Studies show that students of all ages, from elementary school to college, tend to absorb more when they’re reading on paper rather than screens. The advantage for paper is a small one, but it’s been replicated in dozens of laboratory experiments, particularly when students are reading about science or other nonfiction texts.

Experts debate why comprehension is worse on screens. Some think the glare and flicker of screens tax the brain more than ink on paper. Others conjecture that students have a tendency to skim online but read with more attention and effort on paper. Digital distraction is an obvious downside to screens. But internet browsing, texting or TikTok breaks aren’t allowed in the controlled conditions of these laboratory studies.

Neuroscientists around the world are trying to peer inside the brain to solve the mystery. Recent studies have begun to document salient differences in brain activity when reading on paper versus screens. None of the studies I discuss below is definitive or perfect, but together they raise interesting questions for future researchers to explore. 

One Korean research team documented that young adults had lower concentrations of oxygenated hemoglobin in a section of the brain called the prefrontal cortex when reading on paper compared with screens. The prefrontal cortex is associated with working memory and that could mean the brain is more efficient in absorbing and memorizing new information on paper, according to a study published in January 2024 in the journal Brain Sciences. An experiment in Japan, published in 2020, also noticed less blood flow in the prefrontal cortex when readers were recalling words in a passage that they had read on paper, and more blood flow with screens.

But it’s not clear what that increased blood flow means. The brain needs to be activated in order to learn and one could also argue that the extra brain activation during screen reading could be good for learning. 

Instead of looking at blood flow, a team of Israeli scientists analyzed electrical activity in the brains of 6- to 8-year-olds. When the children read on paper, there was more power in high-frequency brainwaves. When the children read from screens, there was more energy in low-frequency bands. 

The Israeli scientists interpreted these frequency differences as a sign of better concentration and attention when reading on paper. In their 2023 paper, they noted that attention difficulties and mind wandering have been associated with lower frequency bands – exactly the bands that were elevated during screen reading. However, it was a tiny study of 15 children and the researchers could not confirm whether the children’s minds were actually wandering when they were reading on screens. 

Another group of neuroscientists in New York City has also been looking at electrical activity in the brain. But instead of documenting what happens inside the brain while reading, they looked at what happens in the brain just after reading, when students are responding to questions about a text. 

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE in May 2024, was conducted by neuroscientists at Teachers College, Columbia University, where The Hechinger Report is also based. My news organization is an independent unit of the college, but I am covering this study just like I cover other educational research. 

In the study, 59 children, aged 10 to 12, read short passages, half on screens and half on paper. After reading the passage, the children were shown new words, one at a time, and asked whether they were related to the passage they had just read. The children wore stretchy hair nets embedded with electrodes. More than a hundred sensors measured electrical currents inside their brains a split second after each new word was revealed.

For most words, there was no difference in brain activity between screens and paper. There was more positive voltage when the word was obviously related to the text, such as the word “flow” after reading a passage about volcanoes. There was more negative voltage with an unrelated word like “bucket,” which the researchers said was an indication of surprise and additional brain processing. These brainwaves were similar regardless of whether the child had read the passage on paper or on screens. 

However, there were stark differences between paper and screens when it came to ambiguous words, ones where you could make a creative argument that the word was tangentially related to the reading passage or just as easily explain why it was unrelated. Take for example, the word “roar” after reading about volcanoes. Children who had read the passage on paper showed more positive voltage, just as they had for clearly related words like “flow.” Yet, those who had read the passage on screens showed more negative activity, just as they had for unrelated words like “bucket.”

For the researchers, the brainwave difference for ambiguous words was a sign that students were engaging in “deeper” reading on paper. According to this theory, the more deeply information is processed, the more associations the brain makes. The electrical activity the neuroscientists detected reveals the traces of these associations and connections. 

Despite this indication of deeper reading, the researchers didn’t detect any differences in basic comprehension. The children in this experiment did just as well on a simple comprehension test after reading a passage on paper as they did on screens. The neuroscientists told me that the comprehension test they administered was only to verify that the children had actually read the passage and wasn’t designed to detect deeper reading. I wish, however, the children had been asked to do something involving more analysis to buttress their argument that students had engaged in deeper reading on paper.

Virginia Clinton-Lisell, a reading researcher at the University of North Dakota who was not involved in this study, said she was “skeptical” of its conclusions, in part because the word-association exercise the neuroscientists created hasn’t been validated by outside researchers. Brain activation during a word association exercise may not be proof that we process language more thoroughly or deeply on paper.

One noteworthy result from this experiment is speed. Many reading experts have believed that comprehension is often worse on screens because students are skimming rather than reading. But in the controlled conditions of this laboratory experiment, there were no differences in reading speed: 57 seconds on the laptop compared to 58 seconds on paper –  statistically equivalent in a small experiment like this. And so that raises more questions about why the brain is acting differently between the two media. 

“I’m not sure why one would process some visual images more deeply than others if the subjects spent similar amounts of time looking at them,” said Timothy Shanahan, a reading research expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

None of this work settles the debate over reading on screens versus paper. All of them ignore the promise of interactive features, such as glossaries and games, which can swing the advantage to electronic texts. Early research can be messy, and that’s a normal part of the scientific process. But so far, the evidence seems to be corroborating conventional reading research that something different is going on when kids log in rather than turn a page.

This story about reading on screens vs. paper 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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Rates of chronic absenteeism are at record-high levels. More than 1 in 4 students missed 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. That means millions of students missed out on regular instruction, not to mention the social and emotional benefits of interacting with peers and trusted adults.

Moreover, two-thirds of the nation’s students attended a school where chronic absence rates reached at least 20 percent. Such levels disrupt entire school communities, including the students who are regularly attending.

The scope and scale of this absenteeism crisis necessitate the implementation of the next generation of student support.

Fortunately, a recent study suggests a promising path for getting students back in school and back on track to graduation. A group of nearly 50 middle and high schools saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates after one year of harnessing the twin powers of data and relationships.

From the 2021-22 to 2022-23 school years, the schools’ chronic absenteeism rates dropped by 5.4 percentage points, and the share of students failing one or more courses went from 25.5 percent to 20.5 percent. In the crucial ninth grade, course failure rates declined by 9.2 percentage points.

These encouraging results come from the first cohort of rural and urban schools and communities partnering with the GRAD Partnership, a collective of nine organizations, to grow  the use of “student success systems” into a common practice.

Student success systems take an evidence-based approach to organizing school communities to better support the academic progress and well-being of all students.

They were developed with input from hundreds of educators and build on the successes of earlier student support efforts — like early warning systems and on-track initiatives — to meet students’ post-pandemic needs.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Importantly, student success systems offer schools a way to identify school, grade-level and classroom factors that impact attendance; they then deliver timely supports to meet individual students’ needs. They do this, in part, by explicitly valuing supportive relationships and responding to the insights that students and the adults who know them bring to the table.

Valuable relationships include not only those between students and teachers, and schools and families, but also those among peer groups and within the entire school community. Schools cannot address the attendance crisis without rebuilding and fostering these relationships.

When students feel a sense of connection to school they are more likely to show up.

For some students, this connection comes through extracurricular activities like athletics, robotics or band. For others, it may be a different connection to school.

Schools haven’t always focused on connections in a concrete way, partly because relationships can feel fuzzy and hard to track. We’re much better at tracking things like grades and attendance.

Still, schools in the GRAD Partnership cohort show that it can be done.

These schools established “student success teams” of teachers, counselors and others. The teams meet regularly to look at up-to-date student data and identify and address the root causes of absenteeism with insight and input from families and communities, as well as the students themselves.

The teams often use low-tech relationship-mapping tools to help identify students who are disconnected from activities or mentors. One school’s student success team used these tools to ensure that all students were connected to at least one activity — and even created new clubs for students with unique interests. Their method was one that any school could replicate —collaborating on a Google spreadsheet.

Another school identified students who would benefit from a new student mentoring program focused on building trusting relationships.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Some schools have used surveys of student well-being to gain insight on how students feel about school, themselves and life in general — and have then used the information to develop supports.

And in an example of building supportive community relationships, one of the GRAD Partnership schools worked with local community organizations to host a resource night event at which families were connected on the spot to local providers who could help them overcome obstacles to regular attendance — such as medical and food needs, transportation and housing issues and unemployment.

Turning the tide against our current absenteeism crisis does not have a one-and-done solution — it will involve ongoing collaborative efforts guided by data and grounded in relationships that take time to build.

Without these efforts, the consequences will be severe both for individual students and our country as a whole.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

This story about post-pandemic education 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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Clouds of doom continue to hover over the debate about teens’ mental health and the role of technology. This spring, the warnings come from the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation” by sociologist Jonathan Haidt. Some parents and educators are calling for a ban on smartphones and laptops in schools. Others are trying to press pause on the panic by pointing to research that needs a longer look.

People feel forced into binary camps of “ban tech” and “don’t ban tech.”

But there is a way to reset the conversation that could help parents, educators and kids themselves make better choices about technology. As writers and researchers who focus on the science of learning, we see a gaping hole in the debate thus far. The problem is that decision-makers keep relying on only two sets of questions and data: One set focuses on questions about how youth are feeling (not so great). The other focuses on how kids are using their time (spending hours on their phones).

A third set of questions is missing and needs to be asked: What and how are children and youth learning? Is technology aiding their learning or getting in the way? Think of data on tech and learning as the third leg of the stool in this debate. Without it, we can’t find our way toward balance.

Haidt’s book focuses primarily on well-being, and it’s great that he recognizes the research on the importance of play and exploration offline to helping children’s mental health. But play and exploration are also critical for learning, and parents and educators need more examples of the many different places where learning happens, whether on screen, off screen or some hybrid of the two. Parents are at risk of becoming either too protectionist or too permissive if they don’t stop to consider whether technology is affording today’s kids opportunities to explore and stretch their minds.

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Harvard professor Michael Rich, author of the recent book “The Mediatrician’s Guide,” argues that our children are growing up in a world in which they move seamlessly between physical and digital information, with mountains of experiences and learning opportunities at their fingertips. This is their reality. Today, even children from under-resourced environments can virtually visit places that in the past were well beyond their reach.

Many parents and teachers know their kids can gain valuable skills and knowledge from using different forms of tech and media. In fact, they are already factoring in the potential for learning when they make decisions about technology. They restrict phones and laptops in certain contexts and make them available in others, depending on what they believe will provide a good learning environment for their children at different ages and stages.

Sometimes the technology, and the way kids explore and build things with it, is integral to what kids need to learn. This year, for example, students have been working in Seattle public libraries with University of Washington professor Jason Yip to build tools and games intended to help other kids identify and avoid disinformation. One game is an online maze built within the world of “Minecraft” that shows what it feels like to fall down rabbit holes of extreme information. “Digital play can open up a number of potentials that allow children to experience unknown and difficult situations, such as misinformation, and experiment with decision-making,” Yip said.

Related: Horticulture, horses and ‘Chill Rooms’: One district goes all-in on mental health support

More focus on the effect of technology on learning — good and bad — is needed at all ages. Studies of young children show that when parents are distracted by their phones, they are less able to help their kids build the language skills that are key for learning how to read. Maybe parents should model different behaviors with their phone use. Also consider a study at the University of Delaware in which researchers read books to 4-year-olds live, via video chat or in a prerecorded video. No significant differences in learning were found between the children reading live or via video chat. This study and others provide clear evidence that children can learn when people read storybooks to them online.

Instead of fighting with children over smartphone use, we should be making sure that there are enough teachers and mentors to help all kids use those phones and laptops to support learning, whether they are collaborating on science fair projects or creating video book trailers for YouTube. Kids need teachers and parents who can give them opportunities to explore, play and grapple with hard things in both the digital world and the real world.

Our society is good at creating polarization. But we don’t have to devolve into extreme “ban” or “don’t ban” positions on smartphones, laptops or other technology today.

Parents and teachers should make decisions about technology after viewing the issue from three perspectives: how much the kids are using the devices, how the devices are affecting kids’ well-being and — the missing leg — how the devices are affecting their learning. Maybe adding this new piece could even help adults see more than just an “anxious generation” but also one hungry to learn.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Golinkoff and Lisa Guernsey are authors of several books on children’s learning and founders of The Learning Sciences Exchange, a fellowship program and problem-solving platform at New America that brings together experts in child development research, media and journalism, entertainment, social entrepreneurship and education leadership.

This story about teens and technology 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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Schools spend billions of dollars a year on products and services, including everything from staplers and textbooks to teacher coaching and training. Does any of it help students learn more? Some educational materials end up mothballed in closets. Much software goes unused. Yet central-office bureaucrats frequently renew their contracts with outside vendors regardless of usage or efficacy.

One idea for smarter education spending is for schools to sign smarter contracts, where part of the payment is contingent upon whether students use the services and learn more. It’s called outcomes-based contracting and is a way of sharing risk between buyer (the school) and seller (the vendor). Outcomes-based contracting is most common in healthcare. For example, a health insurer might pay a pharmaceutical company more for a drug if it actually improves people’s health, and less if it doesn’t. 

Although the idea is relatively new in education, many schools tried a different version of it – evaluating and paying teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improved – in the 2010s. Teachers didn’t like it, and enthusiasm for these teacher accountability schemes waned. Then, in 2020, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research announced that it was going to test the feasibility of paying tutoring companies by how much students’ test scores improved. 

The initiative was particularly timely in the wake of the pandemic.  The federal government would eventually give schools almost $190 billion to reopen and to help students who fell behind when schools were closed. Tutoring became a leading solution for academic recovery and schools contracted with outside companies to provide tutors. Many educators worried that billions could be wasted on low-quality tutors who didn’t help anyone. Could schools insist that tutoring companies make part of their payment contingent upon whether student achievement increased? 

The Harvard center recruited a handful of school districts who wanted to try an outcomes-based contract. The researchers and districts shared ideas on how to set performance targets. How much should they expect student achievement to grow from a few months of tutoring? How much of the contract should be guaranteed to the vendor for delivering tutors, and how much should be contingent on student performance? 

The first hurdle was whether tutoring companies would be willing to offer services without knowing exactly how much they would be paid. School districts sent out requests for proposals from online tutoring companies. Tutoring companies bid and the terms varied. One online tutoring company agreed that 40 percent of a $1.2 million contract with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, would be contingent upon student performance. Another online tutoring company signed a contract with Ector County schools in the Odessa, Texas, region that specified that the company had to accept a penalty if kids’ scores declined.

In the middle of the pilot, the outcomes-based contracting initiative moved from the Harvard center to the Southern Education Foundation, another nonprofit, and I recently learned how the first group of contracts panned out from Jasmine Walker, a senior manager there. Walker had a first-hand view because until the fall of 2023, she was the director of mathematics in Florida’s Duval County schools, where she oversaw the outcomes-based contract on tutoring. 

Here are some lessons she learned: 

Planning is time-consuming

Drawing up an outcomes-based contract requires analyzing years of historical testing data, and documenting how much achievement has typically grown for the students who need tutoring. Then, educators have to decide – based on the research evidence for tutoring –  how much they could reasonably hope student achievement to grow after 12 weeks or more. 

Incomplete data was a common problem

The first school district in the pilot group launched its outcome-based contract in the fall of 2021. In the middle of the pilot, school leadership changed, layoffs hit, and the leaders of the tutoring initiative left the district.  With no one in the district’s central office left to track it, there was no data on whether tutoring helped the 1,000 students who received it. Half the students attended 70 percent of the tutoring sessions. Half didn’t. Test scores for almost two-thirds of the tutored students increased between the start and the end of the tutoring program. But these students also had regular math classes each day and they likely would have posted some achievement gains anyway. 

Delays in settling contracts led to fewer tutored students

Walker said two school districts weren’t able to start tutoring children until January 2023, instead of the fall of 2022 as originally planned, because it took so long to iron out contract details and obtain approvals inside the districts. Many schools didn’t want to wait and launched other interventions to help needy students sooner. Understandably, schools didn’t want to yank these students away from those other interventions midyear. 

That delay had big consequences in Duval County. Only 451 students received tutoring instead of a projected 1,200.  Fewer students forced Walker to recalculate Duval’s outcomes-based contract. Instead of a $1.2 million contract with $480,000 of it contingent on student outcomes, she downsized it to $464,533 with $162,363 contingent. The tutored students hit 53 percent of the district’s growth and proficiency goals, leading to a total payout of $393,220 to the tutoring company – far less than the company had originally anticipated. But the average per-student payout of $872 was in line with the original terms of between $600 and $1,000 per student. 

The bottom line is still uncertain

What we don’t know from any of these case studies is whether similar students who didn’t receive tutoring also made similar growth and proficiency gains. Maybe it’s all the other things that teachers were doing that made the difference. In Duval County, for example, proficiency rates in math rose from 28 percent of students to 46 percent of students. Walker believes that outcomes-based contracting for tutoring was “one lever” of many. 

It’s unclear if outcomes-based contracting is a way for schools to save money. This kind of intensive tutoring – three times a week or more during the school day – is new and the school districts didn’t have previous pre-pandemic tutoring contracts for comparison. But generally, if all the student goals are met, companies stand to earn more in an outcomes-based contract than they would have otherwise, Walker said.

“It’s not really about saving money,” said Walker.  “What we want is for students to achieve. I don’t care if I spent the whole contract amount if the students actually met the outcomes, because in the past, let’s face it, I was still paying and they were not achieving outcomes.”

The biggest change with outcomes-based contracting, Walker said, was the partnership with the provider. One contractor monitored student attendance during tutoring sessions, called her when attendance slipped and asked her to investigate. Students were given rewards for attending their tutoring sessions and the tutoring company even chipped in to pay for them. “Kids love Takis,” said Walker. 

Advice for schools

Walker has two pieces of advice for schools considering outcomes-based contracts. One, she says, is to make the contingency amount at least 40 percent of the contract. Smaller incentives may not motivate the vendor. For her second outcomes-based contract in Duval County, Walker boosted the contingency amount to half the contract. To earn it, the tutoring company needs the students it is tutoring to hit growth and proficiency goals. That tutoring took place during the current 2023-24 school year. Based on mid-year results, students exceeded expectations, but full-year results are not yet in. 

More importantly, Walker says the biggest lesson she learned was to include teachers, parents and students earlier in the contract negotiation process.  She says “buy in” from teachers is critical because classroom teachers are actually making sure the tutoring happens. Otherwise, an outcomes-based contract can feel like yet “another thing” that the central office is adding to a teacher’s workload. 

Walker also said she wished she had spent more time educating parents and students on the importance of attending school and their tutoring sessions. ”It’s important that everyone understands the mission,” said Walker. 

Innovation can be rocky, especially at the beginning. Now the Southern Education Foundation is working to expand its outcomes-based contracting initiative nationwide. A second group of four school districts launched outcomes-based contracts for tutoring this 2023-24 school year. Walker says that the rate cards and recordkeeping are improving from the first pilot round, which took place during the stress and chaos of the pandemic. 

The foundation is also seeking to expand the use of outcomes-based contracts beyond tutoring to education technology and software. Nine districts are slated to launch outcomes-based contracts for ed tech this fall.  Her next dream is to design outcomes-based contracts around curriculum and teacher training. I’ll be watching. 

This story about outcomes-based contracting 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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Tom Brunskill thought he wanted to be a corporate lawyer. 

Now, looking back, he thinks it may have had less to do with his actual skills and interests, and more to do with his devoted consumption of television dramas like Suits and Boston Legal.  

“I used that as my proxy for choosing a career in corporate law, which – shocker – is not a great reason to choose a career,” Brunskill said. 

But Brunskill didn’t come from a family of lawyers. And, though he had studied law as an undergraduate in Australia, he said had no sense of what being a corporate lawyer would actually entail on a day-to-day basis. When he got his first job, it was clear almost immediately that it was not a good match.

“We’ve kind of popularized this idea that you kind of have to be miserable in the early parts of your career as you try and find the role that does align with your skills and interests,” Brunskill said. “That should not have to be the case.” 

So, he set out to change it. He created a program called Forage, which contracts with companies to offer free, virtual job simulations for students and those looking for work. 

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Forage was recently acquired by the education consulting firm EAB, which works with colleges across the U.S. on issues related to enrollment, student success and other institutional goals. The plan is to add Forage’s job simulation resources to other apps that students use regularly, said Scott Schirmeier, the president of technology and partner development at EAB. 

Schirmeier said that although Forage job simulations aren’t a replacement for internships, they can help begin to level the playing field for students who don’t have access to internships and other such opportunities. 

Brunskill said that those students – the ones who don’t have access to robust career networks and internship opportunities – are the ones who stand to benefit the most from these job simulations. They can become familiar with the niche vocabulary and specific tasks associated with the roles they are interested in, and eventually be more confident going into the job interviews. 

“Students that are really well connected or in Ivy League-plus schools, they’re not typically doing our simulations because they already see a route to those employers,” Brunskill said. “There should be no barriers to accessing what those careers look like.”

Related: College leaders refocus attention on their students’ top priority: Jobs after graduation

Brunskill said there are two main goals. One, of course, is to expose students to careers they might not know about (and prevent them from being unpleasantly surprised by their career choice, as he was). The other is to help companies identify candidates who have demonstrated their commitment and interest and who will be likely to stay in these roles for longer periods of time. In the nearly six years since Forage was founded, Brunskill said they’ve found that applicants who go through job simulations are about twice as likely to get jobs at these companies than their peers. 

On the website, students can go through a “job application basics” series, which includes lessons on networking, building a resume and how to prepare for an interview. Or they can go straight into job simulations provided by companies in sectors such as investment banking, life sciences and marketing. 

The simulations, which are self-paced and typically take a few hours, allow students to get an idea of the types of tasks they might be doing. If, for example, they chose to be on the marketing team at Lululemon, they might be asked to create a marketing plan for a new fitness product, and given a list of questions that their plan should answer. After submitting their marketing plan, they’re given an example of how someone actually in that role might have written the plan. 

Brunskill believes that completing these tasks in the simulations makes the students more qualified and competitive applicants. Even if they don’t get the exact job they did a simulation for, they might be more confident in their choice to pursue a similar career at a similar company, and better versed in what that job might actually entail, he said. 

Related: College internships matter more than ever – but not everyone can get one

“The career advice I got from my parents was like, ‘You are an argumentative child. You should become a lawyer.’ That is like literally the extent of what their knowledge was,” Brunskill said. 

“I reckon within like five weeks — I did it for like three or four years — but within about five weeks I realized this is not for me.” 

Avoiding that type of situation also benefits employers, Brunskill said. 

When a student can show that they completed a virtual job simulation, it signals to the employer that the applicant invested the time to get to know the company and the type of work they’d be doing in the job they’re applying for. Brunskill said those students are more likely to be engaged, get promoted and stay with the company. 

By offering job simulations with Forage, companies can also connect with students on far more college campuses than they could otherwise reasonably visit to recruit from, said Schirmeier.

“They have the most to gain from a student making an informed, deliberate career decision,” Brunskill said. 

This story about job simulations was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Our country is facing a severe shortage of nurses, with many U.S. hospitals struggling to meet demands for patient care. By next year, we are expected to face a shortage of up to 450,000 nurses. Allied health professionals such as phlebotomists, pharmacy technicians and medical assistants are also in extremely high demand. 

Unless new policies are created to help attract and train new talent, we will never have enough healthcare professionals to fill the gaps in the workforce, and patient care will ultimately suffer. I believe it is critical for policymakers to create new pipelines for healthcare jobs — starting in high school. 

Many factors contribute to the growing healthcare workforce shortage, from policy and training barriers to high turnover and burnout. One of the most pressing challenges we have today is in building high school students’ awareness of and interest in the healthcare field, specifically in the many available nursing and allied health positions.  

Related: When nurses are needed most, nursing programs aren’t keeping up with demand

As a nurse educator and the mother of a high schooler, I know many young people who have high aspirations but aren’t familiar with the dozens of different paths to a rewarding career in healthcare.  

Surveys show that 58 percent of high school students are interested in jobs that require specific skills, like nursing. But many graduates feel unsure about what to study in college or what career path to pick. And some 30 percent are not following a planned career or educational path at all. 

This gap presents an opportunity for us to build students’ knowledge of and awareness about healthcare while they’re still in high school. That could mean sponsoring health education classes or hosting nurses to speak at job fairs. 

It could mean encouraging students to participate in educational programs to ensure they are academically prepared for the rigor of nursing school prior to their enrollment, or providing healthcare career-focused field trips so they can get a real sense of the many different roles that nurses play.  

Job-shadowing opportunities and simulation labs at local hospitals, healthcare facilities and colleges could also provide students with visual, in-person experiences that expose them to the array of opportunities in the field. 

There is often limited understanding of what it means to build a career in nursing or allied health, fields that include a rich tapestry of different roles and healthcare settings. For example, careers in nursing can range from being a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home to a registered nurse in an emergency room to a Ph.D. nursing educator in a classroom.  

For allied health, a career could mean being a medical coder in a doctor’s office, an EKG technician in a hospital or performing a variety of other roles.  

In short, there are many fulfilling ways to earn a living while bettering our communities — and not all of those paths require going to medical school or completing a four-year program.  

Quicker points of entry to the field, such as through training programs and associate degrees, are just as important for students beginning their healthcare professional journeys. 

Related: How one college is tackling the rural nursing shortage

By partnering with local hospitals, health systems, medical groups and even higher education facilities that offer degrees in healthcare, high school faculty and students can help develop a greater understanding of and interest in nursing as a profession.  

In some states, efforts are already underway. Maryland, Missouri and Florida — among other states — have invested in the future of the nursing workforce by providing grants that support nursing programs through recruitment and retention and enhance existing educational programs. In North Carolina, my local school systems have partnered with a grant-funded program to help high schoolers get credentialed and then intern at hospitals in their senior year.   

With the right support and investments, policymakers and schools can increase awareness of the critical role nursing plays in delivering quality, patient-focused care to our communities across our country.  

By starting early, we can help turn the tide on the nursing and allied health professional shortage and build a robust high school-to-healthcare-worker pipeline to ensure that all patients have access to high-quality care. 

Jade Tate, MSN, RN, CNE, is a NCLEX services manager at ATI Nursing Education. She is based in North Carolina. 

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TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — By the numbers, Tohono O’odham Community College is booming.

Enrollment in the fall semester was just under 1,200, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, nearly triple what it was in fall 2019.

But the desert campus on an isolated patch of the sprawling Tohono O’odham Native American Reservation was nearly empty on a weekday afternoon. Instructors sat alone in front of computers in classrooms and offices teaching their courses online, which is where nearly all the students are learning these days.

Among the few students physically present was Tim James, a 36-year-old from the Gila River reservation, about two hours from the campus. He’s a resident adviser in one of the school’s few dorms, but even he has taken almost all his courses online this school year. And that’s been tough for him to deal with.

“There’s not that personal touch,” said James, who doesn’t have a computer and takes classes on his phone. “I like that human interaction.”

The empty campus at Tohono O’odham reflects an ongoing dilemma facing not only tribal colleges, but colleges in general, where students are increasingly taking courses at a distance instead of studying together in person.

More than half of all undergraduates now take at least some of their courses online, according to the U.S. Department of Education, up from 43 percent in 2015.

This means that students are spending less time than ever on campus, socializing in residence halls, studying together in the library or working in groups. While some online courses are scheduled so that all students meet at the same time, others are designed to give them flexibility to learn at a convenient time.

The upside is the ability to attract students who work full time or care for children, but online courses also run the risk of increasing isolation at a time when technology and working from home are already creating a lot more of it than was previously the case.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

“It is a delicate balance,” said Sharla Berry, associate director of the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University, Long Beach. “It involves understanding the unique needs of your population. Instructors really have to be intentional about creating connection points in these online courses.”

This challenge is already being felt acutely at the country’s roughly three dozen tribal colleges. They’re struggling with the conflict between trying to serve as many students as possible in some of the poorest parts of the United States and promoting in-person classes on campuses that often serve as cultural hubs for reservations and work to perpetuate Native American culture.

“A lot of our cultural practices require us to be together,” said Zoe Higheagle Strong, vice provost for Native American relations and programs at Washington State University and a member of the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho, who also teaches educational psychology. And while online courses have helped attract students who otherwise might not have attended college, Higheagle Strong said, a physical gathering place plays an important role for many Indigenous groups.

“It’s very difficult for us to practice our culture over technology.”

Congress defined tribal colleges and universities in the 1960s; these schools enrolled about 15,500 Indigenous students in the fall, according to the college consortium, and more than 2,000 non-Indigenous students. Most, but not all, are associated with specific Native American tribes.

While nearly all the nation’s colleges and universities have debated how online courses will fit into their futures, the stakes are higher for tribal institutions.

Most get money from the federal government for every student they enroll who is a member of a recognized tribe. The tribal college system rewards higher enrollment, which is why many tribal colleges are especially benefiting financially from the upsurge in online students. If they pull back on offering courses online, they risk losing students — many of whom live 50 miles or more from the closest campus — and the funding that comes with them.

Tribal colleges typically charge low tuition and some, including Tohono O’odham, cut tuition altogether during the pandemic.

At Tohono O’odham, college leaders say they’re now torn by how to proceed. On the one hand, they know students won’t drive hours to attend classes. But they also would prefer that more of them come to campus, not only to be together in person, but because the academic results of online students have been comparatively poor.

“The push is to bring students back,” said Laura Sujo-Montes, the academic dean. “Whether they will want to come back, that is the question.”

Perhaps conscious of its remote location — the college has no physical address, although the campus’s white water tank emblazoned with the college name at mile marker 125.5 north is visible for miles — Tohono O’odham leaders have been working to make the campus more attractive both for students and tribal members.

Related: A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple

The school has built a 75-person-capacity outdoor amphitheater for tribal events off a path that skirts a patch of cholla cactus, and it plans to add a gym for athletic and cultural gatherings. Another new building under construction will house programs in the O’odham language. All students and employees are required to take tribal language and history courses, and each building is marked with only its native name. The main campus is called S-cuk Du’ag Maṣcamakuḍ.

“We’re doing things to improve this campus, to make people want to stay,” said President Paul Robertson in a conference room in the Ma:cidag Gewkdag Ki: building.

Many students, however — as has also been the case at nontribal colleges — appear to prefer taking courses online.

At Nebraska Indian Community College, with three campuses on or near the Omaha and Santee reservations, the pandemic more than doubled native enrollment, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, while the number of nonnative students increased nearly twelve-fold. But the college’s board of directors has worried about the lack of in-person classes, said President Michael Oltrogge.

Adding more of those has been a tough sell, Oltrogge said.

“We tried coming back hot and heavy with in-person classes” in the fall of 2021, he said. “By the second week of classes, there was nobody on campus.”

Like Tohono O’odham, the college hopes to attract more people to the campus by building new facilities. But Oltrogge said funding shortfalls have made it difficult to add larger meeting facilities for college and cultural events.

“I need a place to have my graduations,” he said. “I need a place that’s reliable.”

At North Dakota’s Cankdeska Cikana Community College, on the Spirit Lake Reservation, President Cynthia Lindquist, a Spirit Lake Dakota tribal elder, has tried to reconcile her school’s enrollment boom with a campus that is much quieter since the pandemic.

While students are likely to remain largely online from now on, Lindquist hopes the college will find new life and energy as the tribe’s cultural hub. A new building opening in the fall will include a museum and a library with tribal genealogical materials, she said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

“The college’s history is tied to the tribe’s history,” Lindquist said. “My tribe will finally have a place. Right now, we don’t have any place to go.”

A few hundred miles west, in Montana, Blackfeet Community College is also trying to balance the increased reliance on online courses with its role as a tribal gathering place. It opened a new elder center last fall that routinely attracts more than 100 community members to its elder luncheons, said Jim Rains, the college’s vice president for academics.

Meanwhile, San Carlos Apache College in Arizona has faced the unique challenge of coming of age during the pandemic era. It opened in 2017 with a few dozen students in a handful of unused buildings next to the tribal offices, but enrollment swelled to nearly 400 with the move to online courses, said Lisa Eutsey, the provost.

While college leaders have a site in mind for a new campus and hope to deepen the school’s cultural importance to the community, Eutsey said they’re also “still trying to figure out exactly what we’re going to be.” The initial thinking was that San Carlos Apache would provide mostly in-person instruction, she said, but the strategy has changed.

“Covid has really allowed us to expand our operations to people who weren’t part of our initial plans,” Eutsey said of the online students who live far from campus. Now that the college has changed, she added, “it’s almost like there’s no turning back.”

Leaders at several tribal colleges said they have been pressured by their accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, to bring more students back to campus because few of the schools’ online programs have been approved. Some said that the commission’s demand is unrealistic and unfair to rural colleges and students who likely will simply stop attending college without online options.

The Higher Learning Commission declined to answer questions about its discussions with the colleges.

Other leaders said a return to in-person learning makes sense, partly because of the cultural importance of being around others from their community.

“I think everybody here wants to get back to that type of service delivery,” said Monte Randall, president of the College of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma. “I’m so tired of Zoom meetings. We want to get back in person and see each other.”

Related: When a Hawaii college sets up shop in Las Vegas: Universities chase students wherever they are

Some tribal colleges worry that they are about to lose droves of students whether they’re online or not. During the pandemic, they offered some combination of free tuition, phones, computers, internet and housing, but say they can’t afford to continue that strategy and intend to begin charging tuition again later this year; they expect a big enrollment drop when they do so.

Those fears may be well-founded. On the campus of Tohono O’odham — which has committed to continuing to let students attend without charge — every student asked said he or she had only started attending because tuition was free.

“We want to get back in person and see each other.”

Monte Randall, president, College of the Muscogee Nation

For some, however, the cultural aspects are among the biggest draws for a return to in-person classes.

Sky Johnson grew up in the tiny O’odham village of Comobabi, in the foothills a few miles from Tohono O’odham. When the college announced in 2020 that tuition would be free, she jumped at the opportunity to start working toward her goal of studying art or animation in Japan.

Johnson said she wants to create manga or anime about her culture, as well as to become an herbalist and help her village. A self-described introvert, Johnson said she’s nevertheless in favor of in-person courses because she learns better in a classroom.

“I like to be out,” she said, “but I don’t like to talk to people.”

This story about tribal colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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When I was 11, my younger sister Hanna suffered a complication during a routine surgery. She was unable to breathe for 15 minutes and faced months of recovery that would keep her at home.

As a family, we wanted to spend as much time with her as possible throughout her recovery, which meant reconsidering my traditional elementaryschool schedule.

Supporting Hanna was just one reason why my family and I decided I would enroll in a tuition-free online charter school program beginning in fifth grade and why, as a high school junior, I’m still there, as is Hanna and her twin, Morgan. Public school choice allows students like me to personalize education in order to achieve unique goals.

I live in rural Idaho, and if I’d gone to a traditional middle school, I would have needed to travel more than 90 minutes round-trip from my home in Priest Lake to attend.

Because my parents own and operate a resort that keeps them busy on weekends, we knew that a traditional school schedule wouldn’t allow me to spend time with them on their off days during the week or help Hanna while still attending school.

Related: Most families have given up virtual school, but what about students who are still thriving online?

Idaho allows parents to send their children to any public school in the state regardless of where they live, and there are lots of options — eight different public school types, including charter schools, magnet schools, home-school programs and virtual programs like mine.

When we were making the decision, I also discovered that my local high school didn’t have the Advanced Placement and honors classes I’d eventually want to take. When my parents and I looked into alternatives, we initially considered other online public school options, but most didn’t fit my family’s schedule.

I could have opted for a “cut and paste” approach, in which we’d pick different programs to cover each subject, but that would have been more like a home-school program that my family didn’t have time to manage.

Traditional public school requires students to attend school Monday through Friday, a great fit for a lot of families. However, I wanted to accommodate my family’s business and spend as much time as possible with them, so I found a program that allows me to complete schoolwork on Saturdays and Sundays and take Wednesdays and Thursdays off.

I can even work ahead of schedule if I have extra time. When high school started, I knew I wanted to take challenging math courses during my junior and senior years, and the school I chose offered the flexibility to simultaneously complete both Geometry and Algebra 2 during my sophomore year.

Online classes have also provided me with personalized support in the areas I struggle with most. My program has coaches who guide students through their school experience. Since I began my program seven years ago, my learning coach has helped me study, improve my reading comprehension and put into practice tips and tricks that have helped me succeed in my classes.

Learning coaches are different from teachers because they act more like tutors. I’ve really benefited from working one-on-one with a learning coach, especially when I was younger; they’ve helped me develop lifelong positive habits.

I’ve also had many teachers who accommodated my schedule and needs, which has had a great impact on my grades, my skills and my overall experience. One teacher helped me with a writing assignment I wasn’t even sure how to start.

She walked me through the steps over the phone and sent me videos and documents to help with formatting. She even allowed me to send her my rough draft for feedback before submitting my final assignment.

I could tell her goal was to teach me how to be a strong, resourceful writer and not just help me ace that particular assignment.

My school also does an amazing job of incorporating real-life scenarios into its teaching. In my math classes, lessons often describe how the math I’m learning is used in various careers. And the program’s technology platform helps prepare kids for the future; almost everyone needs to know how to write an email, use a computer and problem-solve.

Just because I’m taking classes online doesn’t mean I’m missing out on classroom conversations. Students share ideas on class topics through frequent online discussions. Everyone is welcome to comment on or add to one another’s ideas.

We’ll have to work with others throughout life. As many jobs are becoming increasingly virtual, it’s equally important to learn how to connect with peers digitally, and I feel like I have a head start.

My school also offers five different language options, including sign language. I’m learningSpanish and following a business management path that offers electives in principles of business and finance.

I plan to take more business electives because I want to study business or economics in college, hopefully at my dream school: Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Related: Supreme Court ruling brings an altered legal landscape for school choice

Because my program offers honors and AP classes, I can apply for competitive scholarships that require having taken a certain number of advanced-level courses. For reaching my personal academic and career goals, online public school has been the right fit.

My school has the types of teachers, staff and advanced courses I need to succeed, and I’ve been able to pursue an untraditional path. I’ve appreciated the extra time with my sister Hanna, who is playing sports and accomplishing many things doctors said she would never be able to do.

I’m grateful that I pursued my education differently despite the scary circumstances that made me and my family look for another way to attend school.

Sidny Szybnski is a junior at Inspire, the Idaho Connections Academy. She lives with her family in Priest Lake, Idaho, and hopes to become the third generation in her family to own and operate their lakefront resort.

This story about public school choice 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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As schools and educators grapple with using artificial intelligence, or AI, in the classroom, I find myself excited by the possibilities for students with dyslexia.

Technology can finally give students with learning differences the personalized lessons needed to help them work with — instead of work around — their disabilities. Used strategically, AI can help teachers design assignments for students’ many different learning styles rather than trying to “fix” their brains with one-size-fits-all approaches to learning. We can figure out how our students process information and then use AI to maximize that — all while saving much-needed time for educators. (As a parent of two children with dyslexia, I’m also worried, but my excitement is currently winning.)

AI is already predicting complex protein structures, helping doctors diagnose patients and building functioning websites. It’s time to put this groundbreaking technology to work for our teachers, many of whom have too many students to have the time to differentiate lessons based on learning differences. To be clear, AI should never replace a teacher. Instead, it can empower them with new time- and cost-saving tools that can improve instruction for all students.

Related: How well does your state support children with dyslexia?

I lead Landmark School, an independent school in the Boston area for students with learning disabilities. Our students are brilliant, creative, hard-working and driven learners, and yet their brains simply don’t intake or output information in the same ways as other students. Some of our teachers are already using AI to create individualized, decodable reading passages of varying complexities about topics that get the kids excited and engaged — basketball, space, race cars and Pokémon. And, using AI, our teachers can generate these passages in seconds, not hours and days. Some tech leaders are predicting that, given enough data, AI will soon be able to teach students with dyslexia to read — with teachers at the helm guiding the process.

School leaders, especially those who are advocates for students who learn differently, must begin having more strategic conversations about AI now. The traditional education system has never worked for students with disabilities, and we could redesign it. Schools must also update how we assess learning and knowledge so that AI is an assistive tool rather than a way to cheat. If we can use this opportunity to transform how we serve students, it will revolutionize schools.

Related: OPINION: Banning tech that will become a critical part of life is the wrong answer for education

Teacher-led AI could provide every student with the individualized, explicit, structured, sequential instruction and expertise that is presently only available to the privileged few who can afford independent schools like mine. For public schools with scant resources, a 30-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio might finally make sense when every student is given an individualized, responsive curriculum powered by their teachers and AI.

AI can be invaluable for the more than a dozen states that have revamped their reading curriculum in the last couple of years to better align with brain science. It can generate word lists, decodable texts and basic lesson plans. It can produce lists of real and nonsense words with specific features — vowel teams, syllable types, spelling patterns, prefixes, etc. — and then incorporate the words into a text about any topic. The benefits are endless for students like my two children, who present their learning differences in very distinct ways.

We are entering an era in which the very skills and talents often associated with dyslexia — creativity, problem-solving, out-of-the-box thinking — are going to be critical to navigating this new and complex technological world.

Research shows that every child — whether they have dyslexia or not — would benefit from learning to read the way we teach students with learning differences. With AI, that is feasible.

In fact, students are leading the way on AI literacy in some places because they understand the importance of this new tool. They know that AI is also going to revolutionize the world of work. If our job as educators is to prepare students for what comes next, we need to start reckoning with the “new next” now. Today’s students will decide the ethical questions that guide our new AI-infused world.

It’s time we adults catch up.

Josh Clark is head of the Landmark School and Landmark Outreach outside Boston and chair of the International Dyslexia Association. He is an expert contributor to the global nonprofit Made By Dyslexia and Microsoft Education and co-founded the Association of LD Schools (ALDS).

This story about AI and dyslexia 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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The pandemic not only disrupted education temporarily; it also triggered permanent changes. One that is quietly taking place at colleges and universities is a major, expedited shift to online learning. Even after campuses reopened and the health threat diminished, colleges and universities continued to offer more online courses and added more online degrees and programs. Some brick-and-mortar schools even switched to online only. 

To be sure, far fewer college students are learning online today than during the peak of the pandemic, when online instruction was an emergency response. But there are far more students regularly logging into their computers for their classes now than in 2019, according to the latest federal data. In fact, there are so many more that online enrollment hit a new post-pandemic milestone in the fall of 2022 when a majority – 54 percent – of college students took one or more of their classes online, a nearly 50 percent increase from the fall of 2019 when 37 percent of college students took at least one online class. 

The sheer numbers are staggering: more than 10 million college students were learning online in the fall of 2022. Compared to before the pandemic, an additional 1.5 million students were taking all of their courses online and 1.35 million more students were taking at least one course online — even as the total number of college students fell by more than a million between 2019 and 2022. 

“Online has become more the norm,” said Phil Hill, a consultant and market analyst of education technology in higher education, whose newsletter alerted me to the new milestone. “It’s almost like exclusive face-to-face instruction is becoming the exception.”

The numbers come from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS, which released fresh data for 2022-23 in January 2024. (Colleges are required to report masses of figures to the Education Department every year in order for their students to be eligible for federal student loans.) Hill extracted the online learning figures from the database and wrote about them in a Jan. 21, 2024  newsletter, “Fall 2022 IPEDS Data: Profile of US Higher Ed Online Education.” 

This column is largely based on Hill’s analysis, but buttressing the evidence for continued growth in online learning is newer fall 2023 data, released after the IPEDS data was made public and Hill’s report, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the research arm of a nonprofit that assists colleges with their data reporting requirements. The Clearinghouse reported that student enrollment growth for the category covering primarily online institutions was twice as large as enrollment growth overall (2.2 percent versus 1.1 percent) between fall 2022 and fall 2023. It didn’t track online course taking at traditional colleges and universities.

At first glance, it might seem strange that both online classes and degree programs are growing while college enrollment has been declining for more than a decade. But Hill explained to me that lost tuition revenue is driving the online shift. Online classes and programs are a way for colleges to reach students who live far from their area. They also appeal to older working adults who cannot come to campus every day. The quest for new students (and their tuition payments) has become more critical for many colleges as there are fewer college-age students in many regions of the country – a population drop that’s spreading throughout the country and will soon affect colleges nationwide. In higher education, it’s called the “demographic cliff.”

“It’s starting to come down to schools saying, ‘If we’re gonna stay alive as an institution, we’re going to be a lot more aggressive in finding ways to reach students,” said Hill. “It’s an existential issue.”

In recent months, several colleges have announced that they’re transforming into purely online institutions to avoid closure. Goddard College in Vermont said it will end on-campus residency programs beginning in the fall of 2024. It had been faced with declining enrollment and tuition revenue, combined with rising operating costs. Three University of Wisconsin campuses are also ending in-person instruction:  UW Milwaukee – Washington County, UW Oshkosh – Fond du Lac,  and UW Green Bay – Marinette.

Four-year public colleges and universities are behind the large post-pandemic increases in online learning, according to Hill. In the past, for-profit colleges, primarily online nonprofits and community colleges had been large drivers of the online trend. 

The pandemic expedited the shift, Hill said, because many colleges hemorrhaged students during the public health crisis and got an early taste of the demographic cliff ahead. Colleges are restructuring for the future. At the same time, nearly all faculty tried teaching online in 2020 and that experience chipped away at their previous resistance, said Hill. Professors may still not be fans of online learning, but they’re not protesting it as much.

Another phenomenon is that colleges are banding together to offer online classes that individual campuses, especially ones in rural areas, cannot afford to teach on their own. It’s a bit like airline code sharing. Hill said the Colorado Community College System, one of his clients, is developing online courses that all 13 colleges can share with their students.

For students, the online shift is a mixed bag. In some cases, it means they can still take classes that otherwise might not be offered, or they can finish their degrees at an institution that might otherwise have shut down. But there’s a large body of research showing that students don’t learn as much from an online course and are more likely to fail or drop out.

One change from pre-pandemic times, according to Hill, is that more online instruction is now scheduled. Lectures still tend to be recorded for viewing at one’s convenience, but students are often required to log in for a discussion or an activity over Zoom. In entirely “asynchronous” courses, students can log in whenever they want. Often that means that they don’t log in at all.

Keeping students motivated online remains a challenge for community colleges, Hill said. “If you’re going to teach online, you still need comprehensive student support, but community colleges are resource constrained,”  he said, explaining that they don’t have enough advisers and counselors to make sure students are logging in and keeping up with their work.  Often, financial, work and family responsibilities interfere with school.

It’s worth noting that far fewer students are learning online at the most selective colleges. Fewer than 20 percent of students are taking an online course at Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Williams and a handful of other elite colleges, according to Hill’s analysis. It’s yet another example of how schooling is changing between the haves and the have-nots.

This story about online college classes 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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