As 2024 reaches its end, it’s a good time to ask what’s coming next for K–12 education.
Nearly five years after the emergence of COVID, the pandemic’s after-effects still ripple through schools and communities, with student learning persistently failing to reach levels seen in 2019. Just under $200 billion in federal assistance to states, which was used to keep districts afloat during the crisis, expired in September — with no further help visible on the horizon.
Increasingly, though, the kids filling American schools have only dim memories of quarantines or virtual instruction. Their experience is instead defined by a rash of trends and technologies that sprang up, or became much more common, during the period when schooling was scrambled: a massive build-out of tutoring programs; the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence as a tool of both academic achievement and academic dishonesty; a rise in student despair and anxiety, which some experts attribute to the spread of smartphones; and, for adolescents, soaring recreational marijuana use under newly permissive state laws.
14 Charts that Changed the Way We Looked at America’s Schools in 2023
Tomorrow is coming faster than ever, and its contours will be shaped by new leadership in Washington. After a fervid campaign season, President-elect Trump has already vowed to essentially terminate the federal government’s role in setting education policy by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
But before turning to the future, The 74 is taking a look back at 2024’s biggest discoveries from the world of education research. Welcome to the year in charts.
Federal Funds Lifted Learning — But Not Enough
Two papers released this summer by the Education Recovery Scorecard and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research attempted to quantify the effects of the federal government’s ESSER funds, which channeled $190 billion to schools and districts over the last four years in response to the pandemic. Their findings showed that the money has helped, but came nowhere close to filling the academic hole left by COVID.
Studies: Pandemic Aid Lifted Scores, But Not Enough To Make Up for Lost Learning
ESSER’s benefits were relatively modest (measured in math test scores, each $1,000 spent yielded about 10 percent of what is generally considered a medium-sized effect in education research) and distributed unequally, as different school districts received wildly divergent amounts from Washington. Assuming a similar bang for the buck, Congress would have to appropriate between $450 and $900 billion in further legislation in order to bring learning back to where it was in 2019, the researchers estimated.
That’s almost certainly not going to happen; ESSER funds officially dried up this September, and no effort has been made to renew them. If no further assistance is coming, the program’s legacy will have been helping to spur an incomplete learning recovery: According to a January analysis released by the leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard, students across the country had only made up one-quarter of their lost progress in reading, and one-third of their deficits in math, by the beginning of this year.
Students Are Still Hurting
NWEA
The full picture of learning loss remains discouraging, particularly for those who were in their foundational years of schooling when the pandemic threw their education into chaos.
According to data released in July by the testing group NWEA, eighth graders in 2024 were still a full school year behind in both math and reading compared with similar students from five years prior. Derived from the scores of 7.7 million students on the organization’s MAP Growth measure, that assessment also pointed to racial achievement gaps that have only grown wider in the 2020s, with Hispanic students falling the furthest behind in both elementary and middle school.
Students Headed to High School Are Academically a Year Behind, COVID Study Finds
While academic damage has been especially scarring for those in middle and high school, even elementary schoolers are making slower academic progress today than in previous years. A separate report, released in March by the curriculum provider Amplify, showed that students from kindergarten through the second grade are making less progress toward literacy than they did during the 2021–22 and 2022–23 school years. In other words, growth has even slowed down since the immediate post-COVID period.
The Disappearing College Freshman
Colleges and universities face punishing demographic challenges in the years to come, as smaller birth cohorts and shrinking high school classes leave institutions to fight over a diminished applicant pool. Even more worrying, data suggests that rising numbers of potential college-goers are reconsidering their future plans and heading directly into the workforce.
The end result is a surprising erosion in the numbers of rising college students. According to preliminary figures circulated this fall by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, freshman enrollment has declined by 5 percent since last year, with 18-year-old freshmen falling by 6 percent. What’s more, that drop comes after a 3.6 percent decline just last year.
Fall College Data Shows Big Gains — And Jarring Freshmen Declines
Much of the shrinkage was concentrated in particular student demographics and institutional types. For example, the number of white students — who constitute a healthy majority of all college attendees — fell by 0.6 percent this year, while their non-white peers continued to tick upwards. Most striking of all, both public and private colleges that enroll high percentages of Pell Grant recipients saw double-digit losses in freshman enrollment.
Charter Schools Boost College-Going, If Not Test Scores
NBER
Charter schools have long enjoyed an uneven reputation based on geography. While those located in cities — often built on a “no excuses” framework that emphasizes high standards and tough discipline — can achieve incredible results, their suburban and rural counterparts generally underperform traditional public schools.
Study: Charters Boost College-Going — Even When Test Scores Fall
But a paper authored by University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes added a striking addendum. In an experiment based in Massachusetts, where Boston-based charters post some of their best results anywhere in the country, she discovered that non-urban charters also manage to significantly increase students’ chances of enrolling and graduating from college. Paradoxically, however, they do so even as those same students perform worse on standardized tests than their peers in nearby public schools.
It’s an open question how children’s achievement could decline even as post-secondary outcomes improve. Cohodes allowed for the possibility that families in suburban and rural school districts might enroll their kids in charters that focus heavily on areas like arts programming or social-emotional instruction, rather than elevating achievement in core subjects like math or English.
“The whole premise of test-based accountability is that test-scores predict longer-term outcomes,” Cohodes told The 74. “But this situation shows it is not always the case, and other things are going on in schools.”
AI Could Get the Most out of Tutors
Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to counter plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students.
That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil.
Study: AI-Assisted Tutoring Boosts Students’ Math Skills
The paper suggests that tutoring initiatives may successfully adapt to the challenges of cost and scale. Another hopeful piece of evidence appeared this spring, when Stanford University researchers found that a “small burst” program in Florida produced meaningful literacy gains for young learners through micro-interactions lasting just 5–7 minutes at a time. If the success of such models can be replicated, there’s a chance that the benefits of tutoring could be enjoyed by millions more students.
Teachers Aren’t Happy
K–12 educators have had a tough few years. While there’s strong disagreement about just how many of them actually walked off the job during the worst years of COVID, a combination of public health fears and worsening conditions in schools has led many to consider leaving the field since the pandemic began.
Teachers Felt More COVID Anxiety than Healthcare Workers, Study Finds
A paper published this fall by Brown University economist Matt Kraft put those fears into a much larger context. Using polling data going back decades, he found that public esteem for teaching — as measured by how many people called it a prestigious career, compared with other professions — is now at the lowest level seen in half a century. Fewer than half of all teachers said that the stress of their job was worth the effort, compared with over 80 percent in the 1970s.
Those numbers are bad enough, but they also appear to be turning off potential teaching candidates. The number of newly licensed teachers fell by one-third between 2006 and 2020, indicating that the reputational problems facing the K–12 workforce came about long before the pandemic. Interest in teaching as a career path among high school seniors and college freshmen has also dropped substantially since 2010.
Even with a precipitously shrinking number of K–12 students, schools will have a hard time coping if this generation of educators is replaced by a smaller, more demoralized cohort of successors.
The Culture Wars Are Coming to a School Near You
One likely reason for lower job satisfaction among those toiling in the classroom? Disputes over politics and culture, which have recently grown far more contentious.
A survey released by the RAND Corporation in February first publicized what many school employees have complained about for years. Lawmakers in 18 states passed legislation restricting classroom discussion of some topics, whether related to politics, history, race, gender, or sexuality, between 2021 and 2023. Those states are home to approximately one-third of all American teachers.
New Study: Two-Thirds of Teachers Censor Themselves Even When They Don’t Have To
Strikingly, however, a full two-thirds of all teachers polled by RAND said that they self-censored or otherwise curtailed dialogue with students about hot-button issues. The authors dubbed that trend a “spillover” between school communities, often driven by groups of particularly vocal parents who may not reflect the attitudes of their neighbors. In the end, more than half of all teachers working in states with no statutory restrictions on classroom discussion still self-censored to one degree or another, the poll indicated.
Notably, those findings dovetail neatly with other research showing that clashes over culture war issues can be surprisingly expensive for districts and potentially harmful to student learning.
Screentime Is On the Rise. So Is Depression
This year will likely be remembered as the period when concerns over children’s smartphone use, both inside schools and out, came under a microscope as never before. An increasing number of schools in the United States and around the world have moved to restrict the use of phones in the classroom, with many complaining of both disengagement during lessons and an atomized culture brought about by technological distraction.
But a growing scientific literature suggests that young people may be profoundly impacted by phones and social media during their hours at home and with friends. In a paper released in February, British academic Danny Blanchflower — a labor economist who has also specialized in the study of public happiness over decades — demonstrated a close correlation between the steep increase in youth exposure to screens and a concurrent upswell in self-described feelings of despair, worry and self-doubt.
Kids, Screen Time & Despair: An Expert in Economics & Happiness Sounds the Alarm
In 2022, Blanchflower and his colleagues found, over one-in-ten young women said they’d experienced a bad mental health day every day over the previous month, tripling the rate they’d reported in the early 1990s. At the same time, the percentage of young women who absorbed more than four hours of screen time each day jumped nearly eightfold.
Arguments about the effect of information technology on youth mental health are hotly contested, with skeptics observing that the evidence for a firm casual relationship between smartphones and depression is still quite tentative. But Blanchflower believes the downside risk of unfettered screentime is too great for policymakers not to act.
“We could fart around about causality, but the potential cost of not doing something is so much greater than the cost of doing something and being wrong,” he told The 74.
Catholic Schools Might Need Vouchers to Survive
Since the beginning of the charter school explosion in the late 1990s, denizens of the policy world have speculated that the birth of a new educational model could escalate the decades-long decline in Catholic schooling. While increasing secularization has likely driven much of the fall in parochial enrollments, the more recent emergence of free, easily accessible schools of choice in virtually every major American city seemed like the equivalent of throwing an anvil to a drowning man.
In a paper released in August, Boston College professor Shaun Dougherty offered persuasive evidence that charter expansion had indeed come at the expense of the Catholic sector. Relying on data collected from over 25,000 K–12 institutions, the study calculated that between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of Catholic school students disenrolled within two years of a charter opening in the vicinity. Given the thin margins in Catholic education, those declines made full-on closures significantly more likely.
Study: Charters Hastened Catholic School Decline. Will ESAs Slow the Process?
In a telling wrinkle, those trends were considerably muted in 10 jurisdictions that offered some form of private school choice, which provides families with money to spend on tuition or other educational expenses. That suggests that, with the spread of education savings accounts and similar policies, the multi-generational eclipse of Catholic schooling may begin to slow or even reverse. But, as Notre Dame law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett told The 74, it could be too late for the Church to reverse its losses.
“If we’d gotten this much of private school choice in 1999, instead of 25 years later, we might have a lot more kids in Catholic schools today.”
School’s In, So Is Crime
As community hubs attracting large numbers of young people, schools are somewhat unavoidably linked to violence and antisocial behavior. Previous research has shown that when low-performing schools in Philadelphia were permanently closed in the early 2010s, the surrounding areas saw a pronounced reduction in violent crime.
Failing Schools: Home to Underachieving Students, Disillusioned Teachers and — According to a New Study — Higher Rates of Crime
But a paper released this fall gave a much more sweeping overview of the link between schools and disorder. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the authors found that criminal activity among children from the ages of 10 to 17 — whether as perpetrators or victims — peaks during the school year, particularly during the autumn and spring. That’s an exact inversion of the pattern for older offenders, who are much more likely to commit crimes during the summer months.
Across more than 3,000 school districts, the school calendar was linked to a 41 percent increase in youth arrests and a 47 percent increase in reported crime, with the surge mostly occurring during school hours and during the week rather than the weekend. Much of the lawbreaking even occurs in schools themselves.
“In poor and rich counties; well-resourced school districts and poorly resourced school districts; and rural and urban counties, schools are a primary driver of criminal activity involving children,” the authors conclude.
For High Schoolers, Weed is Everywhere
Pandemic, Politics, Pre-K & More: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2024
Much of the shrinkage was concentrated in particular student demographics and institutional types. For example, the number of white students — who constitute a healthy majority of all college attendees — fell by 0.6 percent this year, while their non-white peers continued to tick upwards. Most striking of all, both public and private colleges that enroll high percentages of Pell Grant recipients saw double-digit losses in freshman enrollment. INSERT FIGURE B:1, APPENDIX 8, FROM THIS STUDY: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32732/w32732.pdf Charter Schools Boost College-Going, If Not Test Scores This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is student-support-accelerator.png Student Support Accelerator Charter schools have long enjoyed an uneven reputation based on geography. While those located in cities — often built on a “no excuses” framework that emphasizes high standards and tough discipline — can achieve incredible results, their suburban and rural counterparts generally underperform traditional public schools. Shortcode But a paper authored by University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes added a striking addendum. In an experiment based in Massachusetts, where Boston-based charters post some of their best results anywhere in the country, she discovered that non-urban charters also manage to significantly increase students’ chances of enrolling and graduating from college. Paradoxically, however, they do so even as those same students perform worse on standardized tests than their peers in nearby public schools. It’s an open question how children’s achievement could decline even as post-secondary outcomes improve. Cohodes allowed for the possibility that families in suburban and rural school districts might enroll their kids in charters that focus heavily on areas like arts programming or social-emotional instruction, rather than elevating achievement in core subjects like math or English. “The whole premise of test-based accountability is that test-scores predict longer-term outcomes,” Cohodes told The 74. “But this situation shows it is not always the case, and other things are going on in schools.” INSERT FIGURE 2, PAGE 11, FROM THIS STUDY: https://studentsupportaccelerator.org/sites/default/files/Tutor_CoPilot.pdf AI Could Get the Most out of Tutors Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to counter plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students. That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil. Shortcode The paper suggests that tutoring initiatives may successfully adapt to the challenges of cost and scale. Another hopeful piece of evidence appeared this spring, when Stanford University researchers found that a “small burst” program in Florida produced meaningful literacy gains for young learners through micro-interactions lasting just 5–7 minutes at a time. If the success of such models can be replicated, there’s a chance that the benefits of tutoring could be enjoyed by millions more students. INSERT FIGURE 2, PAGE 49, FROM THIS STUDY: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Kraft%20Lyon%20-%20State%20of%20the%20Teaching%20Profession%20-%20April%202024.pdf Teachers Aren’t Happy This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is teacher-prestige.png Annenberg K–12 educators have had a tough few years. While there’s strong disagreement about just how many of them actually walked off the job during the worst years of COVID, a combination of public health fears and worsening conditions in schools has led many to consider leaving the field since the pandemic began. Shortcode A paper released this spring by Brown University economist Matt Kraft put those fears into a much larger context. Using polling data going back decades, he found that public esteem for teaching — as measured by how many people called it a prestigious career, compared with other professions — is now at the lowest level seen in half a century. Fewer than half of all teachers said that the stress of their job was worth the effort, compared with over 80 percent in the 1970s. Those numbers are bad enough, but they also appear to be turning off potential teaching candidates. The number of newly licensed teachers fell by one-third between 2006 and 2020, indicating that the reputational problems facing the K–12 workforce came about long before the pandemic. Interest in teaching as a career path among high school seniors and college freshmen has also dropped substantially since 2010. Even with a precipitously shrinking number of K–12 students, schools will have a hard time coping if this generation of educators is replaced by a smaller, more demoralized cohort of successors. INSERT FIGURE 2, PAGE EIGHT, FROM THIS STUDY: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-10.html This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is rand-research-report.png RAND The Culture Wars Are Coming to a School Near You One likely reason for lower job satisfaction among those toiling in the classroom? Disputes over politics and culture, which have recently grown far more contentious. A survey released by the RAND Corporation in February first publicized what many school employees have complained about for years. Lawmakers in 18 states passed legislation restricting classroom discussion of some topics, whether related to politics, history, race, gender, or sexuality, between 2021 and 2023. Those states are home to approximately one-third of all American teachers. Shortcode Strikingly, however, a full two-thirds of all teachers polled by RAND said that they self-censored or otherwise curtailed dialogue with students about hot-button issues. The authors dubbed that trend a “spillover” between school communities, often driven by groups of particularly vocal parents who may not reflect the attitudes of their neighbors. In the end, more than half of all teachers working in states with no statutory restrictions on classroom discussion still self-censored to one degree or another, the poll indicated. Notably, those findings dovetail neatly with other research showing that clashes over culture war issues can be surprisingly expensive for districts and potentially harmful to student learning. INSERT CHART 7, PAGE 28, FROM THIS STUDY: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32119/w32119.pdf This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is despair_and_aces.png NBER Screentime Is On the Rise. So Is Depression This year will likely be remembered as the period when concerns over children’s smartphone use, both inside schools and out, came under a microscope as never before. An increasing number of schools in the United States and around the world have moved to restrict the use of phones in the classroom, with many complaining of both disengagement during lessons and an atomized culture brought about by technological distraction. But a growing scientific literature suggests that young people may be profoundly impacted by phones and social media during their hours at home and with friends. In a paper released in February, British academic Danny Blanchflower — a labor economist who has also specialized in the study of public happiness over decades — demonstrated a close correlation between the steep increase in youth exposure to screens and a concurrent upswell in self-described feelings of despair, worry, and self-doubt. Shortcode In 2022, Blanchflower and his colleagues found, over one-in-ten young women said they’d experienced a bad mental health day every day over the previous month, tripling the rate they’d reported in the early 1990s. At the same time, the percentage of young women who absorbed more than four hours of screen time each day jumped nearly eightfold. Arguments about the effect of information technology on youth mental health are hotly contested, with skeptics observing that the evidence for a firm casual relationship between smartphones and depression is still quite tentative. But Blanchflower believes the downside risk of unfettered screentime is too great for policymakers not to act. “We could fart around about causality, but the potential cost of not doing something is so much greater than the cost of doing something and being wrong,” he told The 74. INSERT FIGURE 2.1, PAGE 40, FROM THIS STUDY: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai24-1027.pdf This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is catholic-schools-825×283.png Annenberg Catholic Schools Might Need Vouchers to Survive Since the beginning of the charter school explosion in the late 1990s, denizens of the policy world have speculated that the birth of a new educational model could escalate the decades-long decline in Catholic schooling. While increasing secularization has likely driven much of the fall in parochial enrollments, the more recent emergence of free, easily accessible schools of choice in virtually every major American city seemed like the equivalent of throwing an anvil to a drowning man. In a paper released in August, Boston College professor Shaun Dougherty offered persuasive evidence that charter expansion had indeed come at the expense of the Catholic sector. Relying on data collected from over 25,000 K–12 institutions, the study calculated that between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of Catholic school students disenrolled within two years of a charter opening in the vicinity. Given the thin margins in Catholic education, those declines made full-on closures significantly more likely. Shortcode In a telling wrinkle, those trends were considerably muted in 10 jurisdictions that offered some form of private school choice, which provides families with money to spend on tuition or other educational expenses. That suggests that, with the spread of education savings accounts and similar policies, the multi-generational eclipse of Catholic schooling may begin to slow or even reverse. But, as Notre Dame law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett told The 74, it could be too late for the Church to reverse its losses. “If we’d gotten this much of private school choice in 1999, instead of 25 years later, we might have a lot more kids in Catholic schools today.” INSERT FIGURE 3, PAGE 32, FROM THIS PAPER: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/School_Crime_most_recent.pdf This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is school-arrests-school-end.png Todd R. Jones and Ezra Karger School’s In, So Is Crime As community hubs attracting large numbers of young people, schools are somewhat unavoidably linked to violence and antisocial behavior. Previous research has shown that when low-performing schools in Philadelphia were permanently closed in the early 2010s, the surrounding areas saw a pronounced reduction in violent crime.
But a paper released this fall gave a much more sweeping overview of the link between schools and disorder. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the authors found that criminal activity among children from the ages of 10 to 17 — whether as perpetrators or victims — peaks during the school year, particularly during the autumn and spring. That’s an exact inversion of the pattern for older offenders, who are much more likely to commit crimes during the summer months. Across more than 3,000 school districts, the school calendar was linked to a 41 percent increase in youth arrests and a 47 percent increase in reported crime, with the surge mostly occurring during school hours and during the week rather than the weekend. Much of the lawbreaking even occurs in schools themselves. “In poor and rich counties; well-resourced school districts and poorly resourced school districts; and rural and urban counties, schools are a primary driver of criminal activity involving children,” the authors conclude. INSERT WHATEVER GRAPHIC WE COME UP WITH HERE (under “Figures/Tables” on the right-hand side): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2816083?guestAccessKey=8fa21dc7-2a39-4c35-9dd2-47231f9c60d8&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=031224″ target=”_blank”>JAMA Network
One form of vice is particularly prevalent among older adolescents: marijuana use. According to a survey of high schoolers published in March, over 30 percent of seniors reported using weed over the past year.
That figure reflects a few coalescing trends, most importantly the legalization (or decriminalization) of weed in the majority of states. Three-quarters of Americans now live in a jurisdiction where the drug is available for either medicinal or recreational use, though age restrictions still make it illegal for almost any high schooler to do so legally. What’s more, the development of kid-friendly gummies and vape flavors makes marijuana more accessible to young people than in decades past.
‘Behind the 8 Ball:’ How Research is Trying to Catch Up on Cannabis and Kids
That’s especially concerning given the elevated potency of new cannabis items, which are far stronger on average than the common street product of even a few decades ago. Youth marijuana use is clearly linked to inhibited brain development and increased risk of psychological disorders in later life.
“The biggest consequence that we think about in the field of child development … is that using substances that are potentially psychoactive and addictive and have effects on development,” Columbia psychiatrist Ryan Sultan told The 74’s Amanda Geduld. “The younger you are, the more problematic they might be.”
Pre-K Helps Families’ Bottom Lines
Early childhood education has been shown to be an effective tool for improving students’ near-term academic performance, though research is unclear on whether its effects can be sustained over time. In the hopes of reaching students before the K–12 years and combatting gaps in readiness and achievement, a growing number of states and cities have significantly expanded their public pre-kindergarten offerings in recent years.
A paper released in October found that one such expansion brought considerable benefits to participating families — but for a somewhat surprising reason. When New Haven, Connecticut, established a pre-K program in the 1990s, enrolled students saw only ephemeral improvements to their test scores, school attendance, and likelihood of being held back in school, with effects essentially disappearing by the time they finished the eighth grade. But by participating in the program, which provided 10 hours of instruction and supplementary programs each day, those children allowed their parents to work more during the day. On average, caregivers earned 22 percent more, or nearly $5,500 per year for each year their kids remained in pre-K.
Even better, the same parents went on to earn 21 percent more in the six years after the program ended, likely because of their increased experience and job continuity, and their higher income dwarfed the costs of implementing the program. In other words, even if it contributes little in long-term academic gains, pre-K may generate huge value purely as a childcare benefit.
