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Consider This from NPR

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Goats and Soda

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how Americans view the K-12 public education system. We surveyed 5,029 U.S. adults from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, 2023.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos for Pew Research Center on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel Omnibus. The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey is weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income and other categories.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

These findings come amid debates about what is taught in schools , as well as concerns about school budget cuts and students falling behind academically.

Related: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. About two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say this, compared with 40% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In turn, 23% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans say it’s headed in the right direction.

Among Republicans, conservatives are the most likely to say public education is headed in the wrong direction: 75% say this, compared with 52% of moderate or liberal Republicans. There are no significant differences among Democrats by ideology.

Similar shares of K-12 parents and adults who don’t have a child in K-12 schools say the system is going in the wrong direction.

A separate Center survey of public K-12 teachers found that 82% think the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years. And many teachers are pessimistic about the future.

Related: What’s It Like To Be A Teacher in America Today?

Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?

We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
• Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.

How views vary by party

Americans in each party point to different reasons why public education is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say major reasons are:

• A lack of focus on core academic subjects (79% vs. 55%)
• Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%)

In turn, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to point to:

• Insufficient school funding and resources (78% vs. 33%)
• Parents having too much say in what schools are teaching (46% vs. 13%)

Views also vary within each party by ideology.

Among Republicans, conservatives are particularly likely to cite a lack of focus on core academic subjects and teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom.

Among Democrats, liberals are especially likely to cite schools lacking resources and parents having too much say in the curriculum.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

• Partisanship & Issues
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Rachel Minkin is a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center .

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Our Best Education Articles of 2021

Our most popular education articles of 2021 explore how to navigate some of this year’s challenges—including grief, boredom, and isolation—while uplifting our capacity for connection, belonging, and healing. Several articles also highlight how character, conscience, and kindness can guide us toward greater meaning in our lives.

If you are looking for specific activities to support your students’ and colleagues’ social and emotional well-being in 2022, visit our  Greater Good in Education website, featuring  free  research-based practices, lessons, and strategies for cultivating kinder, happier, and more equitable classrooms and schools. And for a deeper dive into the science behind social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and ethical development, consider our suite of self-paced online courses for educational professionals, including our capstone course, Teaching and Learning for the Greater Good .

Here are the 12 best education articles of 2021, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

How to Help Students Feel a Sense of Belonging During the Pandemic , by Mary C. Murphy, Kathryn Boucher, and Christine Logel: Belonging and connection in the classroom contribute to success and well-being, particularly for marginalized students.

Four Ways Teachers Can Help Students Develop a Conscience , by Vicki Zakrzewski: How do kids develop a sense of right and wrong—and what can educators do to help them act on their conscience?

How to Help Students of Color Find Their Power , by Brandy Arnold: Project Wayfinder is helping Black and Latino students explore their identities and goals.

What a Children’s Book Taught Me (and My Students) About Grief , by Lauren McGovern: Teaching sixth graders about grief helped teacher Lauren McGovern after the loss of her son.

36 Questions That Can Help Kids Make Friends , by Jill Suttie: A question-and-answer exercise may help middle schoolers build friendships, including with kids of different ethnicities.

How to Make This Hard Transition Back to School With Your Students , by Amy L. Eva: Here are three ways educators can support their students (and each other) this fall.

A Different Way to Respond When Kids Do Something Wrong , by Joanne Chen: Restorative practices—taking responsibility, making amends, and seeking forgiveness—are an alternative to strict punishments and blame.

What Do Kids Mean When They Say They’re Bored at School? , by Rebecca Branstetter: Boredom can be a temporary emotion or a sign of a deeper issue, says a school psychologist.

How to Help Students Be the Best Version of Themselves , by Karen E. Bohlin and Deborah Farmer Kris: When students are facing challenges, educators can help them reflect on—and act on—what matters to them.

Four Character Strengths That Can Help Kids Learn , by Carol Lloyd: Research suggests that fostering character strengths can help children be better students.

How Educators Can Help Make a Kinder World , by Vicki Zakrzewski: By integrating character education, SEL, and mindfulness, schools can cultivate the inherent goodness in students.

Three Strategies for Helping Students Discuss Controversial Issues , by Lauren Fullmer and Laura Bond: Here are research-based ways to facilitate civil discourse in the classroom.

Bonus: Science of Happiness Podcast Episodes

Episode 94: How to Craft Your Life : When the world around you changes, so can your goals. Our guest, Patty Brown, tries a practice to tap into a new sense of purpose.

Episode 96: Don’t Be Afraid of Your Anger : What happens when we suppress our anger? And what if we tried to work with it instead? Our guest, Soraya Chemaly, tries a practice to harness her inner fierceness to care for herself.

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

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Black students are still kicked out of school at higher rates despite reforms

18-year-old Zaire Byrd poses for a photo, Sunday, July 21, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

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Before he was suspended, Zaire Byrd was thriving. He acted in school plays, played on the football team and trained with other athletes. He had never been suspended before — he’d never even received detention.

But when Byrd got involved in a fight after school one day, none of that seemed to matter to administrators. Byrd said he was defending himself and two friends after three other students threatened to rob them. Administrators at Tri-Cities High School in Georgia called the altercation a “group fight” — an automatic 10-day suspension. After a disciplinary hearing, they sent him to an alternative school.

The experience nearly derailed his education.

“The last four years were a lot for me, from online school to getting suspended,” said Byrd, who started high school remotely during the pandemic. “I could have learned more, but between all that and changing schools, it was hard.”

In Georgia, Black students like Byrd make up slightly more than one-third of the population. But they account for the majority of students who receive punishments that remove them from the classroom, including suspension, expulsion and being transferred to an alternative school.

Those disparities, in Georgia and across the country, became the target of a newly energized reform movement a decade ago, spurred by the same racial reckoning that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement . For many advocates, students and educators, pursuing racial justice meant addressing disparate outcomes for Black youth that begin in the classroom, often through harsh discipline and underinvestment in low-income schools .

The past decade has seen some progress in lowering suspension rates for Black students. But massive disparities persist, according to a review of discipline data in key states by The Associated Press.

In Missouri, for example, an AP analysis found Black students served 46% of all days in suspension in the 2013-2014 school year — the year Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in that state, days after he completed high school. Nine years later, the percentage had dropped to 36%, according to state data obtained via a public records request. Both numbers far exceed Black students’ share of the student population, about 15%.

And in California, the suspension rate for Black students fell from 13% in 2013 to 9% a decade later — still three times higher than the white suspension rate.

Incremental progress, but advocates say bias remains

The country’s racial reckoning elevated the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” — the notion that being kicked out of school, or dropping out , increases the chance of arrest and imprisonment years later. School systems made incremental progress in reducing suspensions and expulsions, but advocates say the underlying bias and structures remain in place.

The upshot: More Black kids are still being kicked out of school.

“That obviously fuels the school-to-prison pipeline,” said Terry Landry Jr., Louisiana policy director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re not in school, then what are you doing?”

Students who are suspended, expelled or otherwise kicked out of the classroom are more likely to be suspended again. They become disconnected from their classmates, and they’re more likely to become disengaged from school . They also miss out on learning time and are likely to have worse academic outcomes, including in their grades and rates of graduation .

Nevertheless, some schools and policymakers have doubled down on exclusionary discipline since the pandemic. In Missouri, students lost almost 780,000 days of class due to in-school or out-of-school suspensions in 2023, the highest number in the past decade.

In Louisiana, Black students are twice as likely to be suspended as white students and receive longer suspensions for the same infractions, according to a 2017 study from the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Yet a new law goes into effect this year that recommends expulsion for any middle- or high-school student who is suspended three times in one school year.

Educators — and parents — seek to keep kids in school

Federal guidelines to address racial disparities in school discipline first came from President Barack Obama’s administration in 2014. Federal officials urged schools not to suspend, expel or refer students to law enforcement except as a last resort, and encouraged restorative justice practices that did not push students out of the classroom. Those rules were rolled back by President Donald Trump’s administration, but civil rights regulations at federal and state levels still mandate the collection of data on discipline.

In Minnesota, the share of expulsions and out-of-school suspensions going to Black students dropped from 40% in 2018 to 32% four years later — still nearly three times Black students’ share of the overall population.

The discipline gulf in that state was so egregious that in 2017 the Minnesota Department of Human Rights ordered dozens of districts and charter schools to submit to legal settlements over their discipline practices, especially for Black and Native American students. In these districts, the department found, almost 80% of disciplinary consequences issued for subjective reasons, like “disruptive behavior,” were going to students of color. School buildings were closed for the pandemic during much of the settlement period, so it’s hard to assess whether the schools have since made progress.

Khulia Pringle, an education advocate in St. Paul, says her daughter experienced repeated suspensions. The harsh discipline put her on a bad track. For a time, Pringle said, her daughter wanted to drop out of school.

Pringle, then a history and civics teacher herself, quit her job to become an advocate, hoping to offer one-on-one support to families experiencing harsh school discipline.

“That’s when I really began to see it wasn’t just me. Every Black parent I worked with was calling me about suspensions,” she said.

Education reform emerged quickly as a goal for the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, when the Vision for Black Lives platform was finalized, it included a call for an education system that acknowledged students’ cultural identities , supported their mental and physical health and did not subject them to unwarranted search, seizure and arrest inside schools.

“We need to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, and that begins in the school,” said Monifa Bandele, a policy leader with the Movement for Black Lives. “Data shows that with each expulsion or suspension, students are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.”

In addition to being disciplined at higher rates, Black students receive more severe punishments than their white peers for similar or even the same behavior, said Linda Morris, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Students of color are often not given the same benefit of the doubt that their white counterparts receive, and might even be perceived as having harmful motives,” Morris said.

Attention to these disparities has led to some changes. Many districts adopted restorative justice practices, which aim to address the root cause of behavior and interpersonal conflicts rather than simply suspending students. Schools increased investment in mental health resources.

And, for a time, some districts, including Chicago and Minneapolis, worked toward removing police from schools . Those efforts gained new momentum in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota by a white police officer.

Schools take a harder line on discipline after pandemic

Calls for stricter discipline and more police involvement resurfaced in recent years, as schools struggled with misbehavior after monthslong pandemic closures.

Activists point to a deeper reason for the pro-discipline push.

“That backlash is also somewhat a response to progress being made,” said Katherine Dunn, director of the Opportunity to Learn program at the nonprofit Advancement Project. “It’s a response to organizing. It’s a response to power that Black and brown and other young people have been building in their schools.”

After his suspension, Byrd, the Georgia student, was sent to an alternative disciplinary program. A district spokesman said the program is supposed to help students continue their education and receive social and emotional support while they’re being disciplined.

Byrd says he waited in line each day for a head-to-toe search before he was allowed into the building. The process, the district said, ensures safety and is administered by the company that runs the alternative school.

“It definitely changed him,” said his mother, DeAndrea Byrd. “He wasn’t excited about school. He wanted to drop out. It was extremely difficult.”

Byrd finished his junior year at the alternative school. He transferred to a different public school for his senior year, where he felt supported by the administration and managed to graduate. He’s since found work near home and plans to attend college at an HBCU in Alabama where he hopes to study cybersecurity.

When he reflects on the fight and its fallout, Byrd said he wished the school could have viewed him as a kid who had never gotten in trouble before, rather than pushing him out.

“I wish they would have never expelled me for my first offense, gave me a second chance,” he said. “None of us should be punished for one mistake.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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A Democratic Vision for Public Schools

Neoliberalism has set the agenda for US public education for decades, championing values of individual choice, standards, and competition—with disappointing results. Amid rising civic discord, we propose a vision for public education that better prepares young people to become citizens and improves the nation’s democratic health.

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The Harris-Walz Vision for Public Schools

Their agenda breaks with decades of Democratic thinking about education.

In an interview this summer, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz made the sort of blunt statement about poverty that has long eluded his fellow Democrats. “People are poor because they don’t have money,” Walz told Pod Save America , rattling off a long list of what he called “chain reactions” for children in America, including low performance in school. That vision is at the heart of the Harris-Walz populist economic agenda, but it also casts the education policy of a Harris-Walz administration as a means of supporting kids and families. This contrasts sharply not just with Republicans but also with previous Democratic administrations.

From the recently proposed $6,000 credit to support newborns in their first year of life to a universal school meals policy to provide every child with free breakfast and lunch regardless of income, the Harris-­Walz education agenda is often inseparable from the campaign’s economic priorities. Both are part of what the candidates describe as a pro-family platform.

“It’s so refreshing to see real policy ideas that are actually targeted to the genuine problems and priorities of parents rather than this kind of culture-war vision about who is going to which bathroom,” says Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The contrast with the goals of a second Trump administration couldn’t be starker. Eliminating the Department of Education —a GOP talking point for decades and a regular Trump promise on the campaign trail —would result in deep cuts to federal funding for under-resourced schools . Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed policy blueprint for a conservative transformation of government, calls for a host of policy changes that would make education more expensive for families, including eliminating Head Start , shrinking the federal school meals program , and the eventual dismantling of public education .

But the emerging Harris-Walz education agenda, with its emphasis on supporting families outside of school, also breaks with decades of Democratic thinking about education. Since Bill Clinton, the party consensus has been that improving the nation’s public schools is the best way to lift kids out of poverty. Yet as inequality deepened and wages stagnated, the party pointed to those schools, and especially their teachers, as the problem, and competition and privatization as the solution. This way of thinking reached its apex under Barack Obama, who sold his get-tough-on-teachers policy as key to the nation’s economic competitiveness and oversaw an explosion of privately run charter schools .

The Harris-Walz vision is much different, positioning public education as one piece of a larger family support system, beginning with universal pre-K , including well-resourced public schools, and continuing through affordable college . That view doesn’t just represent a shift in “blue” thinking. It also puts Harris and Walz on a collision course with red states, which have been moving at rapid speed to privatize public education, often in the name of “parents’ rights.” Fourteen states have now passed legislation creating expansive—and expensive—voucher programs that allow parents to spend public funds on private schools, with little if any public accountability.

As these programs balloon, they are draining much-needed resources away from public schools, while crowding out spending on all kinds of social programs. Arizona, which enacted the largest voucher program in the country in 2022, recently s lashed spending on water infrastructure projects to help close its $1.4 billion budget deficit , due largely to vouchers.

Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, Democrats have struggled to find much of anything to say about public schools. Defensive over school closures and caught off guard by the Republicans’ embrace of school culture wars, the Biden administration has often seemed rudderless on K-12 issues. Beyond Biden’s signature issues of expanding civil rights protections for LGBTQ students and student loan forgiveness —both of which have been stymied by the courts—it’s hard to point to a particular vision of what public schools should do, or indeed why we have them at all.

There are signs that the Harris-Walz approach will be very different. For one, Walz’s background as a social studies teacher and a coach , the epitome of a Midwestern normie, is a powerful rejoinder to the GOP’s fixation on teachers as groomers. And both Harris and Walz are the product of public schools, experiences that have clearly shaped their views about the importance of public education. Reminding Americans why we have public schools, and what we stand to lose if they go away, will require not just contrasting their education policy with the GOP’s platform of abandoning free, secular, taxpayer-­supported schools, but also moving away from the legacy of the Democratic brand of education reform.

“Schools are more than just factories where we keep track of how well kids do on tests. They’re community entities,” says Noliwe Rooks, chair of Brown University’s Africana Studies program. “Public education is an audacious experiment that doesn’t exist in most places, and it’s worth protecting.”

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School Is for Everyone

By Anya Kamenetz

Ms. Kamenetz is a longtime education reporter and the author of “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now,” from which this essay is adapted.

For the majority of human history, most people didn’t go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world, who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10 do so in public schools.

To an astonishing degree, one person, Horace Mann, the nation’s first state secretary of education, forged this reciprocal commitment. The Constitution doesn’t mention education. In Southern colonies, rich white children had tutors or were sent overseas to learn. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed. Those who learned did so by luck, in defiance or in secret.

But Mann came from Massachusetts, the birthplace of the “common school” in the 1600s, where schoolmasters were paid by taking up a collection from each group of households. Mann expanded on that tradition. He crossed the state on horseback to visit every schoolhouse, finding mostly neglected, drafty old wrecks. He championed schools as the crucible of democracy — his guiding principle, following Thomas Jefferson, was that citizens cannot sustain both ignorance and freedom.

An essential part of Mann’s vision was that public schools should be for everyone and that children of different class backgrounds should learn together. He pushed to draw wealthier students away from private schools, establish “normal schools” to train teachers (primarily women), have the state take over charitable schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.

He largely succeeded. By the early 20th century all states had free primary schools, underwritten by taxpayers, that students were required to attend.

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Violence in Schools Seems to Be Increasing. Why?

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Following the return of most U.S. schoolchildren to full-time, in-person learning, a raft of anecdotal reports indicate that violence may be rising in K-12 schools.

Teachers are reporting breaking up fights in schools and are raising concerns about their own safety. Students have been caught with guns or other weapons on campuses in several high-profile incidents. And school shootings in 2021, though still very rare, are on track to surpass their pre-pandemic high.

But if an actual surge is taking place, what’s causing it? Will it reshape the contours of the fractious school-safety conversation? And what do district leaders need to consider as they try to respond?

Criminologists note that the nation is in the grip of a general spike of violence probably due to the pandemic and social unrest accompanying the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Their best guess is that those trends are trickling inexorably, and tragically, down to K-12 students.

“You study these things for so long and then you throw the rule book out. No one really knows why we’ve got the trends and violence we’re seeing right now,” said James A. Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State University, in St. Paul, Minn., who studies gun violence. “But I think at the same time, we’re coming to the same sorts of conclusions.

“It’s a combination of the pandemic; a lack of trust in our institutions, particularly law enforcement; the presence of guns; the toxic, divisive, contentious times we live in. They’re all interacting together.”

What do we know about rates of school crime?

No recent, nationally representative data set exists to confirm that there have been more violent incidents so far in the 2021-22 school year, due to reporting lags and the generally disparate nature of the data across thousands of school systems.

The most-recent federal collection on school safety found that some types of violent crimes were on the rise as of the 2017-18 school year, though the figures still fell far below overall crime levels in schools in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Anecdotally, though, teachers, principals, and educators now say they are seeing an increase that has roughly paralleled the return of most students to in-person schooling.

In Anchorage, Alaska, fights and assaults are making up more of the suspensions issued so far this year. A brawl and stabbing in an Annapolis, Md., high school led to seven juvenile arrests. Pupils damaged elementary classrooms in Vermont, overturning furniture and supply bins. Parents in Baltimore County, Md., organized a protest in response to a perceived increase in violence. In Shreveport, La., a group of fathers are now taking shifts greeting students at the high school after 23 students were arrested in a one-week period.

The rhetoric surrounding these kinds of incidents is often red hot, with administrators and parents warning about even more-dire consequences if district leaders don’t do something now.

“Our students are sending us warning shots. Literal warning shots,” said Peter Balas, a principal at Alexandria City High School, in Alexandria Va., at a city council meeting earlier this month. Shortly after, the council voted to temporarily restore school police officers, who had been pulled from buildings last year in the wake of a wave of national protests about police violence. (A spokeswoman for the district denied a request to follow up with the principal.)

Teachers, too, have reported being victims of violence at school.

In Rochester, N.Y., high school English teacher Corrine Mundorff was in the middle of trying to break up a fight when, she says, a student sexually assaulted her , repeatedly groping her after she told the student not to.

The troubled city has long suffered from generational poverty and high crime rates. With so many kids out of school last year, some seem to have pulled into neighborhood turf squabbles, she said.

“We have some issues that we’ve been dealing with for years and years. This year, however we have brought our kids back—23,000 of them—and for some reason we’ve decided we were going to pretend the pandemic had never happened and ignore 18 months of trauma induced by the pandemic students have experienced,” Mundorff said in an interview. “And we’ve just had these arguments, these conflicts that ignited on day one. The violence that had been happening outside of the school just carried over.”

School shooting on par with pre-pandemic levels

Disparate sources of data generally support the notion that what’s happening in schools this year is actually a reflection of general trends.

National homicide rates soared in 2020 , according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, although other types of crime generally continued a steady decline. And Americans have been on a gun-buying spree during the pandemic. There are now simply more guns in desk drawers, on the streets, and in cabinets.

School shootings are also on track to outpace the figures in 2018 and 2019.

Education Week began its own tracker of school related shootings in 2018 in an attempt to cut through the morass of different definitions used by federal agencies and researchers. Our criteria are more restrictive than other collections. It includes only those incidents that take place during school hours or events, on school property, and in which at least one individual is wounded by a bullet.

According to EdWeek’s criteria, as of Monday of this week, there have been 24 incidents so far this year, resulting in 40 deaths or injuries . Two-thirds of these incidents occurred on or after Aug 1. There were also 24 incidents each in 2018 and 2019.

(The gun-control organization Everytown USA, which has more expansive criteria, also shows this year’s school shooting figures paralleling 2019’s.)

Recent Data: School Shootings

In 2018, Education Week journalists began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll is impossible to measure. We hope only to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and paths forward. Below, you can find big-picture data on school shootings since 2018. (This chart will be updated as new information becomes available.)

See Also: School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where

Details of the incidents are distressingly familiar. At least six began with fights or altercations between students that spilled over into gun violence. Six occurred at—or just following— football games . Three appear to have been precipitated by a pattern of bullying.

School shootings nevertheless remain exceptionally rare, and the small sample makes EdWeek’s collection a limited proxy for trying to determine overall violence trends. But the Gun Violence Archive , a nonprofit that tracks and confirms shootings from thousands of data sources, found that more children, not fewer, were harmed by gun violence in 2020, when many students were working from home, than in each of the past seven years.

Finally, children, like adults, are tired, isolated, and traumatized by the last 20 months. The numbers of children visiting emergency rooms for mental-health issues increased dramatically in a seven-month period in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, causing three children’s health organizations recently to declare a mental health state of emergency.

The nation is still in the crisis of the pandemic with no real end in sight, pointed out Margaret A. Sedor, a school psychologist and a member of the National Association of School Psychologists’ school safety and crisis response committee. And students can display a range of crisis reactions, which may include aggression, in response to the losses of the last two years.

“They’ve had almost two years of being socialized and acculturated in a different way, and we need to acknowledge and support community re-engagement,” she said.

What it all adds up to, said Densley, is this: The global pandemic has exacerbated risk factors for violence in general, like loneliness, isolation, and economic instability. Violence also tends to rise at times of uncertainty, especially when distrust in public institutions is high. And social media serves as an accelerant, whipping up anger and frenzy.

“Now you tie that together with last year’s record gun sales—and we’ve got more people carrying guns in public because of more lax laws in that regard,” he said. “And you can sort of put two and two together and say guns are just more likely to be found in the hands of juveniles.”

Some districts consider a return to school-based policing

Those sobering conclusions seem primed to restart an already searing debate over the role that school resource officers and other safety personnel play in schools.

Earlier this summer, Education Week found that a small number of U.S. school districts remove d police officers or cut their school-policing budgets in the wake of racial-justice protests in 2020. Some of those communities, like Alexandria, Va., are now beginning to have second thoughts.

In Rochester, the president of the teachers’ union and three other labor groups representing educators recently demanded that the district consider several options, including restoring SROs in high schools, increasing the number of school safety officers, and offering evening or remote learning options for disruptive students.

The district did not respond to a request for comment on its safety plans. Its superintendent has acknowledged the concerns about violence in public statements.

In other places, advocates fear that more violence could put paid to longstanding efforts there to remove school officers.

The Shelby County district, which includes Memphis, has resuscitated the idea of a “peace force” staffed by district-hired police officers in the wake of a harrowing shooting at a public K-8 school in late September, apparently prompted by bullying, that left one student in critical condition.

“I’m very concerned about the child, obviously. But my second thought is, ‘Oh no, what does this do to trying to get law enforcement out of schools?’ Because so many people think [having a police officer] is like a Band-Aid,” said Cardell Orrin, the Memphis executive director at Stand for Children Tennessee, which has pushed to remove sheriffs’ deputies from schools. “It makes people feel better rather than solving the challenges, and it potentially further criminalizes children. That is the fear, and I think that’s the fear nationally, too.”

Researchers continue to learn more about SROs and the tradeoffs that having them can mean for students. In an important study released earlier this month , a team of researchers studying federal data found that having an SRO did reduce some violent incidents in schools, mainly fights, but did not appear to reduce shootings or firearm-related incidents.

And their presence came at a high price: It meant that a higher proportion of students were suspended, arrested, or referred to the juvenile-justice systems, and the toll fell disproportionately on Black students. (The research has not yet been peer reviewed.)

Districts will need to honor the complexities

Even these new insights, though, don’t always make it clear what’s happening in the black box. For one thing, it’s ultimately principals who make the call on whether to suspend students, not officers themselves, and principals who, alongside officers, can refer students into the juvenile justice system. Put another way, the research appears to point to broader cultural problems in schools.

People want to see what you’re doing for safety, and police are very visible. Connecting kids with resources or using social workers or school psychologists—those things are not as kind of in-your-face or apparent.

The body of school safety literature invariably recommends that improved school culture and safety hinge on strong relationships between adults and students.

Getting kids back into school and back in routines and being reconnected with their peers and classmates is a critical step, said Sedor, the school psychologist. But it demands that districts think systematically about how to support students, and that they move from merely reacting to incidents to intervention and wellness-promotion efforts.

“I think it’s bringing folks together and acknowledging that things have changed and talking about fear and loss, and then problem-solving and strengthening coping strategies,” she said. “It’s about relationships and being able to listen.”

But desperate to respond to frightened communities, districts often seek out immediate, tangible improvements rather than the painstaking work of improving school culture. For good or ill, police officers and other hardening measures—fences, metal detectors, bulletproof glass—signify safety, even though, for the most part, not much evidence suggests they contribute to safer schools.

“People want to see what you’re doing for safety, and police are very visible. Connecting kids with resources or using social workers or school psychologists—those things are not as kind of in-your-face or apparent,” noted Joe McKenna, a senior research associate at WestEd’s Justice & Prevention Research Center.

Even teachers who say they’re close to their breaking points acknowledge the complex calculus.

“I know that teachers are annoyed that the focus keeps going to school resources officers because there are so many more levels to it, and everyone just focuses on them,” said Mundorff, the Rochester teacher. “Would it be helpful to have one? Sure. Does that solve all our problems? Absolutely not. We have three social workers for 952 students who are carrying tons of trauma. And now we have students who weren’t carrying trauma before the pandemic and the ones before are carrying a ton more.”

In Madison, Wis., Gloria Reyes represents the radical middle when it comes to the ongoing school safety conversation.

A former law enforcement officer, she served on the city school board when it voted in June 2020 to remove SROs. She now teaches classes, including on racism within the criminal justice system at Madison College, and runs a local nonprofit.

She strongly supports the restorative justice programs that have replaced school policing in the district, but she’s also concerned that teachers and other educators aren’t well trained to respond to incidents of violence. And while she agrees that communities have for far too long relied on police for things they shouldn’t, they’ve simultaneously neglected other critical social investments, she notes.

If rising violence is due to a simple equation—that hurt kids hurt other kids—the solution, she fears, is complex.

“We have to have professionals out in our communities, visiting with families and visiting with children and doing the outreach and support,” Reyes said. “You know, it’s going to take families, parents, teachers, social workers—it’s going to take everyone to prevent fighting.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 17, 2021 edition of Education Week as Violence in Schools Seems To Be Increasing. Why?

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International Schools in St. Petersburg - List with Reviews

Quick Links:  British Schools in St. Petersburg ( 4 )   |   IB Schools in St. Petersburg ( 2 )   |   All Schools in St. Petersburg ( 10 )

Read about the different types of international school if you aren't sure what the difference is.

Cambridge International School, St.Petersburg Campus 

At CIS Saint Petersburg we offer a dual Cambridge International and Russian State curriculum and provide our pupils with a full school education (nursery, primary and high school) from 3 until 18 years old to help them fulfil their full potential in society. Our staff consists o... Read More

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The British School of St. Petersburg 

The British School of St. Petersburg (BSSP) mission is to be a World Leading School, which means nothing less than having the highest standards in everything we do. We are unashamedly ambitious with the education we provide, ensuring our children thrive, not just academically, but also personally a... Read More

International Academy of St. Petersburg 

International Academy of St. Petersburg (IA) is committed to providing quality international Christian education in English. IA educates the whole student based on a foundation of Biblical truth in an international and nurturing environment, developing students spiritually, academi... Read More

ILA ASPECT British School 

Your child can attend a private English school without travelling to Great Britain. ILA ASPECT British School , part of the large educational ILA ASPECT (Holding) Company in Saint Petersburg, provides top quality education. In 2011 ILA ASPECT was officially recognized as Cambridg... Read More

International Montessori School 

International Montessori School (IMS) is an English speaking environment for children ages 2 to 7. The school is located in the historic part of St. Petersburg on Vasilevsky Island. For the past 20 years, IMS holds a longstanding reputation as a leading International School of St. ... Read More

Deutsche Schule Sankt Petersburg 

Deutsche Schule Sankt Petersburg (DSP) is a German-Russian encounter school founded in September 2009. The DSP is funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and actively supported by the Central Office for Schools Abroad (ZfA).  The school is also a member of the partner school... Read More

Ecole Française de St. Petersburg 

The French school of St. Petersburg , opened in 2004, is an international, bilingual school with a warm, nurturing, and progressive mindset. Accredited by the French ministry of Education, we offer a child-centered environment based on a the French curriculum and completed by Englis... Read More

International School of Herzen University 

International School of Herzen University (ISHU) offers an international education that is holistic, inquiry-based, and offers each student an individualized learning path. Within ISHU’s multicultural educational environment, students are encouraged to fulfil their academic, crea... Read More

Brookes St. Petersburg International School 

Our newest international school, Brookes Saint Petersburg introduces fully equipped spacious classrooms, music studio, science labs & specialist teaching environments, which optimize learning with integrated technology.Students are supported in a caring environment and given opport... Read More

Insight International Primary School 

Insight International Primary School in Saint Petersburg was originally created so that English speaking children of expatriate parents in Saint Petersburg could receive the same education as if they would in England. The UK national curriculum allows each child to continue their e... Read More

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