The simplest, most effective policy for improving U.S. schools and student outcomes might not be an “education policy” at all—but stronger government protections for young people from addictive products and services that now routinely reach adolescents.

Schools, as everyone knows, can only do so much. K–12 students are only in them for perhaps one-sixth of their waking lives. And data have long shown that socioeconomic factors are far more predictive of student and adult outcomes than what happens in kids’ classrooms. But softening the effects of wealth and privilege is enormously difficult. The protections I’m talking about are simpler and, I think, achievable. And they’re something that we education policy types should promote.

Recent coverage of how legalized gambling and marijuana are affecting young people is illustrative. Phone-based gambling on sports is now legal in 32 states, after a 2018 Supreme Court decision paved the way. Prediction markets, which let users speculate on a wide range of outcomes, including sports, have also expanded rapidly since 2025 and are now available almost everywhere. A recent essay in The Free Press by a high school sophomore argued that boys like himself need protection from this industry because his “generation is finding the lure of betting irresistible”—but they aren’t getting it. “The fact that these sites are technically restricted to those over 18, 19, or 21 years of age (depending on the state) is laughable,” he writes. “Enter the name and identifying info of a parent or sibling over the age requirement, and you’re in.”

A Common Sense Media report published in late January shows how right he is. It reports that 36 percent of boys ages 11–17 gambled in the past year. It rises to 49 percent among 17-year-olds. This connects to the wider digital world in which today’s young people live. Nearly half of boys who gamble see online advertisements promoting the activity, and most say the ads “just started showing up.” And peer culture compounds the problem, suggesting it’s poised to get worse, with 84 percent of boys reporting gambling if their friends do.

Marijuana shows a similar pattern. Colorado and Washington passed the first laws permitting adult recreational use in 2012. Now most Americans live in states where recreational marijuana is legal, and most live in a county with at least one dispensary. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that high schools are struggling with student use during school hours. The blame falls, at least in part, on the way that “legalization has made marijuana culturally acceptable and easy to get.” A California high school felt compelled to install vape sensors in the restrooms. A New York school implemented food restrictions because students were bringing in THC edibles. A principal in Vermont said “It’s just everywhere in the community. That’s really, really hard for schools.”

Like gambling, none of this is legal for high schoolers, but “students said it is relatively easy to get from older siblings, friends, and acquaintances,” reports the Journal. And like gambling, we’ve let profit-hungry firms shape public perception in a manner that is affecting young people. The same article continues:

Cannabis companies now market their wares as treatments for anxiety, pain and sleep problems. Edibles in cute packaging and THC vapes in flavors like “strawberry cough” and “Zkittles” (a play on the candy) can make marijuana seem safe, stylish and fun.

Weed is “seen as organic. It’s all-natural,” said Will Trimua, a 17-year-old Liberty High senior, about many of his peers’ views. And unlike nicotine, doctors sometimes recommend it, “so why should it be bad then?” added Trimua…

The problem is that these activities that our country has embraced, mostly in the name of freedom and money, are often very harmful, especially for teens. A 2024 poll found that 68 percent of those who say they bet on sports online report at least one harmful gambling behavior, such as borrowing money to bet or experiencing emotional distress from losses. And 17 percent met the criteria for problematic gambling. The rates are worst for young people and males. Meanwhile, research increasingly shows that THC is very dangerous for the teenage brain, linking it to attention and memory deficits, poor performance in schools, a 37 percent increase in the risk of depression, a 50 percent increase in the odds of suicidal ideation, and a three-fold increase in suicide attempts. Worth noting, too, is that the marijuana sold commercially today is significantly stronger than what was used illicitly in decades past.

Similar dynamics are present with social media, video games built around heavily incentivized microtransactions, pornography, nicotine vapes, AI assistants, short-form video, high-caffeine energy drinks, online shopping paired with easy consumer credit, and more. Every one of these domains, plus gambling and marijuana, has its own defenders, its own claims about harmless fun or individual choice. But the deeper problem is not any single vice, product, or service. It is the environment they collectively create for adolescents, one saturated with immediate gratification and organized around avoiding discomfort. Teenagers are still learning how to cope with boredom and manage indulgence, and still coming to understand the value of sustained effort and sacrifice. Those skills and habits, and their importance, are learned through repeated exposure and experience. As I argued in a recent piece on moral formation, character develops through daily habituation, modeled behavior, consistent consequences, and the peer cultures that form around them. A child’s formation is inseparable from the environments where that child spends the most time. And that environment is increasingly toxic and predatory.

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In short, America’s young people are in serious trouble and at risk of significant harm at the hands of a system that is driven by greed and a worldview that confuses choice for freedom. Left unchecked, this will be calamitous for education.

Last month I outlined the difficult choice schools face: whether to give in and accommodate a student culture increasingly shaped by constant digital stimulation, or to resist it by insisting on traditional education—whole texts, sustained problem-solving, teacher-led discussion and writing, and the kind of work that requires students to push through boredom and confusion, with tech kept genuinely supplementary.

My preference is the more traditional path because it better builds the habits serious learning requires. But it is only worth pursuing if it’s viable—if it can possibly educate U.S. students well and at scale. My contention is that the environment described in this essay, which adults are allowing to develop around teens, will soon make that approach to education all but impossible. In other words, schooling as we have long known it, and as many still want it, may not survive intact.

The habits that serious, traditional learning requires are formed through repetition, and repetition is shaped by environment. When a teenager spends evenings in a cycle of short videos, algorithmic content feeds, monetized games, gambling parlays, AI shortcuts, and chemical escape, he is rehearsing a posture toward life that he then brings to school every morning. When more and more students do this, the combined effect changes what a classroom feels like, how teachers must approach instruction, and what students are capable of doing. All of it is antithetical to the traditional, effective classroom.

Hence one way, I think perhaps the best way, to facilitate this kind of learning is to press policymakers to create tools that genuinely protect young people from these forces. Age verification should be designed to actually work, particularly for gambling products and pornography. Advertising and promotion for addictive products should be treated as child-exposure problems when minors are plainly part of the audience. Platforms that push such content to minors through recommendation systems should face sharper accountability. Consumer protections in games that feature chance-based monetization and heavily promote microtransactions should take adolescent vulnerability as a central fact. Marijuana policy should reckon with products, such as edibles and vapes, that are easy to conceal and easy to normalize in teen culture. And if such a piecemeal approach cannot work, we should consider sweeping laws that effectively restrict young people’s access to broad categories of risky services.

Some will reject such government protections as paternalism and argue that parents need to do their jobs rather than asking Uncle Sam to do it for them. That is only true if moms and dads can do so reliably at scale. Sadly, that is not realistic. These forces are too powerful, too profitable, too widespread, and too optimized for attention and engagement, and too many parents are already stretched too thin in their time, energy, and finances. Parents have been unable to prevent adolescents from using the internet for harmful and illicit purposes for 30 years. Expecting them to succeed now, when the challenge is harder than ever, is fanciful.

Such protections are, instead, pragmatic and prudent. Governments are the only entities that can accomplish this at scale. Modern societies already restrict young people’s access to products and practices that predictably harm them—alcohol, tobacco, firearms, driving—and sometimes even strengthen those safeguards with universal bans, as with clove cigarettes and the Joe Camel cartoon character. We recognize that kids are developing and not equipped to navigate certain risky environments. The same logic should apply to markets and technologies built to monetize compulsion and weakness.

None of this says that schools are powerless. For one, they can implement tough phone policies and send an important message—one they can even state explicitly—that phones are dangerous for children. Moreover, strong education systems improve student outcomes far more than weak ones. They adopt strong curricula, train teachers better, hold schools accountable for learning, broaden choice, and foster cultures that build character and lasting habits. Effective education policies still matter enormously.

But if we want to create a world in which these policies have any shot at sustained success, we need to widen the frame and advocate for reforming environments that shape adolescents outside school. A society that tolerates—even encourages—markets that profit from obsession, addiction, and escapism should not be surprised when classrooms become harder to run and outcomes become harder to improve. Few actions would do more to improve education than protecting young people from this increasingly predatory world.