Education – The Conversation

Schools are increasingly telling students they must put their phones away – Ohio’s example shows mixed results following new bans

2026-02-04T13:47:04Z

Schools with phone bans are often giving students the option of placing their devices in a locked case or a box. Hill Street Studios/iStock/Getty Images

Cellphones are everywhere – including, until recently, in schools.

Since 2023, 29 states, including New York, Vermont, Florida and Texas, have passed laws that require K-12 public schools to enforce bans or strict limits on students using their cellphones on campus.

Another 10 states have passed other measures that require local school districts to take some kind of action on cellphone usage.

Approximately 77% of public schools now forbid students from having their phones out during class – an increase from the 66% of schools that forbade students from using phones at school in 2015.

Schools across the country are finding different ways to enforce no-phone policies. Some schools have students lock their phones in pouches that only open at the end of the day. Others use simple classroom bins or lockers.

Some research shows that spending a lot of time looking at phones instead of people’s faces can make it harder for children and teenagers to get the basic human skills they need for developing and maintaining friendships and other relationships.

As a scholar of educational leadership, I believe that school is about more than just classes – it’s where young people learn how to get along with others. When phones are put away, students actually start looking at each other and talking again. School hallways and the lunchroom turn into spaces where students learn to resolve conflicts face-to-face and make human connections.

A high school senior shows how to unlock a magnetic pouch that holds her smartphone at University High School Charter in Los Angeles in March 2025. Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Putting phones away in Ohio

Ohio is an example of a state that has clamped down on students’ cellphone usage over the past 18 months.

In May 2024, Ohio went from suggesting some cellphone guidelines for different schools to adopt to requiring that all public districts limit students’ phone use during class. School districts could choose to allow phones at lunch or between classes.

Many schools began using lockable pouches, plastic bins or lockers to keep phones out of sight. They still needed to allow some students to have phones for medical reasons, like monitoring blood sugar on an app.

Ohio then adopted an even stricter cellphone use policy in 2025. This new law required all Ohio public school boards to adopt policies by Jan. 1, 2026, that prohibit phone use during the entire school day, including lunch and the time between classes.

A needed break

In the fall of 2025, I surveyed 13 Ohio public school principals from rural, urban and suburban districts. Principals reported that the partial phone bans increased students’ social interactions and reduced peer conflicts:

• 62% of principals described more verbal, face-to-face socializing during recess, at lunch time and between classes.

• 68% noted that students can stay on one task for more than 20 minutes without seeking a quick digital break.

• 72% observed a shift from heads-down scrolling to active conversation in common areas such as the cafeteria.

• 61% reported fewer online social conflicts spilling over into the classroom.

A tension for students

In late January 2026, I also surveyed and spoke with 18 Ohio high school students about the new phone bans in place at their schools as part of research that has not yet been published.

Their responses revealed a complex tension between understanding the need for the phone ban and feeling a significant loss of personal safety and autonomy.

A few students said they felt safe knowing a phone in the main office is available for emergencies.

Some students said they felt anxious about not being reachable if there is an emergency – like if a relative were in an accident, or if the younger siblings they care for required their help.

Finally, 13 out of 18 students argued that they should be learning the self-discipline required to balance technology with focus. Students said that phone bans made them feel as though they were children who could not make responsible decisions – rather than young adults preparing for professional environments.

Some students also said that not having their phones made it impossible to fill out college and scholarship applications during the school day, since many application systems require multifactor authentication and require phones to log in.

An eighth grader unlocks her cellphone from a pouch at Mark Twain Middle School in Alexandria, Va., in March 2025. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Lessons from Ohio

Rules are more likely to be respected when students feel they have a voice in the boundaries that affect their daily lives. I think that school leaders could address students’ safety and security concerns in different ways, including by establishing a dedicated family emergency hotline that people can call.

Principals could designate supervised areas where more senior high school students can briefly use their phones for multifactor authentication. School leaders could also offer a specific time window for students to check messages on their phones, or an easy way for the school’s main office to deliver them messages from family.

While these insights from Ohio students and principals offer a helpful starting point, they are just one part of a much larger conversation.

More research is needed to see how these bans affect different types of schools and communities across multiple states. Because every district is different, what works in one town might cause unexpected challenges in another. By continuing to study these effects and listening to everyone involved, especially the students, researchers like myself can figure out how to keep classrooms focused and students interacting without making students feel less safe or less prepared for the adult world.

Corinne Brion does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Life isn’t all diamonds – money and fame don’t shield the many ‘Real Housewives’ facing criminal charges

2026-02-02T13:29:40Z

Jen Shah, a cast member of the "Real Housewives" series, leaves a Manhattan federal court in January 2023 after receiving a 6½-year sentence for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Gotham/GC Images

“The Real Housewives” reality TV series, which showcases the lives of a rotating cast of wealthy women in 11 cities in the U.S. and places in several other countries, is famous for its characters’ over-the-top drama and messy personal antics.

But there are also useful lessons that the characters’ lives and frequent run-ins with the law offer to casual observers and criminology students alike.

I developed the idea for The Real Housewives of Criminology course when I heard a story on NPR in 2023 about how the Bravo Network franchise was becoming more like a true-crime TV series.

Jen Shah, a cast member from “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” had recently been sentenced to six years in federal prison for her role in a nationwide telemarketing scheme – but she wasn’t the only one on the show who met such a fate.

Many people who appear on “Housewives” share a real-life penchant for crime – from driving-under-the-influence charges and theft to fraud and assault.

During any given episode, viewers may find “Housewives” stars and their families navigating the fallout – from court dates to public shaming.

I realized that these scenes illustrate core concepts from criminal justice theory and practice as well as any textbook.

A window into the course

The course examines the criminal cases of the “Housewives” and compares them to those of the general public.

Students discuss how factors such as social class, age and race can impact people’s experiences with the justice system. At the same time, they come to understand that factors such as how serious a crime is, a person’s criminal history and the harm done to victims tend to drive case outcomes more than any other factor.

I believe that this course is especially relevant now, because it is increasingly common for undergraduate students to consume news about crime and punishment from streaming platforms and social media.

It seems there is a new “Housewife” arrest every several months, which brings with it new circumstances and a new case study to dissect.

Critical lessons

One key takeaway from the course is that there are many meaningful differences – and similarities – between the criminal cases shown in “Housewives” and those of most people.

While money and power can often go a long way in fighting a criminal conviction, sometimes they fall short when the harm to victims or society is too great, or the pattern of behavior is too obvious.

Many “Housewives” stars and their families have learned this lesson the hard way.

Read along

This course requires students to view footage from “The Real Housewives,” read peer-reviewed criminological research, and listen to podcast episodes from “The Bravo Docket.”

We even read book chapters straight from some of the Housewives’ memoirs. All of this culminates in a “Final Reunion,” meaning a final verbal exam for students, in which they embody one of the “Housewives” cast members and answer questions from me – dressed as host Andy Cohen – about their criminal cases.

Teresa Giudice, right, poses with others in ‘The Real Housewives of New Jersey’ cast in April 2013. She is among the cast members who have faced criminal charges. Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Real takeaways

While the court of public opinion tends to quickly draw conclusions from limited information, my honors students learn that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to the U.S. justice system.

The Real Housewives of Criminology helps them to navigate the nuance beneath the headlines about popular crime news stories, in and beyond the “Bravosphere.”

C. Clare Strange does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Short on resources, special educators are using AI – with little knowledge of the effects

2026-01-30T13:29:22Z

In special education in the U.S., funding is scarce and personnel shortages are pervasive, leaving many school districts struggling to hire qualified and willing practitioners.

Amid these long-standing challenges, there is rising interest in using artificial intelligence tools to help close some of the gaps that districts currently face and lower labor costs.

Over 7 million children receive federally funded entitlements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees students access to instruction tailored to their unique physical and psychological needs, as well as legal processes that allow families to negotiate support. Special education involves a range of professionals, including rehabilitation specialists, speech-language pathologists and classroom teaching assistants. But these specialists are in short supply, despite the proven need for their services.

As an associate professor in special education who works with AI, I see its potential and its pitfalls. While AI systems may be able to reduce administrative burdens, deliver expert guidance and help overwhelmed professionals manage their caseloads, they can also present ethical challenges – ranging from machine bias to broader issues of trust in automated systems. They also risk amplifying existing problems with how special ed services are delivered.

Yet some in the field are opting to test out AI tools, rather than waiting for a perfect solution.

A faster IEP, but how individualized?

AI is already shaping special education planning, personnel preparation and assessment.

One example is the individualized education program, or IEP, the primary instrument for guiding which services a child receives. An IEP draws on a range of assessments and other data to describe a child’s strengths, determine their needs and set measurable goals. Every part of this process depends on trained professionals.

But persistent workforce shortages mean districts often struggle to complete assessments, update plans and integrate input from parents. Most districts develop IEPs using software that requires practitioners to choose from a generalized set of rote responses or options, leading to a level of standardization that can fail to meet a child’s true individual needs.

Preliminary research has shown that large language models such as ChatGPT can be adept at generating key special education documents such as IEPs by drawing on multiple data sources, including information from students and families. Chatbots that can quickly craft IEPs could potentially help special education practitioners better meet the needs of individual children and their families. Some professional organizations in special education have even encouraged educators to use AI for documents such as lesson plans.

Training and diagnosing disabilities

There is also potential for AI systems to help support professional training and development. My own work on personnel development combines several AI applications with virtual reality to enable practitioners to rehearse instructional routines before working directly with children. Here, AI can function as a practical extension of existing training models, offering repeated practice and structured support in ways that are difficult to sustain with limited personnel.

Some districts have begun using AI for assessments, which can involve a range of academic, cognitive and medical evaluations. AI applications that pair automatic speech recognition and language processing are now being employed in computer-mediated oral reading assessments to score tests of student reading ability.

Practitioners often struggle to make sense of the volume of data that schools collect. AI-driven machine learning tools also can help here, by identifying patterns that may not be immediately visible to educators for evaluation or instructional decision-making. Such support may be especially useful in diagnosing disabilities such as autism or learning disabilities, where masking, variable presentation and incomplete histories can make interpretation difficult. My ongoing research shows that current AI can make predictions based on data likely to be available in some districts.

Privacy and trust concerns

There are serious ethical – and practical – questions about these AI-supported interventions, ranging from risks to students’ privacy to machine bias and deeper issues tied to family trust. Some hinge on the question of whether or not AI systems can deliver services that truly comply with existing law.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires nondiscriminatory methods of evaluating disabilities to avoid inappropriately identifying students for services or neglecting to serve those who qualify. And the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act explicitly protects students’ data privacy and the rights of parents to access and hold their children’s data.

What happens if an AI system uses biased data or methods to generate a recommendation for a child? What if a child’s data is misused or leaked by an AI system? Using AI systems to perform some of the functions described above puts families in a position where they are expected to put their faith not only in their school district and its special education personnel, but also in commercial AI systems, the inner workings of which are largely inscrutable.

These ethical qualms are hardly unique to special ed; many have been raised in other fields and addressed by early-adopters. For example, while automatic speech recognition, or ASR, systems have struggled to accurately assess accented English, many vendors now train their systems to accommodate specific ethnic and regional accents.

But ongoing research work suggests that some ASR systems are limited in their capacity to accommodate speech differences associated with disabilities, account for classroom noise, and distinguish between different voices. While these issues may be addressed through technical improvement in the future, they are consequential at present.

Embedded bias

At first glance, machine learning models might appear to improve on traditional clinical decision-making. Yet AI models must be trained on existing data, meaning their decisions may continue to reflect long-standing biases in how disabilities have been identified.

Indeed, research has shown that AI systems are routinely hobbled by biases within both training data and system design. AI models can also introduce new biases, either by missing subtle information revealed during in-person evaluations or by overrepresenting characteristics of groups included in the training data.

Such concerns, defenders might argue, are addressed by safeguards already embedded in federal law. Families have considerable latitude in what they agree to, and can opt for alternatives, provided they are aware they can direct the IEP process.

By a similar token, using AI tools to build IEPs or lessons may seem like an obvious improvement over underdeveloped or perfunctory plans. Yet true individualization would require feeding protected data into large language models, which could violate privacy regulations. And while AI applications can readily produce better-looking IEPs and other paperwork, this does not necessarily result in improved services.

Filling the gap

Indeed, it is not yet clear whether AI provides a standard of care equivalent to the high-quality, conventional treatment to which children with disabilities are entitled under federal law.

The Supreme Court in 2017 rejected the notion that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act merely entitles students to trivial, “de minimis” progress, which weakens one of the primary rationales for pursuing AI – that it can meet a minimum standard of care and practice. And since AI really has not been empirically evaluated at scale, it has not been proved that it adequately meets the low bar of simply improving beyond the flawed status quo.

But this does not change the reality of limited resources. For better or worse, AI is already being used to fill the gap between what the law requires and what the system actually provides.

Seth King does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Even when people’s rights are ignored, understanding the law can keep protesters engaged

2026-01-29T13:17:48Z

A group of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters march in downtown Minneapolis on Jan. 27, 2026. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

There’s been a rise of know-your-rights training sessions in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics. This has included local public officials and organizations sharing online information over the past few months about what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agents knock on your door, among other scenarios that involve immigration law enforcement.

Knowledge is power, the adage goes. But learning the letter of the law has its limits, legal rights experts have noted, if law enforcement officers do not follow the law. The Associated Press reported on Jan. 21, 2026, that ICE distributed an internal memo authorizing ICE officers to forcibly enter someone’s private home with only an administrative warrant – not one signed by a judge, as the Fourth Amendment requires.

Amy Lieberman, education editor for The Conversation U.S., spoke with Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a scholar of social movements and protest policing, to understand the role education can play in Minnesota’s ongoing anti-ICE protests and how legal training’s limits are becoming clear.

A ‘know your rights’ sign in Spanish is posted outside of a cafe in Chicago in November 2025. Erin Hooley/Associated Press

What role is education playing in fueling Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests?

I think it is a really unique moment. There is discussion in the news nationwide about legal observing and know-your-rights training sessions. This kind of legal support and education has been part of social movements for a long time, but have never, perhaps, been in the spotlight on the level that they are right now after the January killings of ICE observers Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

A coordinated way of offering legal support to protesters grew out of 1960s and ‘70s civil rights protests. Legal support for protesters became even more organized during the student-led anti-Vietnam War movement around this same time. The first time there was an organized, mass legal defense of protesters was for the Stop the Draft Week in 1967, when a group of lawyers and law students began working in coordination with activists.

Since then, community organizers, lawyers, law students and others have developed strategies for offering legal support to protesters. That includes legal observers. Legal observers can be lawyers, law students or others trained not to protest, but to independently observe, take notes on and photograph or video incidents at protests, like law enforcement arresting or assaulting someone.

We see, over time, that the way people organize and offer legal support to protesters has become more and more sophisticated. More and more people have knowledge about their civic and legal rights. Other forms of legal support, such as jail and court solidarity, in which individual people who are arrested make collective decisions to support one another, have become more common.

Now, people are also learning about more than their First Amendment rights – they are learning about the rights of immigrants and of anyone who is interacting with ICE and Border Patrol officers. That intensifies the complexity of what people need to know.

Altogether, there is a complex system of legal support in place that has been shown to be very effective at preventing activists from disengaging after experiences of state repression.

What does your own research show regarding how education can shape protests?

In my own research, when activists had experiences of repression – when they were arrested at protests, as has happened in Minneapolis, or experienced police violence, like being sprayed with chemical irritants – legal education was a major determining factor on whether they continued to be involved in the protest movement.

Another deciding issue was whether or not protesters were being helped by pro bono lawyers or there were legal observers present to make protesters feel more confident going into a certain situation.

As people become more educated about their rights and more prepared for the potential risks of protesting, that can make them more confident about going to a protest in the first place and more likely to continue in that work.

We know that, in reality, the rights people learn about are not always respected, at protests or in other situations. So, it is one thing to say that you have a right to do something, like to protest, or not let ICE or Border Patrol agents into your home without a judicial warrant.

It is another thing in practice, especially in the current moment that we are in, in which immigration enforcement officers have increasingly shown disregard for people’s rights. But it is still important for people to be aware that those rights exist.

What role do legal observers play in influencing protest movements?

Legal observers can play a critical role in collecting independent, neutral information about law enforcement actions at protests that can be used if there is a civil suit or a criminal case coming out of a protest.

Legal observing can also, in theory, deter officers who are policing protests, since they know they are being watched and data is being collected on their actions, including potential rights violations.

People on Jan. 28, 2026, gather at a makeshift memorial where Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

How can education serve as a means of self-defense at protests?

Education is the most powerful weapon for people involved in protest movements – that is, knowledge and understanding of what their rights are as well as the risks. Equally important is collecting bail fund money before someone is actually arrested, having a network of people ready to do the work after a protest to defend arrested activists, and holding law enforcement officers accountable for violating people’s rights. Protesters or observers can then know that if they are arrested or injured by law enforcement officers, that people are already there ready to help them.

In my view, the level of disrespect that federal immigration officers are currently showing to people exercising their rights to protest and to film and otherwise monitor public officials is unprecedented. But it has always been the case that just because a legal right exists, it does not mean that it is followed by law enforcement or the government more broadly. Then, and now, it has always been organized groups of individuals who make those rights real through exercising them and working to hold those accountable who violate them.

Heidi Reynolds-Stenson receives funding from the William T. Grant Foundation.

There are long-lasting, negative effects for children like Liam Ramos who are detained, or watch their parents be deported

2026-01-28T13:30:28Z

Children hold signs on the porch of a house as protesters march in Minneapolis against Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Jan. 10, 2026. Octavio JONES/AFP via Getty Images

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy who is an asylum seeker, in Minneapolis on Jan. 20, 2026, the photos quickly became a flash point in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement activity.

In one image, a man wearing a black uniform holds onto a gray and red Spider-Man backpack that the worried-looking young boy, wearing a blue bunny hat with floppy ears, has on his back.

Meanwhile, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations near schools have become increasingly common over the past year, spreading from Texas to Maine. While some parents in Minnesota have set up patrols around schools, there are families choosing to keep their kids home for days or weeks.

We are scholars of migration and children and childhood adversity.

Our research shows that exposure to severe immigration enforcement experiences during childhood carries long-term, significant consequences: These children are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety in young adulthood.

People protest on Jan. 23, 2026, in Minneapolis and show signs referencing Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old child apprehended by immigration enforcement officers. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Why this matters

There is well-documented research showing how immigration enforcement has immediate negative effects on children and adults

Children whose immigrant parents are arrested, detained or deported often experience emotional and behavioral problems, including separation anxiety, school absenteeism, hyperactivity and other behavioral issues.

Yet, until recently, it has not been well understood how experiencing or being subjected to immigration enforcement actions affects children once they grow up to become adults.

That said, over three decades of research shows the clear links between traumatic childhood events and mental health problems in adulthood. Studies show, for example, that adults who experienced temporary separation from their parents as children are more likely to say they’ve experienced depression symptoms years later.

We decided to investigate whether a child being exposed to immigration enforcement actions – meaning the arrest of a parent, or detention of a close family member, for example – is associated with mental health problems among young adults who grew up in immigrant families.

How immigration enforcement unravels families

Our study first combined interviews and open-ended survey questions to define what it means to experience severe immigration enforcement during childhood.

We then examined the link between severe immigration enforcement actions and anxiety among 71 young adults – all U.S. citizens age 18 to 34 – who were raised in immigrant households in New York.

As children, all of these young adults witnessed or experienced the arrest, detention or deportation of an immigrant family member or a member of their communities. Three-quarters of the participants identified as Hispanic.

We analyzed our interviews to develop several criteria to determine what constitutes severe exposure to enforcement during childhood, considering factors like whether they witnessed a detention or arrest more than once, and how old they were when these experiences took place.

We found that approximately 26% of the survey participants – all of whom in this group were Hispanic, except one – had severe exposure to immigration enforcement actions during childhood. Not all of them had a parent who has been deported.

Some of these young people had relatives who had drawn-out cases in immigration court, or felt constant fear that their parents might be deported.

When we linked our interviews with survey data, our results were striking.

We found that young adults who experienced severe immigration enforcement actions as children were twice as likely to have anxiety, compared with young adults who did not have this experience when they were growing up.

Exposure to severe immigration enforcement actions as a child was not independently associated with depression as a young adult. But all the survey participants who said they were experiencing depression also reported anxiety symptoms – further evidence of a connection between severe immigration enforcement actions and anxiety among young people.

A father and child watch as U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and fellow agents conduct operations in Kenner, La., on Dec. 6, 2025. Adam Gray/AFP via Getty Images

Lasting impact of today’s policies

Many legal experts and political observers say that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics in Minneapolis and in other cities are designed to intimidate and instill fear among civilians.

Children are not immune to these tactics, either as witnesses or as targets.

Federal immigration officers deployed tear gas, for example, on students at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis on Jan. 8. Experiences like this constitute a major adverse childhood event, exposing children and adolescents to significant trauma.

We believe that we can learn from decades of adverse childhood experiences research, which clearly shows the link between childhood adversity and physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood.

The enforcement tactics ICE is using in Minnesota and other places in the U.S. today are likely, our research suggests, going to harm the next generation of U.S. citizens and residents.

As trauma researchers have long known, our bodies keep score over a lifetime. The question facing policymakers is not whether these enforcement tactics will cause lasting harm – our research suggests they would – but what human costs we, as a nation, are willing to bear.

Eunju Lee receives funding from Russel Sage Foundation (PI Dreby).

Joanna Dreby receives funding from Russell Sage Foundation

A more complete Latin American history, including centuries of US influence, helps students understand the complexities surrounding Nicolás Maduro’s arrest

2026-01-26T13:44:28Z

A woman shows a portrait of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during a demonstration in Caracas on Jan. 21, 2026. Pedro Mattey/AFP via Getty Images

Many of our college freshman students will have seen and read about the Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. military operation in Venezuela that culminated in the arrest of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. The U.S. has charged Maduro and Flores with conspiracy and drug trafficking. Maduro and Flores are imprisoned in New York City, awaiting trial.

Some freshmen this semester will likely say Maduro’s unusual arrest violates international law. Others may view it as a decisive step in the U.S.’s fight against narco-terrorism.

That’s in part because the U.S has no national curriculum, and high school history courses often rely on teachers’ discretion, even more so than in other content areas. This results in history being taught a lot of different ways across schools.

As scholars of Latin American history and history education in the U.S., we know that most American high school students learn about the ancient civilizations in Latin America and a few other key flash points in history.

But few, we suspect, will understand Maduro’s arrest as part of a long history of the U.S.’s interventions in Latin America, stretching back to the Monroe Doctrine in the 1800s. President James Monroe introduced this foreign policy in an 1823 speech, saying that the U.S. would not allow European colonization or interference in the Western Hemisphere.

Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad on Jan. 5, 2026. XNY/Star Max/Contributor via Getty Images

A partial, skewed history

In high school world history courses, teachers in the U.S. often rely on case studies and examples to indicate historical trends.

High school students are likely to learn about the Inca, Maya and Aztec civilizations as representatives of pre-Columbian Latin America. They read about Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés, who overthrew the Aztec empire, and Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Incas in the early 1500s.

They will learn about how most Latin American countries, including Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Guatemala, gained independence in the early 1800s.

Often, students learn about these countries’ fights for independence, with the case example of the Haitian Revolution. They may learn about Simón Bolívar, the grand Venezuelan military officer and liberator who played a decisive role in the independence movements of countries including Venezuela, Colombia and Bolivia.

Students also often learn about more recent eras, including the Cuban missile crisis, a dangerous tipping point between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that brought the world close to nuclear war in 1962.

But overall, in U.S. history courses the U.S. is typically the main character and Latin America is treated as a place where the U.S. exerts power.

An example of this narrative includes the U.S.’s failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban government in 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

What US high school students miss

It is no surprise that students who learned this version of Latin American history in high school would have many questions about Maduro’s recent arrest – including who the longtime leader is.

A fuller exposure to Latin American history would include, among other things, lessons about neoliberal capitalism, which has long shaped the politics, economies and societies of Latin America. This is a U.S.-government supported policy that promotes less internal government intervention and more free-market capitalism.

Even though most Latin American countries achieved independence just 30 to 40 years after the U.S., not all presidential administrations in the U.S. fully accepted these nations’ freedom.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt added an additional text called a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the U.S. could intervene in the internal affairs of any Latin American country in cases of wrongdoing.

By the late 1800s, the U.S. had conquered more than half of Mexico’s territory and annexed Puerto Rico. It also began occupying Cuba in 1898, after Spain lost the Spanish-American War and control over the island.

The U.S. militarily and politically then backed a 1903 revolution that gave Panama independence from Colombia. Panama’s independence led to a treaty that let the U.S. build and control the Panama Canal for nearly a century.

A political cartoon from 1898 criticizing American foreign policy shows Uncle Sam riding a bicycle with globes of the western and eastern hemispheres for wheels. Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images

A strong influence

Overall, the U.S. intervened in Latin America more than 40 times from 1898 to the mid-1990s.

Some of these interventions involved coups against democratically elected officials – including Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. These coups often led to civil wars or enduring military regimes that the U.S. claimed were necessary to fight the spread of communism.

Chile was then among the countries – including Argentina and Uruguay – that implemented economic policies in the 1970s that kept markets open to foreign businesses and governments, fostering dependence on wealthier nations.

Some Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, struggled financially in the 1990s.

The U.S. and international financial institutions gave conditional loans that promoted austerity – meaning raising taxes and cutting public spending – and market liberalization, which reduces governmental restrictions over an economy. These loans stabilized some economies in the short term, but also made other problems, such as inequality and debt, worse.

In the early 2000s, several countries, including Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia, elected left-leaning leaders who advocated for alternatives to this U.S.-backed economic policy. Ultimately, though, their reforms were often limited and not politically stable.

A more complete history

During a Jan. 4, 2026, press conference, President Donald Trump used a new term, the “Donroe Doctrine,” to describe his administration’s plans to claim dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

One day later, Vice President JD Vance doubled down: “This is in our neighborhood,” he said in an interview about Maduro’s capture. “In our neighborhood, the United States calls the shots. That’s the way it has always been. That’s the way it is again under the president’s leadership.”

Learning a more complete version of Latin American history in high school won’t prevent our college students from bringing questions to class about the U.S.’s capture of Maduro, and why Trump has said the U.S. will “run” Venezuela.

But this knowledge might help our students ask more complex, nuanced questions, such as whom national security strategies actually benefit the most.

Understanding Latin America is not merely a requirement for interpreting headlines about Venezuela but a prerequisite for Americans to understand themselves and their place in the world.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

US hospitality and tourism professors don’t mirror the demographics of the industry they serve

2026-01-26T13:36:34Z

Tourists are diverse. Are tourism professors? Grant Baldwin/Getty Images

White and male professors continue to dominate U.S. hospitality and tourism education programs, our new research has found, even as the industry is growing increasingly diverse. This imbalance raises questions about who shapes the future of hospitality and whose voices are left out of the conversation.

Our analysis of 862 faculty members across 57 of the top U.S. college hospitality programs found that nearly three-quarters of these professors were white, and more than half were male. White men alone represented 43.5% of all faculty, showing persistent overrepresentation.

By comparison, only 3.7% of faculty identified as Black, far below the 14.4% share of the U.S. population that identifies as Black. Asian faculty accounted for 22.5% – significantly more than the Asian share of the U.S. population, with slightly more Asian women than men represented.

Because publicly available data did not allow us to reliably identify faculty from Hispanic or Indigenous backgrounds, our analysis focuses on representation among Black and Asian professors.

Our findings are based on a review of online faculty directories for every U.S. hospitality and tourism program included in the Academic Ranking of World Universities for 2020. We coded each faculty member by gender, race and academic rank using publicly available information gathered through university websites, LinkedIn and other professional profiles.

While this approach cannot capture the full complexity of individual identity, it reflects how representation is typically perceived by students and prospective faculty. For example, when a student browses a university’s website or sits in a classroom, they notice who looks like them and who does not.

Our results point to a stark imbalance. The people teaching, researching and preparing the next generation of hospitality leaders do not mirror the demographics of either the workforce or the student population.

Despite growing institutional attention to fairness and belonging across higher education, the tourism and hospitality field has been slow to evolve.

Why it matters

Representation in higher education isn’t just a matter of fairness. It affects student outcomes and the long-term sustainability of the field. Researchers have found that when students see role models who share their racial or ethnic identity, they report stronger connections to their academic community, higher retention rates and greater academic confidence.

For hospitality programs, which emphasize service, empathy and cultural understanding, these effects are especially meaningful. The hospitality workforce is one of the most diverse in the United States, spanning global hotels, restaurants, events and tourism operations. Yet the lack of variety among those teaching hospitality sends a conflicting message. Diversity is valued in the workforce, but it remains underrepresented in the classrooms training future leaders.

Major employers such as Marriott, Hyatt and IHG have invested heavily in programs that promote access and belonging, creating leadership pipelines for underrepresented groups. Meanwhile, academic programs that prepare these future leaders have not made comparable progress.

The absence of representation among hospitality and tourism academia also shapes the kinds of research questions that get asked. When faculty from underrepresented backgrounds are missing, issues such as racialized guest experiences, workplace bias and equitable career advancement may be overlooked.

What still isn’t known

Our study provides a snapshot, rather than a complete picture of faculty representation in U.S. hospitality and tourism programs. Because the sample focused on research-intensive universities, it excluded many historically Black universities and teaching-focused institutions, which may have more professors of color.

The research also relied on publicly available photographs and institutional profiles to identify race and gender. While this method mirrors how students visually perceive representation, it cannot fully capture multiethnic or intersectional identities.

We believe that future studies should track how faculty composition evolves over time and explore the lived experiences of educators from underrepresented backgrounds. Understanding the barriers that prevent these scholars from entering or staying in academia is essential for creating environments where all faculty can thrive.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Abigail Foster, admissions specialist at the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law, contributed to this article.

When it comes to developing policies on AI in K-12, schools are largely on their own

2026-01-22T13:32:51Z

Generative artificial intelligence technology is rapidly reshaping education in unprecedented ways. With its potential benefits and risks, K-12 schools are actively trying to adapt teaching and learning.

But as schools seek to navigate into the age of generative AI, there’s a challenge: Schools are operating in a policy vacuum. While a number of states offer guidance on AI, only a couple of states require local schools to form specific policies, even as teachers, students and school leaders continue to use generative AI in countless new ways. As a policymaker noted in a survey, “You have policy and what’s actually happening in the classrooms – those are two very different things.”

As part of my lab’s research on AI and education policy, I conducted a survey in late 2025 with members of the National Association of State Boards of Education, the only nonprofit dedicated solely to helping state boards advance equity and excellence in public education. The survey of the association’s members reflects how education policy is typically formed through dynamic interactions across national, state and local levels, rather than being dictated by a single source.

But even in the absence of hard-and-fast rules and guardrails on how AI can be used in schools, education policymakers identified a number of ethical concerns raised by the technology’s spread, including student safety, data privacy and negative impacts on student learning.

They also expressed concerns over industry influence and that schools will later be charged by technology providers for large language model-based tools that are currently free. Others report that administrators in their state are very concerned about deepfakes: “What happens when a student deepfakes my voice and sends it out to cancel school or bomb threat?”

At the same time, policymakers said teaching students to use AI technology to their benefit remains a priority.

Local actions dominate

Although chatbots have been widely available for more than three years, the survey revealed that states are in the early stages of addressing generative AI, with most yet to implement official policies. While many states are providing guidance or tool kits, or are starting to write state-level policies, local decisions dominate the landscape, with each school district primarily responsible for shaping its own plans.

When asked whether their state has implemented any generative AI policies, respondents said there was a high degree of local influence regardless of whether a state issued guidance or not. “We are a ‘local control’ state, so some school districts have banned (generative AI),” wrote one respondent. “Our (state) department of education has an AI tool kit, but policies are all local,” wrote another. One shared that their state has a “basic requirement that districts adopt a local policy about AI.”

Like other education policies, generative AI adoption occurs within the existing state education governance structures, with authority and accountability balanced between state and local levels. As with previous waves of technology in K-12 schools, local decision-making plays a critical role.

Yet there is generally a lack of evidence related to how AI will affect learners and teachers, which will take years to become more clear. That lag adds to the challenges in formulating policies.

States as a lighthouse

However, state policy can provide vital guidance by prioritizing ethics, equity and safety, and by being adaptable to changing needs. A coherent state policy can also answer key questions, such as acceptable student use of AI, and ensure more consistent standards of practice. Without such direction, districts are left to their own devices to identify appropriate, effective uses and construct guardrails.

As it stands, AI usage and policy development are uneven, depending on how well resourced a school is. Data from a RAND-led panel of educators showed that teachers and principals in higher-poverty schools are about half as likely to AI guidance provided. The poorest schools are also less likely to use AI tools.

When asked about foundational generative AI policies in education, policymakers focused on privacy, safety and equity. One respondent, for example, said school districts should have the same access to funding and training, including for administrators.

And rather than having the technology imposed on schools and families, many argued for grounding the discussion in human values and broad participation. As one policymaker noted, “What is the role that families play in all this? This is something that is constantly missing from the conversation and something to uplift. As we know, parents are our kids’ first teachers.”

Introducing new technology

According to a Feb. 24, 2025, Gallup Poll, 60% of teachers report using some AI for their work in a range of ways. Our survey also found there is “shadow use of AI,” as one policymaker put it, where employees implement generative AI without explicit school or district IT or security approval.

Some states, such as Indiana, offer schools the opportunity to apply for a one-time competitive grant to fund a pilot of an AI-powered platform of their choosing as long as the product vendors are approved by the state. Grant proposals that focus on supporting students or professional development for educators receive priority.

In other states, schools opt in to pilot tests that are funded by nonprofits. For example, an eighth grade language arts teacher in California participated in a pilot where she used AI-powered tools to generate feedback on her students’ writing. “Teaching 150 kids a day and providing meaningful feedback for every student is not possible; I would try anything to lessen grading and give me back my time to spend with kids. This is why I became a teacher: to spend time with the kids.” This teacher also noted the tools showed bias when analyzing the work of her students learning English, which gave her the opportunity to discuss algorithmic bias in these tools.

One initiative from the Netherlands offers a different approach than finding ways to implement products developed by technology companies. Instead, schools take the lead with questions or challenges they are facing and turn to industry to develop solutions informed by research.

Core principles

One theme that emerged from survey respondents is the need to emphasize ethical principles in providing guidance on how to use AI technology in teaching and learning. This could begin with ensuring that students and teachers learn about the limitations and opportunities of generative AI, when and how to leverage these tools effectively, critically evaluate its output and ethically disclose its use.

Often, policymakers struggle to know where to begin in formulating policies. Analyzing tensions and decision-making in organizational context – or what my colleagues and I called dilemma analysis in a recent report – is an approach schools, districts and states can take to navigate the myriad of ethical and societal impacts of generative AI.

Despite the confusion around AI and a fragmented policy landscape, policymakers said they recognize it is incumbent upon each school, district and state to engage their communities and families to co-create a path forward.

As one policymaker put it: “Knowing the horse has already left the barn (and that AI use) is already prevalent among students and faculty … (on) AI-human collaboration vs. outright ban, where on the spectrum do you want to be?”

Janice Mak receives funding from Google, National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. She is affiliated with the Association for Computing Machinery's Education Advisory Committee.

Bearing witness after the witnesses are gone: How to bring Holocaust education home for a new generation

2026-01-21T19:22:35Z

Joe Engel, joined here by fellow Holocaust survivors Rose Goldberg and Diny K. Adkins, along with College of Charleston students, dedicated his later years to speaking about his experiences during the Holocaust. Courtesy of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies

Joe Engel was and remains an icon in Charleston, South Carolina. Born in Zakroczym, Poland, he survived Auschwitz and several other concentration camps and fought with the resistance before landing on American shores as a refugee in 1949.

After retirement from his dry-cleaning business, Engel focused his later years on Holocaust education. As part of these efforts, he took to sitting on downtown park benches wearing a name tag that read “Joe Engel, Holocaust Survivor: Ask me questions” – becoming the city’s first public memorial to the victims of Nazi genocide. Knowing he would not be here to impart his message forever, Engel and his friend and fellow survivor Pincus Kolender led a drive to install the permanent memorial that now stands in Charleston’s Marion Square park.

In 2021, I moved to the city to take up my role as a professor and director of Holocaust studies at the College of Charleston. I arrived just in time to meet Engel and to teach many local students who had met him. He died the following year, at age 95.

For years, historians, educators and Jewish groups have been considering how to teach about the Holocaust after the survivors have passed on. Few of today’s college students have ever met a Holocaust survivor. Those who have likely met a child survivor, with few personal memories before 1945. American veterans of the war are almost entirely unknown to our present students; many know nothing of their own family connections to World War II.

Time marches on, distance grows, and what we call “common knowledge” changes. One alarming study from 2018 revealed that 45% of American adults could not identify a single one of the over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, while 41% of younger Americans believe that Nazi Germany killed substantially less than 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

According to a 2025 study by the Claims Conference, there are somewhat more than 200,000 survivors still alive, though their median age is 87. It is sadly expected that 7 in 10 will pass away within the next decade. With their absence near, how can educators and community members bring this history home, decreasing the perceived distance between the students of today and the lessons of the Holocaust?

Bringing history home

One method that shows promise is helping students realize the connections of their own home and their own time to a genocide that might seem far away – both on the map and in the mind.

A letter dated Dec. 27, 1938, sent from Malie Landsmann to her cousin Minnie Tewel Baum of South Carolina. Courtesy of the Jewish Heritage Collection, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston

In classes on the Holocaust, I now use a set of letters sent by a family of Polish Jews to their relatives in Camden, South Carolina. The letters themselves are powerful sources demonstrating the increasing desperation of Malie Landsmann, the main writer. In 1938, she reached out to her cousin Minnie Tewel Baum, seeking help to escape Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Even though the two had never met, Minnie tried everything to help her cousin and her family. In the end, however, she was not successful. American immigration barriers and murderous Nazi policy took their toll, with Malie, her husband, Chaim, and their two children, Ida and Peppi, all killed at Auschwitz.

These haunting letters demonstrate the connections of the war to small-town South Carolina. They give the Holocaust a real human face and a connection to places students know.

Letter collections like these are not rare. The College of Charleston holds a second, far larger group of letters, the Helen Stern Lipton Papers, which runs to over 170 pages of correspondence between family members in South Carolina, German-occupied Europe, Russia and even Central Asia. When I was a Ph.D. student, I participated in classes using the Sara Spira postcards sent from a series of ghettos in Poland to rural Wisconsin. Further archives exist all over the United States. Most communities have connections to the Holocaust, whether via artifacts, people with direct ties or both.

The important thing is to teach in ways that can break down the mental barriers created by time and space. It is indeed the same reason that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum created a traveling exhibit called “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.”

Learning from descendants

As teachers and professors attempt to bridge these divides, they often invite the descendants of Holocaust survivors to their classes to speak. Descendants can retell the stories of their parents’ or ancestors’ perseverance and survival, but what is more important is their ability to put a human face on these events and show how they remain relevant in the lives of so many.

The Stolpersteine memorial to the Landsmann family, installed in Berlin in 2025. Pablo Castagnola, Anzenberger Agency. Courtesy of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies

I take these short visits a step further in a class where students train as oral history interviewers, then conduct recorded conversations with a descendant of survivors. These meetings encourage discussion of family Holocaust history, but only after the student asks the descendant about how they learned about what happened to their parent, grandparent or great-grandparent, and how this might have weighed on their own life years after the war.

This is truly the point here. The most impactful parts of these recordings are almost always the discussions of legacies; of how the families that students meet still live with the enormity of Holocaust trauma.

When a descendant tells students about the past, that is important. But when a descendant speaks of what that past means for them, their family and their community, that is so much more.

Students gain firsthand knowledge of intergenerational trauma; the difficulties of rebuilding; the prevalence of anxiety, worry and depression in survivor homes; and so much more. All of this shows students in no uncertain ways how the Holocaust still has bearing on the lives of people in our communities.

History after memory: A path forward

What’s most heartening about these methods and their successes is what they reveal about what today’s students value. In the age of AI, Big Tech and omnipresent social media, I believe it is still – and maybe even more than ever – the real human connection.

Chad Gibbs with student Leah Davenport, who arranged for Stolpersteine to be installed outside the Landsmann family’s home in Berlin. Pablo Castagnola, Anzenberger Agency. Courtesy of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies

Students are drawn in by the local connections and open up to the stories of real people, brought to them in person. Often, they launch their own research to better understand the letters.

One of my students even helped turn them into classroom materials, now used well beyond our own college. Another did the painstaking work to have four new Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stone, memorials installed in Berlin to commemorate the Landsmann family.

Never having witnessed them myself, I can only imagine the impact of Joe Engel’s conversations on those park benches in downtown Charleston.

Nothing will ever truly replace the voices of the survivors, but I believe teachers and communities can carry on his work by making history feel local and personal. As everything around us seems to show each day, little could be more important than the lessons of these people, their sources and the Holocaust.

Chad S.A. Gibbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance

2026-01-21T13:35:20Z

High school students gather for an anti-ICE protest outside the state capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 14, 2026. Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration’s recent surge of more than 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, is creating ripple effects for students, teachers and parents that go well beyond ongoing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. These protests escalated after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, 2026.

Some Twin Cities parents are arranging security patrols to look out for ICE agents, while others are keeping their kids home altogether. Several large Minneapolis-St. Paul school districts announced on Jan. 15 that they would offer remote learning so students could stay home.

Amy Lieberman, The Conversation U.S. education editor, spoke with Carolyn-Sattin-Bajaj, a scholar of education and immigrant youth, to better understand what regulations restrict ICE’s presence at schools – and how schools can support students and parents concerned about the recent surge of immigrant arrests and deportations in Minnesota.

U.S. Border Patrol agents detain a person near Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images

What prevents ICE from walking into a school building?

The Obama administration issued a memo in 2011 that said federal officials should not conduct immigration enforcement work near sensitive locations, meaning schools and houses of worship. The Biden administration also had this policy in place.

President Donald Trump revoked this memo in January 2025. So now, schools are no longer off-limits to federal immigration agencies, including ICE.

That doesn’t mean ICE or Border Patrol agents can march into a school building to arrest someone. While these officers can freely enter public areas of a school, like a parking lot or lobby, school officials are not legally obligated to admit ICE agents into private spaces like classrooms. ICE officers can enter a classroom if they show a valid federal judicial warrant, signed by a judge – or if there are extreme circumstances that allow them to legally circumvent having a warrant.

School officials are also not required to release information about which kids are enrolled at their school or not, and schools do not collect information about students’ immigration status, so that data cannot be shared.

Some school districts have been developing or revising protocols on how to respond if ICE comes to their schools. A lot of these protocols include recommendations on naming a district superintendent or another local official as the point person for ICE.

How unprecedented is it for ICE to arrest people outside or inside a school?

ICE’s presence at – or near – schools has significantly increased under the second Trump administration.

We have seen violence on school grounds, with ICE attacking students and protesters at Roosevelt High School on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis. In Crystal, Minn., a student’s parent was arrested by ICE personnel on Jan. 14 while waiting for their child at a bus stop.

Even just the threat of ICE agents approaching and arresting people en route to school, or at a school itself, is changing people’s behavior. Some parents in Minnesota and other places no longer take their children to and from school, and have to find other ways to get their kids there. This also affects how many people come to community events and activities held at school.

At one California middle school, the annual moving-up ceremony for students typically held outside had to be delayed in June 2025 after there was a credible rumor that ICE was planning to show up. The district had procedures in place. Because the event was held in an open public space, administrators were stationed at every entrance in case ICE agents turned up – though they didn’t. However, some graduates did not have any relatives there to watch them walk across the stage during the ceremony.

What other considerations are at the forefront of school administrators’ minds in regard to ICE?

The question that is top of mind for many district administrators, school leaders, teachers and other school personnel is “What happens if ICE shows up at our school?”

I think it is important that districts and schools have a clear plan in place that is widely communicated to all adults working in schools, and to students and parents. This should be paired with straightforward and recurrent training for educators on what they might expect if ICE comes to their schools and how to put their schools’ plans in place.

Yet, considering what to do if ICE comes to a school is just the tip of the iceberg. There are approximately 1.5 million children under 18 who are undocumented immigrants and about 4.4 million U.S.-born children who are citizens but have at least one undocumented parent. Many of these students are experiencing significant hardship, including interruptions to their schooling, and other forms of instability that affect their ability to learn and overall well-being.

U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino argues with protesters near Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images

What does your research show on the effects immigration enforcement can have on these students?

My research in seven large California school districts, conducted in 2021, showed that immigration arrests were linked to declines in students’ academic achievement, attendance and other measures of a school’s climate and safety for these students. The biggest declines were among Latino students, especially those who were English language learners.

In another 2023 study of an immigration workplace raid in Texas, a colleague and I found increased student absenteeism, declines in reading and math test scores, and sharp rises in the number of high school students leaving the district. Most often, it was the Latino and multilingual students enrolled in schools in the four counties closest to the raid who were not attending school immediately after the event, or experienced declining test scores.

These consequences persisted. Some of these students were less likely than others to later enroll in four-year colleges. Significantly, not just students who are most likely to have relatives targeted for deportation experienced these effects.

My own research and that of other scholars also show that many teachers are not well prepared for the current realities. But they are eager to know more about their immigrant students’ rights, the resources available to them and how they can serve as allies and advocates.

I believe that to best support students during these troubling times, teachers need better training and guidance on how to navigate challenging conversations about immigration enforcement threats, and how to deal with students’ (and their own) anxiety, uncertainty and trauma.

Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj receives funding from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Spencer Foundation

Iran’s universities have long been a battleground, where protests happen and students fight for the future

2026-01-20T13:36:27Z

Anti-government Iranian protesters rally on Jan. 8, 2026, in Tehran. Anonymous/Getty Images

Iran’s current wave of protests continues to spread across the country, as the United States weighs military intervention. Meanwhile, many Iranian people continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities amid a collapsing currency.

The anti-government demonstrations began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, in December 2025. From there, they quickly reached Iran’s university campuses.

The government’s response was swift and familiar: Authorities ordered universities to move classes online, citing weather concerns. When students continued organizing, the regime closed universities entirely.

I am an Iranian-American who has studied Iranian social movements for more than 25 years. As an educator, I have also led American universities, while maintaining ties to Iranian academic institutions.

I also witnessed firsthand the systematic assault on academic freedom during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 through 2013.

Iran’s universities tell the story of the nation itself: a story of persistent hope confronting relentless repression, and of intellectual life refusing to be extinguished even under extraordinary pressure.

Iranian universities have long been places of political reform and imagination – and where the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian impulses collide with people’s demands for freedom.

The heartbeat of reform

Iran has 316 accredited universities across the country, including the University of Tehran and Islamic Azad University.

Iranian universities have been hubs of political activity and protest since at least the mid-1900s.

Student-led protest movements emerged forcefully in the 1940s following the abdication of Reza Shah, an Iranian military officer who led Iran as its shah, or monarch, from 1925 to 1941.

These groups gained momentum during the oil nationalization movement led by the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Students supported Mossadegh’s promises of a democratic and free Iran, where the benefits of resources – like oil – would be reaped by Iranians first, before extending to the rest of the world.

The United States led a CIA-backed military coup that overthrew Mossadegh and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran in 1953.

College campuses again became critical spaces for political consciousness and opposition.

A long-established pattern

This pattern continued for decades. Universities were central to the 1979 revolution, with students joining clerics, leftists and nationalists in overthrowing the monarchy.

Yet once consolidated, the Islamic Republic quickly turned against the institutions that had helped make the revolution possible.

The 1980s and 1990s saw widespread purges of faculty, with the imprisonment of professors in such numbers that the notorious Evin Prison came to be grimly nicknamed “Evin University.”

Academic life was tightly policed, books were routinely banned, and government surveillance became routine. As Azar Nafisi later documented in the 2003 book “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” intellectual engagement often survived only through clandestine reading groups and private gatherings.

Yet repression never succeeded in erasing student activism. When formal organizing became impossible, it moved underground. When campuses were locked down, ideas continued to circulate.

Thaw, reversal and academic repression

The election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 briefly altered this trajectory of academic repression.

Khatami ran for office as a reformist candidate with strong support from young people. As president, he presided over a limited thaw in academic life. Universities reopened slightly as spaces for debate and research.

I conducted fieldwork on the youth movement and sexual revolution in Iran beginning in 1999 – research that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

But the opening proved fragile. Ahmadinejad’s rise to power in 2005 marked a return to aggressive repression. Universities were again treated as ideological threats. Some faculty members were arrested or dismissed, student organizations were dismantled, and coursework and readings were heavily censored.

Iranian students listen to the lecture of a professor on the campus of Tehran University in October 2006. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images

The irony was stark. By the mid-2000s, Iran had one of the highest literacy rates and highest proportions of college graduates per capita in the region.

Yet the government began restricting which majors women could study and which subjects could be taught. Entire fields, including engineering, education and counseling, were deemed suspect. Professors who resisted faced harassment and dismissal. Student protests were met with force and detention.

Despite this, youth-led mobilization persisted. Every major protest cycle over the past two decades – including the 1999 student uprising – has been driven by young people, many of them university students.

Universities in the current uprising

Recent Iranian university closures underscore the regime’s likely fears of resistance – not simply because of what is taught in classrooms, since curricula can be controlled – but also because of the power that young people can gain when they physically gather in shared spaces.

Dormitories, libraries and cafeterias are where political awareness coalesces, where individual grievances become collective demands, and where dissent acquires momentum.

Today, by systematically alienating young people through economic mismanagement, social repression and the erosion of academic freedom, the government has created its most formidable opposition: young protesters. Analysts have increasingly identified this pattern as one of the regime’s central strategic failures.

Iranian students scuffle with police at the University of Tehran during a demonstration in December 2017. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Universities are a lens into Iran

What happens inside Iran’s universities today is not a side story – it is one of the clearest indicators of where the country may be headed.

The freedom to teach, read, question and debate mirrors the freedom Iranian citizens seek in public life more broadly. Just as women have pushed back against state control of their bodies one millimeter at a time, universities have pushed back against intellectual confinement one page at a time – expanding the boundaries of permissible thought even under threat of punishment.

For decades, Iranian students and professors have demonstrated extraordinary courage in sustaining these small but vital acts of defiance. They have kept alive what Iranians call “koorsoo”: a small, stubborn flame of hope that endures even in darkness.

History suggests that societies which wage war on their intellectual institutions ultimately lose more than control – they lose legitimacy. Iran’s universities have long been the heartbeat of reform. Today, that heartbeat is growing louder – and it may once again shape the course of the nation’s history.

Pardis Mahdavi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Some hard-earned lessons from Detroit on how to protect the safety net for community partners in research

2026-01-20T13:36:15Z

To get seniors online, the author provided them with computers and internet access. David Goldman/AP Photo

For the past 10 years, I have worked on closing the communication gaps that keep older adults at arm’s length from research that could improve their lives.

I worked with Detroiters to bridge the digital divide by developing tools that make it easier for older adults to get online, allowing them to connect to health information and learn about benefits they’re eligible for. I have also codesigned projects with members of the community to help improve older residents’ access to services.

My overriding goal is to help older minority adults connect with research so they are not left out of the very studies meant to reduce health disparities in aging. My work has focused on older adults in Detroit, a majority minority city, to help improve health for all residents.

Despite my best intentions, I recently had an experience where my work created unintended harm for vulnerable people.

I want to share my experience as a cautionary example of how researchers can fail to understand the government benefits that low-income older adults rely on, especially when it comes to research stipends.

Detroit seniors, unplugged

Recently, I completed a project that aimed to bridge both the digital divide and the divide between Detroit residents and researchers.

This project was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became clear how hard it was going to be to connect with Detroit residents. Delivering environmental education and outreach is part of my work at the Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors, also known as CURES. In response to the disconnect caused by the lockdown, our team was fortunate to get funding to deliver computers to 1,700 older Detroiters. Our community partners and advisory board members helped us distribute them.

But we soon learned many of the recipients didn’t know how to use the computers, and some couldn’t get online. At the time, Detroit had one of the lowest internet connectivity rates in the nation. Rates were as low as 40% in 2020.

Detroit has used some creative approaches to getting its residents online.

Poor connectivity has been called a “super-determinant” of health. Not being able to access the internet harms individuals because they are cut off from resources that could make them healthier – such as telehealth appointments, for example. It also creates health inequities for groups of people when research lacks a diversity of perspectives.

Naturally, our next step was to develop tools to help the people who received computers get plugged in. We applied for funding, won it – and soon I was working alongside community health and aging advocates, researchers, service providers and housing administrators to develop and refine a technology tool kit.

Once the tool kit was ready, we distributed it widely. The tool kit is designed to cover the basics for older adults who are new computer users. For example, we included directions for connecting to Wi-Fi and creating an email account. We made this resource available for anyone who is interested in using it.

Intro to Research 101

Our community partners next gathered a cohort of 10 Detroiters who were 65 or older so they could learn how to get involved in virtual research. We developed an online research readiness curriculum to introduce them to the basics of how research is done.

Remembering the challenges of COVID-19, we set a goal of engaging the older adults entirely online. Our early meetings started with 45 minutes spent troubleshooting cameras and microphone connections. A few months later, we were all camera-ready in less than nine minutes.

Because I value their time, I budgeted to pay everyone involved in the project. It is difficult for people to take part in programs when they can’t afford to cover basic expenses, and payment can help relieve these financial pressures. What I didn’t realize is that these modest amounts of money could be treated by HUD as income and trigger increases in rent.

But that is exactly what happened.

The older adults involved in our project lived in HUD housing, and their rental costs are based on their income.

We paid residents $120 monthly. This stipend increased their incomes, which in turn led to increases in their rent, sometimes by the same amount as the stipend. Having higher housing costs left them in worse shape than before they joined our project. The stipends were designed to phase out after 10 months, but it was unclear when their rents would be adjusted again. By being involved, their finances became more precarious.

In my opinion, this illustrates how research involvement, even when designed to be fair and respectful, can create an unintended financial strain for people whose budgets leave no room for error.

My privilege was a blind spot.

Problem-solving through partnership

I would likely never have known about the problem if the housing administrator, who was one of my project partners, had not spoken up on behalf of the residents involved in the project. The residents did not come to me to report the issue. They went to a person they already knew and trusted to talk about the unexpected burden.

Some residents stopped accepting payments for their participation, but they still faced months of higher rental costs while we worked to get their money back.

That relief eventually came, thanks to a vigilant HUD administrator, weeks of calls and emails, and late nights spent reviewing HUD’s policies.

In the end, HUD emailed to say it had agreed to exempt the stipends from the residents’ income because we argued that the payments were “temporary, sporadic and nonrecurring.” In response, the HUD site administrator immediately made adjustments, and the overpayments were returned to the residents.

Everyone involved was hugely relieved.

Learning from my mistake

And that may have been the end of the story if one of my community partners, Zachary Rowe, hadn’t encouraged me to write about what happened so that others could learn from our experience.

In my view, this cautionary tale reveals a critical gap in how researchers engage and support people who are underrepresented in studies, including those who rely on housing assistance and other safety net programs. Without attention to these details, efforts to broaden participation in studies can unintentionally exclude or burden the very people researchers are working to include. Experiences like this reinforce that institutions must adapt their policies so paying people for their time never jeopardizes their basic needs.

Researchers, university research review boards and community partners could all benefit from plain‑language guidance about how earnings interact with safety net programs, benefits and income rules. Projects should start with collaborative efforts to anticipate the real-world implications of engagement.

This kind of persistent troubleshooting supports ethical practices and helps build the kind of trust that makes long‑term research partnerships possible.

I view the additional effort and advocacy required to take these precautions as part of the work of shaping who gets represented in research at all. If engaging people with complex lives and constrained resources were easy, our study samples would already be diversified.

Sharing these difficult experiences can be uncomfortable, but it can also help researchers, institutions and partners do better for those who might otherwise be harmed along the way.

Carrie Leach receives funding from NIH.

Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill

2026-01-16T13:20:12Z

Just slowing down gives you time to question and reflect. Morsa Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern. Reading comprehension scores have continued to decline. The majority of Gen Z parents are not reading aloud to their young children because they view it as a chore. Many college students cannot make it through an entire book.

With their endless scrolling and easy reposting and sharing of content, social media platforms are designed to encourage passive engagement that people use to relieve boredom and escape stress.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

Counterintuitively, social media can make you feel more bored and lonely. Dmitrii Marchenko/Moment via Getty Images

Deep reading versus doomscrolling

People use smartphones and social media for a variety of reasons, such as to relieve boredom, seek attention, make connections and share news. The infinite amount of information available at your fingertips can lead to information overload, interfering with how you pay attention and make decisions. Research from cognitive science helps to explain how scrolling trains your brain to think passively.

To keep people engaged, social media algorithms feed people content similar to what they’ve already engaged with, reinforcing users’ beliefs with similar posts. Repeated exposure to information increases its believability, especially if different sources repeat the information, an effect known as illusory truth.

Deep reading, on the other hand, refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.

Deep reading does require effort. It can trigger negative feelings like irritation or confusion, and it can very often feel unpleasant. The important question, then: Why would anyone choose the hard work of deep reading when they can just scroll and skim?

Motivating mental effort

Mindless scrolling may come with unintended consequences. Smartphone and social media use is associated with increased boredom and loneliness. And doomscrolling is related to higher levels of existential anxiety and misanthropy.

In contrast, attention and effort, despite being exhausting, can deepen your sense of purpose and strengthen social connection. People also feel motivated to complete tasks that help them pursue personal goals, especially when these tasks are recognized by others. For these reasons, sharing books may be one tool to promote deep reading.

One example is a teacher who guides students through longer texts, like novels, paired with active discussions about the books to reinforce comprehension and interpretation. While the debate over the ongoing practice of assigning excerpts over full books in schools continues, evidence does suggest that sustained reading in social settings can promote lifelong enjoyment in reading.

With social connection in mind, social media can actually be used as a positive tool. BookTok is a popular online community of people who use TikTok to discuss and recommend books. Fans post in-depth analyses of “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and other movies or shows, demonstrating that close analysis still has a place in the endless scroll of social media.

Talking about what you’ve read can add a social dimension to what can be a solitary activity. Alfonso Soler/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Slowing yourself down to read deeply

There are steps you can take to meaningfully engage with the constant stream of information you encounter. Of course, this process can be taxing, and people only have so much effort and attention to expend. It’s important to both recognize your limited cognitive resources and be intentional about how you direct those resources.

Simply being aware of how digital reading practices shape your brain can encourage new attitudes and habits toward how you consume information. Just pausing can reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Taking a few extra seconds to consciously judge information can counteract illusory truth, indicating that intentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.

Reading deeply means being able to intentionally choose when to read at different speeds, slowing down as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savor striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of a text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text rather than gleaning information.

Awareness does not mean that you never doomscroll at the end of a long day. But it does mean becoming conscious of the need to also stick with a single text more frequently and to engage with different perspectives.

You can start small, perhaps with poems, short stories or essays, before moving up to longer texts. Partner with a friend or family member and set a goal to read a full-length novel or nonfiction book. Accomplish that goal in small chunks, such as reading one chapter a day and discussing what you read with your reading buddy. Practicing deep reading, such as reading novels, can open you up to new perspectives and ideas that you can explore in conversation with others, in person or even on TikTok.

Science is best communicated through identity and culture – how researchers are ensuring STEM serves their communities

2026-01-15T13:41:14Z

Personal experiences can help foster a sense of belonging for aspiring scientists from underrepresented backgrounds. kali9/E+ via Getty Images

Lived experiences shape how science is conducted. This matters because who gets to speak for science steers which problems are prioritized, how evidence is translated into practice and who ultimately benefits from scientific advances. For researchers whose communities have not historically been represented in science – including many people of color, LGBTQ+ and first-generation scientists – identity is intertwined with how they engage in and share their work.

As researchers who ourselves belong to communities that have been underrepresented in science, we work with scientists from marginalized backgrounds to study how they navigate STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – spaces. What happens when sharing science with the public is treated as relationship-building rather than a one-way transfer of information? We want to understand the role that identity plays in building community in science.

We found that broadening the ways scientists work with the public can bolster trust in science, expand who feels they belong in STEM spaces and ensure that science is working in service of community needs.

STEM spaces as an obstacle course

Science communication involves bridging knowledge gaps between scientists and the broader community. Traditionally, researchers do it through public lectures, media interviews, press releases, social media posts or outreach events designed to explain science in simpler terms. The goals of these activities are often to correct misconceptions, increase scientific literacy and encourage the general public to trust scientific institutions.

However, science communication can look different for researchers from marginalized backgrounds. For these scientists, the ways they engage with the public often focus on identity and belonging. The researchers we interviewed spoke about hosting bilingual workshops with local families, creating comics about climate change with Indigenous youth and starting podcasts where scientists of color share their pathways into STEM.

Instead of disseminating science information through traditional methods that leave little room for dialogue, these researchers seek to bring science back to their communities. This is in part because scientists from historically marginalized backgrounds often face hostile environments in STEM, including discrimination, stereotypes about their competence, isolation and a lack of representation in their fields. Many of the researchers we talked to described feeling pressure to hide aspects of their identities, being seen as the token minority, or having to constantly prove they belong. These experiences reflect well-documented structural barriers in STEM that shape who feels welcome and supported in scientific environments.

Nic Bennett, CC BY-NC-ND

We wanted to see if a broader definition of science communication that incorporates identity as an asset can expand who feels welcomed in scientific spaces, strengthen trust between scientists and communities, and ensure scientific knowledge is shared in culturally relevant and accessible ways.

Transforming STEM communication

Prior studies have found that scientists tend to prioritize communication focused on conveying information, placing much less emphasis on understanding audiences, building trust or fostering dialogue. Our research, however, suggests that marginalized scientists adopt communication styles that are more inclusive.

Our team set out to create training spaces for researchers from communities that have been historically marginalized in science. Since 2018, we have been facilitating ReclaimingSTEM workshops both in-person and online, where over 700 participants have been encouraged to explore the intersections of their identities and science through interactive modules, small-group activities and community-building discussions.

Expanding what counts as science communication is essential for it to be effective. This is particularly relevant for scientists whose work and identities call for approaches grounded in community connection, cultural relevance and reciprocity. In our workshops, we broadly defined science communication as community engagement about science that could be both formal and informal, including through media, art, music, podcasts and outreach in schools, among others.

While some participants mentioned using traditional science communication approaches – like making topics concise and clear, as well as avoiding jargon – most used communication styles and methods that are more audience-centered, identity-focused and emotion-driven.

Nic Bennett, CC BY-NC-ND

Some participants drew on their audience’s cultural backgrounds when sharing their research. One participant described explaining biological pattern formation by connecting it to familiar artistic traditions in her community, such as the geometric and floral designs used in henna. Using imagery that her audience recognized helped make the scientific concepts more relatable and encouraged deeper engagement.

Rather than portray science as something neutral or emotionless, participants infused empathy and feeling into their community engagement. For example, one scientist shared with us that his experiences of exclusion as a multiracial gay man shaped how he approached his interactions. These feelings helped him be more patient, understanding and attentive when others struggled to grasp scientific ideas. By drawing on his own sense of not belonging, he aimed to create an environment where people could connect emotionally to his research and feel supported in the learning process.

Participants found it important to incorporate their identities into their communication styles. For some, this meant not assimilating into the dominant norms of science spaces and instead authentically expressing their identities to be a role model to others. For example, one participant explained that openly identifying as disabled helped normalize that experience for others.

Many felt a deep sense of responsibility to have their science engagement be of service to their communities. One scientist who identified as a Black woman said she often thinks about how her research may affect people of color, and how to communicate her findings in ways that everyone can understand and benefit from.

Nic Bennett, CC BY-NC-ND

Making STEM more inclusive

While the participants of our workshop had a variety of goals when it came to science communication, a common thread was their desire to build a sense of belonging in STEM.

We found that marginalized scientists often draw on their lived experiences and community connections when teaching and speaking about their research. Other researchers have also found that these more inclusive approaches to science communication can help build trust, create emotional resonance, improve accessibility and foster a stronger sense of belonging among community members.

Nic Bennett, CC BY-NC-ND

Centering the perspectives and identities of marginalized researchers would make science communication training programs more inclusive and responsive to community needs. For example, some participants described tailoring their science outreach to audiences with limited English proficiency, particularly within immigrant communities. Others emphasized communicating science in culturally relevant ways to ensure information is accessible to people in their home communities. Several also expressed a desire to create welcoming and inclusive spaces where their communities could see themselves represented and supported in STEM.

One scientist who identified as a disabled woman shared that accessibility and inclusivity shape her language and the information she communicates. Rather than talking about her research, she said, her goal has been more about sharing the so-called hidden curriculum for success: the unwritten norms, strategies and knowledge key to secure opportunities, and thrive in STEM.

Identity for science communication

Identity is central to how scientists navigate STEM spaces and how they communicate science to the audiences and communities they serve.

For many scientists from marginalized backgrounds, the goal of science communication is to advocate, serve and create change in their communities. The participants in our study called for a more inclusive vision of science communication: one grounded in identity, storytelling, community and justice. In the hands of marginalized scientists, science communication becomes a tool for resistance, healing and transformation. These shifts foster belonging, challenge dominant norms and reimagine STEM as a space where everyone can thrive.

Helping scientists bring their whole selves into how they choose to communicate can strengthen trust, improve accessibility and foster belonging. We believe redesigning science communication to reflect the full diversity of those doing science can help build a more just and inclusive scientific future.

Evelyn Valdez-Ward is executive director of ReclaimingSTEM Institute.

Nic Bennett is a volunteer board member of Reclaiming STEM and People's Science Network.

Robert N. Ulrich is the Associate Director of the ReclaimingSTEM Institute.

There’s an intensifying kind of threat to academic freedom – watchful students serving as informants

2026-01-14T13:30:16Z

Approximately 58% of faculty interviewed in a national survey in 2024 reported self-censoring. PM Images/iStock/Getty Images

Texas A&M University told philosophy professor Martin Peterson in early January 2026 that he could not teach some of Greek philosopher Plato’s writings that touch on “race and gender ideology.”

The university’s local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an organization of professors and academics in the U.S., quickly denounced this requirement.

Peterson, in response to his university’s direction, replaced the Plato readings with material on free speech and academic freedom.

Silencing a professor from teaching a certain subject fits within what experts have long recognized as encroaching on academic freedom.

In another high-profile incident at Texas A&M in September 2025, a student filmed an exchange with an English literature professor, Melissa McCoul, who was talking about gender identity.

The student said that McCoul was violating President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order that recognized “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” As a result, the student told her professor, as seen in her video, “I’ve already been in touch with the president of A&M, and I have a meeting with him in person to show all of my documentation tomorrow.” Her video went viral.

This represents a growing threat to academic freedom: Students who act as informants and police their classes and professors for signs of political incorrectness.

A 2023 study found that 75% of college students feel free to report their professors if they say something objectionable. Self-identified liberal students were more likely than conservative students to report their professors to the administration.

As someone who teaches politically charged subjects, I am very much aware of the need to teach in inclusive ways and respect the diversity of student views. I have also written about how academic freedom is changing, given new external threats and political realities. I recognize that students will play an important role in determining the future of academic freedom.

Two high-profile incidents at Texas A&M University show different forms of threats to academic freedom. Kailynn.Nelson/Wikimedia

Academic freedom is not the same as free speech

Academic freedom is a complex concept that is often confused with freedom of speech.

The American Association of University Professors offers one definition: Academic freedom is focused on ensuring that professors can say, teach, discuss and write about any issue within their field, without “interference from administrators, boards of trustees, political figures, donors, or other entities.”

As law professor Stanley Fish has argued, freedom of speech – meaning the right to express oneself without restraint – has no place in college classrooms.

As Fish notes, college classrooms are about the pursuit of truth.

In Fish’s view, this is true in both public and private colleges and universities, even though the Supreme Court has held that free speech applies in any public higher education institution.

I believe that Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton University, made a mistake when he said in November 2025, “Colleges get free speech right through millions of conversations … that take place in dorm rooms or dining hall tables or at public events or classrooms in colleges and universities across the U.S. every year.”

Dorms, dining halls, public events, yes. Classrooms, no.

As the American Association of University Professors’ preamble says, higher education institutions depend “upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” It goes on to say, “Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research.”

While that statement is not legally binding, it establishes a set of standards that are widely endorsed throughout higher education.

The September 2025 incident at Texas A&M is so worrisome because it suggests that faculty are being required to adhere to a political ideology, rather than allowed to pursue the truth as they see it.

Self-censorship on the rise

Despite most colleges and universities embracing academic freedom, a rising number of college professors are today censoring themselves in their classrooms.

Approximately 58% of faculty interviewed in a national survey in 2024 reported “regularly self-censoring in … conversations with students outside of class and in classroom conversations.”

In addition, a 2024 study done at Harvard University found that “Many Harvard faculty members and instructors … reported reluctance to discuss controversial subjects inside and outside the classroom.”

Such pervasive fear has a clear chilling effect in controlling what professors teach and say.

Meanwhile, a 2024 report from the American Enterprise, a conservative think tank, explains that faculty self-censorship “increases when faculty engage with students who could record and circulate words, in or out of context, to the world in a matter of seconds.”

Students’ rights to record classroom discussions

The legal landscape concerning the rights of students to record what happens in a college classroom is complex.

In some states, like Alabama and Maine, people can record someone without their consent, if they are directly part of the conversation being documented. In other states, like California and Massachusetts, all people part of the conversation need to consent to being recorded.

Many universities have their own rules regarding recording. Some limit it in classes, except as necessary to accommodate students with particular disabilities.

Harvard, for example, prohibits any member of a course from posting identifiable classroom statements on social media without people’s written consent.

Protecting academic freedom

The September Texas A&M controversy resulted in the university firing McCoul. Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III also stepped down from his position in September.

In November, a faculty committee then determined that the university did not have good reason to fire McCoul – though she has not been reinstated to her position.

I believe that colleges, universities and groups like the American Association for University Professors need to think about academic freedom differently than they did in 1940, when the association first adopted its academic freedom statement.

This will require colleges and universities to take steps to protect faculty from direct attempts by the government, or outside groups, to punish them for saying something that the government or others deem controversial.

But protecting faculty is also about establishing new norms to govern the classroom.

Adopting the think tank Chatham House’s rules, which say that people during meetings cannot attribute anything said to a specific speaker without their consent, is a possible path.

I have gone one step further. I now begin my classes by discussing my own classroom compact that covers academic freedom, academic integrity and the values that will inform and guide the work we will do.

Students are also required to pledge that they will not post anything about my class, or anything said in it, on social media with or without attribution. And I remind them that Massachusetts legally requires the consent of all people part of a conversation when it comes to recording.

Helping students understand the meaning and value of academic freedom and enlisting them to help protect it is not an easy task. However, the future of that value may depend on it.

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Rural areas have darker skies but fewer resources for students interested in astronomy – telescopes in schools can help

2026-01-13T13:23:23Z

Observing the night sky can get kids interested in astronomy and STEM careers. Jeremy Thomas/Unsplash

The night sky has long sparked wonder and curiosity. Early civilizations studied the stars and tracked celestial events, predicted eclipses and used their observations to construct calendars, develop maps and formulate religious rituals.

Scholars widely agree that astronomy is a gateway science – that it inspires a core human interest in science among people of all ages, from senior citizens to schoolchildren. Helping young people tap into their excitement about the night sky helps them build confidence and opens career pathways they may not have considered before.

Yet today the night sky is often hidden from view. Almost all Americans live under light-polluted skies, and only 1 in 5 people in North America can see the Milky Way. When people live in areas where the night sky is clearer, they tend to express a greater wonder about the universe. Altogether, this means communities with less light pollution have great potential to educate the next generation of scientists.

Rural communities have some of the darkest skies in the country, making them perfect for stargazing. Yet while students in rural areas are in the optimal physical environment to be inspired by the night sky, they are the most in need of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, education resources to support their interests and build the confidence they need to pursue careers in science.

Stargazing, finding constellations and watching meteor showers as a kid inspired my own sense of awe around the vastness of space and possibilities in our universe. Now, I’m the executive director of the Smithsonian’s Scientists Taking Astronomy to Rural Schools, or STARS, a new program led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, that delivers telescopes and associated lesson plans to rural schools across the United States, free of charge. I’m working to share my excitement and wonder with students in rural areas.

A solar eclipse, as viewed through a telescope. STARS

Why hands-on STEM learning matters

Students need direct exposure to STEM careers and hands-on experiences that help them learn the skills they will need to pursue these careers on their own. Hands-on activities ground new knowledge in ways that lectures and reading often cannot. Experiential opportunities connect what may be distant or abstract concepts to clear, tangible, real-world skills. This experiential learning improves students’ understanding of astronomy content and increases their motivation to learn.

Telescopes are important tools for astronomy that scientists use all the time. When students use telescopes as part of their learning, they are experiencing real techniques that scientists use. Using a telescope brings the viewer closer to fantastic celestial objects – allowing them to see galaxies, nebulas, planets, the Moon and the Sun, with solar filter protection, more closely or in greater detail.

Telescopes help students view astronomical objects, like the Moon, up close. STARS

There is nothing quite like seeing the soaring peaks and shadowed valleys of the Moon, or the distinct ring structure of Saturn, or endless other astronomical objects, through a telescope lens. This inspiration can motivate students to use their curiosity to explore the universe and see STEM careers as potential pathways.

Rural STEM education

The National Rural Education Association’s Why Rural Matters 2023 report estimates that there are 9.5 million students attending school in rural areas in the U.S., across more than 32,000 schools. This is more students than the student population of the 100 largest U.S. school districts combined.

While rural communities around the country all look different, they can face similar challenges: limited access to broadband internet, reduced state funding support and restricted geographical access to field trip opportunities, such as museums. Why Rural Matters found, on average, that 13.4% of rural households have a limited internet connection, and for some states this increases to 20%.

Each state distributes their education funding differently. The percentage allocated to rural schools varies from state to state, ranging from 5% to 50% of the total funding, which results in a wide range of money spent per student. Nonrural districts spend an average of US$500 more per student than rural districts. Looking state by state, however, this disparity climbs into the thousands of dollars.

Given their remote locations, rural areas host only 1 in 4 museums in the United States. Only 12% of children’s museums are in rural areas.

Educators may also consider STEM topics daunting. Many teachers do not feel adequately prepared or confident to introduce these topics to students. In other situations, there simply aren’t enough teachers to cover these topics. Shortages of STEM-focused teachers occur at some of the highest rates in rural districts, reducing rural students’ access to these subjects.

These reasons are why, through the STARS program, we give teachers access to a national community of practice that supports peer sharing and participation, alongside the telescope and science-aligned lesson plans. The lesson plans will be available online for anyone to use later this spring, whether or not they are part of the program.

STARS isn’t the only program connecting students with the night sky. Teachers, parents and students can also participate in national activities such as Observe the Moon Night and Globe at Night, and local activities, like their local amateur astronomy clubs.

Rural areas farther from cities tend to have darker skies, better for stargazing. Ryan Hutton/Unsplash

Opportunities to observe the sky with telescopes lead to an improvement in learning outcomes and STEM identity, and rural schools are uniquely situated to introduce students to the night sky. With a little extra support, through community events and educational programs, these schools have the opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Emma Marcucci works for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, as Executive Director of the Smithsonian STARS program, which is supported through private gifts and donations.

Small businesses say they aren’t planning to hire many recent graduates for entry-level jobs – here’s why

2026-01-13T13:15:08Z

Small businesses often do not have the time or resources to onboard recent graduates with little or no experience. 020 Creative/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Small businesses are planning to hire fewer recent college graduates than they did in 2025, making it likely harder for this cohort to find entry-level jobs.

In our recent national survey, we found that small businesses are 30% more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year.

This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade.

Small businesses are generally those with fewer than 500 employees, based on standards from the U.S. Census Bureau and federal labor data.

This slowdown is happening nationwide and is affecting early-career hiring for people graduating from both college and graduate programs – and is more pronounced for people with graduate degrees.

Nearly 40% of small businesses also said they do not plan to hire, or are cutting back on hiring, recent grads who don’t have a master’s of business administration. Almost 60% said the same for people with other professional degrees.

National data shows the same trend. Only 56% of small businesses are hiring or trying to hire anyone at all, according to October 2025 findings by the National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy organization representing small and independent businesses.

Job openings at small employers are at their lowest since 2020, when hiring dropped sharply during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some small businesses may change their hiring plans later in the spring, but our survey reveals that they are approaching hiring cautiously. This gives new graduates or students getting their diplomas in a few months information on what they can expect in the job market for summer and fall 2026.

How small businesses tend to hire new employees

Our survey, which has been conducted annually at the LeBow Center for Career Readiness at Drexel University, collected data from 647 businesses across the country from August 2025 through November.

About two-thirds of them were small businesses, which reflects their distribution and proportion nationally.

Small businesses employ nearly half of private-sector workers. They also offer many of the first professional jobs that new graduates get to start their careers.

Many small employers in our survey said they want to hire early-career workers. But small-business owners and hiring managers often find that training new graduates takes more time and support than they can give, especially in fields like manufacturing and health care.

That’s why many small employers prefer to hire interns they know or cooperative education students who had previously worked for them while they were enrolled as students.

Larger employers are also being more careful about hiring, but they usually face fewer challenges. They often have structured onboarding, dedicated supervisors and formal training, so they can better support new employees. This is one reason why small businesses have seen a bigger slowdown in hiring than larger employers.

Then there are small businesses in cities that are open to hiring recent graduates but are struggling to find workers. In cities, housing costs are often rising faster than starting salaries, so graduates have to live farther from their jobs.

In the suburbs and rural areas, long or unreliable commutes make things worse. Since small businesses usually hire locally and cannot pay higher wages, these challenges make it harder for graduates to accept and keep entry-level jobs.

Recent graduates often land their first jobs with small businesses. Alina Naumova/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Industry and regional patterns

Job prospects for recent college graduates depend on the industry. The 2026 survey shows that employers in health care, construction and finance plan to hire more graduates than other fields. In contrast, manufacturing and arts and entertainment expect to hire fewer new graduates.

Most new jobs are in health care and construction, but these fields usually do not hire many recent college graduates. Health care growth is focused on experienced clinical and support roles, while construction jobs are mostly in skilled trades that require prior training or apprenticeships instead of a four-year degree.

So, even in growing industries, there are still limited opportunities for people just starting their careers.

Even though small businesses are hiring less, there are still opportunities for recent graduates. It’s important to be intentional when preparing for the job market. Getting practical experience matters more than ever. Internships, co-ops, project work and short-term jobs help students show they are ready before getting a full-time position.

Employers often say that understanding how the workplace operates is just as important as having technical skills for people starting their careers.

We often remind students in our classes at LeBow College of Business that communication and professional skills matter more than they expect. Writing clear emails, being on time, asking thoughtful questions and responding well to feedback can make candidates stand out. Small employers value these skills because they need every team member to contribute right away.

Students should also prepare for in-person work. Almost 60% of small employers in our survey want full-time hires to work on-site five days a week. In smaller companies, graduates who can take on different tasks and adjust quickly are more likely to set themselves apart from other candidates.

Finally, local networking is still important. Most small employers hire mainly within their region, so building relationships and staying active in the community are key for early-career opportunities.

Financial case for college remains strong, but universities need to add creative thinking to their curriculum

2026-01-12T13:17:08Z

Unemployment rates are lower among people who have a college degree, compared to those with a high school degree. Wong Yu Liang/iStock Images/Getty Images

A college degree was once seen as the golden ticket to landing a well-paying job. But many people are increasingly questioning the value of a four-year degree amid the rising cost of college.

Almost two-thirds of registered voters said in an October 2025 NBC News poll that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost – marking an increase from 40% of registered voters who said that college wasn’t worth the cost in June 2013.

Caroline Field Levander, the vice president for global strategy and an English professor at Rice University, argues in her December 2025 book “Invent Ed” that people have lost sight of two factors that made universities great to begin with: invention and creativity.

Amy Lieberman, education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Levander to break down the benefits of going to college and university – and how schools can better demonstrate their enduring value.

How can we measure the value of a college degree?

College graduates earn substantially more than people who do not have a college degree.

The average high school graduate over a 40-year career earns US$1.6 million, according to 2021 findings by the Georgetown University Center on Education and Workforce. The average college graduate, over this same 40-year time frame, earns $2.8 million. That $1.2 million difference amounts to around $30,000 more salary per year.

People who earn a degree more advanced than a bachelor’s, on average, earn $4 million over 30 years, making the lifetime earning difference $2.4 million between these graduates and people with just a high school diploma.

College graduates are also better protected against job loss, and they weather job disruption cycles better than high school graduates.

The unemployment rate for people with a high school degree was 4.2% in 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, 2.5% of people with a bachelor’s degree and 2.2% of people with a master’s degree were unemployed in 2024.

Do any of these benefits extend beyond individual students?

In addition to the substantial financial benefits college graduates experience, colleges and universities are major employers in their communities – and not just professors and administrators. Higher education institutions employ every trade and kind of worker, from construction workers to police, to name a few.

Universities are crucial to developing and strengthening the U.S. economy in other ways. The discoveries that faculty and researchers make in laboratories lead to new products, businesses and ideas that drive the U.S. economy and support the country’s financial health.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern did important work in helping to discover statins, while scientists at the University of Pennsylvania developed the mRNA vaccine. The list of inventions that started at universities goes on and on.

Some people are questioning the value of a degree. What role can universities play in reassuring them of their relevance?

Discovery and invention have traditionally been the focus of many graduate programs and faculty research, while undergraduate college educations tend to focus on ensuring that students are able to successfully enter the workforce after graduation.

Undergraduate students need to gain competency in a field in order to contribute to society and advance knowledge.

But I believe universities need to teach something else that is equally valuable: They also need to build creative capacity and an inventive mindset into undergraduate education, as a fundamental return on the investment in education.

Employers report that creativity is the top job skill needed today. The IBM Institute for Business Value, for example, concluded in 2023 that creativity is the must-have skill for employee success in the era of generative AI.

The Harvard Business Review reports that employers are developing short courses aimed to build creative capability in their workers.

Creativity and innovation are both likely to become increasingly important for young people entering the workplace, especially as AI continues to grow. Andriy Onufriyenko/iStock/Getty Images

What can faculty and students easily do to encourage creativity and innovation?

Professors can build what I call a “growth mindset” in the classroom by focusing on success over time, rather than the quick correct answer. Faculty members can ask themselves as they go into every class, “Am I encouraging a growth mindset or a fixed mindset in these students?” And they can use that answer to guide how they are teaching.

Students could also consider committing to trying new courses in areas where they haven’t already been successful. They could approach their college experience with the idea that grades aren’t the only marker of success. And I think they could benefit from developing thoughtful ways to describe their journey to future employers. Simple practices like keeping a creativity notebook where they record the newest ideas they have, among many others that I describe in my new book, will help.

And university leaders need to open the aperture of how we define our own success and our university’s success so that it includes creative capability building as part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Caroline Levander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

New federal loan limits will worsen America’s nursing shortage and leave patients waiting longer for care

2026-01-07T13:37:26Z

There aren't enough people training to become nurses to meet the rising demands for nurse practitioners and registered nurses. Iconic Prototype/iStock/Getty Images Plus

There is growing need for nurses in the United States – but not enough nurses currently working, or students training to become nurses, to promptly see all of the patients who need medical care.

Tens of thousands of nurses have left practice since the pandemic, and many more plan to leave within a few years, according to the 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey, which reviews the number of registered nurses working in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be an average of 189,100 openings for registered nurses each year through 2032. In addition, there will be a need for approximately 128,400 new nurse practitioners by 2034 – making it the fastest-growing occupation in the country.

The tax and spending package signed into law in July 2025 will take effect on July 1, 2026. Among other things, it will likely make it even harder for people to take out loans and help pay for a graduate nursing degree.

We are nurses and professors who oversee large nursing programs at universities. We believe that new restrictions on how nursing students can take out federal loans to pay for their education are likely to prevent people from pursuing advanced nursing roles.

These new regulations will cause the shortage of practicing nurses to intensify – in turn, worsening the quality of care patients receive.

Clinics may offer fewer appointments, hospitals may be forced to reduce services, and nursing programs may have to accept fewer students. As a result, some patients will wait longer, travel farther, or not see nurses altogether.

Nursing students work in a simulation lab at the Florida A&M University Campus School of Nursing in Tallahassee in April 2023. Glenn Beil/Florida A&M University via Getty Images

Paying for nursing education

Someone can become a registered nurse with an associate or bachelor’s degree. But a graduate-level degree is needed for other nursing roles – including nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists and nurse midwives.

Nursing school costs vary greatly, depending on which degree students are seeking and whether they attend a public or private school. Roughly three-quarters of graduate nursing students rely on student loans and graduate with debt to pay for programs that can range from US$30,000 to $120,000 or more.

We have found that nursing students, unlike medical students, often work while enrolled in their programs, stretching their education over longer periods and accumulating additional costs.

The tax and spending law eliminates several federal grants and loan repayment programs for nurses and aspiring nurse educators – faculty members who teach nursing students in colleges and universities.

The law also sharply restricts how much money graduate nursing students can borrow through federal student loans.

Approximately 59% of 1,550 nurses surveyed in December 2025 said that they are now less likely to pursue a graduate degree with the new borrowing limit changes.

A fractured system

Nurse practitioners provide the majority of primary care in the U.S. – particularly in rural areas and communities with few physicians.

In addition, certified registered nurse anesthetists administer anesthesia for surgeries and procedures in many areas. Meanwhile, certified nurse-midwives deliver babies and provide prenatal and postpartum care, especially in areas where there are few obstetricians.

Long waits for new patient appointments are now common across the country, with national surveys showing that patients often wait weeks to months before they receive medical care.

About a decade ago, new patients could often book appointments within days to a few weeks; but today, there are fewer available medical appointments and medical professionals to treat them. This is particularly true for many medical practices serving women, older adults and rural communities.

One of us – Dr. Montgomery – is a women’s health nurse practitioner who routinely sees patients wait months for new appointments in the mid-Atlantic. These delays translate into postponed cancer screenings, delayed medication management and untreated chronic conditions.

Research consistently shows that nursing shortages are associated with worse patient outcomes, including higher mortality and delayed treatment.

Nursing left off the professional degree list

Under the new law, the Department of Education created a classification system that distinguishes professional from nonprofessional graduate degrees. Nursing is now considered a nonprofessional degree.

As a result, graduate nursing students will soon face lower borrowing limits than they currently do.

Previously, there was no need to label nursing as professional or not, because federal student loan borrowing was not capped in a way that required this distinction.

Now, students in professional graduate programs, such as medicine and law, may borrow up to $50,000 per year in federal loans and $200,000 in total.

Graduate nursing students, by contrast, will soon face a federal student loan cap of $20,500 per year and $100,000 total over the course of their education – a significant reduction from prior borrowing options.

The new law also eliminates the Direct PLUS Loan program. This separate, federal student loan program allows students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance of graduate nursing school after they reached annual loan limits on traditional federal loans.

More than 140 members of Congress from both political parties urged the Department of Education in December 2025 to reverse course and classify nursing as a professional degree.

The faculty bottleneck

Graduate loan limits will worsen another critical problem – the shortage of nursing faculty.

There are currently 1,693 full-time vacancies for nursing faculty positions, according to a survey in 2024 by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Of those open positions, 84% require or prefer a doctoral degree.

Universities cannot admit nursing students if there are not enough faculty to teach them.

Nursing programs in the U.S. turned away more than 80,000 qualified applicants to baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2023, in part because they did not have enough faculty.

Better solutions exist

There are policy changes that could prevent this domino effect.

Policymakers could classify nursing as a professional degree for loan purposes, aligning borrowing limits with the documented costs of accredited programs.

Congress and individual states could expand scholarships and loan-repayment programs for nurses who teach or serve in rural and underserved communities.

Universities and governments could work together to share nurse training costs.

Graduate nursing education is not a luxury. It is a cornerstone of the country’s health care system.

Helping nurses afford an education is not just about nurses – it is about patients, communities and the future of medical care in the U.S.

Mary Ellen Smith Glasgow is an AACN Board Member. The views, analyses, and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

Kymberlee Montgomery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Virtual National Science Foundation internships aren’t just a pandemic stopgap – they can open up opportunities for more STEM students

2026-01-06T13:36:22Z

Shifts to remote learning during the pandemic showed that there are some benefits for science students undertaking internships. SolStock/Getty Images

Many engineering and science undergraduates are approaching January application deadlines for prestigious summer internships and study abroad programs – or, in some cases, a spot in the National Science Foundation’s highly competitive Research Experience for Undergraduates, a specialized, paid summer research internship.

Roughly 6,000 American undergraduates take part in this internship each year. Landing this competitive research internship is a big deal. It can give young people interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers hands-on experience, real confidence and a clear picture of what to expect when enrolling in science and engineering graduate programs.

And even if a student decides graduate school isn’t for them, an REU, as it is often known, still shows young people that there are many exciting paths to consider in STEM professions.

A shift for REU internships

These in-person, 10-week summer research experiences mostly take place at approximately 150 to 200 universities in the United States, but also at schools in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Germany and other countries.

REU internships don’t always produce immediate research breakthroughs, but their real purpose is to spark students’ interest in science and prepare them for graduate school and research careers.

During the pandemic, many universities shifted to running REU programs online. Students participating in online REUs conducted research from home and met mentors online, rather than in person.

Surprisingly, this change not only saved money, but it also improved student outcomes in terms of what they said they learned, entrepreneurial skills they developed and the confidence they gained in applying to engineering and technology graduate programs.

Purdue University, where I work as a researcher and innovation professor, piloted one virtual and facilitated two in-person REU programs between August 2021 and August 2024. We found that the virtual model delivered the same – if not better – learning outcomes at a fraction of the cost.

The 14 students who participated in the virtual REU over the course of one or two semesters reported stronger gains in research skills than those who joined the full-time, in-person summer program.

Virtual research opportunities can allow students to form deeper connections with their work and advisers. xavierarnau/iStock/Getty Images

Virtual learning

There are several reasons why this virtual REU approach likely worked.

First, the virtual students met with faculty mentors more often than students who participated in an in-person REU program.

While summer, in-person undergraduate researchers usually met with their mentors around 10 times over the course of 10 weeks, virtual students met weekly with their mentors over 16 to 32 weeks – sometimes having three times as many meetings.

That regular contact helped students stay on track and dive deeper into their renewable energy-focused projects.

Second, because they weren’t spending time in labs, virtual students spent more time doing the kinds of research activities that prepare them for graduate school, like reviewing academic literature, writing up results and thinking through complex problems. These are the kinds of skills that matter most when students make the leap from college to research careers.

Third, the longer, part-time structure of the virtual program gave students more time to absorb new information, reflect on what they were learning and connect ideas. Instead of cramming everything into a 10-week sprint, they took a marathon approach, which helped them learn more.

And finally, virtual REUs made it possible for more students to join the program – especially for those who couldn’t leave home for the summer due to family or other obligations. In our virtual program, we were able to accommodate 14 students, instead of the 10 students who had previously participated in a lab setting.

Roughly 6,000 American undergraduates take part in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates internships each summer. andresr/iStock/Getty Images

Cost-effective research

From a financial perspective, the contrast is striking between virtual and in-person research experiences for undergraduates.

The National Science Foundation recommends budgeting about US$1,550 per student per week for summer REUs. Of that, only $600 goes to the student as a stipend – the rest is spent on housing, meals and travel.

For the cost of offering an in-person summer program to two students, we could serve five in a two-semester virtual REU, or even 10 in a one-semester online version. The potential to reach more students, for longer periods, is undeniable.

In other words, virtual REUs are not just a pandemic-era stopgap. They’re a smarter, cheaper and more inclusive way to deliver on the promise of undergraduate research.

To be sure, there can be some downsides.

While virtual REUs still offer valuable research experience and guidance, students participating in remote programs do miss out on working directly in labs and building natural connections with mentors and peers. Because of this, students can feel less connected and less supported than they would in an in-person program.

Also, not everyone thrives with remote learning.

As the National Science Foundation and other agencies that do scientific research grapple with potentially steep budget cuts, I believe that they should take a hard look at what we’ve learned. Virtual REUs aren’t a compromise – they’re a proven, cost-effective strategy that stretches public dollars while giving students more of what they actually need: access, mentorship and real research experience.

I believe that if the U.S. wants to build the next generation of scientists, engineers and innovators, the government needs to try to meet students where they are – and sometimes, that means meeting them online.

Lisa Bosman receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Colorado faces a funding crisis for child care − local communities hope to fill the gaps

2026-01-06T13:36:10Z

A 2024 Colorado report found that 40,000 parents either quit a job, turned down a job or significantly changed a job due to child care problems. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Colorado is the sixth-least affordable state for child care in the nation. Costs for center-based care average 14% of a two-parent household’s median income and 45% of a single parent’s median income. The federal affordability benchmark is just 7%.

Colorado also faces significant shortages in access to slots in licensed child care programs. In 2023, more than 40,000 Colorado parents reported quitting a job, turning down a job or significantly changing a job because of problems with child care.

Recently, several Colorado counties passed measures to subsidize child care through local taxes. Despite these advancements, Colorado’s child care system is facing a fiscal crisis that is likely to affect families and children for years to come.

Child care disruptions for families with infants and toddlers are estimated to cost the state more than US$2.7 billion in lost economic productivity and revenue. Ensuring access to affordable child care supports workforce participation and enhances the well-being of children and families.

I study early care and education policies and programs that promote children’s cognitive, behavioral and social-emotional learning. My research lab at Colorado State University has been investigating the consequences of a lack of access to high-quality, affordable child care on child and family outcomes.

Colorado’s Child Care Assistance Program

Since the late 1990s, the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program has subsidized the cost of child care for parents and caregivers with lower incomes who are working, searching for work or pursuing education. My research shows these subsidies are a critical lifeline that help lower-income families access child care.

Subsidies allow families to prioritize factors other than cost, such as location, in their search for child care. From 2023 to 2024, the Colorado subsidy program served more than 30,000 children in the state. That’s about 10% of those who qualified, which is typical for most states.

A federal March 2024 rule from the Administration for Children and Families caps family co-payments at no more than 7% of household income. It also requires reimbursement rates to reflect the full cost of care, whereas previously subsidy payments were based on what families could afford to pay.

Although intended to improve affordability for families and adequately compensate child care programs, the rule included no additional federal funding. In Colorado, meeting these new requirements is projected to cost the subsidy system approximately $43 million more per year.

These changes, combined with the expiration of COVID-19 relief funding that provided Colorado an additional $465 million to stabilize and expand child care assistance, has created growing financial instability for the subsidy system.

Approximately one-third of Colorado counties are experiencing an enrollment freeze for their child care subsidies. This means new applicants cannot access subsidized care until the freeze is lifted. There is no set timeline for when that will occur.

Without additional funding that would allow the freeze to be lifted, enrollment in Colorado’s Child Care Assistance Program is estimated to decline by 64%, falling from about 30,000 to just 10,000 enrollees. As children age out or families no longer qualify, spots that would normally open up for new enrollees will remain unfilled during the freeze.

Zooming in on Larimer County

I have been studying the impacts of the enrollment freeze in my hometown of Larimer County, Colorado. It’s a geographically diverse region that includes urban centers such as Fort Collins and Loveland, mountain destinations such as Estes Park, and rural agricultural communities. Like elsewhere in the state, child care costs pose a significant financial strain on local families.

A household in Larimer County with a median income of $64,919 and two children under the age of 5 spends approximately 37% of its income on child care. Due to budget constraints, Larimer County has had an enrollment freeze in the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program since February of 2024. The county has effectively paused the intake of new applicants for subsidies.

In Larimer County, Colorado, a household with two children under the age of 5 and an income of just under $65,000 spends about 37% of its income on child care. UCG/GettyImages

Recently, we administered surveys to 88 families in Larimer County. Approximately half of those surveyed were currently receiving a subsidy and half had applied but were unable to access it because of the freeze. We compared families using advanced statistical modeling that controlled for any differences between groups, allowing us to isolate the effects of the subsidy freeze on family outcomes.

In unpublished research that is being prepared for peer review, we found families affected by the freeze used fewer paid child care hours, faced higher costs, expressed greater concerns about costs, and reported more difficulty paying for care. They also had less reliable and stable arrangements, were less satisfied with their care, experienced higher child care-related stress and displayed greater risk of depression.

But that’s not all. Families without a subsidy reported missing twice as many workdays. When extrapolated across the 425 families in Larimer County affected by the freeze, this translated to over $2.2 million in lost annual earnings.

Local initiatives driving solutions

Recognizing the gaps in affordable child care, counties across Colorado introduced ballot measures to fund local solutions through tax revenue.

These measures come after the state established a universal preschool program in 2022. The following year, the program provided up to 15 hours per week of tuition-free, high-quality preschool for more than 85,000 children.

Measures in Larimer, San Miguel, Garfield, Pitkin and southwest Eagle counties will directly fund child care through sales or property taxes. Measures in Gilpin, Hinsdale, Ouray and Eagle counties will generate funds through lodging taxes.

In Larimer, voters passed a measure that established an additional countywide sales tax of 0.25%, or 25 cents per 100 dollars. The measure is expected to generate $28 million annually for child care assistance and workforce compensation.

A CBS News report on Larimer County’s measure to increase taxes to support child care.

In San Miguel, voters passed an existing property tax of 75 cents for every 1,000 dollars of assessed property value, allowing the county to collect and use all the revenue it generates instead of being limited by a new state cap. This will allow the county to retain nearly $1 million annually to support local child care affordability.

In Eagle County, voters passed a measure approving a lodging tax increase from 2% to 4% on hotel stays and short-term rentals that will raise approximately $4.5 million annually to lower child care costs.

Revenue from these initiatives will provide child care tuition to families, expand child care slots, support quality improvement and raise wages for child care workers.

These local investments cannot by themselves resolve Colorado’s statewide child care funding deficit, but they have the potential to transform access and quality within communities where they are implemented.

Colorado is not alone in these issues. Many other states are facing subsidy enrollment freezes and are exploring regional solutions to stabilize funding.

For example, ballot measures in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Seattle, Washington, also recently passed, providing reliable funding for child care assistance, preschool quality and workforce compensation.

With the uncertainty of the state and federal funding landscape, municipalities across the country may look to Colorado as a model for locally driven strategies that address community needs.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Jenn Finders has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, and North Central Regional Center for Rural Development.

It’s more than OK for kids to be bored − it’s good for them

2025-12-19T13:19:17Z

When children experience boredom, it can result in a brain boost that can push them to explore new activities. Richard Lewisohn/Connect Images via Getty Images

Boredom is a common part of life, across time and around the world. That’s because boredom serves a useful purpose: It motivates people to pursue new goals and challenges.

I’m a professor who studies communication and culture. I am currently writing a book about modern parenting, and I’ve noticed that many parents try to help their kids avoid boredom. They might see it as a negative emotion that they don’t want their children to experience. Or they might steer them into doing something that they see as more productive.

There are various reasons they want to prevent their children from being bored. Many parents are busy with work. They’re stressed about money, child care responsibilities and managing other parts of daily life. Making sure a child is occupied with a game, a TV show or an arts and crafts project at home can help parents work uninterrupted, or make dinner, without their children complaining that they are bored.

Parents may also feel pressure for their children to succeed, whether that means getting admitted to a selective school, or becoming a good athlete or an accomplished musician.

Children also spend less time playing freely outside and more time participating in structured activities than they did a few decades ago.

Easy access to screens has made it possible to avoid boredom more than ever before.

Many parents needed to put their children in front of screens throughout the pandemic to keep them occupied during work hours. More recently, some parents have reported feeling social pressure to use screens to keep children quiet in public spaces.

That is to say, there are various reasons why parents shy away from their kids being bored. But before striving to eliminate boredom completely, it’s important to know the benefits of boredom.

Even very young children could benefit from experiencing boredom in short spurts. Oscar Wong/Moment via Getty Images

Benefits of boredom

Although boredom feels bad to experience in the moment, it offers real benefits for personal growth.

Boredom is a signal that a change is needed, whether it be a change in scenery, activity or company. Psychologists have found that the experience of boredom can lead to discovering new goals and trying new activities.

Harvard public and nonprofit leadership professor Arthur Brooks has found that boredom is necessary for reflection. Downtime leaves room to ask the big questions in life and find meaning.

Children who are rarely bored could become adults who cannot cope with boredom. Boredom also offers a brain boost that can cultivate a child’s innate curiosity and creativity.

Learning to manage boredom and other negative emotions is an important life skill. When children manage their own time, it can help them develop executive function, which includes the ability to set goals and make plans.

The benefits of boredom make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Boredom is extremely common. It affects all ages, genders and cultures, and teens are especially prone to boredom. Natural selection favors traits that offer a leg up, so it is unlikely that boredom would be so prevalent if it did not deliver some advantages.

Parents should be wary of treating boredom as a problem they must solve for their children. Psychologists have found that college students with overly involved parents suffer from more depression.

Other research shows that young children who were given screens to help them calm down were less equipped to regulate their emotions as they got older.

Boredom is uncomfortable

Tolerating boredom is a skill that many children resist learning or do not have the opportunity to develop. Even many adults would rather shock themselves with electricity than experience boredom.

It takes practice to learn how to handle boredom. Start with small doses of boredom and work up to longer stretches of unstructured time. Tips for parents include getting kids outside, suggesting a new game or recipe, or simply resting. Creating space for boredom means that there will be some stretches of time when nothing in particular is happening.

Younger children might need ideas for what they could do when bored. Parents do not need to play with them every time they are bored, but offering suggestions is helpful. Even five minutes of boredom is a good start for the youngest children.

Encouraging older children to solve the problem of boredom themselves is especially empowering. Let them know that boredom is a normal part of life even though it might feel unpleasant.

It gets easier

Children are adaptable.

As children get used to occasional boredom, it will take them longer to become bored in the future. People find life less boring once they regularly experience boredom.

Letting go of the obligation to keep children entertained could also help parents feel less stressed. Approximately 41% of parents in the U.S. said they “are so stressed they cannot function,” and 48% reported that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming,” according to a report from the U.S. surgeon general in 2024.

So the next time a kid complains, “I’m bored!” don’t feel guilty or frustrated. Boredom is a healthy part of life. It prompts us to be self-directed, find new hobbies and take on new challenges.

Let children know that a little boredom isn’t just OK – in fact, it’s good for them.

Margaret Murray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

School shootings dropped in 2025 - but schools are still focusing too much on safety technology instead of prevention

2025-12-17T01:28:01Z

A person mourns at a makeshift memorial outside the Barus and Holley engineering building on the campus of Brown University in Providence, R.I., on Dec. 14, 2025. Bing Guan/AFP via Getty Images

Active shootings represent a very small percentage of on-campus university violence.

But among those that do happen, there are patterns. And as law enforcement officials continue to investigate the Dec. 13, 2025, Brown University shooting, similarities can be seen with other active shooter cases on college campuses that scholar James Densley has studied. “They tend to happen inside a classroom, and there tends to be multiple victims,” Densley explains.

The Brown University tragedy, in which a shooter killed two students and injured nine more, marks the fourth deadly shooting at a U.S. university in 2025.

The Department of Education in Rhode Island, where Brown University is located, said on Dec. 16 that it is urging local elementary and secondary schools to review safety protocols.

Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Densley about how schools have been given what he describes as an “impossible mandate” to try to prevent shootings.

Members of the FBI’s evidence response team work at the scene of the Brown University shooting on Dec. 13, 2025. Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

What is the overall trajectory of school shootings over the past few years?

K-12 school shootings appear to be trending downward, at least in the past two years. But we actually saw the largest jumps in this type of violence in the three to five years leading up to 2024, which trends closely with the broader rise in homicide and violent crime we saw in the pandemic era.

In 2025, there have been 230 school shooting incidents in the U.S. – still a staggeringly high number. This compares with 336 school shootings in 2024, 352 in 2023, 308 in 2022, and 257 in 2021.

How this relates to an increase in schools trying to institute security measures to prevent shootings is an open question. But it’s true that many schools are experimenting with certain solutions, like cameras, drones, AI threat detection, weapons scanners, panic apps and facial recognition, even if there is only weak or emerging evidence about how well they work.

Schools are treated as the front line, because the larger, structural solutions are too difficult to confront. It is much easier to blame schools after a tragedy than to actually address firearm access, grievance pathways – meaning how a person becomes a school shooter – and the other societal problems that are creating these tragedies.

How have schools responded to the rise of school shootings in recent years?

Schools are being asked to solve a societal gun violence problem that they didn’t create and they cannot control. Even the best-run school cannot eliminate all risks when causes accumulate outside of their purview. These attacks are rare but catastrophic, and they create an impossible mandate for schools because when they occur, schools are told it reflects a failure in their preparation. Educators are expected to be teachers, social workers, threat assessors and first responders. It normalizes fear and shifts the responsibility downward.

There is a growing school safety industry that markets fear as a solvable, technical problem. It promises faster ways to detect weapons, for example, but the evidence base for those products is thin, proprietary or nonexistent. One example is an AI detection software that mistook a bag of Doritos for a gun, resulting in a large police response.

Schools are pressured to buy something from these companies to show they are doing something. But some of these systems create false positives, and, more importantly, they shift attention away from human relationships. Technology alone cannot resolve grievances, replace trust and create belonging, but most schools are focused on technology as a means of prevention.

How effective are other prevention systems schools have put in place?

If a school shooter is an outsider trying to attack the building, having a single point of entry, access control or multiple locks on doors creates time and space, which are essential for delaying an attacker until law enforcement can arrive, thus mitigating casualties.

But the evidence shows that nearly all school shooters are either current or former students at the school. They are very familiar with entry and exit points, and they are potentially already inside the building before the school can act on a potential threat of violence.

So, what happens if a school locks down, but you are actually locking the shooter in a room with their potential victims? What if students are forced to hide when it would be safer to run? What if you have a door that locks only from the inside and a student or staff member uses that room to bully or sexually assault another student? We’re building schools to protect against the rare events, but we are not mitigating the more common problems they face.

Students are being asked to practice preventing their own deaths in active shooter drills and learn in environments designed around worst-case scenarios. In general, interpersonal violence and spillover of community violence, like gang-related shootings, are the most common form of school shooting. Most shootings at schools occur in parking lots or at sports events, but we do very little to prepare for those types of scenarios.

Are there any benefits, then, to schools having certain non-tech safety measures in place, like making sure every person has an ID?

Of course, you don’t want strangers walking around in a school building. The fact that someone coming to the school has to get their ID scanned and wear a badge makes perfect sense, not just to prevent shootings but to also prevent theft and assaults and other risks.

The paradox is that school shooters tend to be children already affiliated with the school, and when someone walks in already firing, checkpoints and metal detectors are useless. Historically, several mass shootings in K-12 schools have started outside of the building then moved inside. The issue is not slipping past barriers but overwhelming them in seconds with irresistible force.

People hold candles and sing together on Dec. 14, 2025, at a vigil in Lippitt Memorial Park in Providence, R.I., for the recent mass shooting at Brown University. Ben Pennington/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Absent policy change, what is the clearest way to prevent school shootings, according to current evidence?

Evidence shows that we often see signs of a crisis or withdrawal beforehand from school attackers. And that is why school-based behavioral threat assessment and management is so important. It is really about noticing changes in behavior and having the authority to intervene early. This is not about profiling people or relying on law enforcement alone. It is about having a structured, team-based process for identifying concerning behavior, assessing risk and coordinating appropriate supports – such as counseling – to prevent harm before it occurs. So often in these cases, people had a gut feeling that something was off with a particular student, but they didn’t know what to share or who to share it with.

For decades we’ve invested far more in responding to school shootings once they occur rather than in preventing them. You can lock doors and run drills, but no school can become a fortress.

Attackers leak warning signs in advance. Real prevention is about creating human systems that get upstream of this.

James Densley has received funding from the National Institute of Justice, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation.

A, B, C or D – grades might not say all that much about what students are actually learning

2025-12-16T13:45:11Z

Letter grades have long been part of the fabric of the American educational system. iStock/Getty Images Plus

Grades are a standard part of the American educational system that most students and teachers take for granted.

But what if students didn’t have just one shot at acing a midterm, or even could talk with their teachers about what grade they should receive?

Alternative grading has existed in the U.S. for decades, but there are more educators trying out forms of nontraditional grading, according to Joshua Eyler, a scholar of teacher education. Amy Lieberman, education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Eyler to better understand what alternative grading looks like and why more educators are thinking creatively about assessing learning.

Why are some scholars and educators reconsidering grading practices?

For more than 80 years, students at least in seventh grade through college in the U.S. have generally earned one grade for a particular assignment, and a student’s cumulative grades are then averaged at the end of the semester. The final grade gets placed on a student’s transcript.

In some ways, all of the attention is on the grade itself.

Some educators, including me, are trying to rethink the way we grade. Traditional grading is not always an accurate – or the best – way to demonstrate mastery and learning.

Many college faculty across the U.S., as well as some K-12 teachers and districts, are currently experimenting with different approaches and models of grading – typically doing this work on their own but sometimes also in coordination with their schools.

High school students walk down the halls of Bonny Eagle High School in Standish, Maine, in 2020. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Why is this idea now gaining steam?

Scholars have been researching grades for many decades – there are foundational papers from the early 20th century that scholars today still discuss.

More recently, alternative grading picked up steam in the past 15 to 20 years. Researchers like me have been focused on how grades affect learning.

Grades have been found to decrease students’ intrinsic motivation, and an overemphasis on grades has been shown to alter learning environments at all levels, leading to academic misconduct – meaning cheating.

Grades have also been shown to cultivate a fear of failure among students, at all ages, and inhibit them from taking intellectual risks and expressing creativity. We want students to be bold, creative thinkers and to try out new ideas.

Are there other challenges that alternative grading is trying to correct?

Grades mirror and magnify inequities that have always been a part of American educational systems.

Students who come from K-12 schools with fewer resources, for example, often do not have many textbooks. They often have few, if any, AP courses. These students can develop what researchers call “opportunity gaps.” They do not have the same educational opportunities that students at schools with more resources have.

When students from low-resourced high schools go to college, they can receive worse grades than kids who come from better-resourced schools receive – typically because of these opportunity gaps.

Some people would say that this means these students with low grades are not ready for college. In reality, the grades reflect these students’ past educational experiences – not their potential in college. Once those less-than-stellar grades appear on these students’ transcripts in their first and second years of college, it becomes really hard for students to hit milestones that they need to reach for particular majors.

If we thought about learning a bit differently, those students might have a better shot at reaching their goals.

What do alternative grading models look like in practice?

There are a lot of different grading approaches people are trying, but I would say in the past 10 to 15 years, the movement has really exploded and there is a lot of discussion about it throughout higher education.

With standards-based grading, a biology teacher, for example, would set out a certain number of content- and skill-based standards that they want students to achieve – like understanding photosynthesis. The student’s grade is based on how many of those standards they show competency in by the end of the semester.

A student could show competency in a variety of ways, like a set of exam questions, homework problems or a group project. It is not limited to one type of assessment to demonstrate learning. This grading approach acknowledges that learning is a deeply complicated process that unfolds at different rates for different students.

Other models could look like offering unlimited retakes on tests. Students may have to qualify for the retake by correcting all of the questions they got wrong on a previous exam. Or, teachers set up new assignments that draw on older standards students have previously met, so students have a second shot.

Portfolio-based grading is common in the arts and in writing programs. A student has a lot of time to turn in an assignment and then get feedback on it from their teacher – but no grade. The student eventually puts together a portfolio with the best of their assignments, and the portfolio as an entirety receives a grade.

Another method is called collaborative grading, or ungrading, where students don’t get grades throughout the semester. Instead, they get feedback from their teachers and complete self-assessments. At the end of the semester, the student and teacher collaboratively determine a grade.

What is stopping alternative grading from becoming more widespread?

There have been bursts of activity with grading reform over the past 100 years. The 1960s are a great example of such a period of activity. This is when gradeless colleges like The Evergreen State College were founded.

Social media has helped this particular recent iteration gain traction, as educators can more easily communicate with other people who are grading in different ways.

We are seeing the beginnings of a movement where individuals are trying to do something on this issue. But the issue has not yet drawn together coalitions of people who agree they want change on grading.

Alternative forms of grading have caught on in some private schools, and they have not gained traction in other private schools. The same is true with public schools. Some challenges include logistical support from administrations in K-12 and colleges, teacher buy-in and parental support – especially in K-12 settings.

There is nothing more baked into the fabric of education than the idea of grades. Talking about reforming grading shakes this foundation a little, and that is why it is important to discuss what the alternatives are.

Joshua Rowe Eyler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The ‘one chatbot per child’ model for AI in classrooms conflicts with what research shows: Learning is a social process

2025-12-15T13:26:00Z

Yes, AI tutors can provide individualized feedback, but learning is inherently social. Maskot via Getty Images

In the Star Trek universe, the audience occasionally gets a glimpse inside schools on the planet Vulcan. Young children stand alone in pods surrounded by 360-degree digital screens. Adults wander among the pods but do not talk to the students. Instead, each child interacts only with a sophisticated artificial intelligence, which peppers them with questions about everything from mathematics to philosophy.

This is not the reality in today’s classrooms on Earth. For many technology leaders building modern AI, however, a vision of AI-driven personalized learning holds considerable appeal. Outspoken venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for example, imagines that “the AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development.”

Years ago, I studied computer science and interned in Silicon Valley. Later, as a public school teacher, I was often the first to bring technology into my classroom. I was dazzled by the promise of a digital future in education.

Now as a social scientist who studies how people learn, I believe K-12 schools need to question predominant visions of AI for education.

Individualized learning has its place. But decades of educational research is also clear that learning is a social endeavor at its core. Classrooms that privilege personalized AI chatbots overlook that fact.

School districts under pressure

Generative AI is coming to K-12 classrooms. Some of the largest school districts in the country, such as Houston and Miami, have signed expensive contracts to bring AI to thousands of students. Amid declining enrollment, perhaps AI offers a way for districts to both cut costs and seem cutting edge.

Pressure is also coming from both industry and the federal government. Tech companies have spent billions of dollars building generative AI and see a potential market in public schools. Republican and Democratic administrations have been enthusiastic about AI’s potential for education.

Decades ago, educators promoted the benefits of “One Laptop per Child.” Today it seems we may be on the cusp of “one chatbot per child.” What does educational research tell us about what this model could mean for children’s learning and well-being?

Learning is a social process

During much of the 20th century, learning was understood mainly as a matter of individual cognition. In contrast, the latest science on learning paints a more multidimensional picture.

Scientists now understand that seemingly individual processes – such as building new knowledge – are actually deeply rooted in social interactions with the world around us.

Neuroscience research has shown that even from a young age, people’s social relationships influence which of our genes turn on and off. This matters because gene expression affects how our brains develop and our capacity to learn.

In classrooms, this suggests that opportunities for social interaction – for instance, children listening to their classmates’ ideas and haggling over what is true and why – can support brain health and academic learning.

Research in the social sciences has long since proved the value of high-quality classroom discourse. For example, in a well-cited 1991 study involving over 1,000 middle school students across more than 50 English classrooms, researchers Martin Nystrand and Adam Gamoran found that children performed significantly better in classes “exhibiting more uptake, more authenticity of questions, more contiguity of reading, and more discussion time.”

In short, research tells us that rich learning happens when students have opportunities to interact with other people in meaningful ways.

AI in classrooms lacks research evidence

What does all of this mean for AI in education?

Introducing any new technology into a classroom, especially one as alien as generative AI, is a major change. It seems reasonable that high-stakes decisions should be based on solid research evidence.

But there’s one problem: The studies that school leaders need just aren’t there yet. No one really knows how generative AI in K-12 classrooms will affect children’s learning and social development.

Current research on generative AI’s impact on student learning is limited, inconclusive and tends to focus on older students – not K-12 children. Studies of AI use thus far have tended to focus on either learning outcomes or individual cognitive activity.

Although standardized test scores and critical thinking skills matter, they represent a small piece of the educational experience. It is also important to understand generative AI’s real-life impact on students.

For example: How does it feel to learn from a chatbot, day after day? What is the longer-term impact on children’s mental health? How does AI use affect children’s relationships with each other and with their teachers? What kinds of relationships might children form with the chatbots themselves? What will AI mean for educational inequities related to social forces such as race and disability?

More broadly, I think now is the time to ask: What is the purpose of K-12 education? What do we, as a society, actually want children to learn?

Of course, every child should learn how to write essays and do basic arithmetic. But beyond academic outcomes, I believe schools can also teach students how to become thoughtful citizens in their communities.

To prepare young people to grapple with complex societal issues, the National Academy of Education has called for classrooms where students learn to engage in civic discourse across subject areas. That kind of learning happens best through messy discussions with people who don’t think alike.

To be clear, not everything in a classroom needs to involve discussions among classmates. And research does indicate that individualized instruction can also enhance social forms of learning.

So I don’t want to rule out the possibility that classroom-based generative AI might augment learning or the quality of students’ social interactions. However, the tech industry’s deep investments in individualized forms of AI – as well as the disappointing history of technology in classrooms – should give schools pause.

Good teaching blends social and individual processes. My concern about personalized AI tutors is how they might crowd out already infrequent opportunities for social interaction, further isolating children in classrooms.

Center children’s learning and development

Education is a relational enterprise. Technology may play a role, but as students spend more and more class time on laptops and tablets, I don’t think screens should displace the human-to-human interactions at the heart of education.

I see the beneficial application of any new technology in the classroom – AI or otherwise – as a way to build upon the social fabric of human learning. At its best it facilitates, rather than impedes, children’s development as people. As schools consider how and whether to use generative AI, the years of research on how children learn offer a way to move forward.

Niral Shah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.