| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Jeff Murray

9.11.2026

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Lots to talk about today; so let’s get right to it. Aaron Churchill is on hand to discuss Ohio’s $105 million grant funding from the federal Charter Schools Program grant program, the recipients of which will be announced by the state soon. Twenty-two applicants were vying for funds in two categories—existing high-quality schools looking to expand, and schools looking to open new high-quality models in the state. Or, as Aaron puts it: “Underpinning the charter school model is new schools, new options for communities, new options for parents. And the federal government under both Republican and Democratic administrations has said, ‘OK, we’re going to put some money behind trying to start quality new schools in American communities.’” We’ll be talking about the winners in these clips as soon as they are announced. (Cleveland.com, 9/9/26)
Part of the criteria for charters to compete for CSP funding is strong state report cards. Of course, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce has detected some state testing “anomalies” at a number of charter and district schools from last school year that will—at a minimum—put asterisks on those schools’ upcoming report cards. Further investigation is underway with everyone waiting breathlessly for more details. Aaron Churchill, king of report card data analytics in Ohio, is among them. “The integrity of state assessments, they matter to the public, they matter to parents,” he tells the Dispatch in this coverage. “We cannot be giving dishonest information to the public.” Yep. What he said. (Columbus Dispatch 9/9/26)
Honestly, though, even when anomaly-free, state report cards face serious annual backlash—usually from schools and districts whose ratings are low. Chad Aldis is interviewed extensively in Cincinnati Enquirer’s coverage of the topic. He explains the various components of current report card ratings and defends against the charge that those ratings are unfair to large urban school district like Cincinnati City Schools. Their graduates, Chad says, “are going to be going out and trying to find jobs and going to colleges with students from all these other districts… Parents deserve an honest appraisal of where their kids are.” Nice. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/9/26)
The key point of this Dispatch story—looking at the latest research report on the Columbus Promise scholarship program—is most clear in its final line: “If you have this program that is working and doing what you need it to do, why wouldn’t you figure out some way to fund it?” The sentiment comes from the lead author of the report and is apropos because the adults who benefit from the free-tuition-to-Columbus-State-Community-College-for-Columbus-City-Schools-grads program only want to make sure funding does not stop, which it is in danger of doing right now. However, the “working and doing what you need it to do” part is simply not true. OSU professor and Fordham senior research fellow Vlad Kogan has already dismantled previous positive versions of Columbus Promise research (you can read about that here and here), and his previous critiques are referenced briefly in the latest coverage. But you can only get his full take down of the new report on social media so far. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/9/26)
There are a whole lot of words in this piece on school busing woes widespread in districts across Ohio this school year, most of which blame state funding and/or school choice for those woes. But I am drawn to the comments of Larry Fravel, a third-generation bus driver in rural Licking Heights Local Schools. (His grandfather drove in the 1920s, his father in the 1950s, and his mother in the 1970s.) According to Mr. Fravel, being a school bus driver was, historically, an ideal side gig for farmers (like his family elders), ministers, and stay-at-home mothers. It gave them the flexibility to have a job in the mornings and evenings but freedom during the day. And guess what? The job is exactly the same today as it was in those bygone decades. No wonder there aren’t enough drivers. The fake blame game needs to stop, and a modern transportation infrastructure that doesn’t rely on the availability of farriers, seamstresses, and arkwrights must be built. Right freakin’ now. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/10/26)
Finally this week (whew!): In case you were wondering where some of Ohio’s gubernatorial candidates stand on issues such as teacher pay, math and literacy instruction, and school choice, the OCJ has some answers from three of them. (Ohio Capital Journal, 9/11/26)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

Topics:

Governance

The Education Gadfly

9.11.2026

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WHAT WE’RE READING

Jocelyn Gecker shares Gallup’s new polling results, which show a sharp rise in dissatisfaction among U.S. adults. Once again, parents tend to think more highly of their own kids’ schools than the system as a whole:

About two-thirds of parents with school-age children say they are satisfied with their child’s education, which is also a low point in the trend—parents haven’t had a similarly discontented view since 2013—but double the 32 percent satisfaction with U.S. education among adults overall.

Gallup’s Megan Brenan has the full details, including a chart showing how those on the left and right are coming toward consensus…on how dissatisfied they are with the quality of the nation’s schools.

EXTRA CREDIT:

Daniel Buck, “Three Policy Avenues to Help Public Schools Flourish”

Meredith Coffey, “What Massachusetts’s portrait of a learner gets right (and New York’s doesn’t)”

Ray Domanico, “Traditional Schools Are Losing Their Grip on K–12 Education”

Ingrid Jacques, “Will Democrats delay Trump’s school choice tax credit?”

Bruno V. Manno, “Without Part-Time Jobs or School Clubs, Teens Miss Out on Basic Life Skills”

Michael McShane, “Enrollment Down, Funding Up”

Morgan Scott Polikoff and Rachel Anderson, “How State Board Leaders Can Build Next-Generation Accountability”

Jed Wallace, “Of Alphas and Betas and Getting the Charter School Recipe Right”

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.

The Education Gadfly

9.11.2026

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CHEERS

Ben Sasse extols the virtues of football as “a character-forming institution that channels strength” during a time when boys struggle with factory-model schooling and the temptations and distractions of the digital world.

In a world of instant gratification, it teaches perseverance through early practices and aching muscles. In an era of isolation, football creates community. It forms brotherhood through both misery and joy. In a culture of passivity, football privileges action. In times of peace, football prepares us for war.

JEERS

“While national test scores have largely stagnated or declined in key subjects like math and reading, graduation rates continue to creep up nationally,” writes Lily Altavena. “The use of credit recovery to help students graduate could be playing a role.” Lily digs into the data and talks to Johns Hopkins’s Samantha Viano, who says schools and districts are often “very blasé about their credit recovery enrollment,” and may “not really understand who’s in those classes, what they’re doing in those classes, how long it takes them to work on them.”

Dale Chu

9.11.2026

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I was teaching third grade in California when I heard the news on the way to school that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. Twenty-five years later, many Americans, including my daughter, have no firsthand memory of that fateful day—the tragedy it wrought or the unity it inspired. For those who lived through it, the passage of time may have also changed how the attacks and their legacy are understood. These were the early days of the internet, before smartphones and social media transformed how Americans experience the news. When I wrote about the anniversary in these pages five years ago, it was a very different moment in time, one in which the full fallout of pandemic-related school closures had not yet hit. Nor did we know that 9/11 would help shape American education in ways that, a quarter-century later, would make the contrast with our response to Covid impossible to ignore.

It’s easy to forget that, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was literally at an elementary school in Florida promoting No Child Left Behind. Education was Bush’s top domestic priority, and the issue had featured prominently in the 2000 presidential campaign. But negotiations between the White House and congressional Democrats had stalled. The attacks, remarkably, created an extraordinary political moment that helped push NCLB across the finish line. As Senator Ted Kennedy himself put it at the time:

This is a defining issue about the future of our nation and about the future of democracy, the future of liberty, and the future of the United States in leading the free world. No piece of legislation will have a greater impact or influence on that.

It was a remarkable expression of bipartisan faith in both the power of education and the ability of government to improve it.

To be sure, NCLB had its flaws. The law’s utopian 100 percent proficiency target in reading and math flattened a worthy goal into a bureaucratic compliance exercise. However, these shortcomings should be separated from the law’s animating principle: Schools and districts shouldn’t be permitted to hide the performance of disadvantaged children behind averages. Annual statewide testing, disaggregated results, and accountability make it harder to ignore students who aren’t being served well. And the achievement gains during the NCLB era were real (more on that below). That’s a legacy worth preserving.

The twist, as Sandy Kress, one of NCLB’s key architects, has observed, is that 9/11 also disrupted the bipartisan reform movement that had produced the law. The attacks redirected the country’s attention toward national security and foreign policy, and although they initially forged a rare sense of national unity, partisan politics gradually returned. As Kress put it:

This is really what 9/11 meant: People moved on to other things. Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, plus the return of normal politics, that was huge. The president certainly moved on, and so did the rest of the world… That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001—all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.

By the time Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, much of the bipartisan consensus that had given rise to it had come apart. It was also around this period that the nation’s progress on student achievement began to stall and, eventually, reverse.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic, another crisis of historic magnitude. But instead of bringing Americans together, it exacerbated existing divisions. Education was a particularly vivid example: Debates over masks, social distancing, testing, vaccines, remote instruction, and extended school closures quickly became partisan and institutional battles. Student achievement took a nosedive. If we screwed the pooch with ESSA, we lost much of our urgency around student outcomes after Covid. The contrast with 2001 couldn’t be more stark.

Closing schools in March 2020 was understandable at the time, given all of the uncertainty. But the case for prolonged closures became difficult to sustain as evidence accumulated about the minimal risks that Covid posed to young people and the enormous educational and developmental toll of lost in-person instruction. As former Senator Mitt Romney asked in March 2021, “The cost to children in learning of not having schools open is so overwhelming… how is it that even to this day that there are schools not open yet?” Whatever one’s views about the broader pandemic response, schools should have been among the first institutions we fought to restore because our children had so much to lose.

The results from the post-9/11 and NCLB years are worth remembering. Student achievement made substantial gains from the mid-1990s through the early 2010s, particularly among low-income and minority students. Hispanic and Black fourth graders gained 20 and 21 points, respectively, on NAEP reading, while eighth graders in both groups gained roughly 10 points. Those gains had begun to stall by the mid-2010s, with the effects especially pronounced among the nation’s lowest-performing students. Then came the pandemic, which turned a troubling trend into a much steeper decline. In just a few years, the country lost much of the hard-won progress students had made.

The strange education legacy of 9/11 was, in many ways, an accident of history. The attacks helped propel an ambitious national education agenda into law, even as the political coalition behind it eventually unraveled. Twenty-five years later, the pandemic revealed just how far the country had moved from the consensus that once united reformers. Uncle Sam set out to eliminate achievement gaps with No Child Left Behind. The prolonged school closures of Covid gave new meaning to the phrase. Millions of children were, in fact, left even further behind.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Governance

Teachers & School Leaders

Van Schoales

9.11.2026

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I was recently walking around Austin, Texas. And a block from the new W Hotel, I passed Alpha School, housed in what looked like a tech office. Outside was a sign reading “Kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills, and thrive,” under a big photo of the founder.

I had heard of Alpha School, a private school billed as built on the latest AI technology and learning science and requiring no teachers. I chuckled and forgot about it. Then I saw the storefront and a braggadocious video pitch, and it struck a nerve. Disturbed enough to wonder whether I was just being a judgy Luddite, I went looking.

I’ve been around the education innovation block a few times, having started my teaching career in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s. I was one of the first teachers to pilot the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow when we thought HyperCard (an early stab at hyperlinked media) and laser discs could transform high school classrooms (not so much). I founded and ran the first Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound Charter School and helped support one of the first Edison Schools.

While I’m a natural skeptic about “revolutionary” school designs, I do think we need to rethink most of the traditional models of schooling with a teacher standing in front of a group of 20–30 kids.

As I read more about Alpha School’s design and its founder, MacKenzie Price, I was struck by how bizarrely similar it seemed to Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes’s Silicon Valley start-up, which claimed that with just a small finger prick, its sleek, Apple-like machine could describe everything needed to understand a person’s health. Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud and is now serving time in a federal prison in Texas.

Alpha School claims it needs only two hours of instructional time a day and no teacher, and that it does a better job of preparing students than any other public or private school. Alpha has “guides,” reportedly paid at least $100,000, who are not required to hold a teaching credential. By one account, only about a third of them hold degrees in education. I’ll admit that a model that pays unlicensed adults more than most principals earn and asks them to supervise rather than teach could be an interesting school business model if it actually works. But with the publicly available information, it’s impossible to tell.

Alpha’s boot camp for new high school students is an intensive eight-week course to orient them to the school and program. According to Benjamin Riley’s recent description of the boot camp, Alpha students described an astonishing list of accomplishments on the school’s X feed: scoring better than “most Harvard MBAs” at Harvard’s own Everest leadership simulation, posting a “98th Percentile Nationally on my SAT…As A Freshman,” and teaching themselves AP coursework in five days.

And then there is the heart monitor. Riley reports that students are wired up while watching recorded video of their own parents critiquing them, and must hold their heart rate within 10 percent of baseline to pass. Sounds like something from the dystopian movie Gattaca if it had a high school classroom scene.

Alpha School’s website makes the remarkable claim that its students are in the 99th percentile. It says most students consistently outperform national averages and that, with two hours of AI-supported instruction, they make, on average, 2.6 times the growth on MAP assessments compared to their peers. And it doesn’t end with academics: Elementary students are not only taught to swim by a former Navy SEAL but also to save a struggling teammate, persevere, and keep calm during a stressful “rescue.”

Like most snake oil pitches, there is a ring of truth and some things to like in the Alpha School program. Kids should get out into the world and tackle real challenges. They should learn to solve problems in the field with their peers and be pushed—while supported—to overcome obstacles they did not think possible. (I’m a big believer in programs like Outward Bound, and there is a large body of research showing these programs can be life changing for many students.)

Two things are worth noting about the school’s claims. The first is the simple math on learning time. As the education neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has pointed out, if learning could really be accelerated at the rates Alpha claims, students would finish all of K–12 by the second year of elementary school. The second, and the bigger one, is the numbers themselves. The website is covered in figures suggesting that Alpha students are not merely doing better than students elsewhere but blowing the doors off them. No outside study supports any of it, and the MAP and SAT numbers are close to meaningless without knowing whether Alpha students are being compared with students of similar background. That comparison matters more here than usual: tuition runs as high as $75,000 a year, and every family in the building went looking for this school.

You would think the amazing Alpha results would lead to teams of researchers from Stanford and other research organizations comparing Alpha students with matched peers, trying to understand the school’s secret sauce. Instead, we have boatloads of Theranos-style marketing.

American kids do not need another quick fix to address the growing challenges in our kids’ academic and social development. We need more schools and programs filled with caring, skilled adults prepared to work with kids and their families to take on challenges in this complex 21st century. By the way, I don’t want my kids to “crush” academics or some test. I want them to be curious, kind, lifelong learners, and much more.

The problem is that there are few shortcuts to doing school well. There’s a rich body of research on what makes a quality school. Schools need to have a rich curriculum, an instructional focus (it’s not clear Alpha has one), high expectations, and know their students well. A school culture built around student success is often critical. AI can do many things and may yet be a useful part of a school design, but I have seen no evidence that it can replace a highly effective teacher. I will ask Claude for feedback on this essay. I would not ask it to write this essay.

While MacKenzie Price went to Stanford like Elizabeth Holmes, Price did not drop out of Stanford or wear the Steve Jobs turtlenecks. She is the far more disciplined operator of the two, which is what makes the rhyme particularly unsettling. Like Holmes, she asks the world to accept remarkable claims on evidence only she controls, and the people carrying the risk are children.

On top of everything else, the management structure around the school deserves a hard look. Alpha sits inside a ring of interlocking for-profit vendors (2 Hour Learning, Trilogy Enterprises, Crossover, and an administrative entity) with overlapping ownership and management and a board of the affiliated nonprofit, Unbound Academy, drawn from those same vendors. Its Utah charter application listed MacKenzie Price as board chair, her husband Andrew Price, chief financial officer of Trilogy Enterprises, as treasurer, and Alpha’s own K–8 director as vice chair.

Alpha’s charter school arm has been turned down in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Utah, and approved only in Arizona, whose authorizing standards are among the most permissive in the country. Pennsylvania’s denial called the model untested and faulted the applicant’s governance, noting that its board had never once met.

Not surprisingly, Alpha is now chasing public voucher funds. After the Texas State Board of Education rejected its charter bid in 2025, Alpha applied to the state comptroller’s voucher program, which checks four things: that a school operates in Texas, holds accreditation from an approved organization, has two years of operating history, and administers a standardized test. Nothing at all about results. Alpha was found eligible, quadrupled to more than 30 Texas campuses in a year, and is now among the largest private chains in the program.

Here’s hoping Alpha stays mostly in the independent school space, where families spend their own money and can walk away if it doesn’t work out (though I do think there should be limits on any school making unfounded claims about student achievement as there are for drug companies regarding the efficacy of their products).

Unfortunately, with the growth of state voucher and tax-credit programs that carry no accountability for results, Alpha is positioned to draw millions of tax dollars into its expansion.

I am happy to keep an open mind if Alpha opens its books and classrooms to outside researchers and independent evaluation. Until that happens, I hope public charter authorizers are not hoodwinked by unchecked Alpha claims and insist on documented results.

Policy Priority:

Quality Choices

Topics:

Evidence-Based Learning

Curriculum & Instruction

Governance

Private School Choice

Teachers & School Leaders

Aaron Garth Smith

9.11.2026

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For decades, education funding equity has been a primary aim of K–12 finance reform efforts. But the latest research, along with mounting fiscal challenges for many school districts, underscores a need for fresh thinking in an era that’s no longer defined by savage inequalities.

For starters, public school enrollment has dropped by 1.4 million students nationwide since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and is projected to fall by another 2.7 million students by the 2031–32 school year. But school districts have been slow to cut costs by closing schools and reducing staff as their student populations shrink, putting some at risk for insolvency.

Making matters worse is nearly $400 billion in teacher pension debt that states have amassed, about $9,300 in debt per public school student. Pension debt crowds out dollars available for things that drive results—like competitive salaries that would attract and retain the best teachers—and states are on the hook for their pension promises, which are constitutionally protected, regardless of how many students are in classrooms.

Another challenge for educators is mission drift. Even before the pandemic, non-teaching staff such as counselors, social workers, and instructional aides were on the rise, and now comprise over half of all public school employees. Much of this “staffing surge” can be attributed to special education, but competing priorities—such as spending on community schools and social-emotional learning—also divert resources from core academics.

Finally, public schools are in a learning recession, with math and reading scores declining for more than a decade. Pre-pandemic trends, including large and sustained K–12 funding increases, suggest that states can’t simply spend their way to better student achievement. Policymakers need to find ways to get more from the $1 trillion spent on public education each year, including boosting the supply of meaningful alternatives for families.

To address these and other challenges, a new era of K–12 finance reform should focus on three policy goals. These aims, and eight ways state policymakers can get started, are described below.

Policy goal #1: Improve financial performance through transparency and accountability

States must shine a light on K–12 finance systems by providing clear and timely information on key trends. But they should go beyond simply reporting the basics—such as revenue, tax, and expenditure data—by tying fiscal health to policies that can improve financial performance.

Fiscal health frameworks: Many school districts are on shaky financial footing. States need fiscal monitoring systems that capture the right metrics, make this information accessible to parents and policymakers, and link performance to meaningful interventions. For instance, Texas rates the fiscal health of school districts on an A-to-F scale, and California has escalating interventions ranging from assigning external consultants to advise districts to vetoing spending decisions that threaten their solvency.

School capacity data: School districts have been slow to close under-enrolled schools, stretching resources thin. But in many states, it’s difficult or impossible to know which school buildings are half-empty or bursting at the seams. States should collect and report data identifying underutilized and vacant school buildings, as Florida does. These data could feed into policies, such as right-of-first-refusal and co-location laws (discussed below), that give proven charter schools access to critical, underused infrastructure.

Local funding transparency: When enrollment falls, school districts lose any state aid that’s tied to student counts. But that’s not the case with local operating levies, which are based on tax rates and assessed valuations. As a result, districts can end up collecting more money to serve fewer students and have less incentive to right-size. When enrollment declines hit a specified threshold, local tax rates should be rolled back to maintain an inflation-adjusted per-student amount. Districts could seek voter approval to maintain their existing levy rates, preserving local control.

Policy goal #2: Build fiscally sustainable K–12 systems for future generations of kids

K–12 finance systems should serve today’s students while meeting long-term challenges, especially declining enrollment and legacy costs. This means using scarce resources strategically and in fiscally responsible ways.

Teacher pension reform: K–12 funding is increasingly diverted to public pension costs, even as many states have reduced benefits for teachers. States need to pay down pension debt as fast as possible and modernize antiquated assumptions about investment returns and retirement benefit designs.

Current-year enrollment counts: Many states allocate dollars for students who are no longer enrolled, otherwise known as “ghost students.” This makes budgets more predictable, but it is also expensive and disincentivizes districts from right-sizing. Staffing costs are difficult to shed in the short run, but school districts in states like Arizona, Indiana, and Texas—where funding is based on current-year enrollment—show that funding ghost students isn’t necessary, even if districts can’t easily adjust payrolls mid-year.

Policy goal #3: Get a better return on investment from K–12 dollars

Last but certainly not least, states should adopt funding reforms that make education dollars more productive. For policymakers, this means focusing on academic outcomes and growing a K–12 marketplace that gives families public and private alternatives. While this is easier said than done, promising opportunities exist to get better returns from taxpayer dollars.

Funding system modernization: K–12 finance systems were built for a different era, and many aren’t compatible with school choice policies like education savings accounts (ESAs) and open enrollment, which allows students to attend any public school with open seats. To make these programs accessible and durable, policymakers need to address thorny problems that drive up costs, limit participation, and diminish schools’ incentive to serve students. For example, ESA participants in West Virginia and New Hampshire only get a fraction of public school per-student funding, and school districts in Ohio have little incentive to participate in open enrollment. These issues should be front and center in any school finance reform effort, but they currently aren’t.

Facilities access and financing: Public school closures, while difficult, are necessary in many districts losing significant numbers of students. They can also be an opportunity to give proven charter schools access to the facilities they need. Charter schooling is the most successful education reform in the past three decades, and policymakers should support its growth by adopting or strengthening right-of-first-refusal and co-location laws that put charters first in line to access vacant or underutilized buildings. Other low-cost financing mechanisms, such as revolving loan funds, credit enhancement programs, and tax-exempt bonds, offer innovative ways for policymakers to boost the supply of K–12 options, as Idaho’s experience demonstrates.

Public school deregulation: In an era defined by declining enrollment and school choice, public schools must compete for students. State policymakers can help simply by getting out of the way. States regulate public school spending in myriad unhelpful ways, ranging from class-size mandates to required or recommended staffing ratios for school counselors. They also encourage or require districts to pay teachers based on educational attainment, which is weakly related to student achievement. These and other regulations, while well-intentioned, limit local spending discretion, incentivize hiring non-teaching staff, and ultimately prevent public schools from competing on a level playing field.

Conclusion

Public education is changing rapidly, and today’s challenges won’t be solved by yesterday’s ideas and priorities. A K–12 finance agenda aimed at transparency, sustainability, and productivity can help state policymakers navigate the decade ahead. The eight policies shared here are just the beginning, but they can kickstart a new era in K–12 finance.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

School Finance

Governance

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. Michael J. Petrilli

9.10.2026

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After years of mounting concern about students and screens, the techlash came to a head in June when the Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines for approving a new screen-time policy for students.

The policy is blunt by design. It limits students’ school-assigned screen time on district-issued devices (such as laptops and tablets),^[1] counting both in-school use and homework. Students in pre-K through first grade cannot use school devices for instruction at all, while older elementary students are limited to 60 minutes per day. Middle and high schools have subject-specific limits; for example, high schoolers may spend no more than 90 minutes per subject per week on screens, up to a weekly maximum of 600 minutes or ten hours.

Opinions were predictably mixed on whether LAUSD got it right. Some welcomed the limits, while others thought tech deserved a more nuanced accounting of its virtues.

Yet whatever one thinks of America’s second-largest school district’s attempt to limit the downside of technology, one thing is clear: LAUSD tapped into the national zeitgeist. Weary of children transfixed by devices, isolated from peers and adults alike, district leaders responded to parental pressure and essentially said, “Enough is enough! There has to be a better way.”

Though we might quibble about the details, we at Fordham agree with the impulse. It sure seems, from the outside, that technology has transformed the school experience, especially during high school, and not necessarily for the better. But to find out for sure, we decided to ask the kids themselves. We wanted to know whether students see technology as useful to their learning—or whether they’re weary of tapping keys and scrolling screens. (Some recent polls pointed to the latter.)

We also wanted their sense of just how pervasive technology use is in schools and what misuse on their part might look like. More specifically, how have school-issued devices contributed to distraction and academic dishonesty? How do grading policies and artificial intelligence exacerbate those challenges? And most important, what can schools do now—long after the genie has escaped her proverbial bottle—to preserve the benefits of technology and AI while reducing their harms?

A new Fordham report, High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction, answers these questions. It draws on a nationally representative survey of 1,011 current high school students and 1,013 recent graduates, fielded by Impact Research and UpONE Insights, with Fordham’s Brian Fitzpatrick leading the analysis and report writing.

The investigation yielded four big findings.

First, illicit tech use is rampant.

Seventy-six percent of respondents report personally engaging in at least one form of illicit technology use on a daily basis during high school, including scrolling social media, messaging friends, and shopping or gambling online (Figure 1). Roughly one-third report daily YouTube viewing or recreational gaming, while more than one in five say they use AI without permission.

Figure 1. Taken together, 76 percent of respondents report some kind of daily illicit tech use during high school.

Note: Each bar represents the percentage of respondents who report that they use each technology “multiple times a day” or “once a day” during school hours. Because respondents could select all that apply, the 76 percent figure reflects the share who reported at least one of these behaviors daily.

Second, AI is undermining the high school experience.

Many students are using AI not to support their learning but to bypass it altogether (Figure 2). While roughly half of respondents say they use AI to explain difficult concepts and brainstorm ideas, that same proportion say they use it to “solve math problems.” One-third (36 percent) use it to summarize books or other texts to avoid reading them, 29 percent to write the first draft of an essay or report, and 26 percent to help during quizzes or tests. Lest the point be missed: those uses sound an awful lot like cheating.

Figure 2. The most common uses of AI are legitimate, but many students also use it to cheat.

Note: Bars display percentages of respondents who report using AI for each task during high school.

Third, most U.S. high school students and recent graduates say they spend the majority of class time on school-provided devices.

Illicit use and sanctioned use are hard to tell apart. When so much of the school day runs through screens, it becomes difficult for teachers to know whether a student is completing an assignment or scrolling TikTok.

Figure 3 reveals that 62 percent of respondents spend more than half of their in-class time on school-issued devices. Let’s compare that to the new screen limits in Los Angeles. Under a typical six-hour school day, LAUSD’s cap would allow high school students to spend no more than about one-third of instructional time on screens. Based on our survey data, however, a student who spends at minimum half of class time on a school-issued device would log 900 minutes per week in this hypothetical schedule—50 percent more than LAUSD’s 600-minute weekly limit, and that doesn’t include doing homework on school devices.

Figure 3. Most respondents report spending between half and three-quarters of their school day on a school-issued device.

Note: Bars display the percentage of respondents at each level of self-reported device use in response to the question, “In a typical day, how much of your class time do/did you spend working on a device provided by your high school, such as a laptop or tablet?”

Finally, weak grading standards make distraction and AI misuse worse.

Many respondents report grading practices in their schools that lighten the consequences of not doing the work: partial credit for missing assignments, late-work policies that result in little penalty, and broad access to test retakes.

At the same time, grades are heavily concentrated at the top. Fifty-seven percent of respondents report earning all A’s or mostly A’s, including many whose SAT or ACT scores place them in the bottom half of the national achievement distribution (Figure 4). Put simply, high grades don’t always mean students have mastered the material.

Figure 4. A sizable minority of respondents at the bottom of the SAT and ACT score distributions still report getting all or mostly A’s.

Panel A

Panel B

Note: Bars display the percentage of respondents who report earning all or mostly A’s in high school by self-reported SAT or ACT score range. The salmon-colored bar indicates the reference category (the highest SAT/ACT score range); confidence intervals calculated at the 95 percent level; + = p < 0.1, * = p < 0.05, ** = p < 0.01, and *** = p < 0.001.

Taken together, the findings suggest that American high school students are caught up in—and often contribute to—a disturbing and interconnected set of problems: rampant distraction, widespread AI misuse, heavy dependence on screens, and grading practices that make it easier to earn high marks without mastering the material.

What to do? Fitzpatrick urges states, districts, and schools to take five steps (some of which echo LAUSD’s policy):

Reduce the amount of time students spend on devices.
Place greater reliance on supervised, in-class, paper-and-pencil, and oral exams.
Make grading expectations school-wide and explicit by eliminating routine retakes and enforcing valid consequences for late work.
Ensure that school-device firewalls work.
Adopt stricter bans on cell phones and other personal devices.

We of course agree, but here are three additional observations.

First, device-delivered education runs the risk of diminishing the role of the teacher. In the hands of a less skilled instructor, technology can shift the teacher’s role from knowledgeable expert who sets high expectations and builds trusting relationships to a classroom monitor who watches students work on screens and tries to enforce on-task behavior. When technology endeavors to replace effective teaching rather than support it, districts and schools need to tap (or slam!) the brakes.

Second, this whole thing brings to mind the late Theodore Sizer’s much-lauded 1984 book, Horace’s Compromise, named for fictional high school teacher Horace Smith, who tacitly agrees not to push his students too hard if they agree to sit quietly and cause no trouble. Sizer summed it up as, “Give a little, and get along.” Today, Horace’s students would have screens to help them sit quietly, making the compromise even easier. In other words, today’s kids can be sitting in class and still be somewhere else entirely.

And that, in our view, is the deeper danger with overreliance on screens and AI, in combination with weaker expectations and easier grading. Students can “check out” without leaving the classroom. Over time, that means that precious few will develop the knowledge, concentration, and self-discipline they need to reach their full academic and cognitive potential in life and in service of society.

Third, the combination of AI-driven cheating, tech-enabled distraction, and equity-minded grade inflation is hollowing out the American high school experience. Today it’s beginning to seem more performative than substantive. Yes, high schools have always included some amount of hoop-jumping, box-checking, and authority-pleasing; that’s the nature of any large bureaucratic organization, and young people have to learn to deal with it. (One of us—guess who—facetiously calls it the “bull-shittification of high school!”) But that doesn’t mean we have to keep piling it on. If classes can be endured by zoning out on screens, assignments evaded through cheating, and high grades awarded without mastery, then we have to ask ourselves: What are we even doing here?!

If we listen to young Americans, we hear that the high school experience is not working as it should—and that the problems go deeper than tinkering around the edges. Screen-time limits and such might help, but only if paired with a major rethinking of the high school experience. Yes, that means going back to pencil-and-paper assignments, recalibrating what it takes to get an A, and putting the Chromebooks back in their carts. All that will help. But it also means asking our teenagers to do cognitive work that really matters to their futures, whether of the traditional college-prep variety or something more career-oriented.

In other words, we will only solve these problems by restoring the basic conditions for learning: attention, effort, honest work, and adults willing to hold adolescents to high expectations.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Evidence-Based Learning

Curriculum & Instruction

Teachers & School Leaders