Editor’s note: This is the first of two posts on what students do outside of school hours.
For decades, field biologists tried to understand animals by observing them during the day. They’d sit in a jeep, holding a notebook, maybe wearing a funny hat. They observed what lions, elephants, or jaguars did under the sun.
In the late 1990s, though, camera traps caught on. These were motion-activated, infrared cameras. Little memory cards meant you could leave it there for weeks. So the field exploded with new insights. Some ideas were simple: Lions weren’t lazy, they hunted at night! Some were complex: When you watched coyotes creep into farms, you’d better understand components of the “human-animal conflict zones” (as the conservationists call it).
Education is in a trap. Our field studies daylight behavior—8 a.m. to 3 p.m.—in great detail. Classes are observed, schools are visited, test scores are released. We can describe five different math curricula and how they differ.
But we’re missing what happens after dark: the TikTok binge, the fight over putting the phone away, the slow collapse of homework, the late-night texting and gaming that leads to five hours of sleep, the kid whose executive function is so shot he couldn’t get his homework done if he were in an empty jail cell.
Yes, we have the outlines of the story, but not the details. It’s not sufficient to just say “Yeah, phones.” If we had our own version of camera traps for the 6 p.m.-to-midnight hours—qualitative research, family interviews, ethnographic study—we’d finally see the real factors shaping student success or struggle—and how it’s different in 2025 than in 2015, not across a kid here or there, but across enough of them to draw patterns.
Consider NAEP scores. They fell, even before Covid. Pundits explained it with references to daylight behavior, cuts to school spending, weak curriculum, declining teacher quality, and more.
Then along came scholar Nat Malkus of AEI. He observed that adult math and reading skills fell, too, in similar ways as the decline of fourth and eighth graders. Since we know that adults are not on the receiving end of any teachers, curriculum, or “school” experiences, we know that something else is at work.
Now let’s turn to Jonathan Haidt. You all know The Anxious Generation—his thesis is that smartphones have harmed children. What has Haidt changed his mind about in the past year? He just told Ezra Klein, “I think I grossly underestimated the harm that’s happening. Because I focused on mental illness, but the bigger damage, I think, is the destruction of human attention in possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world.”
Most K–12 people would stipulate that teen flourishing has declined. The good things are down (attention, sleep, in-person friend time, dating, part-time work, sports, happiness). The bad things are up (anxiety, isolation, mental illness).
However, K–12 people treat this decline in teen flourishing as an adjacent issue. For good reason: Schools don’t execute their basic assignments very well, like literacy. But other jobs are foisted upon schools anyway, like mental health. The idea of pushing one more job—to somehow observe or improve 6 p.m. to midnight—is therefore a bad one.
The K–12 sector has had some recent, mostly unsuccessful brushes trying to act on teen flourishing (“Promise Neighborhoods,” social and emotional learning, Character Lab, etc.). So we’re conditioned to avert our eyes when the topic comes up.
But just because schools can’t easily address the 6 p.m.-to-midnight issue doesn’t mean we in the education policy sector shouldn’t devote some serious energy to understanding it. The problem is that each leader and organization is caught up in their favorite topics and targets, be it achievement, whole child, budgets, choice, etc. They have little appetite for field notes on the 6 p.m.-to-midnight window: “We already know enough not to waste time on gaining precision there.”
And yet, Malkus is right: These academic declines are probably not caused, at least not solely, by what’s happening during the school day. And Haidt is right: Not only do we see mental health issues affecting outliers, the ability of the median kiddo to concentrate is declining.
We—Sean and Mike—are appealing to the sector we know best, K–12, to step up here.
Over the past months, the two of us have been observing teenage humans in their natural habitats (futons), via Zoom, often for a couple hours at a time. The trade is: We coach them up on executive function, and as a result, we get to hear their stories and notice their patterns. We’re not proposing any 6 p.m. to midnight policy or intervention right now. We just want to enlist more nighttime field biologists to join us, to help us build a taxonomy.
In part two, coming soon, we’ll discuss the lessons we have learned during these observations.
