There’s been a lot of smart analysis of the dismal NAEP results released last week. But here’s an alarming fact that you probably haven’t seen before: The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in twelfth grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade. So what happened?
There’s been a lot of smart analysis of the dismal results released last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—much of which I’ve highlighted in the last two issues of SCHOOLED, my new Substack newsletter.
But here’s an alarming fact that you probably haven’t seen before: The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in 12th grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade. Let’s see how this looks when we glimpse scores by cohort.
Table 1. Average NAEP scale scores in reading, by cohort
* As Andrew Ho pointed out on LinkedIn, Covid knocked NAEP off its normal schedule, so 12th graders were tested in 2024 instead of 2023. It’s the high school graduating class of 2023 that was tested as eighth graders in 2019 and fourth graders in 2015. So I can’t claim that this was the exact same cohort. But for our purposes, it’s close enough.
Sure enough, when the Class of 2023 was in fourth grade, in 2015, they posted the highest average score ever on the reading NAEP (223)—a full ten points ahead of fourth graders in 2000. That equates to about a grade level of progress over the course of just one generation of students. Pretty darn impressive.
Let’s pause on that good news for a moment. What it means is that elementary schools back in the early 2010s were doing a good job teaching reading, or that students in that generation (people who today are about 20 years old) came into school relatively well prepared, or both.
Of course, we know what happened when these folks were about 15 years old, in 2020. The Covid pandemic struck and sent many of them to Zoom School for a year or longer. No wonder their scores fell off a cliff by 12th grade.
But as others, such as Eric Hanushek, have pointed out, it wasn’t just the pandemic. By 2019, this cohort’s eighth grade literacy scores were already showing signs of trouble. Whereas the class of 2023 had the best reading scores ever as fourth graders—two points ahead of second place, the class of 2019—their eighth grade scores were two points lower than those for the class of 2019, for a four-point swing. Given that scores were down just (!) three points in 12th grade, that indicates that much of the damage might have been done by the end of middle school.
(The general patterns look much the same for math, though the class of 2024 can’t boast the best fourth-grade math scores ever; those came in 2013, for the class of 2022.)
The same story emerges if we re-run this analysis for the lowest-performing 10 percent of students, whose recent declines have been particularly dramatic.
Table 2. NAEP scale scores in reading, 10th percentile, by cohort
So what happened?
We know that Covid (and school closures) hurt achievement significantly between the time that our recent high school graduates were in eighth grade (2019) and in 12th grade (2023–24).
But we also know that reading achievement for this cohort sputtered between the fourth and eighth grades between 2015 and 2019. What explains that?
The obvious culprit is the rise of smartphones and social media during this period and its impact on motivation, sleep, and the time spent reading for fun. While others, including Harvard’s (and NAGB’s) Marty West, have come to the same conclusion, none of us can prove it.
But let’s assume that, someday, a smart economist publishes a study demonstrating convincingly that phones and social media are to blame. It’s still not obvious what we should do about it. Phone bans can help between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. But as Mike Goldstein and Sean Geraghty point out, that ignores the real issue—what kids are doing with their devices after school, on the weekends, and especially into the wee hours of the night. Schools can be part of the battle against screens and scrolling, but we’re going to need to engage parents and communities, as well, if we want to get back to the best reading (and math) scores ever.
Author's note: A big thanks to my colleague Jill Hoppe for her help with data collection for this piece.
Scary NAEP results again.
Harvard Graduate School of Education Academic Dean Marty West writes: “We must search for new explanations and solutions.” But how?
Earlier this year, we wrote:
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 the details of 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.
We have the big picture, from data like the American Time Use Survey, which Jonathan Haidt used to great effect.
Parents get tons of (often confident) advice: take phones away, set screen limits, make kids go outside. But when real parents try these interventions, they often fail. We don’t have fine-grained data on this, so we don’t learn why they failed or how frequently.
For Part 2, below, we share three real case studies from the past year. Together, they illustrate what our field is missing: quality “field studies” of teen patterns (how is time “really” spent) and choppy intervention efforts.
Let’s not leap to solve everything! Let’s first examine what’s going on.
Case study 1
Sarah is on her phone most of the night, so when her alarm rings, she struggles to wake up. Mom pleads for her to go to school most mornings—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Even when she goes, Sarah is late. Not only that, often Mom is late to work after battling Sarah. And once Sarah plops down in the classroom, she is irritable.
Mom read Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation and found it enlightening even though it made her feel like a failure. She’d let Sarah have a phone at age 11. At first, the phone wasn’t so bad. Somewhere along the line, though, there was a tipping point. Now Sarah is always on it.
Mom tried to take the phone back, first through gentle coaxing, then through incentives, then straight up “I’m taking it”—all advice she’s seen on parenting blogs. Sarah’s response was extreme. She left home three times. Mom and Dad would drive, panicked, around their neighborhood looking for her. She was never too far, but each time, Mom gave back the phone. Another time Sarah poured a two-liter bottle of Pepsi on Mom’s bed. Mom was scared. These reactions seemed crazy. She googled “phone addiction treatment,” but when she’d find a place, the Reddit reviews were bad.
Sarah cycled through three therapists over two years. One Sarah didn’t like. Another wouldn’t ever give Mom straight answers about what they were doing in therapy, so Mom moved on. The third seemed to make progress. The phone stayed but at least there was detente in the household. Sarah agreed to try a midnight bedtime and to hand over her phone at 11:30 p.m. to Mom.
A new problem emerged. Sarah would lay there at midnight in good faith but didn’t fall asleep. She tried:
Obviously, the lesson here is not that teens need light dimmers!
Instead: Most interventions fail, whether initiated by parents or professionals. Trying, failing, adjusting—that’s how you find the things that actually work. Glib explanations to parents probably make things worse, creating false expectations of quick resolution. Sarah may be better rested, but other issues remain.
Case study 2
Alan is a distracted tenth grader. Does he have ADHD? One therapist said no. Another said yes—but Mom wondered if the therapist thought she just wanted medication and extra time on SATs.
They tried Ritalin. His teachers said he behaved better in class, but he said it killed his appetite, so they stopped.
Mom has a solid relationship with Alan. She’ll sit him down at the kitchen table to do homework, and he won’t complain too much. But the second she turns her back, he switches to another tab in his browser to chat on Discord. It doesn’t even seem willful—almost automatic, he says, before he even realizes what he’s done.
She’s tried to have him just work with pencil and paper, but the school assignments are literally all online. Math homework, for example, is “Delta Math.” There’s no book.
Alan, on Zoom, comes off as confident and charming. “I can pull up those grades,” he says. “I don’t really need help. This is just Mom overreacting.” He does have high scores on state standardized tests.
Even when Alan does sit down in good faith to get started at 7 p.m., it’s not perfectly clear what homework is due. One night, an executive function coach sat beside him, and it took 27 clicks through Google Classroom to uncover the real list of assignments—which came from six teachers with six different approaches to listing assignments across multiple platforms. Alan hadn’t been lying. He genuinely didn’t know what he was missing, and it took some real detective work to figure it out.
The school recommends Alan show up for afterschool help sessions. But there are two problems. One is he plays sports, and neither he nor Mom wants him to give that up. Two is that the format of the help sessions are not “sit your butt down and get started on the work.” Instead, the sessions are built as if the key problem is comprehension. Teachers say, “Bring me the problems where you’re stuck.” But that’s not Alan’s issue. It’s task initiation and persistence.
The coach tried to experiment alongside Alan:
Some things worked and some didn’t. There were setbacks. One night Alan did 60 minutes of English homework and forgot to hit “submit,” a perfect picture of how foggy the process can be.
But over time, Alan got back on track. He even submitted two big papers early (out of character), raised an F in chemistry to a B and a D+ in math to an A. Teachers noticed the change and opened the door for him to make up old work. His relationship with his mom improved.
Excited, Alan was eager to “go it alone” in the fall term. We wish the story here were glorious. Instead, he fell back into old habits.
Why share this? Too often these “intervention stories” are tied up neatly in a bow—and that doesn’t line up with what we see in the 6 p.m.-to-midnight space.
Case study 3
Jon is an 11th grader in foster care. He’s already in his second high school, so friendships haven’t come easily. Still, he’s outgoing and able to find a few guys to hang with. He uses marijuana three or four times a week.
Academically, he’s in the lower track courses—officially called “college prep”—but the rigor is a joke. Most kids copy homework in plain sight of the teacher. Jon sometimes wonders if vocational-technical school would’ve been better, but that ship has sailed.
He gets services through the Department of Social Services—bus passes, help with medical appointments on occasion, weekly sessions with a caseworker. Jon described a mix bag on that. Over the years, the caseworker switched pretty frequently, so he’d have to re-explain his story to a new adult all over again. One therapist tried trauma-focused CBT, walking him through breathing exercises and thought logs, which felt useful in the moment. But he tired of it and says “I should go back to that.” Jon likes the current counselor, but scheduling is choppy. The net effect: Therapy is “on the list” of services he receives from the state, but it rarely stuck long enough to change his day-to-day life.
His foster mom leans on him for yardwork, and he tries to help out. Sports? He tried basketball in ninth grade but didn’t make the junior varsity team, and he ran track one season but didn’t love it.
Jon says what he really wants is a part-time job. He’s applied to 21 restaurants online, but received no calls back. He asked his caseworker, who said, “Keep trying. It’s hard to find jobs.” He asked his foster mom, and she said, “They want experience, and you don’t have any.”
He got paired with a coach, Geordie, who specializes in helping people “stuck” in their job search. First thing Geordie did is ask Jon to walk him through exactly what he’s been doing. Jon pulls up Indeed.com. He clicks through the application, types in his experience (none), and hits submit. “That’s it,” he shrugs.
Geordie explains that online applications rarely work, especially for a first job. You’ve got to go in person. He has Jon practice the basics: what to wear, how to shake hands, what to say. The pitch is simple but crucial: “I’m never on my phone while working, and I show up 15 minutes early.” (Then you actually have to do those two things, if hired.)
Jon told Geordie what his foster mom had said. Geordie: “That’s true to a point. If a manager has two candidates and both seem trustworthy, and one has experience, that’s who gets the job. But often the manager doesn’t have a perfect applicant, so anyone who seems trustworthy can get hired.”
That weekend, Jon tried it. He walked into restaurants, introduced himself, handed over his info face to face. He had two job offers within days.
At one interview, the manager offered shifts: Wednesdays and Thursdays 4–8 p.m., and Saturdays 12–8 p.m.. Jon wanted to say yes, but he realized he had a mandatory appointment at the Department of Social Services many Wednesdays from 4–5, and only recently had that scheduling gotten locked in. His instinct was to turn down the whole job.
Geordie stopped him. “That’s crazy,” he said. “You negotiate.” Together they rehearsed: Jon could propose starting on Wednesday at 5:30 instead, working until 8 or even 9:30. Or he could swap in a Tuesday 4–8 shift.
Jon went back, made the ask, and the boss agreed.
We asked Jon what he stopped doing in order to make room for the 16 hours a week of work. “Mostly scrolling on my phone,” he said. He’s saving up, but not sure for what. He’s working hard, and his foster mom is impressed and tells him so.
Why does this matter?
We (the authors) focus on a broader outcome we call teen flourishing. Jon’s success (a job) probably doesn’t vault his K–12 experience much, but it makes him feel more confident and productive. Sarah’s increased sleep probably does improve her typical morning at school. We care equally about both.
But for the Fordham Institute audience, our dear K–12 systems friends, these three stories reveal what standardized test scores cannot: the intricate web of factors—sleep deprivation, technology addiction, executive function challenges, social isolation, and a new form of lethargy—that shape student outcomes between dismissal and first period. Sarah’s phone battles, Alan’s invisible homework load, and Jon’s job search illuminate why our education debates often miss the mark.
Here’s what we’re saying and not saying:
For example, U.S. military members suffered a new form of blast injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan from IEDs. DARPA could specify the problem—the physics of blasts, field diagnostics—but not the solutions. They recruited others to come up with rapid advances in diagnosis, mechanisms, and treatment.
That’s what we need here.
We’re not in a situation where “we know what works.” Parents get glib advice that makes things sound too easy. Psychologists give us tiny interventions in controlled settings that don’t mirror real life. K–12 leaders have the political juice to demand better!
We need approaches that work in the messy reality of 6 p.m. to midnight—where progress is slow, setbacks are common, and sometimes the solution is as unexpected as a dimmer switch or a face-to-face conversation with a restaurant manager.
Until we study and address what happens after dark, our high school improvement efforts will continue to fall short.
Editor's note: This was first published in the “Civic-Ready” issue of NASBE’s State Education Standard.
As the nation’s 250th birthday nears, civics education is once again a hot topic, and deservedly so. It hurts to see how little American young people know about the country’s past, its core principles, and how its governments are designed to work. It hurts more to confront evidence that many appear to be losing faith in democracy itself—a worsening problem as domestic discord and conflicts deepen over the role of government itself.
Education leaders face a heavy lift: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” last tested eighth graders in civics and US history in 2022. The grim results showed just 22 percent reaching “proficient” in civics and a dismal 14 percent attaining that level in history. At the same time, a 2023 survey reflects generational differences in confidence in democracy in general: Just 37 percent of those ages 26–41 strongly agreed that democracy is the best system of government, compared with 62 percent of those ages 58–64 and 75 percent of those older than 77.[1]
Nobody should expect schools to do it all, but they have a clear role when it comes to knowledge and skills and a substantial role when it comes to the formation of attitudes and values. And state education leaders—especially state boards—have a role, too. They must sort through some fervent disputes and make good decisions: on standards, assessment and accountability, as well as incentives for districts’ selection of quality curricula and professional development.
Lively disputes surround what schools should teach and children should learn about how governments work, their own rights and responsibilities, and the attributes of good citizenship in 21st century America. Such disputes typically involve both civics and US history, sometimes the entirety of social studies. They usually center on one or both of these sets of questions:
These are important differences, to be sure, especially in a time of political polarization, and it is possible they could lead to radically different curricula and instruction in various parts of the land—a “red state civics” and a “blue state civics,” diverging most on topics such as race and gender.
Today’s “culture wars” undoubtedly make the job of teachers and school leaders harder, as they try to navigate conflicting pressures from parents, officials, and interest groups. In more than a dozen states, lawmakers have been seeking to limit what can be discussed in class, even as the airwaves, social media, and official missives signal from Washington that national officials are “cracking down” on topics and practices they do not favor and teachers are reported to be “censoring themselves” to avoid criticism and controversy.[2]
Reasons for Optimism
There is ample reason for concern but no cause to panic. Conflicts like these need not paralyze those seeking to strengthen the teaching and learning of civics and history in 2025, the semiquincentennial year of the Declaration that follows, and the decades thereafter.
Much of the curricular Sturm und Drang in civics and history appears to be the handiwork of a relatively small number of “conflict entrepreneurs” whose daily fare consists of hurling brickbats and stirring up trouble and whose visibility and income are derived from the same. By overwhelming numbers, ordinary Americans agree to a great extent about what schools should teach and children should learn about civics and history.
In February 2025, the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Applied Research in Education reported widespread agreement (71 percent) that US schools are doing a mediocre or poor job of preparing students to be good citizens. But they also found strong, often bipartisan agreement about what schools should teach their pupils in this realm as well as what civics-related activities students should engage in and schools should encourage. Agreement is not total, but it is sufficient for the analysts to conclude that:
Contrary to political rhetoric, there is high overall support—and a recent narrowing of the partisan divide—for students learning civics topics in school. There is high overall and cross-partisan support for students learning about civic education topics through a wide range of instructional activities.[3]
A second source of optimism for civics-education boosters is the emergence in recent years of worthy consensus-seeking efforts at curriculum development. These generally start with the well-founded conviction that the correct response to the “big choice” questions above is some version of “yes, both.” There are several examples:
In addition, groups such as iCivics, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Jack Miller Center have amassed sizable collections of resources (including games) to deepen educators and students’ knowledge and understanding of American history and government.
Structural Challenges
These efforts do not resolve all the challenges that await conscientious policymakers who want their schools to help young people grow into good citizens who are well informed, principled, and engaged. But the toughest challenges are not hot arguments and angry politics. They are structural, involving priorities, accumulated negligence, and institutional rigidities. I count six main ones.
Academic Standards. By themselves, standards do not teach anyone anything. Rather, they describe a desired result, usually one grade at a time. They thus serve as a starting point for curricula, assessment, teacher preparation, and more. To quote George Harrison, “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road will take you there.”
At least since enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, state leaders have taken standards seriously in the federally mandated subjects of reading, math, and science. Civics and history do not typically get the same attention.
My colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed state standards for those two subjects in 2021, examining their content, rigor, clarity, and organization. The reviewers gave “honors” grades to civics standards in just 18 states and to US history standards in 17. Only five were “exemplary” in both. Twenty were rated “inadequate.” The authors dinged standards that “[p]rovide overbroad, vague, or otherwise insufficient guidance for curriculum and instruction; omit or seriously underemphasize topics that are essential to informed citizenship and historical comprehension; and make poor use of the early grades or fail to revisit essential content in later grades.”[8]
Standards are malleable—and entirely within the control of state leaders. Several jurisdictions have revised their standards since publication of the Fordham study, and others are working on them. However, changes do not always improve the result.
Instructional Time. The second big challenge is the trivial place those subjects occupy in most states’ curricula and graduation requirements. RAND reported in 2023 that the typical US elementary school devotes just three hours a week to social studies.[9] The Council of Chief State School Officers reported in 2018 that almost half of US school districts had reduced the time given to this subject in the aftermath of NCLB’s failure even to mention it, much less to measure student and school performance in this realm.[10]
Middle schools tend to give one period a day to social studies, but that may also encompass world history (or global studies), geography, economics, state and local history, and perhaps a bit of sociology, psychology, and anthropology. In Maryland, for instance, the state’s sixth- and seventh-grade social studies framework describes it as “a two-year experience in which students employ geographic, economic, civic, and historical tools to understand how big geographic questions link the past to the present.”[11] All worth doing, to be sure, but quite a lot more than US history and civics.
In high school, students are usually required to take such courses as American History and Civics (or American Government)—but just once. Civics often lasts just half a year if there is a separate course at all, although some states require students to pass a civics exam. My team at the Hoover Institution tabulated graduation requirements in civics in 2024:
Bear in mind that those half-year and one-year requirements are typically the only civics requirements during a typical high school education, though schools may offer electives such as the AP class “United States Government and Politics.”
Accountability. Few states incorporate civics learning into their assessment and accountability systems for students, teachers, or schools. The main exceptions are the 20 states that require high school pupils to pass a civics test before graduating, although in most of them the passing bar is low and the test deals only with basic knowledge, usually drawn from the naturalization test. As RAND researchers observed:
[S]tudent achievement in social studies remains largely absent from states’ accountability frameworks … and, in the rare cases in which states do factor in social studies achievement, it is weighted at much lower levels than student achievement in other core subjects…. One factor that severely limits states’ ability to include indicators of social studies achievement in their accountability systems is a lack of social studies assessments…. [O]nly a handful of states use a statewide summative assessment in social studies like they do in ELA and math. Typically, states do not assess at all in this subject area…. Furthermore, some of the states that historically assessed students in social studies suspended their assessments because of the COVID-19 pandemic—while retaining test requirements in other subjects—a signal that social studies is seen as a lesser priority.[13]
Teacher Preparation. The fourth challenge is the slipshod preparation of civics instructors, who typically get certified as “elementary” or “middle school social studies” teachers with minimal obligation to have studied civics, American government, or US history, nor any requirement to pass a proficiency test in those fields. One can often elect to major in psychology or sociology while taking few courses in history or American government, emerge with a generic social studies license, and then teach those key subjects.
Unsurprisingly, many teachers report feeling ill prepared. RAND analysts concluded this from a 2020 survey:
We asked teachers to tell us, on a scale from “not prepared at all” to “very well prepared,” how prepared they felt to promote their students’ civic development within their classes. A little more than 60 percent of all teachers indicated they felt “somewhat prepared,” and only 19 percent responded that they felt “very well prepared”.… About one-quarter of all elementary teachers indicated they felt that they were “not prepared” or “not very well prepared” to teach civic development.[14]
Civics Learning Everywhere. Citizenship is not something one learns in a single class. It is shaped by so much that one learns and experiences in school and the rest of one’s life—or fails to experience. Learning in literature, science, and the arts also shapes civics learning, as does what happens on playing fields, in student government, and in other extracurricular pursuits.
Role models also matter greatly: teachers, coaches, neighbors, preachers, team captains, and, of course, parents and family members. If the adult influencers in one’s life seldom vote, do not scrupulously obey laws and rules, seldom engage in civic or neighborhood activities, pay scant attention to current affairs, ignore or berate those who disagree with them, and fail to treat others with civility, even the finest civics class likely cannot compensate. The formal education system must do its part, but it occupies only a portion of childrens’ lives and cannot do it all.
Curriculum. All the solid curricula, frameworks, standards, and supplemental materials for teaching civics and history will not matter if they are not widely used. Surveys show that social studies teachers, especially in the earlier grades but frequently in middle and high schools, too, are scrounging, improvising, and piecing together lessons rather than deploying top-notch curricula for which they have received suitable professional development and ongoing support.[15]
What Should a State Policymaker Do?
State education leaders and policymakers who are serious about civics learning have several powerful levers within their grasp—and even more that they can do by way of leadership and suasion in realms where they are not entirely in charge.
The starting point should be the state’s academic standards, ensuring that these do a solid job of specifying the K-12 system’s desired outcomes in civics and US history. They should be rigorous and content rich. Skills and dispositions matter too, and it is good to give students experience in the real world, possibly via student government or community service.
One may start by checking Fordham’s five-year-old review of the state’s extant standards.[16] Consider the criteria used as well as what the reviewers found and recommended. Perhaps look at the standards of states that aced that review and what can be learned (or borrowed) from them.
Consider the Educating for American Democracy roadmap, which has the makings of exemplary K-12 standards in both subjects, and take a look at the Civic Alliance’s model. Oversimplifying, the former asks the right questions while the latter supplies much factual content that students will need to develop thorough answers to those challenging questions.
When the standards are in good shape, state leaders should ensure that their schools have access to high-quality curricula aligned with the standards. Though local discretion is needed in the touchier elements of these subjects, any state-sanctioned (and paid-for) materials should focus on top-notch content from the earliest elementary grades through high school.
Yet exemplary standards and curricula do not accomplish much unless schools have ample space in their days and years to give these subjects their due, whether in distinctive social studies classes, infusing this content across the curriculum, or both. (There is room within English language arts, for example, for many history and civics topics and examples.)
Nor can this work be accomplished unless states also ensure that schools successfully teach it and students successfully learn it by building civics and history into results-based accountability and report cards for elementary, middle, and high schools. State leaders might also consider an end-of-course exam or something similar for students at least once during the K-12 years. The naturalization test, focused as it is on basic information, is a starting place, but a sophisticated assessment and accountability plan contains much more.
For any of these reforms to succeed, teachers must be well prepared to help their students learn civics and history, which means policymakers—including those responsible for higher education—should review certification and licensure requirements with these subjects in mind. They should also ensure that high-quality professional development is delivered to those already teaching to boost their knowledge and pedagogical skills.[17]
Finally, state leaders would do well both to ensure that ample attention gets paid—in school and out—to the upcoming semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 and then build on it. View it not as a one-time celebration but as the beginning of a decade in which Americans recall the nation’s founding and its grand if unfinished saga. This renaissance in civics and history education might culminate in the 250th anniversary of that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 that produced the Constitution. State leaders, as well as educators and students, should bear in mind Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked what sort of government was forged at that time: “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”
Notes
[1] McCourtney Institute for Democracy, “Mood of the Nation: Americans’ Belief in Democracy,” poll, January 18, 2023.
[2] See, e.g, American Historical Association, “Teaching History with Integrity: Freedom to Learn,” web page.
[3] Anna Saavedra et al., “Agreement across the Aisle: Schools Should Prepare Students for the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship,” report (University of Southern California, February 2025).
[4] Educating for American Democracy, “Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners,” report (iCivics, March 2, 2021). (Full disclosure: I’m on EAD’s steering committee.)
[5] Arizona State University, Center for American Civics, “The Civic Literacy Curriculum,” website.
[6] Civics Alliance, “American Birthright,” web page.
[7] College Board, “AP United States Government and Politics,” web page.
[8] Jeremy Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021,” report (Fordham Institute, June 2021).
[9] Melissa Kay Diliberti, Ashley Woo, and Julia H. Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary Social-Studies Instruction: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey,” research report (RAND, 2023).
[10] Chief State School Officers Association, “The Marginalization of Social Studies,” infographic (2018).
[11] Maryland State Department of Education, Grade 6 and 7 Social Studies Framework, September 2023.
[12] Sophia Craiutu and Jed Ngalande, “State Civics Requirements in 2024,” essay (Hoover Institution, December 2024).
[13] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”
[14] Laura S. Hamilton, Julia H. Kaufman, and Lynn Hu, Preparing Children and Youth for Civic Life in the Era of Truth Decay: Insights from the American Teacher Panel (RAND, 2020), 48.
[15] Diliberti, Woo, and Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure.”
[16] Stern et al., “The State of State Standards for Civics and US History in 2021.”
[17] Educating for American Democracy, “Pedagogy Companion to the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy.”
Claims of teacher shortages in recent years are more complex than the typical rhetoric suggests. Digging into limited labor market data helps uncover particular scarcities—and surpluses—depending on subject, grade level, student type, and teaching location. New research exploring the staffing processes in rural districts helps illustrate the nuance required to both assess and address the challenges specific to those schools.
Researchers Se Woong Lee and Minseok Yang (the latter a Fordham-AEI EEPS alum) use data from the Wisconsin Education Career Access Network (WECAN), a centralized system for Badger State districts to post teacher—and other—vacancies, and for hopeful candidates to upload their applications for those jobs. More than 95 percent of districts use the system, thus providing a trove of data from across the state. They analyze WECAN job postings and applications from 2014 to 2016. Interestingly, some charter and private schools also use the system today, but it is unclear whether they did so in the previous decade. Either way, Lee and Yang focus their study only on full-time teaching positions in traditional districts. That still results in more than 390,000 application-year observations, representing 41,300 teacher candidates who applied for 26,600 vacancies across 404 districts. Staffing records from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provide data on final hiring decisions. Their analysis separated districts into four different typologies—rural, town, suburban, and urban—and compared the numbers and characteristics of applicants and hirees for teaching jobs in the various locales. They also used a mapping tool to determine the distance between applicants’ reported home addresses and the schools to which they applied.
The first big finding: 62 percent of applicants did not apply for vacancies in any rural school, while 6 percent applied exclusively to rural schools. The remainder listed themselves as geographically flexible and showed that to be true by applying to schools of multiple types. The median number of applications received per teacher vacancy in rural districts was nine, compared to eight for urban districts, ten for town districts, and 14 for suburban districts. Their analysis indicates that distance from an urban area seems to be driving this pattern: the farther away a job is from the city, the fewer candidates who apply. Additionally, math and special education teaching vacancies, regularly reported to be the hardest jobs to fill, received lower than the median number of applications across the board with minimal difference based on district type.
Female, non-white, and highly-qualified teachers (as determined by factors like years of experience, degree attainment, and college GPA) all demonstrated reduced inclination to apply for rural jobs. Conversely, individuals with prior rural teaching experience and graduates of rural-based teacher preparation programs exhibited a higher inclination to apply for such jobs. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that applicants to rural schools tend to live much further away (median 39 miles) from the districts to which they are applying, compared to those applying for suburban or urban jobs.
As to hiring, women, teachers with less than three years of experience, and those possessing master’s degrees were more likely to be hired by rural districts than by other district types. The authors speculate that the latter finding is probably due to the fact that so few of them apply to rural schools so they are quickly snapped up whenever possible. Internal applicants (defined as those who currently or previously worked in the district to which they are applying) were 5.9 percentage points more likely to be hired in a rural district than at any other district, and candidates with rural teaching experience or who graduated from a teacher prep program in a rural area also were more likely to be hired in rural districts than in urban or suburban districts.
Lee and Yang note a couple of limitations to their work relating to details of both the supply and demand sides of the equation. How many other candidates declined an offer before the final candidate accepted? Do novice teachers really want rural jobs or are those simply the easiest for them to get? Etc. The age of the data also raises questions about its applicability to today’s employment ecosystem, not to mention the impact of public school/district enrollment declines and growth in the charter and private school sectors. Even so, Wisconsin’s geography hasn’t changed much since 2016, with more than half of districts still defined as rural and encompassing 30 percent of the population. Concern regarding teacher vacancies in those schools has only increased in the last ten years, and the findings here echo those of other analyses showing a nuanced picture of hiring in specific places and subjects.
Based on their findings, the authors assert that “grow your own” programs and efforts to bring pre-service teachers into rural schools for internships or job shadowing would be beneficial policies for district leaders to implement. At the state level, paying all candidates during their student-teaching period, providing funds for hiring bonuses in hard-to-staff positions, and increased support to rural-focused teacher-preparation programs are also suggested as ways to help boost the number and diversity of applicants for rural teaching vacancies.
SOURCE: Se Woong Lee and Minseok Yang, “Who Is Applying to and Being Hired by Rural Schools? What Vacancy and Application Data Reveal About the Rural Teacher Labor Market,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (August 2025).
This week, Mike Petrilli digs into the latest NAEP results—and explores whether the rise of smartphones and social media might help explain them. It’s another solo episode, just Mike and the mic.
On the Research Minute, Adam Tyner shares a new REACH study showing that school voucher programs have boosted private school enrollment by just 3 percent so far—but are already putting upward pressure on tuition.
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