If we are to believe the current rapturous cheerleading around artificial intelligence, education is about to be transformed. Digital educators, alert and available at all times, will soon replace their human counterparts and feed students with concentrated personalized content.

It’s reminiscent of a troubling experiment from the 1960s, immortalized in one touching image: an infant monkey, clearly scared, clutching a crude cloth replica of the real mother it has been deprived of. Next to it is a roll of metal mesh with a feeding bottle attached. The metal mom supplies milk, while the cloth mom sits inert. And yet, in moments of stress, it is the latter the infant seeks succor from.

Notwithstanding its distressing provenance, this image has bearing on a topical question: What role should AI play in our children’s education? And in school counseling? Here’s one way to think about these questions.

With its detached efficiency, an AI system is like the metal mesh mother — capable of delivering information, but little else. Human educators — the teachers and the school counselors with whom students build emotional bonds and relationships of trust — are like the cloth mom.

It would be a folly to replace these educators with digital counterparts. We don’t need to look very far back to validate this claim. Just over a decade ago, we were gripped by the euphoria around MOOCs — educational videos accessible to all via the Internet.

“The end of classroom education!” “An inflection point!” screamed breathless headlines. The reality turned out to be a lot less impressive.

MOOCs wound up playing a helpful supporting role in education, but the stars of the show remained the human teachers; in-person learning environments turned out to be essential. The failures of remote learning during Covid support the same conclusion. A similar narrative likely will (and we argue, ought to) play out in the context of AI and school counseling.

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Guidance for our children must keep caring adults at its core. Counselors play an indispensable role in helping students find their paths through the school maze. Their effectiveness is driven by their expertise, empathy and ability to be confidants to students in moments of doubt and stress.

At least, that is how counseling is supposed to work. In reality, the counseling system is under severe stress.

The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250-to-1, yet the actual average was 385-to-1 for the 2022–23 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. In many schools the ratio is far higher.

Even for the most dedicated counselor, such a ratio makes it impossible to spend much time getting to know any one student; the counselor has to focus on administrative work like schedule changes and urgent issues like mental health. This constraint on availability has cascading effects, limiting the counselor’s ability to personalize advice and recommendations.

Students sense that their counselors are rushed or occupied with other crises and feel hesitant to ask for more advice and support from these caring adults. Meanwhile, the counselors are assigned extraneous tasks like lunch duty and attendance support, further scattering their attention.

Against this dispiriting backdrop, it is tempting to turn to AI as a savior. Can’t generative AI systems be deployed as virtual counselors that students can interact with and get recommendations from? As often as they want? On any topic? Costing a fraction of the $60,000 annual salary of a typical human school counselor?

Given the fantastic recent leaps in the capabilities of AI systems, answers to all these questions appear to be a resounding yes: There is a compelling case to be made for having AI play a role in school counseling. But it is not one of replacement.

Related: PROOF POINTS: AI essay grading is already as ‘good as an overburdened’ teacher, but researchers say it needs more work

AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and offer personalized recommendations makes it well-suited for enhancing the counseling experience. By analyzing data on a student’s personality and interests, AI can facilitate more meaningful interactions between the student and their counselor and lay the groundwork for effective goal setting.

AI also excels at breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps, turning goals into action plans. This work is often time-consuming for human counselors, but it’s easy for AI, making it an invaluable ally in counseling sessions.

By leveraging AI to augment traditional approaches, counselors can allocate more time to providing critical social and emotional support and fostering stronger mentorship relationships with students.

Incorporating AI into counseling services also brings long-term benefits: AI systems can track recommendations and student outcomes, and thus continuously improve system performance over time. Additionally, AI can stay abreast of emerging trends in the job market so that counselors can offer students cutting-edge guidance on future opportunities.

And AI add-ons are well-suited to provide context-specific suggestions and information — such as for courses and local internships — on an as-needed basis and to adapt to a student’s changing interests and goals over time.

As schools grapple with declining budgets and chronic absenteeism, the integration of AI into counseling services offers a remarkable opportunity to optimize counseling sessions and establish support systems beyond traditional methods.

Still, it is an opportunity we must approach with caution. Human counselors serve an essential and irreplaceable role in helping students learn about themselves and explore college and career options. By harnessing the power of AI alongside human strengths, counseling services can evolve to meet the diverse needs of students in a highly personalized, engaging and goal-oriented manner.

Izzat Jarudi is co-founder and CEO of Edifii, a startup offering digital guidance assistance for high school students and counselors supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s SBIR program. Pawan Sinha is a professor of neuroscience and AI at MIT and Edifii’s co-founder and chief scientist. Carolyn Stone, past president of the American School Counselor Association, contributed to this piece.

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When I first started teaching middle school, I did everything my university prep program told me to do in what’s known as the “workshop model.”

I let kids choose their books. I determined their independent reading levels and organized my classroom library according to reading difficulty.

I then modeled various reading skills, like noticing the details of the imagery in a text, and asked my students to practice doing likewise during independent reading time.

It was an utter failure.

Kids slipped their phones between the pages of the books they selected. Reading scores stagnated. I’m pretty sure my students learned nothing that year.

Yet one aspect of this model functioned seamlessly: when I sat on a desk in front of the room and read out loud from a shared classroom novel.

Kids listened, discussions arose naturally and everything seemed to click.

Slowly, the reason for these episodic successes became clear to me: Shared experiences and teacher direction are necessary for high-quality instruction and a well-run classroom.

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Over time, I pieced together the idea that my students would benefit most from a teaching model that emphasized shared readings of challenging works of literature; memorization of poetry; explicit grammar instruction; contextual knowledge, including history; and teacher direction — not time practicing skills.

But even as I made changes and saw improvements, doubts nagged at me. By abandoning student choice, and asking kids to dust off Chaucer, would I snuff out their joy of reading? Is Shakespearean English simply too difficult for middle schoolers?

To set my doubts aside, I surveyed the relevant research and found that many of the assumptions upon which the workshop model was founded are simply false — starting with the assumption that reading comprehension depends on “reading comprehension skills.”

There is evidence that teaching such skills has some benefit, but what students really need in order to read with understanding is knowledge about history, geography, science, music, the arts and the world more broadly.

Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for this knowledge-centered theory of reading comprehension is the “baseball study,” in which researchers gave children an excerpt about baseball and then tested their comprehension. At the outset of the study, researchers noted the children’s reading levels and baseball knowledge; they varied considerably.

Ultimately, the researchers found that it was each child’s prior baseball knowledge and not their predetermined reading ability that predicted their comprehension and recall of the passage.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Embedded within any newspaper article or novel is a vast amount of assumed knowledge that authors take for granted — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the importance of 1776.

Just about any student can decode the words “Berlin Wall,” but they need a knowledge of basic geography (where is Berlin?), history (why was the Berlin wall built?) and political philosophy (what qualities of the Communist regime caused people to flee from East to West?) to grasp the full meaning of an essay or story involving the Berlin Wall.

Of course, students aren’t born with this knowledge, which is why effective teachers build students’ capacity for reading comprehension by relentlessly exposing them to content-rich texts.

My research confirmed what I had concluded from my classroom experiences: The workshop model’s text-leveling and independent reading have a weak evidence base.

Rather than obsessing over the difficulty of texts, educators would better serve students by asking themselves other questions, such as: Does our curriculum expose children to topics they might not encounter outside of school? Does it offer opportunities to discuss related historical events? Does it include significant works of literature or nonfiction that are important for understanding modern society?

Related: PROOF POINTS: Slightly higher reading scores when students delve into social studies, study finds

In my classroom, I began to choose many books simply because of their historical significance or instructional opportunities. Reading the memoirs of Frederick Douglass with my students allowed me to discuss supplementary nonfiction texts about chattel slavery, fugitive slave laws and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by C. S. Lewis prompted teaching about allusions to the Christian creation story and the myth of Narcissus, knowledge they could use to analyze future stories and characters.

Proponents of the workshop model claim that letting students choose the books they read will make them more motivated readers, increase the amount of time they spend reading and improve their literacy. The claim is widely believed.

However, it’s unclear to me why choice would necessarily foster a love of reading. To me, it seems more likely that a shared reading of a classic work with an impassioned teacher, engaged classmates and a thoughtfully designed final project are more motivating than reading a self-selected book in a lonely corner. That was certainly my experience.

After my classes acted out “Romeo and Juliet,” with rulers trimmed and painted to resemble swords, and read “To Kill a Mockingbird” aloud, countless students (and their parents) told me it was the first time they’d ever enjoyed reading.

They said these classics were the first books that made them think — and the first ones that they’d ever connected with.

Students don’t need hours wasted on finding a text’s main idea or noticing details. They don’t need time cloistered off with another book about basketball.

They need to experience art, literature and history that might not immediately interest them but will expand their perspective and knowledge of the world.

They need a teacher to guide them through and inspire a love and interest in this content. The workshop model doesn’t offer students what they need, but teachers still can.

Daniel Buck is an editorial and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the author of “What Is Wrong with Our Schools?”

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Higher education has finally come around to the idea that college should better help prepare students for careers.

It’s about time: Recognizing that students do not always understand the connection between their coursework and potential careers is a long-standing problem that must be addressed.

Over 20 years ago, I co-authored the best-selling “Quarterlife Crisis,” one of the first books to explore the transition from college to the workforce. We found, anecdotally, that recent college graduates felt inadequately prepared to choose a career or transition to life in the workforce. At that time, liberal arts institutions in particular did not view career preparation as part of their role.

While some progress has been made since then, institutions can still do a better job connecting their educational and economic mobility missions; recent research indicates that college graduates are having a hard time putting their degrees to work.

Importantly, improving career preparation can help not only with employment but also with student retention and completion.

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I believe that if students have a career plan in mind, and if they better understand how coursework will help them succeed in the workforce, they will be more likely to complete that coursework, persist, graduate and succeed in their job search.

First-generation students, in particular, whose parents often lack college experience, may not understand why they need to take a course such as calculus, which, on the surface, does not appear to help prepare them for most jobs in the workforce.

They will benefit deeply from a clearer understanding of how such required courses connect to their career choices and skills.

Acknowledging the need for higher education to better demonstrate course-to-career linkages — and its role in workforce preparation — is an important first step.

Taking action to improve these connections will better position students and institutions. Better preparing students for the workforce will increase their success rates and, in turn, will improve college rankings on student success measures.

This might require a cultural shift in some cases, but given the soaring cost of tuition, it is necessary for institutions to think about return on investment for students and their parents, not only in intellectual terms but also monetarily.

Such a shift could help facilitate much-needed social and economic mobility, particularly for students who borrow money to attend college.

Related: OPINION: Post-pandemic, let’s develop true education-to-workforce pathways to secure a better future

Recent articles and research about low job placement rates for college graduates often posit that internships provide the needed connection between college and careers. Real-world experience is important, but there are other ways to make a college degree more career relevant.

1. Spell out the connections for students. The class syllabus is one opportunity to make this connection for students. Faculty can explain how different coursework topics and texts translate to career skills and provide real-life examples of those skills at work. In some cases, however, this might be a tough sell for faculty who have spent their careers in the academy and do not see career counseling as part of their job.

But providing this additional information for students does not need to be a big lift and can be done in partnership with campus staff, such as career services counselors. These connections can also be made in course catalogs, on department websites and through student seminars.

2. Raise awareness of realistic careers. Many students start college with the goal of entering a commonly known profession — doctor, lawyer or teacher, to name a few. However, there are hundreds of jobs, such as public policy research and advocacy, with which students may not be as familiar. Colleges should provide more detailed information on a wide range of careers that students may never have thought of — and how coursework can help them enter those fields. Experiential learning can provide good opportunities to sample careers that match students’ interests, to help further determine the right fit.

Increased awareness of job options can also serve as motivation for students as they formulate their goals and plans. Jobs can be described through the same information avenues as the career-coursework connections listed above, along with examples of how coursework is used in each job.

3. Make coursework-career connections a campuswide priority. College leaders must stress to faculty the importance of better preparing students for careers. Economic mobility is of increasing importance to institutions and the general public, and consumers now rely on information about employment outcomes when selecting colleges (e.g., see College Scorecard).

Faculty can be assured that adding career preparation to a college degree does not diminish its educational value — quite the contrary; critical thinking and analytical skills, for example, are of utmost importance to liberal arts programs and prospective employers. Simply demonstrating those links does not change coursework content or objectives.

4. Help students translate their coursework for the job market. Beyond understanding the coursework-to-career linkages, students must know how to articulate them. Job interviews are unnatural for anyone, especially for students new to the workforce — and even more so for those who are the first in their families to graduate from college.

Career centers often provide interview tips to students — again, if the students seek out that help — but special emphasis should be placed on helping students reflect on their coursework and translate the skills and knowledge they have gained for employers.

A portfolio can help them accomplish this, and it can be developed at regular intervals throughout a student’s time on campus, since reflecting on several years of coursework all at once can be challenging. A Senior Year Seminar can further promote workforce readiness and tie together the career skills gained throughout one’s time on campus.

By making these simple changes, institutions can take the lead in making students and the public more aware of the benefits of higher education.

Abby Miller, founding partner at ASA Research, has been researching higher education and workforce development for over 20 years.

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There is a long overdue movement in states and districts across the country to update K-3 reading and math curricula to ensure they adhere to research-proven practices. However, this movement has a big blind spot: preschool.

Close to half of all four-year-olds in the U.S. now start their formal education in a public preschool classroom, and this share is steadily growing. States invested well over $10 billion in pre-K programs in 2022-23, and the federal government invested $11 billion in Head Start.

Most public preschool programs succeed in offering children well-organized classrooms in which they feel safe to learn and explore. But they fall short in building the critical early learning skills on which a child’s future literacy and math skills depend.

Strong preschool experiences matter. The seeds of the large, consequential learning gap between children from higher-income and lower-income families in language, literacy and math skills in middle and high school are already planted by the first day of kindergarten.

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Many studies in widely differing locales around the country have shown that attending preschool boosts children’s kindergarten readiness, and that its effects can — but don’t invariably — last beyond kindergarten and even into adulthood. This readiness includes the ability to follow teacher directions and get along with peers, a solid understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds, a strong vocabulary and a conceptual knowledge of the number line — all skills on which elementary school curricula can build and all eagerly learned by preschoolers.

But as with all education, some programs are more effective than others, and curriculum is a key active ingredient. Most preschool programs rely on curricula that do not match the current science of early learning and teaching. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch to do better. As a new National Academies report explains, we have ample research that points to what makes a preschool curriculum effective.

Three practical changes will help to move today’s curriculum reform efforts in the right direction.

First, public preschool programs need to update their lists of approved curricula, based on evidence, to clearly identify those that improve young children’s learning and development. In the 2021-22 school year (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 19 states maintained lists of approved curricula, and those lists included curricula that are not evidence-based.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

Second, because the most effective preschool curricula tend to target only one or two learning areas (such as math and literacy), programs need to combine curricula to cover all vital areas. Fortunately, preschool programs in Boston and elsewhere have done precisely this.

Third, tightly linking curricula to teacher professional development and coaching is required for effective implementation. Too often, teacher professional development focuses on general best practices or is highly episodic, approaches that have not translated into preschool learning gains.

We can’t stop with these three changes, however. Children learn best when kindergarten and later elementary curricula build upon preschool curriculum.

None of these changes will solve the problem of the inadequate funding that affects many preschool programs and fuels high teacher turnover. But they can provide teachers with the best tools to support learning.

Getting preschool curricula right is crucial for society to receive the research-proven benefits of early education programs. Evidence shows a boost in learning when programs use more effective curricula.

What’s next is for policymakers to put this evidence into action.

Deborah A. Phillips and Christina Weiland are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on a New Vision for High-Quality Pre-K Curriculum, which recently released a report with a series of recommendations to improve preschool curriculum, as is Douglas H. Clements, who also contributed to this opinion piece.

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Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, educators have pondered its implications for education. Some have leaned toward apocalyptic projections about the end of learning, while others remain cautiously optimistic.

My students took longer than I expected to discover generative AI. When I asked them about ChatGPT in February 2023, many had never heard of it.

But some caught up, and now our college’s academic integrity office is busier than ever dealing with AI-related cheating. The need for guidelines is discussed in every college meeting, but I’ve noticed a worrying reaction among students that educators are not considering: fear.

Students are bombarded with negative ideas about AI. Punitive policies heighten that fear while failing to recognize the potential educational benefits of these technologies — and that students will need to use them in their careers. Our role as educators is to cultivate critical thinking and equip students for a job market that will use AI, not to intimidate them.

Yet course descriptions include bans on the use of AI. Professors tell students they cannot use it. And students regularly read stories about their peers going on academic probation for using Grammarly. If students feel constantly under suspicion, it can create a hostile learning environment.

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Many of my students haven’t even played around with ChatGPT because they are scared of being accused of plagiarism. This avoidance creates a paradox in which students are expected to be adept with these modern tools post-graduation, yet are discouraged from engaging with them during their education.

I suspect the profile of my students makes them more prone to fear AI. Most are Hispanic and female, taking courses in translation and interpreting. They see that the overwhelmingly male and white “tech bros” in Silicon Valley shaping AI look nothing like them, and they internalize the idea that AI is not for them and not something they need to know about. I wasn’t surprised that the only male student I had in class this past semester was the only student excited about ChatGPT from the very beginning.

Failing to develop AI literacy among Hispanic students can diminish their confidence and interest in engaging with these technologies. Their fearful reactions will widen the already concerning inequities between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students; the degree completion gap between Latino and white students increased between 2018 and 2021.

The stakes are high. Similar to the internet boom, AI will revolutionize daily activities and, certainly, knowledge jobs. To prepare our students for these changes, we need to help them understand what AI is and encourage them to explore the functionalities of large language models like ChatGPT.

I decided to address the issue head-on. I asked my students to write speeches on a current affairs topic. But first, I asked for their thoughts on AI. I was shocked by the extent of their misunderstanding: Many believed that AI was an omniscient knowledge-producing machine connected to the internet.

After I gave a brief presentation on AI, they expressed surprise that large language models are based on prediction rather than direct knowledge. Their curiosity was piqued, and they wanted to learn how to use AI effectively.

After they drafted their speeches without AI, I asked them to use ChatGPT to proofread their drafts and then report back to me. Again, they were surprised — this time about how much ChatGPT could improve their writing. I was happy (even proud) to see they were also critical of the output, with comments such as “It didn’t sound like me” or “It made up parts of the story.”

Was the activity perfect? Of course not. Prompting was challenging. I noticed a clear correlation between literacy levels and the quality of their prompts.

Students who struggled with college-level writing couldn’t go beyond prompts such as “Make it sound smoother.” Nonetheless, this basic activity was enough to spark curiosity and critical thinking about AI.

Individual activities like these are great, but without institutional support and guidance, efforts toward fostering AI literacy will fall short.

The provost of my college established an AI committee to develop college guidelines. It included professors from a wide range of disciplines (myself included), other staff members and, importantly, students.

Through multiple meetings, we brainstormed the main issues that needed to be included and researched specific topics like AI literacy, data privacy and safety, AI detectors and bias.

We created a document divided into key points that everyone could understand. The draft document was then circulated among faculty and other committees for feedback.

Initially, we were concerned that circulating the guidelines among too many stakeholders might complicate the process, but this step proved crucial. Feedback from professors in areas such as history and philosophy strengthened the guidelines, adding valuable perspectives. This collaborative approach also helped increase institutional buy-in, as everyone’s contribution was valued.

Related: A new partnership paves the way for greater use of AI in higher ed

Underfunded public institutions like mine face significant challenges integrating AI into education. While AI offers incredible opportunities for educators, realizing these opportunities requires substantial institutional investment.

Asking adjuncts in my department, who are grossly underpaid, to find time to learn how to use AI and incorporate it into their classes seems unethical. Yet, incorporating AI into our knowledge production activities can significantly boost student outcomes.

If this happens only at wealthy institutions, we will widen academic performance gaps.

Furthermore, if only students at wealthy institutions and companies get to use AI, the bias inherent in these large language models will continue to grow.

If we want our classes to ensure equitable educational opportunities for all students, minority-serving institutions cannot fall behind in AI adoption.

Cristina Lozano Argüelles is an assistant professor of interpreting and bilingualism at John Jay College, part of the City University of New York, where she researches the cognitive and social dimensions of language learning.

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Growing up in an immigrant family, I was painfully aware of the sacrifices my parents made for me to be educated in the United States. Their love and support were boundless, embodied by their long hours of work and their emphasis on education from an early age.

One day, I remember taking it upon myself to try to give them the best of everything by chasing after the golden ticket to success: getting into an elite college. It had been emphasized to me that those schools had the best resources, and if I wanted to become a successful scientist, this was seemingly the only way.

The benefits of an Ivy-plus education were drilled into my head from early childhood. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actress Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) went to MIT.

And the colleges referenced in popular media and literature are always the hardest to get into: In the popular television show The Summer I Turned Pretty, Conrad, one of the main love interests and heartthrobs, transfers from Brown to Stanford. Many of Ali Hazelwood’s bestseller books are centered around premier institutions like Stanford and MIT. And I haven’t even begun to mention the arbitrary U.S. News Rankings.

In addition, teen social media feeds are filled with reels like “Do these five things if you want to get into Harvard” and “You’ll never believe where this INSANE applicant got accepted to college!”

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However, elite colleges aren’t a guaranteed means to success, and the immeasurable value we are placing on them sends harmful and dangerous messages to today’s youth.

From eighth grade on, I participated in activities that I loved and, of course, made me stand out. I even wound up on the news. College admission was always on my mind. I put everything I had into getting into one of the most prestigious colleges in the U.S.

This year, my senior year in high school, changed things. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action and changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process induced an atmosphere of confusion and tension. Still, I applied to schools like Columbia and the California Institute of Technology.

My classmates and I vehemently expressed our frustrations with the FAFSA delays; some had to postpone making college commitments (early action) until they were sure that going to their school of choice wouldn’t place them under financial stress. Though we were encouraged to seek out help in school, we only had one counselor dedicated to helping a class of almost 800 seniors with their FAFSA and college application concerns.

For a family with no experience with American college admissions, the best free advice I could find was on platforms like Reddit, College Confidential and Instagram. When news hit that FAFSA had a calculation error, our physics group chat went wild.

The FAFSA errors and delays had the power to impact where we would spend ournext four years. And, from youth, we were taught that these four years had the sole power to determine the rest of our lives. I was lucky to have supportive friends and family and the luxury of a computer and internet at home. But without thousands to spend on expert advice and services, many of my classmates and I were often left in the dark.

Some of my friends expressed having no clue how to fill out the FAFSA with its tricky wording. My dad and I watched a step-by-step YouTube video and an Instagram reel I saved, “What NOT to do on the FAFSA,” to help us figure out how to fill it out.

As the months passed, rejections and waitlists hit me hard. I learned that college admission is not a meritocracy. On a popular Reddit community, I found posts of people lamenting their broken futures now that their Ivy dreams had been crushed.

I heard the stories of kids who stopped talking with friends and family and whose perceptions of themselves changed after getting rejection letters from elite schools. I felt the same. After six rejections, I wondered if I was good enough to pursue astrophysics, the subject I want to study in college.

My ambitious dreams felt foolish. After years of effort, I was planning to stay in my home state of Texas to attend UT Austin.

Just like that, some people changed their attitude toward me even though, in reality, I was the same girl. I had just been overwhelmed by an increasingly stressful and competitive process.

A person who goes to a state school is no less capable of success than a person who goes to Harvard. I’m tired of the college tutors, essay-writing companies and social media creators who are making some teenagers think otherwise.

Related: OPINION: Post-affirmative action, let’s look past our obsession with the Ivy Leagues and other elite schools

I got a call from one of my dream schools, the University of Chicago. I had been accepted off the waitlist, but it seemed likely that I wouldn’t be able to attend because of the cost.

Ultimately, with the help of financial aid, I’ll head there this fall.

We are forced to believe that only the very top colleges matter. When high schoolers are immersed in that mindset, it’s no wonder some feel like their world is ending if they can’t get in.

There is so much that goes into the college admissions process that we can’t control, but we can change the narrative of the culture surrounding it. We can start by providing free support to families who need it.

Siddhi Raut is graduating from Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio, Texas, and she will be a freshman at the University of Chicago this fall.

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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.

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Over the last year I have spent a considerable amount of time talking with college presidents and inquiring journalists. What each asked is essentially the same — What lies ahead for American higher education?

For each, I have had the same answer. The funk that now engulfs us could be never-ending.

Most of those who ask are, like me, steady consumers of higher education’s morning news reports, which feature failed presidencies, campus closures, campus disruptions and political intrusions. This funk is reflected in the continuing dysfunction introduced by the federal government’s failed FAFSA adventure.

Then I discovered I was dead wrong. The real problem is that higher education, like society at large, is being engulfed by a deluge of righteous anger. My evidence? The nightly parade of commentators and hosts on cable news.

With raised voices, waving hands and pronounced grimaces, they declaim against an abundance of villains, bad ideas and misplaced loyalties. Ultimately, I’ve come to understand that what I read about each morning is but an echo of what I watch each evening on TV.

What is needed as an antidote to offset the righteous anger is something that unites rather than divides our campuses. It is a tough but necessary lesson that I finally understood when I joined a convening of 20 institutions developing three-year baccalaureate degrees, something more and more colleges are adding or experimenting with.

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At that meeting, as before, I was asked what lies ahead for our troubled industry. Only now, my answer was different. What lies ahead is not more funk, but rather a voluntary wading into the darker waters of this righteous anger.

As is my custom, I ended my presentation with a call for questions. First up was a college president who, right on cue, snarled, “All right Bob, we get the message, but what are we supposed to do about it?”

Without hesitation, I told him: “Just do something! Something purposeful solving a key higher education problem. Something of value, a truly good idea that can engage important elements of your campus.”

The need for a uniting, positive force was the lesson the 20 institutions then developing three-year degrees talked about almost endlessly. They now knew what worked, what didn’t and how their effort had come to matter.

It was the lesson Christopher Hopey, president of Merrimack College, learned when he challenged a small group of his faculty to design three-year baccalaureate curricula.

Two months in he told me that his faculty were finding the College-in-3 work liberating, that it had given them a burst of energy and optimism.

Other schools had similar experiences; once they got going, success built on itself. What looked at first to be impossible had proven to be doable. There had been encouragement from their accreditors and a willingness on the part of their institutional friends to help.

Related: Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years

What makes these results possible is now pretty well understood by the members of College-in-3.

First, nearly every participating institution thought small, offering just a couple of three-year options, not the entire undergraduate curriculum. And while the prospect of an undergraduate degree that costs students one-quarter less was an administrative talking point, the real excitement was generated by the opportunity to design something really new, beginning with what students did their first year.

Old taboos were discarded. New ideas were readily tried and discarded if they didn’t work. The new watchword for effective design became, “Is it truly student centered?”

It became easier to integrate traditional learning outcomes with vocational interests; there was a new willingness to make internships, summer work and learning experiences elements of the new curriculum. That made it easier to consider this question: “What do we expect our students to know and be able to do when they leave us?”

Perhaps the most unexpected development was the feistiness of institutions that faced regulatory roadblocks. The New England Commission of Higher Education, for example, told the first of our institutions to submit proposals for a three-year degree to wait for a while.

Not deterred, the institutions mounted a successful campaign that convinced the commission to issue guidelines for approving three-year options.

In a different region, a public institution sought approval for a three-year degree, and seemingly did everything right, including securing the endorsement of its accreditor. But it ran into a political buzz saw when it sought the required approval of its state legislature: The faculty union declared the idea of a three-year baccalaureate degree dead on arrival. A 25 percent reduction in time to degree would mean fewer faculty jobs in general and fewer jobs in the liberal arts in particular.

The faculty union won. Yet, the institution, refusing to give up, has remained active in College-in-3.

Our push for a three-year alternative is not the only way to do something that matters, to create a uniting force. Still, it neatly illustrates the advantages of what I have in mind, involving both what and how students learn.

College-in-3does not call for protests or other means of acting out, but it can promise success for all students deemed worthy of admission, regardless of their backgrounds.

Not lamentations on a theme. Not the righteous anger of those alienated by a world turned topsy-turvy. Instead, purposeful change designed from the bottom up. That’s the antidote higher education needs.

Robert Zemsky was founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Since I first moved to Finland in 2013, I have witnessed an ever-deepening societal problem that has devastated student learning. Childhood has become dominated by digital devices. This is a global trend, but it disproportionately affects Finnish children.

Finland’s teenagers, formerly the world’s highest achievers, still perform above average on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, but they turned in their lowest-ever average scores in math, science and reading in the latest study, and those numbers have been going down for years.

In December, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture described the predicament as “extremely disconcerting.”

As a U.S. teacher and parent living in Finland, I understand the concern. American schools can learn valuable lessons from Finnish education, both positive and negative.

In 2016, despite research showing that students who used computers more often at school performed much worse on reading and math PISA tests, the Finnish government announced it would spend millions of euros on ramping up digital learning.

Finland is now one of the leaders in using digital devices at school, ranking sixth overall in the 2022 PISA study. On average, Finnish teenagers reported spending more than four hours on digital devices during the school day.

Predictably, digital distraction is high: The 2022 PISA data revealed that over 80 percent of Finland’s 15-year-olds said that digital devices distracted them, at least sometimes, while in math class.

The data also showed a strong association between digital distraction and student achievement. The teenagers who said they were distracted by their classmates’ device use performed significantly worse academically than those who rarely encountered this level of distraction.

Across wealthy countries, academic achievement has taken a nosedive as children’s smartphone ownership has surged. (Depression and anxiety have spiked, too.) And there is growing evidence that digital devices have eroded learning outcomes. Research has also indicated that excessive cellphone use is associated with adverse effects on student well-being, texting in class is linked to lower grades and just having one’s smartphone nearby decreases cognitive capacity.

Consistent with those findings, Finland’s PISA scores have declined steadily since the iPhone debuted in 2007.

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

It’s tempting to look at the country’s slumping PISA performance and blame the Finnish style of education. But this conclusion misses the forest for the trees.

I work in a hybrid role with Copper Island Academy, a Michigan charter school that uses tried-and-true practices from Finnish education, including regular brain breaks, teacher collaboration and hands-on learning.

Our K-8 school scored in the top 10 percent of the state’s public schools on a comprehensive evaluation that considers proficiency, growth and other key indicators.

Copper Island is careful about what it borrows from Finnish education, however. We embrace evidence-based practices like brain breaks but have refrained, for example, from adopting Finland’s recent emphasis on digital learning.

We subscribe to the country’s former approach of minimizing screen time during the school day. Japan, another high-achieving nation, has also done this.

Unlike their Finnish counterparts, Japanese teens improved upon their 2018 PISA scores in every subject despite the Covid-19 disruption. They also reported the least time using digital devices for leisure during the school day — about an hour less than Finland’s teenagers.

Related: There is a worldwide problem in math and it’s not just about the pandemic

U.S. psychologist Jon Haidt decries a “phone-based childhood,” which contributes to sleep loss, addiction, attention problems and social deprivation. This global phenomenon emerged about 12 years ago, but is playing out differently worldwide.

About 50 percent of American children now receive their first smartphone before they turn 11. According to a 2022 survey, most children in Finland, however, appear to get a phone (typically a smart device) at the age of 5 or 6. The study also indicated that — for the first time in its history — virtually all first-graders owned phones, including phone watches.

Finland’s plummeting PISA scores may reflect — perhaps more than anything else — a phone-based childhood that starts much too early. Experts recommend delaying smartphone ownership as long as possible to reduce distraction and addiction. Smartphone use triggers dopamine increases inside children’s brains, and those spikes make these devices hard to resist.

But there is some hope for Finland’s education system.

A couple of months ago, my 12-year-old son started venting when he came home from his Finnish school. He described classmates who gravitate to their smartphones whenever possible.

“Why doesn’t my school just get rid of phones?”he asked me.

A few weeks later, I received an unexpected email from his principal. The teachers and students had discussed the pros and cons of using phones at school and decided to ban the devices.

The decision filled my son with joy. It was a step in the right direction.

Timothy Walker is an American teacher, educational consultant, and the author of “Teach Like Finland.”

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In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions.

The career moves that are open to aspiring women leaders often propel them toward a very real glass cliff — leadership roles in which the risk of failure is high. By failing to address this bias, states and districts are constraining the rise of some of their most capable current and would-be leaders.

New survey data and research illuminates the experiences and perspectives of women who confront this bias and demonstrates the need for systemic change to dismantle the bias driving the gender gap.

The glass cliff for women is real, but it is not insurmountable. If more leaders — both women and, critically, men — take even a few steps forward, we can build a bridge to a future in which every leader can reach their full potential.

Here are some ways district and state leaders can transform the pipeline for who advances and leads their systems.

First, women in education leadership need more active support, with a shift from mentoring to sponsorship. That calls for women and men to take an engaged role in advancing up-and-coming women leaders — and all leaders, at all stages, who can benefit from on-the-job coaching.

These relationships can be game-changers, results from the first annual Women Leading Ed insight survey found. What’s more, they provide excellent opportunities for men to be allies in advancing gender equality.

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

For example, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent of schools in Oakland, recently recalled having a male coach when she started out. He served as her sponsor, providing coaching and introducing her to other experienced leaders.

“When I started as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, one of the former superintendents called me. This man coached me for two years every Friday,” Johnson-Trammell recounted. “He helped me and pushed me to be the leader I wanted to be as a Black woman. . . . His sponsorship helped open doors to accessing people, it helped me to connect to other superintendents.”

Second, rebalanced evaluation, promotion and hiring processes can be key levers in undoing bias. That means creating diverse applicant pools and hiring committees and providing bias training for those making key personnel decisions.

Seemingly small changes can have big effects. For example, having a finalist pool with two women candidates — instead of just one — made the likelihood of a woman getting hired 79 times greater, recent research in the Harvard Business Review found.

More broadly, the existing education leadership pipeline continues to disadvantage women. Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows — and the Women Leading Ed survey results verify — that women are predominantly funneled toward elementary school leadership and instructional leadership pathways that keep their trajectories below the top jobs in the district or state.

Men, however, are elevated to high school principalships and district positions that include fiscal or operational roles — precisely the kind of experiences that are prioritized during superintendent search processes.

The Women Leading Ed survey results underscore this divergence. Of respondents who had been principals, fewer than 20 percent served in a high school. Overall, just over one in 20 respondents had held finance or operations roles.

In one response to the survey, a woman who was a senior leader in a large urban school district described the bias of the skewed leadership pipeline succinctly: “I was told I’m too petite to be anything but an elementary principal.”

Third, bolstered family and well-being supports are essential to advancing more women leaders. These include parental leave, childcare, eldercare time and scheduling flexibility.

Rising to top district leadership positions comes with costs for women that are typically not shouldered by men.

Respondents to the Women Leading Ed survey reported feeling pressure to overperform professionally to prove their competency. Fully 95 percent of women superintendents believe that they must make professional sacrifices that their male colleagues do not, the survey data show.

Some women reported working long hours while neglecting family, under pressure to maintain unrealistic expectations at the office. One pointed out the additional responsibilities that women often carry in their personal lives, including the care of children or parents, attending and organizing school events, providing homework help and taking family members to doctor appointments.

Related: OPINION: We need more women in top leadership positions in our nation’s public schools

Added pressure at work and greater responsibilities at home lead to burnout: Roughly six out of 10 survey respondents said they think about leaving their current position due to the stress and strain; three-quarters said they think about leaving daily, weekly or monthly.

Providing high-quality benefits can be a key lever for addressing these underlying gender inequalities. So can offering flexible work schedules, hybrid work arrangements and remote work options that provide elasticity in where and when work gets done.

Finally, systems — not just individuals — must be accountable. Setting public goals for female leadership on boards and in senior management is a start. Reporting on progress toward those public goals is vital. So too is ensuring equal pay for equal work.

More than half the superintendents surveyed said that they have had conversations or negotiations about their salaries in which they felt their gender influenced the outcome.

One solution: establish audits for pay equity and increased transparency around compensation. Another: include salary ranges in job postings. These can be powerful steps toward the goal of pay equality.

Over 700 leaders have signed Women Leading Ed’s open letter calling for the adoption of these strategies. The strategies are already taking root through the advocacy and actions of women in education leadership and their allies of all genders.

It is a movement that is both growing and vital, as research makes clear that women continue to face a different set of rules than men in leadership, and districts too often give women window-dressing roles instead of actually reforming their practices to achieve gender equality.

The time for change is now.

Julia Rafal-Baer is the founder and CEO of Women Leading Ed, a national nonprofit network for women in education leadership, and co-founder and CEO of ILO Group, a women-owned education and policy strategy firm.

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