ATLANTA — Science teacher Daniel Thompson circulated among his sixth graders at Ron Clark Academy on a recent spring morning, spot checking their work and leading them into discussions about the day’s lessons on weather and water. He had a helper: As Thompson paced around the class, peppering them with questions, he frequently turned to a voice-activated AI to summon apps and educational videos onto large-screen smartboards.

When a student asked, “Are there any animals that don’t need water?” Thompson put the question to the AI. Within seconds, an illustrated blurb about kangaroo rats appeared before the class.

Thompson’s voice-activated assistant is the brainchild of computer scientist Satya Nitta, who founded a company called Merlyn Mind after many years at IBM where he had tried, and failed, to create an AI tool that could teach students directly. The foundation of that earlier, ill-fated project was IBM Watson, the AI that famously crushed several “Jeopardy!” champions. Despite Watson’s gameshow success, however, it wasn’t much good at teaching students. After plowing five years and $100 million into the effort, the IBM team admitted defeat in 2017.

“We realized the technology wasn’t there,” said Nitta, “and it’s still not there.”

Since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an expanding cast of AI tutors and helpers have entered the learning landscape. Most of these tools are chatbots that tap large language models — or LLMs — trained on troves of data to understand student inquiries and respond conversationally with a range of flexible and targeted learning assistance. These bots can generate quizzes, summarize key points in a complex reading, offer step-by-step graphing of algebraic equations, or provide feedback on the first draft of an essay, among other tasks. Some tools are subject-specific, such as Writable and Photomath, while others offer more all-purpose tutoring, such as Socratic (created by Google) and Khanmigo, a collaboration of OpenAI and Khan Academy, a nonprofit provider of online lessons covering an array of academic subjects.

As AI tools proliferate and their capabilities keep improving, relatively few observers believe education can remain AI free. At the same time, even the staunchest techno optimists hesitate to say that teaching is best left to the bots. The debate is about the best mix — what are AI’s most effective roles in helping students learn, and what aspects of teaching should remain indelibly human no matter how powerful AI becomes?

Skepticism about AI’s place in the classroom often centers on students using the technology to cut corners or on AI’s tendency to hallucinate, i.e. make stuff up, in an eagerness to answer every query. The latter concern can be mitigated (albeit not eliminated) by programming bots to base responses on vetted curricular materials, among other steps. Less attention, however, is paid to an even thornier challenge for AI at the heart of effective teaching: engaging and motivating students.

Nitta said there’s something “deeply profound” about human communication that allows flesh-and-blood teachers to quickly spot and address things like confusion and flagging interest in real time.

He joins other experts in technology and education who believe AI’s best use is to augment and extend the reach of human teachers, a vision that takes different forms. For example, the goal of Merlyn Mind’s voice assistant is to make it easier for teachers to engage with students while also navigating apps and other digital teaching materials. Instead of      being stationed by the computer, they can move around the class and interact with students, even the ones hoping to disappear in the back.

Others in education are trying to achieve this vision by using AI to help train human tutors to have more productive student interactions, or by multiplying the number of students a human instructor can engage with by delegating specific tasks to AI that play to the technology’s strengths. Ultimately, these experts envision a partnership in which AI is not called on to be a teacher but to supercharge the power of humans already doing the job.

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Merlyn Mind’s AI assistant, Origin, was piloted by thousands of teachers nationwide this past school year, including Thompson and three other teachers at the Ron Clark Academy. The South Atlanta private school, where tuition is heavily subsidized for a majority low-income student body, is in a brick warehouse renovated to look like a low-slung Hogwarts, replete with an elaborate clocktower and a winged dragon perched above the main entrance.

As Thompson moved among his students, he wielded a slim remote control with a button-activated microphone he uses to command the AI software. At first, Thompson told the AI to start a three-minute timer that popped up on the smartboard, then he began asking rapid-fire review questions from a previous lesson, such as what causes wind. When students couldn’t remember the details, Thompson asked the AI to display an illustration of airflow caused by uneven heating of the Earth’s surface.

At one point, he clambered up on a student worktable while discussing the stratosphere, claiming (inaccurately) that it was the atmospheric layer where most weather happens, just to see if any students caught his mistake (several students reminded him that weather happens in the troposphere). Then he conjured a new timer and launched into a lesson on water by asking the AI assistant to find a short educational movie about fresh and saltwater ecosystems. As Thompson moved through the class, he occasionally paused the video and quizzed students about the new content.

Study after study has shown the importance of student engagement for academic success. A strong connection between teachers and students is especially important when learners feel challenged or discouraged, according to Nitta. While AI has many strengths, he said, “it’s not very good at motivating you to keep doing something you’re not very interested in doing.”

“The elephant in the room with all these chatbots is how long will anyone engage with them?” he said.

The answer for Watson was not long at all, Nitta recalled. In trial runs, some students just ignored Watson’s attempts to probe their understanding of a topic, and the engagement level of those who initially did respond to the bot dropped off precipitously. Despite all Watson’s knowledge and facility with natural language, students just weren’t interested in chatting with it.

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

At a spring 2023 TED talk shortly after launching Khanmigo, Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, pointed out that tutoring has provided some of the biggest jolts to student performance among studied education interventions. But, there aren’t enough human tutors available nor enough money to pay for them, especially in the wake of pandemic-induced learning loss.

Khan envisioned a world where AI tutors filled that gap. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

One of Khanmigo’s architects, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, was the vice president of learning research and design for education publisher Pearson in 2016 when it partnered with IBM on the Watson tutor project.

“It was a different technology,” said DiCerbo, recalling the laborious task of scripting Watson’s responses to students.

Since Watson’s heyday, AI has become a lot more engaging. One of the breakthroughs of generative AI powered by LLMs is its ability to give unscripted, human-like responses to user prompts.

To spur engagement, Khanmigo doesn’t answer student questions directly, but starts with questions of its own, such as asking if the student has any ideas about how to find an answer. Then it guides them to a solution, step by step, with hints and encouragement (a positive tone is assured by its programmers). Another feature for stoking engagement allows students to ask the bot to assume the identity of historical or literary figures for chats about their life and times. Teachers, meanwhile, can tap the bot for help planning lessons and formulating assessments. 

Notwithstanding Khan’s expansive vision of “amazing” personal tutors for every student on the planet, DiCerbo assigns Khanmigo a more limited teaching role. When students are working independently on a skill or concept but get hung up or caught in a cognitive rut, she said, “we want to help students get unstuck.”

Some 100,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo this past academic year in schools nationwide, helping to flag any hallucinations the bot makes and providing tons of student-bot conversations for DiCerbo and her team to analyze.

“We look for things like summarizing, providing hints and encouraging,” she explained. “Does [Khanmigo] do the motivational things that human tutors do?”

The degree to which Khanmigo has closed AI’s engagement gap is not yet known. Khan Academy plans to release some summary data on student-bot interactions later this summer, according to DiCerbo. Plans for third-party researchers to assess the tutor’s impact on learning will take longer.

Nevertheless, many tutoring experts stress the importance of building a strong relationship between tutors and students to achieve significant learning boosts. “If a student is not motivated, or if they don’t see themselves as a math person, then they’re not going to have a deep conversation with an AI bot,” said Brent Milne, the vice president of product research and development at Saga Education, a nonprofit provider of in-person tutoring.

Since 2021, Saga has been a partner in the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), run by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, to help scale high-dosage tutoring — generally defined as one-on-one or small group sessions for at least 30 minutes every day. The PLI team sees a big and growing role for AI in tutoring, one that augments but doesn’t replicate human efforts.

For instance, Saga has been experimenting with AI feedback to help tutors better engage and motivate students. Working with researchers from the University of Memphis and the University of Colorado, the Saga team fed transcripts of their math tutoring sessions into an AI model trained to recognize when the tutor was prompting students to explain their reasoning, refine their answers or initiate a deeper discussion. The AI analyzed how often each tutor took these steps.  

When Saga piloted this AI tool in 2023, the nonprofit provided the feedback to their tutor coaches, who worked with four to eight tutors each. Tracking some 2,300 tutoring sessions over several weeks, they found that tutors whose coaches used the AI feedback peppered their sessions with significantly more of these prompts to encourage student engagement.

While Saga is looking into having AI deliver some feedback directly to tutors, it’s doing so cautiously, because, according to Milne, “having a human coach in the loop is really valuable to us.”

Related: How AI could transform the way schools test kids

In addition to using AI to help train tutors, the Saga team wondered if they could offload certain tutor tasks to a machine without compromising the strong relationship between tutors and students. Specifically, they understood that tutoring sessions were typically a mix of teaching concepts and practicing them, according to Milne. A tutor might spend some time explaining the why and how of factoring algebraic equations, for example, and then guide a student through practice problems. But what if the tutor could delegate the latter task to AI, which excels at providing precisely targeted adaptive practice problems and hints?

The Saga team tested the idea in their algebra tutoring sessions during the 2023-24 school year. They found that students who were tutored daily in a group of two had about the same gains in math scores as students who were tutored in a group of four with assistance from ALEKS, an AI-powered learning software by McGraw Hill. In the group of four, two students worked directly with the tutor and two with the AI, switching each day. In other words, the AI assistance effectively doubled the reach of the tutor.

Experts expect that AI’s role in education is bound to grow, and its interactions will continue to seem more and more human. Earlier this year, OpenAI and the startup Hume AI separately launched “emotionally intelligent” AI that analyzes tone of voice and facial expressions to infer a user’s mood and respond with calibrated “empathy.” Nevertheless, even emotionally intelligent AI will likely fall short on the student engagement front, according to Brown University computer science professor Michael Littman, who is also the National Science Foundation’s division director for information and intelligent systems.

No matter how human-like the conversation, he said, students understand at a fundamental level that AI doesn’t really care about them, what they have to say in their writing or whether they pass or fail algebra. In turn, students will never really care about the bot and what it thinks. A June study in the journal “Learning and Instruction” found that AI can already provide decent feedback on student essays. What is not clear is whether student writers will put in care and effort — rather than offloading the task to a bot — if AI becomes the primary audience for their work. 

“There’s incredible value in the human relationship component of learning,” Littman said, “and when you just take humans out of the equation, something is lost.”

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CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — When Natalia Molina began teaching her second grade students word problems earlier this school year, every lesson felt difficult. Most students were stymied by problems such as: “Sally went shopping. She spent $86 on groceries and $39 on clothing. How much more did Sally spend on groceries than on clothing?”

Both Molina, a first-year teacher, and her students had been trained to tackle word problems by zeroing in on key words like “and,” “more” and “total”  — a simplistic approach that Molina said too often led her students astray. After recognizing the word “and,” for instance, they might mistakenly assume that they needed to add two nearby numbers together to arrive at an answer.

Some weaker readers, lost in a sea of text, couldn’t recognize any words at all.

“I saw how overwhelmed they would get,” said Molina, who teaches at Segue Institute for Learning, a predominantly Hispanic charter school in this small city just north of Providence.

Related: Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

So, with the help of a trainer doing work in Rhode Island through a state grant, Molina and some of her colleagues revamped their approach to teaching word problems this winter — an effort that they said is already paying off in terms of increased student confidence and ability. “It has been a game changer for them,” Molina said.

Perhaps no single educational task encompasses as many different skills as the word problem. Between reading, executive functioning, problem solving, computation and vocabulary, there are a lot of ways for students to go wrong. And for that reason, students perform significantly worse overall on word problems compared to questions more narrowly focused on computation or shapes (for example: “Solve 7 + _ = 22” or “What is 64 x 3?”).

If a student excels at word problems, it’s a good sign that they’re generally excelling at school. “Word-problem solving in lower grades is one of the better indicators of overall school success in K-12,” said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor at Vanderbilt University. In a large national survey, for instance, algebra teachers rated word-problem solving as the most important among 15 skills required to excel in the subject.

Yet most experts and many educators agree that too many schools are doing it wrong, particularly in the elementary grades. And in a small but growing number of classrooms, teachers like Molina are working to change that. “With word problems, there are more struggling learners than non-struggling learners” because they are taught so poorly, said Nicole Bucka, who works with teachers throughout Rhode Island to provide strategies for struggling learners.

Too many teachers, particularly in the early grades, rely on key words to introduce math problems. Posters displaying the terms — sum, minus, fewer, etc. — tied to operations including addition and subtraction are a staple in elementary school classrooms across the country.

Key words can be a convenient crutch for both students and teachers, but they become virtually meaningless as the problems become harder, according to researchers. Key words can help first graders figure out whether to add or subtract more than half of the time, but the strategy rarely works for the multi-step problems students encounter starting in second and third grade. “With multi-step problems, key words don’t work 90 percent of the time,” said Sarah Powell, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies word problems and whose research has highlighted the inefficacy of key words. “But the average kindergarten teacher is not thinking about that; they are teaching 5-year-olds, not 9-year-olds.”

Many teachers in the youngest grades hand out worksheets featuring the same type of word problem repeated over and over again. That’s what Molina’s colleague, Cassandra Santiago, did sometimes last year when leading a classroom on her own for the first time. “It was a mistake,” the first grade teacher said. “It’s really important to mix them up. It makes them think more critically about the parts they have to solve.”

Another flaw with word problem instruction is that the overwhelming majority of questions are divorced from the actual problem-solving a child might have to do outside the classroom in their daily life — or ever, really. “I’ve seen questions about two trains going on the same track,” said William Schmidt, a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. “First, why would they be going on the same track and, second, who cares?”

Schmidt worked on an analysis of about 8,000 word problems used in 23 textbooks in 19 countries. He found that less than one percent had “real world applications” and involved “higher order math applications.”

“That is one of the reasons why children have problems with mathematics,” he said. “They don’t see the connection to the real world … We’re at this point in math right now where we are just teaching students how to manipulate numbers.”

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

He said a question, aimed at middle schoolers, that does have real world connections and involves more than manipulating numbers, might be: “Shopping at the new store in town includes a 43% discount on all items which are priced the same at $2. The state you live in has a 7% sales tax. You want to buy many things but only have a total of $52 to spend. Describe in words how many things you could buy.”

Schmidt added that relevancy of word problems is one area where few, if any, countries excel. “No one was a shining star leading the way,” he said. 

***

In her brightly decorated classroom one Tuesday afternoon, Santiago, the first grade teacher, gave each student a set of animal-shaped objects and a sheet of blue paper (the water) and green (the grass). “We’re going to work on a number story,” she told them. “I want you to use your animals to tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time,” the story began. In this tale, three animals played in the water, and two animals played in the grass. Santiago allowed some time for the ducks, pigs and bears to frolic in the wilds of each student’s desk before she asked the children to write a number sentence that would tell them how many animals they have altogether.

Some of the students relied more on pictorial representations (three dots on one side of a line and two dots on the other) and others on the number sentence (3+2 = 5) but all of them eventually got to five. And Santiago made sure that her next question mixed up the order of operations (so students didn’t incorrectly assume that all they ever have to do is add): “Some more animals came and now there are seven. So how many more came?”

One approach to early elementary word problems that is taking off in some schools, including Segue Institute, has its origins in a special education intervention for struggling math students. Teachers avoid emphasizing key words and ask students instead to identify first the conceptual type of word problem (or schema, as many practitioners and researchers refer to it) they are dealing with: “Total problems,” for instance, involve combining two parts to find a new amount; “change problems” involve increasing or decreasing the amount of something. Total problems do not necessarily involve adding, however.

“The schemas that students learn in kindergarten will continue with them throughout their whole career,” said Powell, the word-problem researcher, who regularly works with districts across the country to help implement the approach. 

In Olathe, Kansas — a district inspired by Powell’s work — teachers had struggled for years with word problems, said Kelly Ulmer, a math support specialist whose goal is to assist in closing academic gaps that resulted from lost instruction time during the pandemic. “We’ve all tried these traditional approaches that weren’t working,” she said. “Sometimes you get pushback on new initiatives from veteran teachers and one of the things that showed us how badly this was needed is that the veteran teachers were the most excited and engaged — they have tried so many things” that haven’t worked.

In Rhode Island, many elementary schools initially used the strategy with students who required extra help, including those in special education, but expanded this use to make it part of the core instruction for all, said Bucka. In some respects, it’s similar to the recent, well publicized evolution of reading instruction in which some special education interventions for struggling readers  — most notably, a greater reliance on phonics in the early grades — have gone mainstream.

There is an extensive research base showing that focusing on the different conceptual types of word problems is an effective way of teaching math, although much of the research focuses specifically on students experiencing difficulties in the subject. 

Molina has found asking students to identify word problems by type to be a useful tool with nearly all of her second graders; next school year she hopes to introduce the strategy much earlier.

One recent afternoon, a lesson on word problems started with everyone standing up and chanting in unison: “Part plus part equals total” (they brought two hands together). “Total minus part equals part” (they took one hand away).

It’s a way to help students remember different conceptual frameworks for word problems. And it’s especially effective for the students who learn well through listening and repeating. For visual learners, the different types of word problems were mapped out on individual dry erase mats.

The real work began when Molina passed out questions, and the students— organized into the Penguin, Flower Bloom, Red Panda and Marshmallow teams — had to figure out which framework they were dealing with on their own and then work toward an answer. A few months ago, many of them would have automatically shut down when they saw the text on the page, Molina said.

For the Red Pandas, the question under scrutiny was: “The clothing store had 47 shirts. They sold 21, how many do they have now?”

“It’s a total problem,” one student said.

“No, it’s not total,” responded another.

“I think it’s about change,” said a third.

None of the students seemed worried about their lack of consensus, however. And neither was Molina. A correct answer is always nice but those come more often now that most of the students have made a crucial leap. “I notice them thinking more and more,” she said, “about what the question is actually asking.”

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What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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An AI chatbot that walks students through how to solve math problems. An AI instructional coach designed to help English teachers create lesson plans and project ideas. An AI tutor that helps middle and high schoolers become better writers.

These aren’t tools created by education technology companies. They were designed by teachers tasked with using AI to solve a problem their students were experiencing.

Over five weeks this spring, about 300 people – teachers, school and district leaders, higher ed faculty, education consultants and AI researchers – came together to learn how to use AI and develop their own basic AI tools and resources. The professional development opportunity was designed by technology nonprofit Playlab.ai and faculty at the Relay Graduate School of Education.

For many of the educators, the workshop was their first exposure to generative AI models and writing code. Educators say they want opportunities like this one: According to a recent report from nonprofit Educators for Excellence, many teachers say they are hesitant to use AI in the classroom but would feel more comfortable with training about it.

During the workshop, Karen Zutali, an English teacher who works in the Canton City School District in Ohio, created a chatbot to help English teachers design lesson plans and projects that integrate other subjects into lessons.

Using the Playlab platform builder, Zutali started by creating a “background” for her AI chatbot – telling the bot that it was an expert in project and problem-based learning skilled at helping English and language arts teachers create lessons and unit plans. Then she wrote step-by-step directions for the chatbot to follow in conversations with users: For example, if a teacher expressed interest in more detailed lesson plans, the AI would ask which subject the plans should cover.

Most of the apps were designed to help students in specific subjects like math or English, or to provide instant feedback on projects and assignments. Others were meant to lessen teacher workload by helping with lesson planning or project ideas; several were designed to assist English language learners.

Nkomo Morris, a special education teacher at The James Baldwin School, a public school in New York City, said education technology companies often pitch products to schools without a real understanding of what teachers and students need.

“We know our students, we know the capability of the building and the tech we have, and so we can make stuff that is very tailored to the needs that we have,” said Morris, who created an AI chatbot that helps social studies teachers create activities and games to supplement their lessons. With so many AI tools out there, she said it can be difficult to find one that meets exactly what you need, but “it’s so easy to just create your own” with coaching and platforms such as Playlab.ai.

Playlab.ai co-founder Yusuf Ahmad said school districts should provide professional development opportunities for teachers on AI, teaching them to ask tough questions about the technology in their classrooms. The most important question, he said, is: “How does this advance their work and student learning?”

“I think one of the mindset shifts that’s really cool is, actually, you can also create,” he added. “You can bend this technology, you can adapt it to meet your needs.”

This story about AI for teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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DECATUR, Ark. — When Ashlyn Siebert started looking last year for teaching jobs near Decatur — her rural hometown — she knew she wouldn’t make as much as a first-year teacher would 16 miles away in Bentonville, home to Walmart’s headquarters.

The story was the same in dozens of other small towns across Arkansas. If teachers wanted to earn more, they had to move to a bigger school district. In Decatur, teachers with a bachelor’s degree made a starting salary of $36,000. Even if they taught in schools for 25 years, they would still earn less than teachers right out of college in Bentonville, who were making $48,755 a year.

But Siebert’s timing was good. In the span of 15 days in early 2023, the state legislature passed a massive education bill, which went into effect that fall. When Siebert ultimately signed a contract to teach in Decatur for the 2023-24 school year, the starting salary had jumped to $50,000. It’s been a huge help at a time when the cost of living has swelled, Siebert said.

“I think it’s a good way to draw people into the profession, especially if it’s something they already knew they wanted to do but were held back by the salary,” she said.

But the new law has had a mixed reception.

School leaders said the pay jump has made it much easier to attract teachers to small rural school districts like Decatur, where salaries had not kept up with inflation. However,  the law — called the LEARNS Act —  also got rid of mandated annual raises. And it’s caused tension among veteran teachers, many of whom had to work for two decades to come close to making $50,000 annually. Because of the new law, in more than half of the state’s school districts, every teacher made the same salary this year, regardless of years of experience.

It is the largest state investment in teacher salaries in Arkansas history, a big deal in a state that ranked 48th in the country for starting pay up until this year. The law in Arkansas is one of nearly two dozen similar measures in states around the country that have been proposed or passed in the last few years. Most, like the Arkansas law, aim to address staffing shortages. Just north of Arkansas, Missouri passed its own version of the LEARNS Act this year. The state boosted teacher pay to $40,000 among other, more controversial provisions, including an expansion of its voucher program.

Decatur sits in the northwest corner of Arkansas, surrounded by farmland and in the heart of poultry country. Outside of the school system, most people in Decatur work either in the chicken processing plant a few minutes out of town or they raise chickens to sell to the plant, Siebert said. About 80 percent of the nearly 600 students in the school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.

Decatur is near some of the state’s biggest school districts: Springdale, Fayetteville and Bentonville. A year ago, schools in those cities could afford to pay a first-year teacher between $48,000 and $50,282, depending on the district.

Because of that pay gap, between 30 and 40 percent of teachers in Decatur were leaving each year, Decatur School District Superintendent Steven Watkins said.

“We would hire new teachers out of college and keep them three years, until they weren’t novice anymore, and then the bigger schools would hire them,” Watkins said. “There was a huge discrepancy in the money.”

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

This year, teacher turnover in the district dropped to about 10 percent. Watkins credits the salary increase and the district’s decision to move to a four-day school week next year. “I can say out of the ones we’ve lost this year, none of them have been because of the money,” Watkins said.

Since the passage of the LEARNS Act, the district’s applicant pool has been larger and of higher quality, Watkins said. A high school teaching position in Decatur that would have received one or two applicants in the past had more than a dozen this year. The same was true in similar districts. Guy-Perkins, a small school district in central Arkansas with just over 300 students, typically saw three to four applicants depending on the position. This year, the district received 15 applications for a single teaching position at the elementary school.

It’s still too soon to say how much the law will impact future teacher recruitment and retention, according to researchers at the University of Arkansas. A study of teachers entering and exiting schools just before the 2023-24 school year showed modest improvements, at best, but that could be because the law passed in March, when many teachers had likely already made up their mind about the next school year. Because of legal challenges to the LEARNS Act that have since been dismissed, there was also a degree of uncertainty about whether it would actually be implemented, the researchers said. An important litmus test will be the law’s impact on teachers with several years of experience, which research has shown is correlated with classroom effectiveness.

“We cannot say conclusively,” said Gema Zamarro, a professor at the university who co-authored the study. “We have to wait and see.”

But there have already been some unexpected consequences to the new law. While the pay boost may have helped the front-end of the teacher pipeline in small rural schools, the effect on veteran teachers at the top end of salary schedules was less pronounced. The law guaranteed that educators who made close to or more than $50,000 could receive a $2,000 one-time salary increase. That meant in 55 percent of the state’s school districts this year, there was no reward for years of experience or, in many of those districts, advanced degrees. Educators with two decades in the classroom are earning the same salary as their peers who just graduated college. Before the law, teachers made less money but were guaranteed a raise of a few hundred dollars a year for at least 15 years, and teachers with advanced degrees had a higher pay scale.

Related: When schools experimented with pay hikes for teachers in hard-to-staff areas, the results were surprising

“It’s a little frustrating when the guy next door to you has a year and he’s making the same amount as you are,” said Decatur teacher Rebecca McElhannon, who has a master’s degree and 17 years of experience. “Any recognition that we need more pay is amazing, but it could have been more fair.”

A single mother with a teenager, McElhannon occasionally drives for DoorDash and picks up shifts doing concessions at the Fayetteville ballparks to make a little extra money. But she did see some benefits from the law. After the raise, her salary went from a little more than $48,000 to just over $50,000 this year — a pay boost that would have taken her four years to get on the previous salary model.

In Mayflower, a small school district of just under 1,000 students between Little Rock and Conway, kindergarten teacher Kristin Allbritton and third grade teacher Karen Wilson know their years of experience have made them better teachers. The legislation sent them a different message.

“I know I’m valued here,” said Allbritton, who has taught in Mayflower for 15 years. “But feeling, as a professional, valued from this legislation? Yeah, no.”

According to the district’s current salary schedule, both Allbritton and Wilson will continue to make $50,000 until they retire.

“No one has ever become a teacher to gain financially,” said Wilson, who has taught in Mayflower for 19 years, “but at the same time, financial gain is why you work, period. Right? It’s why you work. We can’t put teachers in a box and say, ‘Well, you don’t do it for the money.’ You still have to earn money; you still have to live. It’s hard to watch when teachers are trying to balance all of those feelings and make decisions for what’s best for them.”

From a strategy perspective, it makes sense for a state to focus on improving pay for early career teachers, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

“The attrition rate for first-year teachers in some districts can be 20 or 30 percent, and the attrition rate for somebody who has been teaching for 10 or 15 years is going to be very low — more like 3 or 4 percent,” Goldhaber said. “So, if you’re trying to change salaries to affect teacher attrition, you’re working off a much larger number at the beginning of a career.”

To try and offer some level of raises above $50,000, some small schools have added tiny increases to their budgets. Guy-Perkins approved a $150 annual raise for its teachers every year for up to 16 years. In Mayflower, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 15 graduate credit hours could increase their salary by $500 in their 22nd year of teaching.

Because the LEARNS Act funding is only guaranteed for the next two years and only pays for the current teacher workforce, leaders in smaller school districts are cautious about adding annual raises to their own budgets. According to a University of Arkansas survey, most school leaders said they were somewhat or very likely to increase pay by a flat percent in the next few years. But uncertainty over state funding was the top reason superintendents gave for why their district might not change salaries.

Related: Arkansas schools hire untrained teachers as people lose interest in the profession

The LEARNS Act does include a merit-based bonus for “effective” teachers at the end of the school year, but the rules have yet to be finalized on what “effective” looks like or exactly how much teachers will get. And district leaders have concerns about that, too, fearing that providing meaningful evaluations for every teacher each year will be too time-consuming, according to the Arkansas Times.

Some districts, like Mayflower, include small steps after several years for teachers with advanced degrees, but others don’t. The law is likely to impact graduate teaching programs throughout the state, said April Reisma, president of the Arkansas Education Association. “If you’re not going to get rewarded for going to get advanced degrees, why would you bother?” Reisma said.

Will Benight, a special education teacher in Guy-Perkins, put it this way in emails he sent to legislators: When is the state going to refund him for his master’s degree?

“I mean, seeing as how it’s pointless now, I think it would be fair to know,” said Benight, who said he would return the $6,000 raise he got this year if it meant getting rid of the LEARNS Act.

Along with de-incentivizing advanced degrees, teachers and administrators have raised concerns about other provisions in the wide-ranging law, which spans 144 pages and touches on almost every corner of education policy, including a private school voucher program, a third grade reading retention requirement and a ban on critical race theory and “indoctrination.” The legislation also made it easier for districts to fire teachers, among other changes.

The costs of some of the new policies are not covered by the state, heightening school leaders’ concerns about the long-term sustainability of funding these changes. Teachers whose salaries are paid with federal money didn’t factor into the state’s calculations. Schools with higher levels of students in poverty typically have more federally funded positions such as school social workers and early intervention specialists. Guy-Perkins had to cover the cost of the pay bump to $50,000 for positions such as dyslexia specialist and school counselor.

“I’m just trying to get my bearings straight. There is so much change all at once,” said Joe Fisher, superintendent of Guy-Perkins.

And while the salary raises gave rural schools an edge that has enabled them to better compete for teachers, larger districts have already responded with their own updated salaries. In Springdale next year, a first-year teacher will make $53,600. In Bentonville, the starting salary is $54,424. The pay gap between districts will likely grow wider over time.

Andy Chisum, the Mayflower superintendent, isn’t optimistic. “In 10 years,” he said, “you’re probably going to have that $10,000 gap again.”

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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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Teacher layoffs are likely this fall as $190 billion in federal pandemic aid expires. By one estimate, schools spent a fifth of their temporary funds on hiring new people, most of them teachers. Those jobs may soon be cut with many less experienced teachers losing their jobs first. The education world describes this policy with a business acronym used in inventory accounting: LIFO or “Last In, First Out.” 

Intuitively, LIFO seems smart. It not only rewards teachers for their years of service, but there’s also good evidence that teachers improve with experience. Not every seasoned teacher is great, but on average, veterans are better than rookies. Keeping them in classrooms is generally best for students.

The problem is that senior teachers aren’t evenly distributed across schools. Wealthier and whiter schools tend to have more experienced teachers. By contrast, high-poverty schools, often populated by Black and Hispanic students, are staffed by more junior teachers. That’s because stressful working conditions at low-income schools prompt many teachers to leave after a short stint. Each year, they’re replaced with a fresh crop of young teachers and the turnover repeats. 

When school districts lay teachers off by seniority, high-poverty schools end up bearing the brunt of the job cuts. The policy exacerbates the teacher churn at these schools. And that churn alone harms student achievement, especially when a large share of teachers are going through the rocky period of adjusting to a new workplace. 

“LIFO is not very good for kids,” said Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist at the American Institutes for Research, speaking to journalists about expected teacher layoffs at the 2024 annual meeting of the Education Writers Association in Las Vegas.

The last time there were mass teacher layoffs was after the 2008 recession. Economists estimate that 120,000 elementary, middle and high school teachers lost their jobs between 2008 and 2012. The vast majority of school districts used seniority as the sole criteria for determining which teachers were laid off, according to a 2022 policy brief published in the journal Education Finance and Policy. In some cases, state law mandated that teacher layoffs had to be done by seniority. LIFO rules were also written into teachers union contracts. In other cases, school leaders simply decided to carry out layoffs this way. 

Economists haven’t been able to conclusively prove that student achievement suffered more under LIFO layoffs than other ways of reducing the teacher workforce. But the evidence points in that direction for children in poverty and for Black and Hispanic students, according to two research briefs by separate groups of scholars that reviewed dozens of studies. For example, in the first two years after the 2008 recession, Black and Hispanic elementary students in Los Angeles Unified School District had 72 percent and 25 percent greater odds, respectively, of having their teacher laid off compared to their white peers, according to one study. 

Districts with higher rates of poverty and larger shares of Black and Hispanic students were more likely to have seniority-based layoff policies, according to another study. “LIFO layoff policies end up removing less experienced teachers, sometimes in mass, from a small handful of schools,” wrote Matthew Kraft and Joshua Bleiberg in their 2022 policy brief for the journal, Education Finance and Policy.

Budget cuts can create some messy situations. Terry Grier, a retired superintendent, who ran the San Diego school district following the 2008 recession, remembers that his district cut costs by eliminating jobs in the central office and reassigning these bureaucrats, many of whom had teacher certifications, to fill classroom vacancies. To avoid additional layoffs, his school board forced him to transfer teachers in overstaffed schools to fill classroom vacancies elsewhere, Grier said. The union contract specified that forced transfers had to begin with teachers who had the least seniority. That exacerbated teacher turnover at his poorest schools, and the loss of some very good teachers, he said. 

“Despite being relatively new to the profession, many of these teachers were highly skilled,” said Grier. 

Losing promising new talent is painful. Raúl Gastón, the principal of a predominantly Hispanic and low-income middle school in Villa Park, Ill., still regrets not having the discretion to lay off a teacher whose poor performance was under review, and being forced instead to let go of an “excellent” rookie teacher in 2015.

“It was a gut punch,” Gastón said. “She had just received a great rating on her evaluation. I was looking forward to what she could do to bring up our scores and help our students.”

The loss of excellent early career teachers was made stark in Minnesota, where Qorsho Hassan lost her job in the spring of 2020 because of her district’s adherence to LIFO rules. After her layoff, Hassan was named the state’s Teacher of the Year. 

Hassan was also a Black teacher, which highlights another unintended consequence of layoff policies that protect veteran teachers: they disproportionately eliminate Black and Hispanic faculty. That undermines efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, which is 80 percent white, while the U.S. public school student population is less than half white. In recent years, districts have had some success in recruiting more Black and Hispanic teachers, but many of them are still early in their careers. 

The unfairness of LIFO layoffs became evident after the 2008 recession. Since then, 20 states have enacted laws to restrict the use of seniority as the main criteria for who gets laid off. But many states still permit it, including Texas. State laws in California and New York still require that layoffs be carried out by seniority, according to TNTP, a nonprofit focused on improving K-12 education, and Educators for Excellence. 

While there is a consensus among researchers that LIFO layoffs have unintended consequences that harm both students and teachers, there’s debate about what should replace this policy. One approach would be to lay off less effective teachers, regardless of seniority. But teacher effectiveness ratings, based on student test scores, are controversial and unpopular with teachers. Observational ratings can be subjective and, in practice, these evaluations tend to rate most teachers highly, making it hard to use them to distinguish teacher quality.

Others have suggested keeping a seniority system in place but adding additional protections for certain kinds of teachers, such as those who teach in hard-to-staff, high-poverty schools. Oregon keeps LIFO in place, but in 2021 carved out an exception for teachers with “cultural and linguistic expertise.” In 2022, Minneapolis schools decided that “underrepresented” teachers would be skipped during seniority-based layoffs. Still another idea is to make layoffs proportional to school size so that poor schools don’t suffer more than others.

This story about teacher layoffs 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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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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