This bill would grant student members of the right to vote on the decisions the councils take. If passed, out of the 13 votes per council, students would hold two of them. 

CECs consist of elected community members who evaluate the efficacy of educational programs, recommend improvements, approve zoning lines and weigh in on all things related to public education. State law currently requires that two students, serving in student government and nominated by their superintendents, serve on each of the 32 councils and one on each of the four citywide councils.  

Students on these councils attend the meetings, offer feedback and consultation, share informed perspectives — perspectives that carry unique weight because of their lived experience — yet when the time comes to decide, they have no voting power. 

This dichotomy reveals how  deeply shapes our civic relationship with young people. For decades, institutions have them from the democratic process or included them only in token ways.  

Ironically, CECs themselves perpetuate this pattern. Not only do they deny students voting power, but they have also failed to comply with state law requiring student representation. As of 2024, only 14 student seats were filled, leaving at least two-thirds vacant. An honest reflection of the law makes that not surprising. Would you sit on a council if you were the only non-voting member? 

This bill addresses both problems. It increases the number of students on each council and ensures that students not only inform decisions about policies affecting their daily lives but can cast votes on those decisions. It also broadens access by removing a requirement that the student members serve in student government.

When considering the utilitarianism of this bill, it is easy to understand why it hasn’t generated a lot of attention — it seems like an obvious ‘Yes.’ But pragmatism alone doesn’t guarantee success. Lawmakers introduced this bill in 2023 and three years later, it has yet to pass.  

This is particularly concerning as the new mayor and chancellor vow to improve our current governance model that gives the mayor control over our system. CECs are contingent on mayoral control and are expected to provide vital input to both the mayor and chancellor. Giving students a real seat at the table is a simple but important first step they could advocate for. 

The lack of traction likely stems from limited awareness, paired with to fully embrace the burgeoning movement for youth voice and enfranchisement.   

Fortunately, young people deserve the right to inform and influence the policies and practices that affect their daily lives.  

For those of us working in the youth civic and democratic ecosystem, we’ve witnessed young people’s perspectives and impact on policy from communities to the . We trust their judgment and benefit when we listen. This bill asks lawmakers in Albany to extend that trust.  

Research on adolescent development reinforces this need. By their early teens, young people’s brains are developing in ways that heighten their focus on . 

Evidence from the field and research alone will not secure this bill’s passage. Advocates must also demonstrate what this looks like in practice. , the original author of this bill, demonstrates that reality better than anybody in the city. 

For three decades, BroSis has in New York City. These efforts show how capable young people are and how essential their voices remain in galvanizing change. Young leaders bring insight into systematic challenges in ways that very few decision-makers can fathom, such as longstanding racial disparities in education as well as emerging challenges like artificial intelligence. 

EdTrust-New York has seen the same impact. Through the developed in partnership with BroSis and Adelante Student Voices, students have shaped policy conversations on school discipline, suspension rates and equity across the state. Their contributions have improved both the quality and urgency of those discussions. 

Together we view this bill as a catalyst for better informed education policy and a mechanism to ensure direct student representation. It will also help build civic ownership among young people. 

The bill will ensure the education reflects what students actually need. It also signals to young people, who are growing from the lack of access to the democratic process, that New York City is committed to engaging them and elevating their civic power.  

The strength of this bill lies in its practicality, but we should not mistake simplicity for insignificance. As advocates and policymakers consider how to improve mayoral control, they should take this simple and meaningful first step. This bill deserves full-throated support from anyone in New York City who values young people’s perspectives and believes they must play a meaningful role in the civic process. Let’s give high school students, not just a seat at the table, but a vote.

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s release, hard rules appeared almost overnight. AI tools were banned throughout departments. Teachers watched what seemed like an existential threat materialize in real time, and they responded the way institutions usually do under pressure: They drew a line and told everyone not to cross it.

Three years later, that line is still there. And at many places, nobody ever asked whether it should be, at least not the people most affected by it.

When I looked into how my Austin, Texas, high school’s AI policy was developed, I found that my administrators made the decision internally. There was no student committee, no open forum, no campuswide survey. The rulebook was simply handed down. In K–12 education, require districts to develop and publish AI policies; when they are published, they’re often developed without proper consideration of all stakeholders, including students themselves.

It’s reasonable to counter that students are minors, that institutions need coherent governance and that not all decisions can go to a committee. But AI policy isn’t a routine curriculum adjustment. It governs what tools students are allowed to use to think, draft, research and communicate — tools that increasingly shape how knowledge is produced and evaluated outside school. Getting those rules wrong produces consequences for students.

Brittany Carr’s situation is a well-known example. In early 2023, the had three assignments flagged by an AI detector. She provided her revision history and explained her process writing deeply personal essays about her cancer diagnosis, her depression and her personal recovery. It wasn’t enough. Fearing that a second accusation could cost her financial aid, she began running every essay through an AI detector herself, rewriting any sentence it marked until her writing voice felt flattened and unfamiliar. By the end of the semester, she left the university.

Carr is not alone. The same NBC News investigation found that students across the country deliberately simplified their vocabulary and avoided complex sentence patterns — not to write better, but to write less like themselves. Creative writing assignments exist to help students find their voice, which they can’t do in fear of an algorithm. Carr’s case shows a student reshaping her writing, and ultimately her education, around a software system she had no role in approving, in a policy she had no voice in developing.

Student involvement would not necessarily have guaranteed a different outcome in Carr’s case. But it might have changed the structure that enabled it. Students could have brought up concerns about relying on automated detectors without corroborating evidence. They could have described how fear of false accusations pushes students toward simpler vocabulary, safer syntax and less intellectual risk. They could have asked what procedural protections exist before a software flag becomes an academic charge.

Instead, at many institutions, enforcement architecture was built first. Conversation came later, if at all.

It doesn’t have to work this way. In Los Altos, California, did more than sit in on policy meetings — they designed and ran community workshops, facilitated discussions between sixth graders and administrators, and built an AI chatbot to help other districts draft policies. 

A found that students overwhelmingly want to be part of decisions about how AI is used in their education — and that many already hold sophisticated views on its risks and potential. The fact that Los Altos made national news tells you how rarely that invitation is extended.

But there is a deeper reason students belong in these conversations: We know something policymakers don’t.

At my high school, I’ve witnessed — and experienced — a secret loop in the learning process: we use  large language model tools like ChatGPT and Claude to genuinely improve learning by unraveling concepts, studying for tests and brainstorming ideas. 

A few days ago, a student asked a question about a formula in my AP Physics C class — and nobody knew the answer. Another student opened his laptop and asked Claude, and after a few minutes of back-and-forth, we had completely straightened out our question, improving everyone’s understanding of how circuits worked. I used an LLM to compile notes from my Multivariable Calculus class, which helped me study and earn a near-perfect score on my test. My friend used ChatGPT to learn Java syntax for a project — not to write code, but to understand the language.

A found that 54% of U.S. teens now use AI chatbots for schoolwork, with the most common uses being research and brainstorming — not copying and pasting answers. But that message hasn’t reached the people writing the rules. This secret loop goes completely disregarded by schools, simply because it’s easier to blanket-ban the technology altogether. The generation that grew up with these tools understands their texture in a way no outside committee can replicate.

These AI policies directly affect students’ outcomes and futures. To exclude them from the conversation is simply undemocratic.

If educational institutions are serious about preparing students for democratic citizenship, that commitment must go beyond coursework and into policy-making. The time to invite students into these critical conversations is now. Will schools treat students as subjects of policy, or as participants in it?

While students don’t typically attend these meetings, this one was different: students were present and at the center of the conversation. Scholars spoke candidly about their experiences with the school’s evolving model for clubs and internships — what was working, what could be improved and what they hoped would come next. The students were reflecting on a program called “Worldview Wednesday,” which allows them to explore academic and career interests during the school day. The goal of the staff meeting was to identify implementation trends, including those raised by students, and improve structures for the following school year’s programming.  

What‘s remarkable about CHEC’s approach to staff meetings is not just the clarity of the students’ insights or their sincerity in wanting to help improve programming; it‘s the way the adults lean in, quite literally. Teachers nod, take notes and ask follow-up questions, resembling a co-design session more than a traditional staff meeting. 

That was the CHEC leadership team’s goal. During school year 2024-2025, Principal Maria Tukeva and her staff had set the ambitious target to engage 20% of their learners in traditional adult decision-making spaces. They exceeded that aim, with 30% of their scholars participating over the course of the school year. That also led to student sense of belonging increasing by 7%, according to a school climate survey. 

I see members of the CHEC team modeling a monumental shift in power as staff members center student voice and revamp school culture. Across the country, pockets of school innovation and improvement have historically gained traction in one classroom or school, but their impact is often isolated. Innovative teachers and school leaders are busy people. Districts rarely have the resources, capacity, and system-level enablers to codify and diffuse promising school-level practice widely.  

Codifying and scaling school-level practice can look like curating resource libraries, developing blueprints or playbooks, or even establishing demonstration sites and hosting visits from other school teams so they can see promising practices in action. Districts play a key role in this process, from monitoring and elevating bright spots to providing added capacity and resources to invest in codification. 

They can also create enabling conditions for school innovation through flexible policies and infrastructure that allow promising practices to take root and grow. The , in partnership with the , has implemented some of these strategies to overcome challenges that districts have faced nationwide. The district  is fortunate to have dedicated Design Lab staff members who work with schools to design and evaluate programs, facilitate cohort-based development initiatives, and shape infrastructure and policy through collaboration with other district leaders. 

At CHEC, the student-centered, decision-making model during the school’s meeting in their cafeteria has become an exemplar for youth voice across the district. It has shaped district guidance for key planning processes — such as how stakeholders are engaged in the development of annual comprehensive school plans. I have even heard high schoolers from across DCPS present their own solutions to address chronic absenteeism at our Student Design Days. Some of our schools adopted these student-led ideas, resulting in an increase in-seat attendance by as much as 20%.  

Not far from CHEC is Paul Laurence Dunbar High School — America’s first public high school for Black students — where every eligible senior participates in an off-campus internship with a local nonprofit, government agency or business. The school’s “City as Classroom” model has contributed to an 18% increase in students on track for promotion and graduation. Driven by Dunbar’s pioneering efforts, DCPS codified processes for off-campus learning — clarifying site approvals and attendance tracking — making it easier for other schools to replicate the model. 

Just down the road at Cardozo Education Campus — every ninth grader engages in structured career exploration before selecting a pathway during a celebratory “Declaration Day.” Since launching this model, Career and Technical Education pass rates for the first course in chosen pathways have climbed to 93%. Encouraged, DCPS is expanding support for exploratory CTE opportunities districtwide. 

If we want innovation to scale beyond isolated stories of success, districts can invest in the infrastructure to help support and amplify promising innovations. That can mean creating dedicated roles and teams to provide capacity for codifying and disseminating best practices or building systems to capture and share these practices across campuses.  

But first, it means fundamentally recognizing school-level innovators as leaders for the future of learning. Treating local brilliance as the starting point for system-wide change unlocks the full potential of our schools and the communities they serve. The future of learning is already unfolding in our schools, and I am proud of our young people and our staff for leading the way. 

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

You know, those bipedal mysteries who are bopping around with a simultaneous look of disdain and indifference. They’re listening to music with wired headphones and seem to levitate underneath the baggy, acid washed jeans and windbreakers of the late nineties. There’s probably bubble tea involved. 

In 2028, these kids are voting. In two years, these nine million 16 and17 year olds, zits and all, may be all that stand between us and a failed state.

The ramifications of the 2028 election are looming monumental on the horizon. 

Rally, organize, vote. This is the mantra champions for democracy are pushing. But they’re not pushing it to the kids — and boy, should they.

In its Human Rights Watch warns of an “authoritarian wave” that has come into power across the globe, including in the United States. “Authoritarian leaders have exploited public mistrust and anger to win elections and then dismantled the very institutions that brought them to power,” the report states. 

Throughout history authoritarian playbooks have hinged on capturing the hearts and minds of young people. The idea is simple: You capture the youth early enough and you capture the future. 

This was a key pillar in the Soviet strategy to flip eastern Europe after World War II: simultaneously cripple the education system and funnel to a swath of vulnerable teens eager to form a collective identity. 

The far right in America has internalized this playbook and are committed to realizing it. What does the targeting of these young people look like?

It’s the ‘manosphere’. It’s the podcasters and YouTubers and influencers who are modeling a misogynist and toxic ‘masculine’ grind that appeals to looking for inclusion and identity in a world working to deprioritize the patriarchy. The content and community is the bait, the white noise of far right ideologies consumed through osmosis is the hook.

The manosphere is beginning to tap into the cohort of young Latinos, a marginalized bloc desperate to assimilate and be seen as American. They don’t want to accept they’re latching onto a movement intent on their further disenfranchisement. 

This scheme transcends class and gender. It’s the likes of Erika Kirk, Nick Fuentes, and leaders within Turning Point USA who are flooding teen spaces and media to eloquently rail against a diversifying America and progressive and empathetic principals in ways that are overtly racist and laced with nationalistic rhetoric. 

This prong of the movement doesn’t rely solely on social media; it’s in schools, too. In the last year, the number of in US schools — Turning Point’s high school program — has doubled to 3,000. 

Lawmakers are entwined with these groups, receiving and funneling money toward . They also appear in podcasts and rub shoulders with influencers because they need them to convert young, future voters. 

Why? Because they are desperate to maintain and squash opportunities for America to become a democracy that is representative and elected of its population and their ideals, that is: a youthful generation of progressive people of color.  

As America grows ever more diverse, these power brokers are fervent to recruit a new generation that will maintain their minority rule.

The problem is that it’s working.

The other problem is that champions of democracy aren’t doing the same thing to cultivate the next generation of civically engaged young people who might be able to thwart this movement.

It’s difficult to understand why pro-democratic movements haven’t leaned into cultivating the democratic agency of the 16- and 17-year-old population prior to the voting age. They just don’t.

There is obvious ageism toward young people, and a failure to get behind the science of adolescent development. I also believe it is playing out at scale –- a manifestation of our country’s unwillingness to accept the future is racially and ethnically diverse, multilingual and much better informed than ever before.  

Even when there are attempts to organize around teens, it’s done poorly and with little effect because these young people harbor a growing level of disdain for the priorities and ideologies of both political parties and organizers. They see a civic system that doesn’t look like them, doesn’t have the same priorities of them, and has not to have their best interest in mind. 

In a collaborative study led by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement, 60% of young people agree the political system doesn’t work. Black and Brown youth are . Why should they?

Most chilling, respondents in the study said they do not “buy into the value of democracy”, and are sympathetic to authoritarian governments. This population is expected to account for over . 

So, what can be done? A lot in just two years. 

One of the first priorities is to  protect and reinvigorate — particularly those serving the most diverse and historically marginalized populations. It is here the pipeline for future voters is restored. It’s not just teaching how a bill becomes a law, it’s teaching kids how to build democratic power. Amid systematic attacks on public education, basic and sound civic education is no longer a guarantee, and local leaders must be held accountable to ensure access to strong curricula. 

The education system can’t do all the heavy lifting. Out-of-school time civic education and participatory engagement programs need to be designed and run all over the country. That’s particularly important for two distinct communities: those whose voting rights have been systematically targeted throughout history and those of privilege and access who’ve never felt a need to show up to the polls. 

Beyond programs and education, conversations about why this matters should be taking place at the dinner table, on the courts, on the streets, on line, in the cafeterias and community events. Young people need to rally around the idea of representative democracy. The refrain should be simple: kids are voting in 2028 — are they prepared?

It’s important to remember that our nation is not preparing young people for politics or partisanship: We are preparing them for democracy. 

Voting is not partisan, it is democratic. Civic engagement is not political, it is democratic. It’s not a matter of pushing issues or candidates. . It’s a matter of  preparing them to engage and trusting in their and . They’ve to always land on the .

I’ve said before, the entire youth civic ecosystem must be reformed — a project that is decades of work in the making. Still, I believe one well-prepared generation could radically alter the civic landscape and discourse, and be the catalyst to creating a pipeline of young voters that will lead increased turnout, local level engagement, more representative candidates, increased accountability, and a new age in which majority and representative rule is the status quo and not a pipe dream.  

In the meantime, remember democracy is under threat. There is a movement looking to overturn our republic, and it hinges on capturing the hearts/minds of young people. Young people could have an incredible role to play over the coming years. Where anti-democratic movements recognize the power of youth, the collective good must too — and that collective must rally around young people before it’s too late.

My first encounter was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Standing there, I realized how easily words like history and memory fail. The train tracks ran straight into the Nazi extermination camp and then simply stopped. Our guide said there was nowhere else to go. In New York City, trains mean movement: getting home, staying connected, continuing life. At Auschwitz, they carried people into death.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the scale of the violence but how deliberate it all was. About 80% of the people brought there were murdered within days, many immediately. The system was designed not only to kill, but to make killing efficient. That realization didn’t feel distant. It felt uncomfortably human.

As the trip continued, I began noticing how remembrance shows up — and how often it doesn’t. At the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, I learned about a synagogue that had been destroyed during the Holocaust, rebuilt years later and repurposed as a toy store. That decision didn’t sit right with me. Synagogues are not just buildings; they are spaces of identity and connection. It raised a question I couldn’t shake: When historical spaces are restored, who decides how they are remembered — and what responsibility comes with that decision?

Later, in Warsaw, we visited what remains of the Jewish Ghetto and saw a mural honoring six members of the Jewish resistance who died after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their bravery gave hope to people who had almost none. Yet the mural honoring them wasn’t created until 2022 — nearly eighty years after their deaths. That delay troubled me. Remembrance shouldn’t have to wait decades to feel necessary.

As a Hispanic student who is not Jewish, this trip reshaped how I understand the Holocaust and its relevance today. I learned that antisemitism didn’t suddenly appear in the 1940s — it had deep roots, and difference was used as an excuse to exclude and dehumanize long before genocide followed. That pattern is not just “history.” It’s a warning.

People look different, worship differently, live differently. That diversity should never justify violence. And yet history shows how easily hatred grows when difference is normalized as a threat and memory is treated as optional.

This trip forced me to confront uncomfortable questions: Why did recognition take so long? Why are some stories remembered immediately while others fade? And what happens when remembrance becomes symbolic instead of intentional?

Poland has made important efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and those efforts matter. But remembrance cannot stop at monuments. It must protect meaning, preserve truth and demand honesty. Otherwise, memory risks becoming something we admire instead of something that changes us.

This experience made me realize that remembrance is not passive. It requires participation — especially from those of us who did not inherit this history personally. If remembering becomes optional, history becomes fragile. But if remembrance is active, it becomes a responsibility.

I carry that responsibility with me now. And if I have the opportunity to share even a small part of what I learned, I will. Because remembrance isn’t just about never forgetting. It’s about never looking away.

In recent years, and have made clear that they are . They’re protesting the collective status quo of partisanship, perpetual plutocracy and the unchecked disconnect of our gerontocratic leaders. As they come of age in a moment of extraordinary tension, their patience for traditional civic engagement is coming to an end.

To avoid this we must welcome young people into the socio-political fray by lowering voting ages, redesigning civic education to combat misinformation and radical politics, and extending opportunities for youth to authentically engage at the municipal level.  

It is a fallacy to believe civic consciousness starts at age 18. Regardless of how they communicate it, 14- to 17-year-olds are capable of contributing to elections, as well as to the design of policy and practice. This is particularly true of marginalized youth who offer a unique vantage point on some of our most prominent social issues.

The perspectives of these young people – – are incredibly valuable, particularly at a time when they’re grappling with an onslaught of threats to their , futures – each of which carry tangible ramifications. 

It’s these perspectives that must be nurtured to ensure the longevity of our civic system, and secure the future of equitable and empathetic social progress. And there’s plenty of evidence that proves we’d be right to trust the younger generation’s voices.

In in Iowa. YPAR trains young people to use research methods to inform and influence local policy). In Des Moines, in the midst of a national racial reckoning, a cohort of students saw an opportunity to leverage the that school resource officers (SROs) are more likely to charge students of color with crimes, and threaten their well-being and academic performance. The cohort successfully recommended the school board remove SROs from schools and reallocate those monies to fund counselors. The following year, in the number of students of color referred to the juvenile justice system. 

Along with other across the state, some making it to the House floor, this participatory audit in Iowa displayed the penchant young people have for social analysis and policy, and how their perspectives can be used to effectively influence local policies.

Don’t mistake these Iowan kids as exceptions. What the YPAR audit captured was the capacity and civic agency of the typical “kid.” It reflects the developmental science that tells us to develop social and ethical perspectives that can solve societal issues within ethical and moral parameters. 

It’s the science, research, and results from similar and that have inspired and bolstered my trust in young people — and why I believe we must redefine civics education and develop opportunities for civic participation for young people beginning at age 14. It is also why I am a strong proponent of lowering the voting age for municipal elections to 16 () – which is on voter turnout, engagement and sustained civic involvement.

This is why the election and climate protests on campuses in recent years have felt different. It’s this shift in tone that signals that our .

If this is the case, a great deal is at risk. Without legitimate outlets for civic engagement that are , authentically practiced with , or validated through like YPAR, young people may well resort to and alternatives for affecting change. With our democracy already in a fragile state, it is a necessity to reconsider what civic engagement looks like, and who has access to it.

As this young demographic quickly becomes , it seems accepting them into the civic discourse is the only recourse we have left.  

Redesigning civic education, developing participatory programs, and lowering voting ages is particularly complicated in the current political climate. 

We must avoid dumping kids into a pool of supercharged partisan rhetoric and vitriol. We need to teach pragmatism and civility. We need safe conditions for kids to consider hard data that reflects lived truths and promotes the taking of accountability and responsibility. We need discourse and dialogue. But, above all, we, the adults, must simply hear them. 

Large cultural shifts don’t take place in the vacuum of policy houses or nonprofits. They take place in the collective consciousness, and it requires humility, empathy, acceptance and courage from us all. Let’s trust the kids to help get us there. 

That’s the message of a new , The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The surveys approximately 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries, including the United States. Here are five key insights from the report:

• Roughly 4 out of 10 students are unclear about their career expectations, double the number from about a decade ago.
  
• Almost half (49%) agree (35%) or strongly agree (14%) that school has done little to prepare them for adult life.
  
• There’s a gender gap in students’ aspirations to work in sectors like information technology and health care. For example, around 11% of boys report that they will work in information technology at age 30, compared with 1.5% of girls.
  
• Job preferences focus on a few, well-known professions, such as teaching, psychology and sports. For example, around half of girls and 44% of boys report that they expect to work in one of just 10 jobs, with little change in career preferences since 2000.
  
• The majority of young people don’t get connected to workforce professionals who can help them understand the opportunities available to them. Only 35% report attending a job fair, and just 45% visited a workplace.
  

The report a Teenage Career Readiness Dashboard that covers roughly two dozen issues and allows for comparisons among countries, organized by eight topics:   

Career uncertainty: Do students have clear plans? Does it matter? The report suggests that career uncertainty contributes to behaviors including disengagement from school. 

Planning: What are students’ job expectations? Have they changed over time? How do they compare to actual employer demand? Low-income students are particularly lacking in access to career planning resources. 

Alignment or misalignment: Do students understand what they need to do to achieve their job plans? Many teens hold unrealistic or outdated career goals, prioritizing a narrow band of high-status occupations while neglecting in-demand technical careers. 

Aspirations: Are students’ education plans driven more by social background than ability? The report finds that socioeconomics significantly influence aspiration levels. Disparities are particularly stark, with low-income students less likely to envision themselves in professional careers than wealthier peers. 

Guidance: Do students participate in career guidance activities that make a positive impact on their lives? Most report limited access to career counseling, with the quality and consistency varying dramatically. 

Career development: Is the guidance students do receive responding effectively to social inequalities? Career fairs, job shadowing and internships are critical but underutilized. Roughly 1 out of 5 U.S. students report speaking to a career adviser outside of school, the fifth-lowest rate among the countries surveyed.

Fear for the future: How well do students think they are prepared for their future careers? Roughly half (47%) agree that they worry about not being ready for life after they complete school.  

Employer engagement: How are employers involved in school activities and career development? Does this make a difference? The U.S. significantly lags behind other countries surveyed in providing students with career development activities, such as internships and job shadowing.  

This is illustrated by recent from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and Jobs for the Future that reflects a growing sense among America’s young people that they are adrift in the transition from high school to the next stage of their lives. This survey included over 1,300 16- to 18-year-old Gen Zers and their parents.

It reports that fewer than 3 out of 10 teens feel “very prepared” to pursue any of eight post-high school pathways, including college, a job, the military or a certification program. Even among students most eager for a particular path, less than half feel ready to take the first step.  

The report also finds that just slightly more than half of parents (53%) frequently discuss life after graduation with their teenagers. One in three parents of seniors who are weeks from commencement have still not had that conversation.

When discussions do happen, they typically stick to familiar territory, such as a four-year college or a paid job. Teens’ knowledge mirrors this narrow horizon, with about one-third reporting they know “a lot” about bachelor’s degrees or full-time work.

Both reports suggest there are at least two career-launch pain points that prevent young people from successfully navigating life after high school. The first is an exposure gap — too few students are aware of available career options or understand the various paths to achieve them. The second is an experience gap — too few young people engage in work-based activities, such as internships or apprenticeships, that help them connect learning to the world of work

If students are neither exposed to nor experience career options, they are unlikely to acquire the knowledge, networks and vocational identity needed for adult success. According to the OECD report, students who recall speaking to career professionals or participating in job shadowing are far more likely to have career goals aligned with labor market needs.

So what can state and district leaders and advocates do?

First, start the formal career conversation sooner. Closing the exposure and experience gaps should begin as early as . The longer the wait, the more likely that young people will become lost in transition from school to their next stage. 

Second, widen the scope of career education. The focus on college should give way to a menu that includes certificates, two-year degrees, skilled trades, military service, and career and technical education.

Third, embed responsibility in career education. Involve young people in undertaking adult-like, consequential tasks, such as community projects, paid work and internships.

Fourth, help parents. Many programs and activities are available that can educate parents and guardians, such as workshops on local labor market careers or the different certificates and credentials that young people can earn.

Both the OECD and Gallup reports serve as reminders of the importance of integrating career exposure and experience into the everyday classroom experiences of young people. A central part of this remedy includes a dose of genuine adulthood — offered earlier, explained better and practiced alongside the grownups teenagers are expected to emulate.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

When 17-year-old Mackayla James sat down this month with three of the 11 candidates vying for open seats on the St. Louis School Board, she wanted to know one thing: How will they take student concerns more seriously and give them more input into the decisions made about their education? 

“This is about building a better educational system,” says James, a junior at KIPP High School in St. Louis. “I’m about to graduate next year, but my sister has yet to enter high school, and I don’t want her to be dealing with the same things that I’m dealing with. Adults always say they can make things better for the next generation. Yet the school system is getting worse. It’s not improving. It’s worsening.”

The contentious election, now just three weeks away, comes as the district faces teacher and bus driver shortages, dwindling student enrollment expected to result in school closures, an audit over alleged misuse of district funds by the prior superintendent and chronically low rates of academic achievement. 

In many ways, St. Louis is similar to other urban school districts attempting to claw their way back from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In other ways, it’s very different: Child poverty is high – higher, in fact, than 95% of communities nationwide – and crime, though on a downward trajectory, is still high enough that the state may strip the city’s control of its own police force.

James, meanwhile, is one of the St. Louis area high school students selected after a competitive application process to be part of a small cohort that gathers weekly to learn the nuts and bolts of advocacy and how to effectively inject their voices into the political process. The program, Youth Activators, encompasses a handful of semester-long cohorts and summer fellowships operated by Activate Missouri, all of which focus on boosting civic engagement among young people, with the goal of lifting up student voices in under-resourced communities across the state.

Among other things, the program educates students about the ways schools and districts are funded, the reasons funding can be so disparate, the state of education in their communities and how it got to be that way. With help from the organization’s own grassroots leaders, students identify the people in positions of power in their community and build their own advocacy campaigns to advance an issue that’s important to them. 

Vera Pantazis, a 17-year-old junior at Maplewood Richmond High School who is also part of the St. Louis cohort, had questions of her own for the school board candidates. Tutoring to improve math and reading scores is well and fine, she said, but show me the fine print. 

“So you say that you’re going to provide free tutoring for all kids. What’s that going to look like? How are we funding this? Who’s going to be doing the tutoring, you know? Is that going to be for all schools? All grades? I wanted more details on the biggest education proposals.”

The youth engagement effort marks a change in strategy for the education advocacy group, which had been focusing resources on trying to engage, educate and organize parents on the issues.

“We were asking the people most impacted by the systemic inequalities to fix the issue,” says Tiara Jordan-Sutton, founder and executive director of Activate STL, an offshoot of the statewide organization. “But they have so many things on their plate, and if they have to choose between working another job to put food on the table or attending a curriculum night at their kids school or coming to an organizing meeting, they’re gonna choose to put the food on the table. At the end of the day, there’s multiple competing factors that are keeping parents from being able to jump in this fight. So we needed to think about this from another lens.”

That lens is now trained on students, or as Jordan-Sutton likes to remind folks, “the very people who are closest to the issue.” The issue being, of course, the significant academic and fiscal challenges of the K-12 system. According to the most recent NAEP results, just 27% of fourth-grade students in Missouri and 26% of eighth graders are proficient in reading. In math, 36% of fourth graders and 23% of eighth graders are proficient. No grade-score combination reached pre-pandemic level, and the performance gap between white students and Black students hasn’t budged for more than two decades. 

Out of all the districts in Missouri, St. Louis Public Schools posted the third lowest scores on the state’s last year, with just 21% of students passing the English Language arts assessment and 17% passing the math assessment. The chronic disinvestment of the system has pushed families out of the city in droves, reducing total enrollment by roughly 20% over the past decade. 

“A lot of people in St. Louis think that what’s happening here is the norm,” Jordan-Sutton says. “We have an opportunity to get to them [students] earlier, so that by the time they become parents, they have a very different understanding of why education is the way that it is, who’s allowing it to stay this way, and what the factors or levers are that can be pulled for it to actually improve.”

Activate ATL and the youth advocacy programs she oversees are funded by The Opportunity Trust, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen public education for St. Louis students.

The youth advocacy programs include a paid summer fellowship for high school juniors, seniors and recent graduates, which operates weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., like a real job, and provides young people with a deep understanding about the myriad issues impacting St. Louis – especially education, but also housing and crime – and the tools needed to effectively organize. Among other things, they’re responsible for drafting get-out-the-vote campaigns focused on education equity. 

The semester-long cohorts for high school students run during the school year. Students meet twice a week to learn about how the K-12 system operates and is funded, who controls the purse strings, how the school board operates and who the biggest decision-makers are in the system. They canvas to register students old enough to vote, travel to Jefferson City to meet with legislators at the state capital and draft their own advocacy campaigns related to something they’d like to change at their school. The experience culminates with a pitch contest for a chance to have an advocacy campaign funded and brought to life.

Those pitches include everything from establishing a mental health buddy system among students to increasing the availability of tutoring to becoming more environmentally friendly. For James, who’s biggest concern is lack of communication and understanding of the issues that students face in school, she is considering proposing a plan that would allow a student representative from each high school to sit on the school board. 

“We want students to imagine what school could be like,” says Jordan-Sutton, who began her career as a special education teacher and then principal in Chicago. “What are the things that they love about their school, and what do they wish that they had that’s missing? We tell them, ‘You can do something about that. Let me show you how.’” 

“We teach them how to organize for change in a very structured way,” she says. “It’s not about just staging a protest, or walking out of school, or going to the principal and saying, ‘I want this,’ and expecting the principal to do it. It’s how to fine tune an idea, research it, think through how it should be implemented and whether anyone has ever tried it before. It’s thinking through how to build coalitions of support for it because there’s strength in numbers and how to survey peers to better understand the nuances of it. And finally, it’s about figuring out who in the power dynamics has the ability to implement the change you’re asking for.”

The pivot to focus on youth advocacy is perhaps the next iteration of the national movement that’s taken shape in the wake of the pandemic, with groups like and the helping parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. Yet research shows that young people are eager to be involved in the process, but often feel overlooked by the political process and unprepared or unqualified to take action. 

According to the , young people (18-29) believe that their generation can and should engage in civic life and effect change: 74% said that there are things they can do to make the world a better place, 76% believe that their age group has the power to change things, and 83% recognize the potential of young people working with other generations to create change. However, many don’t feel informed or qualified enough to participate in politics. Only half of youth say they feel they’re “as well-informed as most people,” and even fewer (40%) say that they feel well-qualified to participate in politics. 

Moreover, young people from groups that have historically held less political power were even less likely to feel qualified, with 34% of youth of color saying they feel qualified to participate in politics, compared to 44% of white youth.

In addition, a growing body of shows that when students regard their school leadership as responsive to their expressed input and criticism, students themselves have better grades, attendance and reduced rates of chronic absenteeism. Students who believe they have a voice in school are seven times more likely to be academically motivated than students who do not believe they have a voice, and student voice is also linked to an increased likelihood that students will experience self-worth, engagement, and purpose in school.

“In this moment, with all of these different elections coming up, how do we ensure that the student voice is elevated?” asks Rachel Powers, a senior vice president at The Opportunity Trust. “How do we support students in the same way that we support parents to advocate for what they are looking for, what they need, what they see in their own spaces, in their schools, in their communities?

“We’re trying to get students in that ethos and to understand the power of their collective voice,” she adds. “We know that people who go to the polls don’t always look like people who are served in our schools. And that’s something we point out and ask them, who’s making the real decisions about what happens to you, and do you want to be involved in making decisions that impact you and your community?”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to The 74.

I spent my time in special ed learning basic mathematics and the alphabet, even in fourth grade. My classmates, regardless of the level of support they needed, were all taught the same material in the same way. Our education was not personally tailored. 

I was separated from my general education peers all day and would see them only during recess. This made it quite difficult to connect with them, as we had no class time together. I was quite timid, so approaching anyone from the general education classes made me very nervous. 

When I moved on to general education in middle school, I found that special education hadn’t prepared me at all. I kept failing my classes, despite my best efforts, and I failed to graduate. Special ed also didn’t help me with my social skills, as I made no friends in elementary or middle school.

I felt like I had been thrown into a lion’s den without any weapons. I was not prepared in the slightest. 

Only through litigation was I able to move to a neurodiversity-affirming school. The district offered my family settlement money after we argued in a lawsuit that the school had failed on its promise to educate me. Because of those funds, I was able to attend a high school for autistic students who learn differently, like me. 

Something is terribly wrong with a special education system that consistently fails those it is supposed to help. An analysis from the Center for American Progress shows that special education students are from high school than their general education peers. The same analysis showed that, in 2015, students with disabilities were substantially less likely to be at or above proficiency in mathematics or reading. 

This is a system that needs radical reform. 

First, special ed students must be integrated with the general education peers. Being segregated made me feel like there was something inherently wrong with me, as if putting me in general education would lower the quality of the classroom. Integration would have exposed me to the type of material I needed once I entered middle school. As Jennifer Kurth, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas, in an interview, “study after study is showing that there’s no harm to being included, but there’s great risks of harm to being segregated. Kids [with disabilities] who are included develop better academic skills, better communication skills, better social skills, just kind of everything we try to measure.”&�Բ�����;

It cannot be overstated how demoralizing being put in a segregated classroom is. It makes you feel like you have a pathology that hurts other students. It makes you feel like you’re less intelligent and less capable. My classmates at the time told me it felt like we were hopeless causes. My peers said this in elementary school. Nobody should have to go through that, especially at a young age. 

Second, schools need to abandon the cookie-cutter approach to special education students, where everyone is taught the same way and receives the same accommodations. At the neurodiversity-affirming high school I went to, every student was taught differently, at their own pace. Because of this I went from being a middle schooler at a 4th grade reading level to an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and the founder of a nonprofit, . 

Third, students with disabilities and their families should be allowed to decide what services and programs they receive. At the moment, schools often make these determinations. In California, where I live, many neurodivergent individuals are able to choose what services and programs they receive through the Self-Determination Program. shows that nearly 70% of respondents are satisfied with the program. Through , I’ve been able to receive tutoring and technology vital for my educational journey. 

Before I had access to the program, my family had to sue in order for me to be able to determine what programs and services I receive. I couldn’t even get a tutor who specialized in students with disabilities until we put up a fight. It shouldn’t be this hard. 

If I had been able to choose which services I get, my family and I would have been able to avoid a litigation battle. If I had been able to integrate with my general education peers in elementary school, I would’ve been better prepared for middle school and for building social skills. Simply put, a lot of the mental anguish I went through would have been mitigated.

Integration and self-determination should be implemented in special education across the country.

If I hired a tutor for my daughter, I’d be covering up the school’s and the teachers’ negligence. If I allowed my daughter to fail, however, I would be forcing her school and her teachers to face the consequences of their malpractice.

When I wrote about my position, it enraged many readers, with :

It’s always great to use your children as sacrificial lambs to make a political point than to do your best for them!

This woman is nuts, you work to give your kids what they need to succeed — period. Nothing will change with the school system whether the kid succeeds or fails.

You want to teach the Board of Education a lesson by letting your daughter failed (sic) her Spanish Regents Exam? You need your head examined.

And to that effect.

Except, now that the academic year is over, I can report that my approach worked. And that the outcome benefited not just my daughter, but her classmates and future students of the school.

In math class, my daughter and a group of friends first went to their guidance counselor with complaints about their teacher, and then to the principal, who sat in on one of their classes and promptly brought in a new instructor. Now that they had a teacher who, as my daughter said, “actually makes sense when he talks,” she went from getting 48%, 23% and 14% on tests to a final grade of 94. (And it wasn’t just her grades, which can be subjective. After all the drama, my daughter received an 85 on her math Regents exam. She actually learned.)

For Spanish 3, after five weeks of having no teacher at all in a class that would be culminating with another Regents exam, my daughter and her classmates complained to the Advanced Placement Spanish teacher, who invited them to attend her office hours for intense tutoring.

“She gave us a list of [vocabulary] words to memorize,” my daughter reported. “In the last five weeks of school, she taught us five different conjugations we didn’t know we needed. She made us try. It was horrible.”

My daughter finished 11th grade with a final grade of 80 in Spanish. And, much to our mutual shock, with an 83 on the Regents.

First and foremost, I must thank those teachers who went out of their way to help, even when it, technically, wasn’t their responsibility. As I have written about the inadequacies of some teachers, I feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops with gratitude for the ones who go above and beyond on a daily basis.

Secondly, kudos to the students at my daughter’s school who took their education into their own hands and demanded better instruction than what they were getting. They are an inspiration to those of us who sometimes lose faith that schools ever will, or ever could, improve.

And, finally, a plea to my fellow parents and guardians: Yes, I know it’s hard to watch your kids struggle. Yes, I know we all want to do what’s best for our children, give them a leg up, “give your kids what they need to succeed — period,” as one of my critics insisted.

But that’s a short-term solution for a much larger, institutional problem.

No school, whether in NYC or elsewhere in the nation, will ever fix its failures unless it is forced to confront them. And no school will ever be forced to confront them if families, desperate to protect their children’s grade-point average, continue picking up the slack, making the school appear to be doing an adequate job when it is, in fact, outsourcing its instruction to parents and private tutors while taking credit for positive results.

My daughter and her friends demanded that their school properly educate them and chalked up a victory not only for themselves, not only for their peers, but for all American students who now have a blueprint for taking similar action: In order to succeed, you first have to demonstrate where you’ve failed.

My grades started slipping, and I no longer had energy for volleyball, which used to be one of my favorite hobbies. I knew there was a problem, but since my weight did not reflect my mindset and actions, I did not know how serious it was getting.

Two years later, when I pursued a capstone project at my middle school, , a charter public school in Washington state, I realized that I wanted to spread awareness about eating disorders, though I did not know much about them. As I learned more, I realized that the things I was reading about described what I was facing. I had , which means you have the symptoms of anorexia but aren’t underweight.

The stereotypical image of a person with anorexia is a rail-thin young woman. Because I didn’t fit this stereotype, I and others initially overlooked my extreme symptoms.

Meeting with a counselor following my capstone project marked a turning point. She was encouraging and became a big help, someone I could go to when I was struggling. 

When I was diagnosed and entered recovery at 15, I learned grounding techniques to better calm my mind, healthy eating habits and the concept of , which is an approach toward body acceptance that resonated with me.

I also learned I could open up to my friends and ask them for support in my recovery. It wasn’t easy or quick, but with all this aid, I was eventually able to get to a healthier place.

If it hadn’t been for my capstone project, and the resources I found I could turn to afterward, I’m not sure I would have become educated enough to want recovery.

I shared what I learned with my classmates. However, I couldn’t complete my entire plan for my capstone project because I had also wanted to present my findings at nearby schools, and they were hesitant because they thought those students were too young.

But Spokane International’s elementary principal said I was welcome to come back after graduation and do another presentation again, and I recently returned to my middle school and spoke to multiple classrooms of sixth graders about my experience. 

I worked with a counselor to develop content that emphasized the importance of recognizing and addressing behaviors associated with eating disorders. 

I didn’t solely talk about facts and statistics. I also wanted to share practical advice like seeking support from trusted adults, advocating for yourself and using the grounding strategies that helped me on the road to recovery. And I handed out cards to students with information about how to seek assistance for themselves or others.

The tools I received at my school allowed me to become an advocate for others. 

It’s crucial for schools to provide opportunities like these, whether through allowing students to research health topics on their own or finding creative ways that they can learn through health classes or elsewhere. For me, listening to a teacher reciting symptoms without an opportunity to discuss or reflect on my own didn’t resonate.

This is more important than ever before. Eating disorders for young people . And those with atypical anorexia, like me, are often . This is a serious issue, and schools must be equipped to provide resources to students so we can reverse this dangerous trend.

I’m hoping that by sharing my story, I can help others. If I had heard a young woman like myself talking about eating disorders when I was younger, it wouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to recognize what I was dealing with. I’m hoping that by speaking to early middle schoolers and sharing my story more broadly, I can be that person for someone else.

This week on Class Disrupted, AI expert and Minerva University senior Irhum Shafkat joins Michael and Diane to discuss where AI has been, where it’s going and the rate at which it’s moving. The episode explores the many forms the technology takes, its implications for humanity, and, of course, its applications in education — as told by a student.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Michael, you’ve just spent a week at the happiest place on Earth, and I must admit, I’m a little bit jealous.

Michael Horn: For those who may be confused about what the happiest place on Earth is, it’s Disney World. I was just there with my kids. First time for them. It was a blast. Diane, you know what? I came away with a few takeaways, but one of them was the excellence at scale. Disney has 74,000 employees in that park. And almost every single one of them – it’s probably like 73,500 of them — are just dedicated to making your experience better than the last person you just interacted with. And it’s astounding — however they have managed to do that. So it was a blast. Thank you for asking. But we’re not here to talk about my vacation, although that might be fun. Instead, we’re looking to continue to dive into some of these sticky questions around K-12 Education. Help people see different ways through what has often been pitted as zero-sum battles between the adults in the room and try to think through how we can unleash student progress and prepare them for the world into which they’re entering. And obviously a question that exploded into both of our minds starting last year, Diane was the topic of AI. And, as opposed to the Metaverse, it is still the topic du jour. It is still what everyone is wondering about: artificial intelligence, what do we do with it, and so forth. And you have been teasing me that you have the perfect guest to help us think about this in some novel ways. Take it from here, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Well, I have indeed been doing that. You’re right. AI so far has a longer shelf life. So we’ll see how long that lasts. It’s my great pleasure to introduce you to Irhum. And Irhum and I first met a few years ago when he was a freshman at Minerva University. He was coming from Bangladesh to that global university. He’s now a senior. He spent the last two summers as an intern at Google X here, just about a mile away from where I live. And at Google X, he’s really been focused on large language model, aka AI, research. And you’ve been hearing about Irhum from me and all of our conversations we’ve been having for quite some time, Michael. So, what you know is that I’ve learned a ton from him about AI. And one of the things I love about talking AI with Irhum is that even though he has a ton of knowledge, and, for example, he writes a popular technical blog about AI that I have looked at, and I can’t even decipher a sentence of it. So, highly technical, deep knowledge. But he also is a system thinker, and he cares deeply about how technology is used, how AI is used, and what it means for our society. And so he’s willing to and able to talk with people like me, lay people like me, and help me understand that and engage in a good conversation. And for our purposes, I think, most importantly, Irhum is 20, and it’s so critical to be in dialogue with people in this generation. I think we give a lot of lip service in education to the consumers, if you will, or the students, and then we don’t involve them in our dialogue. And so, I’m just really grateful that he’s here and you all get to meet. And so, welcome, Irhum.

Michael Horn: Irhum, it is so good to have you here. Diane has been teasing this for a while, so thank you for joining us. Before we dive into the AI topic itself, I would just love to hear, through your words — because I’ve heard it a little bit through Diane’s – but I’d love to hear and the audience would love to hear about your journey to Minerva University, your journey to diving into topics of AI. And really, how has that school experience specifically been? Like, what has worked? What hasn’t?

Irhum Shafkat: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Let’s just get into it. I’m one of those people who the standard school system was just not designed for, rather frankly. I grew up inside the national school system back in Bangladesh, up to fourth grade, essentially, and it just wasn’t designed with someone like me in mind. We’re talking an institution with 50 person classrooms, teachers barely able to give anyone attention. And the school system is geared to make you pass a university entrance exam, and if you do that, you’ve done it, you’ve succeeded. And my mindset often was, like, I joked that I was learning full-time and going to school on the side. The way I saw it in my mind, that’s amazing. And I’d say the only reason my path worked out the way it did is because when I was in finishing up middle school, entering high school, so, like, eight to nine grades, like that window, the Internet just rapidly proliferated across the entire country within a couple months. Short couple of months, essentially. You went from not a lot of people using the net to a lot of people using the Internet. And I was one of those people, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s not that I don’t like math, it’s that I don’t understand it.” And there’s a difference between those two things. And I was one of those people. Like, Khan Academy was quite literally designed for me. I’d log onto that thing and I was like, “Oh my God, I actually understand math,” and I can teach myself math. I can succeed at it. And the impression that it left me with is that technology is really opened up. The Internet, in particular, is like one of those frontier technologies that just opened up learning to anybody who could access it and go through the right set of tools needed to learn things, like Khan Academy being one of them. And I guess that’s the mindset I’m seeing this new generation of technologies in AI, too. I wonder who else is going to be using them the way I did and learn something new that their environment wouldn’t otherwise allow them to. I suppose I kept teaching myself things, and that’s kind of, I guess, partly how I ended up at Minerva is because I wanted a non-traditional university education because the traditional high school education clearly wasn’t a fit for me at all. And Minerva was like, “Come here, we won’t bore you with lectures. Our professors barely get to speak for more than five minutes in class. It’s all students just talking to each other and learning from each other. And I was like, “Sign me up.”

Diane Tavenner: Well, and Irham, that curiosity that you are describing in yourself is, I think, one of the things that led you to discover AI long before most of us discovered it. And you discovered it on the Internet. You discovered it by reading papers and sort of following these blog posts while you were teaching yourself. And so, I don’t think it was a surprise for you when it burst onto the scene, because you knew what was coming and where it was coming from. And yet, I think that the world’s reaction has been interesting. And so, you sent me a quote the other day. You texted me a quote about AI that had us both laughing pretty hysterically, probably because it feels very true. And so, I’m going to share that quote, which is, “Artificial intelligence is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it. Nobody really knows how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” Let’s just start by figuring out what people are actually doing. If anything, this is sort of a ridiculous question, but can you just explain AI to us and why it’s suddenly this big deal that it feels like it just spontaneously arrived in 2023?

Irhum Shafkat: I guess there are like three big terms that we should go over when we say AI because it just means so many things. Like AI is such a vague, hard thing to define. But I guess the way I see it is anything that’s just right beyond the edge of what’s computationally possible right now. Because once it becomes possible, people kind of stop thinking about it as AI.

Diane Tavenner: Interesting.

Irhum Shafkat: OK, other people would have their own definitions, but I feel like that’s like, what’s historically been true. Once something becomes possible, it almost feels like it’s no longer AI. What has been more recent, though, is how we keep pushing different tier. Like, if it was the 90s, for example, when Casperov played with Deep blue, the chess playing engine. That thing was like a massive, highly sophisticated program with millions of logical rules. That’s what’s different. What happened over the last ten years is we really pivoted towards machine learning, and specifically a branch of it called deep learning, which allowed us to use really simple algorithms on enormous amounts of data. We’re talking several thousand lifetimes worth of data. When you were talking about training a language model, for example, and ginormous amounts of compute to push all that data through a very simple algorithm. And that’s what changed in that it turns out really simple algorithms work extremely well when you have a large enough compute budget and enough data to pass through them. And the instantiation that everyone really captured the imagination is against a narrower part of machine learning still is called large language models. The large being like, they’re much larger than models for historical language models, in the sense that, at their core, you give them a piece of text, and they just play a guessing game. We’re like, okay, so what’s the next word? And if you keep predicting the next word over and over, you form entire sentences, paragraphs, entire documents that way.

Diane Tavenner: So it sounds like, basically, I’m going to bring it back to education really quickly, Michael. Like AI as you’re describing it, Irhum, is this concept we have in education and learning, which is I plus one. So it’s like where you are just a little bit harder than what you can do, and that’s like your zone of proximal development, like where you best learn. So, it sounds like AI is in that space. It’s like what we can do plus a little bit more is what keeps pushing us forward, basically, on everything that’s written on the Internet with simple formulas.

Irhum Shafkat: Yeah, I guess what captured the imagination is, I think, language in particular, because ChatGPT came out sometime last December, and that, again, took everybody by surprise, essentially. But the thing is, image generation models like Dali Two and stable diffusion were out earlier that summer, and they’re built on basically the same technology, given a ginormous amount of data, produced more samples that look like something that came from the data distribution. I had this with friends, especially outside of computer science, where I show them these generated images, and they’re like, yeah, I thought computers could already do that. What’s special about them? And I’m like, oh, my God, it’s like generating a panda in a spacesuit on Mars.

Diane Tavenner: And they’re like, yeah.

Irhum Shafkat: I thought Photoshop already does that.

Michael Horn: So interesting.

Irhum Shafkat: Whereas with language, language feels…I would almost say people see a conversational interface and almost by de facto assign intelligent attributes to it. Now, this is not to say that it’s all smoke and mirrors. Like, these are remarkably practical technologies that I genuinely think are going to change a lot of what we do today, as we’ll explain. But at their core, I think there’s at least part of the fact that humans genuinely see language differently than other modalities, because, in part, it is unique to us – that we know of at least.

Michael Horn: It’s really interesting, though, because the implication of that, it seems, is that part of this isn’t just the power of what’s been built, but also our reaction to what’s been built. And I think then the corollary, something Diane and I have talked a lot about is, like, right now, you’re seeing very polar opposite reactions to AI. Either it’s the utopian thing that’s going to bring about this glorious future where resources are not scarce and everyone will be fine etc. Or it’s very dystopian, and you see a lot of the – I’m going to insert my own belief for a moment here – but a lot of the technology leaders that have developed this being like, it could be dystopian, it could take over the world. As I hear you describing it, it doesn’t quite sound like either of those is right. It’s like the next step. So, I’d love you to put this in a human context, then, of what does it mean about the roles, particularly as we think about the future of work that humans will play with AI, or how human AI maybe is itself or isn’t? How do you think about the intersection with humanity?

Irhum Shafkat: When I think about the future, one tool I borrow from a former colleague, Nick Foster, who was, I think, head of design at Google X. He would introduce this concept of thinking about the future not as a thing you’re approaching, but almost like a cone of many possible outcomes. There is the probable, which is like the current set of outcomes that seem like really probable, but the probable is not the possible. Like, the possible set of features is much larger. And right now, I think we run a real risk of kind of just not seeing the technology for what it is. It’s a tool that we could actively shape into a future we want. And instead of trying to imagine it through that lens, we’re almost like we’re kind of giving up and we’re like, yeah, it’s going to take over the world or something. It’s going to be bad. Oh, well, it’s almost like we’re sleepwalking towards an outcome to a degree. I see it genuinely as, a technology, a tool. And, yeah, it’s up to us to decide what integration of that into our society looks like, but it’s a tool.

Michael Horn: Do you think part of that is because some of the people behind the coding are also surprised by the outcomes that it produces? And, like, gee, I didn’t know it could do that. And so they’re sort of showing, to your point about this weird passivity that we all seem to be displaying, that maybe it’s because they, too seem surprised by some of its capabilities. And so that is surprising the laypeople like me and Diane, and not to mention the people who aren’t even playing with it yet.

Irhum Shafkat: So, I think it’s important what we’ve seen over the last ten years, but really, the last four, I would say, with scaling really taking off, is when models get larger, they have more capabilities. Like a model from three years ago. No, I’d say a little longer. Maybe four or five, if you go to the joke and ask it to explain it, it wouldn’t be able to do that. It would struggle. But if you ask ChatGPT now, like, “Hey, here’s a joke that my teenage son wrote, I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me? “ It’s going to do a pretty decent job at it.So, one of the things that came with scale is like, capabilities emerge. But the thing that surprises researchers is, I think I saw this analogy on a paper by Sam Bauman, but it’s almost like buying a mystery box. I think you buy a larger box, there’s going to be some kind of new capabilities in there, but we don’t know what they’re going to be until we open up that box. So, I guess that’s where a lot of surprise, even from researchers, come from. That said, I will push back on that a little in that there has been really genuine and serious work done in the last two years where we’re really trying to figure out. We’re like throwing the whole internet at this thing. There’s actually a lot of things going on in there and that these capabilities are not actually as surprising as we think they are. Like joke explanation. At the start when it came out, we were like, “Oh my God, this thing can explain jokes.” But then when you dug into the data deep enough, you’re like, there are tons of websites on the Internet that exist for you to dumb down a joke and explain how it works. So, it didn’t appear out of completely nowhere. The fact that it works on new jokes that are hopefully original and it’s still capable of explaining them is still cool, but it didn’t come out of absolutely nowhere.

Diane Tavenner: Irhum, you just started giving us some time frames and timelines, and you’re sort of, in your mind calculating ten years, four years, two years. I just want to note that ten years ago, you were ten years old, but, okay, we’ll set that aside for a moment. But as you were using those timelines, one of the things that comes up a lot for people is that this feels like it’s going so fast. If you didn’t even understand what was happening in this world, and then suddenly chat GPT came on the scene. You probably didn’t look at it in December because you were busy. But then in the new year, suddenly the whole world’s talking about ChatGPT, and you log on, and then it just seems like every day something new is coming and faster. And I talk to people who just are like, “I can’t keep up.” It’s only been a couple of months, and it feels like it’s just spinning so fast and beyond our control. Is that true? How do you think about that timing, and how do you think about keeping up? How can we conceptualize that, especially as educators?

Irhum Shafkat: Well, for what it’s worth, even researchers have trouble keeping up these days with the sheer amount of papers coming out left, right and center. It’s hard. That said, and I’ll say it is genuinely surprising, the pace at which GPT, in particular, took off, because these models had existed, the model they’re building off of GBD Three that had existed since 2020. We’re talking around the pandemic start period. They just put a chat interface on top of it, and that really seemed to take off. I remember reading news articles and even OpenAI seemed, like, surprised that just putting on a chat interface on top of a technology that had lying around for three years caused it to really take off that way. And even I was surprised because, again, I was in Taipei in the spring, and Taiwan in the spring, and I remember being on the Taiwan high-speed rail, and I’m seeing someone else use ChatGPT on the train next to me. And I was like, wow, this thing is taking up a lot faster than I realized. But it’s important to understand that when I say again that ChatGPT 3 had been lying around for three years before they put a chat interface on top of it. And again, this should not underscore the fact that these models are going to get larger, probably more capable, but it should also ground you in two things. One, the specific burst of innovation we saw in this year in particular had been building up for a bit. Essentially, it’s almost like a pressure valve went off when they put a chat interface on top of it. The other thing, and this is the thing that I wish people would discuss more often, is that it’s not just that the models got larger and we trained them on more of the internet. It’s also that we start paying a lot of money to get a lot of humans to label a lot of this data so that you could fine tune what the behavior of these models are. You see, when GPT3 was trained in about 2020 or so, it’s what we call a base model. It does exactly one thing. You give it a piece of text, and it produces a completion similar to the text data it saw when it was being trained, which would be raw internet data. And it has a tendency to go off the rails because the Internet is full of people who say not very nice things to each other. What changed was the sheer amount of human data collection that went in during that time frame and that this large model was adjusted over to tame its behavior, teach its skills, such as what explaining a joke even is, and all those things. We could talk about that a little bit more. But the big connection being that the jump we saw in those three years is that of a technology that had already existed, that we really learned to adjust better. But we already burned through that innovation once. It’s unlikely we’re going to see another leap on the same scale of learning how to use supervised human fine tuning again, because that innovation has now already existed and is already baked into it.

Michael Horn: That’s fascinating. It’s something I hadn’t understood before either, which is to say that in essence, if I understand you right, obviously the code base continues to evolve for GPT4 and so forth. But in effect, I think what you’re saying is the user interface and how we interact with it is what actually changed, like the skin of how humans interact with the code base. I think it leads us to where we love to talk on this podcast, which is the uses in education and how it’s going to impact that. And obviously, I’ll give you the hall pass if you will. You’re not an educator. We’re not asking you to opine in some way that puts you in a position you’re not. But you are a student right now at a cutting-edge university, constantly thinking about pedagogy. And so, I’m curious, from the student perspective, what excites you at the moment about AI in education?

Irhum Shafkat: I think shrinking the learning feedback loop is the way I would put it. I’m a systems thinker and I use the lens of feedback loop a lot. And whenever you shrink a feedback loop from, say, learning something, like maybe getting a feedback. What I say by feedback loop in education is like, you write a paper, your professor takes maybe two weeks to get it back to you, and you get almost like a signal, like, “Hey, you got these things right. You don’t get these things quite right, though.” What happens when you shrink that from two weeks to a couple of minutes or maybe a couple of seconds? It’s not just shrinking a number, it’s changing how you interact, how your learning experience evolves. And I think it’s nice to connect this back to my middle school years. I think the reason I ended up in math and programming in particular is because those two things have really short feedback loops. In programming in particular, if you write bad code, your compiler just screams that. It’s like, “Hey, you’re trying to add a number to a set of words, it’s not going to work.” And you get like really short, tight feedback loops to keep trying your code over and over again until it succeeds. That’s not true with learning English. With learning English, you write a paper, you wait a week for your professor or teacher to get it back to you. You maybe pick up something and try again next time. And I would say at least part of the reason I ended up picking math and programming is, again, I didn’t have that many great resources in terms of teaching, teachers who could really help me out. So, I naturally gravitated towards things that I would be able to really quickly iterate on: math and programming. Whereas those things – English, the sciences even – I would argue broadly, are not on those same lines. But what then changes with AI, is like, you now have a chatbot, that it doesn’t have to be a chatbot. It could be far more than that, really. You just have a computational tool that can actively critique your writing as you’re writing it out. You’re like, “Hey, what are some ways I could have done this better?” They’re like, “Yeah, you’re using these passive wordy phrases. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing that.” And you’re like, “Why shouldn’t I be doing that? Because it makes it harder for other people to read.” And instead of waiting a week for that to happen, you get fed that feedback in real time, and you have another iteration ready, and you then ask it again, “Hey, how could I do it even better?” That loop shrinks significantly.

Diane Tavenner: That’s fascinating. And I think it’s also what we, Michael and I, have been working on personalized learning, or whatever you want to call it, for a decade plus at this point. And that is certainly one of the promises of personalized learning, is that tight feedback loop. So you’re staying in the learning, and it isn’t delayed. It’s contextualized, and it’s in the moment and immediate. It’s more tutor if you will. That’s why many people have put so much energy into that. And you have now said a couple of things. One ChatGPT, putting this skin on their product, which is essentially a chat bot. Like, you talk with this bot or this window. And then also this potential of what you just described, like the feedback coming a chatbot, if you will. And in my experience, most people, when they think about the uses of AI, are thinking along these lines. Like, that is what they think is there’s going to be someone, whether it’s a little avatar or a box or something, that’s like sort of chatting with me, and that’s kind of how AI is going to play out. I know that you sort of get a little exasperated when that’s all people can imagine. What else might be possible help us expand our thinking a little bit beyond just this sort of chatting?

Irhum Shafkat: I think right now we’re at the phase when the iPhone would have been sometime in 2007. I’m not really qualified to comment on that because I would have been what?

Michael Horn: Don’t worry about it.

Irhum Shafkat: But at least from my understanding of that time period, apps were a new thing. People didn’t really know how to fully utilize them. And the first set of apps were kind of like window gag. And I was like, people were building those? Like, a flashlight app where instead of turning on your phone’s flashlight, it just showed a flashlight on the screen.

Michael Horn: I downloaded one of those. So, it’s true.

Irhum Shafkat: So, I feel like we’re in that era for these language processing technologies right now, in that we have a brand new tool. We’re not entirely sure what using that looks like. And returning back to the quote Diane quoted with the enterprise, I feel like not nearly as many people are asking, “How does this help us solve our problems better?” And a lot more people are asking, like, “How do I put this into my product so my board of directors is happy?”

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. So, the idea being like, what legitimate problems do I have, and can I use this to solve them? And that’s where a useful app – not a flashlight – is going to come from.

Irhum Shafkat: With chatbots in particular. Chatbots became the first big use case. So, everyone’s like, well, this seems to work. Let’s make my own chat bot, but, like, slightly different. And I think it’s just so unimaginative. But the other thing with chatbots is that they have really bad what we call affordances in design. And affordance is something that almost cues you into how to use something. Like, when you see a handle on a door, you’re like, “Oh, this is the thing I grab.” Then, let me ask you, if you had to choose between a big cancel button that cancels your flight that you don’t want to go on, versus dealing with a chatbot to cancel your flight, which one would you pick?

Diane Tavenner: Yes. And you have showed me this and demonstrated this to me. A single button like that is so much more useful. If you know the thing that I’m going to do versus making me talk to it and explain it where something’s inevitably going to go wrong. 

Irhum Shafkat: These technologies are so nascent right now, and what people really need to appreciate is that you need to design them in ways where you almost expect they’re going to produce some unrelated, unpleasant output somewhere along the process. So, it’s almost like a liability if you’re giving a user an open box to type anything they possibly want. And it’s not just a liability; it also just makes the user, again, it doesn’t give the user any affordances. They see a blank box. Like, again, if you need an English tutor bot, you could just as easily have a couple of buttons that could summarize, remove jargon, sorry, highlight jargon, or introduce a couple of buttons that cover a couple of use cases that a standard ninth through twelfth grader may want to use so that they can refine their writing better. Don’t give them an open-ended box where they don’t even know what to ask for help in.

Diane Tavenner: And would that still be using AI, those buttons?

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, behind the scenes? At the end of the day, any implementation of these things that you’ve looked at is a role play engine. If you have interacted with one of these airline processing, like if they use a language, they’re using large language models. Behind the scenes, there’s only two bits that anyone else modifies. Once you have the model, which is you have a dialogue preamble, which is almost like a script someone else writes as like you are now about to role play a dialogue, you are about to assist a user with cancel with their airline queries. And then the actual dialogue that happens, all people do when they’re creating a new implementation of them is that they switch out the preamble with something else. I’m just saying you can write a preamble for each of those buttons. Essentially, if the button is like, hey, you highlight jargon, then you’re like, okay, you are about to role play a bot that takes in some English text and returns the exact spans of text that are abnormally jargony for the writing of a nine to twelve grader. You as the developer should be writing that script because you are the one who knows what this person needs to be using. You shouldn’t leave it up to the user to be writing their own scripts, essentially. For the most part, unless it’s like a very specific use case where you wouldn’t want the user to be writing that, but don’t treat it as the default one, which we for some reason do.

Michael Horn: So, it’s super interesting, the implications on education. And I have a couple of takeaways here and I want to test them by you and then get your reaction. So, the first one is on the flashlight app analogy. I think the implication is that if the iPhone, or in this case OpenAI, is ultimately going to very easily incorporate the thing that you’ve thought of in their own roadmap, your sort of idea is not going to last very long on its own, right? The reason there were these apps is like there was not a button to do your own flashlight or change colors or things like that. And so, they built these apps and then very quickly iPhone realizes, hey, we can just add a quick little button. But I think the second implication is as you start to think about the user experience and come up with these prompts that a user might want to go through so that they’re not guessing what they’re putting into that open ended box, that the opportunity for educators might be to start to build around these different use cases, that if I’m understanding you correctly, perhaps OpenAI is not going to develop all these different use cases and so forth. But instead, the opportunity might be for educators to build on top of their code to develop these sorts of things that help get the problems solved that they and their students are actually trying to solve. But I’m curious where that line ends, and if you see it differently. 

Irhum Shafkat: It’s not a clear hard line. What’s on open AI’s roadmap? I don’t know, but I guess it ties back into what your company is. If your company is trying to add value to people’s lives, that really means sitting down is like, “Oh, am I just going to write a wrapper that takes in a PDF and allows you to just chat with it?” I mean, those all kind of went the way of the dinosaurs last week when OpenAI just integrated like, hey, you can drop a PDF into our thing. But if you really try to aim for deep integration, OpenAI has. I’m making claims here, I don’t know for sure, but I would imagine they don’t have a deep understanding of the K-12 education system, nor would they be necessarily interested in that, because that doesn’t seem to be what their goal right now is, which is to make bigger and better version of these models that are more generally capable. What they’re counting on is that other people take these models and integrate them throughout the rest of the economy. And that’s where other people come in, and that’s where K-12 educators come in, because they are the ones who have a better understanding of what these buttons need to be, what they want their students to be learning at the end of the.

Michael Horn: Love it.

Diane Tavenner: What’s coming to me, Michael, is, on our last episode, we talked with Todd Rose, who wrote the End of Average. That is, in my mind, the foundation of a lot of personalized learning. And one of, I think, the misconceptions people have, or the swings. Education loves to swing the pendulum as we go from totally teacher directed, controlling every second of every bit of learning, and we swing all the way over to like, basically go teach yourself. We’re just going to throw you out in the wild and at some level just throwing people into a chat bot of a large language model is throwing them into the wild. And so, what I hear you saying, Irhum, is we need the in-between. There’s a real role for educators to narrow. It’s not like the whole world personalization is. There’s 12345 ways of doing something and we can narrow down to that and create a much more personalized experience that is curated by expert educators. And we should be looking for that. Happy in between.

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, again, it’s been so fascinating seeing these chatbots interact with the education system and kind of wreak havoc. Honestly, to a degree where professors taking stances on everything from like we should go back to making everyone write things by hand, by the way, please don’t do that. They are an opportunity. Here’s the thing: the factory model of the education system we have where people just go through it, do these problems, hopefully learn something by doing said problems. We don’t need to know they’re learning the thing. We just need to know if they’re doing the thing. They have like a high school diploma. That was going to come to an end because that’s already been out. Like that’s already ill preparing people for the jobs of today. For a while now, these models, they’re not bringing about something that wasn’t going to happen. They’ve just sped it up, essentially, because students already again ask why a student would actually go out of their way to get an essay that I created by these things if they genuinely believed in their own education that hey, if I do this thing I’ll learn something new and that will be helpful in the future. They probably wouldn’t. So why do they feel disillusioned? Because they know deep inside that what they’re learning in their high school is not going to actually prepare them for the world. And you need to actually deal with that disillusionment. And on the counter, I think these models provide an excellent way to actually start tackling that disillusionment by educators seeing themselves almost as designers, as what people need to be learning. I use the example of the door handle because it seems like a simple object. It really isn’t. If you’ve ever been in a hotel with one of those weird, poorly designed shower knobs, you know how much bad design can mess up your day. And when good design works it’s almost invisible. Like you don’t even notice a shower knob when it actually works. And I think that’s what good educational software using these will almost look like the students won’t even realize how seamless it feels, like they press a button that tells them, hey, this is the jargon you’re using. Here’s why it’s bad for you. Here’s an explanation of how you could do it better this time. It should feel seamless and they should feel less disillusioned because they feel like, “Oh my God, I’m actually learning something.”

Michael Horn: Here, so I want to stay just as we wrap up here. And one last question before we go to our sort of bonus round, if you will, of stuff outside of education, which is you just painted a good picture, I think, of how the education system has reacted in very nervous, let’s call it ways to this advent of it, because it has immediately sort of thrown into question so many of these tired practices that it holds on to. And I guess the corollary question I’m curious about, I’ve heard a lot of students, let me frame this a little bit more. I’ve heard a lot of students say, Professor X, you’re thinking a lot about what is the assignment and how am I going to catch you from cheating, but you’re spending a lot less time thinking about what do. I need to learn to be prepared for this world in which AI is going to be underpinning basically everything I could possibly go do in a career? And so, I guess the question I’m curious, from your perspective is, as you look at these traditional factory model education systems, what’s something that they should start teaching students that they don’t perhaps today? And what’s something maybe that they should lose that they continue to hold on to?

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, honestly, I don’t want to sound like a shill for Minerva, but I am going to. I think freshman year, I had never written a full-length essay prior to freshman year in English, and I was kind of really lost, honestly. But one thing that really stood out is, like, my professor spent so much time just breaking down the act of writing into what does it mean like to have a thesis? What does it mean for a thesis to be arguable and substantive instead of something everybody universally agrees with? Because if everybody agrees with what you’re writing, you don’t need to write it. Really breaking down the act of writing into these atomic skills that I keep finding myself using even at the tail end of college now, in senior year. I think that is the kind of thing we’re going to need to do, is like actually asking ourselves like, this is an instrument, a tool we’ve built, that we administer to our students in the hopes that they learn something. Does this tool actually do the thing it advertises? It does but a lot of the time it just doesn’t. And we just kind of need to be honest about that because, again, it’s a lot like, again, the ChatGPT moment in some sense. But also for education, it’s been building up like a pressure valve, and that pressure valve kind of just went off in the last year. Wow.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we could talk for a long time, but that might be the place to land it today. But before we let you go, we always like to, at the end, just mind for what we’re reading, watching, listening to outside of our day to day work.

Michael Horn: Do you have any time for that as a student? 

Irhum Shafkat: Can I talk about a video game?

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s great.

Irhum Shafkat: I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario Wonder, which is like the new Mario Brothers game from Nintendo. It is fun. It is really the best way to describe it. A lot of media really enjoys being dark and gritty and mature or whatever. Nintendo is like, we’re going to make a game that’s unashamedly fun and bright and colorful and just playful. And they’ve been doing that for the better part of, I don’t even know, like 30, 40 years now. And they’ve kind of just stuck to it as a core principle. And I kind of just admire their ability to really set a mission for themselves, which is make things that make people find joyful and fun and actually just stick to it for the better part of half century.

Michael Horn: Oh, I love that one. Diane, what about you?

Diane Tavenner: Well, we’re going to look kind of boring following that one. I’m going to go to the dark, gritty world. I just finished reading the book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter. I will just say seven of the eight chapters do an excellent job of diagnosing the problem, and it’s pretty terrifying. And I do think we should know it. Chapter Eight, where the solutions come in, was not compelling to me, and so it feels like there’s work for us to do.

Michael Horn: And I guess I will say I’m in a similarly dark place, maybe, Diane, because I read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. So go figure. Everyone can figure out where our headspace is. But I finished it before Disney. I had tried to read it a couple times before, and this time I made it through, which is setting me up now for reading Klossovitz, which is where I am now. Grinding through is the right verb, I think. But on that note, Irhum, thank you so much for joining us and making a fraught topic — but a topic with a lot of hyperventilation — really accessible and exciting and giving us a window into where this could be going. Really appreciate you being here with us on Class Disrupted. And for all of those listening, thank you so much for joining us. We’ll see you next time. 

Student representation on school boards is a growing national trend, and Washington state is a pioneer, with nearly half the 295 districts in the state — — including students on their boards. According to the, there are more than 500 student board members across 42 states representing more than 20 million students — a number projected to grow.

Often, these are non-voting members whose power comes from their ability to speak on the record and to influence peers to get involved in what’s happening at their schools. In rare cases, student representatives have a binding vote, such as in Maryland, where the state Supreme Court recently the constitutionality of having students under 18 serve as voting members.

Even in districts where students don’t have an official seat on their district board or on board advisory committees, they’re still showing up at meetings to make public comments and take part in important conversations.

This is a tremendous opportunity for school board members and district leaders to truly hear the perspectives of multifaceted, diverse students and to consider their experiences when making decisions that directly affect them.

During the past five years, I worked closely with school board directors across Washington state, and I observed many successful examples of districts where student representatives had a meaningful impact on policy. Here are some strategies and initiatives that all districts can employ.

First, there may be a tendency to appoint students who already hold leadership roles because they are known entities. It’s important to give the opportunity to all students announcing via social media, school apps, posters, QR codes and word of mouth that applications are open. A key part of this strategy is actively recruiting students with varied experiences and backgrounds and others who are not usually involved in school governance. Students themselves say this method is the most inclusive and leads to the most diversity of voices — something they greatly value.

Second, consider advisory voting — a simple process that many districts have been implementing recently that enables student representatives to voice the concerns, needs and viewpoints of the student body and submit a non-binding vote. After school board members have discussed an agenda item, the chair will ask the student representatives to offer an advisory vote — a chance to share their perspective with the rest of the board, for the record. Members can then consider that information when casting their votes. More and more boards are adopting this process, and the Washington State School Directors’ Association recently shared for districts earlier this year.

Third, engage students in real-world experiences. One Washington district assigned each student representative to analyze one section of a long-term strategic plan, break it down and clarify its implications for young people. They helped simplify the content and collected feedback from peers, which provided valuable insights for the board. In some districts, student representatives play a key role on superintendents’ advisory councils, which are designed to give district leaders feedback directly from students. Student board representatives will often lead these councils, helping to gather a wide array of perspectives and ideas and then bringing that information back to the board, where they can be considered in upcoming decisions.

Fourth, to sustain advances in student representation, schools and districts need to explicitly commit to providing opportunities for student voice. Whatever this looks like — board representation, surveys, focus groups, one-on-one conversations — districts should put it in writing so students know what to expect and can hold leaders accountable. One challenge in involving students is ensuring they feel their feedback has been taken seriously. When the issue of tokenization arises, it’s often because students weren’t acknowledged or no one responded to them, which makes them feel that they’re not seen, heard or valued. Usually, this is inadvertent. Making sure feedback and accountability measures are in place can head off this potential challenge.

Lastly, it’s not realistic to expect that two or three students on a school board can fully represent the perspective of every one of their peers across the district. But there are many ways to get more students involved. Districts can invite them onto advisory committees and topic-specific working groups. They can conduct polls and surveys and demonstrate how they used the results. They can hold leadership training workshops to prepare the next generation of student representatives.

Incorporating student voice into decision-making builds civic engagement and prepares students for the world that awaits them beyond high school. For student representatives on school boards, learning about governance, legislative processes and budgeting is priceless. But what such a program really does is ensure the health and vitality of the local school system and, by extension, the nation’s democracy.

As students head back to school this fall, how are they really doing in the aftermath of COVID-19? 

My organization, YouthTruth, a nonprofit that elevates student voices to help schools improve, set out to answer this question by consulting the experts: students themselves. We analyzed quantitative and qualitative feedback from over 500,000 middle and high school students gathered before, during and after the pandemic. From that data, we learned that student perceptions of learning and belonging in the 2022-23 school year returned to pre-pandemic levels — though troubling differences across student demographic groups remain, with LGBTQ+ students and students of color rating their sense of belonging less positively than their peers. Concerningly, however, students’ experiences with mental health and support from adults in school that worsened during COVID-19 have not recovered.

The most positive of the findings: Young people’s perceptions of learning and belonging followed similar patterns over the course of the pandemic, and both have bounced back to pre-COVID levels, according to the students.

Nonetheless, there remains much room for improvement. Only 42% of students say they feel like a real part of their school’s community. This matters both because of its intrinsic value – young people deserve to feel like they belong — and because belonging is and can catalyze students’ motivation to learn. 

Nearly half of all students surveyed in the 2022-23 school year reported that depression, stress or anxiety makes it hard for them to do their best in school. This proportion had increased steadily over the course of the pandemic, from 39% in spring 2020 to 48% in 2022-23. Meanwhile, the proportion of students saying there is an adult at school they can talk to when feeling upset, stressed or having problems decreased to just 41% in the 2022-23 school year from 46% pre-COVID.

This support gap, created by the simultaneous rise in students’ mental health as an obstacle to learning and decline in support from adults at school, emerged in fall 2020. It has since widened, despite significant attention to COVID’s impact on . Students in our surveys say there are not enough counselors and ask that their schools increase their efforts to reach out to students, to make the help they need “more accessible and clear” rather than just “pushing it under the surface.” The bottom line is that young people’s challenges with mental health and insufficient support are not getting better — not yet, anyway. And these challenges directly impact students’ ability to learn.

Amid this alarming mental health crisis and plummeting NAEP scores, the national narrative on is limited. The obsession with test scores, the pressure to catch up and one-dimensional accountability systems crowd out other integral sources of feedback about how students are doing. The world is taking shape around this younger generation, and decisions are being made about their future. Yet, far too often, their voices are ignored. 

Students are telling the country in no uncertain terms that education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Social, emotional and academic learning are intrinsically linked, and it can progress only so far when these pieces are separated. This has always been true but is especially so now.
Students are imploring adults in and around schools not to go back to business as usual. In some of their own words: “Put us before test scores.” “Work alongside us.” “Actually listen to us.” As educators, administrators and policymakers move forward in this next chapter, they should remember that students are whole people who need whole solutions to succeed in school and in life. Part of the solution must be truly listening to them.

Across the country, young people are by gun violence, which is now the leading killer of kids and teens in the U.S. Fear and anxiety are driving many to that they would be safer armed with a gun, and as a result, many than did two decades ago. But these young people also know that this arms race is not making their communities safer — it’s contributing to more deaths and injuries. 

Within that contradiction lies hope for a safer future, and teens can lead the way, because the decision to pick up a gun is not inevitable. The narrative that only a gun will make a young person safer and can be changed.

This summer, partnered with and to engage some 350 teens, ages 14 to 18, in communities heavily impacted by gun violence. We shared on gun risks with the students and challenged them to create social media campaigns that could help spread the word to their peers that having a gun is not the path to safety.

Initially, many of the teens expressed skepticism. They pushed back on the idea of building campaigns to take on gun violence because they didn’t believe their voices mattered, or that gun violence could be stopped. But as they learned more about the myths that prompt young people to carry firearms, and as we showed them how teen voices had made a difference on other public health and social justice issues, their tone shifted.

Over our six-week program with Chicago Public Schools, students heard from experts on gun violence, met with experts from major ad agencies and learned about how teens can shift culture. They practiced having conversations about the risks of using guns with their peers and brainstormed effective ways into those important dialogues. Finally, the teens created their own to discourage gun use and built strategies for large-scale campaigns that could spread the fact-based message that having a firearm makes gun violence more likely, not less.

We challenged program participants to create social media campaigns for a simple reason: Teens are best reached through their phones and peers. It’s a strategy we’ve used at Project Unloaded since our launch in 2021. In that short time, our signature campaign to spread the message that young people are SNUG — — has reached more than 3 million teens on platforms like and Snapchat. This summer alone, more than 120,000 young people clicked through social media content to view our campaign website, where we share more information about the risks of using guns. When teens know the facts, many from wanting a gun.

Similarly, by the end of their six weeks with us, many of the Chicago students came to see how their voices and ideas could make a difference. The program ended with a pitch contest in front of a panel of judges and hundreds of their peers. The winning team’s had a powerful, simple slogan: Guns don’t give you power. 

Teens want power. And when it comes to social change, they have a lot of it. Consider that Claudette Colvin was only 15 when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus — nine months before Rosa Parks. Her decision snowballed into a movement. Years later, as teens learned about how tobacco companies’ marketing to young people was driving lung cancer rates, they stopped smoking and shifted the culture of cigarettes from cool to uncool in a generation. Two decades ago, nearly a quarter of teens smoked cigarettes. Today, of teens smoke. 

History is full of examples like these, where teens provide the spark for major societal shifts. Today, their savvy use of social media can accelerate the flame that makes narrative and culture change happen. And narrative change campaigns can alter the world for the better.

Teens know that guns are readily available, and that’s not changing anytime soon. But young people are also clear-eyed about their vision for the future. In a second summer program with After School Matters, we asked young people to create social content and art projects to share how guns impact their communities. In one art project, a student wrote, “Guns create a feeling of violence and fear. Without them, our communities could be ‘communities’ again.”&�Բ�����;

Teens know how to build safer communities. It’s up to adults to listen to them and amplify their voices, because guns don’t give you power. Teens have all the power they need to shift the narrative and finally slow the nation’s gun violence epidemic.

Research has confirmed that the design of buildings can influence levels of , , and, in the case of schools, .

But it’s not just researchers and architects who care about the way schools look and feel. Students do as well. 

Recently, I served in the Nevada Youth Legislature, which is composed of 21 student representatives appointed by the Nevada state Senate. As part of my duties, I organized a town hall with high school students. Many of us in the room, including myself, attend schools with significant student populations that qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch — an indicator of poverty.

Before the meeting began, I had anticipated that students would talk about their teachers, or the district’s new grading policy, or the rising cost of college. But I was wrong. The students spent most of the time talking and complaining about their school facilities. Among the top concerns were the presence of metal detectors, toilets and bathroom stalls that were permanently out of service, broken bathroom facilities that forced students to use porta-potties and the lack of a central gathering place or student center. 

It was evident from this town hall that students did not feel safe or supported — and that their grievances were focused largely on their schools’ physical features.

Given that students may spend up to half of their waking hours (or as much as 35 to 40 hours a week) at school — even more if they play sports or are involved in clubs — schools should be designed in ways that positively affect mental health, which can be achieved by more windows and natural light, more common areas, quiet zones and/or meditation rooms, such as fibers, stones and wood, more greenery, painted landscapes on walls, warm colors, natural wood and outdoor areas such as courtyards. 

In his book , Charles Montgomery wrote, “It is impossible to separate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it and to build it for society.” I believe the idea of a “happy city” can be applied to schools and that it is “impossible to separate the life and design” of a school from its students’ experiences of happiness and mental wellness. 

Others think so too. The created a , which measures the impact of architecture and design on health and wellness. The John Lewis Elementary School in Washington, D.C., was renovated using those guidelines, including a large, welcoming entryway, glass structures that maximize natural light, open spaces and comfortable common areas. Principal Nikeysha Jackson told Ed Week in a video that the new design makes the school feel “.”&�Բ�����;

Administrators and teachers seem to think more about the school’s physical design when students are young. At my elementary school, my teacher created a corner in her classroom where students could hang out — reading, socializing or engaging in creative play. Our school, located in the urban center where most students were eligible for free lunch, had an outdoor garden and a multipurpose room where kids could meet. But by the time I got to middle school, most of those serotonin-producing design features had disappeared: We had no school garden or common area, just a courtyard made of concrete. Now, my overcrowded urban high school lacks greenery, a school garden or a common gathering space. 

Districts do not have to construct new schools to make wellness part of their buildings. Sandy Spring Friends School, a high school, was also renovated using components of the WELL Building Standard, including acoustic treatments to reduce reverberations, climate and light controls in each room, floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize the natural light, atria, natural colors and movable furniture that allows for collaboration. As the school’s director, Dr. Rodney Glasgow, in another video, “[W]e’ve got to think about social emotional wellness as one of the rubrics we use to design campuses.”

“You don’t have to build a new building to make wellness part of the building you’re in. It just gives us permission to really put wellness at the center of everything we do,” he told . 

To support student mental wellness, schools should consider sponsoring student-led school beautification projects such as murals, meditation areas and gardens. Schools could remove concrete areas and/or beautify those spaces with planters, greenery and water features. They should also create student centers and/or multiple common areas, and install more windows and design features to bring in the natural light, so they are inviting and soothing.

By paying greater attention to the design of the buildings in which students spend their long days, schools could have a tremendous positive influence on mental health.

A new found two in five Gen Z students agreed with the statement: “The pandemic has made me less interested in pursuing higher education.”

Middle school students, generally 11 to 13 years old, not only contribute to the trend but also lead the view that work experience is more valuable. 

That attitude has translated into an 8% decline in college enrollment from 2019 to 2022, showing how attending college is no longer a given for Gen Z.

“Seeing the way many Millennials are saddled with insurmountable debt from the higher ed system, and knowing from their online lives that other paths are possible, these high school and even middle school students are reconsidering if they even need college to be successful,” wrote in the report.

Gen Z advocates Brian Femminella, co-founder and chief executive officer of , Bella Santos, community leadership board president of , and Ian Gates, policy and program quality fellow of talked about key takeaways from the report:

1. The vast majority of Gen Z middle school students say they don’t see a future pursuing college.

YPulse found 80% of Gen Z middle school students and 85% of high school students plan to go to college compared to 100% pre-pandemic.

Gates, 22, said pandemic-era online learning showed younger Gen Z students how monotonous taking classes can be — whether they’re in middle school, high school, community college or a four-year institution.

“[Gen Z] is thinking about different options now,” Gates told The 74. “A lot of us are thinking about non-college careers…like being a Youtuber, influencer and other alternate paths like that.”

Femminella, 23, said his own college education didn’t necessarily help him start his mental health company.

“When I see how a lot of younger kids would rather do something else, I applaud that,” Femminella told The 74. “We need more folks that want to do different things and shouldn’t fall into the stigma of college being a must.”

2. Gen Z students are more likely to find Google and YouTube more helpful than a teacher.

YPulse found Gen Z students were more likely to choose Google and YouTube over a teacher when asked: “If you wanted to learn something new, what resources would you use?”

Santos, 20, wasn’t shocked.

“There is often not a ton of oversight when it comes to how choosy schools are with who gets to teach — especially in public schools,” Santos told The 74. “Teachers and the system in which they teach aren’t always suited for success to begin with.”

Gates said disparaging parent attitudes towards teachers and school curriculum also had an effect on how Gen Z grows up to question the value of a college education.

“With the parental rights movement, certainly when you’re telling your kid ‘hey your teachers are trying to indoctrinate you and make you communist and make you gay’ it obviously gets to them,” Gates said.

Gates added how states such as Florida, which have banned and , contribute to Gen Z’s disinterest in pursuing higher education by not exposing them to diverse courses. 

3. Gen Z college students struggle to stay interested in their classes and believe they don’t teach practical skills.

YPulse found 55% of current Gen Z undergraduate students and 38% of Gen Z graduate students found their classes not relevant to their lives — in part because college doesn’t teach practical skills such as mental health skills, cooking and personal finance.

“Learning should be an enriching experience no matter what your interests are,” Santos said. “Yet school systems are often set up to just drill information into people’s brains.”

Femminella said mental health concerns should be the foundation on which professors shape their curriculum. 

“There are some moments when students in college need to have a mental health day because they’re overworked,” Femminella said. “There’s not a lot of outlets and resources until it’s too late…and you’re really in the midst of a mental health crisis when there’s ways to avoid that.”

Femminella also said colleges should require personal finance and cooking courses.

“A lot of colleges forget that when Gen Z students close their computer, they’re a human and have to go do other human things like pay bills, cook and clean,” Femminella said. “I think it’s something that should just be incorporated into the entire university structure.”

4. Gen Z students wish they learned about alternative career paths growing up.

YPulse found that 74% of Gen Z students wish they learned more about alternative career paths compared to a traditional college education.

Santos said the social stigma of not attending college is declining among Gen Z students.

“I don’t think it’s for everyone, I don’t think it’s necessary, so it makes sense that other people in my generation see that,” Santos said.

Gates added how this is especially true for students who come from immigrant families and used to feel “the pressure that college is just what’s next.”

“Gen Z knows people are graduating college with all these loans,” Gates said. “They’re taking that into account, especially those from lower income families, and asking themselves if college is really worth it.”

5. Gen Z students believe work experience is more important than a college education.

YPulse found that 57% of Gen Z middle school students and 49% of Gen Z high school students believe work experience is more important than a college education.

Femminella said work experience has been the most helpful tool to his success.

“When you’re in your field and you get to practice, you also get to fail,” Femminella said. “And by failing you learn the most, and that’s been invaluable to starting my company.”

But education today is in a time of disruption and transition. In many respects, it’s not meeting the needs of young people as they enter a changing workforce. 

Maybe it’s time to ask high school students what they need most. 

The “Question the Quo” nationally representative survey of high school students ages 14 to 18 does just that. It documents Gen Z high schoolers’ views and shifting priorities on education and work. It was conducted by the nonprofit ECMC Group in partnership with VICE Media, the seventh survey report since 2020.

It turns out that Gen Z high school students have new and sensible ideas about the relationship between their K-12 education, going to college and starting a career. They want K-12 to provide them with practical knowledge and skills that lead to more education, training and career options after graduation than they now have. Policymakers and educators can and should take these views into serious consideration as they map out new programs and reforms.

Here are four main questions Gen Z high schoolers have on their minds as they think about their futures.

Do we need a college degree?

Gen Z is skeptical about the value of a traditional four-year college degree. They question whether it delivers sufficient return on investment, having heard stories about student loans and debt. Around half (51%) are thinking about pursuing a college degree, down more than 10 percentage points since before the pandemic and 20 points since shortly after COVID began. Other of young people and adults find similar skepticism about the value of a four-year degree.

On the other hand, 65% of Gen Z high schoolers who responded to “Question the Quo” believe education after high school is necessary. But they want options such as online courses, boot camps and apprenticeships.

What skills should K-12 schools teach us?

The practical mindset concerning college also applies to what young people want from high school. Gen Z places a priority on learning life skills along with academics — things like financial literacy, communication, problem-solving and understanding their own and others’ emotions, which are overlooked in the traditional K-12 curriculum. They value good grades and practical, real-world skills. They also have an entrepreneurial spirit, with a third wanting to start their own business.

Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) believe it is important to develop these practical skills before they graduate from high school, so they are better prepared to decide on career paths. These views are consistent with other of the American public and young people on these issues. 

How can work and life coexist?

Gen Z high schoolers are not only interested in making money; they also want time for their personal lives. They see work-life balance as an important priority. In fact, two of the top factors that impact what they will decide to do after high school — long-term earning potential and physical and mental health — have remained consistent throughout ECMC’s seven surveys. In other words, young people yearn for meaningful work that leaves room for personal development and leisure. Their approach to careers echoes a holistic perspective on the need for a healthy balance between work and personal life, which was a key theme of the December 2021 report from the on youth mental health.

How do I achieve my dreams?

Gen Z high schoolers want to learn on the job and over their lifetime. More than two-thirds say their ideal post-high school learning should be on the job through internships or apprenticeships (65%) or through hands-on learning in a lab or classroom (67%). Only a third say their ideal learning would be only through coursework. More than half (53%) want more formalized learning throughout their life. And 8 in 10 believe government and employers should subsidize, pay full tuition or provide direct training for students. 

Gen Z high schoolers do not reject formal academic learning. Rather, they want a system that is more flexible and personalized in its approach to learning and work than what they have now. They are asking K-12 schools, colleges, employers and other stakeholders to think differently about how best to prepare them for jobs and careers. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

As the organizer of the conference, I have had the opportunity to interview over 30 high school and college students from a range of backgrounds, who were nominated by teachers who are slated to speak at the conference or have shared their AI experiences through articles and interviews. Their innovative use of AI tools has underscored to me that if the broader community of educators, policymakers and industry professionals are to harness AI effectively in education, this collective cannot afford to overlook student voices in its discussions. This raises a pertinent question: How can students and educators cultivate a collaborative approach to this rapidly evolving field?

Most students want to learn, but many have anxieties that their current skills and knowledge could rapidly become irrelevant without integrating AI. In my interviews, one accounting student who interned at a tax consulting company said she feared that AI could automate her data processing tasks, while a computer science student expressed worries that tools like ChatGPT could replace his entire job of coding user interfaces for websites. A marketing student noted that the advanced copywriting and strategic thinking abilities of these AI tools are already making the skills she learned in classrooms obsolete.

Such fears are most evident among college students who will soon enter the job market and hope their professors swiftly revisit their teaching materials and reconsider the goals of their classes in light of the evolving future of work. They need to discern which aspects of the curriculum could be enhanced by AI and which may no longer be relevant. Undertaking such a revision requires professors to have a thorough understanding of what AI can and cannot do. Ideally, they will be supported by their academic departments and college-based teaching and learning centers.

Another concern voiced by students pertains to equitable access to and training in these tools. The paid version of ChatGPT significantly outperforms the free version, leading to an unfair advantage for students who can afford it. Furthermore, students who have the privilege of free time to experiment daily with AI tools develop effective prompting techniques that can produce much better results than those of their less well-off peers who must spend their time outside of class working part-time jobs.

Bolstered by such insights, these students have been receptive to educators who are ready to navigate the changes brought about by artificial intelligence. Seeing teachers revise their curricula and foster dialogues about AI’s role in the classroom has encouraged students to reciprocate, sharing their personal experiences with AI tools. Such discussions are proving invaluable in helping educators refine their curricula and evolve their code of ethics around issues like plagiarism while building trust with their students.

It is incumbent on educators to clarify the areas of curriculum that could be enhanced by AI, those that should remain human-centered and those that might benefit from a hybrid approach. For example, English teachers could require students to collaborate with AI for initial brainstorming and drafting of essays, but not for editing and revision. By clearly communicating expectations and providing guidance on artificial intelligence, educators can prevent students from inappropriately using AI — such as generating solutions to every assignment without thinking critically about them — and assure them of the ongoing relevance of their education.

It is equally crucial for school leaders and administrators to think beyond the classroom and formulate clear guidelines for students and teachers at the institutional level. To ensure that these policies are relevant and practical, schools should consider establishing student advisory committees. These could provide valuable insights into students’ experiences with AI, particularly for those working in classrooms where AI-enhanced teaching is being tested. Integrating student voices into discussions about educational policy and curriculum design will undoubtedly speed up the adoption of AI in education while ensuring that appropriate and effective guardrails are in place.

Further, educational institutions should collaborate with leading large language model service providers, such as OpenAI, to guarantee equitable access to and training in advanced programs such as the paid version of ChatGPT. This would not only help close the growing inequality gap in education due to access to premium tools, but equipping educators with a sufficient understanding of AI can alleviate apprehensions that often stem from unfamiliarity with technology. To foster dialogues and effective experiments around AI in education, institutions must empower both students and teachers with the leading tools and a deep understanding of how to get the most out of them.

While many more challenges posed by AI in education remain unresolved, every conversation between students and educators can help accelerate these important, ongoing experiments. This collective quest for insight is precisely why I and the other student volunteers decided to host the AI x Education conference. By providing a platform for rich discussion and collaboration, we aim to contribute toward a future where AI and education coalesce seamlessly, to the benefit of all students. I invite educators interested in attending to register . 

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.”

High school senior Lydia Nichols never expected to fall in love with auto racing. 

It certainly wouldn’t have happened sitting in one of the classrooms at her traditional comprehensive high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But Nichols only spends half her day at that campus. 

The rest of her learning happens half an hour away at , a credit-bearing program for public school students in downtown Cedar Rapids where teens learn through community-based projects. This year, Nichols devised a plan to revitalize Hawkeye Downs Speedway, which to attract visitors. It’s “a huge part of our city’s history, and we don’t want to lose something like that,” she said.

Nichols and the other students on her team decided to host a race this summer where teens are the drivers. By April, they had already raised $30,000 for the event. They purchased cars, commissioned local businesses as sponsors, and launched a marketing campaign to attract drivers and spectators, hoping to fill the Speedway’s stands with nearly 5,000 fans. 

Besides having fun working with the racing community, Nichols said she’s developed marketing, fundraising and event-planning skills. “I really wanted to be involved in the community and help people, and BIG helped me discover the career I want to go into,” she said, adding she’ll study project management in the fall at the University of Iowa. 

For fresh ideas on how to design innovative community projects at your school, sign up for The XQ Xtra — a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

BIG launched in 2013 in collaboration with the Cedar Rapids School District and the nearby College Community School District. Since then, it has inspired students to follow their curiosity and discover their passions. BIG later gained support from the in 2016. Today, over 100 students come to BIG from four different high schools, spending half their day at their “mothership” schools and the other half at BIG, working on real-life projects and earning credits in English, social studies and business. 

Iowa BIG features many of the research-based that demonstrate the impact of what happens when education doesn’t just look like real life but is real life. Students at BIG feel more because they are given autonomy in designing projects connected to . 

Because BIG’s students remain officially enrolled in their home schools, Iowa doesn’t report on their outcomes separately. However, the school shared data with XQ showing BIG’s 2022 graduates from Cedar Rapids High School boasted a higher average ACT score than graduates both statewide and nationwide. BIG’s innovative environment provides lessons for other high schools on how to help students feel more connected to their learning — something they’ll need to succeed in college, careers and in life.

Collaboration by Districts Leads to a Hub for Innovation

Housed in a shared entrepreneurial space without classrooms in New Bohemia, Cedar Rapids’ thriving arts and cultural district, BIG students work alongside local startups. In this way, BIG makes — another one of the XQ Design Principles researchers say can lead to more equitable outcomes for all pupils. 

BIG shows how schools can collaborate to provide student-centric, place-based education they wouldn’t have the capacity to do on their own. The two district partners support BIG financially, covering part of the rent, the director’s salary and equipment expenses. Each district supplies two full-time, certified teachers.

“They’ve got a level of infrastructure and program-building that allows it to scale but also to operate as a hub that’s close to the bone,” said Angela Lyle, a research fellow in the School of Education at the University of Michigan and author of a recent . “They are looking deeply at instruction, learning from it and accelerating learning across the network as a whole.”

It can be financially and programmatically challenging for districts to partner with BIG; a third district pulled out of the collaboration. And for students, shuffling between two distinct learning environments can be a struggle at times. “When you’re doing traditional school, it kind of just feels uninspiring,” said Nichols.

But she also acknowledged advantages. “Since I go to Washington High School, I’m able to be open to all the traditional high school stuff I’d be missing out on while still going to such an amazing program,” Nichols explained, listing extracurriculars, sports and school dances as just some of the perks of still attending her mothership school.

Giving Students Autonomy Requires Help with Time Management 

Iowa BIG gives students an unusual amount of autonomy. But for some, the sheer amount of choice can be overwhelming. 

“The biggest thing kids struggle with is coming for the first time and not knowing how to have any agency,” said BIG’s Community Development Specialist Megan Swanson, who experienced it firsthand when she, herself, was a student at BIG. “In the traditional system, you’re told what to do, and it’s hard to break away and make decisions for yourself.”

BIG’s teachers help students learn to manage their time by utilizing a set of principles called “Modern Agile,” more often seen in organizations like Google than in high schools. With this tool, English teacher Nate Pruett said students spend time reflecting on their work with their team and project, “and that’s where kids often begin to identify their weaknesses in using their freedom.”&�Բ�����;

Developing these mindsets of self-awareness and the skills to be generous team members are crucial for student success — and central tenets of . Research finds collaboration, critical thinking and mastering fundamental literacies are the best ways to develop students who are deeply engaged in their own learning and fully prepared for college and career. 

Innovation and Rigor Come Together 

BIG is still beholden to traditional academic standards. “Students have free reign over projects, and if it matches the class or the standards, that’s great,” Swanson said. “If not, we figure out how to make the standards connect.”

For example, one typical English standard is writing for an audience. After students designed a youth outreach campaign for a local auto shop, they were invited to share their experiences on a local radio station. They prepared by researching listenership demographics and practicing how to answer potential questions. Afterward, Pruett determined whether they had met the English standard by reviewing reflections they wrote on the strategies they used to appeal to their audience.

Students can revise their work until they master a standard, which is then translated into a traditional grade for the student’s mothership school transcript. When a project doesn’t meet all the required subject standards, BIG offers teacher-led seminars once a week to fill in the gaps. Nichols said the structure is conversational and more immersive than a typical lecture. “What we’ve discovered is that a lecture in and of itself isn’t bad,” Pruett said. “It’s bad when that’s all you do.”

Learning Happens Even When a Project Falls Flat

In many schools that use project-based learning, teachers develop the projects. But at BIG, they’re driven by the interests of the students and the community, and Swanson is tasked with building those partnerships. She’s also employed by the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance and meets regularly with business leaders to harvest ideas. 

Swanson said the best projects begin with a problem a partner is trying to solve, like , which came to her looking for help in rethinking an occupational therapy toy for children with delayed fine motor skills. For another project, a local farm asked students to help rethink how to get clean water to livestock. 

BIG will reject a community project if it lacks rigor, but when it comes to projects designed by students, BIG hardly ever says “no,” which means sometimes a project fails — just like in life. “We want projects to be real-world, messy, and have kids experience failure and figure out how to make something work,” said co-founder Trace Pickering, tapping into one of XQ’s other research-based design principles, amplifying .

Students also have the option to leave a project at any time. “Kids can get into the project and realize this isn’t what they wanted to do,” Pickering explained. “Why punish them with some arbitrary timeline that says you have to stick with it?”

Preparing Students for the Future with Real-World Skills

Based on what he hears from alumni, Pickering said BIG is succeeding in its mission. 

“Overwhelmingly, what they tell us, especially kids going to college, is that they recognized that their roommate or their friend down the hall had no idea how to manage their time, how to advocate for themselves, how to build a network,” he said. “Because they had been in an environment — a high school — where every minute had been scripted.”

On an XQ survey of seniors in 2022, 97% of BIG’s 12th graders said they felt prepared for their future, and credited BIG for helping them develop collaboration skills as well as the ability to demonstrate and communicate knowledge and learning, creativity and problem-solving and curiosity — all competencies based on the XQ Learner Outcomes.

This fall, BIG is relocating to the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance building and taking over a floor shared with its next venture: , a standalone magnet high school. City View is launching with 200 ninth and 10th graders, funded by the XQ Institute, New Schools Venture Fund, and grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

As BIG’s principal Dan DeVore put it, “What we really want is for students to have a BIG type experience as well as discover courses where they aren’t beholden to semester-long, hour-a-day block schedule.”&�Բ�����;

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Andrew Bauld is a freelance writer specializing in issues in K-12 and higher education. His pieces have been published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, U.S. News and World Report, School Library Journal and the XQ Institute.

But after spending most of a school year in a role at the center of America’s education culture wars, the high school senior said he’s used his first-hand experiences to be a voice of “moderation” on the seven-member board.

In the face of extremist views, he counters with a dose of reality: “Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on,” he’ll offer. “Only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective.”

In Boise, Rajbhandari’s election win has put in motion a chain reaction of efforts to elevate student voices. The school board now includes a brand new youth advisory council and the district this year administered a first-ever mental health survey to take account of the struggles its students are experiencing.

Meanwhile, the teen has also helped usher along a Climate Action Plan the board is implementing — a measure he had long pushed for as a climate activist with the in his days before holding elected office.

The 74 caught up with the young politician, who’s juggling the responsibilities of senior year alongside oversight of his roughly 23,200-student district, for a Zoom conversation that ranged from his efforts with the nonprofit to facing off against counterprotesters wielding AR-15s.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: It’s been the better part of the school year that you’ve been on the Boise school board. What has stood out to you most so far?

Shiva Rajbhandari: Coming into the school board, I thought this was really the end-all be-all of problem solving. But there’s such a big team that works across our district to write good policy and to propose a strong budget and to make sure that we’re hiring the top staff to keep our schools running. Learning about the incredible people across our district has been really rewarding. 

Also learning how slow change is sometimes. Coming into this role was this transition from being an activist and really calling the shots. Like, we would meet on a Thursday and have a protest organized by Saturday. Those things were very quick. 

Now, there’s a lot more accountability — to our patrons [constituents], to our students — so things happen slower. But it’s neat to consider all aspects of the solution and think critically about how we can best prepare students for college, career and citizenship while maintaining the integrity of our district and the faith of our patrons.

That must be an interesting transition, from activist to school board member. So what are some of the issues you’re working on now where the pace of change has felt slower?

One thing I’m really excited about is establishing a permanent student position on the school board. We’ve been talking about it since January and before that, I was talking with trustees, talking with staff, about how we could shape this policy. [It’s gone to several committees including our student advisory committee and] now we’re waiting until September to take it back to the Governance Committee for review and then hopefully passing. So that’s one example.

Another example would be our district sustainability commitments. This [issue] is why I ran for the school board initially. I led this campaign with my fellow students across our district to establish a clean energy commitment and a long-term sustainability plan for our schools. We’d seen districts across the country move quickly and then our district was slow and deliberate about it. But ultimately, our efforts did lead to the passage of this commitment on clean energy by our school board. 

Some things just take a lot of time, like reviewing all the carbon emissions of our district. And then [the question of] what does the long-term plan look like that saves our taxpayers money. That’s going to take probably another year or two to craft that plan and get that through. 

Going back to the effort to get a permanent youth board member, in your view why is youth voice so important in school decisions?

Students are the primary stakeholders in our education. And yet, our school boards are elected by people who are over 18, the majority of whom are no longer in K-12. They tend to be parents or grandparents or community members, but really only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective of what’s going on in our schools. I think having students on school boards is about bringing in a perspective that is vital to policymaking.

In addition, elevating students to positions of leadership empowers an entire generation of students within your district. Because when students understand that their voices are being taken seriously, that more than anything allows students to achieve their education goals. 

How have your friends and peers reacted to your role on the board? Are they telling you things to bring up in meetings?

Absolutely. Our whole district is getting so much more engagement with students and it’s helped us think outside the box about how to engage students in policymaking. 

For example, we did a districtwide mental health survey. That’s something we’ve never done before and we found out 30% of our students have had depression or suicidal ideation. We identified stress and social isolation as key contributing factors we really want to tackle. But that’s something our district has never done before, not because our district didn’t value student voices, but I don’t think we understood how incorporating student input could help our district. 

We also put together a student advisory committee [to the school board] and we have peer feedback groups. We’ve seen so many more students attending our board meetings, asking questions of our board, bringing ideas forward. 

It’s a simple thing to have [a student] up there on the dais, but it really opens the floodgates for transformative change within a system that is often really rigid.

I saw that you made YouTube previews of the last few meetings. Was that an effort to make the board more accessible to your peers?

Yeah. I think there’s really this misunderstanding of what the board does, and how folks can give input. And so the goal of the video is to communicate to students, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on at our board meeting.’ Everybody should be able to participate.

Going back to when you won your seat, that was a victory over an incumbent who had an endorsement from a far-right group. How have you navigated extremism in the campaign and in your term on the board?

Our state is split ideologically between the far right and the really far right. And there’s this hate group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a policy think tank, whose stated goal is to in our state. And so we’ve seen that come up time and time again with allegations of indoctrination or grooming in our schools. Now we’re seeing the third iteration of that, which is vouchers in the name of school choice, giving public dollars to private and potentially religious institutions with limited accountability.

I think the perspective that I’ve brought is one of moderation. Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on. And here’s what students actually need. No one is scared about a [female-identifying person with male genitalia] going to the girl’s bathroom. What folks are scared about is their friends committing suicide, because we don’t have the mental health resources or the resiliency factors that we need. 

It’s bringing an ounce of reality back to these ideological conversations. I’m super lucky that, in our district, the problems we have with extremists aren’t nearly as bad as in the rest of the state. 

Your time on the board isn’t the first time you’ve interfaced with right-wing activists. Can you tell me the backstory there?

Yeah, gosh. It’s funny, I think nationally, when people hear about Idaho, it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, people are running around with guns.’ And living in Idaho, it’s almost like a fact of life, you organize a protest and folks show up with AR-15s.

The first time I interacted with the group I think you’re referring to, the , I was in ninth grade. We were organizing a protest on Capitol Boulevard and it was 70 kids who got together with signs and we blocked the street, we were playing music and it was honestly a fun day. These folks showed up with AR-15s to our rally. Not only that, but then a ton of cops showed up and they all were friends with the [counterprotesters] who weren’t even from Boise.

Then last year, a student brought a gun to Boise High, the school I’m at now, and he was suspended and not allowed to walk at graduation. This same group . 

The threat of extremism and militarism is very real in Boise. But we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been through so much. I think that takes away the power when people aren’t afraid of you. 

I know we’re jumping from one hot-button issue to the next, but I also wanted to ask about book bans. I saw there’s some state legislation proposed schools for ‘harmful’ books. And there have been several Idaho districts, not Boise, that have enacted bans. So I’m curious how that’s come up in your time on the board?

What’s a little humorous to me about the whole book ban thing is, it’s not parents and it’s not students asking for books to be banned. It’s generally random people who have heard something. And so, for example, in the nearby city of Meridian, there was this group that tried to get 200 books banned from the school library and I think they just pulled the list off the internet because half of the books weren’t even in the Meridian library. 

To me, I will never support any kind of book bans ever because I think free access to information is the cornerstone of democracy.

The narrative that’s being missed is that book bans, frankly, are disempowering to students. It’s alleging that students don’t have the agency to know what they should read. Schools are a resource, they’re a tool for students to learn and engage and ensuring that there’s open access to information is critical to that.

You wrote a recent about efforts to reduce youth voting, which seems like a big issue for you also because I saw you co-lead the organization BABE VOTE. Can you tell me about that?

BABE VOTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, voter advocacy organization promoting voter registration among young people. We just got the data back and Idaho is the between 2018 and 2022. So the efforts that we’re doing are working and it’s really exciting. 

The [Idaho] House and Senate both just passed a bill banning the use of student IDs at the polls, which for many students, that’s their only form of ID, especially college students. 

As soon as the governor signs this bill, we’re actually going to be and protecting the right to vote. So it’s that kind of stuff, knocking on doors, registering people and reminding people, ‘Hey, there’s an election,’ and then protecting the right to vote in the legislature and across the state.

What’s it been like to juggle all this work alongside senior year?

It’s been a little bit crazy. Honestly, being on a school board is [manageable]. Any student can do it. People try to make it something that it’s not.

Senior year, you have so many opportunities and it’s such a wide world. Sometimes it’s hard to get up for first period everyday. But just keeping a Google Calendar and checking in with my friends and making sure that I’m taking time for myself. Also remembering that I don’t have to do everything right; I have this whole team of folks who have supported me in my election on board and support this climate activism work.

One of the things that’s kind of taking a beating has been my track practice. Sometimes it’s hard to get to my practices.

What events do you compete in?

I run the mile and the 800 [meters].

And do you know what your plans are for next year, both in terms of school and whether you’ll maintain the position on the board?

Yeah, I’ll stay on the board. I made a commitment. All meetings we can mostly do virtually, but I will be leaving the state for college. And I want to study public policy and maybe go become a lawyer or something. [Rajbhandari has been accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill, Whitman College and Stanford University and is still deciding where to attend. He was elected to a two-year term.]

And last, who’s one teacher who made the biggest impression on you and why?

Well, there are so many. My teachers were the best teachers ever. One teacher, Monica Church, she was my Student Council teacher and capstone teacher sophomore year. She’s just been such a mentor and a guiding force in my life. Whenever I have a problem or something I want to talk about, she’s the first person I call.

I remember one time in my capstone class, I was running for [student body] vice president and I was a sophomore, so no one had ever done that before, and I was talking about ‘Hey, the election’s tomorrow. Everyone, make sure you go vote.’ And one of my friends, who is kind of a contrarian, goes, ‘Why would you ever vote for Shiva?’ Then Ms. Church was like, ‘Well, I would vote for Shiva. And one thing I’ve learned in the last eight months has been never bet against him.’

Now that’s a source of [motivation]. Whenever I’m like, ‘This is hard,’ I remember Monica Church, someone I respect more than anyone, said, ‘Never bet against Shiva.’ 

“It was an incredibly powerful moment,” says Zander Moricz, a recent Florida high school graduate who was a plaintiff in a suit challenging the law. “We had thousands of students sign a pledge to vote and take a banned history lesson.”&�Բ�����;

The law, passed by the Florida Legislature last year, had outlawed classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3 and required that any instruction in upper grades be “age-appropriate.” The recent extension to was among a slate of resolutions passed by the board at the governor’s behest. It cannot go into effect until after a 30-day “procedural notification” period.

This was not the first time DeSantis has implemented measures targeting LGBTQ Floridians and people of color rather than wait for the legislature to act. Earlier this year, he directed the Florida Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth — a move the legislature is now deliberating enshrining in law. 

DeSantis, widely believed to be laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential bid, has said his election to the governorship proves to make unilateral policy decisions, which lawmakers can later affirm or — highly unlikely in a GOP-dominated state — overturn. Similar use of executive power by governors and attorneys general in .

He has also restricted instruction on topics involving race, outlawed Advanced Placement African American history classes and announced plans to rid Florida colleges and universities of diversity efforts and instruction involving critical race theory. 

While DeSantis and his backers had said the ban on early-grades discussions of LGBTQ topics was needed to protect young children from inappropriate materials, state officials said last week’s extension to all students was necessary to ensure that teachers do not stray from instruction that meets state academic standards.

The protests, which were followed in some places by community rallies, had a twofold purpose, says Moricz, now a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard University. Young people, he says, needed to feel the power in taking action to defend free speech, while sending a message to elected officials that youth are watching — and planning to vote. 

“There is a culture of fear in Florida schools right now, and it’s hard for students to shake,” he says. “Florida’s legislature is not listening to parents, teachers and students. This legislature is listening to Florida’s governor.”

Students joining the noon walkout participated in 20 minutes of organized activities, including a five-minute version of a Black history lesson banned by DeSantis. The focus: censorship of historical Black and LGBTQ figures. Protesters also registered to vote and wrote letters to school board members and other officials promising to work to elect candidates who support students’ rights. 

Making sure the student demonstrators could realize immediate and tangible outcomes — like taking the voting pledge and having the opportunity to enroll in an online, college-level Black history class created by Harvard faculty who had helped to develop the banned AP course — was important to giving them a sense of their potential power, says Moricz.

“Young people in Florida are taking back the state strategically and intentionally,” he says, “and we’re protecting each other in the process.”

Moricz, a founder of the 2,000-member , gained instant acclaim a year ago, when he was warned not to say gay in his commencement address at Pine View School for the Gifted in Osprey, Florida.

Told his mic would be cut if he mentioned his role as plaintiff, Moricz, who is gay, about coming out as curly-haired.

“I used to hate my curls,” he said, doffing his mortarboard. “I spent mornings and nights embarrassed of them, trying desperately to straighten this part of who I am.

“But the daily damage of trying to fix myself became too much to endure. So, while having curly hair in Florida is difficult — due to the humidity — I decided to be proud of who I was and started coming to school as my authentic self.”

After the speech went viral, Moricz was invited to appear on Good Morning America. 

Walkout 2 Learn tapped a number of youth-friendly technologies to organize students throughout the state. Participants were texted instructions on the day of the protest, for example, and will be kept up to date on the group’s work via a Slack channel. Those who independently complete the online Black history class will earn a certification to put on college applications.
“Don’t worry,” , “if your school threatens to punish you, we have lawyers and politicians who will support you.”

In February, 16-year-old junior Elijah Lopez got an unusual invitation from his Washington, D.C., high school, . Members of its executive leadership team were planning their spring retreat in March. They contacted Elijah about inviting students to participate for the first time.

“They wanted student perspective,” he explained. “Ask questions of the students, get some feedback, and then make their decision based on our answers.”

Elijah was already a student representative, meaning he attends weekly meetings with WLA’s executive director, principal and other senior leaders to discuss future plans. At his suggestion, two more juniors active in student government were invited to the retreat virtually. 

The students made concrete suggestions. They persuaded WLA leadership to train more students in peer mediation and helped everyone agree that shutting the doors for entry after a certain hour to reduce tardiness would do more harm than good. They said attendance could improve (after dropping during the pandemic) if more students feel a sense of belonging. Student Autumn Brown explained how some students don’t like being called on by teachers.

“They don’t feel comfortable being called out and speaking in front of big crowds,” the 16-year-old said. “So I feel like when a teacher can just come to the student one-on-one and not, like, put the student on the spot, then it makes the student more comfortable.”

WLA has been emphasizing — one of six research-based XQ — since opening in 2016 as an XQ Super School. The public charter school of about 390 students included students and teachers when it to create an ELA curriculum in 2018 that’s now used in high schools around the country. 

“What we want is to not just have the sense of students co-leading with us, but actually leading adults,” Principal Eric Collazo said. He added that educators are often hesitant to include students, even though there are many benefits. “What we’ve found is in instances where you do release that responsibility to the students, you actually see them start to put into practice or apply the skills that we want to see — not only in high school but beyond in their college or career pathways.”&�Բ�����;

Student voice is one of many ways to rethink the high school experience. Learn more with the XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month.

This is how student voice leads to , another XQ design principle. Students who are engaged in school are 2.5 times more likely to get excellent grades and to do well in school overall, compared with their most disengaged peers, according to . 

Ensuring students feel heard is core to all XQ schools and partnerships, including those with the , , , and XQ’s sponsorship of the podcast . Unfortunately, too many students seemed dissatisfied with school even before the pandemic. In 2017, finding only one out of three middle and high school students rated their school culture positively. There are many ways, as laid out here, schools can improve their culture by creating more room for student voice — so long as they’re committed to listening.

Surveys and Focus Groups Can Produce ‘a Really Important Starting Point’

Many schools use surveys, but there are to this approach. When surveys superficially ask, “What do you think of schools?” The responses are often just about school lunches and bathroom quality, said Adam Fletcher, director of , which provides training tools and technical assistance to K-12 schools. That’s why, he said, surveys or focus groups must go deeper. 

At WLA, students said their school uses anonymous surveys with pointed questions like, “Who is the staff member you feel most connected to?” or “How can we help support you to be a better student?” 

Zachary Clifton, a member of the , said it’s also important to hear from a wide variety of students. He’s heavily involved in extracurricular activities at Corbin High School and has no issue talking to adults at his school. “I feel like that has given me more credibility to where my voice is heard more often than others,” he said. “But as you know, that’s not how democracy works.”

Surveys and focus groups can “produce information about students’ perceptions of their schools that are a really important starting point,” said Anne Mackinnon, a senior advisor at XQ who’s written toolkits for schools to include student voice. She said educators should look for whether there’s mutual trust between students and adults. Then, they need to authentically bring students into school decision-making to create , another XQ design principle. Feedback from students at Elizabethton High School in Tennessee, for example, led the district’s only high school to hire more counselors. 

The Institution of Student Journalism Empowers Students

High school journalism programs give teens a sense of agency by enabling them to explore their interests and share what they find with the larger community. The recent revealed how . The challenge was conducted by PBS NewsHour in partnership with WETA Well Beings campaign and XQ. You can see the winners . won two awards, including one for the below video report investigating why the district school has no windows and the impact that has on learning. 

Students at the Frederick V. Pankow Center in Clinton Township, Michigan, won with a video report on why career and technical education feels engaging.

Harness Student Government’s Power Potential

Student governments should tackle much more than proms and homecomings. These bodies can . The XQ school in New Orleans, which opened in 2018, didn’t have a chance to form a student government because its founding class spent so much time in remote learning. Last year, students proposed a student union with representatives from every grade level. Emery Kaczmarek Johnson, now a senior, said he and the other reps drafted a Bill of Rights and worked together, “writing and discussing with staff on exactly where the line was drawn for things like student confidentiality and privacy, late assignment policies, cell phone usage and bathroom break lengths.”

The small charter school’s founding leader, Sunny Dawn Summers, said these conversations led to a serious discussion about which rules had been poorly enforced, which rules had not yet been put in writing and which ones were more about professional practices. The student handbook and internal policies were updated. “We refined our professional development training for staff and we ultimately created a trauma-informed culture guide that is the basis for how we talk to and work with kids as a school,” she said. 

The student union didn’t happen as planned but Summers said a student government is now in formation. But just the existence of the organization isn’t enough, she said, as school leadership support is critical: “It doesn’t survive if just one adult is interested.”&�Բ�����;

Engage Students in the Staff Hiring Process

New Harmony High has never hired a staff member without student input. “It’s one of the most beautiful free things you can do that provides a lot of student buy-in for new staff members and gives staff members an accurate representation of who they’re going to teach,” Summers said. 

Interviews are conducted by three of New Harmony High’s 16 student ambassadors. Summers said they typically ask questions about special education and classroom management, as well as what the applicant does for fun plus one secret question.

But not all district schools or charters are allowed, based on local human resources policies, to involve students in prospective staff interviews.

Give Students a Voting Seat on School Boards

Students can serve in a variety of roles on local and state school boards. Fletcher, of SoundOut, where they have voting power and where their roles are much more limited. He said Boston is particularly progressive because members of its decide on education policy. Maryland allows students to . Philadelphia allowed high school students to serve on its school board in 2018. 

Ilana Drake, a Vanderbilt University student who served on the New York City Department of Education Chancellor’s Student Advisory Council and the Manhattan Borough Student Advisory Council, said being on these boards made a difference. “Students were able to share their varying experiences with regard to education during COVID-19. My peers and I were able to think about restructuring education and how policies could impact outcomes.”

Clifton said the Kentucky Student Voice Team is lobbying the state legislature to “mandate student membership on school boards” in all Kentucky districts. Students can inform education policy in other ways. Rhode Island in meetings that led to new graduation requirements through its work with XQ.

Student Voice and Academics

Today’s high school students are growing up in challenging times. They’ve been trained since childhood on how to respond to active shooters, and they spent critical developmental years going to school during a pandemic. They also have more access to information than any other generation. Fletcher said that’s changed how this generation thinks about education.

“They want better learning and teaching and leadership in schools,” he said. “Students know that now. And they’re using language around mental health, and they’re using language around pedagogy. Students, themselves, being able to say, ‘I want interactive learning.’”

that students perform better academically, forge stronger relationships with their peers, and feel safer and more prepared for life when they’re in schools that prioritize the integration of social, emotional and academic development.

The students who attended WLA’s executive leadership retreat this year believe opportunities like this make a difference. “I did slack a little bit when I wasn’t involved in school,” Elijah said, adding that his academic performance went up since becoming a student representative and taking school more seriously. His principal agrees there’s a connection. 

“If students feel a sense of belonging, then all other things fall into place,” Collazo said. “You’ll feel more connected with the teacher and you’ll also feel more connected to doing the things that need to get done in order to excel for yourself and for others.”

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school with student voice? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Beth Fertig is senior education editor at the XQ Institute, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving U.S. high schools. She was previously an award-winning veteran journalist at the New York City public radio station WNYC, and was a regular contributor to NPR’s news programs.

Central Falls, Rhode Island 

It was the first day of the 2021 fall semester and Ajah Johnson could not believe what her teachers were telling her. By the end of the course, the instructors said, she and her peers would get to choose how to spend $10,000 to upgrade their school however they decided was best.

“I thought it was a lie,” Johnson said, figuring the classroom exercise involved make-believe money. “There’s no way they’re giving us $10,000.”

But to her delight, the cash was real.

Over the following months, she and her peers received lessons in budgeting, survey techniques and local government, then eventually designed proposals for how to allocate the money. It was the first time Johnson, who grew up in Virginia and had moved to Rhode Island the previous year, ever remembers getting a say in how her school was run.

“I feel like I got to make an impact,” she said. “We felt like we were valued.”

The then-high school junior didn’t know it, but her efforts were feeding into a wider movement revolutionizing democratic engagement far beyond her campus.

The elective, first offered in 2019, has served as proof-of-concept in Central Falls for a process called participatory budgeting, which gives stakeholders a direct say in how public funds are spent. Since then, the model has spread throughout the city and is beginning to take hold statewide.

“[The class] has triggered a lot,” said City Council President Jessica Vega, who helped launch the elective. 

She made sure local officials knew how successful the course was, inviting them to the school’s voting day at the end of the semester. Thanks to a partnership with the Secretary of State’s office, students selected a winning project — new bathroom mirrors to replace ones a teacher said resembled “tin foil” — by casting customized ballots using official voting machines.

“Folks in power in that room came in and saw that. It helped them say, ‘OK, this does work.’ So we were able to expand and start thinking about what a citywide process looks like,” the council president said.

In 2020, when the school district received federal COVID relief dollars, the superintendent earmarked $100,000 for community members to allocate using the same method of direct democracy. After a months-long process, voters decided to invest the full sum into boosting the district’s afterschool learning programs.

Then again in 2021, the City Council set aside $50,000 for elderly and disabled people to choose how to make accessibility upgrades. 

Now, the Rhode Island Department of Health is using a similar tactic in Central Falls and two nearby cities, Providence and Pawtucket, allowing the communities to decide by vote how to spend a collective total of nearly $1.4 million to reduce health care disparities.

“The local success of participatory budgeting in Central Falls was a very encouraging example,” Department of Health spokesperson Annemarie Beardsworth wrote in an email.

Patricia Martinez, the school district’s chief equity officer, marvels at the swift progress.

“It’s really taken on a life of its own,” she said. “It’s a new wave of democracy, especially for underserved BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities.”

Hearing student voices

Over two-thirds of Central Falls’s 22,500 residents are Latino and 35% were born in another country. Some 45% of students in the district are classified as multilingual learners. At roughly one square mile in area, it’s Rhode Island’s smallest and most densely populated city. By measures of income, it’s the most impoverished metro area in the state.

However, by the less tangible measure of social cohesion, there’s an unmistakable richness to the community. Even on brisk days, neighbors lean over porch railings to chat with passersby; the receptionist in the district office calls the person on the other line “darling.”

The community’s interconnectedness has been key to the success of the participatory budgeting course, said Pam Jennings, who co-teaches the elective and whom City Council President Vega calls the “PB queen.” Members of the community are happy to volunteer their time to work with the class, which relies heavily on guest speakers, she said.

As students began brainstorming their projects and speaking to adults in the school about the issues they thought needed fixing — shabby gym equipment or lackluster cafeteria options, for example — a miraculous thing happened, Jennings and her co-teacher Emmanuel Ramos observed.

“As soon as students started making noise about things they wanted to see fixed, things started to get fixed,” Ramos said. Adults in the building heard what students were saying and responded.

Fresh new basketballs appeared in the gym, a salad bar popped up at lunch and the office supply company W.B. Mason offered to donate new furniture for the library, he said.

That’s actually a design feature of the model, explained Brown University education professor Jonathan Collins, who studies direct democracy in schools.

“The interesting thing about participatory budgeting is that the deeper you get into it, the more you quickly realize, it is not about the money,” he said. “[The process] is a tool that can really create and strengthen your civic infrastructure.”

Collins led an of the district’s decision to let community members allocate the $100,000 in COVID relief funding. After that deliberation, the predominantly low-income Latino participants reported double-digit increases in their likelihood to voice concerns to a local official, he found.

The results back up his , which showed that when school districts create meaningful opportunities for parents to make their voices heard, they’re more likely to speak up about issues related to their children’s education. 

For students more broadly, when they perceive their perspectives to be heard and reflected in school policy decisions, it can have a positive impact on academic outcomes like grades and attendance, according to a March 2022 published by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Northwestern University.

Central Falls Principal Robert McCarthy recognized the participatory budgeting elective course as an opportunity to, quite literally, put his money where his mouth was on empowering students.

“Always kids are like, ‘You say that we have a voice, but what does that really mean?’” he said. “When you’re putting $10,000 behind something … it definitely speaks to this notion of, you have some power, but with power comes responsibility.”

‘My class did this’

The participatory budgeting model first launched in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It quickly spread to over 100 cities in the country, helping in those metropolitan areas. Several including Chicago, Seattle and New York have since employed the process and in San Jose, California; Phoenix, Arizona and Brooklyn, New York have brought the idea directly to students.

Only Central Falls, however, has ever made the process into a full-blown course offered within the school day, believes Jennings, who formerly worked for the a nonprofit organization that works to expand the model in the U.S. and Canada.

Other school districts that have used participatory budgeting typically hold sessions after school, which can exclude students who have evening jobs, athletics or child care responsibilities, she points out. As a semester-long, credit-bearing elective, the Central Falls class, on the other hand, has reflected the diversity of the school’s student body. 

“It’s been a very wide mix of students, including students from all different grades, too,” Jennings said. “The class is for everyone. Students of every ability, we can find a niche for them.”

On the first day, students try out a mini-version of their larger mission, collectively choosing how to use $50 to spruce up their classroom. Then, over the ensuing weeks, they receive training in budgeting tactics, survey techniques and then finally, develop project proposals. The class culminates in a school-wide vote to select a winning idea from among a dozen total proposals. 

Though the Omicron wave forced last year’s election online, the last live vote in the 2019-20 school year brought more than three-quarters of the roughly 800-person student body to the gym to cast ballots, Jennings said. This year’s live vote will take place in the spring.

Johnson, who took the course last year, said the experience was “once in a lifetime” and taught her several lessons she didn’t expect, like financial planning and what it takes to turn an idea into a reality.

“I learned so many different things about loans and investments,” she said. “A lot of the things that I learned in that class were brand new.”

Her group’s project sought to improve furniture in the library where previously, students would sit on the floor because the chairs were so uncomfortable, she said. Though her proposal came in second, $3,000 was left over from the winning project — a facelift for the cafeteria. That sum coupled with the W.B. Mason donation has revamped the library considerably, in her estimation.

Seeing the changes, the high school senior relishes the new sense of ownership she feels over her campus. Students linger in the library now, which they never used to do, she said, and the cafeteria has a new monitor to display the lunch options.

“I see it everyday. When I walk in the lunchroom, like, ‘Oh, my class did this.’ When I walk in [the library], I’m like, ‘My class did this.’ I see it every single day.”

Implementing the model

Though there’s now momentum behind the elective course in Central Falls, Jennings recognizes that getting participatory budgeting off the ground can be a difficult task.

“The hardest part is finding the pot of money,” she said. 

In 2019-20, the school district agreed to dedicate $5,000, with the other half coming from a private donor. In 2021-22, after losing a year to the pandemic, the full $10,000 budget came from outside fundraising, as dozens of community members pitched in. That allowed the district to save cash, which, in addition to COVID stimulus money the superintendent earmarked for the elective, means the course is now funded several years out, said Tatiana Baena, the district’s grant director.

“We’re trying to really sustain the program and make sure that it can be ongoing,” she said.

But even with the funds secured, students who dream of pricey upgrades like a new basketball court or state-of-the-art air conditioning get tough lessons in economics, said Ramos, the co-teacher.

“Ten thousand dollars, ultimately, it’s not that much,” he said.

But over time, the impact will compound, predicts Collins, who is closely following the efforts from nearby Providence.

“With the course, every year, there’s a new group of students who are coming in and gaining these skills and gaining this perspective and leaving with this feeling of empowerment,” observes the Brown University researcher. 

“In Central Falls in, maybe it’s 10 years, maybe it’s 20 years, if they keep doing this, you’re going to look up and you’re going to realize like, ‘Oh, wait, they’ve been able to solve some really, really major problems because they have this whole civic infrastructure.’ ”

And for some residents, the changes have been more immediate.

Baena, the district’s grants director who also serves as an elected councilwoman, helped spearhead the city’s recent participatory budgeting effort. The steering committee, she explained, felt it was important that “anyone in the community could have an opinion” and thus decided all residents could cast a ballot, regardless of whether they were registered state voters. One person from voting day in June stands out in her memory.

The woman was elderly and had lived in Central Falls for decades, Baena said, but as an undocumented immigrant, she had never voted in a U.S. election. After filling out the bubble sheet, she held the paper out to the councilwoman.

“You put it in the scanner,” the elderly woman asked Baena.

“No, no, no, señora,” Baena responded. “I want you to know how this feels. You’re going to put it into the scanner.”

The woman fed her ballot, printed by the Secretary of State’s office, into the official voting machine. Smiling, she turned back to her councilwoman.

“Here, my voice matters.”

Correction: Story was changed to correct the spelling of Emmanuel Ramos’s name.