More than 40 years later, students are still fighting to have a voice in their education. But they’re not quietly accepting being silenced or disengaging. When young people feel their voices don’t matter in school decisions, they’re taking their concerns elsewhere: to newspaper editorials, sidewalks and courtrooms that challenge the adults in charge. This generation expects to be heard.

In , after families and students raised attendance and budget concerns through official district channels and were met with silence, they organized a mass sick-out to protest district policies. After the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, students from more than 30 schools , demanding action on gun safety after their calls for policy changes through normal school channels went unanswered.

When , were informed the principal would have final say over what could be published in their newspaper, they spent months working through official channels on a policy proposal. But the school board’s proposed update included none of the students’ requested protections. They published a scathing editorial, forcing a delay and, ultimately, a policy revision.

Some students have gone even further to make their voices heard. In Newark, 16- and 17-year-olds successfully advocated for school board elections, arguing that students should have a say in decisions that directly affect their education. And students in Kentucky , arguing that inadequate education funding violates their rights.

These stories represent a fundamental shift in how students view their relationship with educational institutions and what happens when districts fail to create meaningful channels for young people’s input. 

Research confirms the benefits of asking students for their perspectives and listening to what they have to say. The Quaglia Institute鈥檚 of more than 100,000 students in grades 6 to 12 found that those who believe they have a voice in school are 48% more likely to report being academically motivated and 41% more likely to report being engaged in learning. Notably, the sense of having a voice declines steadily as students age鈥攆rom 59% of sixth graders to just 46% of 12th graders 鈥� meaning districts are losing students precisely when the stakes are highest. These outcomes are undermined when students lack an authentic voice in decisions affecting them.

This gap between consultation and genuine engagement is what’s driving students to seek alternative channels for their concerns. But here’s what can happen when districts create authentic engagement opportunities.

At a high school in when students complained that social-emotional learning felt scripted and meaningless, administrators handed the redesign process over to them. Students surveyed their peers, identified what each grade level needed and created a program where seniors mentor younger students through workshops on everything from time management to conflict resolution. The resulting programming resonated with students because it emerged from student experiences, not adult assumptions. In fact, that students given genuine roles in school reform 鈥� reviewing curriculum, advising on instruction, bridging teacher and student perspectives 鈥� helps measurably improve teacher-student relationships.

In , students spent two years rewriting district policy, creating Mental Health Week and organizing community forums with school board candidates. The Student Voice Council operates as a genuine partner in district governance.

In Grandville, Michigan, a meets monthly, and students have shaped everything from classroom furniture to the district鈥檚 artificial intelligence policy and new course offerings including an aeronautics program. In Medford Township, New Jersey, a has students presenting at staff meetings and driving solutions to real policy questions, including the school鈥檚 smartphone policy. 

One of the great shapers of modern K-12 education, John Dewey, saw public school as the key to preparing . But a found that while 68% of students want to help others, only 44% feel confident they can make a difference and just 30% take civic action. That confidence gap closes when students get to shape their environment.

Empowering students with voice doesn鈥檛 mean handing over the keys to the school. It means inviting meaningful input while keeping adult leadership and accountability in place. Schools that provide genuine ways for students to advocate, organize and create change are preparing the next generation for participatory democracy.

This evolution in student voice represents both a challenge and an opportunity for districts. Schools can continue to treat student input as a public relations exercise while making decisions in closed-door meetings, which increasingly leads to external conflicts that damage trust and disrupt learning 鈥� or they can recognize that true student engagement requires genuine power-sharing. This means giving students real roles in policy development, creating transparent processes for addressing their concerns and accepting that this sometimes brings uncomfortable feedback.

Students are finding their voices with or without permission. The question is whether districts will listen before they’re forced to respond.

Using a protocol I developed called 鈥�,鈥� students mapped what gets in the way of learning. Nearly 100 participants generated more than 250 responses, which they posted, grouped and debated in real time. Students facilitated the process themselves and surfaced patterns with a clarity many adult teams struggle to reach. 

One theme rose quickly: 鈥淣othing changes.鈥�

Students weren鈥檛 talking about curriculum or rigor. They were describing what happens after they speak up. 鈥淲e report things and nothing changes,鈥� one student explained. Another added, 鈥淭he biggest issue isn鈥檛 just bullying, it鈥檚 when adults don鈥檛 respond.鈥� Across the workshop, roughly half of student responses pointed to the same issue: not whether students have a voice, but whether that voice leads to visible action. That鈥檚 the difference.

Across the country, policymakers are doubling down on civics, adding coursework, expanding standards and promoting credentials meant to signal engagement, including efforts like the Seal of Civic Engagement in Connecticut. These efforts are politically appealing, but they risk solving the wrong problem.

They rest on a flawed premise: that civic disengagement can be fixed through coursework and recognition alone. In reality, they may reinforce the very dynamic students describe, where participation is encouraged in theory but rarely shapes outcomes in practice.

This pattern is not unique. National surveys, including those from , show that many students feel their input is collected but rarely acted upon. The issue is not whether students are asked for their voice, but whether that voice meaningfully shapes outcomes.

When students spend years in systems where their input rarely influences decisions, they internalize a quiet but powerful lesson about how institutions work. Participation becomes symbolic, authority feels fixed and influence seems out of reach. Over time, students don鈥檛 just disengage. They adjust their expectations of how institutions operate.

The students in that Connecticut workshop were not disengaged. They were observant. In that room, they didn鈥檛 just identify problems; they modeled the kind of participation schools say they want to teach. Repeated experience taught them that speaking up does not necessarily lead to change.

We are asking students to believe in democracy while placing them in systems that rarely practice it. Civic engagement is not just about understanding democratic systems. It is about believing that participation matters and seeing evidence that it does.

A school can require civics coursework and still operate in ways that undermine it. It can teach the structure of government while modeling a system where decisions are largely made without meaningful student input. That contradiction is embedded in daily experience.

In too many schools, disengagement isn鈥檛 an accident. It is a predictable outcome of how systems are designed. Schools are one of the first public institutions young people encounter, and what they learn there about voice and power does not stay there. If we are serious about strengthening civic engagement, we have to look beyond what we teach and examine how schools function. 

This is, at its core, a design problem.

Students are more likely to engage when they feel known and respected. But belonging alone is not enough; a student can feel supported and still feel powerless.

The same conditions that build belonging, voice, participation and the ability to influence outcomes are also the conditions that foster long-term civic engagement. When those elements are absent, engagement fades over time.

What Needs to Change

This is not a call for another initiative layered onto an already crowded system. It is a call to rethink how schools operate on a daily basis. At a minimum, schools should establish structures where students regularly present proposals to school leadership and where responses are publicly tracked so students can see what changes and why. 

Schools should also make feedback loops visible, create consistent opportunities for dialogue and disagreement, and provide authentic audiences beyond the classroom where student ideas carry weight.

In the Connecticut workshop, the most striking moment was not the list of problems. It was what happened when students were given real responsibility to surface, organize and present their ideas. They did so thoughtfully and collaboratively, demonstrating the very civic skills schools aim to teach. The capacity is already there. The question is whether schools are designed to use it.

We tell students their voice matters, yet we place them in systems where it rarely influences outcomes. Students notice, and over time, they internalize that gap, not because they are apathetic, but because their experience has taught them what to expect.

If we continue to treat civic learning as a content issue, we will keep missing the point.

America does not have a civics crisis because students are disengaged. It has a civics crisis because too many schools are not designed to give students meaningful opportunities to participate. Until that changes, no amount of additional coursework will be enough, because students are already learning how our systems work 鈥� not from what we teach, but from how our schools actually operate.

Unfortunately, too many are not able to participate. Not because they don’t care but because the system is complicated, confusing, and nobody explained it 鈥� or why it鈥檚 important. 

Every year, 4 million Americans turn 18, and most of them aren’t registered to vote. Here’s the thing: When 18-year-olds are registered in big elections, they turn out nearly as much as adults. The problem isn’t apathy 鈥� it’s access. In midterms, of this age group is typically registered, and even in presidential years, it鈥檚 fewer than half, versus three-quarters of older voters. 

Regardless of the issues that motivate young people 鈥� whether it鈥檚 housing affordability, education or immigration 鈥� our collective responsibility is to ensure young Americans are informed and able to express their opinions at the ballot box.

I founded The Civics Center in 2018 because I believe we can and should make voter registration a regular part of high school life. Not simply to register more voters but to instill an understanding of  and appreciation for democratic norms and values. With local partners in 38 states, we have supported close to 1,000 nonpartisan, student-led, peer-to-peer voter registration drives in U.S. high schools, because they鈥檙e the one place you can reach virtually every young American. 

We provide so that students can lead voter registration drives in school, supported by trusted adults, year after year. It鈥檚 like the school newspaper: Once you set up the infrastructure and name faculty advisors, the students do the work, and teachers support. As organizers graduate, younger students take over.

Many people are shocked to learn that the majority of U.S. teens can pre-register to vote as soon as they turn either 15, 16 or 17,. This means that not only is pretty much every senior old enough to register before graduation 鈥� so are many juniors and even sophomores. 

Another little-known fact: 26 states have requiring high schools to help students register to vote; sadly, few states implement those laws effectively. The 1993 鈥淢otor Voter Law鈥� highlights the ability of states to designate high schools as voter registration agencies, yet few have taken steps to do so. Absent official action, it鈥檚 in the hands of students, teachers, parents and others in the community. 

That might seem like adding yet another responsibility to overburdened and underpaid teachers, so we鈥檙e lightening the load with state-specific online aimed at increasing youth participation. That includes information for every state and the District of Columbia: age to register or preregister; upcoming elections and registration deadlines; ID requirements; the number of 18-year-olds in each state; instructions for registering online and by mail; laws requiring high schools to help; and calls to action such as register to vote, join a free training or run a drive. 

Toolkits help teachers who want to support their students鈥� work, a hands-on learning opportunity that encourages conversations about representative government and democratic power. These equip school communities with reliable information and action items to build a durable on-ramp to democracy and a path to lifelong civic engagement.

When we ask students to guess how their community is doing in registering young voters, they are shocked to hear the reality: Under 25% of 18-year-olds are registered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, 42% in New York,49% in New Jersey, 76% in Michigan. In those states, the same statistic for the people over 45 registered to vote is close to 90%. Many students are galvanized to take action to help their communities do better. 

Some of the discrepancies across states and counties can be explained by drivers鈥� licenses and the over-reliance on state DMVs to serve as voter registration agencies. Few teens drive in New York City, where under 35% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote and under 10% of 16- and 17-year-olds are preregistered. In California, poor DMV system design results in 45% of eligible 16- and 17-year-olds opting out of preregistering to vote.

The situation would have been worse if Congress had passed the SAVE Act requiring a narrow range of citizenship documents to register to vote; many high schoolers don鈥檛 have easy access to a passport or birth certificate, which cost money to order and time to ship. Even as the federal version has stalled in the Senate, some states have similar laws enacted or in the works that could survive legal challenges.

No one will be surprised to hear that the hurdles around voter registration disproportionately affect students from low-income or urban communities. That fuels a cycle of neglect and despair: When people aren鈥檛 registered to vote, they don鈥檛 provoke interest from candidates or campaigns; they are less likely to be asked for their input and in turn, are less likely to believe they have power or influence. On the other hand, voting while young typically fosters lifelong democratic engagement.

Because state laws and practices vary widely, we partner with other nonpartisan organizations, including the League of Women Voters, to support high school voter registration. The results can be extraordinary, with hundreds registered in a single, well-organized effort, and students gaining leadership skills and commitment to democracy. 

Imagine the impact: Adding just 100 new registrations per high school, repeated across the 27,000 U.S. high schools, we would see more than 2 million new voters every year.

All of which means that the next two months, leading to graduation season, offer the best chance we know to help the Class of 2026 turn into the voters of 2026 and every election to come.

Anyone familiar with NYC knows that while it has some of the most iconic green spaces in the world, from to the , it also has a shocking number of neighborhoods with almost .

This is where schoolyard transformations come in. Every NYC neighborhood has a public school, and most of them have outdoor yards. For years, various initiatives have taken those city-owned spaces, often covered in asphalt, and opened them up to millions of students and nearby residents for recreation and relaxation.

Nationwide, the Trust for Public Land and other partners have transformed 鈥� including New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and California 鈥� over the past 25 years, playing a vital role and combatting by planting trees and replacing blacktop with permeable surfaces.

But there鈥檚 another, unexpected benefit from this work. It turns out that involving students in the design process has been a powerful lever for learning and leadership, unlocking children’s creativity while planting seeds of inspiration and ambition.

Engaging students as young as third grade gives them something they rarely experience elsewhere: genuine agency. For many, it may be the first time they’ve had a real say in shaping their everyday environment 鈥� and their first real encounter with collective decision-making and the democratic process.

It gives them purpose and ownership and helps them see how their input matters through consultation with an array of stakeholders, from school principals and city agencies to PTAs and community groups. 

Our design process starts with a schoolwide assembly where the project is explained and the outcomes explored. That is followed by a survey where every student can offer ideas about what the new playground might look like.

About 30 student volunteers are then selected to make up the design team 鈥� in cases where an elementary, middle and high school share a schoolyard, the design team will have representatives from all three levels.

During four sessions over a three-month period, students measure their schoolyards, visit completed projects for ideas and interact with landscape architects, general contractors, engineers and other professionals about the project 鈥� getting invaluable exposure to career opportunities along the way.

We emphasize to the students the importance of making the schoolyard design work

for everybody. They figure out what they want during the day, but they also have survey input from parents and other community members about how they鈥檇 like to use the space after school and on weekends.

The kids are often the ones who come up with the most innovative and impactful ideas. 

At a Bronx elementary school, girls loved playing basketball, but boys often took over both of the playground’s courts at recess. So the girls asked if one of the courts could be painted pink. Of course, anyone could play there. But the boys tended to avoid it, and the girls finally had an equal chance to play basketball in their yard.

At a Harlem elementary school, students wanted a space for braiding hair during recess, so they designed one: a two-tiered seating area built for exactly that. It’s the kind of idea no adult would have thought to ask for.

Meanwhile, at an elementary school in Queens, students wanted a wildlife viewing area, so they selected plants known to attract butterflies 鈥� such as lavender and Joe Pye Weed 鈥� and planted them in the schoolyard. They added birdhouses and bat boxes, too, turning a concrete corner into a small urban sanctuary.

The payoff of these transformed spaces extends well beyond recess, yielding numerous positive effects in the classroom. There鈥檚 research showing that exposure to nature can help . It can also lead to . 

That鈥檚 a fantastic perk for any public school. Now, imagine multiplying that across an entire city. In New York, more than 240 schoolyards have been reimagined throughout the five boroughs, but there are about 950 citywide, so there are plenty more waiting to be transformed.

The potential is enormous 鈥� not just for more equitable access to green space, but for young people to discover that they can make their voices heard, make a difference and actively shape the world around them.

This bill would grant student members of the right to vote on the decisions the councils take. If passed, out of the 13 votes per council, students would hold two of them. 

CECs consist of elected community members who evaluate the efficacy of educational programs, recommend improvements, approve zoning lines and weigh in on all things related to public education. State law currently requires that two students, serving in student government and nominated by their superintendents, serve on each of the 32 councils and one on each of the four citywide councils.鈥� 

Students on these councils attend the meetings, offer feedback and consultation, share informed perspectives 鈥� perspectives that carry unique weight because of their lived experience 鈥� yet when the time comes to decide, they have no voting power. 

This dichotomy reveals how鈥� deeply shapes our civic relationship with young people. For decades, institutions have them from the democratic process or included them only in token ways.  

Ironically, CECs themselves perpetuate this pattern. Not only do they deny students voting power, but they have also failed to comply with state law requiring student representation. As of 2024, only 14 student seats were filled, leaving at least two-thirds vacant. An honest reflection of the law makes that not surprising. Would you sit on a council if you were the only non-voting member? 

This bill addresses both problems. It increases the number of students on each council and ensures that students not only inform decisions about policies affecting their daily lives but can cast votes on those decisions.鈥疘t also broadens access by removing a requirement that the student members serve in student government.

When considering the utilitarianism of this bill, it is easy to understand why it hasn’t generated a lot of attention 鈥� it seems like an obvious 鈥榊es.鈥� But pragmatism alone doesn鈥檛 guarantee success. Lawmakers introduced this bill in 2023 and three years later, it has yet to pass.  

This is particularly concerning as the new mayor and chancellor vow to improve our current governance model that gives the mayor control over our system. CECs are contingent on mayoral control and are expected to provide vital input to both the mayor and chancellor. Giving students a real seat at the table is a simple but important first step they could advocate for. 

The lack of traction likely stems from limited awareness, paired with to fully embrace the burgeoning movement for youth voice and enfranchisement.   

Fortunately, young people deserve the right to inform and influence the policies and practices that affect their daily lives.  

For those of us working in the youth civic and democratic ecosystem, we鈥檝e witnessed young people鈥檚 perspectives and impact on鈥痯olicy from communities to the . We trust their judgment and benefit when we listen. This bill asks lawmakers in Albany to extend that trust.  

Research on adolescent development reinforces this need. By their early teens, young people鈥檚 brains are developing in ways that heighten their focus on . 

Evidence from the field and research alone will not secure this bill鈥檚 passage. Advocates must also demonstrate what this looks like in practice. , the original author of this bill, demonstrates that reality better than anybody in the city. 

For three decades, BroSis has in New York City. These efforts show how capable young people are and how essential their voices remain in galvanizing change. Young leaders bring insight into systematic challenges in ways that very few decision-makers can fathom, such as longstanding racial disparities in education as well as emerging challenges like artificial intelligence. 

EdTrust-New York has seen the same impact. Through the developed in partnership with BroSis and Adelante Student Voices, students have shaped policy conversations on school discipline, suspension rates and equity across the state. Their contributions have improved both the quality and urgency of those discussions. 

Together we view this bill as a catalyst for better informed education policy and a mechanism to ensure direct student representation. It will also help build civic ownership among young people. 

The bill will ensure the education reflects what students actually need. It also signals to young people, who are growing from the lack of access to the democratic process, that New York City is committed to engaging them and elevating their civic power.鈥� 

The strength of this bill lies in its practicality, but we should not mistake simplicity for insignificance. As advocates and policymakers consider how to improve mayoral control, they should take this simple and meaningful first step. This bill deserves full-throated support from anyone in New York City who values young people鈥檚 perspectives and believes they must play a meaningful role in the civic process.鈥疞et鈥檚 give high school students, not just a seat at the table, but a vote.

Within weeks of ChatGPT鈥檚 release, hard rules appeared almost overnight. AI tools were banned throughout departments. Teachers watched what seemed like an existential threat materialize in real time, and they responded the way institutions usually do under pressure: They drew a line and told everyone not to cross it.

Three years later, that line is still there. And at many places, nobody ever asked whether it should be, at least not the people most affected by it.

When I looked into how my Austin, Texas, high school鈥檚 AI policy was developed, I found that my administrators made the decision internally. There was no student committee, no open forum, no campuswide survey. The rulebook was simply handed down. In K鈥�12 education, require districts to develop and publish AI policies; when they are published, they鈥檙e often developed without proper consideration of all stakeholders, including students themselves.

It鈥檚 reasonable to counter that students are minors, that institutions need coherent governance and that not all decisions can go to a committee. But AI policy isn鈥檛 a routine curriculum adjustment. It governs what tools students are allowed to use to think, draft, research and communicate 鈥� tools that increasingly shape how knowledge is produced and evaluated outside school. Getting those rules wrong produces consequences for students.

Brittany Carr鈥檚 situation is a well-known example. In early 2023, the had three assignments flagged by an AI detector. She provided her revision history and explained her process writing deeply personal essays about her cancer diagnosis, her depression and her personal recovery. It wasn鈥檛 enough. Fearing that a second accusation could cost her financial aid, she began running every essay through an AI detector herself, rewriting any sentence it marked until her writing voice felt flattened and unfamiliar. By the end of the semester, she left the university.

Carr is not alone. The same NBC News investigation found that students across the country deliberately simplified their vocabulary and avoided complex sentence patterns 鈥� not to write better, but to write less like themselves. Creative writing assignments exist to help students find their voice, which they can鈥檛 do in fear of an algorithm. Carr鈥檚 case shows a student reshaping her writing, and ultimately her education, around a software system she had no role in approving, in a policy she had no voice in developing.

Student involvement would not necessarily have guaranteed a different outcome in Carr鈥檚 case. But it might have changed the structure that enabled it. Students could have brought up concerns about relying on automated detectors without corroborating evidence. They could have described how fear of false accusations pushes students toward simpler vocabulary, safer syntax and less intellectual risk. They could have asked what procedural protections exist before a software flag becomes an academic charge.

Instead, at many institutions, enforcement architecture was built first. Conversation came later, if at all.

It doesn鈥檛 have to work this way. In Los Altos, California, did more than sit in on policy meetings 鈥� they designed and ran community workshops, facilitated discussions between sixth graders and administrators, and built an AI chatbot to help other districts draft policies. 

A found that students overwhelmingly want to be part of decisions about how AI is used in their education 鈥� and that many already hold sophisticated views on its risks and potential. The fact that Los Altos made national news tells you how rarely that invitation is extended.

But there is a deeper reason students belong in these conversations: We know something policymakers don鈥檛.

At my high school, I鈥檝e witnessed 鈥� and experienced 鈥� a secret loop in the learning process: we use  large language model tools like ChatGPT and Claude to genuinely improve learning by unraveling concepts, studying for tests and brainstorming ideas. 

A few days ago, a student asked a question about a formula in my AP Physics C class 鈥� and nobody knew the answer. Another student opened his laptop and asked Claude, and after a few minutes of back-and-forth, we had completely straightened out our question, improving everyone鈥檚 understanding of how circuits worked. I used an LLM to compile notes from my Multivariable Calculus class, which helped me study and earn a near-perfect score on my test. My friend used ChatGPT to learn Java syntax for a project 鈥� not to write code, but to understand the language.

A found that 54% of U.S. teens now use AI chatbots for schoolwork, with the most common uses being research and brainstorming 鈥� not copying and pasting answers. But that message hasn鈥檛 reached the people writing the rules. This secret loop goes completely disregarded by schools, simply because it鈥檚 easier to blanket-ban the technology altogether. The generation that grew up with these tools understands their texture in a way no outside committee can replicate.

These AI policies directly affect students鈥� outcomes and futures. To exclude them from the conversation is simply undemocratic.

If educational institutions are serious about preparing students for democratic citizenship, that commitment must go beyond coursework and into policy-making. The time to invite students into these critical conversations is now. Will schools treat students as subjects of policy, or as participants in it?

While students don鈥檛 typically attend these meetings, this one was different: students were present and at the center of the conversation. Scholars spoke candidly about their experiences with the school鈥檚 evolving model for clubs and internships 鈥� what was working, what could be improved and what they hoped would come next. The students were reflecting on a program called 鈥淲orldview Wednesday,鈥� which allows them to explore academic and career interests during the school day. The goal of the staff meeting was to identify implementation trends, including those raised by students, and improve structures for the following school year鈥檚 programming.  

What鈥榮 remarkable about CHEC鈥檚 approach to staff meetings is not just the clarity of the students鈥� insights or their sincerity in wanting to help improve programming; it鈥榮 the way the adults lean in, quite literally. Teachers nod, take notes and ask follow-up questions, resembling a co-design session more than a traditional staff meeting.聽

That was the CHEC leadership team鈥檚 goal. During school year 2024-2025, Principal Maria Tukeva and her staff had set the ambitious target to engage 20% of their learners in traditional adult decision-making spaces. They exceeded that aim, with 30% of their scholars participating over the course of the school year. That also led to student sense of belonging increasing by 7%, according to a school climate survey. 

I see members of the CHEC team modeling a monumental shift in power as staff members center student voice and revamp school culture. Across the country, pockets of school innovation and improvement have historically gained traction in one classroom or school, but their impact is often isolated. Innovative teachers and school leaders are busy people. Districts rarely have the resources, capacity, and system-level enablers to codify and diffuse promising school-level practice widely.  

Codifying and scaling school-level practice can look like curating resource libraries, developing blueprints or playbooks, or even establishing demonstration sites and hosting visits from other school teams so they can see promising practices in action. Districts play a key role in this process, from monitoring and elevating bright spots to providing added capacity and resources to invest in codification. 

They can also create enabling conditions for school innovation through flexible policies and infrastructure that allow promising practices to take root and grow. The , in partnership with the , has implemented some of these strategies to overcome challenges that districts have faced nationwide. The district  is fortunate to have dedicated Design Lab staff members who work with schools to design and evaluate programs, facilitate cohort-based development initiatives, and shape infrastructure and policy through collaboration with other district leaders. 

At CHEC, the student-centered, decision-making model during the school鈥檚 meeting in their cafeteria has become an exemplar for youth voice across the district. It has shaped district guidance for key planning processes 鈥� such as how stakeholders are engaged in the development of annual comprehensive school plans. I have even heard high schoolers from across DCPS present their own solutions to address chronic absenteeism at our Student Design Days. Some of our schools adopted these student-led ideas, resulting in an increase in-seat attendance by as much as 20%.鈥� 

Not far from CHEC is Paul Laurence Dunbar High School 鈥� America鈥檚 first public high school for Black students 鈥� where every eligible senior participates in an off-campus internship with a local nonprofit, government agency or business. The school鈥檚 鈥淐ity as Classroom鈥� model has contributed to an 18% increase in students on track for promotion and graduation. Driven by Dunbar鈥檚 pioneering efforts, DCPS codified processes for off-campus learning 鈥� clarifying site approvals and attendance tracking 鈥� making it easier for other schools to replicate the model. 

Just down the road at Cardozo Education Campus 鈥� every ninth grader engages in structured career exploration before selecting a pathway during a celebratory 鈥淒eclaration Day.鈥� Since launching this model, Career and Technical Education pass rates for the first course in chosen pathways have climbed to 93%. Encouraged, DCPS is expanding support for exploratory CTE opportunities districtwide. 

If we want innovation to scale beyond isolated stories of success, districts can invest in the infrastructure to help support and amplify promising innovations. That can mean creating dedicated roles and teams to provide capacity for codifying and disseminating best practices or building systems to capture and share these practices across campuses.  

But first, it means fundamentally recognizing school-level innovators as leaders for the future of learning. Treating local brilliance as the starting point for system-wide change unlocks the full potential of our schools and the communities they serve. The future of learning is already unfolding in our schools, and I am proud of our young people and our staff for leading the way. 

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of 社区黑料.

You know, those bipedal mysteries who are bopping around with a simultaneous look of disdain and indifference. They鈥檙e listening to music with wired headphones and seem to levitate underneath the baggy, acid washed jeans and windbreakers of the late nineties. There鈥檚 probably bubble tea involved. 

In 2028, these kids are voting. In two years, these nine million 16 and17 year olds, zits and all, may be all that stand between us and a failed state.

The ramifications of the 2028 election are looming monumental on the horizon. 

Rally, organize, vote. This is the mantra champions for democracy are pushing. But they鈥檙e not pushing it to the kids 鈥� and boy, should they.

In its Human Rights Watch warns of an 鈥渁uthoritarian wave鈥� that has come into power across the globe, including in the United States. 鈥淎uthoritarian leaders have exploited public mistrust and anger to win elections and then dismantled the very institutions that brought them to power,鈥� the report states. 

Throughout history authoritarian playbooks have hinged on capturing the hearts and minds of young people. The idea is simple: You capture the youth early enough and you capture the future. 

This was a key pillar in the Soviet strategy to flip eastern Europe after World War II: simultaneously cripple the education system and funnel to a swath of vulnerable teens eager to form a collective identity. 

The far right in America has internalized this playbook and are committed to realizing it. What does the targeting of these young people look like?

It’s the 鈥榤anosphere鈥�. It’s the podcasters and YouTubers and influencers who are modeling a misogynist and toxic 鈥榤asculine鈥� grind that appeals to looking for inclusion and identity in a world working to deprioritize the patriarchy. The content and community is the bait, the white noise of far right ideologies consumed through osmosis is the hook.

The manosphere is beginning to tap into the cohort of young Latinos, a marginalized bloc desperate to assimilate and be seen as American. They don鈥檛 want to accept they鈥檙e latching onto a movement intent on their further disenfranchisement. 

This scheme transcends class and gender. It鈥檚 the likes of Erika Kirk, Nick Fuentes, and leaders within Turning Point USA who are flooding teen spaces and media to eloquently rail against a diversifying America and progressive and empathetic principals in ways that are overtly racist and laced with nationalistic rhetoric. 

This prong of the movement doesn鈥檛 rely solely on social media; it鈥檚 in schools, too. In the last year, the number of in US schools 鈥� Turning Point鈥檚 high school program 鈥� has doubled to 3,000. 

Lawmakers are entwined with these groups, receiving and funneling money toward . They also appear in podcasts and rub shoulders with influencers because they need them to convert young, future voters. 

Why? Because they are desperate to maintain and squash opportunities for America to become a democracy that is representative and elected of its population and their ideals, that is: a youthful generation of progressive people of color.  

As America grows ever more diverse, these power brokers are fervent to recruit a new generation that will maintain their minority rule.

The problem is that it鈥檚 working.

The other problem is that champions of democracy aren鈥檛 doing the same thing to cultivate the next generation of civically engaged young people who might be able to thwart this movement.

It鈥檚 difficult to understand why pro-democratic movements haven鈥檛 leaned into cultivating the democratic agency of the 16- and 17-year-old population prior to the voting age. They just don鈥檛.

There is obvious ageism toward young people, and a failure to get behind the science of adolescent development. I also believe it is playing out at scale 鈥�- a manifestation of our country’s unwillingness to accept the future is racially and ethnically diverse, multilingual and much better informed than ever before.  

Even when there are attempts to organize around teens, it鈥檚 done poorly and with little effect because these young people harbor a growing level of disdain for the priorities and ideologies of both political parties and organizers. They see a civic system that doesn鈥檛 look like them, doesn鈥檛 have the same priorities of them, and has not to have their best interest in mind. 

In a collaborative study led by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement, 60% of young people agree the political system doesn鈥檛 work. Black and Brown youth are . Why should they?

Most chilling, respondents in the study said they do not 鈥渂uy into the value of democracy鈥�, and are sympathetic to authoritarian governments. This population is expected to account for over . 

So, what can be done? A lot in just two years. 

One of the first priorities is to  protect and reinvigorate 鈥� particularly those serving the most diverse and historically marginalized populations. It is here the pipeline for future voters is restored. It’s not just teaching how a bill becomes a law, it鈥檚 teaching kids how to build democratic power. Amid systematic attacks on public education, basic and sound civic education is no longer a guarantee, and local leaders must be held accountable to ensure access to strong curricula. 

The education system can鈥檛 do all the heavy lifting. Out-of-school time civic education and participatory engagement programs need to be designed and run all over the country. That鈥檚 particularly important for two distinct communities: those whose voting rights have been systematically targeted throughout history and those of privilege and access who鈥檝e never felt a need to show up to the polls. 

Beyond programs and education, conversations about why this matters should be taking place at the dinner table, on the courts, on the streets, on line, in the cafeterias and community events. Young people need to rally around the idea of representative democracy. The refrain should be simple: kids are voting in 2028 鈥� are they prepared?

It鈥檚 important to remember that our nation is not preparing young people for politics or partisanship: We are preparing them for democracy. 

Voting is not partisan, it is democratic. Civic engagement is not political, it is democratic. It鈥檚 not a matter of pushing issues or candidates. . It鈥檚 a matter of  preparing them to engage and trusting in their and . They鈥檝e to always land on the .

I鈥檝e said before, the entire youth civic ecosystem must be reformed 鈥� a project that is decades of work in the making. Still, I believe one well-prepared generation could radically alter the civic landscape and discourse, and be the catalyst to creating a pipeline of young voters that will lead increased turnout, local level engagement, more representative candidates, increased accountability, and a new age in which majority and representative rule is the status quo and not a pipe dream.  

In the meantime, remember democracy is under threat. There is a movement looking to overturn our republic, and it hinges on capturing the hearts/minds of young people. Young people could have an incredible role to play over the coming years. Where anti-democratic movements recognize the power of youth, the collective good must too 鈥� and that collective must rally around young people before it鈥檚 too late.

My first encounter was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Standing there, I realized how easily words like history and memory fail. The train tracks ran straight into the Nazi extermination camp and then simply stopped. Our guide said there was nowhere else to go. In New York City, trains mean movement: getting home, staying connected, continuing life. At Auschwitz, they carried people into death.

What stayed with me wasn鈥檛 just the scale of the violence but how deliberate it all was. About 80% of the people brought there were murdered within days, many immediately. The system was designed not only to kill, but to make killing efficient. That realization didn鈥檛 feel distant. It felt uncomfortably human.

As the trip continued, I began noticing how remembrance shows up 鈥� and how often it doesn鈥檛. At the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, I learned about a synagogue that had been destroyed during the Holocaust, rebuilt years later and repurposed as a toy store. That decision didn鈥檛 sit right with me. Synagogues are not just buildings; they are spaces of identity and connection. It raised a question I couldn鈥檛 shake: When historical spaces are restored, who decides how they are remembered 鈥� and what responsibility comes with that decision?

Later, in Warsaw, we visited what remains of the Jewish Ghetto and saw a mural honoring six members of the Jewish resistance who died after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their bravery gave hope to people who had almost none. Yet the mural honoring them wasn鈥檛 created until 2022 鈥� nearly eighty years after their deaths. That delay troubled me. Remembrance shouldn鈥檛 have to wait decades to feel necessary.

As a Hispanic student who is not Jewish, this trip reshaped how I understand the Holocaust and its relevance today. I learned that antisemitism didn鈥檛 suddenly appear in the 1940s 鈥� it had deep roots, and difference was used as an excuse to exclude and dehumanize long before genocide followed. That pattern is not just 鈥渉istory.鈥� It鈥檚 a warning.

People look different, worship differently, live differently. That diversity should never justify violence. And yet history shows how easily hatred grows when difference is normalized as a threat and memory is treated as optional.

This trip forced me to confront uncomfortable questions: Why did recognition take so long? Why are some stories remembered immediately while others fade? And what happens when remembrance becomes symbolic instead of intentional?

Poland has made important efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and those efforts matter. But remembrance cannot stop at monuments. It must protect meaning, preserve truth and demand honesty. Otherwise, memory risks becoming something we admire instead of something that changes us.

This experience made me realize that remembrance is not passive. It requires participation 鈥� especially from those of us who did not inherit this history personally. If remembering becomes optional, history becomes fragile. But if remembrance is active, it becomes a responsibility.

I carry that responsibility with me now. And if I have the opportunity to share even a small part of what I learned, I will. Because remembrance isn鈥檛 just about never forgetting. It鈥檚 about never looking away.

In recent years, and have made clear that they are . They鈥檙e protesting the collective status quo of partisanship, perpetual plutocracy and the unchecked disconnect of our gerontocratic leaders. As they come of age in a moment of extraordinary tension, their patience for traditional civic engagement is coming to an end.

To avoid this we must welcome young people into the socio-political fray by lowering voting ages, redesigning civic education to combat misinformation and radical politics, and extending opportunities for youth to authentically engage at the municipal level.  

It is a fallacy to believe civic consciousness starts at age 18. Regardless of how they communicate it, 14- to 17-year-olds are capable of contributing to elections, as well as to the design of policy and practice. This is particularly true of marginalized youth who offer a unique vantage point on some of our most prominent social issues.

The perspectives of these young people 鈥� 鈥� are incredibly valuable, particularly at a time when they鈥檙e grappling with an onslaught of threats to their , futures 鈥� each of which carry tangible ramifications. 

It鈥檚 these perspectives that must be nurtured to ensure the longevity of our civic system, and secure the future of equitable and empathetic social progress. And there鈥檚 plenty of evidence that proves we鈥檇 be right to trust the younger generation鈥檚 voices.

In in Iowa. YPAR trains young people to use research methods to inform and influence local policy). In Des Moines, in the midst of a national racial reckoning, a cohort of students saw an opportunity to leverage the that school resource officers (SROs) are more likely to charge students of color with crimes, and threaten their well-being and academic performance. The cohort successfully recommended the school board remove SROs from schools and reallocate those monies to fund counselors. The following year, in the number of students of color referred to the juvenile justice system. 

Along with other across the state, some making it to the House floor, this participatory audit in Iowa displayed the penchant young people have for social analysis and policy, and how their perspectives can be used to effectively influence local policies.

Don鈥檛 mistake these Iowan kids as exceptions. What the YPAR audit captured was the capacity and civic agency of the typical 鈥渒id.鈥� It reflects the developmental science that tells us to develop social and ethical perspectives that can solve societal issues within ethical and moral parameters. 

It鈥檚 the science, research, and results from similar and that have inspired and bolstered my trust in young people 鈥� and why I believe we must redefine civics education and develop opportunities for civic participation for young people beginning at age 14. It is also why I am a strong proponent of lowering the voting age for municipal elections to 16 () 鈥� which is on voter turnout, engagement and sustained civic involvement.

This is why the election and climate protests on campuses in recent years have felt different. It鈥檚 this shift in tone that signals that our .

If this is the case, a great deal is at risk. Without legitimate outlets for civic engagement that are , authentically practiced with , or validated through like YPAR, young people may well resort to and alternatives for affecting change. With our democracy already in a fragile state, it is a necessity to reconsider what civic engagement looks like, and who has access to it.

As this young demographic quickly becomes , it seems accepting them into the civic discourse is the only recourse we have left.聽聽

Redesigning civic education, developing participatory programs, and lowering voting ages is particularly complicated in the current political climate. 

We must avoid dumping kids into a pool of supercharged partisan rhetoric and vitriol. We need to teach pragmatism and civility. We need safe conditions for kids to consider hard data that reflects lived truths and promotes the taking of accountability and responsibility. We need discourse and dialogue. But, above all, we, the adults, must simply hear them. 

Large cultural shifts don’t take place in the vacuum of policy houses or nonprofits. They take place in the collective consciousness, and it requires humility, empathy, acceptance and courage from us all. Let鈥檚 trust the kids to help get us there. 

That鈥檚 the message of a new , The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The surveys approximately 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries, including the United States. Here are five key insights from the report:

• Roughly 4 out of 10 students are unclear about their career expectations, double the number from about a decade ago.
  
• Almost half (49%) agree (35%) or strongly agree (14%) that school has done little to prepare them for adult life.
  
• There鈥檚 a gender gap in students鈥� aspirations to work in sectors like information technology and health care. For example, around 11% of boys report that they will work in information technology at age 30, compared with 1.5% of girls.
  
• Job preferences focus on a few, well-known professions, such as teaching, psychology and sports. For example, around half of girls and 44% of boys report that they expect to work in one of just 10 jobs, with little change in career preferences since 2000.
  
• The majority of young people don鈥檛 get connected to workforce professionals who can help them understand the opportunities available to them. Only 35% report attending a job fair, and just 45% visited a workplace.
  

The report a Teenage Career Readiness Dashboard that covers roughly two dozen issues and allows for comparisons among countries, organized by eight topics:   

Career uncertainty: Do students have clear plans? Does it matter? The report suggests that career uncertainty contributes to behaviors including disengagement from school. 

Planning: What are students鈥� job expectations? Have they changed over time? How do they compare to actual employer demand? Low-income students are particularly lacking in access to career planning resources. 

Alignment or misalignment: Do students understand what they need to do to achieve their job plans? Many teens hold unrealistic or outdated career goals, prioritizing a narrow band of high-status occupations while neglecting in-demand technical careers. 

Aspirations: Are students鈥� education plans driven more by social background than ability? The report finds that socioeconomics significantly influence aspiration levels. Disparities are particularly stark, with low-income students less likely to envision themselves in professional careers than wealthier peers. 

Guidance: Do students participate in career guidance activities that make a positive impact on their lives? Most report limited access to career counseling, with the quality and consistency varying dramatically. 

Career development: Is the guidance students do receive responding effectively to social inequalities? Career fairs, job shadowing and internships are critical but underutilized. Roughly 1 out of 5 U.S. students report speaking to a career adviser outside of school, the fifth-lowest rate among the countries surveyed.

Fear for the future: How well do students think they are prepared for their future careers? Roughly half (47%) agree that they worry about not being ready for life after they complete school.  

Employer engagement: How are employers involved in school activities and career development? Does this make a difference? The U.S. significantly lags behind other countries surveyed in providing students with career development activities, such as internships and job shadowing.  

This is illustrated by recent from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and Jobs for the Future that reflects a growing sense among America鈥檚 young people that they are adrift in the transition from high school to the next stage of their lives. This survey included over 1,300 16- to 18-year-old Gen Zers and their parents.

It reports that fewer than 3 out of 10 teens feel 鈥渧ery prepared鈥� to pursue any of eight post-high school pathways, including college, a job, the military or a certification program. Even among students most eager for a particular path, less than half feel ready to take the first step.  

The report also finds that just slightly more than half of parents (53%) frequently discuss life after graduation with their teenagers. One in three parents of seniors who are weeks from commencement have still not had that conversation.

When discussions do happen, they typically stick to familiar territory, such as a four-year college or a paid job. Teens’ knowledge mirrors this narrow horizon, with about one-third reporting they know 鈥渁 lot鈥� about bachelor鈥檚 degrees or full-time work.

Both reports suggest there are at least two career-launch pain points that prevent young people from successfully navigating life after high school. The first is an exposure gap 鈥� too few students are aware of available career options or understand the various paths to achieve them. The second is an experience gap 鈥� too few young people engage in work-based activities, such as internships or apprenticeships, that help them connect learning to the world of work

If students are neither exposed to nor experience career options, they are unlikely to acquire the knowledge, networks and vocational identity needed for adult success. According to the OECD report, students who recall speaking to career professionals or participating in job shadowing are far more likely to have career goals aligned with labor market needs.

So what can state and district leaders and advocates do?

First, start the formal career conversation sooner. Closing the exposure and experience gaps should begin as early as . The longer the wait, the more likely that young people will become lost in transition from school to their next stage. 

Second, widen the scope of career education. The focus on college should give way to a menu that includes certificates, two-year degrees, skilled trades, military service, and career and technical education.

Third, embed responsibility in career education. Involve young people in undertaking adult-like, consequential tasks, such as community projects, paid work and internships.

Fourth, help parents. Many programs and activities are available that can educate parents and guardians, such as workshops on local labor market careers or the different certificates and credentials that young people can earn.

Both the OECD and Gallup reports serve as reminders of the importance of integrating career exposure and experience into the everyday classroom experiences of young people. A central part of this remedy includes a dose of genuine adulthood 鈥� offered earlier, explained better and practiced alongside the grownups teenagers are expected to emulate.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to 社区黑料.

When 17-year-old Mackayla James sat down this month with three of the 11 candidates vying for open seats on the St. Louis School Board, she wanted to know one thing: How will they take student concerns more seriously and give them more input into the decisions made about their education? 

鈥淭his is about building a better educational system,鈥� says James, a junior at KIPP High School in St. Louis. 鈥淚’m about to graduate next year, but my sister has yet to enter high school, and I don’t want her to be dealing with the same things that I’m dealing with. Adults always say they can make things better for the next generation. Yet the school system is getting worse. It’s not improving. It’s worsening.鈥�

The contentious election, now just three weeks away, comes as the district faces teacher and bus driver shortages, dwindling student enrollment expected to result in school closures, an audit over alleged misuse of district funds by the prior superintendent and chronically low rates of academic achievement. 

In many ways, St. Louis is similar to other urban school districts attempting to claw their way back from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In other ways, it鈥檚 very different: Child poverty is high 鈥� higher, in fact, than 95% of communities nationwide 鈥� and crime, though on a downward trajectory, is still high enough that the state may strip the city鈥檚 control of its own police force.

James, meanwhile, is one of the St. Louis area high school students selected after a competitive application process to be part of a small cohort that gathers weekly to learn the nuts and bolts of advocacy and how to effectively inject their voices into the political process. The program, Youth Activators, encompasses a handful of semester-long cohorts and summer fellowships operated by Activate Missouri, all of which focus on boosting civic engagement among young people, with the goal of lifting up student voices in under-resourced communities across the state.

Among other things, the program educates students about the ways schools and districts are funded, the reasons funding can be so disparate, the state of education in their communities and how it got to be that way. With help from the organization鈥檚 own grassroots leaders, students identify the people in positions of power in their community and build their own advocacy campaigns to advance an issue that鈥檚 important to them. 

Vera Pantazis, a 17-year-old junior at Maplewood Richmond High School who is also part of the St. Louis cohort, had questions of her own for the school board candidates. Tutoring to improve math and reading scores is well and fine, she said, but show me the fine print. 

鈥淪o you say that you’re going to provide free tutoring for all kids. What’s that going to look like? How are we funding this? Who’s going to be doing the tutoring, you know? Is that going to be for all schools? All grades? I wanted more details on the biggest education proposals.鈥�

The youth engagement effort marks a change in strategy for the education advocacy group, which had been focusing resources on trying to engage, educate and organize parents on the issues.

鈥淲e were asking the people most impacted by the systemic inequalities to fix the issue,鈥� says Tiara Jordan-Sutton, founder and executive director of Activate STL, an offshoot of the statewide organization. 鈥淏ut they have so many things on their plate, and if they have to choose between working another job to put food on the table or attending a curriculum night at their kids school or coming to an organizing meeting, they’re gonna choose to put the food on the table. At the end of the day, there鈥檚 multiple competing factors that are keeping parents from being able to jump in this fight. So we needed to think about this from another lens.鈥�

That lens is now trained on students, or as Jordan-Sutton likes to remind folks, 鈥渢he very people who are closest to the issue.鈥� The issue being, of course, the significant academic and fiscal challenges of the K-12 system. According to the most recent NAEP results, just 27% of fourth-grade students in Missouri and 26% of eighth graders are proficient in reading. In math, 36% of fourth graders and 23% of eighth graders are proficient. No grade-score combination reached pre-pandemic level, and the performance gap between white students and Black students hasn鈥檛 budged for more than two decades. 

Out of all the districts in Missouri, St. Louis Public Schools posted the third lowest scores on the state鈥檚 last year, with just 21% of students passing the English Language arts assessment and 17% passing the math assessment. The chronic disinvestment of the system has pushed families out of the city in droves, reducing total enrollment by roughly 20% over the past decade. 

鈥淎 lot of people in St. Louis think that what’s happening here is the norm,鈥� Jordan-Sutton says. 鈥淲e have an opportunity to get to them [students] earlier, so that by the time they become parents, they have a very different understanding of why education is the way that it is, who’s allowing it to stay this way, and what the factors or levers are that can be pulled for it to actually improve.鈥�

Activate ATL and the youth advocacy programs she oversees are funded by The Opportunity Trust, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen public education for St. Louis students.

The youth advocacy programs include a paid summer fellowship for high school juniors, seniors and recent graduates, which operates weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., like a real job, and provides young people with a deep understanding about the myriad issues impacting St. Louis 鈥� especially education, but also housing and crime 鈥� and the tools needed to effectively organize. Among other things, they鈥檙e responsible for drafting get-out-the-vote campaigns focused on education equity. 

The semester-long cohorts for high school students run during the school year. Students meet twice a week to learn about how the K-12 system operates and is funded, who controls the purse strings, how the school board operates and who the biggest decision-makers are in the system. They canvas to register students old enough to vote, travel to Jefferson City to meet with legislators at the state capital and draft their own advocacy campaigns related to something they鈥檇 like to change at their school. The experience culminates with a pitch contest for a chance to have an advocacy campaign funded and brought to life.

Those pitches include everything from establishing a mental health buddy system among students to increasing the availability of tutoring to becoming more environmentally friendly. For James, who鈥檚 biggest concern is lack of communication and understanding of the issues that students face in school, she is considering proposing a plan that would allow a student representative from each high school to sit on the school board. 

鈥淲e want students to imagine what school could be like,鈥� says Jordan-Sutton, who began her career as a special education teacher and then principal in Chicago. 鈥淲hat are the things that they love about their school, and what do they wish that they had that鈥檚 missing? We tell them, 鈥榊ou can do something about that. Let me show you how.鈥欌�� 

鈥淲e teach them how to organize for change in a very structured way,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t’s not about just staging a protest, or walking out of school, or going to the principal and saying, 鈥業 want this,鈥� and expecting the principal to do it. It鈥檚 how to fine tune an idea, research it, think through how it should be implemented and whether anyone has ever tried it before. It鈥檚 thinking through how to build coalitions of support for it because there鈥檚 strength in numbers and how to survey peers to better understand the nuances of it. And finally, it鈥檚 about figuring out who in the power dynamics has the ability to implement the change you鈥檙e asking for.鈥�

The pivot to focus on youth advocacy is perhaps the next iteration of the national movement that鈥檚 taken shape in the wake of the pandemic, with groups like and the helping parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. Yet research shows that young people are eager to be involved in the process, but often feel overlooked by the political process and unprepared or unqualified to take action. 

According to the , young people (18-29) believe that their generation can and should engage in civic life and effect change: 74% said that there are things they can do to make the world a better place, 76% believe that their age group has the power to change things, and 83% recognize the potential of young people working with other generations to create change. However, many don鈥檛 feel informed or qualified enough to participate in politics. Only half of youth say they feel they鈥檙e 鈥渁s well-informed as most people,鈥� and even fewer (40%) say that they feel well-qualified to participate in politics. 

Moreover, young people from groups that have historically held less political power were even less likely to feel qualified, with 34% of youth of color saying they feel qualified to participate in politics, compared to 44% of white youth.

In addition, a growing body of shows that when students regard their school leadership as responsive to their expressed input and criticism, students themselves have better grades, attendance and reduced rates of chronic absenteeism. Students who believe they have a voice in school are seven times more likely to be academically motivated than students who do not believe they have a voice, and student voice is also linked to an increased likelihood that students will experience self-worth, engagement, and purpose in school.

鈥淚n this moment, with all of these different elections coming up, how do we ensure that the student voice is elevated?鈥� asks Rachel Powers, a senior vice president at The Opportunity Trust. 鈥淗ow do we support students in the same way that we support parents to advocate for what they are looking for, what they need, what they see in their own spaces, in their schools, in their communities?

鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to get students in that ethos and to understand the power of their collective voice,鈥� she adds. 鈥淲e know that people who go to the polls don’t always look like people who are served in our schools. And that’s something we point out and ask them, who’s making the real decisions about what happens to you, and do you want to be involved in making decisions that impact you and your community?鈥�

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to 社区黑料.

I spent my time in special ed learning basic mathematics and the alphabet, even in fourth grade. My classmates, regardless of the level of support they needed, were all taught the same material in the same way. Our education was not personally tailored. 

I was separated from my general education peers all day and would see them only during recess. This made it quite difficult to connect with them, as we had no class time together. I was quite timid, so approaching anyone from the general education classes made me very nervous. 

When I moved on to general education in middle school, I found that special education hadn’t prepared me at all. I kept failing my classes, despite my best efforts, and I failed to graduate. Special ed also didn鈥檛 help me with my social skills, as I made no friends in elementary or middle school.

I felt like I had been thrown into a lion鈥檚 den without any weapons. I was not prepared in the slightest. 

Only through litigation was I able to move to a neurodiversity-affirming school. The district offered my family settlement money after we argued in a lawsuit that the school had failed on its promise to educate me. Because of those funds, I was able to attend a high school for autistic students who learn differently, like me. 

Something is terribly wrong with a special education system that consistently fails those it is supposed to help. An analysis from the Center for American Progress shows that special education students are from high school than their general education peers. The same analysis showed that, in 2015, students with disabilities were substantially less likely to be at or above proficiency in mathematics or reading. 

This is a system that needs radical reform. 

First, special ed students must be integrated with the general education peers. Being segregated made me feel like there was something inherently wrong with me, as if putting me in general education would lower the quality of the classroom. Integration would have exposed me to the type of material I needed once I entered middle school. As Jennifer Kurth, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas, in an interview, 鈥渟tudy after study is showing that there’s no harm to being included, but there’s great risks of harm to being segregated. Kids [with disabilities] who are included develop better academic skills, better communication skills, better social skills, just kind of everything we try to measure.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

It cannot be overstated how demoralizing being put in a segregated classroom is. It makes you feel like you have a pathology that hurts other students. It makes you feel like you鈥檙e less intelligent and less capable. My classmates at the time told me it felt like we were hopeless causes. My peers said this in elementary school. Nobody should have to go through that, especially at a young age. 

Second, schools need to abandon the cookie-cutter approach to special education students, where everyone is taught the same way and receives the same accommodations. At the neurodiversity-affirming high school I went to, every student was taught differently, at their own pace. Because of this I went from being a middle schooler at a 4th grade reading level to an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and the founder of a nonprofit, . 

Third, students with disabilities and their families should be allowed to decide what services and programs they receive. At the moment, schools often make these determinations. In California, where I live, many neurodivergent individuals are able to choose what services and programs they receive through the Self-Determination Program. shows that nearly 70% of respondents are satisfied with the program. Through , I鈥檝e been able to receive tutoring and technology vital for my educational journey. 

Before I had access to the program, my family had to sue in order for me to be able to determine what programs and services I receive. I couldn’t even get a tutor who specialized in students with disabilities until we put up a fight. It shouldn鈥檛 be this hard. 

If I had been able to choose which services I get, my family and I would have been able to avoid a litigation battle. If I had been able to integrate with my general education peers in elementary school, I would鈥檝e been better prepared for middle school and for building social skills. Simply put, a lot of the mental anguish I went through would have been mitigated.

Integration and self-determination should be implemented in special education across the country.

If I hired a tutor for my daughter, I鈥檇 be covering up the school鈥檚 and the teachers鈥� negligence. If I allowed my daughter to fail, however, I would be forcing her school and her teachers to face the consequences of their malpractice.

When I wrote about my position, it enraged many readers, with :

It’s always great to use your children as sacrificial lambs to make a political point than to do your best for them!

This woman is nuts, you work to give your kids what they need to succeed 鈥� period. Nothing will change with the school system whether the kid succeeds or fails.

You want to teach the Board of Education a lesson by letting your daughter failed (sic) her Spanish Regents Exam? You need your head examined.

And to that effect.

Except, now that the academic year is over, I can report that my approach worked. And that the outcome benefited not just my daughter, but her classmates and future students of the school.

In math class, my daughter and a group of friends first went to their guidance counselor with complaints about their teacher, and then to the principal, who sat in on one of their classes and promptly brought in a new instructor. Now that they had a teacher who, as my daughter said, 鈥渁ctually makes sense when he talks,鈥� she went from getting 48%, 23% and 14% on tests to a final grade of 94. (And it wasn’t just her grades, which can be subjective. After all the drama, my daughter received an 85 on her math Regents exam. She actually learned.)

For Spanish 3, after five weeks of having no teacher at all in a class that would be culminating with another Regents exam, my daughter and her classmates complained to the Advanced Placement Spanish teacher, who invited them to attend her office hours for intense tutoring.

鈥淪he gave us a list of [vocabulary] words to memorize,鈥� my daughter reported. 鈥淚n the last five weeks of school, she taught us five different conjugations we didn鈥檛 know we needed. She made us try. It was horrible.鈥�

My daughter finished 11th grade with a final grade of 80 in Spanish. And, much to our mutual shock, with an 83 on the Regents.

First and foremost, I must thank those teachers who went out of their way to help, even when it, technically, wasn鈥檛 their responsibility. As I have written about the inadequacies of some teachers, I feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops with gratitude for the ones who go above and beyond on a daily basis.

Secondly, kudos to the students at my daughter鈥檚 school who took their education into their own hands and demanded better instruction than what they were getting. They are an inspiration to those of us who sometimes lose faith that schools ever will, or ever could, improve.

And, finally, a plea to my fellow parents and guardians: Yes, I know it鈥檚 hard to watch your kids struggle. Yes, I know we all want to do what鈥檚 best for our children, give them a leg up, 鈥済ive your kids what they need to succeed 鈥� period,鈥� as one of my critics insisted.

But that鈥檚 a short-term solution for a much larger, institutional problem.

No school, whether in NYC or elsewhere in the nation, will ever fix its failures unless it is forced to confront them. And no school will ever be forced to confront them if families, desperate to protect their children鈥檚 grade-point average, continue picking up the slack, making the school appear to be doing an adequate job when it is, in fact, outsourcing its instruction to parents and private tutors while taking credit for positive results.

My daughter and her friends demanded that their school properly educate them and chalked up a victory not only for themselves, not only for their peers, but for all American students who now have a blueprint for taking similar action: In order to succeed, you first have to demonstrate where you鈥檝e failed.

My grades started slipping, and I no longer had energy for volleyball, which used to be one of my favorite hobbies. I knew there was a problem, but since my weight did not reflect my mindset and actions, I did not know how serious it was getting.

Two years later, when I pursued a capstone project at my middle school, , a charter public school in Washington state, I realized that I wanted to spread awareness about eating disorders, though I did not know much about them. As I learned more, I realized that the things I was reading about described what I was facing. I had , which means you have the symptoms of anorexia but aren鈥檛 underweight.

The stereotypical image of a person with anorexia is a rail-thin young woman. Because I didn’t fit this stereotype, I and others initially overlooked my extreme symptoms.

Meeting with a counselor following my capstone project marked a turning point. She was encouraging and became a big help, someone I could go to when I was struggling. 

When I was diagnosed and entered recovery at 15, I learned grounding techniques to better calm my mind, healthy eating habits and the concept of , which is an approach toward body acceptance that resonated with me.

I also learned I could open up to my friends and ask them for support in my recovery. It wasn鈥檛 easy or quick, but with all this aid, I was eventually able to get to a healthier place.

If it hadn’t been for my capstone project, and the resources I found I could turn to afterward, I鈥檓 not sure I would have become educated enough to want recovery.

I shared what I learned with my classmates. However, I couldn’t complete my entire plan for my capstone project because I had also wanted to present my findings at nearby schools, and they were hesitant because they thought those students were too young.

But Spokane International’s elementary principal said I was welcome to come back after graduation and do another presentation again, and I recently returned to my middle school and spoke to multiple classrooms of sixth graders about my experience. 

I worked with a counselor to develop content that emphasized the importance of recognizing and addressing behaviors associated with eating disorders. 

I didn鈥檛 solely talk about facts and statistics. I also wanted to share practical advice like seeking support from trusted adults, advocating for yourself and using the grounding strategies that helped me on the road to recovery. And I handed out cards to students with information about how to seek assistance for themselves or others.

The tools I received at my school allowed me to become an advocate for others. 

It鈥檚 crucial for schools to provide opportunities like these, whether through allowing students to research health topics on their own or finding creative ways that they can learn through health classes or elsewhere. For me, listening to a teacher reciting symptoms without an opportunity to discuss or reflect on my own didn鈥檛 resonate.

This is more important than ever before. Eating disorders for young people . And those with atypical anorexia, like me, are often . This is a serious issue, and schools must be equipped to provide resources to students so we can reverse this dangerous trend.

I鈥檓 hoping that by sharing my story, I can help others. If I had heard a young woman like myself talking about eating disorders when I was younger, it wouldn鈥檛 have taken me as long as it did to recognize what I was dealing with. I鈥檓 hoping that by speaking to early middle schoolers and sharing my story more broadly, I can be that person for someone else.

This week on Class Disrupted, AI expert and Minerva University senior Irhum Shafkat joins Michael and Diane to discuss where AI has been, where it鈥檚 going and the rate at which it鈥檚 moving. The episode explores the many forms the technology takes, its implications for humanity, and, of course, its applications in education 鈥� as told by a student.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Michael, you’ve just spent a week at the happiest place on Earth, and I must admit, I’m a little bit jealous.

Michael Horn: For those who may be confused about what the happiest place on Earth is, it’s Disney World. I was just there with my kids. First time for them. It was a blast. Diane, you know what? I came away with a few takeaways, but one of them was the excellence at scale. Disney has 74,000 employees in that park. And almost every single one of them – it’s probably like 73,500 of them 鈥� are just dedicated to making your experience better than the last person you just interacted with. And it’s astounding 鈥� however they have managed to do that. So it was a blast. Thank you for asking. But we’re not here to talk about my vacation, although that might be fun. Instead, we’re looking to continue to dive into some of these sticky questions around K-12 Education. Help people see different ways through what has often been pitted as zero-sum battles between the adults in the room and try to think through how we can unleash student progress and prepare them for the world into which they’re entering. And obviously a question that exploded into both of our minds starting last year, Diane was the topic of AI. And, as opposed to the Metaverse, it is still the topic du jour. It is still what everyone is wondering about: artificial intelligence, what do we do with it, and so forth. And you have been teasing me that you have the perfect guest to help us think about this in some novel ways. Take it from here, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Well, I have indeed been doing that. You’re right. AI so far has a longer shelf life. So we’ll see how long that lasts. It’s my great pleasure to introduce you to Irhum. And Irhum and I first met a few years ago when he was a freshman at Minerva University. He was coming from Bangladesh to that global university. He’s now a senior. He spent the last two summers as an intern at Google X here, just about a mile away from where I live. And at Google X, he’s really been focused on large language model, aka AI, research. And you’ve been hearing about Irhum from me and all of our conversations we’ve been having for quite some time, Michael. So, what you know is that I’ve learned a ton from him about AI. And one of the things I love about talking AI with Irhum is that even though he has a ton of knowledge, and, for example, he writes a popular technical blog about AI that I have looked at, and I can’t even decipher a sentence of it. So, highly technical, deep knowledge. But he also is a system thinker, and he cares deeply about how technology is used, how AI is used, and what it means for our society. And so he’s willing to and able to talk with people like me, lay people like me, and help me understand that and engage in a good conversation. And for our purposes, I think, most importantly, Irhum is 20, and it’s so critical to be in dialogue with people in this generation. I think we give a lot of lip service in education to the consumers, if you will, or the students, and then we don’t involve them in our dialogue. And so, I’m just really grateful that he’s here and you all get to meet. And so, welcome, Irhum.

Michael Horn: Irhum, it is so good to have you here. Diane has been teasing this for a while, so thank you for joining us. Before we dive into the AI topic itself, I would just love to hear, through your words 鈥� because I’ve heard it a little bit through Diane’s – but I’d love to hear and the audience would love to hear about your journey to Minerva University, your journey to diving into topics of AI. And really, how has that school experience specifically been? Like, what has worked? What hasn’t?

Irhum Shafkat: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Let’s just get into it. I’m one of those people who the standard school system was just not designed for, rather frankly. I grew up inside the national school system back in Bangladesh, up to fourth grade, essentially, and it just wasn’t designed with someone like me in mind. We’re talking an institution with 50 person classrooms, teachers barely able to give anyone attention. And the school system is geared to make you pass a university entrance exam, and if you do that, you’ve done it, you’ve succeeded. And my mindset often was, like, I joked that I was learning full-time and going to school on the side. The way I saw it in my mind, that’s amazing. And I’d say the only reason my path worked out the way it did is because when I was in finishing up middle school, entering high school, so, like, eight to nine grades, like that window, the Internet just rapidly proliferated across the entire country within a couple months. Short couple of months, essentially. You went from not a lot of people using the net to a lot of people using the Internet. And I was one of those people, and I was like, 鈥淥h my God, it’s not that I don’t like math, it’s that I don’t understand it.鈥� And there’s a difference between those two things. And I was one of those people. Like, Khan Academy was quite literally designed for me. I’d log onto that thing and I was like, 鈥淥h my God, I actually understand math,鈥� and I can teach myself math. I can succeed at it. And the impression that it left me with is that technology is really opened up. The Internet, in particular, is like one of those frontier technologies that just opened up learning to anybody who could access it and go through the right set of tools needed to learn things, like Khan Academy being one of them. And I guess that’s the mindset I’m seeing this new generation of technologies in AI, too. I wonder who else is going to be using them the way I did and learn something new that their environment wouldn’t otherwise allow them to. I suppose I kept teaching myself things, and that’s kind of, I guess, partly how I ended up at Minerva is because I wanted a non-traditional university education because the traditional high school education clearly wasn’t a fit for me at all. And Minerva was like, 鈥淐ome here, we won’t bore you with lectures. Our professors barely get to speak for more than five minutes in class. It’s all students just talking to each other and learning from each other. And I was like, 鈥淪ign me up.鈥�

Diane Tavenner: Well, and Irham, that curiosity that you are describing in yourself is, I think, one of the things that led you to discover AI long before most of us discovered it. And you discovered it on the Internet. You discovered it by reading papers and sort of following these blog posts while you were teaching yourself. And so, I don’t think it was a surprise for you when it burst onto the scene, because you knew what was coming and where it was coming from. And yet, I think that the world’s reaction has been interesting. And so, you sent me a quote the other day. You texted me a quote about AI that had us both laughing pretty hysterically, probably because it feels very true. And so, I’m going to share that quote, which is, 鈥淎rtificial intelligence is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it. Nobody really knows how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.鈥� Let’s just start by figuring out what people are actually doing. If anything, this is sort of a ridiculous question, but can you just explain AI to us and why it’s suddenly this big deal that it feels like it just spontaneously arrived in 2023?

Irhum Shafkat: I guess there are like three big terms that we should go over when we say AI because it just means so many things. Like AI is such a vague, hard thing to define. But I guess the way I see it is anything that’s just right beyond the edge of what’s computationally possible right now. Because once it becomes possible, people kind of stop thinking about it as AI.

Diane Tavenner: Interesting.

Irhum Shafkat: OK, other people would have their own definitions, but I feel like that’s like, what’s historically been true. Once something becomes possible, it almost feels like it’s no longer AI. What has been more recent, though, is how we keep pushing different tier. Like, if it was the 90s, for example, when Casperov played with Deep blue, the chess playing engine. That thing was like a massive, highly sophisticated program with millions of logical rules. That’s what’s different. What happened over the last ten years is we really pivoted towards machine learning, and specifically a branch of it called deep learning, which allowed us to use really simple algorithms on enormous amounts of data. We’re talking several thousand lifetimes worth of data. When you were talking about training a language model, for example, and ginormous amounts of compute to push all that data through a very simple algorithm. And that’s what changed in that it turns out really simple algorithms work extremely well when you have a large enough compute budget and enough data to pass through them. And the instantiation that everyone really captured the imagination is against a narrower part of machine learning still is called large language models. The large being like, they’re much larger than models for historical language models, in the sense that, at their core, you give them a piece of text, and they just play a guessing game. We’re like, okay, so what’s the next word? And if you keep predicting the next word over and over, you form entire sentences, paragraphs, entire documents that way.

Diane Tavenner: So it sounds like, basically, I’m going to bring it back to education really quickly, Michael. Like AI as you’re describing it, Irhum, is this concept we have in education and learning, which is I plus one. So it’s like where you are just a little bit harder than what you can do, and that’s like your zone of proximal development, like where you best learn. So, it sounds like AI is in that space. It’s like what we can do plus a little bit more is what keeps pushing us forward, basically, on everything that’s written on the Internet with simple formulas.

Irhum Shafkat: Yeah, I guess what captured the imagination is, I think, language in particular, because ChatGPT came out sometime last December, and that, again, took everybody by surprise, essentially. But the thing is, image generation models like Dali Two and stable diffusion were out earlier that summer, and they’re built on basically the same technology, given a ginormous amount of data, produced more samples that look like something that came from the data distribution. I had this with friends, especially outside of computer science, where I show them these generated images, and they’re like, yeah, I thought computers could already do that. What’s special about them? And I’m like, oh, my God, it’s like generating a panda in a spacesuit on Mars.

Diane Tavenner: And they’re like, yeah.

Irhum Shafkat: I thought Photoshop already does that.

Michael Horn: So interesting.

Irhum Shafkat: Whereas with language, language feels鈥 would almost say people see a conversational interface and almost by de facto assign intelligent attributes to it. Now, this is not to say that it’s all smoke and mirrors. Like, these are remarkably practical technologies that I genuinely think are going to change a lot of what we do today, as we’ll explain. But at their core, I think there’s at least part of the fact that humans genuinely see language differently than other modalities, because, in part, it is unique to us – that we know of at least.

Michael Horn: It’s really interesting, though, because the implication of that, it seems, is that part of this isn’t just the power of what’s been built, but also our reaction to what’s been built. And I think then the corollary, something Diane and I have talked a lot about is, like, right now, you’re seeing very polar opposite reactions to AI. Either it’s the utopian thing that’s going to bring about this glorious future where resources are not scarce and everyone will be fine etc. Or it’s very dystopian, and you see a lot of the – I’m going to insert my own belief for a moment here – but a lot of the technology leaders that have developed this being like, it could be dystopian, it could take over the world. As I hear you describing it, it doesn’t quite sound like either of those is right. It’s like the next step. So, I’d love you to put this in a human context, then, of what does it mean about the roles, particularly as we think about the future of work that humans will play with AI, or how human AI maybe is itself or isn’t? How do you think about the intersection with humanity?

Irhum Shafkat: When I think about the future, one tool I borrow from a former colleague, Nick Foster, who was, I think, head of design at Google X. He would introduce this concept of thinking about the future not as a thing you’re approaching, but almost like a cone of many possible outcomes. There is the probable, which is like the current set of outcomes that seem like really probable, but the probable is not the possible. Like, the possible set of features is much larger. And right now, I think we run a real risk of kind of just not seeing the technology for what it is. It’s a tool that we could actively shape into a future we want. And instead of trying to imagine it through that lens, we’re almost like we’re kind of giving up and we’re like, yeah, it’s going to take over the world or something. It’s going to be bad. Oh, well, it’s almost like we’re sleepwalking towards an outcome to a degree. I see it genuinely as, a technology, a tool. And, yeah, it’s up to us to decide what integration of that into our society looks like, but it’s a tool.

Michael Horn: Do you think part of that is because some of the people behind the coding are also surprised by the outcomes that it produces? And, like, gee, I didn’t know it could do that. And so they’re sort of showing, to your point about this weird passivity that we all seem to be displaying, that maybe it’s because they, too seem surprised by some of its capabilities. And so that is surprising the laypeople like me and Diane, and not to mention the people who aren’t even playing with it yet.

Irhum Shafkat: So, I think it’s important what we’ve seen over the last ten years, but really, the last four, I would say, with scaling really taking off, is when models get larger, they have more capabilities. Like a model from three years ago. No, I’d say a little longer. Maybe four or five, if you go to the joke and ask it to explain it, it wouldn’t be able to do that. It would struggle. But if you ask ChatGPT now, like, 鈥淗ey, here’s a joke that my teenage son wrote, I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me? 鈥� It’s going to do a pretty decent job at it.So, one of the things that came with scale is like, capabilities emerge. But the thing that surprises researchers is, I think I saw this analogy on a paper by Sam Bauman, but it’s almost like buying a mystery box. I think you buy a larger box, there’s going to be some kind of new capabilities in there, but we don’t know what they’re going to be until we open up that box. So, I guess that’s where a lot of surprise, even from researchers, come from. That said, I will push back on that a little in that there has been really genuine and serious work done in the last two years where we’re really trying to figure out. We’re like throwing the whole internet at this thing. There’s actually a lot of things going on in there and that these capabilities are not actually as surprising as we think they are. Like joke explanation. At the start when it came out, we were like, 鈥淥h my God, this thing can explain jokes.鈥� But then when you dug into the data deep enough, you’re like, there are tons of websites on the Internet that exist for you to dumb down a joke and explain how it works. So, it didn’t appear out of completely nowhere. The fact that it works on new jokes that are hopefully original and it’s still capable of explaining them is still cool, but it didn’t come out of absolutely nowhere.

Diane Tavenner: Irhum, you just started giving us some time frames and timelines, and you’re sort of, in your mind calculating ten years, four years, two years. I just want to note that ten years ago, you were ten years old, but, okay, we’ll set that aside for a moment. But as you were using those timelines, one of the things that comes up a lot for people is that this feels like it’s going so fast. If you didn’t even understand what was happening in this world, and then suddenly chat GPT came on the scene. You probably didn’t look at it in December because you were busy. But then in the new year, suddenly the whole world’s talking about ChatGPT, and you log on, and then it just seems like every day something new is coming and faster. And I talk to people who just are like, 鈥淚 can’t keep up.鈥� It’s only been a couple of months, and it feels like it’s just spinning so fast and beyond our control. Is that true? How do you think about that timing, and how do you think about keeping up? How can we conceptualize that, especially as educators?

Irhum Shafkat: Well, for what it’s worth, even researchers have trouble keeping up these days with the sheer amount of papers coming out left, right and center. It’s hard. That said, and I’ll say it is genuinely surprising, the pace at which GPT, in particular, took off, because these models had existed, the model they’re building off of GBD Three that had existed since 2020. We’re talking around the pandemic start period. They just put a chat interface on top of it, and that really seemed to take off. I remember reading news articles and even OpenAI seemed, like, surprised that just putting on a chat interface on top of a technology that had lying around for three years caused it to really take off that way. And even I was surprised because, again, I was in Taipei in the spring, and Taiwan in the spring, and I remember being on the Taiwan high-speed rail, and I’m seeing someone else use ChatGPT on the train next to me. And I was like, wow, this thing is taking up a lot faster than I realized. But it’s important to understand that when I say again that ChatGPT 3 had been lying around for three years before they put a chat interface on top of it. And again, this should not underscore the fact that these models are going to get larger, probably more capable, but it should also ground you in two things. One, the specific burst of innovation we saw in this year in particular had been building up for a bit. Essentially, it’s almost like a pressure valve went off when they put a chat interface on top of it. The other thing, and this is the thing that I wish people would discuss more often, is that it’s not just that the models got larger and we trained them on more of the internet. It’s also that we start paying a lot of money to get a lot of humans to label a lot of this data so that you could fine tune what the behavior of these models are. You see, when GPT3 was trained in about 2020 or so, it’s what we call a base model. It does exactly one thing. You give it a piece of text, and it produces a completion similar to the text data it saw when it was being trained, which would be raw internet data. And it has a tendency to go off the rails because the Internet is full of people who say not very nice things to each other. What changed was the sheer amount of human data collection that went in during that time frame and that this large model was adjusted over to tame its behavior, teach its skills, such as what explaining a joke even is, and all those things. We could talk about that a little bit more. But the big connection being that the jump we saw in those three years is that of a technology that had already existed, that we really learned to adjust better. But we already burned through that innovation once. It’s unlikely we’re going to see another leap on the same scale of learning how to use supervised human fine tuning again, because that innovation has now already existed and is already baked into it.

Michael Horn: That’s fascinating. It’s something I hadn’t understood before either, which is to say that in essence, if I understand you right, obviously the code base continues to evolve for GPT4 and so forth. But in effect, I think what you’re saying is the user interface and how we interact with it is what actually changed, like the skin of how humans interact with the code base. I think it leads us to where we love to talk on this podcast, which is the uses in education and how it’s going to impact that. And obviously, I’ll give you the hall pass if you will. You’re not an educator. We’re not asking you to opine in some way that puts you in a position you’re not. But you are a student right now at a cutting-edge university, constantly thinking about pedagogy. And so, I’m curious, from the student perspective, what excites you at the moment about AI in education?

Irhum Shafkat: I think shrinking the learning feedback loop is the way I would put it. I’m a systems thinker and I use the lens of feedback loop a lot. And whenever you shrink a feedback loop from, say, learning something, like maybe getting a feedback. What I say by feedback loop in education is like, you write a paper, your professor takes maybe two weeks to get it back to you, and you get almost like a signal, like, 鈥淗ey, you got these things right. You don’t get these things quite right, though.鈥� What happens when you shrink that from two weeks to a couple of minutes or maybe a couple of seconds? It’s not just shrinking a number, it’s changing how you interact, how your learning experience evolves. And I think it’s nice to connect this back to my middle school years. I think the reason I ended up in math and programming in particular is because those two things have really short feedback loops. In programming in particular, if you write bad code, your compiler just screams that. It’s like, 鈥淗ey, you’re trying to add a number to a set of words, it’s not going to work.鈥� And you get like really short, tight feedback loops to keep trying your code over and over again until it succeeds. That’s not true with learning English. With learning English, you write a paper, you wait a week for your professor or teacher to get it back to you. You maybe pick up something and try again next time. And I would say at least part of the reason I ended up picking math and programming is, again, I didn’t have that many great resources in terms of teaching, teachers who could really help me out. So, I naturally gravitated towards things that I would be able to really quickly iterate on: math and programming. Whereas those things – English, the sciences even – I would argue broadly, are not on those same lines. But what then changes with AI, is like, you now have a chatbot, that it doesn’t have to be a chatbot. It could be far more than that, really. You just have a computational tool that can actively critique your writing as you’re writing it out. You’re like, 鈥淗ey, what are some ways I could have done this better?鈥� They’re like, 鈥淵eah, you’re using these passive wordy phrases. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing that.鈥� And you’re like, 鈥淲hy shouldn’t I be doing that? Because it makes it harder for other people to read.鈥� And instead of waiting a week for that to happen, you get fed that feedback in real time, and you have another iteration ready, and you then ask it again, 鈥淗ey, how could I do it even better?鈥� That loop shrinks significantly.

Diane Tavenner: That’s fascinating. And I think it’s also what we, Michael and I, have been working on personalized learning, or whatever you want to call it, for a decade plus at this point. And that is certainly one of the promises of personalized learning, is that tight feedback loop. So you’re staying in the learning, and it isn’t delayed. It’s contextualized, and it’s in the moment and immediate. It’s more tutor if you will. That’s why many people have put so much energy into that. And you have now said a couple of things. One ChatGPT, putting this skin on their product, which is essentially a chat bot. Like, you talk with this bot or this window. And then also this potential of what you just described, like the feedback coming a chatbot, if you will. And in my experience, most people, when they think about the uses of AI, are thinking along these lines. Like, that is what they think is there’s going to be someone, whether it’s a little avatar or a box or something, that’s like sort of chatting with me, and that’s kind of how AI is going to play out. I know that you sort of get a little exasperated when that’s all people can imagine. What else might be possible help us expand our thinking a little bit beyond just this sort of chatting?

Irhum Shafkat: I think right now we’re at the phase when the iPhone would have been sometime in 2007. I’m not really qualified to comment on that because I would have been what?

Michael Horn: Don’t worry about it.

Irhum Shafkat: But at least from my understanding of that time period, apps were a new thing. People didn’t really know how to fully utilize them. And the first set of apps were kind of like window gag. And I was like, people were building those? Like, a flashlight app where instead of turning on your phone’s flashlight, it just showed a flashlight on the screen.

Michael Horn: I downloaded one of those. So, it’s true.

Irhum Shafkat: So, I feel like we’re in that era for these language processing technologies right now, in that we have a brand new tool. We’re not entirely sure what using that looks like. And returning back to the quote Diane quoted with the enterprise, I feel like not nearly as many people are asking, 鈥淗ow does this help us solve our problems better?鈥� And a lot more people are asking, like, 鈥淗ow do I put this into my product so my board of directors is happy?鈥�

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. So, the idea being like, what legitimate problems do I have, and can I use this to solve them? And that’s where a useful app – not a flashlight – is going to come from.

Irhum Shafkat: With chatbots in particular. Chatbots became the first big use case. So, everyone’s like, well, this seems to work. Let’s make my own chat bot, but, like, slightly different. And I think it’s just so unimaginative. But the other thing with chatbots is that they have really bad what we call affordances in design. And affordance is something that almost cues you into how to use something. Like, when you see a handle on a door, you’re like, 鈥淥h, this is the thing I grab.鈥� Then, let me ask you, if you had to choose between a big cancel button that cancels your flight that you don’t want to go on, versus dealing with a chatbot to cancel your flight, which one would you pick?

Diane Tavenner: Yes. And you have showed me this and demonstrated this to me. A single button like that is so much more useful. If you know the thing that I’m going to do versus making me talk to it and explain it where something’s inevitably going to go wrong. 

Irhum Shafkat: These technologies are so nascent right now, and what people really need to appreciate is that you need to design them in ways where you almost expect they’re going to produce some unrelated, unpleasant output somewhere along the process. So, it’s almost like a liability if you’re giving a user an open box to type anything they possibly want. And it’s not just a liability; it also just makes the user, again, it doesn’t give the user any affordances. They see a blank box. Like, again, if you need an English tutor bot, you could just as easily have a couple of buttons that could summarize, remove jargon, sorry, highlight jargon, or introduce a couple of buttons that cover a couple of use cases that a standard ninth through twelfth grader may want to use so that they can refine their writing better. Don’t give them an open-ended box where they don’t even know what to ask for help in.

Diane Tavenner: And would that still be using AI, those buttons?

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, behind the scenes? At the end of the day, any implementation of these things that you’ve looked at is a role play engine. If you have interacted with one of these airline processing, like if they use a language, they’re using large language models. Behind the scenes, there’s only two bits that anyone else modifies. Once you have the model, which is you have a dialogue preamble, which is almost like a script someone else writes as like you are now about to role play a dialogue, you are about to assist a user with cancel with their airline queries. And then the actual dialogue that happens, all people do when they’re creating a new implementation of them is that they switch out the preamble with something else. I’m just saying you can write a preamble for each of those buttons. Essentially, if the button is like, hey, you highlight jargon, then you’re like, okay, you are about to role play a bot that takes in some English text and returns the exact spans of text that are abnormally jargony for the writing of a nine to twelve grader. You as the developer should be writing that script because you are the one who knows what this person needs to be using. You shouldn’t leave it up to the user to be writing their own scripts, essentially. For the most part, unless it’s like a very specific use case where you wouldn’t want the user to be writing that, but don’t treat it as the default one, which we for some reason do.

Michael Horn: So, it’s super interesting, the implications on education. And I have a couple of takeaways here and I want to test them by you and then get your reaction. So, the first one is on the flashlight app analogy. I think the implication is that if the iPhone, or in this case OpenAI, is ultimately going to very easily incorporate the thing that you’ve thought of in their own roadmap, your sort of idea is not going to last very long on its own, right? The reason there were these apps is like there was not a button to do your own flashlight or change colors or things like that. And so, they built these apps and then very quickly iPhone realizes, hey, we can just add a quick little button. But I think the second implication is as you start to think about the user experience and come up with these prompts that a user might want to go through so that they’re not guessing what they’re putting into that open ended box, that the opportunity for educators might be to start to build around these different use cases, that if I’m understanding you correctly, perhaps OpenAI is not going to develop all these different use cases and so forth. But instead, the opportunity might be for educators to build on top of their code to develop these sorts of things that help get the problems solved that they and their students are actually trying to solve. But I’m curious where that line ends, and if you see it differently. 

Irhum Shafkat: It鈥檚 not a clear hard line. What’s on open AI’s roadmap? I don’t know, but I guess it ties back into what your company is. If your company is trying to add value to people’s lives, that really means sitting down is like, 鈥淥h, am I just going to write a wrapper that takes in a PDF and allows you to just chat with it?鈥� I mean, those all kind of went the way of the dinosaurs last week when OpenAI just integrated like, hey, you can drop a PDF into our thing. But if you really try to aim for deep integration, OpenAI has. I’m making claims here, I don’t know for sure, but I would imagine they don’t have a deep understanding of the K-12 education system, nor would they be necessarily interested in that, because that doesn’t seem to be what their goal right now is, which is to make bigger and better version of these models that are more generally capable. What they’re counting on is that other people take these models and integrate them throughout the rest of the economy. And that’s where other people come in, and that’s where K-12 educators come in, because they are the ones who have a better understanding of what these buttons need to be, what they want their students to be learning at the end of the.

Michael Horn: Love it.

Diane Tavenner: What’s coming to me, Michael, is, on our last episode, we talked with Todd Rose, who wrote the End of Average. That is, in my mind, the foundation of a lot of personalized learning. And one of, I think, the misconceptions people have, or the swings. Education loves to swing the pendulum as we go from totally teacher directed, controlling every second of every bit of learning, and we swing all the way over to like, basically go teach yourself. We’re just going to throw you out in the wild and at some level just throwing people into a chat bot of a large language model is throwing them into the wild. And so, what I hear you saying, Irhum, is we need the in-between. There’s a real role for educators to narrow. It’s not like the whole world personalization is. There’s 12345 ways of doing something and we can narrow down to that and create a much more personalized experience that is curated by expert educators. And we should be looking for that. Happy in between.

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, again, it’s been so fascinating seeing these chatbots interact with the education system and kind of wreak havoc. Honestly, to a degree where professors taking stances on everything from like we should go back to making everyone write things by hand, by the way, please don’t do that. They are an opportunity. Here’s the thing: the factory model of the education system we have where people just go through it, do these problems, hopefully learn something by doing said problems. We don’t need to know they’re learning the thing. We just need to know if they’re doing the thing. They have like a high school diploma. That was going to come to an end because that’s already been out. Like that’s already ill preparing people for the jobs of today. For a while now, these models, they’re not bringing about something that wasn’t going to happen. They’ve just sped it up, essentially, because students already again ask why a student would actually go out of their way to get an essay that I created by these things if they genuinely believed in their own education that hey, if I do this thing I’ll learn something new and that will be helpful in the future. They probably wouldn’t. So why do they feel disillusioned? Because they know deep inside that what they’re learning in their high school is not going to actually prepare them for the world. And you need to actually deal with that disillusionment. And on the counter, I think these models provide an excellent way to actually start tackling that disillusionment by educators seeing themselves almost as designers, as what people need to be learning. I use the example of the door handle because it seems like a simple object. It really isn’t. If you’ve ever been in a hotel with one of those weird, poorly designed shower knobs, you know how much bad design can mess up your day. And when good design works it’s almost invisible. Like you don’t even notice a shower knob when it actually works. And I think that’s what good educational software using these will almost look like the students won’t even realize how seamless it feels, like they press a button that tells them, hey, this is the jargon you’re using. Here’s why it’s bad for you. Here’s an explanation of how you could do it better this time. It should feel seamless and they should feel less disillusioned because they feel like, 鈥淥h my God, I’m actually learning something.鈥�

Michael Horn: Here, so I want to stay just as we wrap up here. And one last question before we go to our sort of bonus round, if you will, of stuff outside of education, which is you just painted a good picture, I think, of how the education system has reacted in very nervous, let’s call it ways to this advent of it, because it has immediately sort of thrown into question so many of these tired practices that it holds on to. And I guess the corollary question I’m curious about, I’ve heard a lot of students, let me frame this a little bit more. I’ve heard a lot of students say, Professor X, you’re thinking a lot about what is the assignment and how am I going to catch you from cheating, but you’re spending a lot less time thinking about what do. I need to learn to be prepared for this world in which AI is going to be underpinning basically everything I could possibly go do in a career? And so, I guess the question I’m curious, from your perspective is, as you look at these traditional factory model education systems, what’s something that they should start teaching students that they don’t perhaps today? And what’s something maybe that they should lose that they continue to hold on to?

Irhum Shafkat: I mean, honestly, I don’t want to sound like a shill for Minerva, but I am going to. I think freshman year, I had never written a full-length essay prior to freshman year in English, and I was kind of really lost, honestly. But one thing that really stood out is, like, my professor spent so much time just breaking down the act of writing into what does it mean like to have a thesis? What does it mean for a thesis to be arguable and substantive instead of something everybody universally agrees with? Because if everybody agrees with what you’re writing, you don’t need to write it. Really breaking down the act of writing into these atomic skills that I keep finding myself using even at the tail end of college now, in senior year. I think that is the kind of thing we’re going to need to do, is like actually asking ourselves like, this is an instrument, a tool we’ve built, that we administer to our students in the hopes that they learn something. Does this tool actually do the thing it advertises? It does but a lot of the time it just doesn’t. And we just kind of need to be honest about that because, again, it’s a lot like, again, the ChatGPT moment in some sense. But also for education, it’s been building up like a pressure valve, and that pressure valve kind of just went off in the last year. Wow.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we could talk for a long time, but that might be the place to land it today. But before we let you go, we always like to, at the end, just mind for what we’re reading, watching, listening to outside of our day to day work.

Michael Horn: Do you have any time for that as a student? 

Irhum Shafkat: Can I talk about a video game?

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s great.

Irhum Shafkat: I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario Wonder, which is like the new Mario Brothers game from Nintendo. It is fun. It is really the best way to describe it. A lot of media really enjoys being dark and gritty and mature or whatever. Nintendo is like, we’re going to make a game that’s unashamedly fun and bright and colorful and just playful. And they’ve been doing that for the better part of, I don’t even know, like 30, 40 years now. And they’ve kind of just stuck to it as a core principle. And I kind of just admire their ability to really set a mission for themselves, which is make things that make people find joyful and fun and actually just stick to it for the better part of half century.

Michael Horn: Oh, I love that one. Diane, what about you?

Diane Tavenner: Well, we’re going to look kind of boring following that one. I’m going to go to the dark, gritty world. I just finished reading the book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter. I will just say seven of the eight chapters do an excellent job of diagnosing the problem, and it’s pretty terrifying. And I do think we should know it. Chapter Eight, where the solutions come in, was not compelling to me, and so it feels like there’s work for us to do.

Michael Horn: And I guess I will say I’m in a similarly dark place, maybe, Diane, because I read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. So go figure. Everyone can figure out where our headspace is. But I finished it before Disney. I had tried to read it a couple times before, and this time I made it through, which is setting me up now for reading Klossovitz, which is where I am now. Grinding through is the right verb, I think. But on that note, Irhum, thank you so much for joining us and making a fraught topic 鈥� but a topic with a lot of hyperventilation 鈥� really accessible and exciting and giving us a window into where this could be going. Really appreciate you being here with us on Class Disrupted. And for all of those listening, thank you so much for joining us. We’ll see you next time. 

Student representation on school boards is a growing national trend, and Washington state is a pioneer, with nearly half the 295 districts in the state 鈥� 鈥� including students on their boards. According to the, there are more than 500 student board members across 42 states representing more than 20 million students 鈥� a number projected to grow.

Often, these are non-voting members whose power comes from their ability to speak on the record and to influence peers to get involved in what鈥檚 happening at their schools. In rare cases, student representatives have a binding vote, such as in Maryland, where the state Supreme Court recently the constitutionality of having students under 18 serve as voting members.

Even in districts where students don鈥檛 have an official seat on their district board or on board advisory committees, they鈥檙e still showing up at meetings to make public comments and take part in important conversations.

This is a tremendous opportunity for school board members and district leaders to truly hear the perspectives of multifaceted, diverse students and to consider their experiences when making decisions that directly affect them.

During the past five years, I worked closely with school board directors across Washington state, and I observed many successful examples of districts where student representatives had a meaningful impact on policy. Here are some strategies and initiatives that all districts can employ.

First, there may be a tendency to appoint students who already hold leadership roles because they are known entities. It鈥檚 important to give the opportunity to all students announcing via social media, school apps, posters, QR codes and word of mouth that applications are open. A key part of this strategy is actively recruiting students with varied experiences and backgrounds and others who are not usually involved in school governance. Students themselves say this method is the most inclusive and leads to the most diversity of voices 鈥� something they greatly value.

Second, consider advisory voting 鈥� a simple process that many districts have been implementing recently that enables student representatives to voice the concerns, needs and viewpoints of the student body and submit a non-binding vote. After school board members have discussed an agenda item, the chair will ask the student representatives to offer an advisory vote 鈥� a chance to share their perspective with the rest of the board, for the record. Members can then consider that information when casting their votes. More and more boards are adopting this process, and the Washington State School Directors鈥� Association recently shared for districts earlier this year.

Third, engage students in real-world experiences. One Washington district assigned each student representative to analyze one section of a long-term strategic plan, break it down and clarify its implications for young people. They helped simplify the content and collected feedback from peers, which provided valuable insights for the board. In some districts, student representatives play a key role on superintendents鈥� advisory councils, which are designed to give district leaders feedback directly from students. Student board representatives will often lead these councils, helping to gather a wide array of perspectives and ideas and then bringing that information back to the board, where they can be considered in upcoming decisions.

Fourth, to sustain advances in student representation, schools and districts need to explicitly commit to providing opportunities for student voice. Whatever this looks like 鈥� board representation, surveys, focus groups, one-on-one conversations 鈥� districts should put it in writing so students know what to expect and can hold leaders accountable. One challenge in involving students is ensuring they feel their feedback has been taken seriously. When the issue of tokenization arises, it鈥檚 often because students weren鈥檛 acknowledged or no one responded to them, which makes them feel that they鈥檙e not seen, heard or valued. Usually, this is inadvertent. Making sure feedback and accountability measures are in place can head off this potential challenge.

Lastly, it鈥檚 not realistic to expect that two or three students on a school board can fully represent the perspective of every one of their peers across the district. But there are many ways to get more students involved. Districts can invite them onto advisory committees and topic-specific working groups. They can conduct polls and surveys and demonstrate how they used the results. They can hold leadership training workshops to prepare the next generation of student representatives.

Incorporating student voice into decision-making builds civic engagement and prepares students for the world that awaits them beyond high school. For student representatives on school boards, learning about governance, legislative processes and budgeting is priceless. But what such a program really does is ensure the health and vitality of the local school system and, by extension, the nation’s democracy.

As students head back to school this fall, how are they really doing in the aftermath of COVID-19? 

My organization, YouthTruth, a nonprofit that elevates student voices to help schools improve, set out to answer this question by consulting the experts: students themselves. We analyzed quantitative and qualitative feedback from over 500,000 middle and high school students gathered before, during and after the pandemic. From that data, we learned that student perceptions of learning and belonging in the 2022-23 school year returned to pre-pandemic levels 鈥� though troubling differences across student demographic groups remain, with LGBTQ+ students and students of color rating their sense of belonging less positively than their peers. Concerningly, however, students鈥� experiences with mental health and support from adults in school that worsened during COVID-19 have not recovered.

The most positive of the findings: Young people鈥檚 perceptions of learning and belonging followed similar patterns over the course of the pandemic, and both have bounced back to pre-COVID levels, according to the students.

Nonetheless, there remains much room for improvement. Only 42% of students say they feel like a real part of their school鈥檚 community. This matters both because of its intrinsic value 鈥� young people deserve to feel like they belong 鈥� and because belonging is and can catalyze students鈥� motivation to learn. 

Nearly half of all students surveyed in the 2022-23 school year reported that depression, stress or anxiety makes it hard for them to do their best in school. This proportion had increased steadily over the course of the pandemic, from 39% in spring 2020 to 48% in 2022-23. Meanwhile, the proportion of students saying there is an adult at school they can talk to when feeling upset, stressed or having problems decreased to just 41% in the 2022-23 school year from 46% pre-COVID.

This support gap, created by the simultaneous rise in students鈥� mental health as an obstacle to learning and decline in support from adults at school, emerged in fall 2020. It has since widened, despite significant attention to COVID鈥檚 impact on . Students in our surveys say there are not enough counselors and ask that their schools increase their efforts to reach out to students, to make the help they need 鈥渕ore accessible and clear鈥� rather than just 鈥減ushing it under the surface.鈥� The bottom line is that young people鈥檚 challenges with mental health and insufficient support are not getting better 鈥� not yet, anyway. And these challenges directly impact students鈥� ability to learn.

Amid this alarming mental health crisis and plummeting NAEP scores, the national narrative on is limited. The obsession with test scores, the pressure to catch up and one-dimensional accountability systems crowd out other integral sources of feedback about how students are doing. The world is taking shape around this younger generation, and decisions are being made about their future. Yet, far too often, their voices are ignored. 

Students are telling the country in no uncertain terms that education doesn鈥檛 happen in a vacuum. Social, emotional and academic learning are intrinsically linked, and it can progress only so far when these pieces are separated. This has always been true but is especially so now.
Students are imploring adults in and around schools not to go back to business as usual. In some of their own words: 鈥淧ut us before test scores.鈥� 鈥淲ork alongside us.鈥� 鈥淎ctually listen to us.鈥� As educators, administrators and policymakers move forward in this next chapter, they should remember that students are whole people who need whole solutions to succeed in school and in life. Part of the solution must be truly listening to them.

Across the country, young people are by gun violence, which is now the leading killer of kids and teens in the U.S. Fear and anxiety are driving many to that they would be safer armed with a gun, and as a result, many than did two decades ago. But these young people also know that this arms race is not making their communities safer 鈥� it鈥檚 contributing to more deaths and injuries. 

Within that contradiction lies hope for a safer future, and teens can lead the way, because the decision to pick up a gun is not inevitable. The narrative that only a gun will make a young person safer and can be changed.

This summer, partnered with and to engage some 350 teens, ages 14 to 18, in communities heavily impacted by gun violence. We shared on gun risks with the students and challenged them to create social media campaigns that could help spread the word to their peers that having a gun is not the path to safety.

Initially, many of the teens expressed skepticism. They pushed back on the idea of building campaigns to take on gun violence because they didn鈥檛 believe their voices mattered, or that gun violence could be stopped. But as they learned more about the myths that prompt young people to carry firearms, and as we showed them how teen voices had made a difference on other public health and social justice issues, their tone shifted.

Over our six-week program with Chicago Public Schools, students heard from experts on gun violence, met with experts from major ad agencies and learned about how teens can shift culture. They practiced having conversations about the risks of using guns with their peers and brainstormed effective ways into those important dialogues. Finally, the teens created their own to discourage gun use and built strategies for large-scale campaigns that could spread the fact-based message that having a firearm makes gun violence more likely, not less.

We challenged program participants to create social media campaigns for a simple reason: Teens are best reached through their phones and peers. It鈥檚 a strategy we鈥檝e used at Project Unloaded since our launch in 2021. In that short time, our signature campaign to spread the message that young people are SNUG 鈥� 鈥� has reached more than 3 million teens on platforms like and Snapchat. This summer alone, more than 120,000 young people clicked through social media content to view our campaign website, where we share more information about the risks of using guns. When teens know the facts, many from wanting a gun.

Similarly, by the end of their six weeks with us, many of the Chicago students came to see how their voices and ideas could make a difference. The program ended with a pitch contest in front of a panel of judges and hundreds of their peers. The winning team鈥檚 had a powerful, simple slogan: Guns don鈥檛 give you power. 

Teens want power. And when it comes to social change, they have a lot of it. Consider that Claudette Colvin was only 15 when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus 鈥� nine months before Rosa Parks. Her decision snowballed into a movement. Years later, as teens learned about how tobacco companies鈥� marketing to young people was driving lung cancer rates, they stopped smoking and shifted the culture of cigarettes from cool to uncool in a generation. Two decades ago, nearly a quarter of teens smoked cigarettes. Today, of teens smoke. 

History is full of examples like these, where teens provide the spark for major societal shifts. Today, their savvy use of social media can accelerate the flame that makes narrative and culture change happen. And narrative change campaigns can alter the world for the better.

Teens know that guns are readily available, and that鈥檚 not changing anytime soon. But young people are also clear-eyed about their vision for the future. In a second summer program with After School Matters, we asked young people to create social content and art projects to share how guns impact their communities. In one art project, a student wrote, 鈥淕uns create a feeling of violence and fear. Without them, our communities could be 鈥榗ommunities鈥� again.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Teens know how to build safer communities. It’s up to adults to listen to them and amplify their voices, because guns don鈥檛 give you power. Teens have all the power they need to shift the narrative and finally slow the nation’s gun violence epidemic.

Research has confirmed that the design of buildings can influence levels of , , and, in the case of schools, .

But it’s not just researchers and architects who care about the way schools look and feel. Students do as well. 

Recently, I served in the Nevada Youth Legislature, which is composed of 21 student representatives appointed by the Nevada state Senate. As part of my duties, I organized a town hall with high school students. Many of us in the room, including myself, attend schools with significant student populations that qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch 鈥� an indicator of poverty.

Before the meeting began, I had anticipated that students would talk about their teachers, or the district鈥檚 new grading policy, or the rising cost of college. But I was wrong. The students spent most of the time talking and complaining about their school facilities. Among the top concerns were the presence of metal detectors, toilets and bathroom stalls that were permanently out of service, broken bathroom facilities that forced students to use porta-potties and the lack of a central gathering place or student center. 

It was evident from this town hall that students did not feel safe or supported 鈥� and that their grievances were focused largely on their schools’ physical features.

Given that students may spend up to half of their waking hours (or as much as 35 to 40 hours a week) at school 鈥� even more if they play sports or are involved in clubs 鈥� schools should be designed in ways that positively affect mental health, which can be achieved by more windows and natural light, more common areas, quiet zones and/or meditation rooms, such as fibers, stones and wood, more greenery, painted landscapes on walls, warm colors, natural wood and outdoor areas such as courtyards. 

In his book , Charles Montgomery wrote, 鈥淚t is impossible to separate the life and design of a city from the attempt to understand happiness, to experience it and to build it for society.鈥� I believe the idea of a 鈥渉appy city鈥� can be applied to schools and that it is 鈥渋mpossible to separate the life and design鈥� of a school from its students’ experiences of happiness and mental wellness. 

Others think so too. The created a , which measures the impact of architecture and design on health and wellness. The John Lewis Elementary School in Washington, D.C., was renovated using those guidelines, including a large, welcoming entryway, glass structures that maximize natural light, open spaces and comfortable common areas. Principal Nikeysha Jackson told Ed Week in a video that the new design makes the school feel 鈥�.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Administrators and teachers seem to think more about the school鈥檚 physical design when students are young. At my elementary school, my teacher created a corner in her classroom where students could hang out 鈥� reading, socializing or engaging in creative play. Our school, located in the urban center where most students were eligible for free lunch, had an outdoor garden and a multipurpose room where kids could meet. But by the time I got to middle school, most of those serotonin-producing design features had disappeared: We had no school garden or common area, just a courtyard made of concrete. Now, my overcrowded urban high school lacks greenery, a school garden or a common gathering space. 

Districts do not have to construct new schools to make wellness part of their buildings. Sandy Spring Friends School, a high school, was also renovated using components of the WELL Building Standard, including acoustic treatments to reduce reverberations, climate and light controls in each room, floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize the natural light, atria, natural colors and movable furniture that allows for collaboration. As the school’s director, Dr. Rodney Glasgow, in another video, 鈥淸W]e鈥檝e got to think about social emotional wellness as one of the rubrics we use to design campuses.”

“You don鈥檛 have to build a new building to make wellness part of the building you鈥檙e in. It just gives us permission to really put wellness at the center of everything we do,鈥� he told . 

To support student mental wellness, schools should consider sponsoring student-led school beautification projects such as murals, meditation areas and gardens. Schools could remove concrete areas and/or beautify those spaces with planters, greenery and water features. They should also create student centers and/or multiple common areas, and install more windows and design features to bring in the natural light, so they are inviting and soothing.

By paying greater attention to the design of the buildings in which students spend their long days, schools could have a tremendous positive influence on mental health.

A new found two in five Gen Z students agreed with the statement: 鈥淭he pandemic has made me less interested in pursuing higher education.鈥�

Middle school students, generally 11 to 13 years old, not only contribute to the trend but also lead the view that work experience is more valuable. 

That attitude has translated into an 8% decline in college enrollment from 2019 to 2022, showing how attending college is no longer a given for Gen Z.

鈥淪eeing the way many Millennials are saddled with insurmountable debt from the higher ed system, and knowing from their online lives that other paths are possible, these high school and even middle school students are reconsidering if they even need college to be successful,鈥� wrote in the report.

Gen Z advocates Brian Femminella, co-founder and chief executive officer of , Bella Santos, community leadership board president of , and Ian Gates, policy and program quality fellow of talked about key takeaways from the report:

1. The vast majority of Gen Z middle school students say they don鈥檛 see a future pursuing college.

YPulse found 80% of Gen Z middle school students and 85% of high school students plan to go to college compared to 100% pre-pandemic.

Gates, 22, said pandemic-era online learning showed younger Gen Z students how monotonous taking classes can be 鈥� whether they鈥檙e in middle school, high school, community college or a four-year institution.

鈥淸Gen Z] is thinking about different options now,鈥� Gates told 社区黑料. 鈥淎 lot of us are thinking about non-college careers鈥ike being a Youtuber, influencer and other alternate paths like that.鈥�

Femminella, 23, said his own college education didn鈥檛 necessarily help him start his mental health company.

鈥淲hen I see how a lot of younger kids would rather do something else, I applaud that,鈥� Femminella told 社区黑料. 鈥淲e need more folks that want to do different things and shouldn’t fall into the stigma of college being a must.鈥�

2. Gen Z students are more likely to find Google and YouTube more helpful than a teacher.

YPulse found Gen Z students were more likely to choose Google and YouTube over a teacher when asked: 鈥淚f you wanted to learn something new, what resources would you use?鈥�

Santos, 20, wasn鈥檛 shocked.

鈥淭here is often not a ton of oversight when it comes to how choosy schools are with who gets to teach 鈥� especially in public schools,鈥� Santos told 社区黑料. 鈥淭eachers and the system in which they teach aren’t always suited for success to begin with.鈥�

Gates said disparaging parent attitudes towards teachers and school curriculum also had an effect on how Gen Z grows up to question the value of a college education.

鈥淲ith the parental rights movement, certainly when you’re telling your kid 鈥榟ey your teachers are trying to indoctrinate you and make you communist and make you gay鈥� it obviously gets to them,鈥� Gates said.

Gates added how states such as Florida, which have banned and , contribute to Gen Z鈥檚 disinterest in pursuing higher education by not exposing them to diverse courses. 

3. Gen Z college students struggle to stay interested in their classes and believe they don鈥檛 teach practical skills.

YPulse found 55% of current Gen Z undergraduate students and 38% of Gen Z graduate students found their classes not relevant to their lives 鈥� in part because college doesn鈥檛 teach practical skills such as mental health skills, cooking and personal finance.

鈥淟earning should be an enriching experience no matter what your interests are,鈥� Santos said. 鈥淵et school systems are often set up to just drill information into people’s brains.鈥�

Femminella said mental health concerns should be the foundation on which professors shape their curriculum. 

鈥淭here are some moments when students in college need to have a mental health day because they鈥檙e overworked,鈥� Femminella said. 鈥淭here’s not a lot of outlets and resources until it’s too late鈥nd you鈥檙e really in the midst of a mental health crisis when there’s ways to avoid that.鈥�

Femminella also said colleges should require personal finance and cooking courses.

鈥淎 lot of colleges forget that when Gen Z students close their computer, they鈥檙e a human and have to go do other human things like pay bills, cook and clean,鈥� Femminella said. 鈥淚 think it’s something that should just be incorporated into the entire university structure.鈥�

4. Gen Z students wish they learned about alternative career paths growing up.

YPulse found that 74% of Gen Z students wish they learned more about alternative career paths compared to a traditional college education.

Santos said the social stigma of not attending college is declining among Gen Z students.

鈥淚 don’t think it’s for everyone, I don’t think it’s necessary, so it makes sense that other people in my generation see that,鈥� Santos said.

Gates added how this is especially true for students who come from immigrant families and used to feel 鈥渢he pressure that college is just what鈥檚 next.鈥�

鈥淕en Z knows people are graduating college with all these loans,鈥� Gates said. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e taking that into account, especially those from lower income families, and asking themselves if college is really worth it.鈥�

5. Gen Z students believe work experience is more important than a college education.

YPulse found that 57% of Gen Z middle school students and 49% of Gen Z high school students believe work experience is more important than a college education.

Femminella said work experience has been the most helpful tool to his success.

鈥淲hen you’re in your field and you get to practice, you also get to fail,鈥� Femminella said. 鈥淎nd by failing you learn the most, and that’s been invaluable to starting my company.”

But education today is in a time of disruption and transition. In many respects, it鈥檚 not meeting the needs of young people as they enter a changing workforce. 

Maybe it鈥檚 time to ask high school students what they need most. 

The 鈥淨uestion the Quo鈥� nationally representative survey of high school students ages 14 to 18 does just that. It documents Gen Z high schoolers鈥� views and shifting priorities on education and work. It was conducted by the nonprofit ECMC Group in partnership with VICE Media, the seventh survey report since 2020.

It turns out that Gen Z high school students have new and sensible ideas about the relationship between their K-12 education, going to college and starting a career. They want K-12 to provide them with practical knowledge and skills that lead to more education, training and career options after graduation than they now have. Policymakers and educators can and should take these views into serious consideration as they map out new programs and reforms.

Here are four main questions Gen Z high schoolers have on their minds as they think about their futures.

Do we need a college degree?

Gen Z is skeptical about the value of a traditional four-year college degree. They question whether it delivers sufficient return on investment, having heard stories about student loans and debt. Around half (51%) are thinking about pursuing a college degree, down more than 10 percentage points since before the pandemic and 20 points since shortly after COVID began. Other of young people and adults find similar skepticism about the value of a four-year degree.

On the other hand, 65% of Gen Z high schoolers who responded to 鈥淨uestion the Quo鈥� believe education after high school is necessary. But they want options such as online courses, boot camps and apprenticeships.

What skills should K-12 schools teach us?

The practical mindset concerning college also applies to what young people want from high school. Gen Z places a priority on learning life skills along with academics 鈥� things like financial literacy, communication, problem-solving and understanding their own and others鈥� emotions, which are overlooked in the traditional K-12 curriculum. They value good grades and practical, real-world skills. They also have an entrepreneurial spirit, with a third wanting to start their own business.

Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) believe it is important to develop these practical skills before they graduate from high school, so they are better prepared to decide on career paths. These views are consistent with other of the American public and young people on these issues. 

How can work and life coexist?

Gen Z high schoolers are not only interested in making money; they also want time for their personal lives. They see work-life balance as an important priority. In fact, two of the top factors that impact what they will decide to do after high school 鈥� long-term earning potential and physical and mental health 鈥� have remained consistent throughout ECMC鈥檚 seven surveys. In other words, young people yearn for meaningful work that leaves room for personal development and leisure. Their approach to careers echoes a holistic perspective on the need for a healthy balance between work and personal life, which was a key theme of the December 2021 report from the on youth mental health.

How do I achieve my dreams?

Gen Z high schoolers want to learn on the job and over their lifetime. More than two-thirds say their ideal post-high school learning should be on the job through internships or apprenticeships (65%) or through hands-on learning in a lab or classroom (67%). Only a third say their ideal learning would be only through coursework. More than half (53%) want more formalized learning throughout their life. And 8 in 10 believe government and employers should subsidize, pay full tuition or provide direct training for students. 

Gen Z high schoolers do not reject formal academic learning. Rather, they want a system that is more flexible and personalized in its approach to learning and work than what they have now. They are asking K-12 schools, colleges, employers and other stakeholders to think differently about how best to prepare them for jobs and careers. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to 社区黑料.

As the organizer of the conference, I have had the opportunity to interview over 30 high school and college students from a range of backgrounds, who were nominated by teachers who are slated to speak at the conference or have shared their AI experiences through articles and interviews. Their innovative use of AI tools has underscored to me that if the broader community of educators, policymakers and industry professionals are to harness AI effectively in education, this collective cannot afford to overlook student voices in its discussions. This raises a pertinent question: How can students and educators cultivate a collaborative approach to this rapidly evolving field?

Most students want to learn, but many have anxieties that their current skills and knowledge could rapidly become irrelevant without integrating AI. In my interviews, one accounting student who interned at a tax consulting company said she feared that AI could automate her data processing tasks, while a computer science student expressed worries that tools like ChatGPT could replace his entire job of coding user interfaces for websites. A marketing student noted that the advanced copywriting and strategic thinking abilities of these AI tools are already making the skills she learned in classrooms obsolete.

Such fears are most evident among college students who will soon enter the job market and hope their professors swiftly revisit their teaching materials and reconsider the goals of their classes in light of the evolving future of work. They need to discern which aspects of the curriculum could be enhanced by AI and which may no longer be relevant. Undertaking such a revision requires professors to have a thorough understanding of what AI can and cannot do. Ideally, they will be supported by their academic departments and college-based teaching and learning centers.

Another concern voiced by students pertains to equitable access to and training in these tools. The paid version of ChatGPT significantly outperforms the free version, leading to an unfair advantage for students who can afford it. Furthermore, students who have the privilege of free time to experiment daily with AI tools develop effective prompting techniques that can produce much better results than those of their less well-off peers who must spend their time outside of class working part-time jobs.

Bolstered by such insights, these students have been receptive to educators who are ready to navigate the changes brought about by artificial intelligence. Seeing teachers revise their curricula and foster dialogues about AI’s role in the classroom has encouraged students to reciprocate, sharing their personal experiences with AI tools. Such discussions are proving invaluable in helping educators refine their curricula and evolve their code of ethics around issues like plagiarism while building trust with their students.

It is incumbent on educators to clarify the areas of curriculum that could be enhanced by AI, those that should remain human-centered and those that might benefit from a hybrid approach. For example, English teachers could require students to collaborate with AI for initial brainstorming and drafting of essays, but not for editing and revision. By clearly communicating expectations and providing guidance on artificial intelligence, educators can prevent students from inappropriately using AI 鈥� such as generating solutions to every assignment without thinking critically about them 鈥� and assure them of the ongoing relevance of their education.

It is equally crucial for school leaders and administrators to think beyond the classroom and formulate clear guidelines for students and teachers at the institutional level. To ensure that these policies are relevant and practical, schools should consider establishing student advisory committees. These could provide valuable insights into students’ experiences with AI, particularly for those working in classrooms where AI-enhanced teaching is being tested. Integrating student voices into discussions about educational policy and curriculum design will undoubtedly speed up the adoption of AI in education while ensuring that appropriate and effective guardrails are in place.

Further, educational institutions should collaborate with leading large language model service providers, such as OpenAI, to guarantee equitable access to and training in advanced programs such as the paid version of ChatGPT. This would not only help close the growing inequality gap in education due to access to premium tools, but equipping educators with a sufficient understanding of AI can alleviate apprehensions that often stem from unfamiliarity with technology. To foster dialogues and effective experiments around AI in education, institutions must empower both students and teachers with the leading tools and a deep understanding of how to get the most out of them.

While many more challenges posed by AI in education remain unresolved, every conversation between students and educators can help accelerate these important, ongoing experiments. This collective quest for insight is precisely why I and the other student volunteers decided to host the AI x Education conference. By providing a platform for rich discussion and collaboration, we aim to contribute toward a future where AI and education coalesce seamlessly, to the benefit of all students. I invite educators interested in attending to register . 

As part of their work, researchers determined school鈥檚 effectiveness based upon its impact on students鈥� social-emotional development, test scores and behaviors. They concluded that the most effective schools provide a welcoming environment for students, an experience that shapes their later years. 

鈥淗igh schools matter,鈥� said Shanette Porter, senior research associate at UChicago Consortium on School Research and the study鈥檚 lead author. 鈥淎nd they matter quite a lot. How safe students feel 鈥� physically, socially, psychologically 鈥� how deeply connected they are to others, how much they trust their teachers and their peers matters.鈥�

She said, too, that student voice is a powerful tool, one schools can use to design better, more effective systems: The biggest predictor of student outcomes in their study was what the students themselves said about their school experience. 

And the impact isn鈥檛 just social-emotional, Porter said. It influences trackable metrics such as test scores, high school graduation rates and college attendance, researchers found. 

鈥淭hese things that feel soft are inextricably linked to these hard measures of learning,鈥� Porter said.  

Researchers drew their data from six cohorts of 160,148 of eighth and ninth grade students who attended CPS between 2011鈥�12 and 2016鈥�17: 42% were Black, 44% were Hispanic and 86% received free or reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty. The college attendance-related data came only from those who attended ninth grade for the first time between 2012 and 2014. They totaled 55,564 students. 

The study examined students鈥� administrative records 鈥� including those related to attendance and discipline 鈥� plus surveys provided by both children and teachers about their school鈥檚 climate, whether it had effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, a supportive environment and ambitious instruction.

Students also completed a questionnaire focusing on their emotional health, connectedness to school, academic engagement, grit and study habits. 

The study found that students who attended a highly effective school 鈥� one ranked by the researchers as being in the 85th percentile based on their collected data and student and teacher survey responses 鈥� saw their test scores improve more than those at other CPS campuses. They noted, too, that attendance increased for this group while suspensions and disciplinary infractions dropped.

And the beneficial effects continued well beyond freshman year: Students who attended a school at that 85th percentile increased the likelihood of graduation by 2.41 percentage points and the chance of attending college within two years of graduation by 2.57 percentage points. They also were 20% less likely to be arrested on campus as compared to the average rate of arrest for all high schoolers in the district. 

A spokeswoman for the Chicago school system said it remains committed to social- emotional development: CPS has spent millions growing such offerings in recent years, based in part on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The study found that in 2021, 10% of high school students attempted suicide one or more times in the prior year. 

CPS has hired 123 additional school counselors since 2021, placing the staff at its highest-need campuses. It also has expanded training and support for school-based counselors, social workers, and psychologists so they can implement small-group and individual social-emotional interventions, the spokeswoman said.

But the social-emotional learning tactics underpinning the positive results seen in Chicago Public Schools 鈥� and employed by many other districts around the country for several years 鈥� are now under attack from the far right. 

Members of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty have labeled social-emotional learning, which can include lessons on self-regulation and relating to others, indoctrination, saying it leads to the idea that the country is  

They say it infringes on parents鈥� right to raise their children. Karen VanAusdal, vice president for practice at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL, acknowledged the pushback. 

鈥淐ertainly there are groups like that that are trying to make social-emotional learning a political soundbite,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut 鈥� there are many more parents, educators and policy leaders who understand the importance of social-emotional learning. The work is continuing.鈥�

VanAusdal said helping students develop skills outside academics is invaluable, especially now, in the wake of the pandemic, when so many are reporting mental health struggles. showed some consensus among parents: 66% said it鈥檚 鈥渆xtremely or very important鈥� that their children鈥檚 school teaches them to develop social and emotional skills. Twenty-seven percent said it was somewhat important, Pew reported.  

鈥淭his has always been a bipartisan issue,鈥� VanAusdal said. 鈥淲e want children to have healthy relationships. We want them to have the skills they need to achieve their career and life goals and be caring members of our communities 鈥� and we know social-emotional learning is the pathway to achieving that.鈥�

High school senior Lydia Nichols never expected to fall in love with auto racing. 

It certainly wouldn鈥檛 have happened sitting in one of the classrooms at her traditional comprehensive high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But Nichols only spends half her day at that campus. 

The rest of her learning happens half an hour away at , a credit-bearing program for public school students in downtown Cedar Rapids where teens learn through community-based projects. This year, Nichols devised a plan to revitalize Hawkeye Downs Speedway, which to attract visitors. It鈥檚 鈥渁 huge part of our city鈥檚 history, and we don鈥檛 want to lose something like that,鈥� she said.

Nichols and the other students on her team decided to host a race this summer where teens are the drivers. By April, they had already raised $30,000 for the event. They purchased cars, commissioned local businesses as sponsors, and launched a marketing campaign to attract drivers and spectators, hoping to fill the Speedway鈥檚 stands with nearly 5,000 fans. 

Besides having fun working with the racing community, Nichols said she鈥檚 developed marketing, fundraising and event-planning skills. 鈥淚 really wanted to be involved in the community and help people, and BIG helped me discover the career I want to go into,鈥� she said, adding she鈥檒l study project management in the fall at the University of Iowa. 

For fresh ideas on how to design innovative community projects at your school, sign up for The XQ Xtra 鈥� a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

BIG launched in 2013 in collaboration with the Cedar Rapids School District and the nearby College Community School District. Since then, it has inspired students to follow their curiosity and discover their passions. BIG later gained support from the in 2016. Today, over 100 students come to BIG from four different high schools, spending half their day at their 鈥渕othership鈥� schools and the other half at BIG, working on real-life projects and earning credits in English, social studies and business. 

Iowa BIG features many of the research-based that demonstrate the impact of what happens when education doesn鈥檛 just look like real life but is real life. Students at BIG feel more because they are given autonomy in designing projects connected to . 

Because BIG鈥檚 students remain officially enrolled in their home schools, Iowa doesn鈥檛 report on their outcomes separately. However, the school shared data with XQ showing BIG鈥檚 2022 graduates from Cedar Rapids High School boasted a higher average ACT score than graduates both statewide and nationwide. BIG鈥檚 innovative environment provides lessons for other high schools on how to help students feel more connected to their learning 鈥� something they鈥檒l need to succeed in college, careers and in life.

Collaboration by Districts Leads to a Hub for Innovation

Housed in a shared entrepreneurial space without classrooms in New Bohemia, Cedar Rapids鈥� thriving arts and cultural district, BIG students work alongside local startups. In this way, BIG makes 鈥� another one of the XQ Design Principles researchers say can lead to more equitable outcomes for all pupils. 

BIG shows how schools can collaborate to provide student-centric, place-based education they wouldn鈥檛 have the capacity to do on their own. The two district partners support BIG financially, covering part of the rent, the director鈥檚 salary and equipment expenses. Each district supplies two full-time, certified teachers.

鈥淭hey鈥檝e got a level of infrastructure and program-building that allows it to scale but also to operate as a hub that鈥檚 close to the bone,鈥� said Angela Lyle, a research fellow in the School of Education at the University of Michigan and author of a recent . 鈥淭hey are looking deeply at instruction, learning from it and accelerating learning across the network as a whole.鈥�

It can be financially and programmatically challenging for districts to partner with BIG; a third district pulled out of the collaboration. And for students, shuffling between two distinct learning environments can be a struggle at times. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e doing traditional school, it kind of just feels uninspiring,鈥� said Nichols.

But she also acknowledged advantages. 鈥淪ince I go to Washington High School, I鈥檓 able to be open to all the traditional high school stuff I鈥檇 be missing out on while still going to such an amazing program,鈥� Nichols explained, listing extracurriculars, sports and school dances as just some of the perks of still attending her mothership school.

Giving Students Autonomy Requires Help with Time Management 

Iowa BIG gives students an unusual amount of autonomy. But for some, the sheer amount of choice can be overwhelming. 

鈥淭he biggest thing kids struggle with is coming for the first time and not knowing how to have any agency,鈥� said BIG鈥檚 Community Development Specialist Megan Swanson, who experienced it firsthand when she, herself, was a student at BIG. 鈥淚n the traditional system, you鈥檙e told what to do, and it鈥檚 hard to break away and make decisions for yourself.鈥�

BIG鈥檚 teachers help students learn to manage their time by utilizing a set of principles called 鈥淢odern Agile,鈥� more often seen in organizations like Google than in high schools. With this tool, English teacher Nate Pruett said students spend time reflecting on their work with their team and project, 鈥渁nd that鈥檚 where kids often begin to identify their weaknesses in using their freedom.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Developing these mindsets of self-awareness and the skills to be generous team members are crucial for student success 鈥� and central tenets of . Research finds collaboration, critical thinking and mastering fundamental literacies are the best ways to develop students who are deeply engaged in their own learning and fully prepared for college and career. 

Innovation and Rigor Come Together 

BIG is still beholden to traditional academic standards. 鈥淪tudents have free reign over projects, and if it matches the class or the standards, that鈥檚 great,鈥� Swanson said. 鈥淚f not, we figure out how to make the standards connect.鈥�

For example, one typical English standard is writing for an audience. After students designed a youth outreach campaign for a local auto shop, they were invited to share their experiences on a local radio station. They prepared by researching listenership demographics and practicing how to answer potential questions. Afterward, Pruett determined whether they had met the English standard by reviewing reflections they wrote on the strategies they used to appeal to their audience.

Students can revise their work until they master a standard, which is then translated into a traditional grade for the student鈥檚 mothership school transcript. When a project doesn鈥檛 meet all the required subject standards, BIG offers teacher-led seminars once a week to fill in the gaps. Nichols said the structure is conversational and more immersive than a typical lecture. 鈥淲hat we鈥檝e discovered is that a lecture in and of itself isn鈥檛 bad,鈥� Pruett said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 bad when that鈥檚 all you do.鈥�

Learning Happens Even When a Project Falls Flat

In many schools that use project-based learning, teachers develop the projects. But at BIG, they鈥檙e driven by the interests of the students and the community, and Swanson is tasked with building those partnerships. She鈥檚 also employed by the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance and meets regularly with business leaders to harvest ideas. 

Swanson said the best projects begin with a problem a partner is trying to solve, like , which came to her looking for help in rethinking an occupational therapy toy for children with delayed fine motor skills. For another project, a local farm asked students to help rethink how to get clean water to livestock. 

BIG will reject a community project if it lacks rigor, but when it comes to projects designed by students, BIG hardly ever says 鈥渘o,鈥� which means sometimes a project fails 鈥� just like in life. 鈥淲e want projects to be real-world, messy, and have kids experience failure and figure out how to make something work,鈥� said co-founder Trace Pickering, tapping into one of XQ鈥檚 other research-based design principles, amplifying .

Students also have the option to leave a project at any time. 鈥淜ids can get into the project and realize this isn鈥檛 what they wanted to do,鈥� Pickering explained. 鈥淲hy punish them with some arbitrary timeline that says you have to stick with it?鈥�

Preparing Students for the Future with Real-World Skills

Based on what he hears from alumni, Pickering said BIG is succeeding in its mission. 

鈥淥verwhelmingly, what they tell us, especially kids going to college, is that they recognized that their roommate or their friend down the hall had no idea how to manage their time, how to advocate for themselves, how to build a network,鈥� he said. 鈥淏ecause they had been in an environment 鈥� a high school 鈥� where every minute had been scripted.鈥�

On an XQ survey of seniors in 2022, 97% of BIG鈥檚 12th graders said they felt prepared for their future, and credited BIG for helping them develop collaboration skills as well as the ability to demonstrate and communicate knowledge and learning, creativity and problem-solving and curiosity 鈥� all competencies based on the XQ Learner Outcomes.

This fall, BIG is relocating to the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance building and taking over a floor shared with its next venture: , a standalone magnet high school. City View is launching with 200 ninth and 10th graders, funded by the XQ Institute, New Schools Venture Fund, and grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

As BIG鈥檚 principal Dan DeVore put it, 鈥淲hat we really want is for students to have a BIG type experience as well as discover courses where they aren鈥檛 beholden to semester-long, hour-a-day block schedule.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Andrew Bauld is a freelance writer specializing in issues in K-12 and higher education. His pieces have been published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, U.S. News and World Report, School Library Journal and the XQ Institute.