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Posts by Paul Costello1

Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low

September 11, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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A student reads and writes notes with a pink mechanical pencil in a classroom.

High school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 on a national test, a loss probably related to increases in screen time and the pandemic. Their math scores fell as well.

By Dana GoldsteinSept. 9, 2025 New York Times

The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades, according to new federal testing data, a worrying sign for teenagers as they face an uncertain job market and information landscape challenged by A.I.

In math, 12th graders had the lowest performance since 2005.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam, showed that about a third of the 12th-graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills.

It was a sign that, among other skills, they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech. In math, nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may not have mastered skills like using percentages to solve real-world problems.

The test scores are the first of their kind to be released since the Covid-19 pandemic upended education. They are yet another sign that adolescents are struggling in the wake of the virus, when schools were closed for months or more. They also arrive at a time when Americans overall are abandoning printed text for screen time and video-dominated social media, which experts have linked to declining academics.

The NAEP test results indicate “a stark decline” in performance, said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the federal Education Department that administers the tests.

Only about a third of 12th graders are leaving high school with the reading and math skills necessary for college-level work, he added.

The findings echo grim statistics on the recent achievement of younger children.

For about 10 years, declines have been most pronounced among low-performing students, indicating that the floor of academic achievement has fallen. NAEP scores among top 12th-graders — those at the 90th percentile or above — have not changed significantly over the decades these exams have been given, in either reading or math.

Test score drops were probably caused in part by the disruptions of the pandemic, including illness, school closures and remote learning. The seniors included in the new federal data were in 8th grade when the virus transformed daily life in March 2020. Millions of teenagers spent a year or more learning online.

Even so, data from previous testing shows that learning declines — especially among struggling students — began several years before the pandemic. Experts have pointed to a wide range of possible explanations.

Over the last decade, both adults and children began to replace reading time with screen time, social media and, increasingly, streaming video. And over the same period, the federal government and many states relaxed policies that were intended to hold schools and teachers accountable for student learning.

Among Republican policymakers, much of the energy in education policy has shifted away from raising test scores, and toward providing parents with private-school vouchers. Many elected Democrats have focused more on social supports for students, like nutrition and mental health counseling, than on academic rigor.

States and school districts have worked to improve early reading instruction and provide broader access to advanced math. But at least so far, those changes have not resulted in national achievement gains.

The new test data also includes 8th-grade science scores. Performance in 2024 declined, with 38 percent of students scoring below the basic level, compared with 33 percent in 2019.

NAEP exams are given to representative samples of students across the country, and are considered more challenging than the state standardized tests that public schools prepare students for.

The NAEP results are widely scrutinized by educators, policymakers and researchers. They provide one of the few nationally comparable snapshots of student performance, in a country where much education policy is set at the local level.

The achievement declines cut across demographic divides of race, class and sex. One of the few brights spots was in science among 8th graders who were not proficient in English. That group’s performance improved between 2019 and 2024.

Some experts said that in response to declining achievement, policymakers should look to a few states that have shown recent improvements in NAEP test scores for younger children. State-by-state results are not available for the 12th-grade level.

“There’s a road map out there from states like Louisiana and Tennessee, focused on high-dosage tutoring, high-quality curriculum and clear information for parents on where their kids stand,” said Marc Porter Magee, chief executive of 50CAN, an education advocacy group. “What’s missing now is the political will to bring it to every state.”

Other experts have urged a top-to-bottom rethinking of how education is delivered.

D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton, said that with the ubiquity of screens, it seems inevitable that in the future, fewer people will engage with lengthy texts.

But he argued that the cultural inheritance passed down through the generations in printed books and articles could continue through speech, performance, memorization, recitation and other age-old forms of learning.

“It’s important that we not throw out reading,” he said. “But we have to work with where we are, and people are not going to get dumber. We are going to carry forward the tradition in powerful ways, and we’re going to do it in ways that are unrecognizable to our grandparents. That’s always been the case.”

Still, some worry the NAEP results have implications for American companies as they seek skilled employees, and for American workers as they seek good jobs.

Margaret Spellings, who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush and now leads the Bipartisan Policy Center, said declining achievement was “an economic emergency that threatens our work force and national competitiveness.”

The release of the NAEP test data on Tuesday is the first since President Trump decimated staffing at the Education Department as part of his push to abolish the agency. The National Center for Education Statistics now has only three full-time employees, according to Dr. Soldner; earlier this year there were about 100. The administration fired the agency’s widely respected leader, Peggy Carr.

Before the test scores were released, administration officials sought to project the idea that the agency was running adequately, telling reporters that it was on schedule to deliver NAEP exams in 2026 and 2028 and planned to hire about 10 people to help with the testing program.

In a statement, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the latest test scores “confirm a devastating trend.” “The lesson is clear,” she continued. “Success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested.”

Ms. Spellings said the test results raised questions about Mr. Trump’s priorities.

“The current conversation in Washington is a distraction from our most urgent priority of better preparing our students,” she said in a statement. “This is not the right moment to talk about closing the Department of Education. When your house is on fire, you don’t talk about making renovations.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/us/12th-grade-reading-skills-low-naep.html

MyScore Basics

August 29, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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https://ai.syllaby.io/share/980d4acd-7bf7-4746-b354-5c6ee6de6271

Inside and Outside | Learning the location of an object with Toddlers, Preschool & Kindergarten Kids

MyScore needs you to understand first principles.
First up, humans have an inside and an outside. They are connected. What goes on inside affects outside. What goes on outside affects inside. Pretty simple- but fundamental.

Second, if the outside is in flux, don’t expect inside to be unaffected. Troubled times produce troubled people.

That means human beings are always having to adjust to change.

Fourth, what evolution has given us as our early warning system for the future is how we feel. Fear sees future as threat. Anxiety sees uncertainty. Hope sees future as promise. Love feels future as welcome.

SEL isn’t merely management or regulation- words that mean stability. No. It teaches us how to use our emotions to navigate into a future that is always changing, always asking us to grow up.

AmeriCorps is under siege. What happens in the communities it serves?

August 29, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Former AmeriCorps service member Daniel Zare, 27, visits Project Change at Sligo Middle School on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he mentored students before federal government cuts in April. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)


By:Ashley Murray-August 18, 20256:33 am Maryland Matters

Maryland judges ordered some funds restored, but programs hobbled as uncertainty clouds their ability to plan, move forward

SILVER SPRING, Md. — Daniel Zare worked one-on-one as an AmeriCorps member with students going through rough times in school, lightening teachers’ workload in the classroom.

At AmeriCorps Project CHANGE, based in Silver Spring’s Sligo Middle School, Zare was one of several in his group who tracked adolescents’ emotional and social wellbeing over months using a system dubbed “My Score.” They then helped support the kids who were struggling the most.

In April, though, the program screeched to a halt. That’s when the Trump administration abruptly canceled nearly $400 million in active AmeriCorps grants across the United States that fund volunteers who embed in communities, in exchange for a small stipend and education award.

“All the work that we had culminating toward the end of the year, the relationships that we built with teachers and students and officials, it just completely went kaput because we were told we weren’t allowed to go to work at all,” Zare, 27, told States Newsroom.

Like so many longstanding federal programs and institutions severely reduced or dismantled as part of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project, AmeriCorps — and its nonprofit partners — are now assessing the damage and seeking a way forward.

AmeriCorps programs that survived last spring’s DOGE cuts are slowly beginning a new year of service amid major uncertainty over whether they will be able to continue their work in classrooms, food banks, senior centers and other community hubs.

Winners and losers among states

AmeriCorps, a federal agency signed into law in 1993 by former President Bill Clinton, places roughly 200,000 members across the United States at 35,000 service locations, according to current agency data.

Members serve in schools, local governments and with a wide range of nonprofits that focus on health, disaster relief, environmental stewardship, workforce development and veterans.

The staffers, who pledge to “get things done for America,” are paid a modest living allowance that hovers around the poverty line. Some, but not all, can get health insurance while in the program.

Members who complete their service term, which usually lasts from 10 to 12 months, receive an education award that can be used to pursue a degree, earn a trade certificate or pay student loans.

AmeriCorps federal dollars reach programs via a couple routes. In many cases, grants flow from AmeriCorps to governor-led state and territorial commissions that divvy them up according to local priorities. In other cases, federal dollars flow straight to a program via a competitive grant process. 

Kaira Esgate, CEO of America’s Service Commissions, said when the Trump administration ordered the cuts in April, some states lost large portions of their AmeriCorps portfolio, while other states fared better.

“There were no real clear trend lines around what or who got terminated and why,” said Esgate, whose member organization represents all 49 state commissions (South Dakota doesn’t have one) and the commissions for the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.

Abby Andre, executive director of The Impact Project, an initiative of Public Service Ventures Ltd., a private corporation that launches and scales solutions to strengthen public service and communities., has been collecting data and plotting on an interactive map where AmeriCorps programs have been canceled. Andre, a former Department of Justice litigator, has also worked with her team to build other maps showing where federal workforce cuts have been felt across the country.

“AmeriCorps is a really great example of the federal dollars being kind of invisible in communities. Communities often don’t know that a local food bank or a senior center are supported by AmeriCorps volunteers and AmeriCorps money,” said Andre, who taught administrative law at the Vermont Law School after working under President Barack Obama and in Trump’s first administration.

Andre said communities with a lack of social services, including in rural areas, will likely feel the biggest losses without an AmeriCorps presence because the agency “facilitates pennies-on-the-dollar type services through volunteer work.”

“It’s not as though if these community services folded, those communities would have the money to fund equal or better services through the private market,” she said.

Losing trust

The Maryland Governor’s Office on Service and Volunteerism gave the green light to Project CHANGE to keep its program, which serves Montgomery County in suburban Washington, D.C., running through the upcoming school year.

Paul Costello, director of Project CHANGE, is now scrambling to launch a new AmeriCorps cohort after receiving the news on July 22 that the initiative had been funded. He estimates members won’t be able to begin until almost a month into the school year.

Paul Costello, director of Project Change at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, reads student self-assessments of their confidence levels, hopefulness and excitement for learning. Costello's program places AmeriCorps members in classrooms to help students with emotional and social challenges. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
Paul Costello, director of Project CHANGE at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, reads student self-assessments of their confidence levels, hopefulness and excitement for learning. Costello’s program places AmeriCorps members in classrooms to help students with emotional and social challenges. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“Sadly, AmeriCorps, as a brand name, is badly damaged, I think. I mean, I’ve got a meeting on Wednesday with a major partner who told us two weeks ago ‘We thought you were dead,’” Costello told States Newsroom in an Aug. 11 interview.

Costello’s program not only places service members in Montgomery County Public Schools, where Zare served, but also with partners including Community Bridges, Montgomery Housing Partnership and Family Learning Solutions.

The nonprofits respectively focus on helping adolescent girls from diverse backgrounds, children whose families live in community-developed affordable housing units and teens eyeing college and career paths.

The county’s school system is the largest in the state and serves a highly diverse population. About 44% of the system’s 160,000 students qualify for free and reduced meals, and close to 20% are learning English while continuing to speak another language at home.

Costello’s 18 cohort members embedded in those schools and nonprofits this past academic year were suddenly yanked in April when the government cut his grant. The partners, which had planned and budgeted to have the members through June, were thrown into “total chaos,” Costello said.

“So some of them are so desperate, they rely on their members. They had to dig into their pockets to keep them on as staff. And then we go back to them this year and say, ‘You want members this year?’ AmeriCorps has made no attempt to make them whole. So they’ve been screwed,” Costello said.

AmeriCorps did not respond to States Newsroom’s questions about nonprofits losing money.

Legal action

The federal courts granted some relief to members and organizations who abruptly lost living allowances and contractually obligated funding.

A Maryland federal district judge ordered in June that funding and positions  be restored in 24 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that sued the agency.

Another district judge in the state also handed a win to more than a dozen nonprofits from across the country that sued to recover funding they were owed.

But for many it was too late, and AmeriCorps’ future still feels shaky.

After suddenly losing his living allowance in April, Zare had to leave Silver Spring.

“I was renting a room off of Georgia (Avenue), and I was not able to pay rent there anymore, so I actually moved back to my mom’s in Germantown for the time being,” he told States Newsroom in August, referring to another Maryland suburb.

Hillary Kane, director of the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development, said by the time the court orders were issued, many of her AmeriCorps members had already found other positions and she had completely let go of one of her full-time staffers.

While the court injunctions were “welcome news,” reinstating the programs remained “questionable,” Kane wrote in a July 21 update for Nonprofit Quarterly.

Kane’s organization is a member of the National College Attainment Network, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that was among the successful plaintiffs.

Other organizations that joined the lawsuit are based in California, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Virginia.

The Democratic-led states that won reinstatement for AmeriCorps members include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Going forward?

Kane got news on July 10 that PennSERVE, Pennsylvania’s state service commission, reinstated funding for her AmeriCorps program that places members in four West Philadelphia high schools to mentor students on their post-graduation plans.

The late notice meant Kane could only begin recruiting new members in mid-July.

“And so our start date has to be a bit fluid,” Kane told States Newsroom during a July 22 interview. “We have to essentially recruit people into this one-year cohort position, and say, ‘We’re hoping to start September 2, but we’re not 100% sure. Can you kind of just roll with it?’ It’s an awkward position to have to be in.”

The AmeriCorps pledge hangs at Project Change at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
The AmeriCorps pledge hangs at Project CHANGE at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

Other AmeriCorps programs have not fared so well, as the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget continues to withhold funds that were appropriated by Congress for the ongoing fiscal year.

Trump signed legislation in March that extended the $1.26 billion for AmeriCorps for the full 2025 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

Kane said the most “insidious” part of the recent AmeriCorps storyline is that programs that receive grants directly from the federal agency are being strung along by OMB.

“So there are agencies who have been theoretically awarded money, but they’re like, ‘Is it actually going to happen? Should I spend all this money and then not be able to bill the federal government to reimburse me if OMB is going to hold it hostage?’”

Programs at risk include 130 recently expired contracts for AmeriCorps Foster Grandparent and Senior Companions programs that support roughly 6,000 senior citizen volunteers across 35 states. The programs are eligible for just over $50 million for the new service year, which should be off to a start.

Congress pleads with budget office

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators pressed the executive branch agency on Aug. 1 to release the funds.

“Further delays in grantmaking will have immediate and irreversible consequences for programs, AmeriCorps members, and communities,” the senators wrote in a letter to OMB Director Russ Vought.

Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York in signing the letter. All are members of the Senate National Service Caucus.

The White House and AmeriCorps did not respond for comment.

The Republican-led Senate Committee on Appropriations voted on July 31 to preserve $1.25 billion in AmeriCorps funding for fiscal year 2026. Collins chairs the committee.

U.S. House appropriators, which for the last two years under Republican leadership have sought to cut AmeriCorps funding, are expected to debate its budget in September. But it’s almost certain Congress will have to pass a stopgap spending bill when the end of the fiscal year arrives to stave off a partial government shutdown, so a final decision on funding may not come for months.

Change for everyone

Zare never did have a chance to say goodbye to all his students in April.

And even though the option was on the table, he did not sign up to serve a third year with AmeriCorps.

Before he applied and earned a spot with Project CHANGE, Zare was working odd jobs, including as a utilities contractor for Comcast. He had also earned his associate’s degree.

Former AmeriCorps service member Daniel Zare, 27, visits Project Change at Sligo Middle School on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he mentored students before federal government cuts in April. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
Former AmeriCorps service member Daniel Zare, 27, visits Project CHANGE at Sligo Middle School on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he mentored students before federal government cuts in April. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“I don’t think there’s any other program to take someone like me who was working a couple of different jobs and put them in an environment like this, to see firsthand as an American citizen how our classrooms operate and what position I would need to be in to actually be of benefit,” Zare told States Newsroom.

Zare is now freelancing and debating his next move, whether that’s a new job or further higher education.

“AmeriCorps is something that I’m always going to cherish because a lot of the people there still help me,” he said.

Editor’s note: D.C. Bureau Senior Reporter Ashley Murray served in AmeriCorps in 2009-2010.

Last updated 6:49 p.m., Aug. 18, 2025

https://marylandmatters.org/2025/08/18/repub/americorps-is-under-siege-what-happens-in-the-communities-it-serves/

Minor gains made in Maryland test scores, but wide demographic gaps remain

August 29, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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English language arts show increases for a third straight year; math also sees gains, but still lags far behind

By:William J. Ford-August 27, 20252:15 am Maryland Matters


Maryland public school students made modest gains in math and English language arts, but significant gaps remain between demographic groups, the latest test results show.

The Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP), which students took this spring, showed nearly 51% of students were proficient in language arts, an increase from about 48% in the 2023-24 school year.

The results mark the third straight year of language arts increases, gains that are being attributed in part to the “science of reading” curriculum that State Superintendent Carey Wright brought with her from Mississippi, where test scores rose significantly while she was superintendent there.

Fourth grade was the only level that saw their overall scores go down, form 49.3% in the 2023-24 school year to 48.4% in 20240-25, according to results reviewed Tuesday by the state Board of Education.

Math scores also rose, but they remained far behind language arts: About 26.5% of students were proficient in math, versus 24% in the previous school year.

The board approved a revision of math standards, and parts of a math policy will be implemented this year, which should help improve student outcomes, said Tenette Smith, chief academic officer with the state Department of Education.

“We are seeing progress, but there’s still important work” to be done, Smith said.

The data are from tests taken by students in the spring in grades three through eight in math and language arts. Language arts is also assessed in 10th grade. Student proficiency is also measured in specific math courses and in science for students in fifth and eighth grades.

At least two board members expressed concerns about the gaps between student groups, specifically Black and Latino students.

The biggest gap, according to the exam results, came in eighth grade science.

 A look at student proficiency among student demographics who took the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program exam last school year. Click here for full-size chart. (Screenshot from Maryland State Department of Education)

About 62% of Asian students were proficient in that subject last school year, compared to 53% in the 2023-24 school year. White student proficiency rose from 40% to nearly 49% in the same period. While other student groups also made progress, they still trailed:

  • Latino students went from 11.7% proficiency in 2023-24 to 17.1% last school year;
  • Black students rose from 12.3% in 2023-24 to 17% last school year.

Board member Alverne “Chet” Chesterfield asked why the same “set of folks still underperforming.” That was echoed by board member Nick Greer, who noted that the same concern was expressed last year and who asked what strategies will be looked at in the near future to help close those achievement gaps.

With the exception of language arts, the proficiency level for students with disabilities and multilingual students didn’t reach double digits.

“What we need to be doing as a state and as superintendents and principals … is identifying those specific children that were still struggling regardless what subgroup they’re in,” said Wright, the state superintendent, during a briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon. “You’ve got to look at individual children, because each child’s needs are very individual, and that’s what we’re expecting schools to do.”

School systems vary

Worcester County, which recorded the second-highest proficiency level in math at 39.3% in 2023-24 school year, moved into first place last year with a rate of 47.7%. Despite a drop from 69.4% two years ago, Worcester County still had the highest English proficiency last year, at 68.5%.

 A map of Maryland that shows percentage of students rated proficient on the English language arts exam in all 24 school districts. Click here for a full-size map. (Screenshot from Maryland State Department of Education)

One reason for that jurisdiction being the best in Maryland comes from consistent leadership, said state board President Joshua Michael. Worcester County school board member Jon Andes also was the school system’s superintendent from 1996 to 2012.

“This is a school district over decades that has had very few superintendents,” Michael said. “So there is a level of instructional coherence in that district. There’s a level of continuity in leadership.”

Just behind Worcester in math proficiency is Howard County, which recorded its students’ proficiency in math at 42%, pu from 41.1% two years ago.

Carroll County students had the second highest proficiency in English at 66.5%. Students in Dorchester County saw the biggest increase in English scores, rising from 33.7% to 41.3%.

Although Somerset County recorded the lowest student proficiency in math last school year at 10.1%, that was an improvement from the 9.8% recorded two years ago.

Despite the gains, lawmakers missed an opportunity to make scores even higher in the future, said Trish Brennan-Gac, executive director of Maryland READS, in an interview Tuesday.

The General Assembly approved a training program within the Excellence in Maryland Public Schools Act during this year’s 90-day legislative session. But no funding was attached to the program educators call a “coaching program.”

“We will not see as dramatic improvement in reading instruction in 2026 as we could have,” Brennan-Gac said. “Had the legislature funded that program, they would have been able to establish the coaching program this summer, train the coaches and begin to have them supporting teachers in the classroom this year, which means by the spring, when the MCAP scores were administered, students are more likely to have had better reading instruction and have reading proficiency rates increase.

“So next year, we will probably, hopefully see the same continued weak trend instead of a dramatic improvement,” she said. “So, if we want to see that dramatic improvement, then we have to get the coaching funded.”

https://marylandmatters.org/2025/08/27/minor-gains-made-in-maryland-test-scores-but-wide-demographic-gaps-remain/

Superintendent Welcome to 2026

August 25, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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MCPS: “Welcome Back, MCPS Families and Staff! Today is the beginning of another exciting school year, and I’ve got a feeling that this is going to be a great year for our students, staff and families. ...


“MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor is known for his love of fun videos ” By Adam Pagnucco.

TT Raps!

Why We Are Feeling Less Hopeful, and What to Do About It – Replies

August 25, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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What Can Help When You're Feeling Hopeless

Readers react to a column by David Brooks analyzing the gloominess trend in the United States.

To the Editor:

Re “More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us),” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 8):

Mr. Brooks ascribes hopelessness in the U.S. to the loss of traditional values and community. He has written many very insightful articles, but this piece is really off the mark. How can he say that America has been thriving economically and that “income inequality has gone down” in the last decade or so?

The level of inequality in America has reached epic proportions not seen in a century. A few hundred plutocrats hold more wealth than at least 200 million ordinary Americans. Donald Trump was elected because millions of Americans can’t afford health care, housing or a quality education and cannot get a decent-paying job.

The loss of community is directly related to our hypersteroidal capitalist economy in which good jobs have disappeared from whole sections of the country because the financial markets demand short-term profits at the expense of workers and their communities. And the Democrats have not done nearly enough to address these problems.

Furthermore, the deliberately addictive social media platforms — one of our “great” corporate inventions — rob people of genuine connections and damage teenage minds.

Mr. Brooks, the spiritual crisis and hopelessness are real, but this has occurred because of the unleashing of extreme greed and the complete corruption of our politics by Big Money going back to at least the 1980s.

Seth Mausner
San Francisco

To the Editor:

David Brooks attributes “very liberal” American students’ high levels of depression to their embrace of “autonomy and social freedom,” their hyper individualism, their “greed” and their worship of individual choice at the expense of “core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth.”

He does not mention factors like economic anxiety, climate change, environmental devastation, digital devices, social media, suppression of free speech or political despair in the face of nascent dictatorship.

I am a relatively happy 78-year-old very liberal man, but if I were a college student I’d be depressed, too.

Mr. Brooks’s analysis is disappointingly reductive in its omission of so many discouraging realities of current American life.

Stephen Kessler
Santa Cruz, Calif.
The writer is a columnist for The Santa Cruz Sentinel.

To the Editor:

David Brooks is right: People flourish where there’s not only prosperity but also “dense networks of relationships” and shared purpose. He’s also right that America and other industrialized societies have largely let material success crowd out the social and moral conditions that sustain a good life.

And while I agree with Mr. Brooks that culture is at the heart of the problem, I’m convinced that there’s still plenty that we can do to address these challenges through sound public policies.

Start by scaling “social prescribing” in primary care so clinicians connect lonely patients to community groups, arts, nature and volunteering. Launch a national service year to bring people together to solve problems. Reinvest in “third places” — libraries as one-stop hubs for learning, counseling, job help and civic life; parks, community kitchens and maker spaces that invite people to unite without having to spend money.

As the adage goes, politics is downstream from culture. Yet smart public policies can reshape culture by making connection the default of modern life. Both left and right care about the disconnection that Mr. Brooks describes. Let’s build the political will to start fixing it.

Kim Samuel
Toronto

To the Editor:

David Brooks focuses on the rise in hopefulness among poorer, more religious countries and the decline in richer, more secular countries like the United States and Western Europe. His reasoning is that “since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression.”

I agree with his analysis. However, he fails to point out the upside of the adoption of such values.

As a result of the trend “to emancipate the individual from the group,” previously repressed groups are freed from conformity to the norm. L.G.B.T.Q.+ individuals are certainly better off than they were in the 1960s. Religious minorities are freer to practice their religion as they choose. Indeed, “cat ladies” whose career goals are nontraditional are undoubtedly happier.

The real challenge is not to recreate the 1960s conformity but to create a society in which religious and cultural institutions provide a sense of community for all of us in all of our diversity.

David Silverstone
West Hartford, Conn.

To the Editor:

David Brooks encourages a focus on abstract notions of shared community that ignores the real economic and political conditions.

The United States has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality among developed nations. Globalization and deindustrialization have hollowed out previously cohesive communities. Economic mobility has stalled as one’s future success is highly correlated to what ZIP code one was born into. Meanwhile tech companies engineer our realities and are set to radically change our work lives with A.I. No amount of church attendance will fix these worries.

And why are young liberals more depressed than conservatives? Maybe they are aware enough to worry about their own and their children’s future in a world where government has failed to successfully address these problems. Perhaps young conservatives aren’t noticing those trends.

And besides, what kind of yardstick is “happiness”? In Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World,” the populace was given Soma so that they could feel “happy” while not noticing their oppression.

Mr. Brooks’s prescriptions for values and connection are hollow when disconnected from the societal context in which we live.

Diane Finn
Candler, N.C.
The writer is a semiretired social worker/psychotherapist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/opinion/americans-pessimism-hopefulness.html

Why More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us)

August 25, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By David Brooks   Opinion Columnist

a bleak photo of road lined with buildings

I hope you don’t mind if I pierce the general gloom with a piece of wonderful news. More people around the world report that they are living better lives than before. Plus they are becoming more hopeful about the future. In a new survey, the Gallup organization interviewed people across 142 countries and asked them a series of questions to determine whether they felt they were thriving in their lives or struggling or, worst of all, suffering.

The number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade. The number of people who say they are suffering is down to 7 percent globally, tying with the lowest level since 2007. This trend is truly worldwide, with strong gains in well-being in countries as far-flung as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay.

Unfortunately, there is a little bad news. Some people reported sharp declines in well-being. That would be us. The share of the population that is thriving is falling in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent.

To put it another way, the nations with some of the highest standards of living are seeing the greatest declines in well-being. We still enjoy higher absolute levels of well-being than nations in the developing world do, but the trend lines are terrible.

This should not be a surprise. I would say the most important social trend over the past decade has been the disconnect between our nation’s economic health and its social health. Over these years the American G.D.P. has surged, wages have risen, unemployment has been low, income inequality has gone down. At the same time, the suicide rate has surged, social isolation has surged, social trust is near rock bottom. According to a Gallup survey from January, the share of Americans who say they are “very satisfied” with their lives has hit a new low. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer report, only 30 percent of Americans feel optimistic for the next generation.S

What’s going on here?

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual.

I spoke with Dan Witters of Gallup, who broke down some of the contributors to social and spiritual health. People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.

The most comprehensive study of well-being is probably the Global Flourishing Study, led by Tyler J. VanderWeele of Harvard and Byron Johnson of Baylor. Their group has interviewed 200,000 people across 22 countries beginning in 2022. They found that a few countries do well across material, social and spiritual measures, notably Israel and Poland. A lot of countries score well materially, but the people who live in them are less likely to have a sense of clear purpose and meaning, like Japan and the Scandinavian nations. Other countries don’t do as well economically, but do very well socially and spiritually, like Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines.

I’d say that the nations that are doing well in that Gallup thriving survey are those that are experiencing rising living standards while preserving their traditional social arrangements and value systems. The nations like America that are seeing declining well-being are fine economically, but their social and spiritual environments are deteriorating.

Why have rich nations lagged behind in this way? VanderWeele theorizes that maybe it’s a question of priorities. “I tend to think you end up getting what you value most,” he told me. “When a society is oriented toward economic gain, you will be moderately successful, but not if it’s done at the expense of meaning and community.”

I’d add that we in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess are poisonous to our well-being. Over the past several decades, according to the World Values Survey, North America, Western Europe and the English-speaking nations have split off culturally from the rest of the world. Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression than the values that prevail in the Eastern Orthodox European countries such as Serbia, the Confucian countries like South Korea and the mostly Catholic Latin countries like Mexico.

The countries that made this values shift are seeing their well-being decline, according to that Gallup thriving survey. The countries that resisted this shift are seeing their well-being improve. The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price.

Two groups are particularly hard hit. First, young people. Those of us who are older can at least remember the pre-Bowling Alone era. But young people now have to grow up in a more distrustful and atomized world. It used to be that people’s happiness levels followed a U-shaped curve. People felt happier when young, then it dipped in middle age (it’s called having teenage children), and then happiness levels rose again around retirement. Now the curve looks more like a slope. People are more miserable when young, doing OK in middle age and happiest in their senior years. Young Americans are the worst off among all age groups in that Global Flourishing Study, as are young people in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Britain and other Western countries.

Progressives, and especially young progressives, are the other group that is suffering. Since researchers started measuring these things in 1972, conservatives have almost always been happier than progressives because conservatives are more likely to do the things that correlate with happiness, like get married, go to church, give to charity, feel patriotic, have more sex and feel their life has meaning.

But around 2011 something changed. Lower happiness levels transmogrified into higher levels of depression and mental illness, a related but different thing. That year, young progressives began reporting a significant rise in depression rates. A few years later, conservatives began reporting a similar rise, but not to the same degree. A 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 35 percent of “very conservative” college students said they suffer from poor mental health at least half the time, which is terrible, but 57 percent of “very liberal” students did, which is horrendous.

There’s a lot going on to explain these depression rates, but one of them has got to be that progressives are more likely to embrace the autonomy and social freedom ethos described in that World Values Survey, and this hyperindividualistic ethos is not good for your social and spiritual health.

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.

David Brooks
  • David Brooks
  • Opinion Columnist

In this piece I offer a cultural explanation for why more people in poorer countries feel like they are thriving while fewer people in rich countries feel like they are – that we care less about and are less versed in social and spiritual knowledge. Of course there are many alternative explanations. One is about momentum: Many poorer countries feel like they are moving up, while richer ones feel like they are stagnating.

Another, coming from Brink Lindsey, whose book “The Permanent Problem” will be coming out soon, is that affluence changes expectations: Affluent people want government and society to provide basic physical security as well as meaning and purpose and friendship. When they can’t deliver, people get angry and disillusioned.

Do these alternate explanations seem plausible? Are there others? Thanks for reading the piece!

My students resisted reading books. I found an unexpected solution.

August 25, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Guest column by Seth Biderman Washington Post August 24th 2025

A few months into my first year of teaching middle-school English in Santa Fe, I realized that a handful of my students were not reading books. I had carefully structured the class time so there would be 20 minutes for silent, light-dimmed independent reading. Most of the students tucked into a novel at their desks or on the floor — an angsty adolescent novel or a dog-eared Harry Potter. But six or seven kids in my class of 20 would just sit at their desks and stare out the window. Or doodle on the back of their hand. Or unfold a paper clip and use it to make intricate carvings into an eraser. (Smartphones, the ultimate distractors, were not yet a thing.)

I would come up to these kids, and in a very gentle voice, remind them that they were supposed to be reading. Any book they wanted — it was their choice. But they did have to read.

The kids would sigh, lift themselves from their desks and shuffle over to the bookshelf. This I had stocked with all sorts of paperbacks from the thrift store and my own collection. The kids would look at the titles for a few seconds, grab one with a thin spine, shuffle back to their desks, open it up and wait for me to leave. Forty-five seconds later, they’d be once again window-staring or doodling or eraser-carving, the book lying sad and forgotten before them.

Like every English teacher who has ever walked this planet, I interpreted their resistance to reading not only as a pedagogical challenge but also as a personal affront. More: It was further evidence that civilization was in decline. What better way to learn about honesty and humility than to read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”? What better way to understand compassion and tolerance than to read “The House on Mango Street”? What is life without “The Catcher in the Rye”?

There was also the lesser issue of the New Mexico state standards for English language arts, which I was legally obliged to insert into these half-formed human beings. These standards were full of proclamations like, “By eighth grade, students should be able to identify how an author employs metaphors to express key themes in a work of fiction.” Which those nonreader students would never learn by carving into their erasers.

I tried sticks and I tried carrots. I assigned mini book reports and punished the nonreaders with bad grades when they failed to produce. I created whole-class reading challenges, promising pizza parties if as a group we read so many books in a month. Following the advice of more experienced colleagues, I offered graphic novels and magazines to the nonreaders, just to get them started.

None of this worked. If anything, my efforts only made the nonreaders resent reading — and me — even more.

This problem kept me up at nights. I was 26 years old and fresh off a two-year stint at creative writing school. My secret ambition was admittedly naive: to become John Keating in “Dead Poets Society,” belting Walt Whitman from the desktops. Every minute a child did not read eroded my dream, left me defeated and gray.

Then I remembered my beloved 11th grade English teacher, Ms. Germanas. In her class, we had all read a book because she had made us do it. Each afternoon, we pulled our desks into a circle and read aloud “The Scarlet Letter.” No one had found much pleasure in “The Scarlet Letter,” but we had read every word of that book. All of us.

This approach flew in the face of my desire to create independent-minded students, motivated to read by their own love of literature and longing for human connection. But something had to give. I pulled the plug on independent reading and said that we were going to read a book, all of us together.

It was an unpopular edict, met with groans. The readers liked reading their own books, and the nonreaders liked carving their erasers. I held my ground, and that Friday afternoon the students came in to find the desks in a circle, and on each a copy of “Of Mice and Men.”

Yes, a book about two farmhands on a ranch in the 1930s, written by a White man now long dead.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told them. “We’re going to read this out loud, page by page.”

One boy raised his hand and asked if he could read first.

“No,” I said. “I’m reading it to you.”

We opened the book, and I began.

It worked. Little by little, Friday by Friday, the nonreaders stopped window-staring and doodling. They wouldn’t always turn the pages, but they would listen.Advertisement

After a few Fridays, I noticed that one of the most inveterate nonreaders was not only listening, but also looking at his book, even mouthing along. On a hunch, I pulled him after class, showed him how quotation marks worked, and asked him to read Lennie’s lines the following week. He turned out to be a natural, with a slow, plodding delivery. Steinbeck would’ve been pleased.

As we proceeded, some of the reading kids asked if they could take the book home and finish it. I told them they could not. And if I caught them reading ahead in class, I would stop and make them come back to the page we were on.

With that one student reading Lennie and me reading the descriptions at a leisurely clip, it took us a few months of Fridays to move through that slim novel.

I taught English for another decade after that class. Each year, I was asked to spend less time on literature, more time training students to hunt down main ideas in snippets of informational text. Each year, I failed to comply, and kept reading novels out loud.

I don’t know what the next generation of English teachers has done. I don’t know if middle and high school students still circle up and listen to literature anymore.

What I do know is that I will never forget how the classroom was dark and still and quiet as we came to those final tragic pages of that Steinbeck classic. There seemed to be very little happening in the world outside the windows. “Le’s do it now. Le’s get that place now,” our Lennie read, slowly. Carefully. And I read on from there, and the classroom grew even quieter, the circle seeming to shrink, the distance between us dissipating, falling away. And then the final words, and we closed our books and sat there, 20 human beings in a circle, the unbearable weight of humanity draped over us like an enormous wool blanket, into which it was all woven in, rage and injustice, compassion and love.

Seth Biderman is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. This is adapted and edited from an essay in his Substack, Unprincipalled, which draws from his former life as a teacher and principal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/08/20/reluctant-readers-teacher-steinbeck-read-aloud/

Chronic Absenteeism Still a Struggle in 2024–2025

August 19, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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empty desks in school classroom

RAND -Selected Findings from the American School District Panel and the American Youth Panel
Melissa Kay Diliberti, Lisa Chu, Lydia R. Rainey, Samantha E. DiNicola, Robin J. Lake, Heather L. Schwartz
Research Published Aug 14, 2025

Key Findings

  • Chronic absenteeism in the 2024–2025 school year remained above prepandemic levels.
  • In roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30 percent of students were chronically absent—a far higher share of students than in rural or suburban school districts.
  • One-quarter of youths in K–12 districts do not think being chronically absent from school is a problem.
  • Youths’ most commonly reported reason for missing school was sickness.
  • District leaders report using a combination of strategies, including family messaging and partnering with community organizations, to combat absenteeism.

Persistent high levels of absenteeism are slowing students’ academic recovery after the disruptions to schooling brought on by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Dewey et al., 2025). Even several years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, heightened levels of chronic absenteeism continue to be one of district leaders’ top concerns. Four in ten districts identified reducing chronic absenteeism in their schools among their top three most pressing challenges for their schools during the 2024–2025 school year, including 8 percent who ranked this issue as their top challenge. Districts’ concern about chronic absenteeism is on par with their concern about raising math and reading achievement.[1]

Beyond being a persistent challenge, chronic absenteeism levels also continue to be a puzzle. Heightened absenteeism was perhaps not surprising during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically upended normal schooling conditions. However, it remains unclear why increased absenteeism is still such a large problem for school districts years after the pandemic has ended and schooling routines have returned to prepandemic conditions.

There are many competing and complementary explanations for why absenteeism has remained above prepandemic levels (Mervosh and Paris, 2024). One hypothesis is that families and students became accustomed to districts’ relaxed expectations and revised instructional practices that were implemented during the pandemic; for example, schools might still be providing more-generous makeup windows or allowing students to make up more missed schoolwork online, relative to their prepandemic practices. Specifically, the availability of online materials to replace in-person instruction may have shifted at least some parents’ perceptions about the importance of their children being physically present in school (Diliberti et al., 2024; Saavedra, Polikoff, and Silver, 2024). A second is that many youths are struggling with mental health challenges after the pandemic, and increased anxiety or depression may be the reasons that students are missing more school (Stanford, 2023). Third, parents may be taking illnesses more seriously after the pandemic and keeping their children home for minor issues instead of sending them to school (Diliberti et al., 2024; Vázquez Toness, 2024). Finally, teacher absenteeism has also increased (Hansen, Aggarwal, and Wagner, 2025), which some suspect might make in-person attendance less compelling for students, although recent data have cast doubt on this theory (Jacobson, 2025).

Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing at least 10 percent of school days (i.e., 18 days in a typical 180-day school year or roughly three-and-a-half weeks of school) for any reason, whether excused or unexcused (U.S. Department of Education, undated).

In this report, we investigate the state of chronic absenteeism across the nation as of the 2024–2025 school year. We provide chronic absenteeism levels for the most recent school year using recollections from district leaders, updating our prior work on this topic from the 2023–2024 school year (Diliberti et al., 2024). We also investigate youths’ reasons for being absent from school and consider what strategies districts are using to get students back in school.

To address these questions, we primarily use survey and interview data collected through the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and MGT. In particular, we use data from an ASDP survey administered to 245 K–12 public school districts between March and May 2025.

We weighted these districts’ responses to our survey to make them representative of K–12 public school districts across the country. We caution readers that this is a very small share of the roughly 13,000 school districts located across the United States. Furthermore, although we weighted our small sample of districts to make it representative of school districts across the country at least on such observable characteristics as enrollment size, region, locale, and district poverty level, even our weighted survey sample might not be entirely representative of districts nationally. It is likely that the public school districts that enroll in the ASDP and take our surveys differ from those who do not in meaningful ways that are impossible to measure. We complement these survey data with interviews of 14 leaders of these districts between March and May 2025. Although we interviewed only those who agreed to participate, these data help us better understand and extend our survey results. We also rely on results from an American Youth Panel survey of 1,551 youths, ages 12 to 21, conducted in January and February 2025, which we also weighted to be representative of youths across the nation. More details about our methods are included at the end of this report.

The full set of ASDP survey results can be viewed and user-friendly charts can be created in Bento, a free data visualization tool. To learn more about Bento, go to www.getbento.info/about or email bento@mgt.us.

Chronic Absenteeism Remains Above Prepandemic Levels

In spring 2024 and spring 2025, we asked nationally representative samples of K–12 public school districts to estimate what percentage of their students had missed 10 percent or more of school days (i.e., had been chronically absent) during the school year. We used districts’ responses to this survey item to construct a national estimate of the chronic absenteeism rate in the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 school years, as shown in Figure 1.[2]

As reported in Diliberti et al. (2014), we estimate that roughly 19 percent of K–12 students nationally (or about 9.4 million students) were chronically absent in the 2023–2024 school year. Our updated estimate for the 2024–2025 school year is roughly 22 percent (10.8 million students). Because these estimates are derived from district leaders’ best recollections of their student absenteeism rates, they are subject to some degree of uncertainty, as represented by the confidence intervals in Figure 1.[3]

In Figure 1, we present these survey-based national estimates alongside annual chronic absenteeism rates for the school years 2016–2017 through 2023–2024 that we obtained from Malkus (2025).[4] Although the Malkus estimates were constructed using a different methodology than our estimates, we include them to provide the best available context to interpret our 2024–2025 estimate. Nevertheless, readers should use caution when interpreting the trendline because our estimate is both derived through a different method and imprecise because of our data limitations.[5]

With these caveats in mind, our 2024–2025 estimate is lower than the estimated 28 percent of students who were chronically absent in the 2021–2022 school year but notably is still above the prepandemic rate of about 15 percent.

Figure 1. Chronic Absenteeism Rates by School Year

A line chart showing chronic absenteeism rates by school year from 2016 through 2025. The data from 2016–2023 is obtained from Malkus and the chart also shows estimates from RAND surveys for 2023–2025.Data from Malkus (2025)Estimate from RAND surveys2016-172017-182018-192019-202020-212021-222022-232023-242024-25051015202530%School closures due to COVID-19 pandemic. Interpret with caution due to data collection interruptions.

This line chart displays chronic absenteeism rates by school year from 2016–17 through 2024–25.

  • Data from 2016–17 to 2022–23 is from Malkus (2025) and is represented by a solid blue line.
  • Estimates for 2023–24 and 2024–25 are from RAND surveys and shown as a dashed purple line.

Key data points:

  • 2016–17: 13.4%
  • 2017–18: 15.2%
  • 2018–19: 15.1%
  • 2019–20: 13.3%
  • 2020–21: 18.9%
  • 2021–22: 28.5%
  • 2022–23: 25.4%
  • 2023–24 (RAND survey estimate): 19.1%
  • 2024–25 (RAND survey estimate):  21.8%

A shaded region highlights the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years, with a note indicating school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a caution to interpret data from this period carefully due to data collection interruptions.

NOTE: Data for school years 2016–2017 through 2023–2024 were obtained from Malkus (2025). Data from 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 were obtained from our nationally representative surveys of districts. The y-axis shows percentage of students who were absent, and the x-axis shows the school year.

Data collection was particularly unreliable during the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years because of the transition to remote instruction that occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some districts stopped reporting attendance data and those that did report such data likely used differing definitions of attendance (Schwartz et al., 2021).

When we interviewed district leaders, their comments mirrored these findings. Even as their districts’ attendance rates improved, 11 of the 14 leaders reported that their districts’ chronic absenteeism rates are still “too high” or “disappointing.” As one leader from a district with more than 20 percent of students chronically absent said, “That number has actually dropped each year since we came back from COVID full-time . . . even though it still feels very high.” All of the district leaders with whom we spoke said that they are “continuing to work on” reducing absenteeism.

Extreme Chronic Absenteeism Is Highly Concentrated in Urban Districts

We categorized the severity of districts’ chronic absenteeism levels using definitions from Attendance Works (2024): low (0 to 5 percent of students chronically absent), modest (5 percent to 10 percent of students chronically absent), significant (10 percent to 20 percent of students chronically absent), high (20 to 30 percent of students chronically absent), and extreme (30 percent or more of students chronically absent). Figure 2 shows the distribution of our surveyed districts across these severity levels in the 2024–2025 school year. As shown in purple, about one in ten of our surveyed districts reported extreme chronic absenteeism levels in 2024–2025. Meanwhile, fewer than one in ten districts had low absenteeism levels, as shown in yellow. Most districts fell in the middle of the spectrum. That is, about two or three districts in ten had modest, significant, and high rates of absenteeism in the 2024–2025 school year.

Bar chart showing the percentage distribution of districts by severity of chronic absenteeism levels, separated by district subgroups. The severity levels are: Low, Modest, Significant, High, and Extreme.
Figure 2. Percentage Distribution of Districts by Severity of Chronic Absenteeism Levels, by District Subgroup

However, the severity of chronic absenteeism levels varied significantly across different types of districts as shown in Figure 2. Most concerningly, nearly half of urban districts reported extreme levels of chronic absenteeism, meaning that 30 percent or more of students in urban districts were chronically absent. Urban districts were roughly five to six times more likely to report extreme chronic absenteeism levels than their rural and suburban peers did (see the purple box in Figure 2). This finding suggests that dangerously high levels of chronic absenteeism is a problem that is largely concentrated in urban districts.[6] Of course, high levels of chronic absenteeism is not an entirely new problem for urban districts; even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, urban districts had higher absenteeism rates than their suburban and rural peers (Malkus, 2025).

We talked to two leaders in urban districts with extreme chronic absenteeism levels about why they thought their rates remained elevated. Their responses generally matched those of the district leaders in suburban and rural areas. They cited an increase in student and family disengagement, student illnesses and mental health challenges, and transportation issues, but they emphasized that the challenges they face in urban districts “are just that much more acute and concentrated.”

One-Quarter of Youths Think Being Chronically Absent Is Not a Problem

We asked about 1,300 youths, ages 12 to 21, who are enrolled in K–12 schools and are part of the RAND American Youth Panel, created in 2024, whether they thought it was a problem when children miss three or more weeks of school in a single school year. Most of the students (74 percent) said that missing three weeks of school is mostly a problem and that it is hard to catch up from that much missed school. However, one-quarter of youths (26 percent) said that missing three weeks of school is “mostly OK” and that students can make up what they missed online or in person (see Figure 3).

Youths’ perceptions about whether being chronically absent is a problem did not depend on gender, race/ethnicity, or age group. However, we did find one factor associated with youths’ beliefs about whether being absent is problematic: their parents’ highest education level. More specifically, youths whose parents’ highest education levels were high school completion (or less) were more likely than youths whose parents had higher education levels to say that they believe missing three weeks of school is mostly OK (see Figure 3). A full one-third of students whose parents did not complete further education after high school said that they felt missing three weeks of school is mostly OK.

Figure 3. Percentage of Youths Who Said They Felt It Is “Mostly OK” to Miss Three Weeks of School, by Parents’ Highest Education Level

Bar chart comparing the percentage of youth who felt it was “mostly ok” to miss three weeks of school by their parents’ highest education level: high school or less, some college or associate’s degree, or bachelor’s degree or higherAll youth26%Parents’ highest education levelHigh school or less (ref. group)33%Some college or associate’s degree*24%Bachelor’s degree or higher*23%

GroupPercentage
All youth26%
Parents’ highest education: High school or less (reference group)33%
Parents’ highest education: Some college or associate’s degree*24%
Parents’ highest education: Bachelor’s degree or higher*23%

NOTE: This figure depicts response data from the following survey question administered to a nationally representative sample of youths ages 12 to 21: “Is it OK or is it a problem when kids miss three or more weeks of school in a school year?” (n = 1,337). Youths were asked to choose between two response options: (1) “It’s mostly OK. Kids can make up what they missed online or in person” or (2) “It’s mostly a problem. It’s hard to catch up from that much missed school.” Only youths who were enrolled in K–12 schools at the time of survey administration received this question. The y-axis shows the percentage of youths. An asterisk (*) indicates that the subgroup percentage of youths reporting that it is “mostly OK” to miss three weeks of school is statistically significantly different (p < 0.05) from the percentage of youths with a parent whose highest level of education was high school (or less) and who said the same.

By Far, Youths’ Top Reason for Missing School Was Sickness

All told, 82 percent of youths reported that they had missed at least some school in 2024–2025. Perhaps related to their beliefs about whether missing school is problematic, children of parents whose highest education level was high school completion (or less) were slightly more likely than youths whose parents completed higher levels of education to say that they had missed at least some school this year.

We asked youths to identify all the reasons why they had missed school in the 2024–2025 school year. By far, the most common reason that youths identified was sickness: 67 percent of them said that they had missed because of sickness (see Figure 4). Other reasons that youths identified for missing school were not nearly as prevalent: 10 percent said that they missed school because they felt down or anxious, 9 percent said that they missed school because they overslept, and 7 percent said that they missed school because they were uninterested. Though still not very prevalent, older youths (those 15 to 17 years old) were more likely than younger youths (those 12 to 14 years old) to identify these three things (anxiety, oversleeping, and disinterest) as reasons for having missed school. Meanwhile, less than 5 percent of youths selected the other reasons noted, including needing to care for a family member (4 percent), lack of transportation to school (3 percent), being too far behind on schoolwork (3 percent), and work conflicts (1 percent).

Figure 4. Percentage of Youths Who Selected Various Reasons for Missing School This Year

Bar chart comparing percentage of youths who selected various reasons for missing school this year.Sickness67%Felt down or anxious10%Oversleeping9%Uninterested in school7%Needed to care for a family member4%Lack of transportation to school3%Too behind on schoolwork to go3%Work hours conflict with school hours1%

Reason for missing schoolPercentage of youths
Sickness67%
Felt down or anxious10%
Oversleeping9%
Uninterested in school7%
Needed to care for a family member4%
Lack of transportation to school3%
Too behind on schoolwork to go3%
Work hours conflict with school hours1%

NOTE: This figure depicts response data from the following survey question administered to a nationally representative sample of youths ages 12 to 21: “What are all the reasons you have missed school this year?” (n = 1,342). Only youths who were enrolled in K–12 schools at the time of survey administration received this question. Respondents were instructed to select all that apply. Eighteen percent of youths selected, “I haven’t missed any school this year.”

Taken altogether, these findings support the hypothesis that one reason absenteeism has remained above prepandemic levels is simply because youths and their families are taking sicknesses more seriously after the pandemic. What we heard from district leaders further supports this hypothesis. In interviews, some district leaders said that they believed schools and families had overcorrected when it came to dealing with children’s sicknesses by encouraging children to stay home for even mild symptoms. As one leader from a rural district expressed, “I think we had trained them during COVID.”

However, it may also be the case that youths report sickness as their reason for missing school because this reason might be more socially acceptable than others. Youths also might interpret sickness as encompassing other health and wellness reasons for missing school (e.g., “taking a mental health day”); therefore, youths’ responses may overrepresent sickness as the primary reason for school absences.

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Parents are burned out and lonely. Are our rigid rules making it worse?

August 18, 2025 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Column by Marina Lopes WASHINGTON POST August 14th 2025

My friend Melissa has the voice of a principal you don’t want to cross: calm, steady and, sometimes, dripping with disapproval.

One Wednesday night, I watched her use it on my son.

“Ollie. Down.” He was scaling her mid-century modern table mid-game of tag, seconds from toppling a plant onto her Persian rug. In our house, that behavior might have earned a warning or maybe a plea to take the game to his room. But at Melissa’s, it crossed a line, and he knew it.

Ollie inched his body down, each limb surrendering individually. Head hung, he braced for his scolding.

“The table is not for climbing,” she said firmly. “If you do it again, I’ll send you home.”

Melissa and I parent differently. At her house, there are no gentle reminders. Rules are clear. Expectations are high. Compliments are rare. She’s more likely to say “Do better” than “Great job.” At karaoke, she has no problem telling her 7-year-old son he’s off pitch and should try harder or sit down. I’ve even seen her return his drawings when she thinks he didn’t put in his best effort. Her style would raise eyebrows among many parents. Still, several times a week, I send my children over to eat, to play and, occasionally, to get yelled at.🌎

After years abroad, my husband and I were wary of raising our kids in the isolated bubble of an American nuclear family. In many of the countries where I worked as a foreign correspondent, there was always an auntie, a grandma or a neighbor hugging, guiding and yelling at kids who stepped out of line. In Singapore, grandparents are the primary caregivers for half of children by the time they’re 18 months old. In contrast, just 4 percent of children in the United States are primarily cared for by their grandparents. In Mozambique, child care is often collective, with one adult watching over a street full of kids while others work. But back in the States, my husband and I, like 82 percent of Americans, lived alone, far from family, surrounded by neighbors we barely knew beyond a polite hallway nod.

Inspired by the collective care I saw overseas, we decided to build a village of our own. So we moved in next door to our best friends: Melissa, Jeremy and their son, Jay. We shared school drop-offs, meals and playdates, but not parenting philosophies. At first, the differences jarred me. I would rush to comfort them after a scolding, or cut a playdate early and take them home. But to my surprise, my kids quickly learned to adapt. They learned that different adults have different expectations, and we learned to trust other grown-ups to show up for our kids, even when they didn’t follow our script.

Parents say they want a village, but too often, we only want villagers who parent exactly like we do. When caregivers don’t align with our philosophies, we sometimes opt out, at a cost.

Maternal anxiety and parental loneliness have surged to record highs. A survey by Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center found that 66 percent of parents feel isolated and 62 percent experience burnout.

I’ve lived the alternative. When I was writing my book, “Please Yell at My Kids,” I spent years studying how families around the world raise children in community. In places including Brazil, Singapore and Mozambique, I saw how neighbors, aunties and grandparents routinely love, care for and, yes, scold kids. In these cultures, the village is alive — not because everyone agrees on every parenting decision but because they trust each other to show up, even imperfectly.

That trust is eroding in the U.S., where parenting can feel like a tightrope walk.

Modern caregivers are swimming in expert-fed, algorithm-driven advice: gentle parenting, conscious parenting, positive parenting, attachment parenting — each with their own jargon and ever-expanding list of rules.

Many of the principles, like naming emotions, praising effort over outcome and modeling regulation instead of punishing, stem from solid developmental research. But as the guidelines become more rigid and complex, the unintended consequence is often less help for parents who desperately need it.

“There are impossible rules,” said Kimberly Bepler, a “grandmother doula” in Oregon who trains grandparents to support new parents. “You can’t yell. You can’t say no. You can’t discipline harshly.”

Bepler says today’s parents are deeply committed to getting it “right.” But many don’t realize how many other adults it takes to raise a child without burning out. Increasingly, grandparents, teachers, even coaches are stepping back, not out of apathy but fear of saying the wrong thing, crossing a line or being shamed for parenting “incorrectly.”

Sandy Wolfe got a crash course in millennial parenting at a playground when she warned her granddaughter to “be careful.” Her daughter quickly corrected her: “We don’t say that anymore. We ask, ‘What’s your plan here?’”

In a video that’s now been viewed more than 11 million times, Wolfe’s daughter walked her through the new parenting lexicon. “Good job” is now “good choice.” “Stop hitting your sister” is replaced with “gentle hands.” Even “I’m so proud of you” is now “You should be so proud of yourself.”

The internet had opinions. Some applauded the gentle parenting framework. Others rolled their eyes and sided with the bewildered grandmother. But beneath the laughs is a deeper tension: What happens to the village when the parenting rule book gets too thick to follow?

Rebecca Parlakian, senior director of programs at the early childhood development organization Zero to Three, says the goal isn’t to be perfect; it’s to offer kids safe, loving, responsive care. “They can adapt to different caregiving styles, as long as those three things are there,” she said.

There’s no question that today’s parenting ideals reflect progress, including more emotional attunement, greater mental health awareness and a commitment to kinder discipline. But if we want the village back, we have to loosen our grip. That may mean more screen time, sugar or a different kind of discipline than our kids are used to at home.

But the beauty of a village isn’t sameness. It’s the wild, messy, deeply varied ways we show up for each other again and again.

Parenting doesn’t need more rules. It just needs more hands.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2025/07/22/no-one-wants-a-village/