Once a month at Impact Puget Sound Elementary, I break it on purpose.

We call it Hallway Holler. About once a month, teachers nominate scholars who have embodied our school’s Core Values and Commitments in meaningful ways. Those students get to sprint down the hallway — full speed, arms pumping, sneakers squeaking — while their classmates line the walls, arms outstretched to form a tunnel, cheering as loud as they possibly can. Teachers run right alongside their kids. The noise is glorious. The joy is real.

I know how that sounds. But I’d argue it’s one of the most direct things I do to address one of American education’s most stubborn problems: getting kids to show up.

Hallway Holler started at our Tukwila campus, in a single ground-floor hallway, almost as a small experiment. The idea was simple: Take something we care deeply about — our core values — and make the recognition of it feel like the biggest deal in the building. It worked so well, so fast, that we expanded it to all four of our schools and moved it to monthly. Now it’s a founding pillar of who we are as a charter school network.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was what it would mean to the kids. One first grader told me: “My favorite part is that we get to run. When I am chosen to run, and people are cheering for me, it makes me feel proud of myself.” A fourth grader put it even more plainly: “I always want to be at school to see if I am running again. I want to work even harder.”

When we surveyed families about what they wanted as we expanded to middle school, Hallway Holler came up unprompted. Not from parents. From kids. Students told their families about it. That feedback loop — from a child’s excitement to a family’s sense of belonging — is not something I could have manufactured with a policy memo.

I want to be honest about what Hallway Holler is not. It is not a reward for perfect behavior or a prize for the most popular kids in class. Teachers nominate scholars who have embodied our values in meaningful ways: spreading kindness in the classroom, in common spaces, at recess and beyond. Recognition rotates, so that every child gets seen across the year for something real. 

 I think about one of our fourth graders who, just a year ago, struggled to find his footing. Third grade had been difficult: academically, socially and in how he experienced school. This year, he set a goal: to show up each day as his best self. He knew Hallway Holler wasn’t about perfection, but about growth. 

Over time, through small consistent choices like choosing kindness in the classroom, supporting peers at recess, and taking responsibility when things went wrong, he grew! He even stepped up as a buddy to a younger class. When his name was finally called for Hallway Holler, it wasn’t for being the loudest or the most polished. It was for that steady, daily effort.

Since then, he has grown more than 15 points in both reading and math, a reflection of what can happen when a student feels seen, valued and motivated to keep showing up.

The kids who aren’t running this month are forming the tunnel, dancing and cheering and sending love as their peers sprint past. They are part of it too. And they know their moment is coming.

That deliberateness matters. This isn’t about performance or perfection. It’s about the ongoing, daily work of noticing kids — and then making that noticing feel like the biggest deal in the building.

The joy work and the academic work are not in competition. They are the same work,and the field doesn’t talk about that enough.

Chronic absenteeism is one of the most stubborn problems in American public education, and the conversation around it tends to focus almost entirely on removing obstacles — calling families, connecting them to resources, offering transportation. All of that matters and we do all of that. But that framing treats attendance as a problem to be solved rather than a behavior to be motivated. What gets talked about far less is the other side of the equation: making school a place kids are genuinely, viscerally excited to return to. 

And when kids are in school, they’re learning. At Impact Puget Sound Elementary, 65.3% of our students meet grade-level standards in ELA and 65.8% in math — outpacing our local district, Tukwila School District, by 13.9 percentage points in ELA and 25.8 points in math. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. 

A child cannot learn on a day they are not here — and a child who wants to be here shows up. At Impact Puget Sound, we have over 90% average daily attendance which places us on pace with and slightly above the national average for all students. Nationally, schools where 75% or more of students qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch average attendance rates of 80% to 85%. At Impact Puget Sound, where 79% of our students qualify, we’re at 90.8% — a gap our team and families have earned.

But it requires knowing your community well enough to find the specific version of joy that lands for your specific kids. For us, it turned out to be something as elemental as permission to run in the hallways while your whole school cheers your name.

Some of my students don’t fully understand the data behind attendance yet. They don’t know what chronic absenteeism costs them in the long run. But they know the feeling of rounding a corner at full speed. They know their teacher is running beside them. They know that this — this specific, loud, joyful moment — only happens because they showed up and lived our values.

That’s enough. For now, that’s everything.

At McDowell County Schools in North Carolina, we’ve learned that trust grows slowly, through hundreds of small, predictable moments, each one rooted in how schools communicate with families, staff and students.

Several years ago, we realized our communication was too fragmented to build that kind of trust. Families received the same information in multiple messages — emails, flyers, texts, social media posts — all with slightly different tones or details. A single snow day could trigger four versions of the same message. Teachers were frustrated, parents were unsure what to believe and staff spent time managing confusion instead of connection.

We didn’t need more communication; we needed better communication. So, brought all the schools in the district onto a single communications platform. We use , but the real change came not from the tool itself, but from the clarity and consistency it allowed us to create.

After years of trial and error, we’ve learned that the most effective district communications strategies share a few core principles. First, simplifying your tools goes a long way — using fewer channels reduces confusion and makes it easier for families and staff to know where to look for information. Second, consistency matters — templates provide a reliable structure that not only saves time but also builds trust with the audience. Third, it’s essential to explain the “why” behind messages. When people understand the context, compliance becomes true buy-in. Fourth, it is important to close the loop: ask for feedback, acknowledge it and show clearly how it informed your decisions. And fifth, through it all, lead with positivity. Celebrating even the small wins can keep morale high and momentum strong.

We started by rethinking tone. Before, a school message about early dismissal read: “Due to an unforeseen scheduling adjustment, students will be released at 12:15 p.m. today. All extracurricular activities are canceled.”

It was accurate, but the tone was impersonal and it didn’t give families the context they needed. The new version focused on clarity, empathy and the why: “We’ll be releasing students early today at 12:15 p.m. so our staff can attend a district training session. We appreciate your flexibility and want to be sure families have plenty of time to plan for pickup or after-school care.”

That change seems small, but families immediately noticed. They told us it felt more human — and it cut follow-up calls nearly in half.

We also reworked how we communicated policy reminders. In the past, attendance updates sounded procedural: “Students with 10 or more unexcused absences are subject to disciplinary action per district policy.”

Now, we frame them around partnership and shared goals: “Every day in class makes a difference. If your child has missed several days, our team is here to help you get back on track. Reach out to your school’s attendance office for support because we want every student here, every day.”

When we shared this shift during a with school leaders across the country, we saw dozens of comments in the chat responding with that same lightbulb moment: Clarity doesn’t have to mean formality.

Over time, those simple, consistent choices have changed our district’s culture. Messages now follow a rhythm and tone that feel uniform, no matter who sends them. Parents know where to look for information, and teachers know their updates won’t conflict with messages from the district. What used to feel like chaos now feels coordinated.

But communication isn’t just about sending the right message — it’s also about listening to what comes back. Every few weeks, we invite families and staff to share feedback through short digital surveys. We ask: Are you getting the information you need? Is there anything that isn’t clear? The answers help us spot patterns before they grow into problems. When families in one area said they were confused about attendance reporting, we realized we’d been using different phrasing in school newsletters. We corrected it across all schools within a day. That kind of responsiveness signals to families that their voices matter, and that’s where trust takes root.

We’ve also learned that not every message has to be an announcement. Some of the most powerful communication happens when sharing small, everyday wins, such as a picture of a student helping a classmate, a quick thank you to families who attended literacy night or a note celebrating staff for extra effort. During the webinar, one teacher joked that “snacks to the rescue” had become their unofficial morale booster after a principal started sharing photos of Friday staff snack carts. Those little touches remind everyone that communication is not just about logistics; it’s about connection.

Transparency has been another cornerstone. When our district rolled out a new cellphone policy, we didn’t just send the rules. We explained why and how the decision came about from staff input, safety considerations and classroom disruptions. We held Q&A sessions and gathered feedback. Families might not have loved every change, but they appreciated being included in the process.

The results haven’t been dramatic headlines or viral moments. They’ve been something quieter but more sustainable: steadier relationships, calmer campuses and a deeper sense of trust between home and school.

Great communication isn’t about perfection — it’s about connection. Families don’t expect flawless wording; they expect honesty, clarity and care. And when they consistently see those qualities in every message, they begin to believe not just in the information they receive, but in the people who send it.

The RAND study found a 22-point difference in stress levels and a 6-point difference in the degree of burnout — gender disparities that have held constant since at least 2021. Female teachers are also almost twice as likely as similarly educated women in other professions to report frequent stress.

These trends are worrying not just for teachers, but also for students, said Elizabeth Steiner, senior policy researcher at and the lead author of the report.

“Teacher well-being is … really important because it is related to how well teachers are able to do their jobs, which is related to how well students learn,” she said.

“Having a teacher who is present and engaged and putting forth their full effort to help the students they teach could make a real difference,” Steiner added, “as opposed to a teacher who is less engaged or struggling with mental health, or poor well-being, or poor work-life balance.”

Steiner said she is particularly concerned about female teachers, especially because they make up about of the workforce. A RAND report this fall will explore which factors may be driving the disproportionate levels of stress.

Overall, 62% of teachers surveyed reported frequent job-related stress this year, up 3 percentage points from last year but down from the record high of 78% in 2021. Still, they were almost twice as likely as similar working adults to report persistent stress. Teacher burnout levels dropped over the past year, from 60% to 53%, yet remain 14 points higher than levels reported by their non-educator peers. 

Black teachers were more likely than their white peers to report burnout (59% versus 53%), symptoms of depression (25% versus 18%) and an intention to quit (28% versus 14%). Notably, they were less likely to report frequent job-related stress, a discrepancy that Steiner called “a puzzle.”

The findings, published June 24, come from the fifth annual State of the American Teacher Survey, which looks at well-being and retention for K-12 public school teachers. Researchers focused on sources of job-related stress, pay, hours worked and intention to leave. This year’s sample consisted of 1,419 teachers.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, said she is “not surprised at all by these findings.” The “chaos and confusion” of the current political moment, she said, has made being a teacher an even more stressful job.

“Meeting the needs of whole students,” she added, “has gotten increasingly more difficult.”

Despite reporting persistently high levels of stress, the share of teachers overall who said they intend to leave their jobs by the end of the school year fell 6 percentage points, from 22% in 2024 to 15% this year. Fewer teachers also reported feeling burnout this year (53% versus 60%). The relative consistency of responses since 2023 suggests teacher well-being may have stabilized since the pandemic, according to the report.

The most common source of job-related stress for teachers across the board was student behavior (52%), followed by salary (39%). Black teachers were less likely to attribute their stress to student behaviors but more likely to point to salary as a key factor.

This could be tied to their pay: Black teachers, on average, reported earning 6% less than white teachers. Researchers think this could be, at least in part, driven by where teachers live and whether their states have collective bargaining units.

Teachers overall reported an average base salary of approximately $73,000 in 2025, a roughly 4% increase from 2024 but still significantly lower than the $103,000 average salary reported by similar working adults. 

Just under half of teachers (46%) said they were better off financially than their parents, compared with 61% of similarly working adults. 

has shown that while pay is a major contributing factor to teacher satisfaction, it is not the only one.

“If there are ways to look at the constellation of factors that include pay, administrator support, hours worked and a cornucopia of other working conditions that could help improve those things, that — based on what we found — seems like a solid recipe for improving retention and improving teacher engagement in their jobs,” Steiner said.

Hours and benefits also may play a role in overall stress and burnout levels: On average, teachers this year reported working 49 hours a week — four hours less than last year, but still 10 hours more than they’re paid to work, on average. 

And while more teachers had paid sick leave and employer-funded health insurance than similar working adults, fewer reported receiving paid parental leave. Just over a quarter of teachers said they receive this benefit, versus about half of similarly working adults. 

Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, which the lack of paid parental leave, stressed its importance.

“It’s both a smart policy to recruit and keep good teachers, and it’s the right thing to do,” she said in an email.

Overall, Peske added, “Districts that offer teachers competitive benefits are better positioned to attract great teachers, reduce turnover and maintain the stable workforce that is essential for students to succeed.”

This is not a challenge schools can solve with lectures or punishments. My own early efforts to talk a student into better attendance were often met with slow eye rolls, exasperated sighs — and no change. In hindsight, I wasted time talking at students about not showing up. What I’ve learned — and now teach other school leaders — is that the only way forward is to build schools that students want to be in, families feel proud to choose and that instill confidence in their teachers.

When I was a principal, my team at Harlem West Middle School, part of the Success Academy network, stopped treating absenteeism as a compliance problem. We saw it for what it was: a culture issue. While some students were facing housing instability, coping with mental health challenges or caring for relatives, many simply didn’t feel a strong sense of belonging at school that would make attendance worthwhile.

The same was true for families. Between work, transportation and income constraints, parents faced hurdles. Their child’s absenteeism wasn’t due to a lack of care — it was the result of life’s complexities.

It became the job of my faculty and staff to recognize what was making it hard for students to show up or fully engage, and then offer practical ways to help them make the most out of their school day.

One of the most powerful — and surprisingly simple — shifts we made was giving students more ownership of their school. They helped shape how we started our mornings by making daily announcements: researching and delivering news stories, providing schoolwide updates or interviewing classmates, often showcasing their own talents. They also offered ideas for celebrating peers and created engaging student-run organizations, such as chess, theater and book clubs, along with student-organized competitions and leadership opportunities within the school community.

Instead of talking at students when they showed up to school, we made it a point to speak with them, and more importantly, to listen. We asked what school needed to look and feel like for them in order to show up. When students returned after an absence, we didn’t lead with scolding or suspicion. We said, “We missed you yesterday,” sending a message: You belong and you matter. These reconnections were not formal interrogations or overengineered workshops. They happened in the in-between spaces — while walking to class, sitting side-by-side in the cafeteria or helping set up for an event. The best conversations started with soft questions like: “What’ve you been up to?” or “What’s good?” or “What did you think of [add a local event]?” I often asked students for help as a way to invite connection: “Can you give me a hand with these?” Walking shoulder to shoulder, we created quiet moments to talk — or just be together. Sometimes the silence was just as valuable as the words. 

We worked just as hard to re-engage families. For younger students, we used drop-off and pick-up times as natural opportunities to connect — moments that didn’t require extra trips or schedule changes. For older students, we prioritized showing up at sporting events and performances — not just to be seen, but to listen and learn. We asked families what was exciting their kids, what made them anxious and what they needed from us to rebuild trust. 

We documented those conversations and brought them back to our regular meetings with our teaching and leadership staff. There, we looked for patterns and designed responses that were consistent across classrooms. These included deliberate attendance recognition — shoutouts to students by name during morning meetings, personalized notes or celebrations of progress — and flexible academic support time, where students could catch up, study quietly or get targeted help during the school day. These weren’t new programs; they were daily choices made by our staff, built on strong connections with students, that gave them the time and chance to be truly engaged and focused.

Today, as managing director of , I employ those lessons to help educators use attendance as a lever to design better schools. That includes leadership coaching, academic redesign and strategic planning that prioritizes enrollment, engagement and better outcomes.

Across the country, I’ve seen low-cost, high-impact strategies that work: greeting every student each morning, elevating student voices through clubs and leadership roles and creating moments for peers to celebrate one another. These culture shifts work because they put the people in the building first.

Chronic absenteeism won’t be solved with incentives or threats. But it can be addressed by building schools that students are drawn to. It starts with school leaders. I encourage every administrator, district leader and principal to build a school they’d be proud to send their own child to. When students feel a school is worth showing up for, they will.

While extreme heat endangers everyone, . Kids’ bodies heat up faster and aren’t as efficient as adults’ at regulating temperature. Children also tend to spend more time outside and rely on adults to make sure they stay hydrated and take breaks from the sun. These factors put them at risk of excessive exposure, which can lead to and short- and long-term health issues, including . It can disrupt . Unchecked, .

Schools should be safe spaces for students to flourish, but many buildings — particularly in — are ill equipped to protect young people from extreme heat. The average American school building is , and an estimated of districts don’t have adequate HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, leaving students vulnerable to extreme heat and poor air quality. 

As the climate gets hotter, communities that are now faced with more frequent, long and intense heat. Studies estimate that more than that historically didn’t need cooling systems must now install them, costing up to and impacting over . For many older buildings, installing air conditioning to support a new HVAC system. Yet many schools don’t have the budgets for these costly renovations. 

But without adequate environmental systems, students and staff face increasingly , both of which affect the quality of teaching and learning. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, kids felt these impacts throughout the 2024-25 school year. In just the first week of class, Philadelphia had to send that weren’t prepared for the heat. In March, to keep kids safe, a result of unusually high temperatures and a new normal of hotter school days.   

Ensuring that students can learn and thrive in safe environments requires policies that increase funding for school infrastructure. But the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are making moves that put more students at risk. For example, in March, the over $2.5 billion in funds to help public schools address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including money that was paying to . Now, many schools are no longer able — putting them back at square one. 

Alongside this loss of funding, House Republicans’ would terminate the earlier than provided under the Inflation Reduction Act — meaning schools would lose credits toward energy-efficient heating and cooling systems. The bill would also defund programs that monitor air quality in schools, which allow school leaders to make informed decisions that keep kids and teachers safe.

In addition, the Trump administration has and to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency responsible for monitoring climate, weather, oceans and coasts. NOAA is also the parent agency to the National Weather Service, the key source of reliable forecasting. Gutting these pivotal agencies means it will be for schools, families and local officials to prepare for extreme heat and provide protective measures for children. 

Kids need policymakers to instead of dismantling existing supports. To do so, state officials first need to better understand the conditions of their schools’ infrastructure through needs assessments and surveys. In the meantime, families and those working with children could benefit from clear guidance from state and local governments on heat safety standards that protect kids, similar to those . Districts could also use help navigating existing resources, such as applications for state and federal grants, that tend to be overly complicated and confusing. 

But ultimately, making sure all students have access to safe and healthy schools will take dedicated to modernizing buildings’ infrastructure. This needs to happen fast, before kids return to class for another inevitably hot school year. 

Meanwhile, over the summer, parents and providers should call on their local policymakers to implement communitywide climate resilience projects so kids can . These should include equipping public transportation and community spaces with energy-efficient cooling, installing and maintaining water fountains, planting trees to increase shade and equipping playgrounds with heat-resistant materials. 

It’s past time to invest in programs that provide safe and healthy learning environments for children. Following the , it’s critical that policymakers at all levels take big actions to protect children from the changing climate — not throw away the programs and agencies that provide support. If they don’t act soon, students will be forced to spend yet another school year in risky buildings that endanger their academic achievement, health and development.

Once a month, staffers at Sullivan Middle School in Sullivan, Illinois, pick adjectives to describe their feelings about work as part of an anonymous online survey. 

Principal Nathan Ogle said the short questionnaire, which he implemented in October, has helped transform employee culture at the rural school of 250 students. It’s one of the products offered by , an education technology startup that’s trying to improve teacher well-being across the U.S. 

The company has pulse surveys, downloadable resources and staff care packages that schools and districts can purchase. Since its 2022 launch in Omaha, Nebraska, Alpaca has worked with more than 100 schools and districts in 25 states. It received at the 2025 Future of Education Technology Conference, which features ed tech innovations and businesses.

“It’s been incredibly useful just to get that feedback from my staff on what things they’re feeling and experiencing,” Ogle said. “I’ve been able to respond to that stuff as it’s coming in, more or less in real time.”

During the 2023-24 school year, 48% of public school teachers reported declining mental health that impacted their work, up from 42% the year before, according to . The percentage of teachers who reported their schools offered minimal or no employee wellness programming increased from 68% in 2023 to 72% in 2024.

For Alpaca’s founder, Karen Borchert, the focus is employee engagement and retention: “What does it feel like to go to work when you are a teacher, what is it like and what could make it better?” Borchert went to college to become a high school teacher, but after earning her degree became interested in nonprofits and startups. She decided to create her own company after the pandemic hit and school staff shortages worsened.

She began by selling subscription care packs to teachers and schools. The packs — which inspired the name Alpaca — cost $25 to $35 each and include items like snacks, pens, notepads, markers, tissues, lip balm and a handwritten note. 

Last year, Alpaca launched its online pulse survey along with free like staff activities, teacher appreciation tips and strategies to help administrators make their employees feel valued. Borchert said most of the schools that use Alpaca will have staff complete the survey in monthly meetings. Some use Alpaca’s digital resources to host games and give out the care packages as prizes.

“We love to see them work together as a system or as a platform,” Borchert said. “And then, by the time the principal gets back to their office, all of their survey data is live and ready, and they can see what’s needed.”

Ogle said the monthly pulse surveys are more useful than his district’s annual climate survey, which doesn’t provide results until after the school year is over. When he began implementing the survey last fall, many teachers said they felt stretched thin and wanted time to plan with one another.

In response, he restarted a school tradition of “Working Wednesdays.” Administrators took over supervising students during lunch so teachers could use that time to collaborate with colleagues.

“Since we’ve implemented that, ‘stretched thin’ is no longer a phrase that people are choosing” on the survey, he said. “I have staff members who, if I just went and asked them, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ They’re going to say, ‘Fine,’ because that’s what they do. But this gives them that opportunity to anonymously let me know how they’re really doing.”

Alpaca’s reach also extends beyond schools and districts. 

High Desert Education Service District, a Bend, Oregon, agency that places thousands of substitute teachers in 10 nearby school districts every year, began . Part of the state’s Department of Education, High Desert uses the pulse survey for the subs to rank how they feel about working in different schools and districts. Substitutes also receive Alpaca packs when they accept a certain number of school assignments.

Borchert said Caddo Parish Public Schools in Shreveport, Louisiana, uses the products in its . And the University of Nebraska-Lincoln uses the pulse survey and care packages for its student teachers. 

Sue Kemp, a professor in the university’s special education department, said the survey results help her decide which schools to place student teachers at to gain practical experience in the classroom. 

“It gives me a better picture about how the students are feeling and doing in their school,” she said. “I get a better snapshot of the support that they’re feeling in the school and in their own skill development, and what they need on top of it.”

The student teachers and the educators who are supervising them in the classroom also receive monthly Alpaca packs as a way to say “good job” or “thank you” for their work, Kemp said. She said the students and the supervisors have reported that the care packages make them feel more positive about their jobs and more connected to the college.

“We are at a moment where I think our educators are going to need so much care, and they’re going to need so many good support systems,” Borchert said. “They’re going to need to be able to say how they’re feeling and what they need while we kind of walk through uncertain or unprecedented times.”

The discovered ongoing issues including increased classroom disruptions and declining trust between teachers and parents, principal and colleagues. The researchers analyzed data from the which collected responses about school wellness from roughly 123,000 to 130,000 teachers in more than 3,300 Illinois schools annually from 2019 to 2023.  

“I would have thought the 2020-21 school year was the big disrupted year,” said Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri professor who worked on the study. “It’s quite reasonable to think that was the worst. But this data is telling us that’s clearly not true. And our findings give no indication that working conditions will rebound naturally now that the pandemic is behind us.”

The 5Essentials survey identifies five main indicators of school success: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments and ambitious instruction. Each year, teachers and students are asked to rate their experiences.

The most dramatic change after the pandemic began was in classroom disruptions. A found that 70% of educators said students in their schools misbehaved more than before the pandemic. In , the percentage increased to 72%.

Koedel’s research found the quality of student discussions and professional development also declined from 2019 to 2023. The trust teachers felt toward parents, principals and other educators didn’t worsen from 2019 to 2021 but deteriorated from 2021 to 2023. Teacher safety significantly improved in 2021, when most schools shifted to online learning, only to drop again in 2022 and 2023, once students returned to classrooms. 

A few working conditions initially declined but improved from 2021 to 2023, including collaborative practices and student engagement in learning

The study also analyzed Illinois survey data by school demographics. Teachers from schools in wealthier communities had better working conditions, but experienced the same decline as educators in lower-income schools.

Schools where instruction was delivered online during the 2020-21 school year also had larger declines in working conditions compared with schools where learning was in-person.

Koedel said that while the study focuses on Illinois, educators nationwide have experienced similar working conditions.

“There’s really no reason to think Illinois is some weird place that’s so different from every other [state]” Koedel said. “In my opinion, we should expect Illinois to be like other places, because a lot of what’s happening in schools there is happening everywhere.”

For example, other national studies have highlighted the link between teacher job satisfaction and educators’ well-being and retention. 

A from the RAND Corp. found that teachers who had administrator support and felt they belonged in their schools were less likely to report burnout and job-related stress. Those who had strong positive relationships with their colleagues and felt their students were engaged in learning were also much less likely to report poor well-being.

“There’s a deeper question of, like, ‘What exactly is it that’s driving this?’ ” Koedel said of the University of Missouri results. “I believe this is telling us we have made some sort of bad decisions about how we’re running schools, but this doesn’t tell us what decisions we made that were bad, right? So I’m trying to understand that better.”

More than 1 in 4 queer 13- to 17-year-olds attend school in the seven states that now mandate this inclusive instruction, versus 20% who live in the 20 states that have passed what advocates call Don’t Say Gay laws. 

Research shows schools are safest for LGBTQ children and educators, and that students learn best, when they see themselves in classroom materials. They are far less likely to hear homophobic and transphobic slurs, to feel unsafe because of their identity or gender expression, to miss school or to be victimized. They attend school more consistently, get better grades and are more likely to say they have multiple teachers who are supportive. 

The presence of clubs known as gay-straight alliances improves school climates for all students — especially those from marginalized backgrounds. And straight, cisgender educators report feeling more confident in their ability to meet students’ needs when they themselves learn about LGBTQ people and topics. 

But the question of whether laws requiring accurate and positive portrayals of LGBTQ people, history and events make schools more welcoming is a complicated one. The first state to adopt a mandate, California, has seen only incremental change after 15 years. Other states that more recently began requiring inclusive instruction — most notably Illinois and Oregon — took note, wrote stronger laws and have seen more rapid progress. 

Policymakers and advocates are amassing pinpointing practical reasons why the mandates succeed or fail. Perhaps a law didn’t include funding for new resources, set deadlines or require state officials to follow up to make sure schools complied. Maybe it gave few specifics about which changes to textbooks would fulfill the requirements and even less guidance to help  educators and the public understand why they are important for LGBTQ students’ well-being and academic success. Or it could be that districts found it easier to comply with policies that identified or created free, optional materials, called for training teachers and principals on their use and on incorporating students’ feedback, and issued step-by-step guidance on implementation.      

Whatever the factors involved, the fact is that during the last two decades, the number of LGBTQ students who say they are exposed to inclusive instruction has dropped nationwide, from 20% to 16%. Nearly 15% say they are taught negative depictions. And though it’s early in the implementation process in some places, the number of students who say their classes included positive lessons in the seven states that mandate them ranges from 15% to 32%, with an average of 22.5%. 

Even in communities where educators are eager to make the called-for changes, school board meetings have become contentious, as organized groups charge that allowing discussion of LGBTQ topics leads to the “grooming” of students to become gay or trans. 

The resulting fear and confusion are frequently more powerful than the letter of the law. And administrators and even district attorneys often lack clarity on what the law is, including in places with strong protections for LGBTQ kids and educators.

It’s a tough political reality that is about to get even harsher. 

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold funding from “, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”

Well-tested legal limits on federal involvement in what schools teach may make it difficult for Trump to starve schools that teach “woke” concepts. But the of demonstrates that in practice, he may well get his way.

A culture of fear and intimidation

“There is a lot of talk happening now about clamping down on inclusive learning coming from the incoming administration,” says Brian Dittmeier, policy director of GLSEN, which has been monitoring school climate for LGBTQ students for 25 years. “I just want to make clear that there’s a long bipartisan record, and requirements from Congress, that the U.S. Department of Education not dictate curriculum to the states.”

But classroom materials are just one element of what makes a school welcoming, he adds. School leaders need to take a number of steps to build trust with marginalized students — which can be hard to do in the face of ideological assaults. 

“You can adopt policies, you can put books on the library shelves,” says Dittmeier, “but if there is a culture of fear and intimidation, and there’s not the follow-through of inclusion, it’s going to impact the success of those interventions when it comes to reducing adverse mental health outcomes and diminished academic performance.” 

U.S. education policy has long put local leaders in charge of many decisions, so long as school systems meet thresholds set by state and federal officials. So while states create curricular standards — guidelines spelling out what students are expected to learn in each grade and subject — for the most part, district leaders can decide how to include those required topics in classroom lessons.  

Because of this, there are countless places where things can fall apart between a governor signing a bill into law and a teacher feeling safe enough to mention, for example, that astronaut Sally Ride was a lesbian or that Pride Month recognizes the revolt at the Stonewall Inn.  

It’s long been understood that all children when they in classroom materials. One popular theory describes curricula featuring people of different races, abilities and backgrounds as providing “” — a mirror so a child feels connected to the material and a window for learning about other cultures. 

In the case of LGBTQ students, inclusive curriculum — instruction that includes the societal contributions of queer people — also makes schools safer. According to GLSEN, which advocates for policies making schools more welcoming, 4 in 5 queer youth ages 13 to 17 feel unsafe in school, making a third uncomfortable enough to miss at least one day a month. 

Last year, GLSEN analyzed comparing the experiences of LGBTQ students in schools that use inclusive curriculum and those that don’t. Researchers found dramatic differences in student mental health and academic engagement, as well as overall school climate. The positive impacts are also felt by LGBTQ students of color and gender-nonconforming students, who typically report the highest levels of victimization.   

Compared with students in schools that don’t use inclusive curriculum, they are far less likely to routinely hear homophobic and transphobic remarks. Less than half (49%) hear the word “gay” used in a negative way, compared with almost three-fourths (72%) in schools that don’t use inclusive curriculum. One in 4 (27%) hear slurs such as “fag” or “dyke,” compared with almost half (48%). 

LGBTQ students in schools that use inclusive curriculum are almost twice as likely (67% vs. 35%) to say their classmates are accepting. They are dramatically less likely to feel unsafe, half as likely to be victimized in person and less likely to miss school. Consistent attendance is particularly important in light of past GLSEN surveys that put the LGBTQ dropout rate at 35% — three times the national average.  

California’s glacial pace

Armed with early versions of this research and with stories of being bullied, in 2006 some 500 students, accompanied by friends and families, descended on the California statehouse to demand passage of a law that would require schools to use “bias-free” curriculum. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ultimately vetoed the initial bill. 

In 2011, the state Assembly passed the law, the first in the country requiring schools to include the contributions of LGBTQ people in their instruction. As he signed the FAIR Education Act, which also called on educators to teach about people with disabilities, then-Gov. Jerry Brown said he expected it to for textbooks and other materials reflecting the mandated changes to reach classrooms. 

In fact, that estimate was . Notably, the law did not include a deadline for compliance, a mechanism for monitoring implementation or consequences if schools did not shift instruction. Fifteen years after its passage, it remains unimplemented in most of the state’s nearly 1,000 school systems.

A by the advocacy group Equality California found that of districts had adopted all the required changes, though 60% had taken at least one step toward compliance. In 2021, just 27% of California LGBTQ students aged 13 to 17 told GLSEN they had been exposed to positive representations of LGBTQ people in class, an increase of only 5 points since the law’s passage.

To be fair, implementation of curricular standards is never quick. Once a law calling for change is passed, state officials typically appoint a group of educators and subject-matter experts to decide which facts or skills should be taught in each grade. The potential revision is then shared with the public for feedback. 

In the case of the FAIR Act, California’s updated history and social studies standards were , six years after the law’s passage. In deference to local control, districts were left to decide what materials to use.    

But determining whether a textbook meets standards is painstaking work that exceeds the capacity of many districts. And materials are scarce.    

For example, a 2018 of the 3,000 children’s books published the previous year found that half of characters were white, 27% were animals, 10% Black, 7% Asian or Pacific Islander, 5% Latino and 1% Native American. 

Last year, The Education Trust that are part of five curricula that received favorable ratings from EdReports, an organization that evaluates classroom materials for quality. Less than 40% of the texts reviewed featured people of color. In most of those that did, reviewers found “limited representation, such as through stereotypes or as background to the stories of others.” 

When the FAIR Act was passed in 2011, suitable resources were even harder to find. The books Education Trust reviewed included two gay men and six individuals with disabilities, for example. The law required state officials to screen and approve textbooks that districts could voluntarily adopt.

State academic standards vary widely and are often met with political opposition, making the process of approving materials contentious. Publishers are under pressure to customize materials to meet each state’s parameters. Because of their size and tendency to adopt standards at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, California, with 6.7 million K-12 students, and Texas, with 5.8 million, have outsized influence on what publishers produce. 

A January 2020 New York Times piece printed for both markets, finding discordant recountings of the history of capitalism, Reconstruction, immigration, white flight and what one Texas volume called the “Americanization” of Native Americans. A month later, a found seven states did not directly mention slavery in their standards, and 16 listed states’ rights as the cause of the Civil War.      

In California, advocates and members of the state commission reviewing classroom resources scrapped over how to identify historical figures such as Emily Dickinson, James Buchanan and Ralph Waldo Emerson; how to characterize people who were not out when they were alive; and whether to include context regarding sexual orientation or gender identity in texts given to students, or only in teachers’ guides. 

At one point, for example, McGraw-Hill pushed back against the commission’s request to describe Ellen DeGeneres as “a lesbian and humanitarian,” suggesting the materials instead say DeGeneres “works hard to help people. She and her wife want all citizens to be treated fairly and equally,” the news site EdSource. 

Ultimately, the state rejected two sets of materials from one commercial publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and accepted 10. Examples of age-appropriate lessons the state advisory board approved include a section titled “Different Kinds of Families” in a second-grade book, an entry on the legal recognition of same-sex marriage for fourth-graders and a on homosexual life under Nazi rule.    

In 2018, appropriate curricula were ready for classroom use. A year later, the number of California LGBTQ students ages 13 to 17 surveyed by GLSEN who said they were exposed to positive representations of queer people had risen from 22% to 33%. 

But the next time GLSEN administered its school climate survey, in 2021, the culture wars were in full swing and the rate had fallen to 27%. Last fall, an Equality California found that fewer than one-third of schools had fully implemented the law’s requirements. 

Illinois, Oregon learn from California’s missteps

In 2019, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois and Oregon adopted inclusive curricular standards. Nevada would follow in 2021, and Washington state in 2024. Like California’s, the new laws require instruction about other rarely discussed groups as well, such as Native Americans and people with disabilities. During the same time period, three other states — Vermont, Connecticut and Delaware — passed legislation requiring state officials to create model curricula and updated standards.

The new policies vary in approach, with several states taking steps to avoid problems that dogged implementation in California. Colorado lawmakers, for example, set aside money to pay for textbooks. A number of districts, including Denver Public Schools, did not wait for the state review process and instead turned to Teaching Tolerance, the Human Rights Campaign and other outside groups for . 

In Illinois, officials appointed an advisory council composed of advocates, academic subject-matter experts and health officials to come up with curricula and . Like California’s, the law leaves the question of whether to adopt the materials up to local officials, but it mandates checks on whether the instruction is being provided as part of a process of monitoring whether districts are following a number of state requirements. So far, no Illinois district has been found to be out of compliance, according to the state Board of Education. 

Mollie McQuillan is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the implementation of LGBTQ school policies. Illinois has a lot of work left to do, says McQuillan, who uses they/them pronouns. “But they’ve filled some of these holes that we see in other states.” 

The same committee of advocates and experts that screened classroom materials, the Illinois Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council, also wrote the guidance for how school systems could meet the new standards. Essentially a how-to manual, explains why inclusion is important, how to determine whether a lesson is age-appropriate and how to gain teacher buy-in. For example, it suggests back-to-school night is a good time to let parents know about the new law and its goal of a safe and supportive school climate, and to encourage families to ask questions.      

If inclusive standards requirements are not accompanied by anti-bullying and anti-discrimination policies — and similarly specific instructions for implementation — confusion can arise. Faced with uncertainty, McQuillan says, local leaders often default to the status quo.                  

Few principal and superintendent licensure preparation programs include training on sexual orientation or gender, they say. Because of this, school leaders may not be aware of their students’ needs, much less have a sense of urgency about meeting them. 

Far from having considered how transgender and nonbinary students may experience school, administrators and district leaders often don’t realize how strong traditional gender norms can be. They may never have questioned how their schools’ physical spaces and activities are organized. 

A member of the advisory council that has guided the implementation of the Illinois law, Julio Flores trains educators, school administrators and families on LGBTQ topics. Demand, he says, has been strong — and often, the information sought is much more basic than how to frame a lesson.

In his workshops, the mere mention of new curricular standards often triggers a much broader conversation among teachers and school leaders who, depending on the demographics of their communities, might have questions ranging from what constitutes respectful speech to how to make their classrooms safe. One of the topics most frequently raised is the difference between sexual orientation and gender.  

“One common question is, ‘How do young people know that their gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth?’ ” he says. “ ‘How can I support young people, especially if their parents are not supportive?’ That’s a huge challenge for adults, wanting to support their young people but also recognizing parents also have their own process.”

Data on how quickly school climates shift after an inclusive curriculum mandate is adopted are scant. In the four states that passed requirements in 2019, implementation was sometimes held up as school leaders scrambled to figure out how to respond to COVID-19, and the most recent school climate research from GLSEN — the most detailed data available — was published in 2021. (A new dataset is expected later this year.) 

But there are early suggestions that enacting several LGBTQ student protection policies at the same time — and being explicit about how they are to be enacted — can be effective. The second state to pass a curriculum law was New Jersey, which requires the teaching of accurate representations of queer and disabled people but leaves it to individual school boards to decide what inclusive means. Compared with 2011, the state saw a 3 percentage point drop in the number of students who said they were exposed to positive representations. 

By contrast, Oregon, where standards will not be mandatory until the 2026-27 school year, saw a 9-point gain. In its recent analysis, GLSEN noted that the degree of specificity and the  comprehensive nature of the state’s directions to school systems are likely key reasons why. In addition to the kinds of advice included in Illinois’ guidance, Oregon’s encompasses other steps educators should take to make schools more welcoming. For example, after explaining that fostering trust between students and administrators is crucial, directs school leaders to create a process for youth and staff to report incidences of bias and to spell out what steps will be taken.  

Based on the data the organization has gathered over the last 25 years, GLSEN researchers say that to make the most difference in student welfare, inclusive curriculum should be — both and in on-the-job professional development — by the adoption of non-discrimination and anti-bullying laws and by the creation of forums where LGBTQ youth can express their needs. 

According to GLSEN’s Dittmeier, six states now require that teachers be trained on LGBTQ inclusion, and seven have developed materials for educator professional development.

“All of these supports are really key to ensuring that LGBTQ youth feel included in their school environment and can obtain the success of their peers,” says Dittmeier. “When these interventions are available in the school, it really results in a dramatically different school experience for LGBTQ youth.”

But other research has documented an increase in ambivalence about inclusive instruction among teachers. A 2022 survey administered by Educators for Excellence found that 1 in 3 do not support including LGBTQ topics in instruction, while 11% believe their school does not enroll any queer children at all. 

Support for inclusive instruction was weakest among older educators and white ones, with 82% of teachers under age 50 expressing support and 97% of Black, Latino and Indigenous educators saying they are in favor. Educators also told the researchers they fear the wave of state legislation curtailing classroom speech and are unsure what they can say. 

Over the last two years, Oregon has trained 1,000 educators and staff at universities and nonprofits that work with schools to implement the new standards. The state has awarded grants to organizations to provide professional development, instructional materials, affirming drop-in spaces for homework help and youth summits, and it requires districts to have formal community engagement processes.

Uniquely, Oregon also recognized that discussions of LGBTQ school inclusion typically focus on bullying, suicidality and other negative experiences. So officials asked students where they feel most accepted and has helped community groups create opportunities — many of them tailored to young people of a particular race or ethnicity — for queer youth to have fun and spend time with affirming adults.   

School board pushback — and a lawsuit

In May 2023, a newly elected conservative school board majority in California’s Temecula Valley Unified School District overruled a group of teachers who had selected new, state-adopted social studies textbooks for grades 1-5. The reviewers had solicited feedback from parents, which was overwhelmingly positive or neutral.  

The three new board members — who earlier banned instruction on critical race theory, which is not taught in K-12 schools — said they opposed the curriculum because they did not want students to learn about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. 

A tug of war with state officials ensued. The state Department of Education and California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched investigations, and Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened consequences. But the FAIR Act did not set deadlines for schools to shift their instruction, require state officials to monitor implementation or spell out what would happen in districts that ignored the mandate.

In July, the Temecula Valley board doubled down, again the curriculum. Within a day, the governor said he planned to order the books and send the district the $1.6 million bill. Newsom also said that if the Assembly passed a bill that would create consequences for flaunting the FAIR Act and other laws requiring inclusive instruction, he would fine the district $1.5 million.      

The second law would, in fact, , but not until two months after the Temecula Valley board backed down and agreed to adopt most of the curriculum. A few days later, the district’s teachers union, a group of educators and parents sued the board, charging that its votes rejecting instruction required by state standards and a variety of other edicts involving race, sexuality and gender . The case is wending its way through courts.         

‘Anti-LGBTQ animus is still socially acceptable’ 

Even if federal law continues to curtail Trump’s ability to force the elimination of inclusive curriculum, the culture wars may ultimately stymie implementation in many places. 

A survey released last spring by University of Southern California researchers Anna Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff found deep partisan divides in which topics Americans feel are appropriate for classroom discussions, with the biggest gulf on LGBTQ subjects. 

Unlike many polls, the survey asked about hypothetical scenarios in which students’ ages and the content of possible lessons varied from exposing elementary-aged children to stories with a variety of kinds of families to topics that include sex.   

Depending on the scenario, 4 in 5 Democrats said they support inclusive instruction in high school and half or fewer in lower grades. Republicans, by contrast, were comfortable with LGBTQ topics less than 40% of the time at the high school level and less than 10% in elementary school.     

Blue state government notwithstanding, Polikoff wrote in , California has the same partisan divides on inclusive curriculum as other places. The political right, he noted, had “fixed its gaze” on LGBTQ issues in schools.   

“The reason for this shift is obvious: Anti-LGBTQ animus is still socially acceptable,” Polikoff wrote. “The reality is that LGBTQ issues in schools are a thorny problem, and .”
The range of responses, he told The 74, does suggest a path forward, albeit a long one: “We really do need to have a discussion about what’s age-appropriate, what parents want and kids need. And that’s probably not going to be one conversation. That’s probably going to be 50 conversations, one in each state. Or maybe 13,000 conversations, one in each district.”

Those numbers include sick days and other personal leave, but they don’t professional development days, parental leave, long-term disability or other family and medical leave.

That statistic might be shocking, but it’s not just Chicago. Other large Illinois districts including Elgin, Rockford and Springfield had similarly large percentages of teachers missing large chunks of the school year. Across the state, 34% of teachers missed 10 or more days.

Illinois is one of the few states that track data like this, but there’s reason to think teacher attendance is a problem nationwide. According to the from the Institute for Education Sciences, 72% of districts reported that teacher absences were higher in 2022 than they were pre-pandemic. The latest results from June 2024 suggest those numbers may have come down a bit, but they are far from returning to normal.

Worker absences are across all industries, so how worried should we be in education specifically? One difference is that teaching is more like a service job in the sense that, when the kids are there, the school needs someone to cover the classroom. In education, an absence means someone has to pick up the slack, so when a teacher is out, it has real, immediate costs.

The most visible are financial. In 2023, public and private schools across the country employed a combined . Schools have responded to pandemic-era staffing shortages by raising the hourly wage for subs — paying on average in 2023, up 35% from 2018. Given those rates, and depending on how many days and hours each sub worked, schools could have paid nearly $17 billion in substitute teacher costs in 2023.

That may actually be an undercount, because in recent years districts have been unable to find subs to plug all their gaps. That leads to a different type of cost, of teachers having to cover for their peers. When educators are assigned extra tasks, like , or told to cover in another teacher’s classroom, that contributes to a bad cycle of increased workload and stress, which to even more teacher absences.

Ultimately, students bear yet another type of cost when their teachers are absent. As might be expected, research has that one-off substitute teachers are not nearly as effective as regular full-time teachers. Lower-achieving students are both more likely to be assigned to subs and when their regular teacher is absent.

What’s driving the increase in teacher absences? And what can districts do to turn it around?

The first thing to note is that it’s probably not any one thing. Looking at the Illinois district , I found only very small correlations between teacher attendance and the rate at which they stayed with their district employer, the evaluations they received or the district’s overall staffing levels.

The teacher absences also don’t appear to be driven by the spread of COVID or other illnesses. One might expect those to affect students and teachers in similar ways, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Across Illinois schools, there was very little connection between the rate at which students and teachers were missing school.

But the strategies that districts are deploying to address student absences could also be extended to teachers. For example, a 2018 District Administration article building awareness of teacher absenteeism rates, offering prizes or awards for individuals or teams with strong attendance records and building a cadre of reliable on-site subs who can step in.

As Tim Daly has suggested on his Substack , teacher absenteeism may be one symptom of a multifaceted problem in which schools have lost their sense of purpose. Student achievement is down, stories of are rampant and teachers are being when grading students even when the kids aren’t attending school or haven’t mastered the content.

Moreover, principals and district leaders may have been hesitant to crack down too hard on teacher absences for fear they would lose employees. That may have made sense in 2022, say, when the labor market was particularly tight. But those fears should lessen somewhat as it’s to hire. 

Another way to interpret the elevated absenteeism rates is that they are simply an indicator of a more stressed, less engaged teacher workforce. In that sense, the numbers could be considered a of employee dissatisfaction, and more states and districts should be tracking their stats and exploring ways to reduce absences in their schools.

These findings, taken from a sample of almost 1.9 million students, parallel a that tracked students over recent years. Given the tremendous stress and constrained interpersonal interactions that teachers faced in 2020, the pandemic bump shown below seems remarkable (particularly for middle and high school students). Just as noteworthy: When the pandemic receded, the improved relationships disappeared as quickly as they had emerged.

What might have caused these improved relationships? Why didn’t they last? And how might educators reproduce and sustain them in the future?

A second chart provides additional insights. Of the five questions Panorama used to measure teacher-student relationships, the one that yielded the largest pandemic jump from 2019 to 2022 was, “When your teachers ask you how you are doing, how many of them are really interested in the answer?” The increase in the percentage of students answering “frequently” or “almost always” was most pronounced for middle (from 52% to 61%) and high school students (from 41% to 50%). Yet, even elementary students, who already feel extremely positively, sensed that their teachers were unusually interested in how they were faring during COVID, with an increase from 70% to 73%. Presumably, as the pandemic faded, teachers felt less obligation to stay on top of all that their students were facing. 

Yet, reverting to old patterns does not have to be inevitable. Educators who prioritize a rich understanding of their students’ experiences and who communicate that interest to their students will likely see these efforts pay off in multiple ways. Research shows that students who have positive relationships with their teachers learn more (as measured by grades and test scores), .

Given these benefits, the question naturally arises: How can these relationships be improved? One of the most promising levers for improving relationships, in the classroom, workplace or the home, is the capacity for social . For instance, researchers have found that teachers’ motivation and ability to accurately infer their students’ thoughts and feelings is an excellent predictor of .

Furthermore, research evaluating a showed that enhancing teachers’ social perspective taking capabilities can improve relationships. Training educators to take the perspective of a student with whom they had challenges improved their relationships and bolstered academic achievement. In other words, both the teachers who received the training and the students felt that they had more positive relationships. These students also performed significantly better academically than those whose teachers did not receive the training.

Conveniently, a number of these strategies can be adopted even without formal training.

As one example, from the training, teachers worked in pairs while taking the perspective of a student they found challenging. Having a partner allowed each teacher to benefit from an alternative point of view. A math teacher may get a completely different, and enlightening, picture of a student by hearing how that student behaves in physical education.

The training also encouraged educators to entertain multiple hypotheses, just as a detective would. As teachers think through their interactions with a particular student, they can generate multiple explanations for a behavior rather than leaping to a single conclusion. By seeking to support or disconfirm more than one pet theory, teachers tend to approach their next interactions more with curiosity than with judgment. For example, maybe a student has lost motivation for a particular class, or perhaps issues at home have overwhelmed the student at the moment.

In other research, relationship benefits occurred when one party merely that the other was trying hard to take their perspective. So when teachers made genuine efforts to understand how their students were holding up during the pandemic, the gesture was likely appreciated.

In short, teachers can choose from multiple social perspective-taking strategies to better understand and relate to their students. All are cost-free. Each one is flexible enough for teachers to implement in ways that work for them.

In a moment laden with heightened concerns about students’ mental health, poor and loneliness, students need positive relationships more than ever. Naturally, these social bonds are valuable in their own right, too. With a few social-perspective taking strategies, teachers can improve their current relationships and those with future students. No more pandemics required.

As part of their work, researchers determined school’s effectiveness based upon its impact on students’ social-emotional development, test scores and behaviors. They concluded that the most effective schools provide a welcoming environment for students, an experience that shapes their later years. 

“High schools matter,” said Shanette Porter, senior research associate at UChicago Consortium on School Research and the study’s lead author. “And they matter quite a lot. How safe students feel — physically, socially, psychologically — how deeply connected they are to others, how much they trust their teachers and their peers matters.”

She said, too, that student voice is a powerful tool, one schools can use to design better, more effective systems: The biggest predictor of student outcomes in their study was what the students themselves said about their school experience. 

And the impact isn’t just social-emotional, Porter said. It influences trackable metrics such as test scores, high school graduation rates and college attendance, researchers found. 

“These things that feel soft are inextricably linked to these hard measures of learning,” Porter said.  

Researchers drew their data from six cohorts of 160,148 of eighth and ninth grade students who attended CPS between 2011–12 and 2016–17: 42% were Black, 44% were Hispanic and 86% received free or reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty. The college attendance-related data came only from those who attended ninth grade for the first time between 2012 and 2014. They totaled 55,564 students. 

The study examined students’ administrative records — including those related to attendance and discipline — plus surveys provided by both children and teachers about their school’s climate, whether it had effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, a supportive environment and ambitious instruction.

Students also completed a questionnaire focusing on their emotional health, connectedness to school, academic engagement, grit and study habits. 

The study found that students who attended a highly effective school — one ranked by the researchers as being in the 85th percentile based on their collected data and student and teacher survey responses — saw their test scores improve more than those at other CPS campuses. They noted, too, that attendance increased for this group while suspensions and disciplinary infractions dropped.

And the beneficial effects continued well beyond freshman year: Students who attended a school at that 85th percentile increased the likelihood of graduation by 2.41 percentage points and the chance of attending college within two years of graduation by 2.57 percentage points. They also were 20% less likely to be arrested on campus as compared to the average rate of arrest for all high schoolers in the district. 

A spokeswoman for the Chicago school system said it remains committed to social- emotional development: CPS has spent millions growing such offerings in recent years, based in part on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The study found that in 2021, 10% of high school students attempted suicide one or more times in the prior year. 

CPS has hired 123 additional school counselors since 2021, placing the staff at its highest-need campuses. It also has expanded training and support for school-based counselors, social workers, and psychologists so they can implement small-group and individual social-emotional interventions, the spokeswoman said.

But the social-emotional learning tactics underpinning the positive results seen in Chicago Public Schools — and employed by many other districts around the country for several years — are now under attack from the far right. 

Members of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty have labeled social-emotional learning, which can include lessons on self-regulation and relating to others, indoctrination, saying it leads to the idea that the country is  

They say it infringes on parents’ right to raise their children. Karen VanAusdal, vice president for practice at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL, acknowledged the pushback. 

“Certainly there are groups like that that are trying to make social-emotional learning a political soundbite,” she said. “But … there are many more parents, educators and policy leaders who understand the importance of social-emotional learning. The work is continuing.”

VanAusdal said helping students develop skills outside academics is invaluable, especially now, in the wake of the pandemic, when so many are reporting mental health struggles. showed some consensus among parents: 66% said it’s “extremely or very important” that their children’s school teaches them to develop social and emotional skills. Twenty-seven percent said it was somewhat important, Pew reported.  

“This has always been a bipartisan issue,” VanAusdal said. “We want children to have healthy relationships. We want them to have the skills they need to achieve their career and life goals and be caring members of our communities — and we know social-emotional learning is the pathway to achieving that.”

If school leaders are to have any success in tackling the challenges coming out of the pandemic, including staffing shortages, learning gaps and students’ emotional well-being, they must first address the satisfaction problem. Given the of a teacher’s attitude on student happiness, rethinking the value proposition of the profession to bring more flexibility, sustainability and joy to the role might be a good place to start.

The job of the teacher hasn’t substantially changed in decades, despite significant shifts in the world in general and the world of work in particular. The vast majority of educators earn an undergraduate degree in teaching, pass a licensure exam and teach one grade or subject in a classroom for the entire school day. Those who want to work with students but crave flexible schedules, subject or grade-level variety, or simply an opportunity to branch out have few options. Too often, career advancement means leaving the classroom for administrative positions. Meanwhile, people who desire to work in schools but lack the necessary credentials can’t find a way in.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Numerous factors shape how educators are recruited, trained, deployed and retained as part of a modern teaching workforce. But current policies should serve as the floor, not the ceiling, of what is possible. As highlighted in TNTP’s , while there are short-term strategies, the deeper work is ahead — enhancing the value proposition for teachers, developing and expanding professional pathways, and reimagining the educator’s role.

Policy shifts like the one in Shelby County, Tennessee, that allows substitute teachers without a bachelor’s degree, might create a new stream of educator candidates. In Phoenix, the Parent Educator academy has trained 339 parents, and a similar partnership with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota is preparing caregivers to serve as a child’s first teacher and providing a clear path into the profession, from paraprofessional — which often does not require a four-year college degree — to teacher. TNTP works with districts across the country to help create programs that offer parents and community members a way into the classroom, as paraprofessionals or licensed teachers. Going further, school systems should create and staff permanent positions with embedded training for substitute teachers or paraprofessionals who are willing and ready to prepare for educator roles.

It’s also critical to consider all available tools, including new and emerging technologies with the potential to create greater flexibility for teachers, students and parents while improving effectiveness. To be clear, innovations were taking place in pockets before the pandemic: for instance, Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis has been using adjustable schedules and individualized learning pathways since it opened its doors in 2017, and, through a strong partnership with Purdue University, has offered customized experiences that lead to internships. However, during the pandemic, schools engaged in a widespread experiment in using technology to deliver and receive learning. It was born of necessity, and it certainly wasn’t always successful, but there are lessons from that time worth exploring.

, a report commissioned by Edmentum, examined how virtual technology can expand access to high-quality teachers and learning specialists, while enabling staffing innovations like team teaching and non-teaching classroom support roles. In these models, teachers have adjustable schedules, more opportunities for support and training, and greater clarity around their jobs.

Building on what they learned during the pandemic, districts like Gadsden, New Mexico, leverage virtual teachers for hard-to-staff courses, while Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., is offering hard-to-staff and low-demand courses, such as Russian language, online. This enables the school to tap into a larger talent pool, including educators who can’t afford, or prefer not, to live in the D.C. area.

Too often, society talks about teaching as a calling. While it is said with reverence, that way of thinking ignores the reality of the post-pandemic economy and education landscape. It also hides the simple fact that teachers want what most other professionals seek in their careers: . And with , teachers who are not satisfied will continue to have options outside the classroom. 

The success of the country’s public education system depends on the satisfaction of educators and the students they teach. It’s incumbent on education leaders and policymakers to get creative and use all the tools at their disposal to address the customer-satisfaction challenge of bringing more joy back to teaching and learning. 

The outstanding performance of the Nashville Metro Police officers likely drastically reduced the number of casualties, but six killed instead of 15 or 20 doesn’t feel like a win. We must not lose sight of an underlying reality: By the time a gunfight breaks out at a school, many systems have already failed. Defeating a shooter at a school should be the very last line of defense. Politicians and educators should commend the heroism of the Nashville police without creating the impression that this response is the ideal outcome.

That’s because when it comes to schools, the most effective gunfight is the one that never happens.

People will continue to disagree about gun policy and how to balance Second Amendment rights with responsibilities. But even with that debate stalemated, there are active and passive measures schools can take, because school shootings are rarely random. 

shows that in more than 3 out of 4 school shootings, there are warning signs ahead of time – the shooter signals or directly tells others of an intent to do harm or threatens the target. It’s too soon to know exactly what transpired in Nashville and why, but the parents of the shooter were concerned enough to try to limit their access to firearms. The Parkland shooter was pretty clear about what he had in mind. The parents of the Oxford, Michigan, high school shooter are for their lack of action in the lead-up to that incident.

Most school shootings are not attacks by outsiders. Rather, they are perpetrated by students or people known to students. Sometimes it’s a domestic situation that spills over into a school. That’s why the first line of defense is a healthy school culture where students have adults they trust and can share concerns with. Just as elite military units soak up intelligence, school officials must develop a culture where students share information of concern.

Schools should not profile students; there is no typical profile of a school shooter. But once a student exhibits warning signs, schools should act. The signs and signals are the sort of things common sense would suggest: a fixation with violence, weapons, past school shootings, dramatic changes in dress or behavior, threatening behavior or explicit threats.

What’s more, this is not just security work. A healthy school culture and a sense of belonging carry multiple benefits for students, including better academic outcomes. Bullying and alienation are a factor in many school shootings. Some anti-bullying and social-emotional learning initiatives are facing political pressure, and some are poorly designed or ideologically fraught. Yet the Secret Service, hardly a hotbed of leftism, , “it is critical that schools implement comprehensive programs designed to promote safe and positive school climates, where students feel empowered to report bullying when they witness it or are victims of it, and where school officials and other authorities act to intervene.”

Training also matters — for adults more than students. Active shooter drills in schools are too often just security theater. They convey the sense that officials are doing something, but in practice serve only to increase anxiety and depression among students. Training for adults, however, is crucial, with all staff knowing their role in an emergency. In the Nashville bodycam video, officers are greeted by school personnel relaying pertinent information and giving them access to the building. They don’t slow the officers down, inundate them or have multiple people creating confusion. Schools should take an “all-hazard” approach to emergency response, with “active shooter” just one contingency among many, much more likely ones schools will face. 

Of course, there are basic steps schools should take with regard to security, including controlling building access and implementing passive measures like making sure doors and locks work consistently and that there are clear lines of sight outside of schools. These steps do not adversely impact the experience of students but make schools safer.

In the end, schools are places of learning, filled with children, not forts or foxholes. The Nashville shooter shot their way into the school. That’s horrifying, but exceedingly rare. All the attention obscures just how low the risk is for any given school.  Regular communication from schools emphasizing this while also explaining steps that are being taken for safety should be the norm. 

Politicians and education leaders can turn schools into bunkers and “harden the target” to the point of absurdity or recognize that the best gunfights are the ones that never happen. And they don’t happen because of a healthy school climate that heads them off far upstream.

As education scholars who have spent over a decade in three cities talking to parents about their school choices, we found that a surprisingly large number are aware of and considering social-emotional factors in their decisions. Usual narratives about school choice focus on privileged parents seeking out prestigious academic environments for their children from a young age, whether in the form of selective public schools or programs, private options or an affluent suburban district. These choices have been tied to increasing school segregation across the country.

But in our , we found a racially diverse group of privileged parents seeking urban schools that prioritize their child’s happiness. We identified this group of “happiness-oriented parents” using a qualitative meta-analysis of seven studies we and several colleagues conducted over the last decade. Examining interviews with families conducted during that research helped us to draw out similarities, demonstrating this phenomenon across geographies, communities and time frames.

In those interviews, we found this group of parents prioritized factors outside of academic rigor, saying they were looking for schools that were “happy and comfortable,” “happy and grounded” or “not too academic,” and where “each child is known by a teacher.” Our findings over the last decade are aligned with a recent that found mental health was parents’ leading concern for their children in 2022. 

In contrast to research that emphasizes or test scores as indicators of a school’s desirability, happiness-oriented parents use a wider lens in describing what a “good school” looks like. Many are even willing to buck the trend in choosing a different type of school from their peers. What this happiness orientation looks like varies across families — some avoid schools perceived to be too academically competitive, while others prioritize racial/ethnic inclusivity, an alternative pedagogy, a special theme, outdoor time, arts, individualized attention, ease of commute or social-emotional learning. 

These parents often emphasized that they sought schools where their children could develop qualities beyond standard academic skills, like a love of learning, confidence, social interactions or an interest in the arts. Many parents told us test scores don’t tell the whole story about a school’s quality and that they believed rankings and perceived rigor mattered less than relationships, racial representation and school climate.

Taken together, happiness-oriented parents’ school choices could have a broader impact beyond their own children. In downplaying academically competitive criteria (which often align with schools that are disproportionately white and/or high-income), these families are in some cases willing to consider a wider and potentially more racially and socioeconomically diverse set of schools. This could aid in school integration efforts and . These parents could with students, educators and advocates for social justice and integration, or at least not actively oppose these efforts. More broadly, happiness-oriented parents prioritize a welcoming school environment, happy and content students, and loving teachers and school staff; if administrators and policymakers focused more on these aspects of schooling, it would improve the educational experiences of children across the board.

In terms of integration alone, however, happiness-oriented parents may not always be partners in these efforts, since for some, diversity was more of a by-product of their choice than a central factor in their decision-making. Moreover, because their focus is on their children’s individual happiness, even parents with a stated openness to choosing diverse settings may cause harm by existing families in a school or exercising the privilege of their choices by moving their kids when they are unhappy. 

As the mental health crisis among children comes into clearer focus, education policymakers and leaders should take happiness into greater account by supporting schools that prioritize equity, strong student relationships, creativity and social emotional well-being — criteria that are good for all students. This could create a path toward more welcoming, inclusive and racially integrated schools while addressing one of the biggest crises facing America’s young people today. 

The answer is two-fold. First, it’s important to know we are not going to give parents information that doesn’t help them, or only helps some of them. Second, we have been consistently adding new data, but its type and source may surprise you.

Omitting new assessment data — for now 

The cancellation of standardized testing in 2020 and the partial resumption in 2021 has produced two years of nonexistent or, at best, incomplete data. In collecting data from all 51 state education agencies, we’ve found that student participation levels differ widely, ranging from 97% in Mississippi to just 23% in California. 

Importantly, even in states with “high” participation rates, we do not know which student groups are represented. History tells us the highest-need students often disappear from these data first — and they are also the ones who have from pandemic learning disruptions.

Without disaggregation, it is impossible to discern which student groups are under- or unrepresented in a given data set, challenging our ability to present an accurate view on how schools are serving all students. Using incomplete data sets to update our school quality ratings would be like trying to make a recipe with only a partial ingredient list.

This, combined with the concerns we’ve heard from many of our research partners, is why we are excluding 2020 and 2021 assessment data from our GreatSchools ratings. In most states, this means that parents will continue to see test data from 2019 on their school profiles until we can obtain and display 2022 assessment data. Each state’s timeline and data publication process is unique, but we hope to receive this data and make it available to parents nationwide on our profiles by the end of this year.  

Although we are working to collect and display this 2022 assessment data as soon as we can get it from states, we also know that parents can’t wait. They need recent, relevant school information now. For families, parsing through years of school data isn’t an academic exercise — it’s a matter of their child’s education and well-being. According to the , more than a third of K-12 parents are concerned about how schools are supporting students’ learning and their social-emotional and mental health needs amid the ongoing pandemic. 

Parents need timely, robust school information now more than ever, and we have committed to finding and sharing it from several new sources.

Advancing a broader view of school quality 

Data acquisition challenges aside, we know that . Painting a rich picture of school quality includes sharing information on the resources schools have to offer, the practices they employ to support all students, as well as the outcomes the school is achieving and whether all of these things are equitably distributed. 

Even before the pandemic struck, GreatSchools has been collecting and sharing new, relevant school information with parents that goes beyond test scores. We remain committed to presenting families with a more holistic view of school quality by:

• Sharing new data types. School quality is reflected by more than just assessment data. Components of a school’s culture, such as trust and commitment, to student success. We’ve already added this “school climate” data to GreatSchools profiles in Illinois and New York City. Building upon what we’ve learned, we are now preparing to display climate data in five more states in the coming months. By connecting more parents with this valuable, new type of school quality information, we hope more states will see the benefit of making this data accessible for families.

• Leveraging partnerships to improve data access. High schools with strong college outcomes often to advanced course offerings. To help parents discover schools that offer such classes, we’re partnering with national organizations that share our commitment to ensuring parents have equitable access to this information. Starting this week, parents will be able to browse high schools’ advanced course offerings on GreatSchools profiles and explore for their child’s success.

• Spotlighting best practices for college success. In 2021, we with our annual College Success Award, which offers parents a snapshot of whether high schools prepare students to enroll in college, succeed with college-level coursework, and persist into their second year. In 2022, we launched our bilingual collection to highlight for educators and parents how College Success Award-winners are innovating to create more equitable and effective experiences for their students. The two-year project began with a thorough landscape analysis; consultation with school design experts; interviews with experts, parents, and educators; and a data analysis on schools with outsized success among low-income students. 

• Improving opportunities for school leaders to share information. Who better to share what makes a school great than the dedicated leaders that walk its halls each day? School leaders can of their school, then add information about practices, policies and courses to their GreatSchools profile. This newly revamped feature allows leaders to connect directly with current and prospective parents and provide additional context beyond quantitative data, from band to world languages to extracurriculars and more.

• Elevating the voices of historically marginalized families. The Community Reviews section of our school profiles allows parents, students, faculty and community members to share their school experiences with others. We’ve recently improved our to better support parents of diverse backgrounds in sharing their story. In the past three months alone, nearly 10,000 parents and community members added new reviews to school profiles, reflecting upon school safety, learning, social-emotional well-being and more so families of similar identities can understand how the school will support their child.

A call to action for state education agencies

As noted, we are actively working with states to collect 2022 assessment data and look forward to displaying that on our profiles when it becomes available. In the meantime, we urge states to join our efforts to connect parents with the rich school quality information they want and deserve. To do this, state education agencies must:

• Disaggregate data sets. Giving families access to rich, disaggregated data builds knowledge, expands thinking and strengthens positive communication among families, educators and schools. A recent Data Quality Campaign shows that only 28 states disaggregate data by student groups in their state report cards (and six states that previously did have now removed it). The effects of disrupted learning were not evenly distributed and parents deserve to know who is being left behind.
  
• Calculate growth. Even without consistent assessment data from 2020 and 2021, states can — and should — . There is no reason why 2019 and 2022 data cannot be used to quantify how well schools have supported students the past few years. If we only look at students’ current achievement levels, we will not get a clear understanding of how schools are truly serving their students, particularly children of color. This is why growth is now key to our GreatSchools ratings, and why we continue to advocate for states to gather (and disaggregate) this data to provide a more nuanced lens on school quality.

• Prioritize school climate data. School climate data helps parents understand important aspects of their child’s learning environment, such as leadership, collaboration among teachers, instructional rigor, family engagement and student social-emotional support. Although the pandemic disrupted the collection of this information, it’s coming back much quicker than assessment data. However, many states still don’t collect or report climate data, others do so voluntarily by districts, and some share it only at the district or state level. Every school in the country should have a climate survey and parents should be able to see the results. States can make this happen. 

Combining reliable and valid outcomes data — particularly data rooted in equity — and new information about climate, school practices and parent perspectives will give parents more of what they need to obtain a better picture of school quality today. As the ancient proverb goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Though the pandemic complicated our usual ways of assessing school quality, it has also created opportunities to find new ways of understanding how well schools are serving their students. 

Parents need accurate and equitable school information now. With a bit of creativity and dedication, together we can find it. 

The researchers who surveyed almost 15,000 school staff members on student behavior and toxic school environments plan to find out. 

This week, the American Psychological Association  a follow-up survey to keep tracking the extent of violence against school staff and its effect on educators’ decisions to stay in their jobs. 

“This will give us strong comparisons across time,” said Susan McMahon, chair of the task force behind the survey and an associate dean in the College of Science and Health at DePaul University. 

The current study showed 37 percent of administrators have been harassed or threatened with violence from a student, 42 percent have experienced similar treatment from a parent and 15 percent have been the victim of a violent incident involving a student. 

Those findings reflect responses collected during the 2020-21 school year, when many schools remained closed. Recent reports from and professional organizations suggest schools are now seeing even more defiant and aggressive acts from students and that teachers aren’t waiting until the year is over to walk away. 

“The fact that many schools were hybrid or online during the time of the survey makes these rates even more concerning,” McMahon said. “Not only are schools operating in person, the effects of the pandemic are extensive in terms of lost loved ones, lost learning, health issues and the stresses related to COVID-19.”

The results come weeks after President Joe Biden drew attention to student mental health as part of his State of the Union address and followed up by signing a federal budget that includes $111 million to increase the supply of school counselors, social workers and psychologists. The researchers point to that would further increase both staff training in mental health and positions for those professionals. But they also say school climate has deteriorated and adding more staff alone won’t fix the problem. The researchers analyzed over 7,000 written responses, in which staff expressed the need for more security personnel and said they’ve faced “belittling” comments from parents and the community. 

“We’re asking for more than just mental health money,” said Ron Astor, a public affairs and education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the task force. “This is a pressure cooker. We need clear guidelines around issues of civility.”

A from the National Association of Secondary School Principals also pointed to rising concerns over harassment, with 34 percent of principals reporting online threats from parents and 29 percent reporting in-person threats from parents.

Elliot Duchon, a former superintendent in the Jurupa Unified School District, near Los Angeles, said political strife and escalating fights and curriculum have contributed to a breakdown in school climate. In some districts, parents encouraged their children to go to school before districts dropped mandates.

“Parents are literally teaching their kids to disobey school rules,” said Duchon, now a consultant with F3Law, a California firm specializing in education.  

A look that ‘meant trouble’

Tracy Cooper, a veteran school bus driver in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, who testified during a Thursday on the survey findings, said a parent threatened to have her fired because she enforced the district’s mask policy.

“Luckily for me, I’ve only had one student threaten to physically attack me,” she said. A boy “had this look on his face that meant trouble” and then tried to push her down as she walked through the aisle, she said..

Maggie Maples, a recreational therapist in the Mustang Public Schools, near Tulsa, said she’s arrived at schools this year to work with students only to find they’ve been suspended.

“Eighth-grade boys can get a little violent,” said Maples. “There are a couple kiddos who are really defiant when it comes to agreeing with teachers. They cuss them out or make threatening comments.”

The data shows some educators have had enough. Researchers found between 23 percent and 43 percent of respondents wanted or planned to quit the profession. The rates across regions were fairly similar, ranging from 35 percent in the Midwest and West to 38 percent in the South. State-level surveys, including those in and , point to similar results.

Now a year later, local reports show some followed through on those intentions. In the , 169 teachers left between December and mid-February, and the lost more than 50 teachers shortly after the school year began. Experts, however, say it’s too soon to conclude that teachers are quitting at higher rates than in a typical year. A number of factors, including more open positions fueled by federal relief funds, could contribute to staff vacancies.

“We really are in the middle of a crisis right now,” said Autumn Rivera, a sixth grade science teacher from Colorado and one of four current finalists for national Teacher of the Year. “It’s very rare for teachers to leave in the middle of the school year.”

Not all schools are experiencing the same uptick in violent outbursts. Michael Brown, principal of Winters Mill High School in Carroll County, Maryland, north of Baltimore, said he braced himself for a rash of discipline issues last fall.

While there were a few “rough patches” around the holidays, that’s no different than a typical year, he said, adding that students seem to be grateful for school experiences that they missed while schools were closed. When the school held an outdoor homecoming dance, students stayed until the end despite occasional rain. 

“It’s almost like a reintroduction to everything,” Brown said. “Just having the normal things that they had taken for granted has really helped to reduce some of those behaviors.” 

Disclosure: Linda Jacobson co-authored several books with Ron Astor on and students facing .

The Indiana bill includes a provision that would require districts to get parents’ permission before students take any survey that “reveals or attempts to affect the student’s attitudes, habits, traits, opinions, beliefs or feelings.” Parents say such surveys violate student’s privacy and could encourage students to question their mental health or sexual identity.

The legislation stems from a “parents’ rights” movement in Republican-led states across the country that has featured efforts to get and dealing with race and sexuality. Arizona was among the first states to require parent permission for surveys six years ago, but concerns from parents about prying questions have recently spread to districts in Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere.

“Parents are saying ‘What is this intended to do? What are you doing with the data, and how do we opt out of it?’” said Dawn Lang, who has a fourth grader in the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, north of Indianapolis.

Schools use such surveys to get a read on what students think about their teachers, relationships with peers, access to weapons and, increasingly, issues related to race and diversity. Educators, researchers and others providing services to schools say it’s important to get “student voice” about topics such as substance use, mental health and student engagement. Under pressure to spend billions in federal dollars to address precisely those issues, many are relying on surveys to inform how they spend the money.

Indiana districts, and many across the country, offer parents an opportunity to opt their child out of taking surveys — referred to in the field as passive, or implied, consent. Requiring all students to get permission in advance, or opting in, would reduce participation and leave schools less informed about what students think, experts say.

“Schools often use climate surveys to get a sense of what I call conditions for learning,” said Sandra Washburn, a researcher with the Center on Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Indiana. “Do students have input into decisions, someone at school they trust? That’s really good data. When we have 50 percent of the student population saying they’re bored on a daily basis, we take note of that.”

If the bill passes, she worries it could limit the number of districts that participate in the , which has been running for more than 30 years and asks students questions about topics ranging from drug and alcohol use to whether their schoolwork is meaningful.

With U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently issuing about increases in youth suicide attempts and substance use, Washburn said, “We need local data that tells us how our kids are doing.”

Requiring written parental consent in advance “has the potential for compromising the validity of the sample of participating students,” said Mikyoung Jun, a survey statistician at Prevention Insights, the Indiana University center that runs the Indiana Youth Survey. 

She pointed to that compared survey samples using both active and passive consent. The active consent group was less likely to include older students, as well as those with behavior problems, single parents or academic struggles. Basing decisions on such results could lead to “mistargeted” policies and programs, the authors wrote.

‘Good faith, important questions’

Lang and parent groups in other states have especially raised concerns over from Boston-based Panorama Education, which now has 1,500 client districts, including Hamilton Southeastern Schools. 

Among questions on the survey given to third-through-fifth graders are: “How often did you get your work done right away, instead of waiting until the last minute?,” “How well did you get along with other students who are different from you?” and “How often do you worry about violence at your school?” 

Surveys for middle and high school students include additional diversity, inclusion and cultural awareness questions, such as, “At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics with other students?”

Survey questions about race and diversity are among those that Brooke Lawson, coordinator of mental health and school counseling for the district, said parents call about the most. 

The district posts opt-out information in multiple ways: the , the superintendent’s weekly video message, a district email to families and principals’ newsletters. She stressed that parents can request to see their child’s responses to the survey report.

Lang, a parent in the district, said she missed the notice about the survey last fall. “It was maybe bundled in with a newsletter at the end of the week,” she said.

Some parents are uncomfortable staff members analyzing students’ thoughts on personal matters.

“They are picking these programs because they’re being told the kids are depressed,” said Kelli Moore, who pulled her eighth grade son out of the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina. She is among those who protested the district’s contract with Panorama, which the district in December. 

Moore added that the demographic questions might plant seeds of “gender confusion” in students’ minds.

“They might make a child think, ‘Maybe I am gay or maybe I’m supposed to be a girl, or maybe I’m supposed to be a boy,’” she said.

Districts using Panorama surveys can choose to offer just male or female as options, or add a third choice for a student to “self-describe,” explained Brendan Ryan, a spokesman for the company.

But he added that districts can “modify the language or options however they deem appropriate for their students.” Districts, he added, own the data, not Panorama. District officials decide who has access to it and whether to give teachers access to an individual student’s responses. 

“There are very fair, good faith, important questions that we think parents should be asking,” he said, “and we’re trying to separate that out from the folks who think we shouldn’t be talking about Rosa Parks because it makes white kids feel bad.”

‘Falling through the cracks’

Brandan Keaveny, a data ethics consultant and former chief accountability officer in the Syracuse Public Schools in New York, said federal relief funds for pandemic recovery have likely prompted more districts to conduct surveys without first gauging parental support

“It’s like, ‘This is what we’ve decided. What do you think?’” he said, adding that districts need to ensure they communicate the purpose of the surveys, the opt-out process and how parents can request their child’s data — and do it in multiple languages. 

“Schools need to be communicating to parents all the places where data is shared on their child,” he said. “I always said to principals, ‘You really need to get people actively involved.’”

But he added that moving to an opt-in process, which he compared to voter suppression, “creates obstacles that keep families” from participating, especially if they don’t speak English or have other reasons for missing messages from their children’s schools. 

Beth Lehr, an assistant principal in the Sahuarita Unified School District in Arizona, south of Tucson, said her school has a hard time getting student perception data because of , passed in 2016, that like the Indiana proposal, requires active consent for student surveys.

Her district received this school year to implement training programs for teachers and pay stipends to those leading afterschool programs for students with additional social and emotional needs “But we can’t do the data gathering to figure out who really needs that intervention because we are required to get active consent,” she said.

Of the 1,063 students in her school, only 160 returned permission forms, she said, adding that even if parents don’t object to the surveys, many don’t read their emails or get the forms from their children in the first place. 

Parents who sign the forms “are probably already doing as much as they can to help their kids,” she said. “We’re missing the kids who are falling through the cracks, because they’re falling through the cracks for a reason.”

Panorama isn’t the only organization facing pushback for its surveys. A parent in a said she was “blindsided” by her child taking a survey created by San Francisco-based non-profit YouthTruth.

Even so, more than half of the 2,100 schools using the survey requested an optional set of questions related to diversity, equity and inclusion the organization introduced for the first time this year, said Sonya Heisters, deputy director of YouthTruth.

Parents, she added, aren’t limiting their concerns about surveys to school board meetings. 

“We’re hearing from parents who are even contacting us directly,” she said. “That didn’t used to happen.”