Smartphones and social media are likely at least partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic that started around 2013. Is it possible that phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013?
It’s understandable. The education world is awash in articles trying to figure out what artificial intelligence is going to mean for schools and students. But before we get too focused on the latest technological breakthrough, let’s not pretend that we have figured out how to cope with the previous one. Over the last decade, smartphones have become commonplace. Today, 95 percent of American teenagers have a supercomputer in their pocket.
Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and others have brought necessary attention to the likelihood that smartphones and social media are partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic gripping our nation. It’s not a watertight case, because it’s nearly impossible to prove a causal relationship with a phenomenon as ubiquitous as this one.
What scholars can say is that the sudden rise in teenage anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide all happened at the same time that teenagers’ adoption of smartphones passed the 50 percent mark—around 2012 or 2013. They can also show that the children most likely to engage in heavy use of smartphones and social media—girls, especially liberal girls—also experienced the greatest increase in mental health challenges. And they can point to other countries that show similar patterns.
My purpose here is not to evaluate this evidence, though I generally agree with Haidt that we should adopt the precautionary principle and assume that phones and social media are likely doing real damage to our kids. Then we should act accordingly.
My immediate question, however, is whether phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013, long before pandemic-era shutdowns sent test scores over a cliff.
I don’t believe this was the only cause of our achievement woes in the 2010s. As I’ve argued before, I believe the Great Recession was also to blame, both because of its impact on families’ home circumstances, and because of the sudden and significant budget cuts that followed in 2013 and 2014, especially in high-poverty schools. Kirabo Jackson has been particularly persuasive that these spending cuts had a measurable negative impact on achievement. Another potential factor was a shift away from school accountability; in 2012 the Obama administration softened the consequences for low test scores targeted by the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in 2015, and Congress replaced it with the Every Student Succeeds Act.
But I do think we need to take the smartphone hypothesis seriously. Especially because, unlike the Great Recession or the pandemic, these trends are not receding in the rearview mirror. Indeed, adolescent phone use continues to rise. If it is one reason that students aren’t learning as much as they did in the pre-smartphone era, that’s a problem we need to grapple with.
Figure 1. Share of U.S. teens age 12–17 with smartphones, 2011–22
So what’s the evidence? First and foremost, as mentioned above, the timing lines up (see Figures 1 and 2). We see smartphone ownership really taking off among adolescents in middle and high school around 2013. That’s also when median achievement on the eighth-grade math test in the National Assessment on Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked. It’s fallen modestly ever since. For our lowest-performing students—those at the 10th and 25th percentiles—the declines were more dramatic.
Figure 2. Eight-grade math NAEP scores, 1996–2019
Another piece of evidence comes from Catholic schools, which serve as a plausible control group for the smartphone hypothesis (see Figure 3). Catholic-school students also take NAEP math and reading tests. But they are not directly impacted by changes in education policy such as the shifts in federal school-accountability rules or cuts in public-school spending. So if Catholic schoolkids also saw achievement declines around 2013, which in fact happened, especially in reading, that could be an indication that something outside education policy is to blame.
Figure 3. NAEP reading and math performance, 1996–2019
But there is also some conflicting evidence. The drops in achievement in the 2010s tended to be for our lowest-achieving students, who are disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic, and male. And yet, as we know from the studies that Haidt and others point to, phone and social media use was most concentrated among middle-class girls (at least initially). So that doesn’t match up.
Before I conclude with the obligatory call for more research, it’s worth pondering what mechanisms could link smartphone and social media use to lower student achievement. Most obvious are problems around attention, as students’ brains adapt to the rush from “likes,” YouTube videos, TikToks, and other platforms, and then struggle to listen to (much less read) slower-moving and less-vivid presentations, such as the ones they are likely to encounter in class and homework. (Our poor teachers!) Or it could be phones’ impact on mental health; it’s hard to learn when you’re anxious or depressed.
There’s also the issue of sleep (see Figure 4). This is cited in the mental health literature, too, as we know that kids sleep less today than before phones and social media entered the scene, and we also know that there’s a relationship between less sleep and poor mental health.
Figure 4. Adolescents sleeping less than eight hours per night
But so too is there a relationship between less sleep and less student learning. After all, sleep is when the brain works much of its magic, forming connections and cementing ideas in long-term memory. Plus, it’s hard to learn when you’re tired, and it’s really hard to learn when you stay home from school because you have been up much of the night. So there is an angle here that also connects with our chronic absenteeism crisis.
What to make of all of this? If we return to the precautionary principle, the least we can do is try to encourage parents to curb their tweens’ and teens’ phone and social media use. Educators can do their part by setting and enforcing classroom rules that phones be turned off or at least stowed away, unless there’s a compelling instructional reason to use them—though that is admittedly an uphill battle. Abolition is likely impossible, though some legislative proposals to make it harder for kids to access social media apps until they are sixteen might help. But schools could certainly encourage parents to limit screen time to a reasonable number of hours per day, be much tougher about earlier bedtimes, and require kids to dock their phones outside their bedroom during sleeping hours. There’s a strong foundation of research to back up any effort to protect and promote students’ sleep, which may help ease some uncomfortable conversations.
Indeed, more sleep might be the killer app that could make a huge difference—both for students’ academic achievement and mental health. It’s a good reminder that as we contemplate the future impact of AI on schools and society, what likely matters most aren’t the machines we use but the attention we give to our children’s timeless human needs.
Editor's note: This was first published by Education Next, which also created the figures that are reproduced here.
Welcome to the latest installment of the Regulation Wars, a long-running family quarrel that centers on the perceived tensions between two of the charter school movement’s founding principles: innovation and execution (or, if you prefer, autonomy and accountability).
Advocates of the former worry that a single-minded focus on the latter will stifle new and potentially fruitful ideas and practices. So, in an effort to shed additional light on the subject, a new study by Ian Kingsbury, Jay Greene, and Corey DeAngelis tries to quantify “innovation” and understand how it relates to policymakers’ efforts to ensure a morally acceptable level of execution—that is, to regulation, mostly in the name of accountability. More specifically, the study focuses on the relationship between states’ widely varying regulatory environments and the ostensibly innovative characteristics of the 1,438 charter schools that opened in the United States between 2015 and 2017.
To quantify regulation, the authors rely on the scores that the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) gave to states between 2014 and 2016, which range from 0 to 33 (with a higher score signifying a tighter approach). To quantify innovation, they first examined individual schools’ websites and coded them to see how they varied along five dimensions: pedagogy, curriculum, populations targeted, setting, and themes. They then assigned each identified characteristic a point value “equivalent to the inverse of its [national] prevalence.” (In other words, they gave more points to schools that were more unusual.) And finally, they added up the points that individual charter schools were awarded for each characteristic/dimension.
Based on the resulting totals, the authors’ estimate that a 1-point increase in a state’s NACSA score was associated with a 0.014 standard deviation decrease in the innovativeness of the average charter school that opened within its boundaries. Similarly, they find a negative relationship between a state’s NACSA score and the innovativeness of the average school’s “pedagogy,” “setting,” and “theme.” Yet, as they acknowledge, “the abstract nature of the total innovation score and components makes it difficult to interpret results.” So, to concretize things, they also consider the relationship between regulation and the twenty-four characteristics that are the basis for the five dimensions of “innovation.” Of these, six are significantly related to regulation. For example, states that take a tighter approach to regulation have fewer schools in “virtual” and “hybrid” settings, as well as fewer with “experiential” pedagogies.
The existence of something akin to these more granular relationships is fairly intuitive. After all, even most accountability hawks acknowledge that there are trade-offs. Insofar as authorizers prioritize test-based academic growth—which they should, given the strong relationship between short-term test score gains and positive long-term student outcomes—that necessarily rubs up against a laissez-faire, anything-goes embrace of “innovation.” Still, the mere likelihood of such a tradeoff does not imply that it is troublingly severe, that the authors have succeeded in quantifying it, or that sober-minded education policymakers should spend a lot of time worrying about it in an era of widespread learning loss and justified alarm about the trajectory of national achievement trends.
From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools). Moreover, if the concern is really with innovation, at least as traditionally understood, then timing is an issue, as is clear from the authors’ self-generated list of ostensibly innovative characteristics, which includes longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene).
As those examples suggest, what the authors’ measure actually captures is more akin to “programmatic diversity” than “innovation.” Except that even “diversity” is being generous, since what the measure really captures is how similar a particular state’s charter sector is to the national charter sector (rather than how many different types of schools a state’s charter sector includes). Which simply isn’t the same thing as diversity or innovation, no matter how much the authors may want it to be.
For obvious reasons, the dissimilarity between a state’s charter sector and the rest of the charter school movement could be related to the types of students it serves. Yet, as noted, a school’s “targeted population” is itself a dimension of innovation and/or diversity, meaning that states with disproportionate numbers of students who are “disabled” or “at risk of dropping out” are likely rewarded or penalized insofar as their charter sectors are representative.
Similarly, it seems obvious that charters in rural states are more likely to have virtual and hybrid schools than those in more urbanized states, and that more rural states (which tend to be redder) may be likelier to take a hands-off approach to regulation. So even if one grants that more virtual schools are a good thing (and, to be clear, one does not), it’s not obvious that tighter regulation is the cause of their relative scarcity in places like New Jersey. In other words, in addition to being fundamentally correlational, many of the relationships the study uncovers are plausibly explained by factors that states cannot control and that have nothing to do with regulation.
All of which makes it hard to swallow the authors’ claim in a recent National Review article that “we know heavy charter regulation has this negative effect on diversity and innovation in the charter sector because we actually measured it in our new peer-reviewed study.”
No, we don’t. No, they didn’t. And the mere fact that a study is “peer reviewed” doesn’t mean it should be taken seriously.
Yes, one of the hopes was that charters would be innovative, and some of them are. But with or without those burdensome regs, genuinely useful innovations seem to be a rarity in K–12 education, which is why the charter school movement has often disappointed on that score and the focus has understandably turned to execution, where there is far more rigorous evidence of their continuing success.
Maybe it’s premature for an election that’s still a year away, and perhaps it’s archaic to expect to find any serious discussion of issues and policies in candidates’ campaign websites. Old-fashioned plodder that I am, however, I went foraging on those websites to see what I could find about their policy positions on education.
I started with the two “official” Biden re-election campaign sites and came up completely dry—dry on issues in general, not just education. They’re devoted to fund-raising and staff recruitment. No doubt the powers that be in the Biden camp prefer to let the President’s actions and proposals signal what he would do during a second term, at least for the time being.
Turning to the Republican side, with Mike Pence now out, I settled for Politico’s judgment that six GOP contenders remain, in some sense, plausible. So that’s where I went hunting. It was not a totally fruitless quest, but it wasn’t very rewarding, either. Here’s the short version:
The Trump website has a lot to say on education.
Tim Scott also has a lot to say.
Vivek Ramaswamy has a few one-liners.
The others—DeSantis, Haley, Christie—are almost devoid of substance at the campaign website level, but they’re all governors or ex-governors, so it’s not hard to track down information about their education track records.
Does it matter? Read on—they’re in the same order as above—and see what you think.
Donald Trump:
One of Trump’s campaign websites states his positions and plans on fifteen major issues. Education appears under the heading “Protect Parents’ Rights.” Here’s the entirety of it:
President Donald J. Trump fought tirelessly to expand charter schools and school choice for America’s children. He secured permanent funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and protected free speech on college campuses. Now, Joe Biden and the radical left are using the public school system to push their perverse sexual, racial, and political material on our youth. President Trump will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory or gender ideology on our children. His administration will open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination. President Trump will veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education, keep men out of women’s sports, and create a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values. President Trump will reward states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure for grades K–12 and adopt Merit Pay, cut the number of school administrators, adopt a Parental Bill of Rights, and implement the direct election of school principals by the parents.
Tim Scott:
Senator Scott’s website is by far the most detailed on a bunch of issues, including an extensive section on education, half of which recounts his record in Congress. Here’s (all of) what’s there:
Education, Not Indoctrination
“I have lived the truth that education is the closest thing to magic in America. But today, the far left has us retreating away from excellence in our schools. Extreme liberals are letting Big Labor bosses trap millions of kids in failing systems. They’re replacing education with indoctrination.”
America’s children should be learning ABCs, not CRT. The radical Left wants to indoctrinate our children, not educate them. We will fight to ensure that America’s kids are learning how to read and write, not about gender transition and sexual identity. We must demand excellence in our schools, which means giving every family a choice, every parent a voice, and every child a chance.
A Proven Record:
Note before moving on that both Trump and Scott pack a lot of substance into relatively few words. None of it is developed in detail—and some seems beyond the reach of anyone sitting at the Resolute desk. But it’s worth coming back one day for some serious unpacking of what they, as President, might actually try to do in education.
Vivek Ramaswamy:
His campaign website offers twenty-five one-liner “policy commitments to take America First further than Trump.” The two that (sort of) bear on education say this: “Incentivize trade schools over hollow college degrees (sorry, gender studies majors)” and “Shut down toxic government agencies: Dept of Education, FBI, IRS, and more (and rebuild from scratch when required).” Period.
Ron DeSantis:
Nothing about issues is printed on his confusing and shape-shifting website. A few video clips show him speaking briefly about education. But his time as governor of Florida has built quite a record, much of it in the realm of “culture wars.” USA Today offered a decent summary.
Nikki Haley:
Her campaign website is regrettably silent on issues. But she, too, was a governor (2011–17) and built an education track record. More immediately, a Spectrum News transcript of a recent New Hampshire campaign forum offers a summary of what she says she would focus on in education if elected president.
Chris Christie:
You’ll find nothing on issues on the campaign website, though there are a bunch of videos. But he, too, racked up a considerable record on education as governor of New Jersey (2010–18), which may prefigure what he might seek to encourage in this realm if he were president.
Campaign websites, like party platforms, won’t likely influence the choices of many voters, whether in primaries on the general election. But insofar as they offer clues as to what a candidate might actually do once in office, they bear watching. So I’ll be back with more, including my take on the Trump and Scott assertions.
The aspiration of early childhood education (ECE) is kindergarten readiness for its young learners, followed by strong academic achievement in elementary school and an array of positive social-emotional outcomes along the way (and beyond). Researchers have found evidence to support the positive impacts of ECE across these dimensions over the years, but the holy grail—evidence that the academic benefits persist rather than fade out over time—remains elusive. A recent study out of Oklahoma, however, touts an important breakthrough.
Researchers from the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa looked at a group of seventy-five children. Thirty-seven were randomly assigned as infants to participate in an “enhanced” Head Start program called Educare beginning in 2006, while the remaining thirty-eight participated in other ECE programs. Although that’s a small sample size, these seventy-five children were a subset of a much larger randomized-control trial comprising all of the various Educare sites, of which there are twenty-five across the country. The Educare program, which began with one school in Chicago in 2000, uses high-quality teaching practices, intensive family engagement, and data utilization to enhance the learning environment for students, and includes embedded professional development for staff. Additional features include year-round, full-day services; lead teachers with bachelor’s degrees; and dedicated family support staff with small caseloads and bachelor’s-level training.
Students in both groups began in infant care/ECE at around nineteen months of age and remained until the start of kindergarten. Control group students’ care and education arrangements ran the gamut—including public preschool, Head Start, community-based childcare centers, and family care—and changed occasionally up until the start of formal education. Most treatment group students also had other caretakers and educators outside of Educare prior to kindergarten, but were steady enrollees in Educare throughout. The treatment group consisted of slightly more boys than girls; the control group slightly more girls than boys. All families in both groups reported income below the federal poverty line based on family size, and all lived in under-resourced communities in and around Tulsa.
Children were followed through the end of third grade. Data included measures of executive function and assessments of early academic skills in literacy, language, and math collected through one-on-one administration of standardized tests twice per year. Different testing instruments were used based on students’ developmental level. Parents were surveyed each spring starting in kindergarten and continuing through third grade to provide information about the home, children’s activities, relationships between children and parents, and parental stress. Teachers completed surveys in the fall and spring of each year to provide information about students’ social-emotional development, behavior, and relationships at school. Classroom quality (K–3 only) was observed and rated each winter for both the treatment and control group, focusing on the areas of emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System.
Children in the treatment group demonstrated statistically significant increases in vocabulary, oral comprehension, and math scores as compared to their control group peers from preschool through third grade, after controlling for child and family characteristics and the limited range of classroom quality metrics. Additionally, treatment students attained scores at the national average in these three areas at the end of third grade, indicating that Educare graduates narrowed the gap with their more affluent peers across the nation.
Results on the behavioral dimensions were more mixed, with children in the treatment group showing higher skills on one of the two measures of executive function but equal outcomes in the area of social-emotional skills. Parents of children who attended Tulsa Educare reported fewer behavior problems when the children were preschoolers than parents of children in the control group, although teachers reported no differences in behavior in elementary school.
Does this meet the holy grail criteria of persistent positive effects for increased student achievement? The lead author of the study and the local Educare’s communications consultants seem to think so. The model appears solid, as does the consistency of attendance for the children in the treatment group. Having low-income students performing at the national average in certain aspects of third grade achievement is a positive finding, but it feels too early to declare full victory on these grounds. The switch from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” is a typical point at which fadeout begins—not covered here—not to mention the fact that these boys and girls had not yet hit the academic buzzsaw of pandemic-mitigation school closures by the time the analysis stopped. Only time—and more data—will really tell the tale.
SOURCE: Diane M. Horm, Shinyoung Jeon, Moira V. Clavijo, and Melissa Acton, “Kindergarten through Grade 3 Outcomes Associated with Participation in High-Quality Early Care and Education: A RCT Follow-Up Study,” Education Sciences (August 2023).
Schools across America continue struggling to help their students catch up following unprecedented learning losses resulting from pandemic school closures beginning in March 2020. It is vital—both to address current needs and to stash away for future use—to determine which methods work to boost student achievement. To that end, a group of researchers, led by Stanford University’s Susanna Loeb, recently examined a high-dosage tutoring effort called OnYourMark, a fully virtual model designed to solidify foundational literacy skills for students in kindergarten through second grade.
The program features a high-quality curriculum informed by the science of reading with a focus on phonics, phonological awareness, and fluency. It includes four twenty-minute sessions per week in either one-on-one or two-on-one formats, regular progress monitoring, and two-week “lesson sprints” that use student data to target specific early literacy skills.
Although OnYourMark currently serves more than 1,400 students across multiple states, the study focuses on how a single charter management organization used the program in twelve Texas schools during the 2022–23 school year. In each school, building-level staff first selected the students who were most in need of academic help (approximately ten per building), and these were given guaranteed access to limited tutoring slots. These 121 students are thus excluded from the study sample, as their enrollment in tutoring was not determined by random assignment. The remaining students in grades K–2 were randomly assigned to available slots in one-on-one tutoring (N=510), two-on-one tutoring (N=570), or a control group (N=1,005) that generally received only regular classroom instruction. Participating students received tutoring in their classrooms from online tutors. A small number of control group students did cycle into tutoring during the year if a slot became available, but they remained in the control group for purposes of the study.
Student performance data come from end-of-year DIBELS testing for basic literacy skills and NWEA MAP testing for reading fluency. Administrative data for comparison include student demographics, school attendance rates, and prior test performance.
At the highest-/simplest-level of analysis, all students assigned to OnYourMark tutoring did better than their control group peers, scoring approximately 0.08 standard deviations (SD) higher on end-of-year early literacy tests. The researchers then break down the overall findings across numerous individual variables. For just two statistically significant examples: Kindergartners benefitted from treatment more than students in other grade levels, and prior low-performers benefitted more than prior high-performers. Additionally, participation in the one-on-one tutoring mode boosted test performance more than did participation in two-on-one mode.
The researchers then combine several variables to find that maximal treatment effects accrued to first graders assigned to one-on-one tutoring (0.19 SD over their control group peers) and to prior low-performers in one-on-one tutoring (0.18 SD).
The research team concludes that the virtual effort appears less effective than in-person tutoring of similar quality and intensity, based on their review of prior research. However, the positive impacts of virtual tutoring compared to no tutoring are also apparent. High-quality and in-person high-dosage tutoring is definitely an effective tool to help students recover from pandemic learning loss. But in locations where in-person options are not available at scale, these positive findings should give school leaders and parents some confidence that a well-designed virtual program can be part of the solution.
SOURCE: Susanna Loeb et al., “The Effects of Virtual Tutoring on Young Readers: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” National Student Support Accelerator (October 2023).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discuss who loses when grades are inflated. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines if Tennessee’s new school funding law really is progressive.
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