Thomas B. Fordham Institute - District 91��Ƭistration

Opinion: AI makes human writing more valuable—and changes how schools should teach it

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:43:15 +0000

The rise of AI has caused anxiety about the future of writing instruction. If the technology can write—or help people write—quickly and coherently on nearly any topic, and will likely get better and better at this, do we still need to teach students how to write?

I’m quite certain the answer among educators and school leaders is, overwhelmingly, yes—of course we do. But their rationale, from what I’ve seen, tends to point to cognitive benefits: organizing one’s thoughts, constructing persuasive arguments, faithfully reproducing observations and events on the page, anticipating objections, and the like.

All of that is true. But it’s missing another emerging, less intuitive reason why this instruction is crucial: AI is likely to make good human writing—whether produced independently or with assistance from a large language model—rarer and more valuable. But producing authentically human content while using the technology calls for strong traditional writing and editing skills, as well as the ability to apply those skills in chatbot prompts. Schools should therefore teach students to write both with and without AI.

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Could breaking up the Education Department actually improve federal education policy?

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:19:13 +0000

Republicans have spent decades promising to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Usually, the threat has been more symbolic than serious. It’s been a reliable applause line in conservative politics, rarely followed by serious structural change.

The Trump administration, however, has moved beyond slogans. It has not offered a blueprint for reorganizing federal education policy—beyond returning the K12 parts to the states.

But through a series of interagency agreements, it has begun shifting education programs to other agencies of the federal government.

Good schools don’t beat staff turnover. They’re built for it

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:19:17 +0000

In my last post, responding to Holly Korbey’s call to study successful schools more closely, I argued that education’s deeper problem isn’t discovering success. It’s sustaining it. Again and again, we celebrate high-performing schools at their peak, only to watch—or more pertinently fail to notice—when they drift, decline, or disappear altogether within a decade. This raises a significant and uncomfortable question: If the high-fliers we celebrate and seek to emulate don’t stay aloft, were they really that good to begin with?

When successful schools lose their momentum, the usual suspects are leadership turnover, staff churn, demographic change, political conflict, or the quiet assumption that the success was fragile all along. But many of these factors, particularly staff and leadership changes, are not flaws in our system, they’re features.

The average superintendent typically lasts little more than a single contract cycle. Principals tend to remain only about four years in a given school, with even shorter stints in high-poverty settings. Roughly a third of teachers leave the classroom within five years. Any school improvement model that only works if the adults stay in place isn’t a model—it’s catching lighting in a bottle. What ultimately distinguishes the schools that endure is not whether turnover happens, but whether effective practices have been institutionalized strongly enough to survive it.

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The TikTok generation presents schools with a difficult choice

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:17:52 +0000

The average American teenager now consumes more than eight hours of screen media daily, with short-form content like TikTok and YouTube Shorts commanding an ever-growing share of that attention. Meanwhile, reading for pleasure among teens has plummeted to historic lows, with only 17 percent of thirteen-year-olds reporting they read for fun almost daily, down from 35 percent in 1984. These statistics represent a fundamental shift in how young minds process information, form connections, and understand the world around them.

This transformation presents schools with a stark choice. They can’t control what students do in their free time, but they can decide what they reinforce in classrooms and through homework.

Do we struggle against the current and try to restore traditional expectations—whole texts, sustained problem-solving, teacher-led discussion and writing, tech kept genuinely supplementary—even though that kind of learning is slower, harder, and increasingly out of sync with students’ attention spans and preferences? Or do we acknowledge that those ships have sailed and adapt our education systems to meet students where they are and engage them in what they like doing, even if that means compromising on what we’ve long considered essential elements of a well-rounded education?

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Why are students missing school?

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:16:32 +0000

As states continue to confront abysmal post-pandemic attendance patterns, understanding why students miss school has become increasingly important. A recent study published by the American Enterprise Institute examines how reasons for student absences have shifted before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Panorama survey, administered annually in Rhode Island, captures student experiences with school climate, engagement, learning, and other topics. The state’s chronic absenteeism measure asks students “Why have you been absent from school?” followed by a predetermined list of reasons including bullying, taking care of family, and illness. Students could select one or more reasons from the list.

Using self-reported responses from more than 660,000 Rhode Island students in grades 3–12 between 2017 and 2024, the researchers compared the pre-pandemic period (2019–20) with the post-pandemic (2023–24). They disaggregated reasons for absence by grade level, gender, race/ethnicity, and school characteristics (e.g., poverty level, achievement rating), and explored how different reasons for absence may be correlated.

Read more at .

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Sex, drugs and screens: Why schools can’t win the dopamine Olympics

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:02:02 +0000

We are in the throes of an attention arms race:��own a smartphone, and nearly one in three eight-year-olds do, as well. Seven in ten high school teachers say cellphone distraction is��. In response,�� have implemented phone bans, and calls are growing for schools to reclaim students’ focus. But the problem runs deeper than devices in pockets or backpacks. Classrooms today are competing not just with screens, but with an attention economy engineered to keep young and old alike scrolling, swiping and craving more.

Even if schools could wall off smartphones, they can’t escape the cultural logic these devices have taught. Every app, notification, and algorithm is designed to maximize engagement and minimize friction—to make effort feel optional. Learning, by contrast, runs on the opposite principle: It requires focus, patience, and struggle. Yet rather than confronting that tension head-on, too many education leaders have tried to bridge it with��—gamified lessons, digital bells and whistles, AI tutors that promise to “make learning fun.” It’s a fool’s errand. The classroom will never outcompete TikTok or YouTube on engagement, nor should it try.

Educator-turned-researcher Daisy Christodoulou underscored the reality in a recent Substack post titled, “.” Her argument is simple, piercing, and hard to ignore: Most phone apps are trying to do just one thing, which is hold the user’s attention. Teachers are also trying to hold their students’ attention, but they also want their students to learn. In a straight head-to-head with a phone app, the teacher will always lose because, while the app is optimizing for one parameter (fun), educators are optimizing for two (fun and learning). Christodoulou drives the point home with a line that is equally amusing and alarming:��“If online content is so addictive that it can lead to adults having less sex, it’s probably fair to speculate that it will lead to kids studying less algebra.”

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Why high schools should help students land summer jobs

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:54:20 +0000

Much of the education world is obsessed these days (and rightly so) with preparing students for the world of work. That is certainly the case within the subculture of��, but a growing number of policymakers and advocates are expressing an interest in making sure that��all��students, even those heading straight to college after high school, develop the real-world “durable skills” that their future employers will demand.

The impulse is great. But as with so many other skills that we hope our young people will develop, we quickly assume that what’s needed is some new school-based program or course or curriculum. What if, instead, the way to teach work skills is to encourage teenagers to, you know, work?

There’s a growing interest in work-based learning, such as apprenticeships and internships during high schoolers’ junior and senior years. But there’s also a recognition that placing lots of students in such opportunities is nigh impossible, given transportation and liability challenges, not to mention that a lot of workplaces don’t know what to do with sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

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