Dr. Kane is a professor of education and economics at Harvard. Dr. Reardon is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford.
Parents have become a lot more optimistic about how well their children are doing in school.
In 2020 and 2021, a majority of parents in the United States reported that the pandemic was hurting their children’s education. But by the fall of 2022, a Pew survey showed that only a quarter of parents thought their children were still behind; another study revealed that more than 90 percent thought their child had already or would soon catch up. To hear parents tell it, the pandemic’s effects on education were transitory.
Are they right to be so sanguine? The latest evidence suggests otherwise. Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.
Below: 2019 compared to 2022
As part of a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA — the Education Recovery Scorecard project — we have been sifting through data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, to understand where test scores declined the most, what caused these patterns and whether they are likely to endure. The school districts in these communities enroll 26 million elementary and middle school students in more than 53,000 public schools, roughly 80 percent of the public K-8 students in the country.
We’ve looked at test scores, the duration of school closures, broadband availability, Covid death rates, employment data, patterns of social activity, voting patterns, measures of how connected people are to others in their communities and Facebook survey data on both family activities and mental health during the pandemic.
And to get a sense of how probable it is that students will make up the ground they lost over the next few years, we looked at earlier test scores to see how students recovered from various disruptions in the decade before the pandemic.
Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.
In 2019, the typical student in the poorest 10 percent of districts scored one and a half years behind the national average for his or her year – and almost four years behind students in the richest 10 percent of districts – in both math and reading.
By 2022, the typical student in the poorest districts had lost three-quarters of a year in math, more than double the decline of students in the richest districts. The declines in reading scores were half as large as in math and were similarly much larger in poor districts than rich districts. The pandemic left students in low-income and predominantly minority communities even further behind their peers in richer, whiter districts than they were.
But while the effects of the pandemic on learning were quite different across communities, they were, surprisingly, evenly distributed among different types of students within each community. You might expect that the more affluent children in a district would be better protected from the educational consequences of the pandemic than their lower-income classmates. But that’s not what we found.
Instead, within any school district, test scores declined by similar amounts in all groups of students – rich and poor, white, Black, and Hispanic (we didn’t have enough data on Asian and Native American students to measure their learning). And the extent to which schools were closed appears to have affected all students in a community equally, regardless of income or race.
Overall, it mattered a lot more which school district you lived in than how much money your parents earned.
Once we know that there was much more variation between districts than within them, the obvious question is: Which community factors determined how children were affected? One primary suspect is school closures. And indeed, our study — like other studies, one of which members of the team worked on — shows that test scores declined more in districts where schools were closed longer. In districts closed for 90 percent or more of the 2020-21 school year, math scores declined by two-thirds of a year, nearly double the decline in districts that were closed for less than 10 percent of the school year.
But school closures are only part of the story. Students fell behind even in places where schools closed very briefly, at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020, and then re-opened and stayed open for the next few years. Clearly, there were other factors at work.
What were they? We found that test scores declined more in places where the Covid death rate was high, in communities where adults reported feeling more depression and anxiety during the pandemic and where daily routines of children and families were most significantly restricted. In combination, these factors put enormous strain on parents, teachers and kids — making it unlikely that adults could help kids focus on school. Curtailed social activities were particularly harmful: On average, both math and reading scores declined by roughly a tenth of a year more in the 10 percent of districts where social activities were most curtailed than they did in the 10 percent least restricted.
We also found that the test score declines were smaller in communities with high voting rates and high census response rates — indicators of what sociologists call “institutional trust.” School closures were also less harmful in such places.
What all this means is that the educational impacts of the pandemic were not driven solely by what was happening (or not happening) in schools. The disruption in children’s lives outside of school also mattered: the constriction of their social lives, the stress their parents were feeling, the death of family members, the signals that the world was not safe and the very real fear that you or someone you love might get very sick and die. The pandemic was a public health and economic disaster that reshaped every area of children’s lives, but it did so to different degrees in different communities, and so its consequences for children depended on where they lived.
Regardless of how exactly the pandemic caused educational harm, the overall effect has been devastating.
So what do we do now?
Schools cannot just “hurry up.” Especially in math, teachers build students’ understanding sequentially — from arithmetic to fractions to exponents to algebra. Schools have curriculums, and teachers have their lesson plans for each topic. In theory, a school district could rethink its curriculum following a disruption — skimming and paring to move more quickly — but that would be difficult to coordinate across hundreds or thousands of teachers. And do we really want students to have an abbreviated understanding of fractions?
When students fall behind, they don’t just catch up naturally. Reviewing data from the decade preceding the pandemic, we identified numerous instances where a school district’s test scores suddenly declined or suddenly rose in a particular grade. Our data does not reveal the causes. But we can see what happened afterward: Students resumed learning at their prior pace, but they did not make up the ground they lost or lose the ground they gained. Years later, the affected cohorts remained behind or ahead.
Over the past two years, many school districts have used the $190 billion in federal pandemic relief money to add tutors and other school staff and to raise summer school enrollment — all in an attempt to accelerate learning. To a limited extent, they succeeded. In one widely used math and reading assessment, the average student in grades three through eight resumed learning at a slightly faster than normal rate — making up about 25 percent of their pandemic loss in math and reading during the 2021-22 school year and the summer of 2022. But even if schools are able to maintain that pace after the federal dollars to pay for tutors and summer school run out, it will take four years or more to return to pre-pandemic achievement levels.
The truth is children are already paying the price. In the coming weeks, 3.5 million high school seniors are set to graduate — less prepared, on average, for college and a career. They will be joining the more than 10 million students who have already graduated since the pandemic began.
In the hardest-hit communities — where students fell behind by more than one and a half years in math — like Richmond, Va.; St. Louis; and New Haven, Conn. — schools would have had to teach 150 percent of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row just to catch up. It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time.
For those districts that lost more than a year’s worth of learning, state leaders should require districts to resubmit their plans for spending the federal money and work with them and community leaders to add instructional time.
Parents are relieved to see their children learning again. But most parents remain ill informed about how far behind their children are. To help change that, we’ve made our data public and will continue doing so as new data become available.
Public officials could — and should — help get the word out as well. This summer, mayors and governors should be launching public service campaigns to promote summer learning. And school boards should begin negotiating to extend the next school year (and use the federal dollars to pay teachers for the extra time).
Especially given the mental toll of the pandemic, students need more than math and reading this summer. Rather than school districts trying to do it all themselves, they should link with other organizations — museums, summer camps, athletic programs — that already offer engaging summer programming, and add an academic component to those programs. For instance, Boston After School and Beyond provides an average of $1,500 per student in financial incentives and teaching support to add three hours of academic programming per day from a certified teacher at summer camps enrolling Boston students. The incentives are largely paid for by Boston Public Schools. The program is a potential model for other communities.
While summer learning can be part of a solution, it cannot be the sole solution. Research on programs like the one in Boston suggests that participants make up about one-quarter of a year’s worth of learning in math during a six-week summer program. That takes us part of the way, but nowhere near as far as we need to go.
Communities must find other ways to add learning opportunities outside the typical school calendar. Most educational software — like Zearn and Khan Academy — makes it possible to track students’ use and progress. Schools could incentivize organizations working with students after school, on weekends or during school vacation weeks to include time for students to learn online and then reimburse them based on students’ progress. Some districts are even paying tutoring providers based on student outcomes.
Especially in the hardest-hit communities, it is increasingly obvious that many students will not have caught up before the federal money runs out in 2024. School boards and state legislatures should start planning now for longer-term policy changes. One possibility would be to offer an optional fifth year of high school for students to fill holes in academic skills, get help with applying to college or to explore alternative career pathways. Students could split their time among high schools, community colleges and employers. Another option would be to make ninth grade a triage year during which students would receive intensive help in key academic subjects.
As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave in place the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic. In many communities, students lost months of learning time. Justice demands that we replace it. We must find creative ways to add new learning opportunities in the summer, after school, on weekends or during a 13th year of school.
If we fail to replace what our children lost, we — not the coronavirus — will be responsible for the most inequitable and longest-lasting legacy of the pandemic. But if we succeed, that broader and more responsive system of learning can be our gift to America’s schoolchildren.
For a time, it appeared as if academic recovery from covid was underway. Now, new research shows that many students are actually sinking even deeper.
The research is based on tests from last winter and spring 2024, four years after schools abruptly went online — and comes just as billions of dollars in federal covid relief money for schools run out.
“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” NWEA, a testing company that works in more than 9,000 U.S. school systems, said in a paper released Tuesday. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer supports this conclusion.”
The test score gaps between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are growing wider, the group found, and are worse than “what we had previously deemed as the low point.”
Together, data from three large testing companies paints a more pessimistic and troubling picture than prior reports and raises questions about how school districts, which face a fall deadline to spend the last of the $190 billion in federal covid relief money, will help large numbers of students who are still behind.
“We’re a long way from pre-pandemic levels of student achievement,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington, who was not involved in any of the new reports.
It’s unclear exactly why some students remain behind, but experts suggest that teaching children what they missed and current material at the same time is a tall task. Researchers at NWEA, hunting for possible explanations, say one factor may be rising absenteeism. “If kids aren’t in their classroom, how can they be learning?” asked Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA.
The new research comes from NWEA, Curriculum Associates and Renaissance — companies that are employed by school districts to provide assessments throughout the year to help teachers track their students’ progress.
Their findings do not line up perfectly. Two of the three companies found that older students are struggling more than younger ones, while the third found the reverse. But all three found large groups of students who are falling further behind.
NWEA examined spring 2024 scores from about 7.7 million students from grades three to eight who took its MAP tests. It found the gaps between those results, compared with how students performed pre-pandemic, have widened in the years since the height of the pandemic in many grades. For instance, the gap with pre-covid results in sixth grade grew by 40 percent in math between fall 2023 and spring 2024; the gap in eighth grade reading grew by 31 percent.
The gaps are so large, for instance, that the average eighth-grader would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levelsin math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.
The youngest students performed better, NWEA found. They still lagged behind their pre-pandemic counterparts but have started to close the gaps, while they’ve widened for older students. Third-graders, for instance, would need 2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.
“Students, especially older ones, remain a long way from recovery,” the report said.
Some middle-schoolers are struggling because they are behind on basic reading skills, said Cory Chapman, a special education math teacher at MacFarland Middle School in Northwest Washington. This past year’s seventh-graders were in third grade — a crucial year for literacy — when the pandemic sent them home for virtual school.
“The thing is, once you get past third grade, no one’s teaching you how to read anymore,” Chapman said. He has students who understand math — they can multiply, divide and solve equations — but can’t comprehend word problems. “So that wonderful math kid now gets bumped down a little bit because they can’t get through the words.”
Renaissance, which administers Star assessments, does not yet have results for spring 2024, but it does have data from last winter for 5 million students in math and 6.3 million in reading. Its findings echo NWEA’s: The oldest students are struggling the most.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
In math, Renaissance found that first-graders had recovered to pre-covid levels of achievement, and there was steady progress from grades two to six. But the gaps between where scores used to be and where they are now widened in math for grades eight through 12.
“Not only has there been no progress in closing the initial covid impacts, average performance in those grades is even farther,” a summary of the results said. “It’s as if the pandemic or some other factor is continuing to result in lower and lower performance.”
The losses were less steep in reading, Renaissance found, and students were not as far behind. Grades one and four had caught up, and grades three and five through 12 were making steady progress. Grade two had made no progress, a finding that researchers were not sure how to explain.
The third testing company, Curriculum Associates, which administers i-Ready assessments, found somewhat different results. It follows cohorts of students and found those who were in grades two, three and four in 2021-22 showing signs of recovery in reading; in math, this was only true of those who were in grade four that school year. It also found that, in most cases, students who were close to or on grade level at that time were doing well by spring 2024.
But on average, younger students and those who were academically behind have lost even more ground in the last two years.
“The younger cohorts had their early childhood experiences messed up — maybe they did not get some foundational skills,” said Jennifer Sattem, senior director of research strategy at Curriculum Associates.
“Recovery is a little bit all over the place,” she added.
Some researchers suggested the academic regression may relate to a twin crisis unfolding across the country: chronic absenteeism. The average number of students missing at least 10 percent of school days — about 18 days — nearly doubled from 15 percent in 2017-18 to 28 percent in 2021-22, based on data from all 50 states analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The rate improved but only slightly in 2022-23 — to 26 percent, based on 43 states. Data for last school year is not yet available in most states.
It’s hard for students to learn when they’re not in school, and students who return after missing days in class are often confused and behind, leaders and experts in academia say.
“There’s absolutely a correlation between students coming to school and academics,” said Tiffany Anderson, superintendent of the Topeka Public Schools in Kansas. Before the pandemic, her district successfully worked to decrease chronic absenteeism but saw it spike again in 2021 and 2022. It fell to about 24 percent last school year — still double the pre-pandemic rate.
A 2016 study published in the Economics of Education Review found that reducing absences by 10 days led to gains of 5.5 percent in math and 2.9 percent in reading. An analysis published last year by the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that absenteeism accounts for 27 percent of the overall test score decline in fourth-grade math and 45 percent of the decline in fourth-grade reading. Research last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that schools with greater increases in chronic absenteeism also had steeper drops in proficiency tests; however, it said that it was not clear if one was causing the other.
In D.C.’s charter and traditional public schools, officials also see a connection between academic performance and attendance and have battled to bring down chronic absenteeism. Roughly 35 percent of students in both school systems were chronically absent between the start of the year and March 1, compared to almost 40 percent over the same period during the 2022-23 school year, according to a midyear attendance report.
Complete data for last year is not yet available. By the end of the 2022-23 school year, chronic absenteeism had reached 43 percent — lower than the previous year but still 13 percentage points higher than pre-pandemic.
“We need young people in school every day, all the time, in order to ensure that we are recovering most effectively and that they are showing up and learning as much as they possibly can,” said Paul Kihn, the city’s deputy mayor for education. “That’s why you see our relentless pursuit of improved attendance.”
Schools have sent automated letters and phone calls to remind parents about attendance, changed program offerings to entice more kids to come, and even purchased rides for students who don’t have safe or reliable transportation. The D.C. Council is piloting an approach that will send teens to social service programs, rather than penalizing them in court, for missing class.
Districts across the country are making similar efforts, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Georgetown University education think tank.
“There are a lot of states and districts that are really working hard on absenteeism, but I think it’s something that we have to continue to have this sense of urgency on because we will never get the kinds of academic results that kids deserve if we don’t figure out how to get them to come to school regularly,” Cohen said. “Everything else that we’re trying to do around learning loss, whether it’s tutoring or extending the school day or whatever, it’s only going to work if the kids are in school.”
By Laura MecklerLaura Meckler covers the news, politics and people shaping American schools. She previously reported on the White House, presidential politics and immigration for the Wall Street Journal, as well as on health and social policy for the Associated Press. She is author of DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, about her hometown. Twitter
By Lauren LumpkinLauren Lumpkin is a reporter at The Washington Post covering local schools. Twitter
Perspective by Valerie StraussDecember 17, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. EST Washington Post
For years now, we’ve watched a movement called social-emotional learning become popular in U.S. schools with the aim of meeting the needs of students beyond academics — a recognition that many aspects of a young person’s life outside school affect how they achieve in a classroom.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs are intended to help people learn and effectively use “knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.” That comes from the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, which you can learn more about here.
Academics and others have raised questions about the creation and implementation of SEL programs, and others have questioned whether the approach is enough to meet the needs of students today. In this piece, two well-regarded scholars argue that SEL is not enough — and they detail how the United States is far behind other wealthy countries in dealing with the well-being of young people.
Hargreaves has been working for decades to improve school effectiveness. He has been awarded visiting professorships in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Norway and Singapore. He is past president of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement.
Shirley has for many years worked with schools around the world to improve teaching and learning, helping educators in diverse environments work together across disciplines and schools.
A broad movement is tearing through our schools. Many teachers love it. Professional developers can’t get enough of it. Systems are investing heavily in it. Finally, it seems, schools can focus on something else other than test scores and technology: our children’s emotional and mental health. It’s called social and emotional learning, or SEL for short.
SEL is aimed at developing skills that enable young people to understand and express their own and each other’s emotions, manage feelings, learn self-regulation, and build positive relationships. SEL has become a front-line effort to battle the mental health epidemic that is plaguing our young people.
But the question remains: Is it enough?
In the face of rampant racism, digital addiction, a climate change crisis that threatens our entire species, and the greatest economic inequalities in 50 years, positive psychology books that urge us to manage our behavior with calmness, resilience, and grit have been flying off the self-help shelves. SEL has joined them. Psychologists, consultants, philanthropies, and system leaders are tackling the mental health crisis with individualistic, psychological strategies.
No, it’s not enough. When it comes down to the quality of our kids’ lives, we need to go all in.
We’re not against SEL as one way to deal with the covid-19 crisis in education and the spate of mental health issues that preceded it. Covid-19 pulled everyone up short about what truly matters during students’ time in school.
Separated from their peers, teenagers were the most likely age-group to get anxious and depressed. Adolescent suicide attempts escalated by over 30 percent between 2020 pre-pandemic levels, and 2021 levels during the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adolescents spent over seven hours a day on screens — over double their pre-pandemic use levels. Childhood obesity levels have skyrocketed.
It’s not just the pandemic that has been getting to our kids. So is climate change. Some three-quarters of young people said in a recent survey (conducted in 10 countries by a group of universities) said they view the future as frightening in regard to the climate.
For years, the U.S. record on child well-being has been atrocious. UNICEF places the United States at 36th out of 38 wealthy nations on a table measuring the well-being of 15-year-olds. On physical health, with its astronomical rates of child obesity and third-world levels of child poverty, the United States ranks dead last.
It’s hard to be well if you live in a sick society.
Overdue efforts by U.S. government to turn the tide for America’s poorest and most marginalized young people are more than welcome. The Build Back Better Act promises to reduce child poverty by as much as 40 percent. It will extend paid child-care to millions.
But even all this is insufficient. Compared to many other nations, the United States is still taking a more limited response to the student mental health crisis. Other countries pin their hopes on a broader concept of well-beingthat was advanced by the World Health Organization in 1948. It brought well-being onto the world stage, regarded it as central to peace and security, and made it a societal issue as well as an individual one.
The United States is not fighting awful ill-being with a quest for better well-being. While schools in other countries are confronting big issues such as digital dangers, wealth inequality, children’s rights, excessive testing, and climate change, SEL is offering U.S. educators and their kids into a lesser world of trainable, culture-free, psychological competencies.
By 2013, all U.S. states had identified preschool competencies for SEL. Many states have also developed age-appropriate competencies for K-12 education. Countless professional development courses are being accessed by teachers eager to promote SEL in their schools.
In a world that seems to be falling apart, and where people’s quality of life is collapsing, influential organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (famous for its PISA tests), and the US National Center for Education and the Economy, are turning to social and emotional competencies for most of their answers. This is like responding to the catastrophic flooding caused by climate change, with calls for more sandbags.
SEL emphasizes keeping calm and getting children to self-regulate “negative” emotional states like anger, anxiety, and depression. A wider view of well-being, however, regards so-called negative emotions like righteous anger and indignation as exactly what’s needed to fire up civic engagement in response to the monumental challenges of our time. Emotions like frustration (with dithering leaders), enmity (toward hatemongers), and disgust (with racism) rarely receive validation in SEL.
SEL justifies almost everything in terms of learning. Perhaps this is a strategy to stave off conservative criticisms that SEL detracts from academic achievement. But pushed to the limit, SEL can be just one more way to jack up test scores. In its very name, SEL addresses only those aspects of well-being that can be regarded as learning, rather than ones that also affect the human development of the whole child. This is very different from well-being policies in Canada, Australia, and Europe.
SEL is indifferent to high stakes tests that are responsible for widespread ill-being. A real well-being agenda challenges such anxiety-inducing practices of top-down accountability.
SEL has limited psychological ways of managing digital risks such as online bullying. Well-being strategies advance systemic strategies of ethical technology use concerning issues like excess screen time and digital addiction.
SEL ignores spiritual, physical, and societal well-being. It doesn’t encourage students to learn outdoors in nature and become stewards of the environment. It has nothing to say about physical fitness. Nor does it address young people’s spiritual hunger to feel part of something greater than themselves.
To be sure, SEL has led to some improvements in student achievement and mental health, including among racialized and minoritized groups. After years of criticism that the so-called neutral competencies of SEL favored privileged White forms of emotionality, an emerging movement toward what’s being called “transformational SEL” is now helping some students find their voice in relation to racism and poverty. But, in general, we think SEL is still being massively oversold.
It’s time for U.S. educators to go beyond the positive and culturally neutral psychologies of grit, growth mindsets, resilience, and self-regulation as the answers to the mental health crisis and everything that’s causing it. We have to reclaim the bigger and bolder well-being agenda for our students and ourselves.
Our world needs to wake up. Keeping our kids calm and just helping them to carry on will achieve the exact opposite. So, instead of turning inward to our skill sets, let’s go all-out and all-in for well-being in our schools and in our societies, to give everyone a better education, for a better quality of life, in a better world.Share14Comments
By Valerie StraussValerie Strauss is an education writer who runs the Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the L.A. Times. Twitter
By Nicole Asbury August 26, 2024 at 6:11 p.m. EDT Washington Post
Ameilya Coleman waited expectantly for her mom in front of their driveway Monday morning. She was ready to start the 10-minute walkfrom their hometo Dr. Ronald McNair Elementary School in Germantown.
Monday marked not just the first day of school for Ameilya and thousands of other D.C.-area students. It would be the third-grader’s first time taking classes in person.
The D.C. region is heading back to school, and our local education team wants to hear how you’re preparing for the new year. Submit your thoughts here.
Before now, most of Ameilya’s education was through Montgomery County Public Schools’ virtual academy. But it closed over the summer as Maryland’s largest school system tried to reconcile a shortfall in its budget. The school board’s June decision left the families of over 700 students enrolled in the virtual academy scrambling to decide what to do in the fall.
Some students who are medically vulnerable were eligible for an online home and hospital teaching program that the Montgomery school district provides. But there were many other students, like Ameilya, whose schooling routine would change.
Ameilya’s mother, Barbara Galasso, took photos of the third-grader before they started theirwalk to the school. “Are you excited?” Galasso asked. Ameilya replied with a simple, “Mhm.”🌸
Then, Galasso asked, “Are you scared?” Ameilya shook her head. “Are you sure?” She shook her head again.
Galasso admitted she was scared. One of her 13-year-old twins was bullied in elementary school years ago, she said. She was worried about those experiences repeating as her twins also started their first day at Northwest High School in Germantown. Already, the twin who had been bullied was targeted again while trying out for the high school’s volleyball team, Galasso said, when a girl went up to her and said, “Have you ever played volleyball before? Are you stupid?” Galasso called the athletic director immediately and said, “If one hair on my kid’s heads gets ruffled, I will sue the entire county,” she recalled.
The school system’s leaders “don’t understand the anxiety and mental torment they’re putting these kids through,” Galasso said. “We have to deal with these children.”
The Montgomery Virtual Academy was introduced in 2021 as an option for families who did not want to return toin-person classesafter the coronavirus closed schools. Families filled out an application to join.
Former Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight included money to continue the virtual academy in her recommended budget for the 2024-25 school year. School board members briefly considered cutting the academy in February because it was covered by federal covid relief funds that are set to expire September, according to an email the school board sent at the time. But they chose to keep it.
In June, the board reversed course and eliminated the academy after the county council approved a budget that would give the school system about 99 percent of its requestbutleft a funding gap of about $30 million.School officials claimed that the academy’s graduation and attendance rates were lower compared with the rest of the district. The decision stunned some families, who rallied outside of school board meetings to call on the district to reopen the academy.
Some families appealed the decision in a filing to the Maryland State Board of Education but learnedit could take months before that process is complete, said Sterling High, a parent whose son attended the virtual academy last school year.
High’s two students are enrolled in the district’s home and hospital teaching this school year, buthe said the program is not “as comprehensive or comparable to what the MVA provided.”
Earlier in August, new MontgomerySuperintendent Thomas Taylor apologized to families in a letter for the way the closure of the academy was handled. He wrote the board made the decision to cut the program with the understanding that district administration would find a solution for the families enrolled. But that work did not happen, he said.
Taylor saidhis administration is working toroll out a hybrid program that would “not be identical but similar” to the virtual academy. If approved by the school board and funded, it would launch during the second marking period — which starts in November. He added that the solution wouldn’t work for every student since it would be designed “to serve only those with a demonstrated medical need.”
In an interviewwith The Washington Post earlierthis month, Taylor said that a majority of students in the academy “can return to a regular ed setting.”
“I get that it’s not their preference and that there’s going to be some challenges with that,” he said. “Our school team is there to support our students through those challenges and their families through those challenges.”
Galasso doesn’t think Taylor’s proposed hybrid program is an option for her daughters, and she is worried about their academic performance in a school building. She said that when the coronavirus caused schools to shift to virtual instruction, her twins flourished. Both of them have ADHD, she said, and were able to walk around when they needed breaks. Their grades were a mix of As and Bs.
“Their performance was incredible,” Galasso said. “I can’t even explain to you the difference.”
The family chose to remain online when the school system offered it in 2021. Ameilya followed her older sistersinto the academy when she started school.
But on Monday, that changed.
Ameilya walked a few paces ahead of her mom, carrying her pink Stitch backpack and purple lunchbox. She was excited to see her best friend and her teacher, she said.
Galasso wrapped her arm around her daughter as they approached McNair Elementary. They walked in through the school’s front doors together.
When Galasso emerged a few minutes later, she was crying.
“It’s just everything is brand new,” she said.Share83Comments
By Nicole AsburyNicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland. Twitter
Opinion Writer Jay Caspian Kang A wide-ranging cultural critic and New York Times Magazine contributor tackles thorny questions in politics, culture and the economy.
A few weeks ago, I debuted a running feature called “The Magic Wand,” where I throw out an idea and make the case for it in this newsletter. This week, I want to suggest a solution to the civic worker problem that would bring in a fleet of new employees into some of the more unskilled, less in demand, but ultimately invaluable positions that are indispensable to functioning communities.
The Problem
Last month, The Times published a story about the severe understaffing of New York City’s municipal services. “The wave of departures has included health care workers, parks employees, police officers and child protective service workers,” my colleagues Dana Rubinstein and Emma G. Fitzsimmons reported. Nearly 8 percent of city jobs are currently vacant, a rate five times that of recent years. It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific cause for this situation — The Times’s story cited slow hiring processes, better opportunities in other fields, and the hangover from a pandemic hiring freeze that ended in November 2021.
New York City is certainly not the only city facing a civic employee shortage. In San Francisco, municipal staffing problems have gotten so bad that workers have taken to the streets demanding that the city fill vacant positions. The city of San Diego, as of this spring, had an eye-popping 16 percent job vacancy rate for its various agencies and services. Washington D.C., which is facing a police shortage, started offering a $20,000 hiring bonus to new officers who join the force.
The effects of all these civic worker shortages can be felt in nearly every facet of life. Trash doesn’t get picked up; the police take longer to respond to calls; services that help the homeless suffer from chronic understaffing and infrastructural failure.
The Solution: A Major Expansion of AmeriCorps
In late March, the White House proposed a more than 16 percent increase to the budget of AmeriCorps, a federal service program that gives people a modest stipend to work on various projects across the country. If approved, the agency would receive a total of $1.34 billion, which will go to supporting “250,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers” and “support targeted investments in communities where the need is greatest.”
Instead of just adding 16 percent to the budget of AmeriCorps, the White House should increase the size of the AmeriCorps work force from 250,000 to three million (for the rest of this column, I’ll refer to it as Mega AmeriCorps), embark on a substantial press tour to promote it, and broadly expand the benefits of enrolling in the program. This would be the first step in eventually calling for a revival of the Universal National Service Act, which would require every American to commit two years of their lives to national service between the years of 18 and 25.
This idea might sound scary at first blush, but was actually part of the Democratic mainstream as recently as 14 years ago when Barack Obama seriously discussed a similar idea during his 2008 campaign. Charles Rangel, the former longtime Democratic congressman from New York, repeatedly called for forms of compulsory service for years. More recently, Pete Buttigieg floated the idea while campaigning in 2019. Last year, my colleagues on the editorial board asked if young Americans should be required to do a year of service.
The issue, as the editorial board pointed out, is that it’s difficult, potentially illegal, and perhaps even morally wrong to compel young Americans into a period of service. That said, it’s also difficult to imagine that these programs could become voluntary societal norms without a radical shift in the sense of precarity and pressure that young people feel on a daily basis.
What’s needed is a real test run for universal national service; one that’s championed by the government and not just an assortment of nonprofits like, say, Teach for America. Mega AmeriCorps could be just that. A new fleet of workers, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25, could be placed in cities, towns, and rural areas with civic labor shortages. They should be provided housing, a livable salary, and a job training infrastructure that will not only prepare them to do their work, but also set them up for a career in whatever civic organization they enter.
The key for success would be a slow, but ultimately forceful normalization of joining up with Mega AmeriCorps after high school, which would have the added effect of lessening the pressure that many kids feel to compete and excel in their academic pursuits. Access to higher education plays far too large a role in nearly every facet of American life, from what salary you earn to what side of the political divide you fall. This would be a conscious effort to reduce the importance of a postsecondary education by creating a bridge between high school and a career that could allow you to circumvent the need to go to college at all. Much of the money that goes to Mega AmeriCorps would be spent on training and apprenticeship programs to get young people credentialed and prepared for a career.
Even middle-class kids who might ultimately find their way to a four-year college could be encouraged to join up with AmeriCorps with the proper incentives. For what feels like years, the White House has been debating student loan forgiveness. While I’m not entirely sure about tying existing loan forgiveness to Mega AmeriCorps, I do think the White House could partner with states and, much like the G.I. Bill, offer to supplement or fully cover the state or community college tuition of anyone who had completed two years of service. The service time would also count as class credits and could even help with admission into more exclusive state schools. This would also reduce tuition costs by cutting down on the time a Mega AmeriCorps graduate needed to be on campus.
Here’s a specific example of how it could work
I’ve written quite a bit about how one of the enduring and less-discussed problems with homelessness in California is that there simply are not enough workers to carry out the grand plans of politicians or even maintain the current raft of services. This is understandable even in times when civic agencies are fully staffed, for the very simply reason that working with the homeless isn’t easy.
Currently, much of the homelessness work in California gets contracted out to third-party nonprofits like Urban Alchemy, an organization that helps formerly incarcerated people find work. But the intensity of the homelessness crisis and the labor shortage have placed a great deal of strain on these organizations to keep up with demand.
An energized and well-funded Mega AmeriCorps could produce a new work force to engage with the homeless at every level: Outreach on the streets, support to get people into shelters or into permanent housing, and then follow-ups once people have stabilized. Because it’s a federal program, it would be easier for the public to monitor than third-party nonprofits. And while it might be true that many of the young people who go into these jobs will not work in homelessness services for their whole career, there will at least be enough bodies around to run everything from shelters to permanent supportive housing services to harm reduction centers to so-called “Safe Sleep” sites.
An admittedly too-broad and unpopular opinion
I, myself, am an AmeriCorps alumnus. I did an environmental restoration program in Seattle when I was 19 years old. I was not an ideal employee by any means, but I did plant some trees and learn quite a bit about forestry, climate change and park maintenance. I also learned that there is a value to service, which was an invaluable lesson during a dark time in my life when the thought of going to college and pursuing some sort of career seemed like an impossibility.
Some of these revelations came from just growing up a bit, but I do think that there was something about the almost conscripted feel of the organization that provided me with a sense of duty to the city of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. I joined AmeriCorps as a teenager because I did not have any other plans with my life, nor did I have any skills. It was, in effect, the only place that would take me and give me something to do.
Today’s young people are dealing with much more than I did back around the turn of the millennium. Many feel hopeless and depressed. National service is not a panacea for these ailments, nor can it change the economic precarity that many young people feel, but it can provide a sense of community and a meaningful pathway into a career that falls outside of the clogged and ultracompetitive pathways that exist today.
I do not support compulsory military service, but it seems clear to me that many of the problems with political polarization and the atomization of the individual in this country come from the fact that there are increasingly few places where people from different economic backgrounds can work together for a good cause.
Among the elite classes, the idea of service has mostly been reduced down to a line item on a college application. The much-discussed divides in this country, whether economic, racial or educational, cannot be solved through some feat of wonkery or through pretty speeches by politicians. What needs to exist is some place that can pool a lot of different young people together. College will never accomplish any of that in the way that two years of service — hopefully eventually two mandatory years of service — could.
The good news is that AmeriCorps already exists. It’s time to turn it into something much more ambitious and hopefully let its example pave the way for a national service requirement.
Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.”
By the Editorial Board July 4, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Washington Post
On July 4, Americans pause to celebrate the brave and radical actions of 1776, when 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy, creating a nation that not only survives but also remains the world’s strongest. Wars, pandemics, inequality and political strife, among other challenges, have threatened this nation. But what those 56 men envisioned holds firm today: Its strength flows from Americans’ ability to acknowledge and work through differences.S
Today, the United States doesn’t face a common external foe akin to the British crown — or the Soviet Union, as in the Cold War. Instead, cultural shifts among Americans threaten to make the country more divided and weaker. This long Independence Day weekend is time to recognize the danger of Americans’ growing independence from one another.
These cultural shifts are visible not just in increasing partisan polarization but also in how Americans relate to one another day by day. Americans volunteer less than they used to, increasingly making more time for their own hobbies, but not to help others. In the early 2000s, nearly 30 percent of Americans over age 16 saidthey volunteered at least once in the past year.That had fallen to 23 percent by 2021. It hasn’t been a straight decline, but the trend is generally downward. If volunteering rates now were similar to the early 2000s, about 12 million more people would volunteer each year. Many charities say they are seeing this firsthand as they struggle to get enough help. Charitable giving has declined even more. Nearly 70 percent of Americans said they gave money to a charitable cause in the early 2000s versus only 50 percent in 2018.
The reasons are not entirely clear. The pandemic contributed to a pullback in any type of socializing in person. Some also point to the 2017 Republican tax law changes that led to fewer people claiming a charitable tax deduction, since they no longer itemize their deductions. But charitable giving was falling before that change, and most Americans weren’t giving solely for a tax write off. The bigger explanation appears to be a great disengagement from civic life. Many people no longer have interest in joining institutions of any sort — government, religious or civic. The United States is becoming a “less charitable nation,” researchers say.
The decline in volunteering and giving coincides with a drop-off in religious attendance, union membership and childbearing. Suburban areas have seen an especially large decline over time. Parents with children under 18 at home are more likely to volunteer formally. Many Americans say they help out neighbors informally by babysitting, petsitting or running errands, but these courtesies are not the same as formal volunteering, in which one helps people one does not know well — or at all.
More Americans seem to prioritize wellness — their mental and physical health, and their work-life balance — especially after the pandemic and as baby boomers age. In general, this is good — but not when taken to extremes. Entrepreneur Michael Karnjanaprakorn wrote recently that today’s status symbols are “sabbaticals, long attention spans, quality time with kids, valuing time over money, [a] slow and calm lifestyle, [a] meeting-free calendar, having ‘enough,’ early retirement [and a] biological age younger than your real age.” Noticeably absent from the list was any mention of using free time to help others — or connecting with new people, even though research shows that social interaction is crucial to overall health.
One result of these trends is a loneliness epidemic. Another is the weakening of Americans’ understanding and sense of connection to their fellow citizens. The country has a less generous welfare state than other advanced nations, offset somewhat by a strong charitable culture. But Americans now see less often parts of their communities outside their immediate friend circles and neighborhoods. Volunteering makes people aware of different socio-economic conditions and struggles — and ways to help.
The government can fill some of the gaps. The United States is the only advanced economy with no requirement that employers offer paid sick leave or paid vacation days. If employers close on July 4, there is no federal law requiring employees to be paid for the holiday. That should change.
But the government cannot make up for the fraying of civil society, and it should not try. It is up to Americans to sustain and renew their bold experiment in self-government. In past periods of crisis and civil strife, they have. Current and rising generations can again, re-engaging in their communities for the sake of their country — and for themselves.
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
People’s ratings of life satisfaction, hope, and other dimensions of their well-being have become important metrics in disciplines such as economics and public health because they predict health, productivity, employment, and other social outcomes. Recent research suggests that hope, which can be measured with survey instruments, is the most important dimension of well-being for predicting future outcomes for individuals and society. Trends in hope have been tracked as a key factor in the rising numbers of U.S. deaths of despair—a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, and St. Louis, Missouri, have shown that those who have hope for the future—and who are often supported by a mentor—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors. By contrast, individuals in despair are unlikely to respond to incentives or opportunities and are vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. This article provides evidence that hope influences social and economic outcomes and examples of policies that can help restore hope in populations that have lost it. Preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to a society’s health and security.
_________________________________________________________________________ Societies in the United States and many other countries have become increasingly polarized and unequal, not only in regard to income and opportunity but also in terms of how people feel about their lives. These sentiments matter to economists and other social scientists because feelings such as happiness, optimism, and hope—elements of what researchers refer to as “subjective well-being”—can, when properly measured, predict for both individuals and groups such important outcomes as physical and mental health, productivity, civic participation, longevity, and success in the labor market.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the single most consequential component of subjective well-being is hope. People usually think of hope as an emotion rather than something that can be measured and linked to behavioral, economic, and political outcomes. Economists who study hope—a small group that includes me—define it slightly differently. In social science, hope is not simply the belief or feeling that one’s circumstances will get better: That is optimism. Rather, hope is optimism combined with the belief that one has the agency to make things better.
Research suggests that hope, like happiness and other aspects of well-being, has a genetic component and is also shaped by environmental factors such as familial and community support, education, and opportunity.1 This influence of environment means that policymakers and civic leaders have an opportunity to promote and nurture hope among citizens.
The stakes for doing so, or failing to do so, are high. My colleagues and I have tracked downward trends in hope in the United States and linked them to the rising numbers of deaths of despair, a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Individuals in despair—a condition in which people do not care whether they live or die and therefore lack a narrative for their own future—are not likely to respond to incentives or nudges or take advantage of opportunities to get ahead. Research shows that they are more vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and radicalization.
Those who have hope for the future are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors that can jeopardize their health.
Conversely, in communities where hope is nurtured, people are more likely to thrive. With collaborators, I have conducted surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Peru and Missouri and found that those who have hope for the future—many being the recipients of encouragement from a mentor in their family or community—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors that can jeopardize their health.
Social scientists and policymakers should both measure hope as a distinct constituent of well-being and develop interventions that cultivate it.
In this article, I provide empirical evidence and review lessons from well-being research and other disciplines that suggest possible policies for restoring hope in populations where it has been lost or diminished. I also recommend—as I argue in my recent book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us From Despair2—that social scientists and policymakers should both measure hope as a distinct constituent of well-being and develop interventions that cultivate it. In the United States, preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to the population’s heath, well-being, cohesion, and even national security (see note A).
Sizing Up a Crisis of Despair
By several measures, the United States is experiencing a full-blown crisis of despair. Suicides, fatal drug overdoses, and deaths related to alcohol use are at unprecedented levels. For example, overdoses alone caused nearly 107,000 deaths in 2021, up from 52,400 in 2015.3,4 And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveys of high school students across the United States indicate that the rate of mental health problems in adolescents, especially young women, has consistently risen since the surveys began in 2011, a pattern exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.5 In 2021, three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, and one in three said they had contemplated suicide.3,5 And the malaise extends more broadly. When asked in a recent Gallup poll whether they were satisfied with the way things were going in the United States, only 19% of Americans said that they were. This percentage starkly contrasts with the high of 65% in 1986.6
The crisis was brought to light in the seminal 2015 article by economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton that introduced the term “deaths of despair.”7 Their 2017 follow-up paper showed that these preventable deaths among White people without a college degree were rising quickly enough to potentially reduce overall U.S. life expectancy.8
At about the same time, Sergio Pinto and I found remarkable gaps in hope and optimism between African American and White people, which were widest for those at low levels of income. We found that low-income African Americans are 3 times as likely as Whites to score high in hope on an 11-point optimism scale. This advantage aligns with trends in mortality, in which low-income Whites, who have traditionally had lower mortality rates, are losing ground compared with low-income African Americans, who are making gradual progress.9 In a more recent analysis published in a Brookings Global Working Paper in 2022, we showed that depression (a sign of despair and lack of hope) preceded deaths of despair among individuals and communities by 2 to 4 years, suggesting that well-being metrics could have served as a warning indicator had they been collected regularly.3
Measuring hope in individuals and across populations is, however, a relatively new area of academic inquiry, especially in economics. Economic research into well-being generally concentrates on happiness and satisfaction with one’s life as key determinants of human welfare and quality of life. Happiness and satisfaction typically correlate with hope and are related to it, but hope differs in its emphasis on a belief in one’s ability to improve one’s situation. Researchers often measure hope by administering surveys, and they are becoming more skilled at verifying that participants’ self-reported hope is, indeed, hope. For instance, researchers may correlate the self-reports with biological or psychological markers, such as the level of the stress hormone cortisol in a saliva sample and the presence of Duchenne smiles—smiles that involve the eyes as well as the mouth and convey genuine happiness.10
Health and Social Consequences of Hope and Despair
As already mentioned, research suggests that well-being traits such as happiness and hope have a genetic component yet hope, like many other traits and emotions, can be influenced by environmental factors like familial support, education, and opportunity, including opportunities created by shifting societal trends.11 For example, in a 2019 study of respondents in the U.S. Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID), Kelsey J. O’Connor and I found that African Americans and women experienced increases in hope in the late 1970s, likely because of expanded civil rights and the woman’s movement, whereas men with less than a high school education experienced decreases in hope over the same time period.12
In our PSID study, O’Connor and I found that a higher level of hope predicts better health and longevity.12 Participants, who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, had been surveyed while in their 20s and asked whether they thought their lives would “work out.” Today I consider the question to be a proxy measure of hopefulness. Participants who said they thought their lives would work out, compared with members of their peer group (matched on age, race, and gender) who were not as hopeful (that is, they indicated that they did not think their lives would work out), were more likely to be alive in 2015.
My colleague Julia R. Pozuelo and I extended our analysis of the link between hope and long-term outcomes by following 400 low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, over 3 years.13 At the beginning of the study, 85% of the participants told us that they planned to go to college or seek postgraduate education even though none had parents educated beyond secondary school. This was a surprisingly high level of hope and aspiration. An interesting detail is that almost all of them had a mentor—a teacher, a relative, or another respected adult—who supported their aspirations. Three years later, 90% of those who planned to pursue higher education were still enrolled, and they were 15% to 20% less likely than their less hopeful peers to have engaged in risky health behaviors, such as smoking or having unsafe sex.
We repeated the survey in low-income neighborhoods in St. Louis, one primarily African American and one primarily White. Remarkably, the same differences in hope that our earlier work highlighted between low-income African American and White adults held consistently among our adolescent respondents. The African American adolescents were more hopeful and more likely to trust others and to aspire to advance beyond a high school education. The White teenagers showed a good deal of self-reliance but were less hopeful, were less likely to trust others, and did not plan to continue their education past high school. Another clear difference between the two groups was that the African American adolescents were much more likely to have a local mentor who encouraged their efforts in school, whereas the White adolescents much more often reported that their parents did not support any plans for education beyond high school. The implication, here and in the Peru study, is that having a mentor to rely on for support helps young people remain hopeful and on track with their dreams.2
Although community well-being is difficult to measure, empirical evidence suggests that individual-level hope has positive spillover effects. When a community has many individuals with high levels of life satisfaction, their satisfaction seems to spill into the community, increasing the well-being of individuals in that community who have low levels of life satisfaction.14 Hope may spill over into a community and raise its collective well-being in a similar manner. Whether, how, and why this works are matters that can and should be explored in future empirical research. Despair, meanwhile, has negative psychological spillover effects on community well-being.15,16
Other research establishes links between lack of hope and vulnerability to misinformation. Individuals experiencing despair lack a narrative for their future and the wherewithal to pursue purposeful activity; these deficits often coexist with the tendency to believe fake news and conspiracy theories, a correlation that is supported by recent neurological research.17,18
Promoting Hope: Lessons and Policies
In light of the growing body of evidence that hopelessness harms society in many measurable ways—constraining educational attainment and healthy habits among young people; driving addiction, suicide, and other deaths of despair; and impairing voters’ ability to discern truth—it would behoove community and political leaders to take steps to cultivate hope. As I noted in a 2021 Brookings report,19 an important first step would be to regularly track aspects of well-being in official government statistics just as countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada do.19
An important first step would be to regularly track aspects of well-being in official government statistics just the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada do.
The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics pioneered the regular inclusion of well-being metrics in its annual statistics, using the ONS 4. This is a set of four questions that capture distinct dimensions of well-being: two cognitive evaluations (one for life satisfaction and one for meaning and purpose in life) and two daily experience, or affect, measures (one that asks about yesterday’s level of happiness and one that asks about yesterday’s level of anxiousness). Responses to all four are made on a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being the lowest score and 10 the highest. The United Kingdom is in the process of expanding its battery of well-being questions with several new ones intended to capture satisfaction with specific life domains, such as work and health, as well as a question related to hope. These are still in the testing phase but should be incorporated into the next round of the country’s Annual Population Survey.
If the United States had a standard indicator of well-being that could be tracked across populations and places over time, not unlike how the gross national product serves as an indicator of a country’s fiscal well-being, changes in that indicator could serve to alert policymakers that a population’s well-being was declining so they could intervene before a full-blown crisis arose. Life satisfaction is the most used metric of well-being and an obvious first measure to track. Yet adding a hope metric (as the United Kingdom has decided to do) would further enhance understanding of a critical dimension of the public’s well-being and provide a basis for directing interventions.
Federal agencies also can provide more support for hope cultivation efforts at the local and community levels. In my 2021 Brookings report,19 I recommended creating a federal task force for combating despair that would serve primarily as an information clearinghouse to inform local practitioners about interventions from around the country that succeeded in reducing deaths of despair, keeping adolescents on track in school, and addressing other aspects of hopelessness. Such a task force could provide small grants for logistical support in low-resource settings. Here, too, the United Kingdom offers a useful model. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing was set up at the same time that the ONS 4 was rolled out. The center, funded by both government and private grants, collects reports of experiences with a variety of evidence-based interventions that have proven helpful at fighting despair. These interventions have applied a variety of strategies to counteract despair, such as promoting self-esteem and ways to engage in the community to reduce loneliness; enhancing autonomy and respect among workers to improve workplace satisfaction; and introducing soft skills such as stress reduction, relationship skills, and healthy diet and exercise habits into middle and high school curricula to promote self-esteem and resilience. Efforts like these are most likely to succeed when they include local input and participation, but they also benefit from external logistical advice and support. In the United States, a 10-year-old nonprofit called Results for America plays a somewhat similar role, providing guidance and grants supporting myriad local efforts to optimize opportunities and well-being around the country but without the benefit of government well-being data.
Research on well-being suggests that one straightforward way to cultivate hope in those who lack it is to provide opportunities for volunteering, engaging in the arts, or enjoying nature. Activities like these encourage isolated people, especially older ones, to leave their homes and actively engage with and contribute to their communities. For children and adolescents, teaching coping and resilience tools in school has been shown to have a lasting positive effect on academic performance and well-being scores. For example, students in the Greater Manchester area of England who participated in the #BeeWell program, which teaches soft skills to promote personal responsibility and resilience, continued to show improvements three years after participating. The program was complemented by neighborhood-based support groups.20
The value of local support, in the form of family or community-based mentors, was also a key takeaway from surveys my collaborators and I conducted to measure hopefulness among low-income adolescents in Peru and St. Louis.13 Such support is particularly important in underserved areas, where access to mental health care is limited. (For an example of an organization offering such support, read about the Visible Hands Collaborative at https://visiblehandscollaborative.org.)For a summary of recommendations, see the sidebar Who Should Do What.To spread hope in the United States and elsewhere, scholars must learn more about the factors that underpin well-being and develop interventions that communities and political leaders can apply to nurture hope’s growth where it is lacking and support it where it exists. Policies based on the scientific study of hope could be critical to sparing future generations from lives of despair.
Key Points
•Hope is an aspect of well-being that is increasingly recognized by economists and other social scientists as having important effects on health, employment, productivity, and longevity
.•Like other dimensions of subjective well-being, hope can be measured with survey instruments that are validated by biological and psychological markers. Hope is distinct from happiness and other dimensions of well-being in that it entails a sense of agency in finding a positive pathway forward.
•The United States is in the grip of a hopelessness crisis. This crisis is most clearly reflected by the rising numbers of deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, alcohol-related illness) but also by labor force drop-out, dismal academic achievement, and increases in political polarization and beliefs in conspiracy theories
.•Research suggests that hope can be bolstered with interventions and policies aimed at improving resilience among adolescents, reducing isolation among older people, and directing resources to communities in despair. Successful interventions typically involve community leaders creating opportunities for community members to participate in the arts, volunteer, or engage in school-based group activities. Yet more work is needed both in measuring hope and in determining the best ways to promote hope in a given context. (See the Who Should Do What sidebar for detailed policy recommendations.)
Who Should Do What
Following are steps that federal policymakers can take to better understand the scope of despair in the United States and identify programs that can address it:
•Create a federal task force that coordinates efforts to combat despair around the country. It could also serve as an information clearinghouse where people launching new local initiatives can get information about successful strategies and tools, and it could provide logistical assistance and seed grants.
•Track and measure hope and despair along with other well-being statistics with instruments such as those used by the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics. When surveys are consistent across countries, learning and the generation of an international well-being monitor are facilitated.
•Invest in research that aims to better understand, measure, and facilitate hope, and coordinate with other funders of such research. Programs that rely on a range of public and nongovernmental sources are typically more cost-effective and productive than those funded solely by government grants.
•Although government officials are probably best positioned to measure and track national data on hope and despair, they should make use of the expertise of scholars, statisticians, and others who can advise on survey design and other measurement questions and identify successful community experiences that can be replicated.
Following are steps that community leaders can take to promote and cultivate hope:
•To help children and adolescents, school leaders, civic organizations, and local policymakers can expand efforts to teach self-esteem, resilience, and coping skills in school and community programs, as the United Kingdom’s #BeeWell program does. Media literacy programs can be instituted to teach young people how to identify and reject misinformation.
•To help young adults, local governments and civic groups can invest in mentoring programs and expand access to mental health care and to skills training for the jobs of the future.
•To help older and isolated adults, local governments and civic organizations can implement programs that promote community involvement, such as volunteering, access to the arts, and walks in nature, as the What Works Centre for Wellbeing does in the United Kingdom.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Footnote
A. This article expands on an essay titled “The New Science of Hope” that the author published with The Atlantic in April 2023.Go to Footnote
25% to 54% of Gen Z K-12 students are lacking engaging school experiences
Engagement is particularly low among non-college-bound students
Students are most excited to learn when teachers make it interesting
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As parents and children prepare for the start of a new school year, a survey from the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup finds that the experiences young people in the U.S. have in their middle and high school classrooms are closely tied to their confidence and optimism about their future — but many schools are struggling to engage their students.
The online survey was conducted April 26-May 9, 2024, with 4,157 12- to 27-year-old children and young adults, including 2,317 who are enrolled in a K-12 school, using the probability-based Gallup Panel. This is the latest in the Voices of Gen Z study, a multiyear research effort to understand the educational and life experiences of this generation.
Between 25% and 54% of students say they are not having eight engaging experiences in school, such as feeling that what they are learning is important or interesting. Less than half of students say their schoolwork positively challenges them (49%) or aligns with what they do best (46%).
One-third or less of students strongly agree they are having each of these engaging experiences, and nearly half (46%) do not strongly agree they are having any of them.
The extent to which Gen Z K-12 students feel engaged in the classroom is an important factor in their overall wellbeing and outlook for the future. The 25% of students who report the highest ratings on these engagement items are more than twice as likely as students who report the lowest 25% of ratings to be thriving in their lives (76% vs. 32%, respectively) and are more than four times as likely to strongly agree they have a great future ahead of them (61% vs. 15%).
Students who do not plan to pursue a degree after high school are also notably less likely than college-bound students to feel motivated by, interested in or excited about what they are learning in school. They are also significantly less likely to feel their schoolwork gives them the opportunity to do what they do best.
What would it take to get Gen Z more engaged in the classroom? According to the students themselves, the teacher plays a big role: Six in 10 say that when they are most excited about or interested in what they are learning, it is because their teacher made the material interesting and exciting for them. The same percentage mention that the subject matter was something they wanted to learn more about. Nearly half of Gen Z K-12 students (46%) also say opportunities to engage with the material in a hands-on way drive their interest, and about one in three (35%) most enjoy what they are learning when they can connect it to the real world.
Gen Z Feels Optimistic About the Future — but Not Prepared for It
One of the key findings from the first year of the Voices of Gen Z study was the contrast between the optimism young people had for the future and the relatively low levels of confidence they expressed about their readiness for it. One year later, the gap remains: While nearly eight in 10 Gen Zers (79%) agree they have a great future ahead of them, about half (51%) agree that they feel prepared for that future.
Optimism is largely consistent across age and gender. Black Gen Zers are more likely than their peers to feel they have a great future ahead of them; however, this group remains among the least likely segments of Gen Z to feel prepared for the future. Meanwhile, though not uniquely optimistic, 25- to 27-year-olds, Asian and White Gen Zers, and Gen Z men and boys are most likely to feel prepared for the future.
Gen Z students who do not plan to pursue a degree after high school are less likely than their college-bound peers to agree they feel optimistic about the future. About two-thirds of those who do not plan to attend college (68%) believe they have a great future ahead of them, compared with more than eight in 10 students planning to pursue an associate (81%) or bachelor’s degree (86%). These non-college-bound students are also less likely to agree they feel prepared for their future (40%) than those hoping to earn an associate degree (45%) or bachelor’s degree (54%).
Due to the relationship between school engagement and Gen Z’s future outlook, the dampened optimism non-college-bound students feel may be a reflection of the consistently lower levels of engagement they report at school, as well as a belief that what they are learning may not be relevant to their postgraduation lives.
Bottom Line
The extent to which Gen Z K-12 students feel hopeful about and prepared for their future is linked to how engaged they feel in the classroom. Unfortunately, fewer than two in 10 students strongly agree that what they are learning in class feels important, interesting, challenging or aligned with their natural talents. This disconnect is especially high among students who do not want to attend college, and previous Gallup research finds that engagement declines as students advance along their K-12 journeys.
Gen Z students suggest several strategies teachers and schools could use that might help increase their engagement: Learning from teachers who are themselves highly engaged with the material and finding opportunities to apply what they are learning in a hands-on, relevant way are two such strategies. Finding ways to implement these and other strategies for all students, including those who do not plan to pursue further education after high school, might not only increase student engagement in the present but also better prepare those students for success in adulthood.
Deputy Superintendent; Office of School Support and Well-being; Office of District Operations Social-Emotional and Mental Health Programming and Services for Students A. B. C.
PURPOSE To set forth a framework for a multitiered system of universal, targeted, and intensive student services that support the essential educational mission of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS): student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion To affirm the Board of Education’s commitment to student social-emotional well-being and mental health as essential to student academic success
ISSUE Student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion all have strong social-emotional and mental health components: cognitive demands for learning; social and emotional and mental health demands for behaving according to school rules, norms, and expectations; and physical demands to be active throughout the school day. School communities thrive when the student body is engaged in school life, healthy, and its members make positive decisions that promote their own well-being and the wellbeing of others.
POSITION 1. The Board affirms the importance of students and parents/guardians having access to reliable and caring sources of support in times of worry, concern, or crisis. In every MCPS school setting, students shall have access to social-emotional and mental health professionals and other trusted adults who interact with students regularly and can facilitate appropriate and timely connections with social emotional and mental health supports, programming, and services for students when needed.
MCPS will establish learning objectives and supporting resources for MCPS staff and, as appropriate, volunteers who regularly interact with students, so that they are knowledgeable about the functions of the Student Well-being Teams (SWBTs) and Educational Management Teams (EMTs)., to activate available resources, such as small-group skills training, short-term individual or group counseling, case management, home visits/interventions for absenteeism, behavior threat assessment, suicide assessment, crisis intervention, or referral to community partner agencies for individual or group therapy.
2. 3. 4. Consistent with Policy ABC, Family-School Partnerships, the Board promotes student and family access to social-emotional well-being and mental health supports, programming, and services, provided either directly by MCPS staff or through community partners.
a) b) Students will have regular opportunities to meet in person with school based MCPS social-emotional and mental health professionals, who will help them understand, as appropriate, the programming and services available to students, including each school’s SWBT.
MCPS will effectively communicate school-level information to families and students about the social-emotional well-being, mental health professionals, and programming and services at each school, either through direct provision by MCPS staff or through referrals to community partner agencies.
The Board seeks to support students’ academic success with a multitiered system of supports that – a) b) fosters positive, respectful, orderly, and safe learning environments necessary for effective learning, in alignment with Policy COA, Student Well-being and School Safety, and the Be Well 365 Initiative; and
responds to specific student needs by analyzing, organizing, and activating available resources and appropriate student services professionals, including school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers (SSWs), and direct outreach professionals such as pupil personnel workers (PPWs), emergent multilingual learner therapeutic counselors (ETCs), and parent community coordinators (PCC).
A multitiered system should include, but not be limited to, the following key components: a) b) Universal programming available to all students – grade-specific and age appropriate classroom instruction through the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) curricula for health education and mental health literacy;
research-informed schoolwide social-emotional learning programs; and drop-in support from school-based mental health professionals.
Targeted student supports – consultation among parents/guardians and grade-level or subject-area teams, as appropriate, to consider specific student needs and strengths and develop behavior support and interventions that address identified concerns.
c) 5. Intensive support – coordination through SWBTs and EMTs to activate available resources, such as small-group skills training, short-term individual or group counseling, case management, home visits/interventions for absenteeism, behavior threat assessment, suicide assessment, crisis intervention, or referral to community partner agencies for individual or group therapy.
MCPS shall provide parents/guardians with access to student educational records entitled to them under the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
6. D. MCPS partnerships with with community partner agencies shall be established through memoranda of understanding that specify, as appropriate, partnership roles and responsibilities, referral processes, safety planning, decision-making rules, and confidentiality and data-sharing protocols in alignment with FERPA, which governs MCPS staff and programming, and the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, which governs health providers.
DESIRED OUTCOMES 1. 2. 3. E.
All students will thrive and become healthy, resilient, self-confident, and successful young people, who are engaged in school life and make positive decisions that promote their own well-being and the well-being of others.
Students and families will access, when needed, the appropriate supports that students may need and understand the purposes of social-emotional and mental health programming.
The educational mission of MCPS will be supported by an effective and efficient system of universal, targeted, and intensive student services to foster positive, respectful, orderly, and safe learning environments necessary for effective learning.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES The superintendent of schools will –
1. 2. implement counseling, social-emotional learning, health education, and mental health literacy curricula to support student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion with social-emotional knowledge and skills appropriate for their level of development;
provide students and families with school-level and topic-specific information needed to effectively access each social-emotional and mental health program and practice area, provided through MCPS resources and community partners;
3 of 4 IJA 3. 4. F. collect regular feedback on stakeholder access to social-emotional and mental health programming and services; and establish regulations and/or other administrative procedures necessary for carrying out the commitments and priorities outlined in this policy, consistent with Maryland law and Board policy.
REVIEW AND REPORTING 1. 2. 3. The superintendent of schools shall recommend to the Board the funding necessary and available to implement the goals of this policy and strategically deploy student services professionals and their responsibilities effectively and equitably. As part of deliberations on the superintendent of schools’ recommended budget, the Board will review the capacity of social-emotional and mental health programming and student services for elementary, middle, and high schools and alternative programs, and determine the funding necessary and available to promote equitable and effective staffing, informed by national best practices.
This policy will be reviewed on an ongoing basis, in accordance with the Board of Education’s review process.
Related Sources: Policy History: MD Educ Code Ann § 7-1501 (2018); MD Courts and Judiciary Code Ann §5-609; Code of Maryland Regulations, sections 13a.07.11.03; 13a.05.05.02; 13a.12.03.02; 13a.12.03.07; 13a.12.03.11; 13a.12.03.08.08; 13a.12.04.08.08 Formerly Policy IJA, School Counseling (2004); amended by Resolution No. 200-24,