‘Addicted to Screens’: Teachers Sound the Alarm on Their Youngest Students
Even the most ordinary moments in daily life present a learning opportunity for young children.
Take a trip to the grocery store, for instance, where kids can pick up new vocabulary spanning the alphabet—from avocados to zucchinis. But today’s family trip to the store is just as likely to find a parent pushing a cart while a child sits absorbed in a tablet or smartphone.
From family outings to bedtime rituals, electronic devices have taken on a central role in the lives of children as young as toddlers. Forty percent of children have their own personal tablet by age 2, and nearly 25% of 8-year-olds own a cellphone, according to a 2025 national report by Common Sense Media. Educators say the effects are increasingly visible in the classroom.
Kids Who Were Babies During COVID Are Now Struggling With Reading and Math
lthough most of them were still in diapers when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, today’s early elementary students didn’t make it through the global catastrophe unscathed.
A new analysis from NWEA, an assessment company, suggests that these children are experiencing learning disruptions even now.
While kindergarten achievement levels in math and reading largely held steady during and since the pandemic, by first and second grade, students are performing below pre-pandemic averages, according to an analysis of NWEA’s Map Growth assessment data from spring 2017 to spring 2025. In math, at least, first and second graders have shown slow, incremental progress. Gaps in reading achievement, however, seem stubbornly stalled.
Babies Born During COVID Are Now in Kindergarten. Here’s What Educators Are Learning
They learned to babble to masked adults. They spent their toddler years on video calls with grandparents instead of at storytime in the local library. Many started preschool only to have it disrupted by quarantines or staffing shortages. Now, the first generation of children born during the COVID pandemic has entered kindergarten, and educators say they are meeting a cohort unlike any before.
When Lexia surveyed more than 200 kindergarten teachers working with early learners last fall, we wanted to understand what they were seeing in their classrooms. The responses offer both a clear-eyed look at the challenges and a sense of optimism about the path ahead.
Why we need more than technology to solve chronic absenteeism
During my nearly 20 years as an edtech executive, I’ve seen how well-designed technology can meaningfully improve teaching and learning. But I’ve also learned its limits.
Some of the most urgent challenges schools face today aren’t problems of scale or data, but of trust, relationships and human connection. A prime example of this is our struggle to address chronic absenteeism.
Chronic absenteeism emerged as a serious national challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at 31% in the 2021–22 school year. While rates declined slightly to 28% in 2022–23, far too many students continue to miss significant instructional time.
As school cellphone bans gain in popularity, lawmakers say it’s time to go bell-to-bell
The momentum behind cellphone bans in schools has reached more than half the states, as teachers, superintendents and education experts praise these policies as a way to boost student achievement and mental health, and to rebuild a sense of community that many believe has been diminished by students’ addiction to screens.
Now, the question for many states and school districts isn’t whether to remove distracting devices from students each day, but for how long.
States that have passed laws requiring some kind of cellphone policy now are considering going further and mandating daylong bans, even for high schoolers. The idea has gotten some pushback from students, but also from teachers and parents who say strict bell-to-bell bans aren’t necessary. Some say they worry about safety in the event of a school shooting or other emergency.
Are Students Prepared for College-Level Math? A Senator Wants to Know
Are high school students getting the preparation they need for college math? The question, long a focus of study in K-12 math education and policy, is now the subject of a Senate inquiry.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, sent letters to nearly three dozen selective colleges and universities on Friday, requesting information about the math abilities of their incoming first-year students.
The move follows the release of a November report from the University of California, San Diego, which found a steep increase over the past five years in the number of freshmen at the institution requiring remedial math
4 Early Care and Education Issues to Watch in 2026
If 2025 featured a mix of highs and lows in early care and education, 2026 is poised to bring a series of deeper challenges to the field, as states prepare to make difficult budget decisions in anticipation of the looming federal funding cuts.
“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.
“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
11 Critical Issues Facing Educators in 2026
Over the last couple of years, in our individual coaching and long-term hybrid Instructional Leadership Collective work, the two of us have discovered a pattern. Regardless of which country we are working in, school and district leaders and their teams are focused on the same common themes when we engage them in cycles of inquiry to come up with a problem they want to solve.
In surveys with nearly 1,000 leaders we have worked with over the last couple of years, it has become clear that there are 11 problems educators are working really hard to solve. So, for this post in the new year, we wanted to highlight the problems, which we also refer to as critical issues. In our inquiry cycles, leaders tell us they have been working on them for multiple years.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of critical issues, nor is it written in any particular order of importance, but we have grouped them into three categories, which you will see below. As we know, politics, especially the divisive politics we are experiencing in the U.S., infiltrate our schools, but the reality is that none of the leaders who we work with talks about politics as one of their top priorities. Politics is merely something they have to navigate—the topic for a future blog post—so they can get to those other problems.
Districts look to new year with new leaders
Larry Huff was named superintendent of Rockford Public Schools in Illinois after having led Elkhart Community Schools in Indiana since 2024. Huff is credited with leading major gains in student learning, teacher support and school-community partnerships at Elkhart Community Schools.
In Wisconsin, Superintendent Glenda Butterfield-Boldig is moving to the Clinton Community School District from the Bowler School District. Butterfield-Boldig also served as superintendent of the White Lake School District.
Matthew Cheeseman, who has served as superintendent of Beaufort County Schools since 2019, will take the helm of Craven County Schools in North Carolina on Feb 1. Cheeseman led Perquimans County Schools from 2016 to 2019 and was recently named the 2025–2026 Southeast Region 2 Superintendent of the Year.
School Shootings in 2025: The Fewest Incidents and Deaths in 5 Years
The overall number of U.S. school shootings in 2025 that resulted in injuries or deaths was lower than in any year since 2020, according to Education Week’s school shootings tracker.
Seventeen school shootings this year met the criteria for Education Week’s tracker—fewer than half the number that took place in each of the previous four years.
Seven people died in school shootings this year—down from 18 last year, 21 the year before, and 40 in 2022