Today’s guest is Jonathan Haidt, whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The New York University psychologist and Heterodox Academy cofounder argues that what he calls a play-based childhood has been replaced with a phone-based one over the past 50 years, leading to skyrocketing rates […]
In recent years, the tide turned against standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. Once a nonnegotiable metric for determining college admission, many universities have cast off such tests, declaring them unnecessary—or even racist. While many schools went test-optional during the pandemic, that trend seems to have continued even on the other side of COVID-19 […]
School choice opponents warn that students with disabilities lose their federal protections when they enroll in private schools. “It’s important for Arizona families to be aware of the rights they give up when they leave the public school system,” said the state’s Attorney General Kris Mayes. But the latest special education scandal casts further doubt […]
Seattle is getting rid of its specialized public schools in an effort to increase racial equity. Ironically, this decision may end up hurting the very students the policy change is intended to help. In 2021, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) moved to phase out its “highly capable cohort schools.” The district had three elementary schools, five […]
Since COVID-19 shuttered American schools, chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, with the number of students missing more than ten percent of school days climbing from 15 to 26 percent since 2019, according to new data from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). While the cause of this increase is easily pinned on COVID-era online schooling, the solution […]
There’s no such thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close. Starting in 1983, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program sent police officers into classrooms to teach fifth- and sixth-graders about the dangers of drugs and the need, as Nancy Reagan famously put it, to “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model […]
Mean Girls/Paramount”> The eponymous mean girls in Mean Girls aren’t as mean as they used to be. The 2024 version—a movie adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of the original 2004 movie—retains some of the iconic lines of Tina Fey’s masterpiece (fetch is still not happening). But the power of the original derived from how surprising it was […]
Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash ‘> A majority of American parents want kids to have access to their phones at school, a new survey finds. In addition, most parents think cellphones have a positive effect on their kids’ lives. Debates over teens and smartphones often contain the (assumed or explicit) premise that parents want their kids […]