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Education Articles & More

Our best education articles of 2022, 
readers and editors pick the most interesting and insightful articles from the past year about teaching, learning, and the keys to well-being at school.
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Our most popular education articles of 2022 explore how to help students feel connected to each other and cultivate character strengths like curiosity and humility, amid the many stressors and pressures that young people are facing today. They also offer support for educators’ and school leaders’ well-being, and reflect on hopes for transformative change in education. 

If you are looking for specific activities to support your students’ and colleagues’ social and emotional well-being in 2023, visit our  Greater Good in Education  website, featuring free research-based practices, lessons, and strategies for cultivating kinder, happier, and more equitable classrooms and schools. For a deeper dive into the science behind social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and ethical development, consider our suite of self-paced  online courses  for educational professionals, including our capstone course,  Teaching and Learning for the Greater Good . Or join one of our new communities of practice that focus on educator well-being, offering space for rest, reflection, togetherness, and hope—and some science, too!

Here are the 12 best education articles of 2022, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.


Six Ways to Find Your Courage During Challenging Times , by Amy L. Eva: Courage doesn’t have to look dramatic or fearless. Sometimes it looks more like quiet perseverance.

Calm, Clear, and Kind: What Students Want From Their Teachers , by Jenna Whitehead: Researchers asked students what makes a caring teacher—and these same qualities may help support your well-being as an educator.

How to Help Teens Put Less Pressure on Themselves , by Karen Bluth: Self-compassion can help teens who are struggling with toxic perfectionism. Five Ways to Support the Well-Being of School Leaders , by Julia Mahfouz, Kathleen King, and Danny Yahya: Burnout rates are high among principals. How can we fight burnout and promote self-care?

How to Help Your Students Develop Positive Habits , by Arthur Schwartz: Small habits repeated regularly can help students cultivate character strengths like patience, gratitude, and kindness.

Can We Make Real, Transformative Change in Education? , by Renee Owen: A new program is preparing leaders to facilitate systemic change in education in order to better serve all students.

Five Ways to Help Students Feel Connected at School Again , by Jennifer de Forest and Karen VanAusdal: According to students themselves, they are yearning for opportunities to connect with friends and peers as they head back to school.

How to Prepare for the Stresses of College , by Erin T. Barker and Andrea L. Howard: Researchers explain the most common causes of stress and distress at college, and what students can do to thrive during a big life transition.

How Humility Can Make Your Students the Best People Ever , by Vicki Zakrzewski: Simple ways for educators to help students move from “me” to “we.”

Four Ways to Inspire Humble Curiosity in Your Students , by Amy L. Eva: Humility and curiosity can encourage students to be passionate about learning and open to others’ perspectives.

What Middle Schoolers Can Teach Us About Respect , by Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman and Lia E. Sandilos: Teens are developing a nuanced understanding of what respect means. Here are some ideas for cultivating more of it in the classroom.

Why Teachers Need Each Other Right Now , by Amy L. Eva: Here are four simple ways to find social support as an educational professional.

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Best Education Articles of 2022: Our 22 Most Shared Stories About Students & Schools

Amid a fourth school year disrupted by covid, our 22 most discussed articles about learning loss, student safety, innovation, mental health & more.

Every December at The 74, we take a moment to recap and spotlight our most read, shared and debated education articles of the year. Looking back now at our time capsules from December 2020 and December 2021 , one can chart the rolling impact of the pandemic on America’s students, families and school communities. Two years ago, we were just beginning to process the true cost of emergency classroom closures across the country and the depth of students’ unfinished learning. Last year, as we looked back in the shadow of Omicron, a growing sense of urgency to get kids caught up was colliding with bureaucratic and logistical challenges in figuring out how to rapidly convert federal relief funds into meaningful, scalable student assistance. 

This year’s list, publishing amid new calls for mask mandates and yet another spike in hospitalizations, powerfully frames our surreal new normal: mounting concerns about historic test score declines; intensifying political divides that would challenge school systems even if there weren’t simultaneous health, staffing and learning crises to manage; broader economic stresses that are making it harder to manage school systems; and a sustained push by many educators and families to embrace innovations and out-of-the-box thinking to help kids accelerate their learning by any means necessary.

Now, 2½ years into one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American education, these were our 22 most discussed articles of 2022: 

The COVID School Years: 700 Days Since Lockdown  

Learning Loss: 700 days. As we reported Feb. 14, that’s how long it had been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents, teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. 

With spring approaching, there were reasons to be hopeful. More children had been vaccinated. Mask mandates were ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Read her full report . 

• A 700-Day Parental Awakening : Marguerite Roza, of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab, reflects on the past years
• 700 Days of Missed Opportunities — and Lingering Inequities : Robin Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, looks back (and forwards)
• 700 Days of Balancing Student Safety Against Keeping Classrooms Open : Superintendent Pedro Martinez reflects
• 700 Days in Pictures : 24 months inside one resilient school district
• The COVID School Years : See our special report, looking back on 700 days of the pandemic

Threatened & Trolled, School Board Members Quit in Record Numbers

School Leadership : By the time we published this report in May, the chaos and violence at big city school board meetings had dominated headlines for months, as protesters, spurred by ideological interest groups and social media campaigns, railed about race, gender and a host of other hot-button issues. But what does it look like when the boardroom is located in a small community, where the elected officials under fire often have lifelong ties to the people doing the shouting? Over the last 18 months, Minnesota K-12 districts have seen a record number of board members resign before the end of their term. As one said in a tearful explanation to her constituents, “The hate is just too much.” Beth Hawkins takes a look at the possible ramifications .  

• Million-Dollar Records Request : From COVID and critical race theory to teachers’ names & schools, districts flooded with freedom of information document demands

Nation’s Report Card Shows Largest Drops Ever Recorded in 4th and 8th Grade Math

Student Achievement : In a moment the education world had anxiously awaited, the latest round of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in October — and the news was harsh. Math scores saw the largest drops in the history of the exam, while reading performance also fell in a majority of states. National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr said the “decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.” Even as some state-level data has shown evidence of a rebound this year, federal officials warned COVID-19’s lost learning won’t be easily restored. The 74’s Kevin Mahnken breaks down the results .

• Lost Decades : ‘Nation’s Report Card’ shows 20 years of growth wiped out by two years of pandemic
• Economic Toll : Damage from NAEP math losses could total nearly $1 trillion
• COVID Recovery : Can districts rise to the challenge of new NAEP results? Outlook’s not so good 

Virtual Nightmare: One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic

Mental Health : As the debate over the lingering effects of school closures continues, the term “pandemic recovery” can often lose its meaning. For Jason Finuliar, a California teen whose Bay Area school district was among those shuttered the longest, the journey has been painful and slow. Once a happy, high-achieving student, he descended into academic failure and a depression so severe that he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility. “I felt so worthless,” he said. It’s taking compassionate counselors, professional help and parents determined to save their son for Jason to regain hope for the future. Linda Jacobson reports .  

16 Under 16: Meet The 74’s 2022 Class of STEM Achievers

This spring, we asked for the country’s help identifying some of the most impressive students, age 16 or younger, who have shown extraordinary achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. After an extensive and comprehensive selection process, we’re thrilled to introduce this year’s class of 16 Under 16 in STEM. The honorees range in age from 12 to 16, specialize in fields from medicine to agriculture to invention and represent the country from coast to coast. We hope these incredible youngsters can inspire others — and offer reassurance that our future can be in pretty good hands. Emmeline Zhao offers a closeup of the 2022 class of 16 Under 16 in STEM — click here to read and watch more about them .

A ‘National Teacher Shortage’? New Research Reveals Vastly Different Realities Between States & Regions

School Staffing : Adding to efforts to understand America’s teacher shortages, a new report and website maps the K-12 teaching vacancy data. Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with shortages currently localized in nine states. “There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states. … It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said author Tuan Nguyen. Marianna McMurdock reports on America’s uneven crisis . 

Meet the Gatekeepers of Students’ Private Lives

School Surveillance : Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, the Pittsburgh mother didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn. Waskiewicz worked on contract as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts in an effort to prevent youth violence and self-harm. As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Waskiewicz and other former moderators at Gaggle believe the company helped protect kids, but they also surfaced significant questions about its efficacy, employment practices and effect on students’ civil rights. Eight former moderators shared their experiences at Gaggle with The 74, describing insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Read the latest investigation by The 74’s Mark Keierleber . 

Students Continue to Flee Urban Districts as Boom Towns, Virtual Schools Thrive

Exclusive Data : A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, data shows many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared with 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%, according to data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends. Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. While many urban districts were already losing students before the pandemic, COVID “accelerated” movement into outlying areas and to states with stronger job markets. Experts say that means many districts will have to make some tough decisions in the coming years. Linda Jacobson reports . 

‘Hybrid’ Homeschooling Making Inroads as Families Seek New Models

School Choice : As public school enrollments dip to historic lows, researchers are beginning to track families to hybrid homeschooling arrangements that meet in person a few days per week and send students home for the rest of the time. More formal than learning pods or microschools, many still rely on parents for varying levels of instruction and grading. About 60% to 70% are private, according to a new research center on hybrid schools based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta. Greg Toppo reports .

Educators’ ‘Careless’ Child Abuse Reports Devastate Thousands of NYC Families

Student Safety : Thousands of times every year, New York City school staff report what they fear may be child abuse or neglect to a state hotline. But the vast majority of the resulting investigations yield no evidence of maltreatment while plunging the families, most of them Black, Hispanic and low income, into fear and lasting trauma. Teachers are at the heart of the problem: From August 2019 to January 2022, two-thirds of their allegations were false alarms, data obtained by The 74 show. “Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ … It also could be 10 million other things,” one Bronx teacher said. Read Asher Lehrer-Small’s report . 

The Contagion Effect: From Buffalo to Uvalde, 16 Mass Shootings in Just 10 Days

Gun Violence : May’s mass school shooting in Texas — the deadliest campus attack in about a decade — has refocused attention on the frequency of such devastating carnage on American victims. The tragedy unfolded just 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. In fact, The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings with at least four victims in just 10 days. Read Mark Keierleber’s report . 

Teachers Leaving Jobs During Pandemic Find ‘Fertile’ Ground in New School Models

Microschools : Feeling that she could no longer effectively meet children’s needs in a traditional school, former counselor Heather Long is among those who left district jobs this year to teach in an alternative model — a microschool based in her New Hampshire home. “For the first time in their lives, they have options,” Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, an investment firm supporting online programs and ed tech ventures, told reporter Linda Jacobson. Some experts wonder if microschools are sustainable, but others say the ground is “fertile.” Read our full report . 

Facing Pandemic Learning Crisis, Districts Spend Relief Funds at a Snail’s Pace

School Funding : Schools that were closed the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74. The delay is significant, experts say, because research points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning. Of the 25 largest districts, the 12 that were in remote learning for at least half the 2020-21 school year have spent on average roughly 15% of their American Rescue Plan funds — and districts are increasing pressure on the Education Department for more time. Linda Jacobson reports .

Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now, This Posh Rhode Island City Strives to Teach Its Past  

Teaching History : Every year, millions of tourists marvel at Newport, Rhode Island’s colonial architecture, savor lobster rolls on the wharf and gaze at waters that — many don’t realize — launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America. But after years of invisibility, that obscured chapter is becoming better known, partly because the Ocean State passed a law in 2021 requiring schools to teach Rhode Island’s “African Heritage History.” Amid recent headlines that the state’s capital city is now moving forward with a $10 million reparations program, read Asher Lehrer-Small’s examination of how Newport is looking to empower schools to confront the city’s difficult past .  

Harvard Economist Thomas Kane on Learning Loss, and Why Many Schools Aren’t Prepared to Combat It  

74 Interview : This spring, Harvard economist Thomas Kane co-authored one of the biggest — and most pessimistic — studies yet of COVID learning loss, revealing that school closures massively set back achievement for low-income students. The effects appear so large that, by his estimates, many schools will need to spend 100% of their COVID relief to counteract them. Perversely, though, many in the education world don’t realize that yet. “Once that sinks in,” he said, “I think people will realize that more aggressive action is necessary.” Read Kevin Mahnken’s full interview . 

In White, Wealthy Douglas County, Colorado, a Conservative School Board Majority Fires the Superintendent, and Fierce Backlash Ensues

Politics : The 2021 election of four conservative members to Colorado’s Douglas County school board led to the firing in February of schools Superintendent Corey Wise, who had served the district in various capacities for 26 years. The decision, which came at a meeting where public comment was barred, swiftly mobilized teachers, students and community members in opposition. Wise’s ouster came one day after a 1,500-employee sickout forced the shutdown of the state’s third-largest school district . A few days later, students walked out of school en masse, followed by litigation and talk of a school board recall effort. The battle mirrors those being fought in numerous districts throughout the country, with conservative parents, newly organized during the pandemic, championing one agenda and more moderate and liberal parent groups beginning to rise up to counter those views. Jo Napolitano reports .

Weaving Stronger School Communities: Nebraska’s Teacher of the Year Challenges Her Rural Community to Wrestle With the World  

Inspiring : Residents of tiny Taylor, Nebraska, call Megan Helberg a “returner” — one of the few kids to grow up in the town of 190 residents, leave to attend college in the big city and then return as an adult to rejoin this rural community in the Sandhills. Honored as the state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, Helberg says she sees her role as going well beyond classroom lessons and academics. She teaches her students to value their deep roots in this close-knit circle. She advocates on behalf of her school — the same school she attended as a child — which is always threatened with closure due to small class sizes. She has also launched travel clubs through her schools, which Helberg says has strengthened her community by breaking students, parents and other community members out of their comfort zone and helping them gain a better view of the world outside Nebraska while also seeing their friends and neighbors in a whole new light. This past winter, as part of a broader two-month series on educators weaving community, a team from The 74 made multiple visits to Taylor to meet Helberg and see her in action with her students. Watch the full documentary by Jim Fields, and read our full story about Helberg’s background and inspiration by Laura Fay . 

Other profiles from this year’s Weaver series: 

• Texas’s Alejandro Salazar : The band teacher who kept his school community connected through COVID’s chaos
• Hawaii’s Heidi Maxie : How an island teacher builds community bridges through her Hawaii school
• Georgia’s Allie Reeser : Living and learning among refugees in the ‘Ellis Island of the South’
• See the full series : Meet 12 educators strengthening school communities amid the pandemic

Research: Babies Born During COVID Talk Less with Caregivers, Slower to Develop Critical Language Skills

Big Picture : Independent studies by Brown University and a national nonprofit focused on early language development found infants born during the pandemic produced significantly fewer vocalizations and had less verbal back-and-forth with their caretakers compared with those born before COVID. Both used the nonprofit LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology, which delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day, including the number of words spoken near the child and the child’s own language-related vocalizations. It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which are critical to language acquisition. The joint finding is the latest troubling evidence of developmental delays discovered when comparing babies born before and after COVID. “I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” Brown’s Sean Deoni tells The 74’s Jo Napolitano. Read our full report . 

Minneapolis Teacher Strike Lasted 3 Weeks. The Fallout Will Be Felt for Years

Two days after Minneapolis teachers ended their first strike in 50 years this past May, Superintendent Ed Graff walked out of a school board meeting, ostensibly because a student protester had used profanity. The next morning, he resigned. The swearing might have been the last straw, but the kit-bag of problems left unresolved by the district’s agreement with the striking unions is backbreaking indeed. Four-fifths of the district’s federal pandemic aid is now committed to staving off layoffs and giving classroom assistants and teachers bonuses and raises, leaving little for academic recovery at a moment when the percentage of disadvantaged students performing at grade level has dipped into the single digits. From potential school closures and misinformation about how much money the district actually has to layoffs of Black teachers, a lack of diversity in the workforce and how to make up for lost instructional time, Beth Hawkins reports on the aftermath . 

After Steering Mississippi’s Unlikely Learning Miracle, Carey Wright Steps Down

Profile : Mississippi, one of America’s poorest and least educated states, emerged in 2019 as a fast-rising exemplar in math and reading growth. The transformation of the state’s long-derided school system came about through intense work — in the classroom and the statehouse — to raise learning standards, overhaul reading instruction and reinvent professional development. And with longtime State Superintendent Carey Wright retiring at the end of June, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken looked at what comes next .

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it to Combat Learning Loss

Learning Acceleration : In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. In February, just days after the secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a newly released study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring did yield modest, if positive, learning benefits for the hundreds of middle schoolers who participated. But those gains were considerably smaller than the impressive results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” the study’s co-author, Matthew Kraft, told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.” Read our full report . 

Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor

STEM : Robert Sansone was born to invent. His STEM creations range from springy leg extensions for sprinting to a go-kart that can reach speeds of 70 mph. But his latest project aims to solve a global problem: the unsustainability of electric car motors that use rare earth materials that are nonrenewable, expensive and pollute the environment during the mining and refining process. In Video Director James Field’s video profile, the Florida high schooler talks about his creation, inspiration and what he plans to do with his $75,000 prize from the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Learn more right here , and watch our full portrait below: 

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Driving a global movement to transform education: Key moments of 2022

2022 was a year that witnessed major milestones in the global movement to transform education. Against a backdrop of an alarming learning, and budgetary crisis, UNESCO’s call for a global mobilization to place education at the top of the political agenda resonated across the world with renewed national and global commitments. And three UNESCO World Conferences focusing on early childhood, higher education and lifelong learning further set out a common vision and pledges to drive progress in the next decade. Here are some key moments and themes that have marked this ‘transformative’ year in education.

The turning point: Why we must transform education now

Our current global education system is failing to provide quality learning for everyone throughout life and help us shape peaceful, just, and sustainable societies. UNESCO data shows that worldwide, 244 million children and youth are out of school. There is a crisis in foundational learning, literacy and numeracy skills among young learners. It is estimated that 60% of children globally are unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of ten. The COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered the largest disruption to education in history, has deepened a pre-existing crisis of inclusion, quality and relevance

It has never been more crucial to reimagine the way we learn, what we learn and how we learn, as outlined in UNESCO’s flagship Futures of Education Report, which called for a new social contract for education. The turning point is now. That is why the United Nations Secretary-General convened the Transforming Education Summit in September in New York to rally world leaders and put education at the top of the political agenda. Youth advocates were involved throughout the process leading to the Summit and adopted the Youth Declaration  on their common vision for transforming education.

At the Summit, more than 130 countries committed to rebooting their education systems and accelerating action to end the learning crisis. To build momentum for the Summit , UNESCO hosted a Pre-Summit in June that was attended by 154 education ministers and vice-ministers and 1,800 participants. It provided a forum for countries to present preliminary outcomes of national consultations and to have multilateral discussions on new commitments.

Connected, inclusive and green: How UNESCO wants to transform education

UNESCO has been mobilizing and consulting all stakeholders and partners to galvanize the transformation of every aspect of learning, including an urgent call to increase education funding. An estimated US$200 billion additional education finance is required annually to get low- and lower-middle-income countries on track to achieve SDG 4.

Recent UNESCO findings reveal that around half of the 100 countries reviewed had no mention of climate change in their national curriculum. And nearly one-third of school-age children - 463 million - are without access to distance learning. That is why at the Transforming Education Summit, UNESCO put the spotlight on key initiatives to accelerate action:  

• Getting every learner climate-ready : Building on the knowledge and practice accumulated in Education for Sustainable Development, a new Greening Education Partnership aims to deliver strong, coordinated and comprehensive action that will prepare every learner to acquire the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to tackle climate change and to promote sustainable development.
• Expanding public digital learning : A Global Initiative on Public Digital Learning will map and analyze existing public platforms and content; help countries create and strengthen national platforms; identify and share best practices; and establish international norms and standards to guide the development of platforms. The initiative aims to ensure that every learner, teacher, and family can easily access, find, and use high-quality and curriculum-aligned digital education content to advance their learning.
• Fast-tracking gender equality in education : UNESCO and partners launched a Call to Action to catalyze cooperation and transformative action on gender equality in and through education , together with a Global Platform to drive leadership and accountability.
• Improving access for crisis-affected children and youth : UNESCO together with partners presented a Commitment to Action to improve access and learning outcomes for children and youth affected by crises ; to support teachers and to increase financing across humanitarian and development instruments. It stresses a holistic approach across health and social sectors.

Why early childhood care and education matters

The right to education begins at birth. But new UNESCO data shows that 1 out of 4 children aged 5 have never had any form of pre-primary education. This represents 35 million out of 137 million 5-year-old children worldwide. Despite research that proves the benefits of early childhood care and education , only half of all countries guarantee free pre-primary education around the world. UNESCO’s World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in November. With the adoption of the Tashkent Declaration, countries committed to invest at least 10% of total education spending on pre-primary education and to ensure that salaries and working condition of pre-school personnel are at least at par with those of primary education teachers.  

Higher education: How to unleash the talent of the next generation

Higher education is evolving at a very rapid pace around the world. The number of students in universities and higher education institutions has more than doubled globally in the last two decades to 235 million. And it’s expected to double again in the next decade, along with international student mobility. With our planet’s growing sustainability challenges, large scale digitization and increasing inequalities, it’s clear that new knowledge and skills are needed today. That is why higher education must be transformed in order unleash the talent of the next generation. The UNESCO World Conference Higher Education that took place in Barcelona, Spain last May presented a roadmap that outlines key principles and transitions to reorient higher education in the decade ahead.

The right to lifelong learning: Why adult education matters

There are 771 million illiterate adults globally today and many more do not have the adequate skills and knowledge needed to navigate through our increasingly digital 21st century demands. While participation in adult education is improving in some places, access to learning opportunities remains profoundly unequal. To advance the world’s commitment to the right to lifelong learning , UNESCO convened the International Conference on Adult Education in Marrakech, Morocco in June. With the adoption of the Marrakech Framework for Action, over 140 countries committed to translating the vision of a right to lifelong learning into reality. The Framework will guide the development of adult learning and education over the coming decade.

Looking ahead

To ensure commitments are translated into concrete plans, the SDG4 High-Level Steering Committee has set up new indicators measuring green and digital education at the national level, and calls on countries to build on the Sustainable Development Goal benchmarking process by setting national targets for both. These benchmarks will measure the progress that each country intends to achieve by 2025 and 2030.

In 2023, UNESCO calls for maintaining strong political mobilization around education and chart the way to translate commitments and global initiatives into action. The International Day for Education , celebrated worldwide on 24 January, will be the year’s first event to ensure that education is at the top of governments’ agendas in a context of a global recession, growing inequalities and the climate crisis.

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The 12 Most Popular Edutopia Stories of 2022

We crunched the numbers to find the articles, videos, and blogs that resonated the most with you this year.

As 2022 draws to a close, we took a look back at our most popular feature stories, blogs, and videos of the year, the ones you read and watched the most, discussed and shared with your colleagues many thousands of times over. 

One of our most-read articles this year was dedicated to novice teachers entering their first roller-coaster year in the classroom, and offered a set of guiding principles from veteran teachers. Top reads also included a deep-dive into compelling research on the value of play-based learning, and an article that examined a recent study about the underestimated—and often misunderstood—impact of brain breaks on learning. 

Our video about a high school in Lincroft, New Jersey, where students begin each day dedicating the class to someone who inspired them—one student picked Mahatma Gandhi, another chose his grandfather, a retired soccer player in Northern Ireland—racked up close to one million views. Four classroom shifts designed to take the emphasis off grades was another hugely popular video, as was one that examined methods for putting student voice and choice at the center of the classroom community.

Meanwhile, professional educators continued to contribute exceptionally valuable blogs all year long. Among the most-read content written by practitioners in the field this year: Linnea Lyding's success story about incorporating movement into reading lessons; and Rachel Fuhrman's list of seven attention-getters designed to help quiet students down without teachers having to raise their voice.

Here are the most popular feature stories, videos, and blogs from 2022:

7 Attention-Getters to Use Instead of Raising Your Voice These visual and audio cues can help middle and high school teachers quickly get students back on track.

For New Teachers, 6 Principles to Remember This Year It won’t be easy, but if you prepare for turbulence and set reasonable goals, you’ll stay calmer and make progress in all the right places.

We Drastically Underestimate the Importance of Brain Breaks When it comes to optimizing learning, we don’t value breaks enough, neuroscientists suggest in a new study.

Building Classroom Community Through Daily Dedications When students share stories about those who have inspired and impacted them, the whole classroom feels more connected.

How Instructional Coaches Can Use Co-Teaching to Support Teachers A matrix based on a teacher’s belief in themselves and their belief in students can facilitate effective instructional coaching.

25 Essential High School Reads From the Last Decade We asked members of our community to share recently published novels they would love to have read in high school. Here are your top picks.

5 Reasons to Bring Plants Into the Classroom Keeping potted plants in your room is more than just a nice touch. Research points toward many benefits for the environment—and for your learners.

Squats, Lunges, and Phonemes Adding movement to reading lessons reinforces key concepts and helps fidgety students concentrate.

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The alarming state of the American student in 2022

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November 1, 2022

The pandemic was a wrecking ball for U.S. public education, bringing months of school closures, frantic moves to remote instruction, and trauma and isolation.

Kids may be back at school after three disrupted years, but a return to classrooms has not brought a return to normal. Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed historic declines in American students’ knowledge and skills and widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students.

But even these sobering results do not tell us the whole story.

After nearly three years of tracking pandemic response by U.S. school systems and synthesizing knowledge about the impacts on students, we sought to establish a baseline understanding of the contours of the crisis: What happened and why, and where do we go from here?

This first annual “ State of the American Student ” report synthesizes nearly three years of research on the academic, mental health, and other impacts of the pandemic and school closures.

It outlines the contours of the crisis American students have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and begins to chart a path to recovery and reinvention for all students—which includes building a new and better approach to public education that ensures an educational crisis of this magnitude cannot happen again.

The state of American students as we emerge from the pandemic is still coming into focus, but here’s what we’ve learned (and haven’t yet learned) about where COVID-19 left us:

1. Students lost critical opportunities to learn and thrive.

• The typical American student lost several months’ worth of learning in language arts and more in mathematics.

• Students suffered crushing increases in anxiety and depression. More than one in 360 U.S. children lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

• Students poorly served before the pandemic were profoundly left behind during it, including many with disabilities whose parents reported they were cut off from essential school and life services.

This deeply traumatic period threatens to reverberate for decades. The academic, social, and mental-health needs are real, they are measurable, and they must be addressed quickly to avoid long-term consequences to individual students, the future workforce, and society.

2. The average effects from COVID mask dire inequities and widely varied impact.

Some students are catching up, but time is running out for others. Every student experienced the pandemic differently, and there is tremendous variation from student to student, with certain populations—namely, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, as well as other vulnerable populations—suffering the most severe impacts.

The effects were more severe where campuses stayed closed longer. American students are experiencing a K-shaped recovery, in which gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students, already growing before the pandemic, are widening into chasms. In the latest NAEP results released in September , national average scores fell five times as much in reading, and four times as much in math, for the lowest-scoring 10 percent of nine-year-olds as they had for the highest-scoring 10 percent.

At the pace of recovery we are seeing today, too many students of all races and income levels will graduate in the coming years without the skills and knowledge needed for college and careers.

3. What we know at this point is incomplete. The situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest.

The data and stories we have to date are enough to warrant immediate action, but there are serious holes in our understanding of how the pandemic has affected various groups of students, especially those who are typically most likely to fall through the cracks in the American education system.

We know little about students with complex needs, such as those with disabilities and English learners. We still know too little about the learning impacts in non-tested subjects, such as science, civics, and foreign languages. And while psychologists , educators , and the federal government are sounding alarms about a youth mental health crisis, systematic measures of student wellbeing remain hard to come by.

We must acknowledge that what we know at this point is incomplete, since the pandemic closures and following recovery have been so unprecedented in recent times. It’s possible that as we continue to dig into the evidence on the pandemic’s impacts, some student groups or subjects may have not been so adversely affected. Alternatively, the situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest. Some students are already bouncing back quickly. But for others, the impact could grow worse over time.

In subjects like math, where learning is cumulative, pandemic-related gaps in students’ learning that emerged during the pandemic could affect their ability to grasp future material. In some states, test scores fell dramatically for high schoolers nearing graduation. Shifts in these students’ academic trajectories could affect their college plans—and the rest of their lives. And elevated rates of chronic absenteeism suggest some students who disconnected from school during the pandemic have struggled to reconnect since.

4. The harms students experienced can be traced to a rigid and inequitable system that put adults, not students, first.

• Despite often heroic efforts by caring adults, students and families were cut off from essential support, offered radically diminished learning opportunities, and left to their own devices to support learning.

• Too often, partisan politics, not student needs , drove decision-making.

• Students with complexities and differences too often faced systems immobilized by fear and a commitment to sameness rather than prioritization and problem-solving.

So, what can we do to address the situation we’re in?

Diverse needs demand diverse solutions that are informed by pandemic experiences

Freed from the routines of rigid systems, some parents, communities, and educators found new ways to tailor learning experiences around students’ needs. They discovered learning can happen any time and anywhere. They discovered enriching activities outside class and troves of untapped adult talent.

Some of these breakthroughs happened in public schools—like virtual IEP meetings that leveled power dynamics between administrators and parents advocating for their children’s special education services. Others happened in learning pods or other new environments where families and community groups devised new ways to meet students’ needs. These were exceptions to an otherwise miserable rule, and they can inform the work ahead.

We must act quickly but we must also act differently. Important next steps include:

• Districts and states should immediately use their federal dollars to address the emergent needs of the COVID-19 generation of students via proven interventions, such as well-designed tutoring, extended learning time, credit recovery, additional mental health support, college and career guidance, and mentoring. The challenges ahead are too daunting for schools to shoulder alone. Partnerships and funding for families and community-driven solutions will be critical.

• By the end of the 2022–2023 academic year, states and districts must commit to an honest accounting of rebuilding efforts by defining, adopting, and reporting on their progress toward 5- and 10-year goals for long-term student recovery. States should invest in rigorous studies that document, analyze, and improve their approaches.

• Education leaders and researchers must adopt a national research and development agenda for school reinvention over the next five years. This effort must be anchored in the reality that the needs of students are so varied, so profound, and so multifaceted that a one-size-fits-all approach to education can’t possibly meet them all. Across the country, community organizations who previously operated summer or afterschool programs stepped up to support students during the school day. As they focus on recovery, school system leaders should look to these helpers not as peripheral players in education, but as critical contributors who can provide teaching , tutoring, or joyful learning environments for students and often have trusting relationships with their families.

• Recovery and rebuilding should ensure the system is more resilient and prepared for future crises. That means more thoughtful integration of online learning and stronger partnerships with organizations that support learning outside school walls. Every school system in America should have a plan to keep students safe and learning even when they can’t physically come to school, be equipped to deliver high-quality, individualized pathways for students, and build on practices that show promise.

Our “State of the American Student” report is the first in a series of annual reports the Center on Reinventing Public Education intends to produce through fall of 2027. We hope every state and community will produce similar, annual accounts and begin to define ambitious goals for recovery. The implications of these deeply traumatic years will reverberate for decades unless we find a path not only to normalcy but also to restitution for this generation and future generations of American students.

The road to recovery can lead somewhere new. In five years, we hope to report that out of the ashes of the pandemic, American public education emerged transformed: more flexible and resilient, more individualized and equitable, and—most of all— more joyful.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

How politics and the pandemic put schools in the line of fire.

A previous version of this story incorrectly said that 39 percent of American children were on track in math. That is the percentage performing below grade level.

Test scores are down, and violence is up . Parents are screaming at school boards , and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling.

For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools.

Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades, and it reaches into almost everything that educators do: from teaching math, to counseling anxious children, to managing the building.

Political battles are now a central feature of education, leaving school boards, educators and students in the crosshairs of culture warriors. Schools are on the defensive about their pandemic decision-making, their curriculums, their policies regarding race and racial equity and even the contents of their libraries. Republicans — who see education as a winning political issue — are pressing their case for more “parental control,” or the right to second-guess educators’ choices. Meanwhile, an energized school choice movement has capitalized on the pandemic to promote alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The temperature is way up to a boiling point,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “If it isn’t a crisis now, you never get to crisis.”

Experts reach for comparisons. The best they can find is the earthquake following Brown v. Board of Education , when the Supreme Court ordered districts to desegregate and White parents fled from their cities’ schools. That was decades ago.

Today, the cascading problems are felt acutely by the administrators, teachers and students who walk the hallways of public schools across the country. Many say they feel unprecedented levels of stress in their daily lives.

Remote learning, the toll of illness and death, and disruptions to a dependable routine have left students academically behind — particularly students of color and those from poor families. Behavior problems ranging from inability to focus in class all the way to deadly gun violence have gripped campuses. Many students and teachers say they are emotionally drained, and experts predict schools will be struggling with the fallout for years to come.

Teresa Rennie, an eighth-grade math and science teacher in Philadelphia, said in 11 years of teaching, she has never referred this many children to counseling.

“So many students are needy. They have deficits academically. They have deficits socially,” she said. Rennie said that she’s drained, too. “I get 45 minutes of a prep most days, and a lot of times during that time I’m helping a student with an assignment, or a child is crying and I need to comfort them and get them the help they need. Or there’s a problem between two students that I need to work with. There’s just not enough time.”

Many wonder: How deep is the damage?

Learning lost

At the start of the pandemic, experts predicted that students forced into remote school would pay an academic price. They were right.

“The learning losses have been significant thus far and frankly I’m worried that we haven’t stopped sinking,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

Some of the best data come from the nationally administered assessment called i-Ready, which tests students three times a year in reading and math, allowing researchers to compare performance of millions of students against what would be expected absent the pandemic. It found significant declines, especially among the youngest students and particularly in math.

The low point was fall 2020, when all students were coming off a spring of chaotic, universal remote classes. By fall 2021 there were some improvements, but even then, academic performance remained below historic norms.

Take third grade, a pivotal year for learning and one that predicts success going forward. In fall 2021, 38 percent of third-graders were below grade level in reading, compared with 31 percent historically. In math, 39 percent of students were below grade level, vs. 29 percent historically.

Damage was most severe for students from the lowest-income families, who were already performing at lower levels.

A McKinsey & Co. study found schools with majority-Black populations were five months behind pre-pandemic levels, compared with majority-White schools, which were two months behind. Emma Dorn, a researcher at McKinsey, describes a “K-shaped” recovery, where kids from wealthier families are rebounding and those in low-income homes continue to decline.

“Some students are recovering and doing just fine. Other people are not,” she said. “I’m particularly worried there may be a whole cohort of students who are disengaged altogether from the education system.”

A hunt for teachers, and bus drivers

Schools, short-staffed on a good day, had little margin for error as the omicron variant of the coronavirus swept over the country this winter and sidelined many teachers. With a severe shortage of substitutes, teachers had to cover other classes during their planning periods, pushing prep work to the evenings. San Francisco schools were so strapped that the superintendent returned to the classroom on four days this school year to cover middle school math and science classes. Classes were sometimes left unmonitored or combined with others into large groups of unglorified study halls.

“The pandemic made an already dire reality even more devastating,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, referring to the shortages.

In 2016, there were 1.06 people hired for every job listing. That figure has steadily dropped, reaching 0.59 hires for each opening last year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. In 2013, there were 557,320 substitute teachers, the BLS reported. In 2020, the number had fallen to 415,510. Virtually every district cites a need for more subs.

It’s led to burnout as teachers try to fill in the gaps.

“The overall feelings of teachers right now are ones of just being exhausted, beaten down and defeated, and just out of gas. Expectations have been piled on educators, even before the pandemic, but nothing is ever removed,” said Jennifer Schlicht, a high school teacher in Olathe, Kan., outside Kansas City.

Research shows the gaps in the number of available educators are most acute in areas including special education and educators who teach English language learners, as well as substitutes. And all school year, districts have been short on bus drivers , who have been doubling up routes, and forcing late school starts and sometimes cancellations for lack of transportation.

Many educators predict that fed-up teachers will probably quit, exacerbating the problem. And they say political attacks add to the burnout. Teachers are under scrutiny over lesson plans, and critics have gone after teachers unions, which for much of the pandemic demanded remote learning.

“It’s just created an environment that people don’t want to be part of anymore,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “People want to take care of kids, not to be accused and punished and criticized.”

Falling enrollment

Traditional public schools educate the vast majority of American children, but enrollment has fallen, a worrisome trend that could have lasting repercussions. Enrollment in traditional public schools fell to less than 49.4 million students in fall 2020 , a 2.7 percent drop from a year earlier .

National data for the current school year is not yet available. But if the trend continues, that will mean less money for public schools as federal and state funding are both contingent on the number of students enrolled. For now, schools have an infusion of federal rescue money that must be spent by 2024.

Some students have shifted to private or charter schools. A rising number , especially Black families , opted for home schooling. And many young children who should have been enrolling in kindergarten delayed school altogether. The question has been: will these students come back?

Some may not. Preliminary data for 19 states compiled by Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, found seven states where enrollment dropped in fall 2020 and then dropped even further in 2021. His data show 12 states that saw declines in 2020 but some rebounding in 2021 — though not one of them was back to 2019 enrollment levels.

Joshua Goodman, associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, studied enrollment in Michigan schools and found high-income, White families moved to private schools to get in-person school. Far more common, though, were lower-income Black families shifting to home schooling or other remote options because they were uncomfortable with the health risks of in person.

“Schools were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t,” Goodman said.

At the same time, charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded, saw enrollment increase by 7 percent, or nearly 240,000 students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. There’s also been a surge in home schooling. Private schools saw enrollment drop slightly in 2020-21 but then rebound this academic year, for a net growth of 1.7 percent over two years, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,600 U.S. schools.

Absenteeism on the rise

Even if students are enrolled, they won’t get much schooling if they don’t show up.

Last school year, the number of students who were chronically absent — meaning they have missed more than 10 percent of school days — nearly doubled from before the pandemic, according to data from a variety of states and districts studied by EveryDay Labs, a company that works with districts to improve attendance.

This school year, the numbers got even worse.

In Connecticut, for instance, the number of chronically absent students soared from 12 percent in 2019-20 to 20 percent the next year to 24 percent this year, said Emily Bailard, chief executive of the company. In Oakland, Calif., they went from 17.3 percent pre-pandemic to 19.8 percent last school year to 43 percent this year. In Pittsburgh, chronic absences stayed where they were last school year at about 25 percent, then shot up to 45 percent this year.

“We all expected that this year would look much better,” Bailard said. One explanation for the rise may be that schools did not keep careful track of remote attendance last year and the numbers understated the absences then, she said.

The numbers were the worst for the most vulnerable students. This school year in Connecticut, for instance, 24 percent of all students were chronically absent, but the figure topped 30 percent for English-learners, students with disabilities and those poor enough to qualify for free lunch. Among students experiencing homelessness, 56 percent were chronically absent.

Fights and guns

Schools are open for in-person learning almost everywhere, but students returned emotionally unsettled and unable to conform to normally accepted behavior. At its most benign, teachers are seeing kids who cannot focus in class, can’t stop looking at their phones, and can’t figure out how to interact with other students in all the normal ways. Many teachers say they seem younger than normal.

Amy Johnson, a veteran teacher in rural Randolph, Vt., said her fifth-graders had so much trouble being together that the school brought in a behavioral specialist to work with them three hours each week.

“My students are not acclimated to being in the same room together,” she said. “They don’t listen to each other. They cannot interact with each other in productive ways. When I’m teaching I might have three or five kids yelling at me all at the same time.”

That loss of interpersonal skills has also led to more fighting in hallways and after school. Teachers and principals say many incidents escalate from small disputes because students lack the habit of remaining calm. Many say the social isolation wrought during remote school left them with lower capacity to manage human conflict.

Just last week, a high-schooler in Los Angeles was accused of stabbing another student in a school hallway, police on the big island of Hawaii arrested seven students after an argument escalated into a fight, and a Baltimore County, Md., school resource officer was injured after intervening in a fight during the transition between classes.

There’s also been a steep rise in gun violence. In 2021, there were at least 42 acts of gun violence on K-12 campuses during regular hours, the most during any year since at least 1999, according to a Washington Post database . The most striking of 2021 incidents was the shooting in Oxford, Mich., that killed four. There have been already at least three shootings in 2022.

Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security, which maintains its own database of K-12 school shootings using a different methodology, totaled nine active shooter incidents in schools in 2021, in addition to 240 other incidents of gunfire on school grounds. So far in 2022, it has recorded 12 incidents. The previous high, in 2019, was 119 total incidents.

David Riedman, lead researcher on the K-12 School Shooting Database, points to four shootings on Jan. 19 alone, including at Anacostia High School in D.C., where gunshots struck the front door of the school as a teen sprinted onto the campus, fleeing a gunman.

Seeing opportunity

Fueling the pressure on public schools is an ascendant school-choice movement that promotes taxpayer subsidies for students to attend private and religious schools, as well as publicly funded charter schools, which are privately run. Advocates of these programs have seen the public system’s woes as an excellent opportunity to push their priorities.

EdChoice, a group that promotes these programs, tallies seven states that created new school choice programs last year. Some are voucher-type programs where students take some of their tax dollars with them to private schools. Others offer tax credits for donating to nonprofit organizations, which give scholarships for school expenses. Another 15 states expanded existing programs, EdChoice says.

The troubles traditional schools have had managing the pandemic has been key to the lobbying, said Michael McShane, director of national research for EdChoice. “That is absolutely an argument that school choice advocates make, for sure.”

If those new programs wind up moving more students from public to private systems, that could further weaken traditional schools, even as they continue to educate the vast majority of students.

Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, who opposes school choice programs, sees the surge of interest as the culmination of years of work to undermine public education. He is both impressed by the organization and horrified by the results.

“I wish that organizations supporting public education had the level of funding and coordination that I’ve seen in these groups dedicated to its privatization,” he said.

A final complication: Politics

Rarely has education been such a polarizing political topic.

Republicans, fresh off Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race, have concluded that key to victory is a push for parental control and “parents rights.” That’s a nod to two separate topics.

First, they are capitalizing on parent frustrations over pandemic policies, including school closures and mandatory mask policies. The mask debate, which raged at the start of the school year, got new life this month after Youngkin ordered Virginia schools to allow students to attend without face coverings.

The notion of parental control also extends to race, and objections over how American history is taught. Many Republicans also object to school districts’ work aimed at racial equity in their systems, a basket of policies they have dubbed critical race theory. Critics have balked at changes in admissions to elite school in the name of racial diversity, as was done in Fairfax, Va. , and San Francisco ; discussion of White privilege in class ; and use of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which suggests slavery and racism are at the core of American history.

“Everything has been politicized,” said Domenech, of AASA. “You’re beside yourself saying, ‘How did we ever get to this point?’”

Part of the challenge going forward is that the pandemic is not over. Each time it seems to be easing, it returns with a variant vengeance, forcing schools to make politically and educationally sensitive decisions about the balance between safety and normalcy all over again.

At the same time, many of the problems facing public schools feed on one another. Students who are absent will probably fall behind in learning, and those who fall behind are likely to act out.

A similar backlash exists regarding race. For years, schools have been under pressure to address racism in their systems and to teach it in their curriculums, pressure that intensified after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Many districts responded, and that opened them up to countervailing pressures from those who find schools overly focused on race.

Some high-profile boosters of public education are optimistic that schools can move past this moment. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona last week promised, “It will get better.” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “If we can rebuild community-education relations, if we can rebuild trust, public education will not only survive but has a real chance to thrive.”

But the path back is steep, and if history is a guide, the wealthiest schools will come through reasonably well, while those serving low-income communities will struggle. Steve Matthews, superintendent of the 6,900-student Novi Community School District in Michigan, just northwest of Detroit, said his district will probably face a tougher road back than wealthier nearby districts that are, for instance, able to pay teachers more.

“Resource issues. Trust issues. De-professionalization of teaching is making it harder to recruit teachers,” he said. “A big part of me believes schools are in a long-term crisis.”

Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.

The pandemic’s impact on education

The latest: Updated coronavirus booster shots are now available for children as young as 5 . To date, more than 10.5 million children have lost one or both parents or caregivers during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the classroom: Amid a teacher shortage, states desperate to fill teaching jobs have relaxed job requirements as staffing crises rise in many schools . American students’ test scores have even plummeted to levels unseen for decades. One D.C. school is using COVID relief funds to target students on the verge of failure .

Higher education: College and university enrollment is nowhere near pandemic level, experts worry. ACT and SAT testing have rebounded modestly since the massive disruptions early in the coronavirus pandemic, and many colleges are also easing mask rules .

DMV news: Most of Prince George’s students are scoring below grade level on district tests. D.C. Public School’s new reading curriculum is designed to help improve literacy among the city’s youngest readers.

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Editorial article, editorial: education leadership and the covid-19 crisis.

• 1 Chapman University, Orange, CA, United States
• 2 Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, United States
• 3 Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States

Editorial on the Research Topic Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis

This research topic presents important developments in the field of education as the COVID-19 crisis ripples across the world. Not only have educators everywhere had to take extraordinary measures to deal with the health and safety threats they have encountered on a daily basis since the onset of this pandemic, but they have also had to learn new technologies, and respond to multiple demands as the landscape of teaching and learning shifted under their feet. The 20 articles in this collection, which capture early responses to the pandemic, highlight the complex, disruptive nature of this ongoing global challenge. While many of the authors have found hopeful ways to understand what educators have been experiencing, they also chronicle the harsh realities of loss and interrupted learning that weigh heavily on teachers, administrators, parents and students.

Themes connecting this collection include: leadership contexts, organizational perspectives and potential future opportunities. Both empirical studies and thought-provoking essays offer informative insights into how the education community is striving to address the needs of a diverse student population and deliver crucial services to local neighborhoods and stakeholders situated far afield. In addition, authors identify future research that will be crucial for the field as individuals and systems grapple with what it means to live with this and future public health disasters.

Leadership Contexts

Crisis leadership and the toll a crisis takes on human beings is examined in a number of the articles. Although often called upon to respond to emergencies ( Virella and Cobb ), leaders in education have not traditionally been prepared to manage crises ( McLeod and Dulsky ). Articles by Urick et al. and by McLeod and Dulsky identified the importance of self-care and support structures for principals while they navigate the turbulence of a crisis. In a study of Scottish primary Head Teachers, Ferguson et al. found that the leaders’ focus on an ethics of care ( Noddings, 1986 ) allowed them to re-negotiate their leadership role. Particularly important was the call-to-action school leaders embraced as the crisis exacerbated racial and economic inequities students experienced ( Reyes-Guerra et al. ; Virella and Cobb ). DeMartino and Weiser analyzed school and higher education crisis leadership to understand the distinctions between the institutional response and the values of individual leaders. Similarly contrasted, rural superintendents and their school boards took different approaches to the public health crisis in Lochmiller ’s study and Hayes et al. found that rural school principals adopted care-taker leadership in response to Covid-19 challenges.

Organizational Perspectives

To address the adverse impact the pandemic has had on children’s social, emotional and cognitive development, an expanded notion of organizational capacity building emerged in Herrmann et al.’s research on empathy training for elementary school staff in Germany. Organizational factors such as school culture ( Keown et al. ) accountability, principal autonomy, professional culture and teacher decision-making were found to influence the capacity of school leaders to support student learning ( Weiner et al. ). Biag et al. presented evidence of the effectiveness of mutually beneficial partnerships between local education agencies (LEAs) and higher education institutions (IHEs) to facilitate students’ social, emotional and learning needs. Also focused on higher education, Kruse et al. , found that declining resources and changing institutional policies and practices created dilemmas and conflicts for department heads to continue to prioritize social justice and equity. Similarly, undergraduate science learning and medical school practices have been severely impacted by the necessity to implement alternative teaching and learning strategies ( Anderton et al. ; Guadix et al. ). Cordeiro et al. reported on the financial as well as academic challenges to the operation of an international non-governmental organization (INGO) with schools in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Opportunities

Several articles presented conceptual ideas to help re-frame education or to consider educational leadership in a different light. Castrellón et al. use the concept of collective healing, which is anchored in resistance, love, collective well-being and solidarity to advocate for the humanizing of the collective experience of loss and disruption. The rapid spread of the virus forced the closure of schools and required educators to deliver instruction remotely with little opportunity to plan or master new technologies ( Rincones et al. ). Using Ilich’s notions of deschooling society, these authors provide ideas for a collective re-examination of school systems as echoed by Reyes-Guerra et al. , who argue that systems cannot simply revert to old inequitable ways. In a similar vein, Price and Cumings Mansfield question whether this crisis offers us with an opportunity to reconsider State educational policy decisions and to view community stakeholders as educational leaders moving forward. Also looking at educational policy, Joaquin et al. , examined the innovative national responses to the pandemic by Philippine IHEs in comparison to responses made by IHEs in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Further Research Needed

Even as infection rates surge in the United States and parts of Europe implement new lockdowns, the education community is feeling immense pressure to get “back to normal” as quickly as possible. This pressure combined with the politicization of health concerns and mask and vaccination mandates is putting enormous demands on an already struggling system. Educators in the United States are retiring or leaving the profession at alarming rates. Student and educator mental health concerns are on the rise, and issues of educational equity, put to the side in many contexts in light of the requirements of health and safety, have been exacerbated. These and other continuing and compounding impacts of the COVID Pandemic must be given serious attention by the research community. The long-term effects of social isolation and community disruptions on adult and child learning and well-being must be studied, as well as new conceptualizations of education, schooling, teaching, and leading. If we continue to use the same measures of efficacy and achievement, as this collection suggests, we may overlook innovations that could completely reimagine schools and learning communities that are grounded in equity of access, opportunity and outcomes.

As educators, students, communities and governing bodies move into the third year of continuing upheaval caused by the coronavirus disease and its aftermath, educational researchers across the globe need to continue their investigations of how equitable and high-quality teaching and learning can best be supported in all schools, colleges and home settings. In these efforts, special care must also be given to understanding and transforming global inequities (global south versus global north, as well as within emerging nations). This research topic pinpoints significant areas for further research. Among the myriad concerns this early research identified, possible directions for new and follow-up studies include: In what ways does educational leadership need to be reconceived to best meet the needs of the especially vulnerable populations of students who have lost precious opportunities to learn? How is leadership generated collectively to provide more compassionate and targeted responses to the social, emotional, mental health and academic needs of students, teachers and instructors in all settings? How must educator preparation change to prepare educators who can teach and lead for equity in an increasingly complex and challenged profession? How can government policies be better crafted to retain and nurture the best educators so that such crises do not harm educational processes irreparably? What educational innovations implemented during the pandemic, albeit hastily and haphazardly, should be retained? What kinds of infrastructure and technological advancements are necessary to address any future major disruptions to education? How can such new networks be provided equitably and sustainably to all communities?

We urge researchers to pursue the questions raised here and look forward to reading about additional approaches, perspectives, and experiences that position educational leaders more successfully for future crises.

Author Contributions

MG drafted the editorial. MY and MB-J edited it and MG prepared final from edits.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Noddings, N. (1986). A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education . Los Angeles, United States: University of California Press .

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Keywords: educational leadership, COVID crisis, rethinking leadership, equity, community

Citation: Grogan M, Young MD and Byrne-Jiménez M (2022) Editorial: Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis. Front. Educ. 7:838313. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.838313

Received: 17 December 2021; Accepted: 10 January 2022; Published: 04 February 2022.

Edited and reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Grogan, Young and Byrne-Jiménez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Margaret Grogan, [email protected] 

This article is part of the Research Topic

Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis

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Times Higher Education’s most-read articles of 2022

Readers show a taste for the uk’s ref as normality returns after pandemic.

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Beyond being a guide to the staple interests of academics and higher education professionals, Times Higher Education ’s annual most-read lists often tell you something more meaningful about the 12 months just past.

The lists for 2020 and 2021 were dominated by stories about Covid-19 and how the pandemic was impacting international student mobility – always a topic of significant interest online. The 2022 list, however, marks something of a return to normality, with a wide range of stories making the top 15, and our coverage of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework taking a number of the highest-ranked spots.

15.  After 30 years of STEM, it is time to move on

Higher education has more than its fair share of acronyms and few receive more attention than STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – with these subjects increasingly dominating research funding and policy debates. This January opinion piece by Andy Miah, chair in science communication and future media at the University of Salford , took aim at the acronym wars, whether the rival option is STEAM – adding arts to the mix – or even one for today’s digital economy, MESH: media literacy, ethics, sociology and history. “We should not look towards new forms of subject alliance, which will have the same effects as STEM of excluding or deprioritising other forms of knowledge,” he wrote. “Instead, we need to create integrated knowledge pathways and programmes of work that celebrate networked intelligence across subjects.”

14.  Manchester investigates PhD student’s masturbation paper

The concerning story of a University of Manchester PhD who published a journal paper describing how he masturbated to sexualised images of young boys was the subject of a number of THE articles, all of which attracted strong attention from readers – and one of which makes an appearance higher up our most-read list. This initial story described how Karl Andersson’s paper, “Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan”, raised questions around vetting at the Sage journal Qualitative Research , which later retracted the paper. Summing up scholars’ shock was Alice Sullivan, professor of sociology at UCL, who said: “Wanking is not a research method; it is just wanking.”

13.  UK university and Indian IIT to offer joint degree for first time

India’s Institutes of Technology are perhaps the one part of the country’s higher education system with the potential to be major global players, but traditionally they have struggled to attract international students or be major players in global research collaboration. This scoop from THE ’s Pola Lem revealed a sign of significant progress: a deal between the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Birmingham to offer two-year master’s programmes in the fields of energy systems, data science and biomedical engineering.

12.  ‘Eye-watering’ Australian university salaries revealed

Amid all the furore about vice-chancellors’ pay in the UK, their earnings are small fry compared with what the top brass can make Down Under. This story from Asia-Pacific editor John Ross, based on freedom of information requests, revealed that big pay packets aren’t confined to the presidential suite only. The documents seen by John “illustrate the rich pickings enjoyed by Australian university A-listers, with dozens of staff out-earning the prime minister and hundreds attracting salaries way over those prescribed in industrial agreements”.

11.  Australian work rules for overseas students ‘courting disaster’

Throughout 2022, Australia sought to tempt back international students who looked elsewhere during long-running Covid-driven border shutdowns by loosening the rules around how many hours they could work during their studies. While the move proved popular with employers battling post-pandemic labour shortages, higher education experts warned that the move risked resurrecting the types of perverse behaviour – such as an explosion in demand for cooking and hairdressing courses – that triggered a harmful regulatory crackdown a decade ago. A series of articles from John Ross raised the alarm, including this one, which proved particularly popular with readers.

10.  ‘Cognitive dissonance’ blamed for academics’ mental health woes

THE runs many stories on the mental health issues that researchers and academics battle with, but what is causing them? This article focused on "cognitive dissonance" – the idea that scholars come into higher education seeking to embrace reason, objectivity, and public responsibility, and then find they are employed in institutions that fail to live up to these values in their own activities. “Facts matter; data matters; evidence matters,” said Peter Tregear, lead author of the study that our article was based on. “That’s clearly going to come crashing into a brand-focused management style concerned instead with spin and image – where you’re expected to fall into line rather than speak truth to power.”

9.  Poor German pushing international students towards dropping out

Lots of major higher education sectors want to increase their international recruitment. But once students are enrolled, can institutions keep them? Not always, and shaky language skills are often a key factor in overseas learners’ decision to drop out. This article focused on a survey of more than 4,500 international students at 125 universities by Germany’s academic exchange service, Daad, which found that many lack the German-language skills needed, with some students only realising mid-course that their skills were insufficient to write a thesis.

8.  Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars

The toxic dispute over the rights of transgender people and how freely these matters should be discussed remains academia’s most divisive issue. In this long read, Laura Favaro, a researcher at City, University of London ’s Gender & Sexualities Research Centre, outlined what she found after interviewing 50 gender studies academics across many disciplines to learn about their views and experiences of the dispute. “Having approached the topic with an open mind, my discussions left me in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England, and many countries beyond,” wrote Favaro. Perhaps inevitably, the feature attracted significant attention from readers – and significant commentary from those on both sides of the debate.

7.  If the UK bans overseas students, guards will have lonely Christmases

Our most-read list always throws up a few surprises, and this is perhaps one of them. Suggestions that international students could be banned from all but the UK’s most “elite” universities created significant concern in the sector in the final few months of the year, and were the subject of several news pieces. The article that attracted more attention than any other, however, was this perspective from campus security guard George Bass, noting how the security desk is often the first and last port of call for jet-lagged and far-from-home students. “In the end, all this talk of banning international students is probably just political point-scoring,” Bass said. “But you don’t have to be a Manchester City supporter to know that it’s hard to score points without a Spanish midfielder, a Brazilian goalie, a Norwegian centre-forward and a Portuguese right-back playing alongside the bloke from Barnsley.”

6.  Pressure to pass mediocre students forced me out of academia

When it comes to standards of university assessment, grade inflation is usually the elephant in the room: can such significant increases in grading really be explained by improvements in teaching only? Anything that suggests otherwise strikes a chord with academics, and their managers, too – including this opinion piece by an anonymous former physics professor at a small private college in the US. In it, the author outlined how they had been driven to quit by pressure from demanding students to pass substandard assignments. The pressure came from managers too, for reasons which the author identified as being purely financial. “Many students at my former institution assumed that their academic success and graduation was guaranteed,” the professor wrote. “They also assumed – rightly – that their failure was ruled out upon payment of their tuition.”

5.  PhD graduates ‘look overqualified’ for university administration

It is well known that there are nowhere near enough academic jobs for all PhD students, and also that it can be hard to branch out beyond a university career, with a doctoral graduate sometimes looking overqualified for relatively junior roles. It turns out that this applies in academia, too, with a study finding that many PhD graduates who moved into university administrative roles, while positive about their decision and valuing the job security it offered, still faced barriers, with employers assuming they wouldn’t be satisfied in their role and so wouldn’t stay long. PhD careers stories are always popular on THE , and this was no different.

4.  REF 2021: Golden triangle looks set to lose funding share

The publication – a year late – of the results of the UK’s 2021 Research Excellence Framework was the big event of 2022 in UK higher education. This story, the first of three REF-related entries on the most-read list, identified what was perhaps the key shift in the latest exercise: improved performance, and hence increased funding, for a number of universities outside the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Large research-intensive institutions in major regional centres such as the universities of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool – as well as several smaller research institutions and regional post-92s – all looked set to receive a bigger share of quality-related funding in the wake of the exercise.

3.  REF 2021: Quality ratings hit new high in expanded assessment

When it comes to REF methodology, the big change in the 2021 exercise was the requirement for universities to submit all research-active staff for assessment. Previously institutions were able to choose who they put in, leading to significant “game-playing” – and much rancour – over who was “REF-able” and who wasn’t. A significant increase in the number of academics being submitted to the REF went hand in hand with a large rise in overall quality ratings, suggesting that much excellent research had historically been overlooked by evaluators.

2.  REF 2021: Social sciences on the up as arts and humanities shrink

It is widely held that most academics’ interests are fairly well confined to their own area of scholarly expertise and the associated discipline. This notion is supported by the fact that this article – looking at performance across different research areas, and including detailed, field-by-field league tables, outperformed other, bigger-picture, stories.

1.  Masturbation journal paper exposes deeper problems in research

That journal paper provided THE with its most-read article of the year. In this opinion piece, William Matthews, an LSE fellow in the anthropology of China at the London School of Economics, argued that Karl Andersson’s “appallingly bad” paper exposed the insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity.

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Teens and social media: Key findings from Pew Research Center surveys

For the latest survey data on social media and tech use among teens, see “ Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2023 .” 

Today’s teens are navigating a digital landscape unlike the one experienced by their predecessors, particularly when it comes to the pervasive presence of social media. In 2022, Pew Research Center fielded an in-depth survey asking American teens – and their parents – about their experiences with and views toward social media . Here are key findings from the survey:

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand American teens’ experiences with social media and their parents’ perception of these experiences. For this analysis, we surveyed 1,316 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17, along with one parent from each teen’s household. The survey was conducted online by Ipsos from April 14 to May 4, 2022.

This research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board (IRB), Advarra, which is an independent committee of experts that specializes in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

Ipsos invited panelists who were a parent of at least one teen ages 13 to 17 from its KnowledgePanel , a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses, to take this survey. For some of these questions, parents were asked to think about one teen in their household. (If they had multiple teenage children ages 13 to 17 in the household, one was randomly chosen.) This teen was then asked to answer questions as well. The parent portion of the survey is weighted to be representative of U.S. parents of teens ages 13 to 17 by age, gender, race, ethnicity, household income and other categories. The teen portion of the survey is weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with parents by age, gender, race, ethnicity, household income and other categories.

Here are the questions used  for this report, along with responses, and its  methodology .

Majorities of teens report ever using YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. YouTube is the platform most commonly used by teens, with 95% of those ages 13 to 17 saying they have ever used it, according to a Center survey conducted April 14-May 4, 2022, that asked about 10 online platforms. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, followed by roughly six-in-ten who say they use Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%). Much smaller shares of teens say they have ever used Twitter (23%), Twitch (20%), WhatsApp (17%), Reddit (14%) and Tumblr (5%).

Facebook use among teens dropped from 71% in 2014-15 to 32% in 2022. Twitter and Tumblr also experienced declines in teen users during that span, but Instagram and Snapchat saw notable increases.

TikTok use is more common among Black teens and among teen girls. For example, roughly eight-in-ten Black teens (81%) say they use TikTok, compared with 71% of Hispanic teens and 62% of White teens. And Hispanic teens (29%) are more likely than Black (19%) or White teens (10%) to report using WhatsApp. (There were not enough Asian teens in the sample to analyze separately.)

Teens’ use of certain social media platforms also varies by gender. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to report using TikTok (73% vs. 60%), Instagram (69% vs. 55%) and Snapchat (64% vs. 54%). Boys are more likely than girls to report using YouTube (97% vs. 92%), Twitch (26% vs. 13%) and Reddit (20% vs. 8%).

Majorities of teens use YouTube and TikTok every day, and some report using these sites almost constantly. About three-quarters of teens (77%) say they use YouTube daily, while a smaller majority of teens (58%) say the same about TikTok. About half of teens use Instagram (50%) or Snapchat (51%) at least once a day, while 19% report daily use of Facebook.

Some teens report using these platforms almost constantly. For example, 19% say they use YouTube almost constantly, while 16% and 15% say the same about TikTok and Snapchat, respectively.

More than half of teens say it would be difficult for them to give up social media. About a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media, while 55% say they spend about the right amount of time there and just 8% say they spend too little time. Girls are more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on social media (41% vs. 31%).

Teens are relatively divided over whether it would be hard or easy for them to give up social media. Some 54% say it would be very or somewhat hard, while 46% say it would be very or somewhat easy.

Girls are more likely than boys to say it would be difficult for them to give up social media (58% vs. 49%). Older teens are also more likely than younger teens to say this: 58% of those ages 15 to 17 say it would be very or somewhat hard to give up social media, compared with 48% of those ages 13 to 14.

Teens are more likely to say social media has had a negative effect on others than on themselves. Some 32% say social media has had a mostly negative effect on people their age, while 9% say this about social media’s effect on themselves.

Conversely, teens are more likely to say these platforms have had a mostly positive impact on their own life than on those of their peers. About a third of teens (32%) say social media has had a mostly positive effect on them personally, while roughly a quarter (24%) say it has been positive for other people their age.

Still, the largest shares of teens say social media has had neither a positive nor negative effect on themselves (59%) or on other teens (45%). These patterns are consistent across demographic groups.

Teens are more likely to report positive than negative experiences in their social media use. Majorities of teens report experiencing each of the four positive experiences asked about: feeling more connected to what is going on in their friends’ lives (80%), like they have a place where they can show their creative side (71%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), and that they are more accepted (58%).

When it comes to negative experiences, 38% of teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel overwhelmed because of all the drama. Roughly three-in-ten say it makes them feel like their friends are leaving them out of things (31%) or feel pressure to post content that will get lots of comments or likes (29%). And 23% say that what they see on social media makes them feel worse about their own life.

There are several gender differences in the experiences teens report having while on social media. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to say that what they see on social media makes them feel a lot like they have a place to express their creativity or like they have people who can support them. However, girls also report encountering some of the pressures at higher rates than boys. Some 45% of girls say they feel overwhelmed because of all the drama on social media, compared with 32% of boys. Girls are also more likely than boys to say social media has made them feel like their friends are leaving them out of things (37% vs. 24%) or feel worse about their own life (28% vs. 18%).

When it comes to abuse on social media platforms, many teens think criminal charges or permanent bans would help a lot. Half of teens think criminal charges or permanent bans for users who bully or harass others on social media would help a lot to reduce harassment and bullying on these platforms. 

About four-in-ten teens say it would help a lot if social media companies proactively deleted abusive posts or required social media users to use their real names and pictures. Three-in-ten teens say it would help a lot if school districts monitored students’ social media activity for bullying or harassment.

Some teens – especially older girls – avoid posting certain things on social media because of fear of embarrassment or other reasons. Roughly four-in-ten teens say they often or sometimes decide not to post something on social media because they worry people might use it to embarrass them (40%) or because it does not align with how they like to represent themselves on these platforms (38%). A third of teens say they avoid posting certain things out of concern for offending others by what they say, while 27% say they avoid posting things because it could hurt their chances when applying for schools or jobs.

These concerns are more prevalent among older teen girls. For example, roughly half of girls ages 15 to 17 say they often or sometimes decide not to post something on social media because they worry people might use it to embarrass them (50%) or because it doesn’t fit with how they’d like to represent themselves on these sites (51%), compared with smaller shares among younger girls and among boys overall.

Many teens do not feel like they are in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling what information social media companies collect about them. Six-in-ten teens say they think they have little (40%) or no control (20%) over the personal information that social media companies collect about them. Another 26% aren’t sure how much control they have. Just 14% of teens think they have a lot of control.

Despite many feeling a lack of control, teens are largely unconcerned about companies collecting their information. Only 8% are extremely concerned about the amount of personal information that social media companies might have and 13% are very concerned. Still, 44% of teens say they have little or no concern about how much these companies might know about them.

Only around one-in-five teens think their parents are highly worried about their use of social media. Some 22% of teens think their parents are extremely or very worried about them using social media. But a larger share of teens (41%) think their parents are either not at all (16%) or a little worried (25%) about them using social media. About a quarter of teens (27%) fall more in the middle, saying they think their parents are somewhat worried.

Many teens also believe there is a disconnect between parental perceptions of social media and teens’ lived realities. Some 39% of teens say their experiences on social media are better than parents think, and 27% say their experiences are worse. A third of teens say parents’ views are about right.

Nearly half of parents with teens (46%) are highly worried that their child could be exposed to explicit content on social media. Parents of teens are more likely to be extremely or very concerned about this than about social media causing mental health issues like anxiety, depression or lower self-esteem. Some parents also fret about time management problems for their teen stemming from social media use, such as wasting time on these sites (42%) and being distracted from completing homework (38%).

Note: Here are the questions used  for this report, along with responses, and its  methodology .

CORRECTION (May 17, 2023): In a previous version of this post, the percentages of teens using Instagram and Snapchat daily were transposed in the text. The original chart was correct. This change does not substantively affect the analysis.

• Age & Generations
• Age, Generations & Tech
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• Social Media
• Teens & Tech
• Teens & Youth

Emily A. Vogels is a former research associate focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center

Risa Gelles-Watnick is a research analyst focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center

How Teens and Parents Approach Screen Time

Who are you the art and science of measuring identity, u.s. centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages, teens, social media and technology 2023, most popular.

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Education Week's Leadership Symposium 2024

Education Week’s 2024 Leadership Symposium will take place live and in person in Arlington, VA, just 5 minutes outside of Washington, DC. Join school and district leaders from across the nation for 3 days of empowering strategies, networking, and inspiration.

Hyatt regency crystal city, arlington, va, may 1 - 3, 2024.

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I recommend this event for all educators, especially educational leaders. The speakers are innovators in the field and people you want to meet. And the networking opportunities have been invaluable to me. Once you come, you'll be back.

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Explore and discuss some of the most critical issues education leaders are facing and discover ideas for solutions through a variety of session formats, guests, and topics. You will leave inspired by new ideas, empowered with actionable takeaways that can be applied in your own schools and districts, and connected to an expanded network of K-12 leaders.

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Need some help convincing your boss or school board that you should attend? Most Leadership Symposium attendees have the costs of their registration badge paid for by their school or district. Download this letter template that you can use to convince your school board or administrator to approve and fund your trip.

This year’s symposium will feature two half-days (Wed. 5/1 and Friday 5/3) and one full day (Thursday 5/2) of content focused on Teaching & Learning, Thriving Students, and Resilient Leadership.

Click on each day below to see the schedule and check back as we continue to fill the program with empowering sessions, inspiring speakers, and valuable networking opportunities.

Wednesday, May 1

Check-in and networking, welcome and opening remarks.

Leaders to Learn From Recognition Ceremony

Panel discussion: the state of teaching: big takeaways for school and district leaders.

Industry Perspective: Successfully Navigating the Staffing Crisis

Networking Break

Interactive polling session: teacher morale and satisfaction.

Learn & Reflect: De-implementation: Creating the Space to Focus on What Works

Day 1 Closing Remarks

Cocktail reception, thursday, may 2, topic-focused networking breakfast, flash briefing: taking the pulse on ai's uptake in schools, panel discussion: embracing ai in education.

Industry Perspective: Beyond Survival: Thriving with Innovative Leadership in Today's Schools

Leadership Interview: The Long Game: A Superintendent's Lessons on Leading a Multi-Year Improvement Effort

Keynote: Fostering Purpose and Inclusion to Drive Student Success in College and Careers

Industry Perspective: Insights from Educators: Making In-School, High-Impact Tutoring Work

Book Signing by Freeman Hrabowski

Interactive breakout session 1: collective leader efficacy: how to strengthen instructional leadership teams.

Interactive Breakout Session 2: The Perils of Speaking Out: How Education Leaders Can Deftly Navigate Public Debates Over Curriculum, Culture Wars, and Politics

Interactive Breakout Session 3: Write a Smart AI Policy for Your School or District

Interactive breakout session 4: give students a voice--get big results.

Panel Discussion: Real Talk With Students on the Mental Health Supports They Say Help Most

Industry Perspective: Thriving Learners: Design for One, Design for All

Leadership Interview: What Happens When School and District Leaders Prioritize Family Engagement

Industry Perspective: Exploring Effective Instructional Strategies in a Diverse School District

Featured Speaker: U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona

Day 2 Closing Remarks

Friday, may 3, interactive polling session: student engagement and motivation, travel to breakout sessions, learn & reflect: how to teach students to be the ultimate stem problem solvers.

Leadership Interview: Improving Literacy Instruction and Achievement at Scale: Lessons From a State Chief

Closing Remarks

Who will i hear from.

Learn from senior K-12 district and school leaders and nationally recognized leadership and policy experts. Check back for an updated speaker list.

Thank you to all our symposium sponsors

View pricing and register below. This event is exclusively for district and school leaders. Education Week reserves the right to review and revoke registrations from individuals who are not employed in this capacity.

Registration payment is taken via credit card. To inquire about alternate forms of payment, please contact Emma Prillaman at [email protected]

*Online event includes access to livestream content on the main stage and online extras.

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Questions about registration? Email [email protected]