There has been much talk and concern in recent months about making higher-level math more accessible to high schoolers, particularly low-income students from Black and Hispanic communities. Much of this discussion dwells on what is the best curriculum to use to teach Algebra I and other higher-level math courses.

The right curriculum is important, of course. A high-quality curriculum creates the foundation for success in math. A curriculum that values culturally responsive education enables teachers both to value the many kinds of experiences that students bring to classrooms and to push them academically while engaging them personally.

But properly implementing an Algebra I curriculum is at least as important as the curriculum itself. The core of implementation, meanwhile, is coaching each teacher for the specific challenges they will face in their classrooms. The key to success is ensuring that teachers understand the vision for how to implement the curriculum and are therefore motivated and prepared to use it to help children learn in ways that are relevant to them.

In a way, it’s like photography. The key to creating art with light and time is not the equipment. Although Hasselblad and Leica cameras and a metal case of Nikkor lenses are great in the hands of those who know how to use them, a great tool to create expressive photographic art can also be found in your purse or pocket. As with teaching algebra, the key is not the specific tool, but knowing the right approach and being trained well enough to be confident in using that approach.

Related: Kids are failing algebra. The solution? Slow down

I’ve seen a focus on implementation pay off in my own work as director of Algebra Success for the Urban Assembly. One of our coaches at the nonprofit, Latina Khalil-Hairston, encouraged teachers at Harry S Truman High School in the Bronx to tinker with their curriculum to encourage more student involvement.

They created a new lesson structure that focused more on getting students to help each other solve problems than on getting direction from teachers. While doing so, they were mindful of adopting this new structure within the challenging constraint of having only 45 minutes for each lesson. Teachers saw more participation and better results, which has been its own motivation.

Professionals in all fields need coaching and support — why would high school math be any different? We wouldn’t give a basketball playbook to a player and expect them to be LeBron James. Even LeBron James still practices and gets coaching feedback. Even the most accomplished among us need to see a vision of excellence.

Yet I have seen many schools fall into the trap of investing in a curriculum without giving teachers the most useful ways to implement it. Unsurprisingly, these schools fail to achieve the results they hoped for and then abandon one curriculum for another.

But the curriculum is just the camera. Training and coaching, personalized to each teacher, produce the art.

And that coaching should not only help teachers understand their tools, but also help them better understand the backgrounds of their students to ensure that their perspectives are part of the learning process. Knowing the nature of the student body can dramatically enhance understanding, retention and interest in math (or any subject).

Related: OPINION: Algebra matters, so let’s stop attacking it and work together to make it clearer and more accessible

I’ve seen the results. Just last year, we saw pass rates on the Algebra I Regents for schools participating in our Algebra Success program rise 13 percent over the previous year. College-readiness math results rose 14 percent.

It is time for schools and districts to abandon the search for the one perfect curriculum — it does not exist. Instead, they should focus on how to better implement the systems they have in an engaging, effective way. They should invest in the training and support of teachers to master the instruction of that curriculum. With these changes, we know students will find success in Algebra I, putting them on the path to higher-level math courses and postsecondary success.

Shantay Mobley is the director of Algebra Success for the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that promotes social and economic mobility by innovating in public education. She previously was a math teacher, school leader and instructional consultant.

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Students gather once a month at my high school for what we call “equity lunch chats” with teachers and administrators. The students ask about many topics, including tardy policies, access to athletics and clubs, and even treatment by deans and security. Their questions give the adults like me in the room a glimpse into their world. But no matter how the conversation starts, the students — nearly half of whom are Black, Asian, Hispanic or multiracial — often come back to complaints about the lack of diversity in our school’s textbooks and educational materials.

They want to see themselves and their cultures reflected in the books we read, and they don’t want token representation. They want more diverse classroom experiences.

“I appreciate that my teachers try to offer different narratives,” a student said at one of our sessions discussing teaching materials featuring history and stories from all continents, “but they always seem to be about hardship or having to overcome an obstacle. We are never just the average main character.” Another student pointed out that he already knows about the “famous people of color, but never hears about the everyday lives of them.”

As a Colorado secondary school history teacher and former English teacher, I believe, and research shows, that student achievement improves when learners are personally engaged. Higher engagement correlates with higher productivity, work quality and satisfaction — and even improved attendance rates.

Students tell us this every day in ways big and small. I see them clamor for Zheng He, Simon Bolivar, Cesar Chavez, Mary Wollstonecraft and Haile Selassie when they choose research topics. In her research paper this year, a student named Briana who picked Cesar Chavez wrote that she had never been given so many choices before, and that “the choices have never included topics that make me feel like I am learning about my own heritage at the same time. I am so proud to be Hispanic and loved researching a personal hero of mine.”

I also see my students’ hands go up when we study world religions, and they can share a story from home. They nod along as we cover topics that connect to stories their grandparents shared with them, like tales of migration and cultural celebrations.

Related: Teaching social studies in a polarized world

It’s time we listened to our students and strengthened our curriculums to teach a balanced history that honors all cultures and narratives. Here are a few ways we can do this:

Improve instructional materials. Our long-standing curricula highlight a Eurocentric global history and white-centric American history, with only small cameos by the people who were enslaved, harmed and marginalized. Gathering a team of students and educators to advise on an inclusive curriculum would give students a voice in the process and create a starting place for teachers like me as we build our own classroom lesson plans.

Provide all students opportunities to advocate for inclusive sources. When students have voice and choice in their learning, they are more inclined to participate and succeed. Teachers can learn from those choices and adapt long-term lesson-planning to respond to the various needs and interests of all their students. High schools can build student-led spaces like those in our equity lunch chats, where students suggest texts and topics, and history classes like mine can support the mission of making our curriculum more inclusive.

Provide educators with the time and training to be culturally responsive teachers. As schools across the country welcome more diverse student populations (including 2,800 migrant children newly enrolled in Denver schools in January), the need for teachers to be culturally responsive is ever more pressing. States should offer teachers stipends and extra time to diversify their historical knowledge and then build lessons and materials to reflect it. Districts should also consider bringing in students and experts in equity studies as sounding boards and editors for these new curriculums.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: There’s something missing from my Advanced Placement classes, and that needs to change

In the meantime, I look forward to our lunch chats and to learning from our students about how we can listen better and make real gains toward their goal of a more equitable education. We must continue to be advocates for an inclusive learning experience that allows for honesty, connection and relevance for all our learners.

Emily Muellenberg is a social studies teacher at Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. She is a 2023-24 Teach Plus Colorado Policy Fellow.

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Imagine interacting with an avatar that dissolves into tears – and being assessed on how intelligently and empathetically you respond to its emotional display.

Or taking a math test that is created for you on the spot, the questions written to be responsive to the strengths and weaknesses you’ve displayed in prior answers. Picture being evaluated on your scientific knowledge and getting instantaneous feedback on your answers, in ways that help you better understand and respond to other questions.

These are just a few of the types of scenarios that could become reality as generative artificial intelligence advances, according to Mario Piacentini, a senior analyst of innovative assessments with the Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

He and others argue that AI has the potential to shake up the student testing industry, which has evolved little for decades and which critics say too often falls short of evaluating students’ true knowledge. But they also warn that the use of AI in assessments carries risks.

“AI is going to eat assessments for lunch,” said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he co-authored a research series on the future of assessments. He said that standardized testing may one day become a thing of the past, because AI has the potential to personalize testing to individual students.

PISA, the influential international test, expects to integrate AI into the design of its 2029 test. Piacentini said the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs PISA, is exploring the possible use of AI in several realms.

• It plans to evaluate students on their ability to use AI tools and to recognize AI-generated information.
• It’s evaluating whether AI could help write test questions, which could potentially be a major money and time saver for test creators. (Big test makers like Pearson are already doing this, he said.)
• It’s considering whether AI could score tests. According to Piacentini, there’s promising evidence that AI can accurately and effectively score even relatively complex student work.  
• Perhaps most significantly, the organization is exploring how AI could help create tests that are “much more interesting and much more authentic,” as Piacentini puts it.

When it comes to using AI to design tests, there are all sorts of opportunities. Career and tech students could be assessed on their practical skills via AI-driven simulations: For example, automotive students could participate in a simulation testing their ability to fix a car, Piacentini said.

Right now those hands-on tests are incredibly intensive and costly – “it’s almost like shooting a movie,” Piacentini said. But AI could help put such tests within reach for students and schools around the world.

AI-driven tests could also do a better job of assessing students’ problem-solving abilities and other skills, he said. It might prompt students when they’d made a mistake and nudge them toward a better way of approaching a problem. AI-powered tests could evaluate students on their ability to craft an argument and persuade a chatbot. And they could help tailor tests to a student’s specific cultural and educational context.

“One of the biggest problems that PISA has is when we’re testing students in Singapore, in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s a completely different universe. It’s very hard to build a single test that actually works for those two very different populations,” said Piacentini. But AI opens the door to “construct tests that are really made specifically for every single student.”

That said, the technology isn’t there yet, and educators and test designers need to tread carefully, experts warn. During a recent panel Javeria moderated, Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said any conversation about AI’s role in assessments must first acknowledge disparities in access to these new tools.

Many schools still use paper products and struggle with spotty broadband and limited digital tools, she said: The digital divide is “very much part of this conversation.” Before schools begin to use AI for assessments, teachers will need professional development on how to use AI effectively and wisely, Turner Lee said.

There’s also the issue of bias embedded in many AI tools. AI is often sold as if it’s “magic,”  Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer at SoapBox Labs, a software company that develops AI voice technology, said during the panel. But it’s really “a set of decisions made by human beings, and unfortunately human beings have their own biases and they have their own cultural norms that are inbuilt.”

With AI at the moment, she added, you’ll get “a different answer depending on the color of your skin, or depending on the wealth of your neighbors, or depending on the native language of your parents.”  

But the potential benefits for students and learning excite experts such as Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, where she helps develop online assessments. Huff, who also spoke on the panel, said AI tools could eventually not only improve testing but also “accelerate learning” in areas like early literacy, phonemic awareness and early numeracy skills. Huff said that teachers could integrate AI-driven assessments, especially AI voice tools, into their instruction in ways that are seamless and even “invisible,” allowing educators to continually update their understanding of where students are struggling and how to provide accurate feedback.

PISA’s Piacentini said that while we’re just beginning to see the impact of AI on testing, the potential is great and the risks can be managed.  

“I am very optimistic that it is more an opportunity than a risk,” said Piacentini. “There’s always this risk of bias, but I think we can quantify it, we can analyze it, in a better way than we can analyze bias in humans.”

This story about AI testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Aftyn Behn hoped that this would be the year the Tennessee legislature was free of bills related to the anti-abortion movement. Since it is now illegal to terminate pregnancies in the state, the Democrat figured her Republican counterparts in the Tennessee House would concentrate their efforts on causes other than restricting reproductive rights. 

But she was mistaken: The House on March 18 passed the “Baby Olivia Act,” which gives public schools the greenlight to screen a fetal development video produced by a controversial anti-abortion group. On Wednesday, the bill made it out of the Tennessee Senate Education committee, which has recommended that the Senate pass it as well. 

“I’ve been in the trenches fighting against anti-abortion legislation and policy for a long time, and I really just thought this year that they could just let it go,” Behn said. “And it just continues to get worse. They’re just trying to find little holes where they can move forward with their anti-abortion legislation, and it happens to be in curriculum that would be adopted across the state.”

“Meet Baby Olivia,” a three-minute computer-generated video first released in 2021 that critics call misleading and manipulative. North Dakota passed legislation allowing schools to show the video last year, but West Virginia’s “Baby Olivia” bill failed to pass before the legislative session there ended this month.

The video was created by the organization Live Action, which objects to abortion for any reason and has captured secret footage at abortion clinics while advocating for Planned Parenthood to be defunded. The organization, founded by anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, wants students nationwide to watch “Meet Baby Olivia” in school.

The bills that have advanced in various states would require schools ranging from elementary to high school to show the fetal development video or one like it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which includes over 60,000 members, has raised concerns about the video, noting that it calculates gestational age two weeks earlier than standard and depicts fetal development as more advanced than it is. Critics say the video also misrepresents when a fetal heartbeat can be detected and how early one can survive outside the womb. Some conservative medical groups, meanwhile, have endorsed it.

Since most states do not require medically accurate comprehensive sex ed, exposing students to misinformation about human reproduction is concerning because youth may not have access to materials that counter it, experts said. They told The 19th this is especially concerning paired with widespread book bans across the country. 

“‘Baby Olivia’ is a medically accurate, animated glimpse of human life in the womb,” Rose said in a statement to The 19th. “Every student in our nation deserves access to best-in-class education on human development. It is tragic that basic facts about human biology are so controversial for abortion supporters in 2024.”

She added that the video aims to educate viewers in a straightforward way. “Every fact in the video has been exhaustively sourced and corroborated and is similar to what you would find in an embryology textbook,” she said.  

Related: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed in public schools

Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa, disagrees. The Iowa House in late February passed legislation that would allow public schools to show “Baby Olivia.” Stillwell said that the video reflects the beliefs of Live Action rather than evidence-based science.

“For the major medical organizations to all be firmly against this propaganda tells you everything you need to know,” Stillwell said. “This video very intentionally misleads the audience by using a dating structure that contradicts what is used in medical practice. They talked about weeks from fertilization rather than the way that pregnancy is actually calculated, which is from the last menstrual period.”

Stillwell said the video sensationalizes gestures, such as hand clasping or thumb sucking, that fetuses make. The point, she said, is to manipulate and appeal to a young audience.

As “Meet Baby Olivia” has drawn widespread criticism, states including Iowa and Tennessee have amended their legislation so that schools are not required to show that video specifically but any fetal development video like it. The change in legislative wording, however, does not actually prohibit public schools from showing the Live Action video. That means schools will likely choose that video to show, as “Baby Olivia” is the most prominent fetal development video of its kind, critics say. 

Behn tried unsuccessfully to amend the Tennessee legislation to bar schools from showing the Live Action video. In Iowa, legislators amended the bill to remove specific reference to “Baby Olivia,” but it still requires schools to show a computer-generated fetal development video, State Rep. Molly Buck said.  

“In removing the specific reference to Live Action’s ‘Baby Olivia,’ what the bill sponsor did was put in the requirement that this computer-generated video depict the humanity of the unborn child,” Stillwell said. “Now that phrase is not defined anywhere. There’s no indication of how to measure the humanity. So, by our reading of the bill, the problem remains that the only piece of curriculum that could actually meet this prescriptive requirement from the state remains Live Action’s ‘Baby Olivia’ video.”

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the US

Such legislation, Stillwell said, constitutes an effort to put anti-choice propaganda in schools. 

Educators have pushed back against “Baby Olivia” legislation, in part because they object to politicians mandating curriculum, arguing that is the domain of state boards of education or similar entities. The Iowa State Education Association has said that it opposes “the politicization of any curriculum.” Moreover, Iowa education code prohibits requiring exact instructional methodologies or materials to achieve curriculum goals. 

Buck, who has taught elementary school in Iowa for 28 years, said that it is troublesome when legislators implement laws outlining exactly what must be taught in classrooms. 

“Schools tend to stick to the letter of the law,” she said. “A danger of prescribing very specific curriculum in the legislature is that it starts to scare school districts about, ‘Well, can we step outside of that at all? Can we teach more than that?’” 

Plus, Iowa does not require schools to offer comprehensive sex ed, so students may not learn anything about human reproduction beyond what they see in “Baby Olivia,” Buck said.  

“When we talk about indoctrination of kids, we have to be mindful of both sides,” she said. “We don’t want the ‘liberal left’ indoctrinating our kids, and we don’t want the right side indoctrinating our kids either. So our kids need factual health information, not fictional.”

Heather Corinna, author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College,” said that the silver lining may be that many young people get their information about sex through digital means, making them likely to stumble across online resources that counter any factual inaccuracies about reproduction they come across in class. 

“Young people know the internet exists,” said Corinna, founder and director of Scarleteen, a sex education support organization and website. “We have millions of young people that come to Scarleteen all the time, and coming to fact check [what] they heard in sex ed is a common reason.”

Sex ed has been terrible for years, but students aren’t stupid, Corinna said. Many of them expect it to be rooted in propaganda, which Corinna considers “Baby Olivia” to be. “That’s what it is,” they said. “It’s produced like political propaganda.” 

Corinna, who once worked in an abortion clinic, takes issue with how Live Action stages fetal development and describes fetuses. “They say they can recognize lullabies and stories,” they said. “No one can do a test on someone in utero to find out if they recognize something; that’s not a thing. It’s sheer projection.”

Sarah Dean, an English teacher at a public charter school in the Nashville area, objects to the video and to the fact that the sponsor of the Tennessee bill, State Rep. Gino Bulso, is a lawyer, not an educator. She pointed out that Bulso has sponsored legislation that supports censorship in schools and targets transgender students, gender-affirming care and drag performers, among other controversial policies. Bulso also sponsored the bill to expel three Democrats for protesting gun violence after a school shooting in Nashville last year. A representative for Bulso told The 19th he was not available for an interview.

Dean characterized his pattern of legislation as a systematic effort to promote a specific ideology and discriminate against individuals “who don’t fit within that,” she said.

The Baby Olivia Act, Dean continued, devalues the expertise of teaching professionals. “We don’t do that to other professionals,” she said. “But when it comes to teachers, people think, ‘Well, I went to school, so I must know.’ But there’s a lot more pedagogy that goes into teaching and being an educator, so it’s somewhat like arrogance and also just out of touch, impractical, for these people to be making bills about education because they don’t honestly know what the impact is going to be for students and for teachers.”

The goal of “Baby Olivia,” Behn said, is to emotionally manipulate young people who are or may fall pregnant into ruling out abortion. Since Tennessee has a number of health care gaps — including a lack of access to reproductive health care, high rates of parental mortality and a large number of crisis pregnancy centers, Behn said, she considers the undertones of the video to be “nefarious.” In addition to “Baby Olivia,” Tennessee also recently introduced legislation that would make it a crime for an adult to help a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent. Given the state’s political climate, Behn is particularly concerned about youth in the state’s rural areas who may not only lack resources but also have information gaps about pregnancy and reproduction.

“The intention of this video is to show any kids who might be pregnant in the school system that the fetus is living and breathing, and that they’re better off keeping the baby,” Behn said.

But Corinna is not convinced that anti-abortion materials keep people from ending unwanted pregnancies. If they have the opportunity to do so, they typically terminate their pregnancies anyway, Corinna said, because they’re in an unhealthy romantic relationship, financially ill-equipped to raise a child, or have a medical issue, among myriad other reasons.

“More times than not, in my experience, that person, if they need an abortion, they still go have one. They just feel awful about it,” Corinna said. “What keeps people from having abortions is an inability to go get one.”

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I participated in an online completion event recently with the aim of supporting students with the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form so I could gain new insights for the counselors I work with at New Visions for Public Schools.

As someone who’s been a college access professional for nearly a quarter century, it was eye-opening.

I was painfully aware that the new, “Better FAFSA” launch has been a nightmare, even though Congress passed the law that created it with the intent of making the process of completing the FAFSA form simpler for students and families and of increasing access to federal aid like the Pell Grant. Instead, the so-called Better FAFSA has been riddled with known issues, including many that have unfairly affected our most vulnerable students — specifically those whose parents do not have a Social Security number (SSN).

Now, parents without SSNs are required to obtain an FSA ID in order to sign into their child’s FAFSA. Then they must provide permission for FAFSA systems to obtain their tax information from the IRS. In short, it hasn’t been working, and many parents have been shut out of completing their part of the FAFSA.

Related: ‘Simpler’ FAFSA complicates college plans for students, families

They’re not the only ones. Many other parents and students have also been struggling to submit their information. Students who are permanent residents, for example, have struggled to enter their information on the form after entering their green card number.

When I agreed to participate in this free online completion event, I expected more success. Although it was 3.5 hours long, I only managed to work with four families. And I was able to complete the FAFSA with only one of them, even with all my years of experience supporting students and guiding counselors through some of the most difficult financial aid scenarios and even though I was familiar with the latest updates and challenges. None of that was enough to enable me to guide more families through to completion within the three-plus hours of the event.

As discouraged as I was, I remembered that counseling, especially around financial aid, is primarily about relationships. I made sure to spend a few minutes chatting with the students and parents to put them at ease.

I affirmed the hard work they had put into the form, especially for those who had been dealing with these complications for over a month.

I even offered a little guidance around finding a good fit for college.

But if I struggled with the new form, with all my advantages, how can we possibly expect families to complete the new FAFSA on their own?

The support that counselors and other college access professionals provide will continue to be essential in keeping students engaged and motivated to pursue their postsecondary goals during this FAFSA upheaval. This work must move forward.

Here’s a bit of advice for anyone trying to help.

Those of us who do this work can learn from one another. For example, a number of my colleagues in New York City have started an email FAFSA support group in which we share updates, screenshots and other information.

In addition, social media is full of groups hashing out FAFSA concerns, while professional organizations like the National College Attainment Network, or NCAN, have been diligently updating their FAFSA tool kits.

We can also remind students — and help them with — other forms that need to be completed, like the CSS Profile and verification forms. In short, we need to make sure that students are doing everything they can to access financial aid.

In the meantime, students who have successfully submitted the FAFSA must know that it will take weeks for their form to be processed. They will have to check their email regularly to keep track of their application and any financial aid-related requests from colleges.

It is likely that financial aid packages will not be available until April or May (schools that require the CSS Profile will be able to provide financial aid packages sooner). This dynamic disproportionately affects our lowest-income students. These students need time to compare several financial aid packages, and they should be reminded of this.

Many colleges haven’t yet extended their enrollment deadlines. That means that advocacy by students and those who work with them will be even more important to ensure they get the time needed to make these important decisions.

Related: OPINION: It’s time to stop using the FAFSA to determine who gets emergency aid

These FAFSA changes are difficult, but they must not defeat students and their families. Together we can help them succeed with the kind of hard work, information-sharing and mutual support I’ve witnessed among the counselors I work with.

I hope we can come out on the other side and be well-prepared to continue the good fight.

 Sandy Jimenez is postsecondary pathways resource manager at New Visions for Public Schools and a co-author of the “Understanding FAFSA Guide.”

This story about the new FAFSA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Yancy Sanes teaches a unit on the climate crisis at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx – not climate change, but the climatecrisis. He is unequivocal that he wants his high school students to be climate activists.

“I teach from a mindset and lens that I want to make sure my students are becoming activists, and it’s not enough just talking about it,” the science and math teacher said. “I need to take my students outside and have them actually do the work of protesting.”

The school partners with local environmental justice organizations to advocate for a greener Bronx. Sanes recently took some students to a rally that called for shutting down the jail on Rikers Island and replacing it with a solar energy farm, wastewater treatment plant and battery storage facility.

Sanes gets a lot of support for this approach from his administration. Social justice is a core value of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, and the school also belongs to a special assessment consortium, giving it more freedom in what is taught than a typical New York City public high school.

For Sanes, who grew up in the neighborhood and graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer himself, getting his students involved in activism is a key way to give them agency and protect their mental health as they learn what’s happening to the planet. “This is a topic that is very depressing. I don’t want to just end this unit with ‘things are really bad,’ but ‘what can we do, how are we fighting back’.” Indeed, climate anxiety is widespread among young people, and collective action has been identified as one way to ameliorate it.

Related: Teaching ‘action civics’ engages kids – and ignites controversy

Sanes is at the far end of the teaching spectrum when it comes to promoting climate activism, not to mention discussing controversial issues of any kind in his classroom. Conservative activists have already begun branding even basic instruction about climate change as “left-wing indoctrination.” The think tank Rand recently reported in its 2023 State of the American Teacher survey that two-thirds of teachers nationally said they were limiting discussions about political and social issues in class. The authors of the report observed that there seemed to be a spillover effect from states that have passed new laws restricting topics like race and gender, to states where no such laws are on the books. 

The current level of political polarization is having a chilling effect, making civics education into a third rail, according to Holly Korbey, an education reporter and the author of a 2019 book on civics education, “Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All.” “We are living in this time where there’s increased scrutiny on what schools are telling kids,” she said.

She said that, as a mom living in deep-red Tennessee, she wouldn’t be happy to have a teacher bringing her kids to protests. “I really don’t want schools to tell my kids to be activists. I think about how I personally feel about issues and flip that around.  Would I be okay with teachers doing that? And the answer is no.”

Even Sanes has a line he won’t cross. He taught his students about Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, but he stopped short of encouraging his students to do the same. “I specifically cannot tell students, you gotta walk out of school,” he said. “That goes against my union.”

And yet, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that schools have an obligation to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy. And, emerging best practices in civics education include something called “action civics,” in which teachers in civics and government classes guide kids to take action locally on issues they choose. Nonprofits like Generation Citizen and the Mikva Challenge, Korbey said, cite internal research that these kinds of activist-ish activities improve knowledge, civic skills, and motivation to remain involved in politics or their local community. Others have argued that without a robust understanding of the workings of government, “action civics” provides a “sugar rush” without enough substance.

Related: The climate change lesson plans teachers need and don’t have

Even at the college level, it’s rare for students to study climate activism in particular, or political activism more generally. And this leads to a broader lack of knowledge about how power works in society, say some experts.

“Having visited many, many departments in many schools over the years, I’m shocked at how few places, particularly policy schools, teach social movements,” said sociologist Dana Fisher. Fisher is currently teaching a graduate course called “Global Environmental Politics: Activism and the Environment,” and she also has a new book out about climate activism,“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.”She’s taught about social movements for two decades at American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland-College Park.

“It’s crazy to me that, given that the civil society sector is such a huge part of democracy, there would not be a focus on that,” she added.

Through empirical research, Fisher’s work counters stereotypes and misconceptions about climate activism. For example, she’s found that disruptive forms of protest like blocking a road or throwing soup on a masterpiece are effective even when they’re unpopular. ”It doesn’t draw support for the disruption. It draws support for more moderate parts of the movement,” she said. “And so it helps to expand the base.”

As an illustration of the ignorance about disruptive action and civil disobedience in particular, Fisher noted K-12 students rarely hear about the topic unless studying the 1960s era, and “a very sanitized version. They don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was really unpopular and had a very active radical flank that was doing sit-ins and marches.”

In 12 years of public school in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Jada Walden learned very little about activism, including environmental activism. She learned a bit in school about the Civil Rights Movement, although most of what she remembers about it are “the things your grandmother teaches you.”

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Walden didn’t hear much about climate change either until she got to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge. “When I got to college, there’s activism everywhere for all types of stuff,” she said.

She’d enrolled with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. “When I first got there. I just wanted to hit my books, get my degree,” she recalled. “But my advisors, they pushed for so much more.” She became passionate about climate justice and the human impact on the environment, and ended up majoring in urban forestry. She was a student member of This Is Planet Ed’s Higher Education Climate Action Task Force (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor.) 

If it were up to her, Walden would require all college students to study the climate crisis, and do independent research to learn how it will affect them personally. “Make it personal for them. Help them connect. It will make a world of difference.”

Korbey, the “Building Better Citizens” author, would agree with that approach. “Schools exist to give students knowledge, not to create activists,” she said. “The thing we’re doing very poorly is give kids the knowledge they need to become good citizens.”

This column about teaching climate activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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We want to hear directly from recent college applicants: What did you want to share about yourself with admissions officers? Your replies will help us understand what it’s like to apply to college now. We may share some of what we hear from you with our readers. Feel free to respond to any or all of the questions. 

If you prefer, you can also email us directly at editor@hechingerreport.org. We won’t publish anything you submit without speaking to you first.

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Psychologists have long warned that children’s lives are overscheduled, which undermines their ability to develop non-academic skills that they’ll need in adulthood, from coping with setbacks to building strong relationships. Now a trio of economists say they’ve been able to calculate some of these psychological costs.

In a new data analysis published in the February 2024 issue of the Economics of Education Review, three economists from the University of Georgia and the Federal Reserve Board found that students are assigned so much homework and signed up for so many extracurricular activities that the “last hour” was no longer helping to build their academic skills. Instead, the activities were actually harming their mental well-being, making students more anxious, depressed or angry. 

“We’re not saying that all these activities are bad, but that the total is bad,” said Carolina Caetano, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of economics at the University of Georgia. Homework and scheduled activities, she said, were eating away at time for sleep and socializing, which are also important. 

The downsides of homework and scheduled activities were most pronounced during the high school years, when students are feeling pressure to earn high grades and load up on extracurriculars for their college applications, the researchers found.

Unfortunately, the researchers weren’t able to put a precise number on how many hours is too much, and Caetano explained to me that the number might not be the same for everyone.

Parents who worry that their children might be overscheduled should ask themselves whether they feel their days are so busy that their children don’t even have time for spontaneous play dates, Caetano said. “If you feel stretched, you’re probably on the too-much side of this,” she said.

Caetano and her research team analyzed the time diaries of 4,300 children and teens, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The diaries had been collected over the years, dating back to 1997, as part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a large nationally representative household survey overseen by the University of Michigan. Children, parents and survey workers kept track of a random weekday and a random weekend day for each child, allowing the researchers to see how children spent every minute.

The researchers described a wide assortment of activities intended to improve children’s skills as “enrichment.” Homework was the largest component, adding up to two thirds of the total enrichment hours. The remainder of the enrichment time was occupied by reading (14 percent of the enrichment time), followed by before- and after-school programs (7 percent). In the diaries, relatively little time was spent being read to by parents, tutoring and other academic lessons, and on non-academic lessons, such as piano, soccer or driver’s ed. On average, children spent 45 minutes a day on all of them, ranging from zero to four hours a day.

The researchers then compared time spent on these enrichment activities with academic test scores along with non-cognitive psychological measures, which were based on parent surveys of their children’s behaviors, such as being withdrawn, anxious or angry. 

At first, there seemed to be a strong association between time spent on enrichment and academic skills and positive behaviors. That is, students who were more scheduled also had higher test scores and better behaviors. 

But scheduled students also tend to be wealthier. Their families have the resources for tutors, after-school activities, or nannies who enforce homework time. It’s hard to tell how much the activities were responsible for boosting students’ skills or whether these highly resourced children would have done just as well on the tests and non-cognitive measures without the activities. After adjusting for family income and other demographic characteristics, some of these benefits melted away. Still, some association between scheduled activities and academic skills remained. In other words, even between two children with the same demographics and family income, the one that was more scheduled and spent more time on homework scored higher.

However, these scheduled children of the same income and demographics still differ from each other in important ways. Some are more motivated or conscientious. Some have photographic memories or are hard working. Some have a gift for math or music. The children who choose to do more homework and participate in after-school activities are exactly the ones who are more likely to score higher anyway. It’s a thorny knot to disentangle how much the homework and scheduled activities are driving the improvement in skills.

In this study, the researchers used a new statistical technique for large datasets to disentangle it. And once they adjusted for the effects of the students’ unobservable or inner differences, all the academic benefits melted away, and well-being turned negative. That is, the final or marginal hour of homework and activities didn’t raise a student’s test scores at all and lowered a child’s non-cognitive behaviors.

The researchers also noticed a dilemma in the data. The psychological downsides of overscheduling hit before students’ cognitive skills were maximized. There’s a point where a child could still boost his academic skills by doing another hour of homework or tutoring, for example, but it would come at the expense of mental well-being. With more time spent on these activities, the academic returns eventually fall to zero, but by that time, there’s been a considerable hit to well-being.

A lot more research is needed to understand if some activities are harming students more than others. One question Caetano has concerns timing. She wonders what would happen if little kids were less scheduled in elementary school. Would they then have more resilience to deal with the time pressures in high school? 

The statistical techniques in this study are new and researchers debate about how and when to use them. Josh Goodman, an education economist at Boston University who was not involved in the study, commented that the causal claims between overscheduling and academic skills and mental well-being aren’t “perfect,” but called them “good enough.”  He said on X (formerly Twitter) that “the paper raises some very uncomfortable questions (including about my own parenting decisions!)” 

Of course, parents aren’t entirely to blame. Schools assign the homework and their children’s grades will suffer if it isn’t done. College admissions departments value applicants with high grades and activities. Caetano sympathizes with parents who find it hard to individually push back against the current system.

It’s similarly difficult for one school to unilaterally change homework policies when colleges could penalize their students. Indeed, schools that have tried reducing the pressure have sometimes felt the wrath of parents who are worried that less homework will cause their children to fall behind the competition. Ultimately, Caetano says that education policymakers on the state or federal level need to set policies to ratchet down the pressure for all.

This story about extracurricular activities was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Amid the growing debate over how best to teach math, there is another ballooning problem: grades. They’re becoming increasingly untethered to how much students know. That not only makes it harder to gauge how well students are learning math and catching up from pandemic learning losses, but it’s also making math grades a less reliable indicator of who should be admitted to colleges or take advanced courses.

The latest warning sign comes from college admissions test maker ACT, which compared students’ ACT test scores with their self-reported high school grades between 2010 and 2022. Grade inflation struck all high school subjects, ACT found, but it was highest for math, followed by science, English, and social studies.

Grade inflation accelerated after 2016 and intensified during the pandemic, as schools relaxed standards. But as schools settled back into their usual rhythms in 2021-22, grades didn’t fall back to pre-pandemic norms and remained elevated. Grades continued to rise in math and science even as grade inflation stabilized in English and social studies. For a given score on the math section of the ACT, students said they had earned higher grades than students had reported in previous years.

Edgar Sanchez, an ACT researcher who conducted the analysis, said the inflation makes it hard to interpret high school grades, especially now that A grades are the norm. “Does 4.0 really mean complete content mastery or not?” Sanchez asked, referring to an A grade on the 0 to 4 grade-point scale.

Grade inflation is a big trend across the country.  “It’s not just happening in some classrooms or with some teachers, it’s happening across the system,” said Sanchez. “What is happening in the system that is pushing this trend?”

Grades represent more than just content mastery. Many teachers factor in attendance, participation and effort in calculating a final grade. It’s possible that even math teachers are weighing soft skills more heavily with the increasing popularity of social-emotional learning. Or, perhaps high schools have watered down the content in math courses and students are genuinely mastering easier material.

A’s on the rise

Sanchez speculates that test optional admissions have elevated the importance of high school grades. He encouraged journalists and other researchers to look into the increased pressures on high school teachers of math and science courses, which Sanchez described as ”pivotal” for getting into competitive STEM college programs.  

Sanchez said he shared his grade inflation findings with college administrators, who told him that incoming STEM students are not as prepared as students in previous years. (The Hechinger Report has also found that college students are struggling with basic math.) But college professors didn’t report a similar academic deterioration with their humanities students. “That was an interesting confirmation of these findings,” Sanchez said.

ACT isn’t an unbiased research organization. The nonprofit sells tests and it has been advocating for colleges to re-establish exam requirements. However, neutral observers have also found strong evidence of high school grade inflation. The U.S. Department of Education documented rising grades on high school transcripts between 2009 and 2019, while 12th grade math scores fell on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The National Center for Education Statistics plans to update this transcript study in 2024. 

The ACT analysis, published in August 2023, covered almost 6.9 million high school seniors who took the ACT between 2010-22. They attended over 3,800 different public schools. It was a follow up to a 2022 report, which also detected grade inflation through 2021. This 2023 update looked at grade inflation by subject and added 2022.

Sanchez calculated that average math grades, adjusted for student and school characteristics, increased 0.30 grade points from 3.02 in 2010 to 3.32 in 2022. This translates to a movement from  “B” average to above a “B+” average in a decade. During this same time period, science grades increased by 0.24 points, while English and social studies rose by 0.22 points and 0.18 points, respectively. (The analysis excluded bonus points that some high schools award for Advanced Placement and other courses. A 4.0 was the maximum grade.)

Measuring grade inflation: Grades rise as ACT test scores fall

Grades are rising against a backdrop of declining achievement. English, math, reading and scientific reasoning ACT scores fell slightly between 2010-22. The sharpest declines were in math, in which the average ACT score dropped from 21.4 to 20.2. Three quarters of this math deterioration has taken place since 2020. 

Grade inflation may indeed be an unintended consequence of a well-intended policy to de-emphasize testing. More than 1,800 colleges have adopted test-optional or test-blind admissions. That’s increased the importance of grades. The losers here are students who still need to understand math – no matter what their grade.

This story about grade inflation in high school was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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What is the best way to teach? Some educators like to deliver clear explanations to students. Others favor discussions or group work. Project-based learning is trendy. But a June 2023 study from England could override all these debates: the most effective use of class time may depend on the subject.

The researchers found that students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math. It was just the opposite in English class. Teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that subject. 

“There does seem to be a difference between language and math in the best use of time in class,” said Eric Taylor, an economist who studies education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the study’s authors. “I think that is contradictory to what some people would expect and believe.”

Indeed, the way that the 250 secondary school teachers in this study taught didn’t differ that much between math and English. For example, math teachers were almost as likely to devote most or all of the hour of class time to group discussions as English teachers were: 35 percent compared to 41 percent. Lectures were one of the least common uses of time in both subjects.

The study, “Teacher’s use of class time and student achievement,” published in the Economics of Education Review, gives us a rare glimpse inside classrooms thanks to a sister experiment in teacher ratings that provided the data for this study. Teachers observed their colleagues and filled out surveys on how frequently teachers were doing various instructional activities.

How secondary school teachers in low-income secondary schools in England allocate class time

The researchers studied 32 high-poverty English secondary schools and looked at how the allocation of classroom time in years 10 and 11 related to the test scores of 7,000 students. Throughout the United Kingdom, including England where this study took place, 11th year students take General Certificate of Secondary Education [GCSE] exams, which are akin to high school exit exams. (Years 10 and 11 are equivalent to 9th and 10th grades in the United States.)

Researchers didn’t prove that teachers’ choices on how to spend class time caused GCSE scores to go up. But they were able to control for teacher quality, and they noticed that even among teachers who had the same ratings, those who opted to allocate more time to individual practice work had higher student math scores. Similarly, among English teachers with the same quality ratings, those who opted to allocate more time to discussions and group work had higher student English scores. “Better” teachers who received higher ratings from their peers had a slight tendency to allocate time more effectively (that is, more practice work in math and more discussion time in English), but there were plenty of teachers who had gotten strong ratings from peers who didn’t spend class time this way.

The researchers did not theorize about why individual practice work is more important in math than in English. I’ve noticed that doing a lot of practice problems during school hours is a big part of the algebra tutoring programs that have produced strong results for teens. Advocates of project-based learning once tried to develop a curriculum to teach math, but backed off when they struggled to come up with good projects for teaching abstract math concepts and skills. But they had success with English, science and social studies. 

Although the study took place in England, Taylor sees lessons here for U.S. educators on how to spend their class time.  “I suspect that if we repeated this whole setup in high schools in New York or elsewhere in the United States that we would see similar results,” said Taylor. 

In this country many teachers are encouraged to incorporate “math talks” as a way to develop mathematical reasoning and help students see multiple strategies for solving a problem. Progressive math educators might also favor group over individual work. Yet this study found stronger math achievement for students whose teachers devoted less class time to math discussions or group work. 

Critics might complain that test scores shouldn’t be the ultimate goal of mathematics education. Some teachers care more about developing a love of math or inspiring students to pursue math-heavy fields. We cannot tell from this study if teachers who conduct more math discussions produce other long-term benefits for students. 

It’s also unclear from this study exactly what math teachers are doing during the long stretches of independent work time. Some may be milling about offering hints and one-to-one help. Others might be kicking back at their desks, catching up on email or drinking a cup of tea while students complete their homework in class.

Even teachers who devote most of their class time to independent practice work may begin class with five or 10 minutes of lecturing. It’s not as if students are magically teaching themselves math, muddling through on their own, Taylor said.

“It’s not the only thing that’s going on in these classes,” said Taylor. 

I suspect that we’re going to have more information on how good teachers spend their precious minutes of class time in the near future, thanks to improvements in artificial intelligence and learning analytics. I can imagine algorithms more accurately analyzing how class time is spent from audio and video recordings, eliminating the need for human observers to code hours of instructional time. 

“Even if we don’t know exactly the recipe to give to teachers today, I think this study does say, ‘Well, hold on a minute, maybe we should be thinking differently about what’s right if we’re teaching math or language’,” said Taylor. These results, he added, should encourage educators to think more about what works best for each subject.  

This story about math teaching methods was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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