what it is today. We can aim higher. We can seek to become the world leader in literacy.<\/p>\n Other countries have shown that prioritizing stronger literacy outcomes can improve performance. For example, in 2011, Ireland adopted a ten-year national literacy and numeracy strategy<\/a> with explicit performance targets, changes to curriculum and teacher support, and regular national measurement. On PISA 2022, Irish 15-year-olds scored 516 out of 1,000 in reading, tying for second among 81 participating education systems and placing first among European Union countries.<\/p>\n Estonia is another success story. Since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it has built a coherent national system that combines a demanding national curriculum with unusually high levels of school and teacher autonomy. Estonia\u2019s 15-year-olds scored 511 in reading on PISA 2022, 29 points above the OECD average and among the strongest results in Europe. Just as importantly, strong performance is nearly ubiquitous. Estonia has one of the smallest gaps in achievement between schools of any country in the world.<\/p>\n Ireland and Estonia do not offer a blueprint the United States can simply copy. But they do demonstrate that democratic nations can decide literacy is a national priority, organize around improving it, and achieve better results than the United States has today.<\/p>\n While the nuts and bolts of reading instruction belong to teachers, schools, states, and districts, presidents define our national priorities\u2014and the executive branch can lead the country toward better results.<\/p>\n Already, the federal government tracks unemployment monthly. Inflation and economic growth are measured quarterly. Public health agencies monitor disease outbreaks in real time. These indicators determine government action. Our federal assessment of literacy, on the other hand, is given just once every two years.<\/p>\n The next administration should treat literacy as seriously as it treats the economy. It should establish clear national goals for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade reading. By fourth grade, children should be independent readers. By eighth grade, they should be able to comprehend more complex academic material. And by twelfth grade, young adults should be leaving school prepared for college, careers, and citizenship.<\/p>\n The targets should be ambitious enough to inspire action while remaining tethered to what high-performing states and school systems have already demonstrated. They should include progress at the top and the bottom: more students reaching true proficiency, fewer students trapped in functional illiteracy, and narrower gaps based on family income.<\/p>\n Every January, the President should release a plain-English Presidential Literacy Report Card and devote five minutes during the State of the Union to updating Congress and the country on the reading progress of America\u2019s elementary, middle, and high school students. That report card should include readiness across grades, gaps by income, the states making the most progress, and leading indicators that help explain whether the country is moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n This information would be much easier for the public to understand than debates over funding formulas or competing philosophies about phonics. It would create organic accountability without prescribing exactly how states or districts should improve.<\/p>\n Just as importantly, presidents should celebrate success. Winning strategies should become national case studies rather than local news. This would be an inversion of the typical role of federal education policy, which has often focused on chastising failure and requiring intervention in jurisdictions whose progress lags. Let\u2019s build something more like a lunar landing and less like the IRS.<\/p>\n A critical weakness in America\u2019s literacy strategy is a shortage of timely information.<\/p>\n This void is especially noteworthy because federal agencies produce astonishingly detailed data about nearly every other important sector of American life. We know how many jobs the economy created last month. We know whether inflation rose by one-tenth of a percentage point or two-tenths. We have data on crop yields, housing starts, consumer confidence, manufacturing output, retail sales, and warehouse inventories. We can estimate how much orange juice is likely to cost months from now.<\/p>\n Yet we cannot answer basic questions about reading instruction in America\u2019s schools. What literacy curricula are schools using? How much sustained reading are students doing inside and outside the classroom? How are teachers being prepared to teach reading? Which professional learning models are most effectively improving classroom practice? Which students are receiving timely intervention when they fall behind? Which states are best at implementing literacy instruction\u2014and how do they do it?<\/p>\n Without answers to these questions, federal policymakers often operate like physicians attempting to treat patients without access to their vital signs. The NAEP eventually tells us whether achievement has risen or fallen, but it does not tell us enough about why.<\/p>\n No President would accept that level of blindness in economic policy. It would be impossible to lead. We should not accept it for literacy either.<\/p>\n The next administration should create America\u2019s first National Literacy Intelligence System. The phrase may sound technocratic, but the purpose is simple: help the country learn faster, not comply harder.<\/p>\n In practice, this means a public dashboard that reports on both outcomes and leading indicators. Measures could include NAEP results; student and teacher surveys; state implementation trends; curriculum-use maps; data on teacher preparation, intervention access, and attendance patterns; and other indicators that predict future reading achievement.<\/p>\n The goal should not be federal control over classrooms. States and districts would continue making instructional decisions. The federal government would focus on creating a better understanding of what is happening across the country and why.<\/p>\n Fortunately, much of the necessary infrastructure already exists. The NAEP regularly measures student achievement through national student samples. The National Center for Education Statistics administers large-scale surveys. Federal agencies possess deep expertise in data collection, sampling, and reporting. The challenge is modernizing and synthesizing an outdated architecture.<\/p>\n Student surveys, for example, should be updated to provide richer information about reading habits, digital media consumption, independent reading, and instructional experiences. Teacher surveys should collect more granular information about preparation, curriculum implementation, professional learning, instructional materials, and classroom practice.<\/p>\n States should have opportunities to report which literacy initiatives they have adopted and how implementation is progressing. Curriculum use should be measured systematically rather than anecdotally. Teacher preparation programs ought to report how candidates are being equipped to teach reading. The next administration should explore making that reporting a requirement for receiving federal funding.<\/p>\n Modern data infrastructure means much of this information could be collected digitally at far lower cost than was possible even a decade ago. Regular releases would help the country identify patterns. For example, if independent reading suddenly declines nationwide, leaders should know within months, not years. If implementation of a promising curriculum accelerates achievement in multiple states, policymakers should help other states learn from that success promptly. Conversely, if warning signs arise across multiple indicators, leaders should not have to wait for the next generation of students to pay the price before recognizing the problem.<\/p>\n Any serious federal literacy agenda must respect the reality that schools are local institutions. Washington should not attempt to turn reading instruction into another national compliance exercise. But respecting federalism does not require national indifference. The federal government can set goals without dictating methods. It can collect information without interfering in classrooms. It can identify success without requiring every state to copy the plans of higher-performing peers.<\/p>\n The most useful role for the federal government is to create conditions that accelerate learning. When a state like Mississippi makes extraordinary gains\u2014its ranking on the fourth-grade NAEP improved from forty-ninth to ninth between 2013 and 2024 after the state launched initiatives to improve curriculum, instruction, and student support\u2014others should know what changed. When implementation falls apart and results suffer, leaders should be able to correct course before millions more children pass through broken systems.<\/p>\n The United States does not need another decade in which every literacy debate begins from scratch. Research and practice have already given us substantial guidance about how children learn to read, where schools often struggle, and what kinds of support teachers need. The urgent challenge is not simply to win another argument. It is to produce better results at national scale.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s top PISA performer is Singapore, with a 2022 reading score of 543. Imagine the benefits that would accrue to the United States if we matched or exceeded that figure. It would mean higher earnings for workers and fewer Americans trapped in cyclical poverty. Today, we have more very poor readers (approximately one in five students) than advanced readers (one in seven). By raising our PISA score to 543, we would flip that relationship, meaning more students would be able to understand complex documents, succeed in college without remedial courses, and complete advanced workforce training.<\/p>\n More importantly, we would substantially increase the share of Americans with the tools for democratic judgment. Fluent readers can comprehend most of what they consume. But only advanced readers can skillfully scrutinize arguments and compare validity across multiple sources and perspectives\u2014exactly what we need our citizens to do.<\/p>\n For generations, presidents\u2019 education legacies have been measured by landmark legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and No Child Left Behind in 2002. The next great accomplishment in education should not be a sweeping law. It should be establishing literacy as a defining national imperative and creating the public infrastructure to pursue it successfully.<\/p>\n In 2029, our next President will inherit a country drowning in words but starving for understanding. AI will make text easier to produce\u2014and harder to trust. Public debate will be faster, louder, and more polluted with machine-generated material. In that world, literacy is a prerequisite for democratic survival.<\/p>\n Washington does not need to overstep its bounds to improve literacy. It needs to do what only the federal government can do: Set a national ambition, tell the country the truth about progress, make success visible, and build the public information infrastructure that allows states to learn from one another at the speed children deserve.<\/p>\n America should aspire to become the most literate country in the world. That begins with a President willing to say so\u2014and to be measured by whether it happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Historically, Washington\u2019s primary approach to improving literacy has been grantmaking. Congress appropriates money. The Department of Education launches a new initiative with a name like Reading First, which eventually gives way to Striving Readers, which is followed by Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants. Advocates lobby feverishly over curricula and methods. States compete for funding. Then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1293,1019,1017,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-children","tag-education","tag-features","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16527,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16524\/revisions\/16527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16532,"date":"2026-09-15T20:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16532"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:08","slug":"a-department-of-education-and-then-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/a-department-of-education-and-then-some\/","title":{"rendered":"A Department of Education\u2014And Then Some"},"content":{"rendered":" American children are in trouble. After generations of improvement, test scores are declining<\/a> and fewer<\/a> children are showing up to class. COVID-19 knocked school systems off-kilter, disrupting the steady progress of knowledge and skills. Bad science has infected reading instruction<\/a> in the early grades, while national leaders have largely given up<\/a> on holding schools accountable for their performance. Meanwhile, kids are melting into their damn phones. A serious nation would give this crisis the attention it deserves. Instead, education officials are scrambling to decipher a new federal law in which (deep breath) people can get a dollar-for-dollar federal income tax credit on the first $1,700 they donate to a state-approved 501(c)(3) scholarship-granting organization that provides grants to children for almost any K-12 educational expense one could think of other than<\/em> the basic cost of attending their local public school. If that seems weirdly complicated, it\u2019s supposed to be. The tax credit shell game is meant to obscure what is, plainly, a private school voucher program.<\/p>\n Vouchers have a long, research-backed track record of altering student achievement. Unfortunately, they make it worse. The Brookings Institution notes<\/a>, \u201cIn Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations\u2014extremely high by education policy standards\u2014with declines that persisted for years.\u201d Other states have shown similar results.<\/p>\n The gargantuan American public education system is famously resistant to interventions of all kinds, so it\u2019s a testament to how much of a sham vouchers have proven to be that they sit alongside a global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans on the short list of surefire ways to hurt student learning. Naturally, the Trump Administration decided to spend tens of billions of dollars to make school vouchers more accessible nationwide. While President Donald Trump says<\/a> the tax credits will help children \u201ctrapped in failing government schools,\u201d the evidence from similar state-financed programs suggests the main beneficiaries will likely be well-off families that get a subsidy for pricey private school tuition they would have paid anyway (or, as recently occurred in Arizona\u2019s voucher program, tickets to Hamilton<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n The rest of the Trump education agenda amounts to wanton vandalism. Since taking office in early 2025, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has tried her best to destroy the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Nearly half of all ED employees resigned, were pushed into retirement, or were laid off or fired during Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) purge of the federal workforce. Whole units were abolished. Many of the remaining divisions were transferred to other federal agencies. ED\u2019s \u201cfinal mission,\u201d McMahon has said, is its own dismemberment plan.<\/p>\n While McMahon repeatedly pledged to send money and authority \u201cback to the states,\u201d she mostly sent them a few hundred yards away to other buildings in Washington, D.C., at great bureaucratic expense. Much of special education was transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), putting it under the purview of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who believes, wrongly, that a common weedkiller is turning male frogs<\/a>\u2014and therefore human boys\u2014into girls. The Trump Administration promised to balance the federal budget by reducing fraud, yet McMahon shut down<\/a> the ED division responsible for fraud prevention. In the name of reducing waste, DOGE wasted millions of dollars by cancelling research projects that were already years underway. An official department spokesperson urged Americans to \u201cmake education great again\u201d by posting a photo of an all-white Virginia classroom taken during the state\u2019s massive resistance to racial desegregation.<\/p>\n The actual solution to turning around U.S. education should match the scale of the challenge. Compared to those in other countries, the American education system is highly decentralized, leaving many local schools isolated and impoverished. Privatization and federal abandonment will make this even worse. The care and education of children stand as signal national responsibilities without national resources to match. Interstate highways are built the same everywhere. The armed forces defend us all. Health care, while uneven, stands on a foundation of federal insurance. Colleges and universities receive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal research grants, need-based financial aid, and student loans. America\u2019s children, our legacy and our future, need to learn. Yet for this greatest shared obligation, we have, as one nation, done the least.<\/p>\n In that sense, Trump\u2019s nihilistic education agenda offers a kind of mirror-image roadmap for the next President. Rather than shrink the U.S. Department of Education or do away with it altogether, we should make it three times bigger. Federal programs serving children shouldn\u2019t be cut to pieces and dispersed among far-flung agencies with no expertise in education; they should be gathered in one place, to support the whole continuum of child development. We need more than just a Department of Education. We need a Department of Children and Learning.<\/strong><\/p>\n T<\/span>he Department of Children and Learning (DCL) would do everything ED is charged with by statute while incorporating children\u2019s programs currently located in other federal agencies, including the school lunch benefits located at the Department of Agriculture and the Head Start and child-care programs housed at the Department of Health and Human Services. As any parent can tell you, health, nutrition, and learning all go together.<\/p>\n The DCL would be organized around three main purposes: funding, research, and civil rights. Its mission would be ensuring that foundational education services and the latest scientific findings and technological advances are available to all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Existing programs that don\u2019t contribute to this core mission would be replaced.<\/p>\n This ambitious agenda will require more money and more people. But it\u2019s worth saying first what the DCL will not <\/em>be, particularly with respect to \u201clocal control.\u201d When asked, most people favor local control of public education. The Trump Administration cites the importance of local control as their main reason for chopping ED to bits. As a phrase, its potency lies in its appeal to the natural human feeling of intense parental responsibility. If you believe, correctly, that your most important purpose in life is the safety and prosperity of your children, you will be naturally attracted to an idea that seems to give you agency in shaping their education.<\/p>\n But as it is practiced in U.S. education, \u201clocal control\u201d is a false promise. It means that local school districts\u2014and in the privatization era, individual families\u2014are left alone to search and struggle for enough resources to purchase what an indifferent and unforgiving market chooses to provide. It means that students destined to compete in a global economy are tied down by how much money their neighbors happen to pay in property taxes. It condemns teachers to crumbling buildings and outdated curricula. It means that the various institutions charged with the care and education of children don\u2019t communicate, coordinate, or collaborate. \u201cLocal control\u201d is a long con. It exploits parental anxiety by pretending to give people power, then leaves them feeling individually responsible for our collective failure.<\/p>\n Local communities have the right and responsibility to decide who will teach their children and lead their public schools. Those accountable for school performance should be as close to parents and voters as possible. Critical organizational decisions shouldn\u2019t be routed through a central bureaucracy in Washington. State governments ultimately determine academic standards for their children. At the same time, all local school districts should have enough money to hire great teachers who are versed in the latest research findings and empowered by the newest education technologies. And all children should have equal rights to a free, high-quality education tailored to their specific strengths and needs, regardless of their race, family income, native language, immigration status, or disability.<\/p>\n The DCL should expand on ED\u2019s current mission but not be bound by its past limitations and mistakes. During the testing-and-accountability era from 2002 to 2015, schools with low scores were required to submit paperwork promising to improve\u2026somehow. It didn\u2019t work very well. No organization ever achieved greatness by filling out a form. ED has also been draped with a net of small, congressionally mandated programs that lack enough money to matter. No one is satisfied with America\u2019s educational progress during the four decades since ED was created. But the solution is to build a bigger, better department with the tools, expertise, and resources to do the job right.<\/p>\n Congress would need to pass legislation creating the DCL, as it did when multiple agencies were consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. The political calculus is more plausible than it might seem. Only one-quarter of adults<\/a>\u2014and barely half of Republicans\u2014support the evisceration of ED. Ideological convictions tend to fade when you\u2019re struggling to help your child with a learning disability. And every member of Congress has constituents who are struggling to pay for child care and want to send their children to good public schools.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he DCL\u2019s funding mission should be rooted in the understanding that U.S. public schools have always been unduly and unusually influenced by private wealth. As I wrote previously in these pages<\/a>, the nation\u2019s patchwork of 14,000 public school districts was shaped over decades by a combination of deliberate racism, laissez-faire economics, and the political power of wealthy families. As a result, children today are divided by class and race into educational haves and have-nots. A more balanced financial model, one that splits funding responsibility between state and federal governments like the health-care system does, could make up some of those disparities. But the only way to truly give every child a fair chance at educational opportunity is to redraw<\/a> school district boundaries themselves, or to make them much less meaningful as dividers of opportunity. The DCL would provide states with large financial incentives to distribute their own state and local resources fairly.<\/p>\n The new department would also coordinate federal efforts to help parents of young children pay for high-quality child care, so that parents can afford to work and children can start school on a level playing field. As with many federal programs for children, existing efforts like Head Start and child-care block grants, both administered by HHS, are well meaning but too small to serve more than a small fraction of the families in need. They should be rolled into a much larger federal program that provides parents with the choice of free, high-quality, licensed child care or a direct monthly financial subsidy for families who choose to care for their children at home or by paying a relative or trusted caregiver.<\/p>\n The DCL\u2019s research mission would be to bring education science and scholarship on par with health care, where it belongs. The annual budget for the National Institutes of Health is nearly $50 billion. The budget for the Institute of Education Sciences is less than $1 billion\u2014or was, until it was DOGE-d into near oblivion. The United States spends north of a trillion dollars per year on elementary and secondary education, plus hundreds of billions more for college. The effectiveness of that investment is remarkably underexamined. Financing research is exactly the kind of activity that the federal government has historically excelled at\u2014limited in purpose, but massive in scale. The goal would be to build a new generation of educational researchers charged with identifying the most effective curricula, teaching practices, and uses of technology.<\/p>\n The core civil rights function of the DCL would be ensuring that the benefits of additional financial resources and new knowledge accrue to the most vulnerable people. There\u2019s a reason that many of the most historic civil rights battles have been fought at the schoolhouse door. Knowledge is power, kept by the powerful. The promises made by Brown v. Board of Education <\/em>in the 1950s and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the 1970s are still, today, only partially fulfilled. The Trump Administration gave up<\/a> on enforcing desegregation orders mandated by federal civil rights law and Brown v. Board <\/em>and closed seven of the 12 regional offices of ED\u2019s Office for Civil Rights before moving enforcement of civil rights out of the department entirely. The DCL would make sure that racial segregation in education is consigned to the nation\u2019s shameful past. It would also modernize the often frustrating and bureaucratic system for enforcing student\u2019s rights under the IDEA and ensure that immigrant children receive the public education they are entitled to under law.<\/p>\n The DCL would be organized to excel at these three core missions, with the understanding that learning doesn\u2019t only take place inside the classroom. Recent research<\/a> from the nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute found that students learn more from a \u201ccommunity schools\u201d strategy that integrates mental health services, nutrition, and health care with the help of parents and after-school organizations. That\u2019s a comprehensive, guaranteed support system that is exactly the opposite of giving parents private school vouchers and tax credits to buy whatever random, uncoordinated services the private market chooses to supply. Programs that feed schoolchildren, like the school lunch program, would be run by the DCL. So would programs that prepare kids for school, like Head Start.<\/p>\n A big, bold Department of Children and Learning is needed for more than just ensuring that the workers of tomorrow can compete in an unforgiving global labor market. Democracy itself is at stake. Historically, public schools are where Americans of different backgrounds come together by learning together. With shared purpose, we become a people able to weather disagreement and build a multifaceted country. Today, measures of cohesion and patriotism are all moving in the wrong direction. The privatized, market-driven, hyperlocal education agenda being pushed by Trump and his allies is worse than a mere plan for educational mediocrity and private profit. It is a surrender to the forces of crude tribalism and an abdication of our responsibility to advance the grand American vision of true pluralistic democracy.<\/p>\n The next President will inherit a country of polarized ideologies. But she or he will also lead a nation with common needs. When it comes to education, parents of all political stripes mostly want the same thing: a safe, well-organized, effective public school nearby in their community. We have never really tried to organize our national policies around fulfilling that goal. Now\u2019s the time to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" American children are in trouble. After generations of improvement, test scores are declining and fewer children are showing up to class. COVID-19 knocked school systems off-kilter, disrupting the steady progress of knowledge and skills. Bad science has infected reading instruction in the early grades, while national leaders have largely given up on holding schools accountable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1571,1019,1017,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-department-of-education","tag-education","tag-features","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16532"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16540,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16532\/revisions\/16540"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16537,"date":"2026-09-15T20:18:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16537"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:18:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:00","slug":"tackling-the-youth-mental-health-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/tackling-the-youth-mental-health-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling the Youth Mental Health Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":" Few people have been untouched by the troubling and enduring youth mental health crisis. Already significant before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has only worsened since. This challenge crosses party lines, social strata, and culture. If you were to ask a representative group of parents to raise a hand if they had a kid suffering at home, nearly half the hands would go up. In 2023, four in ten high school students reported<\/a> persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, with two in ten seriously contemplating suicide. Add an LGBTQ+ identity and the latter number goes up<\/a> to almost four in ten. With more kids coming out these days, we know that being LGBTQ+ is certainly not rare. We also know that when they receive love, acceptance, and support, these young people tend to thrive. Suicidal ideation for students of color is like that of white students, but the risk for girls (27 percent) is far greater<\/a> than it is for boys (14 percent). As for the parents, remember that saying about how you can only be as happy as your least happy child? It\u2019s not only the kids who are suffering. While many are studying the contributors to this crisis, with potential culprits including<\/a> climate change, growing socioeconomic inequality, and isolation due to increased screen time, the research on resilience points us to both risk factors and protective factors that can help us make headway in solving the crisis. Boosting young people\u2019s protective factors is one way to improve their mental health, and one potent protective factor consists of attending a good school that will enhance the student\u2019s connections with others. How does one define a \u201cgood school\u201d? A good school feels safe and appropriately challenging, and it is filled with people whom the child looks forward to seeing, whether they\u2019re peers or staff members. A good school engenders a sense of belonging and acceptance while insisting that the kids work hard and behave with respect and integrity. A good school helps kids<\/a> learn to work well together and to form friendships. Academic and social success breed positive mental health.<\/p>\n How do we build these good schools? Thankfully, years of research on the topic has already provided the answer. We know the essential ingredients<\/a> for creating and running schools that help students succeed academically and emotionally. Now we need a bold national investment to implement them across the country. Here is a cohesive blueprint that the next President can promote to improve our schools and help solve the youth mental health crisis.<\/p>\n It starts with instruction. One of the most hopeful promises of our democracy is a well-educated populace, which means that all students need access to high-quality and comprehensive curricula. In the public schools, all means all<\/em>. For the instruction to hit home for all our youth, the curriculum needs to be meaningful to them, to their situation, to their culture, to their needs. This is why culturally responsive instruction<\/a> is important. This is when teachers seek to learn about and build relationships with students and families whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own. When the instruction effectively considers the circumstances and characteristics of the learner, kids dial in. Paired with high expectations and equitable policies that eliminate barriers to success, curricula that acknowledge the diversity of students as valuable to the learning process provide everyone with a true shot at becoming educated, pursuing a hopeful future, and living a healthy, productive life.<\/p>\n Truly meeting students where they are in their learning and mental health requires deftness, skills, and organization. The schools that get it right<\/a> integrate their academic and mental\/behavioral health supports, delivering evidence-based multi-tiered systems of support that make access to the right level of assistance possible through valid and timely screening and assessment. School leadership teams analyze data to determine the learning and social\/emotional needs of each student, using a variety of classroom and standardized assessments. Students who are struggling get noticed. Their needs are evaluated, and tailored interventions are provided. Their progress is monitored efficiently and at regular intervals, with the results informing whether the intervention is working, whether it needs to be intensified or changed, or whether the student has improved and can be released from the targeted intervention process.<\/p>\n This multi-tiered approach is an especially powerful way of ensuring that all children\u2019s mental health needs are met. We know that there are simply too many suffering kids to help every one of them on a one-to-one basis. And even if we had an endless supply of qualified mental health professionals in schools, not everyone needs individual counseling. Most kids will be happy enough if they have friends and are successful in school or some other performance-related endeavor, such as sports or the arts. Achieving these two feats will not be enough to cure every child\u2019s mental health problems, but it will help a lot of them by arming them with kinship and self-esteem.<\/p>\n Inspired schools chase a positive school climate. The research on this is especially strong. Schools that invest time, energy, and resources in analyzing their environment find that when their school climate ratings increase, the changes are palpable. Kids end up wanting to go to school because they trust and like their teachers, their peers treat them decently, they have friends, and they enjoy being part of the community. Attendance rises, disciplinary actions and suspensions plummet, faculty morale improves<\/a>, and caregivers start to rave about the school. Even test scores go up. Every parent knows that when your child wants to go to school, everything gets easier.<\/p>\n One important element of a positive school climate is a comprehensive discipline system that utilizes evidence-based and culturally responsive practices to reduce repeat offenses. Such a system incorporates restorative justice<\/a>, reinforces positive behavior, and teaches kids important life lessons in the process. Effective school discipline is clear, consistent, and equitable.<\/p>\n Another paramount concern for parents, students, and staff alike is school safety. We have a rich knowledge base about which practices are most effective for preventing violence, preparing for crises, and intervening when an emergency occurs. The PREPaRE curriculum<\/a> is a comprehensive, evidence-based program developed over the course of two decades by the National Association of School Psychologists that helps schools to strengthen threat assessments and crisis response teams. Employing reasonable physical security measures such as locked entries and close monitoring systems, together with robust school climate efforts that strengthen relationships, increases the likelihood that potential threats will be reported and addressed.<\/p>\n When personnel at schools treat all students with respect, those schools tend to produce successful learners. But in our pluralistic society, it can be a challenge to achieve this blanket of respect, especially against the backdrop of our culture wars. The rights of children are imperiled in many school communities due to oppressive and illegal local policies that promote specific religious practices in schools and deny children rights to their own authentic identities. When schools find a way to establish rules, values, and mores that just about everyone can agree on (it\u2019s kind of hard to argue with respect<\/em> or integrity<\/em>, for example), and then go about incorporating those tenets into behavioral expectations, it elevates the dialogue and helps everyone focus on how to behave, children and adults alike.<\/p>\n It\u2019s particularly challenging for schools to find a way across the divide these days, with parents and staff sometimes identifying with vastly different philosophies. In many locales, the diversity of thought exists both within and between these two groups. When a majority culture or perspective exists in a school community, it can be especially tricky to be inclusive of those who think, identify, or gather differently. School leaders who make this effort in a good-faith way\u2014putting in the work to be accessible, to listen to the concerns of parents, and to promote practices that honor and protect the rights of children\u2014have a good chance of helping all parents<\/a> to feel heard and respected, and thus to be more likely to support their school. When parents are connected to their school, they also have access to school mental health personnel who can provide guidance about topics that affect children\u2019s wellness, such as monitoring social media access, recognizing signs of adolescent depression and anxiety, and improving communication within the family.<\/p>\n Forging school-community partnerships is one way to maximize resources to provide a full range of services for students. There are examples across the country that can be studied and replicated, such as the Comprehensive Behavioral Health Model<\/a> developed by UMass Boston in partnership with Boston Public Schools and Boston Children\u2019s Hospital. In this model, professionals in each of these organizations coordinate funding, resources, and services to provide tiered mental and behavioral health services for schoolchildren.<\/p>\n The next President has the opportunity to launch an initiative that will speak to the millions of parents and other family members who are agonizing over how to help their suffering children. A national investment in policies and resources that strengthen schools\u2019 ability to meet the mental health needs of their students will turn the tide on this problem. The youth mental health crisis affects all of us. A community-based solution is necessary. With 87 percent of our nation\u2019s students attending public schools, that is where learning, growing, and healing can take place. The next President should elevate this conversation and make supporting students\u2019 mental health a national priority.<\/p>\n Schools cannot meet the learning and emotional needs of children and youth without high-quality teachers, principals, and support personnel. But it remains challenging to recruit our brightest and most inspiring individuals into the field and then keep them there, particularly those from diverse backgrounds like those of the children they serve. The next administration should pursue boosting federal funding streams to tackle this problem.<\/p>\n Although most people can agree that schools need to meet the learning needs of students, not everyone believes in the need to fund public schools appropriately, especially if they think the system is broken and can\u2019t be fixed. Thus, accountability measures that assess social elements (e.g., absenteeism) as well as academic ones must be valid and reliable to strengthen the case for funding, especially among those who do not care to open their pocketbooks for public schools their children do not attend, not to mention those conservatives who deem public schools a place for leftist brainwashing.<\/p>\n And the question exists: Why must schools meet the emotional needs of children and teens? Some would say, That\u2019s up to the parents to manage<\/em>. But it was easier to argue this point when smaller percentages of children were struggling with their mental health and loneliness, when fewer children were demonstrating behavioral problems that parents could not for the life of them solve, when there were fewer kids being diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression. Back then, many parents might say that schools should stay out of the mental health realm.<\/p>\n These days, we know that parents need help, and well-staffed schools can make a real difference. The schoolhouse is where approximately 70 percent<\/a> of children access the mental health support they need. When school mental health personnel are staffed at the recommended ratios, children have a better chance of overcoming their emotional, behavioral, and social problems, and parents get the guidance and support they need. Schools that support multidisciplinary collaboration among highly trained professionals to address student needs produce greater percentages of healthy and successful students.<\/p>\n It is important to ensure that school-employed mental health professionals are appropriately trained to provide both prevention and intervention services. School psychologists have such training: They are experts in learning, behavior, mental health, and school systems. The National Association of School Psychologists recommends a staffing ratio of one school psychologist to 500 children. The recommended ratio for both school counselors and school social workers is 1:250. Current data show the national average ratios coming up alarmingly short: 1:1,071 for school psychologists, 1:372 for school counselors, and a sobering 1:2,106 for school social workers.<\/p>\n Efforts to improve staffing ratios of mental health personnel made headway before the current Administration called for a halt last year. Two federal programs, the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program, were passed into law in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Supplemental funding to both programs was authorized<\/a> in 2022, resulting in significant progress in addressing workforce shortages and increasing services to students. The current Administration abruptly discontinued the grants in the spring of 2025. While the Department of Education allocated a new batch of funding later that year, the new grants only amounted to about 20 percent of the canceled funding. The will to address shortages of school mental health personnel exists, even in our divided legislature; funding must be safeguarded and expanded. But grants such as these do not offer a lasting solution. The next President needs to champion legislation that will provide sustained, long-term funding to prevent future shortages.<\/p>\n Achieving these goals requires a strong federal Department of Education that promotes evidence-based instruction and practices while holding states, districts, and schools accountable for improving student outcomes. A new presidential administration in 2029 must reinstate, fully fund, and adequately staff the department so that it can provide guidance, offer technical assistance, and ensure consistent implementation of federal education laws by states and local education agencies. Strong federal leadership can once again make education a national priority, sending a clear message to the nation’s youth: We see you. You matter. And you deserve to go to a good school<\/em>.<\/p>\n By continuing to fund school mental health grant programs through bipartisan action, Congress has signaled a willingness to address the youth mental health crisis. But these investments fall short of what is needed. While reducing staffing ratios is vital, it is equally important to improve access to student loans and provide loan forgiveness incentives for mental health professionals who serve underserved communities.<\/p>\n Bold action is necessary to renew the hopes and health of this young generation, many of whom have withdrawn and succumbed to despair about a future they see as hopeless. The next President must embrace a national strategy that prioritizes healthy students and thriving schools for a strong America. This would be a national investment in our future. Nothing is more important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Few people have been untouched by the troubling and enduring youth mental health crisis. Already significant before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has only worsened since. This challenge crosses party lines, social strata, and culture. If you were to ask a representative group of parents to raise a hand if they had a kid suffering at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1019,1017,1444,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-education","tag-features","tag-mental-health","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16537"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16612,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16537\/revisions\/16612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16552,"date":"2026-09-15T20:17:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16552"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:17:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:17:43","slug":"how-to-rein-in-the-bad-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/how-to-rein-in-the-bad-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Rein in the Bad of AI"},"content":{"rendered":" Ever since the release of ChatGPT rocked the world in November 2022, the topic of students cheating on homework has heavily featured in the public dialogue on education and artificial intelligence. Initially, many schools, districts, and universities banned AI use\u2014a move that bought time for teachers and administrators to learn about the technology and develop their response. This was followed by a flurry of activity, including purchasing plagiarism checkers and updating school \u201cacademic integrity\u201d policies to provide clarity to students and catch those who violate the rules. After leading the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education<\/a>, I am convinced that this focus on cheating in schools is a distraction from the real concerns AI poses for education. From September 2024 to October 2025, my Brookings colleagues and I examined more than 400 studies; interviewed more than 500 students, teachers, parents, and technologists; and ran a Delphi panel (a structured consensus-building research approach used in forecasting), all to help us understand the potential benefits and risks of AI to students\u2019 learning and development. Our question was simple: Is the current rollout of generative AI headed in the right direction when it comes to supporting K-12 students? What we found has implications not just for how our children will learn and grow, but for how well society can cultivate a new generation of citizens.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence has a long history in education, including being used in intelligent tutoring systems that help students understand what the right answer is and why. But the landscape changed in November 2022, when the first large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, arrived for public consumption. Until that point, AI\u2019s job was to help students get to the right answer based on preprogrammed content, as in the popular video game Prodigy Math. In the game, students pick an avatar and can only pass to the next level on their quest once they solve a certain number of math problems correctly. Prodigy Math has a special place in my heart because it kept my fourth-grade son entertained (and learning math) for hours when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n But I would have never let him spend hours playing alone on ChatGPT. Generative AI is fundamentally different because it generates new content<\/em>. It is creative. It communicates with students in their own language (no code needed), interacts as if it were a person, responds to students\u2019 emotional states by mirroring their tone, and from time to time goes completely off the rails (e.g., inventing historical figures, falsely describing events, and encouraging self-harm).<\/p>\n The technology is changing rapidly. Initially, the best description of the generative AI models was that they were powerful word prediction machines. If you typed in \u201cI would like coffee with\u2026\u201d they would almost certainly fill in \u201ccream\u201d or \u201csugar\u201d and not \u201cblueberries\u201d or \u201ccars.\u201d This is because they were trained on so much data that they learned the reasonably common patterns related to any string of words.<\/p>\n At the beginning, the LLMs were toddlers learning everything they possibly could, and human-generated training data was how they grew stronger. This included virtually every single thing that had ever been digitized and placed on the internet, regardless of what the content was or its truthfulness. From New York Times<\/em> articles to conspiracy-inventing Reddit threads, almost all of it went into the training data that powers the models most of us use today. Not long ago, the large AI labs began to worry about running out of training data\u2014they had almost scraped the internet clean of all its accessible data. What other sources could be found?<\/p>\n At least two remain: us and the AIs themselves. The more people use AI chatbots, the more training data we give the AI labs for training their models. And now, labs are beginning to have AI models themselves generate new data<\/a> to train on. We have entered a world where AIs train AIs\u2014the Wild West of AI development.<\/p>\n Across the United States, students are accessing AI in a myriad of ways. According to a national survey<\/a> conducted by the College Board, 84 percent of high school students say they use AI for schoolwork. If they are over 13, many can access general-purpose AI chatbots or AI friends by directly creating accounts\u2014Anthropic\u2019s Claude is the only popular model to currently state that users must be 18 or older. In practice, young people can make up a fake birthday. In fact, in 2025, the global usage of ChatGPT fell dramatically<\/a> during the summer months, when schools and universities were out of session. AI is now also embedded across digital platforms that children frequent, so many access generative AI via their social media feeds. If children have a Snapchat account, they can activate \u201cMy AI,\u201d an AI friend that is built on top of general-purpose AI chatbots. In my research, students report<\/a> using My AI and other social media chatbots, like Meta AI, to do their homework for them.<\/p>\n In school, students may be accessing powerful general-purpose AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, through their school-issued laptops or tablets. That is often not school-sanctioned. More likely, they are interacting with AI that has been crafted to assist with very specific educational content. Educators are beginning to experiment with creative uses such as education-specific AI chatbots embedded in digital textbooks or worksheets. Students who read the content but are confused can ask an embedded AI chatbot to explain it a different way. Or students can receive feedback from an AI chatbot that a teacher has developed specifically for a writing assignment, allowing them to improve their essays before they turn them in. In Singapore, students regularly get feedback on punctuation and grammar<\/a> from an educational AI while teachers concentrate their feedback on the substance of students\u2019 writing, from voice to style to argument. Students have also started taking virtual field trips with the help of AI-supported virtual reality simulations, going to places they could not otherwise visit.<\/p>\n With such a complex web of AI interactions, assessing the potential benefits and risks of generative AI to children\u2019s learning and development was no easy task. Ultimately, we found that the difference lies in what Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology frequently calls \u201cnarrow\u201d versus \u201cwide\u201d AI use.<\/p>\n Narrow AI use includes the tools created for very specific educational use cases (e.g., essay feedback, virtual field trips) and can provide a range of benefits to students\u2014first and foremost, by supporting their teachers. Studies in the United States find that teachers estimate they save close to six hours a week<\/a> thanks to AI by improving things like the efficiency of their administrative tasks. The American Federation of Teachers has established the National Academy for AI Instruction with the financial backing of large AI companies. The institute, whose advisory board I sit on, is tool-agnostic (it does not promote the tools of the companies that help fund it and trains teachers on a wide range of AI tools) and dedicated to helping teachers learn about AI but also, and more importantly, empowering them to lead the way in finding creative AI uses that improve education. From saving time on administrative tasks to finding new ways to assess students\u2019 learning\u2014a notoriously difficult task for educators\u2014to providing AI-powered assistive learning technology for students with learning differences, there is a range of real potential benefits from smart deployment of narrow AI use.<\/p>\n The problem is that \u201cwide\u201d AI use\u2014open-ended discussions with general-purpose AI chatbots or AI friends\u2014poses serious potential risks<\/a> for students and undermines the very competencies they need to access the benefits of narrow AI use. Overreliance on general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT bypasses the mental effort needed to build both critical thinking skills and the ability to form supportive relationships. These chatbots are designed for any situation and can quickly become \u201ctell not teach\u201d machines when used by busy or bored students.<\/p>\n While there have been few studies tracking generative AI\u2019s impact on student learning outcomes<\/a> in school, multiple studies using brain scans, pre- and post-tests, interviews, and other methods have examined how students\u2019 and adults\u2019 cognitive functioning is affected by AI use. It turns out that to learn, students must actually practice thinking for themselves. It takes effort. And if they use AI for story ideas, writing, or solving math problems, they ultimately end up retaining little<\/a> of it because they never did the work in the first place.<\/p>\n A flurry of new terms is being used in education discussions to describe the impacts of wide AI use on cognitive functioning: cognitive offloading, cognitive atrophy, cognitive surrender, cognitive debt. I have put forth my own term: cognitive stunting<\/a>. This is the potential risk to developing young minds that I think we have to worry most about. I am afraid that if we do not limit children\u2019s wide AI use, and quickly, they will not develop the skills to transfer or \u201coffload\u201d to AI in the first place. Like with physical stunting\u2014where children\u2019s physical development is held back, most often from lack of nutrients, during crucial periods of their growth\u2014children need to engage in effortful thinking when they are young if they are to grow up to think critically and independently. We do not yet have a clear system for tracking cognitive stunting like we track physical stunting. This is something the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control would be well positioned to develop. In the meantime, anyone who cares for children would be wise to err on the side of caution.<\/p>\n The risk of cognitive stunting is not the only concern stemming from children\u2019s wide AI use. There are also a range of risks to the core foundations of our trusting relationships with other humans. Among U.S. teens who have engaged with AI friends, currently one in three<\/a> says they like talking to their AI friends as much as or more than other human beings. This is in large part by design. General-purpose AI chatbots and friends are used more, and sell better, when they act like an always supportive person. This anthropomorphic and sycophantic design of generative AI means that young people, who can struggle to distinguish the online from the offline world, develop real emotional attachments to AI chatbots. And, most worrisome for anyone who cares about child safety, children\u2019s emotions and real-life behaviors can be influenced by AI chatbots, sometimes to tragic ends<\/a>.<\/p>\n The fear is not just for the individual child who is lonely, withdraws into a relationship with an AI chatbot, distances himself from his family and friends, and in extreme cases takes the advice of the AI chatbot to self-harm. The worry is for a generation of children growing up with a new type of friend: one that will always agree with them, always validate their feelings, and no matter what, always be there for them. Socialization is central to growing up, and encountering people who have different perspectives and views helps young people develop. This socialization is essential not just for their ability to have strong human-to-human relationships across their lives, but also for the teaching and learning process.<\/p>\n Trusting relationships are at the heart of the positive exchange between teacher and student that helps children learn. When relational trust<\/a> increases among families and schools, schools are ten times more likely to improve across a range of measures, including student academic learning outcomes. Our task force found that AI is eroding the trusting relationships that education relies on. Students who are socialized by AI companions may struggle to take feedback when they are wrong, to work effectively in group projects with peers, and to navigate the complex social landscape of a classroom. And if too much focus goes to the problem of cheating, teachers turn from trusted mentors into detectives trying to ferret out AI misuse. This fundamentally erodes the relational trust between teachers and students, shifting the dynamics in schools and undermining their role in developing constructive future citizens.<\/p>\n How can we expect to raise a generation of young people who trust their public institutions, and each other, if they are socialized in schools without trust? Schools do much more than pass on inherited knowledge from one generation to the next. They often serve as one of the first places\u2014and increasingly, in our polarized and isolated world, the only place\u2014where young people regularly interact with community outside of their immediate family and neighbors. Encountering different perspectives, finding ways to forge common understanding, and just plain getting along with others are core to the daily work of teachers and schools. In the best of times, schools serve as engines of social trust creation<\/a>, bringing communities together, reinforcing norms of constructive citizenship, and cultivating civic health. Ultimately, with schools being among the only public institutions present in virtually every community across the country, we should all be worried if AI begins to undermine the trusting relationships fundamental to education.<\/p>\n It is for these reasons that ultimately our task force decided that given current AI implementation, with pervasive wide AI use by children, the technology\u2019s risks at this time overshadow its benefits.<\/p>\n There is much that can be done to diminish the risks of wide AI use and harness the power of narrow use.<\/p>\n First, we must limit the wide use of AI by children. It is unreasonable to put the burden of this task squarely on the shoulders of busy teachers, parents, or even students themselves. Calls to help young people \u201cuse AI responsibly\u201d have their place, but the real need is to ensure that companies produce responsible and ethical AI products. Government action is required, and multiple paths show promise. Ensuring that general-purpose AI chatbots and AI companions have safeguards that limit children\u2019s access is one of the few purple issues on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan legislation abounds, including the proposed Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act, which, among other things, requires age verification for emotionally manipulative AI companion apps. My colleague Gaia Bernstein argues that the FDA can leverage its power to recall harmful products<\/a> to remove damaging AI products from the market. States, districts, and cities can slow down<\/a> the uptake of AI in schools to make sure they get it right. We have seen this across partisan lines from the state of Utah to the cities of New York and Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Second, schools themselves have an important role to play. Instead of focusing on cheating and investing in expensive AI detection tools, they can shift the nature of their assignments. If students can easily hack a homework assignment with a generative AI chatbot, then teachers shouldn\u2019t assign it. Classrooms can use applied learning and assessments that rely on oral presentations, using knowledge to construct a portfolio or project, and just plain old paper and pencil in class exams. These are all good ways to ensure students are not bypassing their learning with AI tools. Plus, teaching that asks students not just to master important knowledge but to use that knowledge to solve real problems helps engage students. This could include harnessing biology to help spruce up a local park or using math to redesign a school playground. When students get the opportunity to spend time in what I call \u201cexplorer mode<\/a>,\u201d they are more motivated, get better grades, and display more prosocial behavior. In this way, teaching and learning transformation does not just limit the risks of AI. It harnesses the very benefits that schools can bring to students and to their communities.<\/p>\n If wide AI use continues to be a feature of the educational experience, we may see the next generation struggle with independent thinking, building relationships, and trust in our civic institutions. But we can bend the arc of AI implementation toward a better future, one in which narrow AI use supports children\u2019s flourishing. The path to this future is hard but doable. It entails the education community shifting teaching so that students cannot bypass actual learning by offloading thinking to AI; local, state, and national governments putting safeguards on children\u2019s AI use; and a broad effort to help families better understand AI and ensure their children engage with it safely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since the release of ChatGPT rocked the world in November 2022, the topic of students cheating on homework has heavily featured in the public dialogue on education and artificial intelligence. Initially, many schools, districts, and universities banned AI use\u2014a move that bought time for teachers and administrators to learn about the technology and develop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1845,1293,1019,1017,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-children","tag-education","tag-features","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16552"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16626,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552\/revisions\/16626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16618,"date":"2026-09-15T20:17:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16618"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:17:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:17:35","slug":"the-schools-our-kids-deserve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/82\/the-schools-our-kids-deserve\/","title":{"rendered":"The Schools Our Kids Deserve"},"content":{"rendered":" Education is often a strange, in-between policy area. It\u2019s top of mind for parents and emotionally resonant with voters (consider COVID-19 school closings), but gets little attention from federal policymakers, especially conservatives interested in devolution and local control. Donald Trump has taken that conservative apathy to its logical conclusion, gutting the Education Department and putting a former professional wrestling executive at its helm. All this is happening as American children\u2019s test scores continue to plummet. So for this installment of our \u201cNext Agenda\u201d series, we wanted to focus not just on repairing recent harms to our education system, but fixing longstanding problems like poor literacy rates and nascent ones like artificial intelligence in schools. The problems are large, but we think these solutions are, too.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Education is often a strange, in-between policy area. It\u2019s top of mind for parents and emotionally resonant with voters (consider COVID-19 school closings), but gets little attention from federal policymakers, especially conservatives interested in devolution and local control. Donald Trump has taken that conservative apathy to its logical conclusion, gutting the Education Department and putting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1920],"tags":[1019,1017,1128,1554,1061],"class_list":["post-16618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1920","tag-education","tag-features","tag-introsymposium","tag-schools","tag-symposium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16631,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16618\/revisions\/16631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":16514,"date":"2026-09-04T17:20:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/?p=16514"},"modified":"2026-09-04T17:20:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:20:05","slug":"here-and-now-unionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/arguments\/here-and-now-unionism\/","title":{"rendered":"Here-and-Now Unionism"},"content":{"rendered":" The years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic presented the ripest conditions for a labor resurgence in generations.<\/p>\n As the country emerged from the acute phase of the pandemic, deferred demand for goods and services pushed unemployment down and shifted power toward workers and away from employers desperate to keep stores staffed and production lines running. Help-wanted signs blanketed fast-food establishments, car dealerships, and big box stores, each one promising higher pay. Workers job-hopped<\/a> by the millions, bidding up wages and contributing to the first period of falling inequality<\/a> in decades. Pandemic relief programs cushioned workers\u2019 accounts as they searched out the best deal\u2014and took risks in the workplace, including by organizing in unlikely quarters.<\/p>\n One of the labor movement\u2019s biggest victories during this time occurred in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the United Auto Workers (UAW) successfully organized a Volkswagen plant in spring 2024. That breakthrough victory, occurring just five years after workers rejected a prior attempt at the same factory, produced widespread coverage documenting labor\u2019s \u201chistoric,\u201d<\/a> \u201cseismic,\u201d<\/a> and \u201cmilestone\u201d<\/a> win, and congratulations<\/a> from the sitting U.S. President, Joe Biden. It also produced roughly 4,000 new dues-paying members, a significant haul for a labor movement that had grown accustomed to playing defense over decades of decline.<\/p>\n Many certainly hoped that the combination of a red-hot labor market, a leader who described himself<\/a> as \u201cthe most pro-union President in American history,\u201d and high-profile victories at name-brand companies between 2021 and 2024 would reverse labor\u2019s steady losses in the private sector. It didn\u2019t. Private-sector union density fell during this period, from 6.1 percent to 5.9 percent, where it sits today.<\/p>\n What was lost amid the fervor about \u201clabor\u2019s resurgence\u201d was the fact that the core barriers to revitalizing unions in the private sector remained firmly in place in the United States, and nearly everywhere else. For what\u2019s exceptional about our labor movement isn\u2019t so much its beleaguered state when it comes to the private sector: It\u2019s how few public-sector<\/em> workers are organized. Private-sector unions have struggled in nearly every single advanced economy for decades now. The good news this Labor Day is that there is room for growth\u2014just not where the movement and its allies have directed so much hope and attention. Instead of focusing on car factories, the movement should target public-sector employees: K-12 teachers, health-care workers, building cleaners, social workers, and others who don\u2019t currently belong to a union but would if they could.<\/p>\n The UAW\u2019s southern march stalled after its Tennessee breakthrough. An election at an Alabama Mercedes plant ended up in a double-digit defeat for the union. The UAW allocated tens of millions of dollars to organize over a dozen other Southern plants, but as of today, the Volkswagen factory stands as its one and only beachhead.<\/p>\n Tellingly, those Volkswagen workers who voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW back in 2024 had to wait nearly two years to secure a union contract. Thousands of Starbucks workers at approximately 700 stores have had to wait even longer. What began with a couple of dozen workers at a handful of Buffalo-area locations voting to unionize back in the winter of 2021 soon metastasized into a nationwide effort. But Starbucks has employed a tried-and-true tactic of delay. Workers at the successfully organized Buffalo Starbucks, for example, have now endured nearly five years of impasse as they await a union contract. Meanwhile, progress in organizing new stores has slowed. Delaying first-contract ratification saps a union of the energy and excitement that sustained the initial drive and slows any momentum the union hopes to use in new campaigns. It\u2019s hard to convince ambivalent workers to join your cause if it takes years for them to enjoy the protections and material benefits unions provide, especially in high-turnover service-sector jobs.<\/p>\n One could go on: Chris Smalls\u2019s successful organizing drive at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in 2022 garnered him a New York <\/em>magazine cover story<\/a> and a White House invitation<\/a>. It did not, however, garner a union contract: Those warehouse workers still remain at a bargaining impasse four years after the employee election to authorize unionization. During the period of \u201clabor resurgence,\u201d Trader Joe\u2019s workers successfully unionized a few stores. But the \u201cprogressive\u201d grocery retailer has fought<\/a> contract ratification at the bargaining table while arguing in court that actions taken by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)\u2014the nearly century-old adjudicating body that governs labor-management relations in the private sector\u2014are unconstitutional, joining other corporate giants<\/a> like SpaceX and Amazon that have made similar claims.<\/p>\n What makes the ongoing attacks on the NLRB odd is that when it comes to efforts to fight off unionization drives, employers have long had the law on their side, and a massive anti-union consulting industry to alert them how best to deploy it. Well before fighting against a first contract, employers routinely subject suspected union sympathizers to surveillance, harassment, and outright termination. During a drive, employers force workers into \u201ccaptive audience meetings\u201d<\/a> warning of the dangers of organizing, including that their jobs would be jeopardized should they vote the union in. Many of these practices are perfectly legal; some aren\u2019t. But firms figure the penalties, such as rehiring a worker fired for pro-union activities and offering back pay, are paltry compared to the costs of dealing with a union.<\/p>\n Beyond employer intransigence and a legal framework tilted heavily in the bosses\u2019 favor, core transnational challenges to private-sector organizing remain firmly in place. Generations back, automation and outsourcing eroded labor\u2019s manufacturing stronghold in the United States and across other advanced economies. The continuing growth of service-sector industries presents labor with numerous organizing challenges. These range from how few workers are employed in many service-sector establishments, to high turnover rates that disrupt momentum during a drive, to the comparative lack of structural power wielded by, for example, workers at a Burger King versus engineers at a key Boeing plant. A strike at the former amounts to a small blip in the firm\u2019s overall revenue as thousands of other outposts keep churning out Whoppers and fries. A strike at the latter immediately costs the company billions while threatening production and delivery schedules for clients like the Pentagon.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, widespread workplace \u201cfissuring\u201d<\/a>\u2014when companies fill jobs through subcontractors and staffing agencies, even for services performed internally, or shift legal responsibility for workers to others by franchising\u2014forces organizers to chase moving targets, and numerous minor ones at that. A small subcontractor providing a few dozen front-desk workers to a name-brand hotel isn\u2019t nearly as appealing or cost-effective a target as a giant steel factory welcoming thousands of employees daily to its gates. Fissuring is now ubiquitous, even among our tech giants. The majority of workers at Google, for example, aren\u2019t actually employed<\/a> by Google.<\/p>\n Another Southern union victory in the spring of 2024 generated far fewer headlines than the UAW\u2019s triumph in Tennessee, and no encouragement from the then-President. It also brought in far more union members. In June, unions representing public-school workers in Fairfax County, Virginia, launched a massive organizing drive, and overnight the public-sector unionization ranks grew by more than 27,000\u2014the equivalent of nearly seven auto plants.<\/p>\n The UAW\u2019s breakthrough in Tennessee wasn\u2019t even its largest recent win. Not by a long shot. A few years prior, the UAW gained 17,000 new members\u2014but these workers weren\u2019t busy churning out the latest SUV. Instead, they were graduate student researchers at California public universities, who formed<\/a> the Student Researchers United affiliate of the UAW.<\/p>\n Despite their size, these labor advances went largely unheralded in the press, and largely unnoticed by pro-labor politicians and other allies. Yet they highlight a major difference in organizing potential in the public versus the private sector today: Public-sector unions can organize workers at scale<\/em>. And these victories also reveal a fundamental fact of today\u2019s public-sector union workforce: It has room to grow.<\/p>\n The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), passed in 1935, governs labor management relations throughout much of the private sector, and over time, private-sector employers have perfected ways to use the law to keep their workplaces union-free. There is no NLRA equivalent in the public sector. On the one hand, this means that anti-union states like South Carolina have great leeway to restrict collective bargaining rights among state and local workers. On the other, less hostile states can establish frameworks to make large-scale organizing efforts comparatively easy. That\u2019s what happened with the Fairfax County educators, who took advantage<\/a> of a statewide measure enacted in 2021 allowing Virginia counties to grant collective bargaining rights to state and local workers. No such measures are needed in more union-friendly states, which already confer widespread bargaining rights to government employees.<\/p>\n The sheer size of recent organizing breakthroughs in Virginia, California, and elsewhere is next to impossible to replicate in the private sector because of how bargaining units are defined differently. Organizing Starbucks requires painstaking and time-intensive organizing efforts\u2014and separate votes\u2014at each of the more than 15,000 outposts, since the NLRA considers bargaining units to be at the establishment level, rather than at the firm or sector level. By contrast, organizing graduate student researchers across dozens of California universities took only campaign because they all share a common employer: the state of California.<\/p>\n Encouragingly for unions looking to replicate these successes, millions of public-sector workers who aren\u2019t in a union would join one if given the opportunity. A 2024 survey<\/a> of 4,000 public-sector workers that I helped conduct found that approximately half of the nonunion workforce would sign up if they had the chance. Importantly, these millions of unorganized workers aren\u2019t concentrated in states that restrict collective bargaining. If anything, nonunion government workers in pro-union states are slightly more receptive to unions than their counterparts in less friendly terrain. Even in the highest-union-density states, a huge swath<\/a> of the public-sector workforce remains unorganized. Only one state in the United States\u2014New York\u2014has a public-sector unionization rate anywhere close to that of Canada.<\/p>\n Closing the gap between public-sector workers\u2019 desire for representation and actual representation rates would bring the United States closer to peer countries when it comes to worker power. Canada\u2019s overall union coverage rate is nearly three times that of the United States, with nearly a third of its total workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements. As in the United States, this overall rate masks enormous differences by sector. But the sectoral differences are even starker in Canada, with its public-sector coverage rate of nearly 80 percent<\/a> compared to 15 percent in the private sector. Public-sector union membership in Great Britain isn\u2019t as high as in Canada, but in 2025 it stood nearly 50 percent higher than in the United States.<\/p>\n Recent scholarship reveals just how significant the passage of \u201cright-to-work\u201d (RTW) legislation has been for the private-sector workforce, union and nonunion alike. Inequality rises after these laws are enacted, while wages for middle- and working-class workers decline<\/a>. The share of workers having to clock long hours climbs<\/a>, and employers get stingier<\/a> in pension provision.<\/p>\n Right-to-work laws ban unions from requiring workers in unionized establishments to join or pay the cost of representation, despite unions\u2019 legal obligation to represent all workers. This encourages free-riding, as employees can enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without bearing any costs. A slight majority of states have passed right-to-work legislation, but unions and their allies have stymied recent efforts to expand the map of RTW terrain, including in red states such as Missouri. The result today is a relatively frozen map after a period of pitched legislative battles in the 2000s and \u201910s.<\/p>\n There\u2019s been no such impasse in the public sector: A 2018 Supreme Court case, Janus v. AFSCME<\/em>, effectively made the entire public sector RTW. Coverage at the time suggested<\/a> the decision would \u201ckneecap\u201d unions that organize government workers, and that the consequences were likely to be permanent<\/a>. Eight years after passage, the nation\u2019s public-sector unionization rate has in fact declined\u2014but only by about a percentage point. In 2017, the last full year prior to implementation of RTW throughout the public sector, just over 34 percent of public-sector workers were organized. In 2025, the last year for which we have complete data on union rolls, just under 33 percent remained union members.<\/p>\n Why Janus<\/em> didn\u2019t prove the death knell for government unions that so many labor supporters feared\u2014and opponents wished for\u2014remains an open question. Certain clues have emerged. First, an earlier and narrower Supreme Court case, Harris v. Quinn<\/em>, foreshadowed<\/a> Janus<\/em>, with the majority opinion signaling the Court was likely to order RTW throughout the public sector in the near future. This tip-off provided unions with advance notice of where the Court was likely heading and time to plan a response. Many unions got to work shoring up existing memberships through aggressive outreach and advertising about the benefits they provide. And second, some states cushioned the blow<\/a> by passing legislation that helped protect public-sector union finances, aided unions with recruitment by providing early access to new employees, and allowed unions to charge nonmembers for representing them in grievance procedures to discourage<\/a> free-riding.<\/p>\n This resilience shows that the challenges posed by RTW can be overcome and shouldn\u2019t be used as an excuse for inaction. After all, one way to limit the impact of free riders is to organize new dues-paying members.<\/p>\n As Janus<\/em> showed, existing outside the strictures of the NLRA does not mean public-sector unions are invulnerable to attacks. Back in 2011, then-Governor Scott Walker signed legislation curtailing the power of public-sector workers in Wisconsin. Over the next decade, the state\u2019s union rolls fell by half. And upon taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump took a hatchet to the federal workforce and to the unions that represent it, \u201caccomplishing the largest individual episode of union busting in U.S. history,\u201d according<\/a> to labor historian Joseph McCartin. First, under the leadership of Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency initiative targeted hundreds of thousands of federal workers for removal. Later, Trump signed Executive Order 14251, which removed collective bargaining rights for a million of the federal workers who remained.<\/p>\n Yet, recent data indicate<\/a> that the unionization rate among federal workers actually increased<\/em> in 2025. The frontal assault may have motivated unorganized workers previously unconvinced that a union was necessary to sign up, blunting the effect of the Administration\u2019s actions. It is too early to assess the long-term effects of Trump\u2019s attack on the federal workforce. But what seems clear today is that Trump\u2019s moves had the unanticipated (and from the Administration\u2019s perspective, unwanted) effect of advertising the protections unions can provide to workers newly worried about their job security.<\/p>\n Over a decade back, longtime labor strategist and writer Richard Yeselson wrote in these pages of the need for the labor movement to practice \u201cfortress unionism\u201d<\/a>: protect and solidify the few remaining union strongholds while waiting until a burst of working-class activism catalyzed new opportunities. As the economy reopened post-pandemic, that activism seemed to arrive; workers job-shopped for better deals in droves, driving up wages and demanding better working conditions. Strike activity surged<\/a>, and organizing campaigns blossomed far beyond labor\u2019s traditional bastions, including at topless bars<\/a> and cannabis dispensaries<\/a>.<\/p>\nA Movement for Transformative and Sustainable Investment<\/strong><\/h6>\n
A Movement for Intentional Collaboration<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Depoliticizing Education<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\n<\/p>\nA Strong Foundation for Students in a Changing World<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\n
A New Vision to Boost Teaching and Learning in the AI Era<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\n
Devices Down, Eyes Up, Hands-On<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\n<\/p>\nLiteracy Is a Democratic Imperative<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Peer Democracies Have Elevated Literacy<\/strong><\/h5>\n
America Needs National Literacy Goals<\/strong><\/h5>\n
We Know More About Orange Juice Than Young Readers<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Build a National Literacy Intelligence System<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Not a National Curriculum<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Better Literacy Will Strengthen Democracy<\/strong><\/h5>\n
A Presidency Measured in Readers<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\nLocal Solutions<\/h5>\n
1. Ensure Equity, High Expectations, and Rigorous Learning for All<\/h6>\n
2. Integrate Academic, Mental Health, and Learning Supports<\/h6>\n
3. Foster Safe, Positive, and Inclusive School Climates<\/h6>\n
4. Strengthen Collaboration and Family-Community Partnerships<\/h6>\n
National Solutions<\/h5>\n
1. Demand Presidential Leadership<\/h6>\n
2. Invest in a Skilled, Diverse, and Well-Supported Workforce<\/h6>\n
3. Reinstate the Federal Department of Education<\/h6>\n
\n<\/p>\nWhat Is Generative AI?<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Are Children Using AI?<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Implications for Children\u2019s Learning and Development<\/strong><\/h5>\n
What Government and Schools Can Do<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Employers Strike Back<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Public-Sector Breakthroughs\u2014and Room for Growth<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Challenges to Organizing Government Workers<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\u201cRight to Work\u201d Goes National<\/h6>\n
The Federal Worker \u201cBloodbath\u201d<\/em><\/h6>\n
Protect the Private, Expand the Public<\/strong><\/h5>\n