Back to School: Three Big Challenges

Deanna Lee

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast by RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. Back-to-school season is in full swing, and there are many trends and changes right now that are reshaping American education. More and more schools are banning cell phones, trying to keep kids focused on learning. Some students are missing school at an alarming rate. And artificial intelligence seems poised to transform the classroom as we know it. It's a lot.

Fortunately, whether you're a teacher, principal, superintendent, a parent, or even a student, our guest today is the perfect person to help us make sense of it. Heather Schwartz is Vice President and Director of RAND Education, Employment, and Infrastructure. Heather, welcome.

Heather Schwartz

Thanks. It's good to be here.

Deanna Lee

Okay, so we're discussing education today, but the research division that you lead covers a lot of other topics. So, before we focus on back to school, can you give us a quick overview about your role here at RAND, what kinds of questions your team is trying to answer, and how you see those three areas—education, employment, and infrastructure—kind of connecting with one another.

Heather Schwartz

Sure. So, like you said, that division name, education, employment, and infrastructure is quite a mouthful. Really what the bottom line there is that the goal is for better schools, better jobs, and to build smarter and cheaper infrastructure. And finally, also to create safe communities. So, we have about 200 researchers who work in the division, and they come from a wide variety of disciplines like education, economics, and engineers. So, I would say to boil it down, the big questions that we ask are how can we strengthen teaching and learning in schools? How can we help people get good jobs and the training and the skills that they need? And how can modernize pretty-outdated infrastructure like housing, transportation, and water systems?

It's true that these are siloed topics. They are separate from each other, but they are fundamentally connected in that they're basic building blocks of a healthy community, and they're also engines for upward economic mobility.

Deanna Lee

Absolutely. All very big questions to answer, very important questions to answer, to be sure. Let's start with our back-to-school discussion. And we'll begin with a topic that seems to be on everyone's mind right now and in all the headlines, and that's AI. But we're going to talk about what it means for teachers and students as they head back to the classroom, beginning with teachers. How widespread is the use of AI among educators right now?

Heather Schwartz

Well, AI has definitely landed on schools' shores. We've seen a really large uptick in teachers' use of AI from 2025—so, think two school years ago, into this last school year, the one that's just completed a few months ago. And we know this because at RAND we have a standing panel of about 28,000 public school teachers from across the country. A standing panel is a group of people who agree to take surveys over time. So, we've been fielding surveys on a rolling basis to teachers for many years now. And over the past couple of years, we've been asking them about their AI use. So, the headline here is that about half of K–12 public school teachers are now using AI tools in their work. That's about double the rate from two years ago. The older the student, the more likely their teacher is using AI. So about two in 10 elementary teachers told us they were using AI weekly for their work as of this last spring, meaning a couple of months ago. Three in 10 middle school teachers and four in 10 high school teachers.

Deanna Lee

OK, and I'm glad you brought up the panels. I think we're going to be talking about a lot of findings from those panels today, and we'll certainly link to those studies in the show notes. Can you tell us what we've learned so far about how teachers are using AI in the classroom, what purposes they're using it for?

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, we've been asking them that. And what they tell us is, mainly, if you boil it down, they say they're mainly using AI to tailor their materials to their students' needs, that is, and to create instructional content. So, think using AI to adjust a reading passage to different reading levels among your students in your class, or asking AI to help you write quiz questions or to help develop a worksheet. So those would be common AI uses among teachers.

Importantly, we've been also asking teachers what tools they're using. And far and away, teachers and principals are using general purpose tools, think ChatGPT or other chatbots, as opposed to education-specific tools, like a tool like Magic School. The way I characterize this, and I have to credit this, I think, to Rebecca Winthrop, like shallow and wide uses of AI as opposed to narrow and deep uses of AI.

Deanna Lee

Interesting. And what are you seeing on the student side? How are kids using AI?

Heather Schwartz

Very similar pattern as to teachers—like very significant increases in the proportion of students who say they're using AI for homework or school. So as of this last year—again, a couple months ago—about two-thirds of middle schoolers on up said that they were using AI for their homework. That's up from about 50 percent, I'm rounding, from two school years ago. So again, what are kids using? General purpose AI tools, like chatbots, like ChatGPT. And they're using it pretty extensively in the sense that most of these students are saying they're use AI for homework in three or more of their classes as opposed to one. So, it's not students just using AI for math or just using AI to help them write an essay in their English class. They tend to be using it across the board. Um, when we ask them how they're using it, like for what types of purposes, I would summarize it as basically like "study buddy" help, meaning getting better explanations of their assignments, asking AI to help them brainstorm ideas, to look up facts, or helping them to either do writing or revise writing.

Deanna Lee

OK, another interesting thing that came out of the homework study you mentioned that found that students' use of AI for homework is increasing rapidly. Kids also reported that they were concerned about relying on AI too much. Can you talk a little bit about that specific finding and kind of what it means?

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, this is what I think the single most disturbing trend that I've been seeing is that the more students that are using AI, the more agree that AI is harming critical thinking skills. So, to put numbers on that, two-thirds of students agreed with the statement that the more you use AI, the more it harms critical thinking. That's up from like 50 percent of students who agreed with that statement two school years ago. What's especially concerning to me is that there's [an] increasing proportion of students, middle schoolers, high schoolers, college age students who strongly agree with that statement. So, I think this is really raising an alarm bell that we need guidance fast so that kids aren't using AI just to cognitively offload the work of school onto a chatbot that does the thinking for them.

Deanna Lee

Sure, and I'm glad you brought up guidance. I certainly want to ask you about that. It kind of sounds like we're playing catch up already. So, what kind of training or guardrails or guidance are teachers and students actually getting right now, if any?

Heather Schwartz

Well, AI policies and guidance are coming online. So, again, as of a couple of months ago, spring 2026, 80 percent of school principals nationally told us that their school or district does have an AI policy or guidance. So that's two times the proportion of principals who said that they had a policy as of two years ago. Okay, so sharp uptick, good. But you know, devil's in the details. Because we also interviewed a number of teachers this last year about their AI policies. And the teachers—as opposed to the principals—are often saying they either don't have a policy or it's a confusing policy.

The kinds of guidance and training that schools have been doing so far tends to be teacher-facing more than student-facing. And the teacher-facing AI guidance is often about teaching them about what AI is, or training on things like AI for lesson planning. That seems to be what's sort of the first wave of training and guidance that is coming. I think there's a lot of districts relying on what's called fair use policies, meaning like no plagiarism allowed, and relying on just that as their sort of guidance around use of AI. It's a slow-moving area because many districts are nervous about putting out a policy that's outdated, you know, within the minutes of publication because of how fast AI is moving.

Illinois just published a really extensive set of guidance this summer, which is unusual in the sense of it being very deep and broad. And in that guidance, it says that students can only use AI-enabled tools when they've been formally approved; when there's data privacy safeguards in place; and when there is clear disclosure, opt-out options, and human oversight. It's a sensible policy, but it's a high bar, and I do not think that most schools have anything close to that yet. My sense is that—and we're going to be asking questions to verify this of students and teachers this coming year. But if I had to hazard a guess, I think that students and teachers are primarily using free accounts through chatbots so far with their personal email addresses or else their school-issued email accounts. I think it's sort of wild west right now about how and what people are using AI for in schools.

Deanna Lee

Right, and it seems to me that a policy like that might be kind of difficult to enforce if students and teachers are using AI attached to their personal accounts, right?

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, absolutely.

Deanna Lee

Okay, so taking a step back, if AI is going to become a tool that supports teachers' needs and supports student learning rather than something that undermines those things, what do you think needs to happen now to sort of set the stage for that positive progress?

Heather Schwartz

Well, schools and districts do need to figure out what tools are okay and what's not okay, and whether you can use these kinds of tools on school-issued devices, like, say, Chromebooks. I mean, there has to be these guardrails on what's in, what's out, and what can you use AI for. Is it cheating to use AI or chatbots for homework, or is it not? Those kinds of things have to be clarified because students don't know, and they're working in the dark. And also, quite a few students are worried about being accused of cheating with use of AI. So, there's these downsides to this lack of clarity rather than merely like the lack of clarity encouraging sort of innovation and experimentation. Students and teachers both need to know rules of the road around AI, which is I know no easy task.

But on a bigger, maybe deeper level, I think that schools need to move from this sort of push versus pull, like a pull method of a chatbot to which you can go and ask a question and get an answer, as opposed to a push-in method where AI is embedded within curriculum or within the kind of digital materials that students are using in schools. Currently we're using this, largely using this, pull method, meaning I, teacher, use a chatbot or I, student, use a chatbot, and I go ask it a question and often it's doing the work for me to some degree. Whereas I think a more advanced state of using AI in schools is going to involve that AI becomes embedded within the day-to-day materials that a teacher is using or that a student is using, so as to help them become more of a teacher rather than doing the cognitive work for you.

So, for example, if I'm a math teacher. and I'm using my math curriculum that the school has given to me. And a use case that I'm excited about with AI is if students are entering their answers into this digital software, and I'm getting data in real time in my math class about what my students' answers were, AI could really help me and say, four out of 10 students are getting it wrong in this manner, and you could offer this mini lesson to talk about that particular misconception. I think that's a teaching aid that would really help teachers, and its sort of deep embeddedness within the learning materials—as opposed to sort of shallow, wider use like a generic chatbot.

Deanna Lee

It sounds almost like we're thinking of a future state that's similar to a computer in every classroom decades ago was maybe what we're envisioning. And now we're thinking about AI in terms of how we get it in the classroom in useful ways that will help teachers and students.

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, exactly. AI that teaches, not tells, to use someone else's phrase. AI should not be doing the cognitive lift on behalf of students, in particular, where they really need to be able to do that sort of first-draft thinking themselves. It's a mistake to have AI be there as a sort of brainstorming buddy that ends up being the crutch for that first-draft thinking. Because in that first-draft thinking, that's when you're doing the recall and that hard work of synthesizing and figuring out what the correct answer is or what the lead argument is, if I'm in my English class. That's the kind of thing that we don't want students to stop doing. That's a necessary building block to learning, and outsourcing it to AI, I think, will mean students simply don't learn this material anywhere as deeply as if they're doing it on their own.

Deanna Lee

Right, and that's good advice for all of us as users of chatbots.

Heather Schwartz

Yep.

Deanna Lee

OK, we could certainly keep talking about AI. But for now, let's move on from that emerging technology to some disruptive devices that schools have now been wrestling with for years, and that's cell phones. How much are kids actually using their cell phones in school right now?

Heather Schwartz

Well, I have a 13-year-old, and we just got her a phone, her first cell phone, a week ago. And I have to say, we felt like we folded. It felt like a failure, but we managed to "wait until eight," to use the phrase, waiting until eighth grade to get our daughter her phone. Yeah, cell phones are basically universal now. About 90 percent of U.S. teens have one and almost all schools let students bring phones to campus. And I would say it's more than three-quarters of teachers and principals find that cell phones are a major classroom distraction, that they harm classroom culture and school climate. And, I mean, it's not exactly news that students are often checking their phones in class when they should be paying attention.

Deanna Lee

Right, and when we're talking about checking their phones, we also have to consider smartwatches and other things that make it a little easier to check your phone in kind of a stealthy way during class. So, what kinds of policies are schools putting in place to try and address this problem? And are those policies working?

Heather Schwartz

Well, there has been really heartening movement on this, and nearly all schools have some kind of cell phone rule in place now. As of this last school year, I think a couple of months ago, about half of middle and high school students attended a school that had a so-called bell-to-bell ban, meaning no use of cell phones from the time you get to school until the time school is over. About a quarter of them were in schools where they couldn't use cell phones during class time, but they could during non-instructional time. So, think lunch or recess or hallway transition times. And then the final quarter of students said that they were in school where they could use phones in class, or else there was just no ban on use at all. So, it's become ubiquitous to have a school rule. The younger the students, like elementary schools, are much more likely to prohibit phone use during the school day at all, whereas high schools are much likely to allow use of cell phones during non-instructional time.

The good news here is that we do see evidence that the stricter the phone policy, the less likely the student is to use the phone during class. This is not watertight by any means. So, for example, about 50 percent of students who are in a school with a bell-to-bell ban, said they nevertheless check their phone during class at least once a day. Okay. But then compare that to the 80 percent of students who said they checked their phone during class at least once a day in schools that have looser cell phone restrictions. So, it means that the cell phone restrictions are dampening use, they're not eradicating use. And furthermore, students do game the system, no surprise. And half of students admitted that on our surveys that they have tried to evade school phone rules, like by hiding phones in their pockets or using smartwatches as a workaround. But consistent enforcement did make a difference. So only 17 percent of students with teachers that they called “very strict” said that they kept their phone hidden in a pocket during class, compared to half of the students who did the same if they had a teacher that was "only a little strict." So, teacher enforcement of the rules, not surprisingly, really matters. But my feeling is it's really worth it, because I do think there's real benefits from restricting cell phone use.

Deanna Lee

Absolutely. So, we feel for the teachers, and that's surely a difficult job. Speaking of the benefits, you asked principals—asked educators—about what they think about these cell phone policies. What are the biggest benefits? Obviously, these policies are making at least a little bit of a difference, but are there drawbacks as well? What were the educators' takes on these policies?

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, principals far and away are in favor of these cell phone policies and restrictions: 86 percent of principals said they're in favor. They said it benefits school safety and the learning environment, reduces distractions. Students, by the way, say the same thing about reducing distractions and actually improving school climate.

Deanna Lee

Okay, so some students are on board with these policies, even if they're maybe trying to evade them at the same time.

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, exactly. There's actually some surprising, well, I don't know, maybe not surprising, but there is student support for moderate bans on school, I'm sorry, on cell phone use. It's like, during class time, yes. During lunch and hallway time, no.

Deanna Lee

So if a school is rethinking its cell phone policy right now, what should the school keep in mind? What's important to consider with respect to the evidence we discussed?

Heather Schwartz

Well, I think that schools should be realistic about why they're doing it, and I think the most immediate payoff is in reducing distractions, refocusing students, improving school climate. I don't think school bans are going to be a silver bullet to improve math and reading achievement, at least not in the short run. I think improving academic achievement is a much more complicated set of inputs that have to go in to try to really move the needle on students' achievement. Nevertheless, I am definitely bullish on cell phone bans, because I do think we've seen strong evidence that it can help with that climate, which I think is really important. It matters that students feel like they are in a place that they belong, that teachers and students know them and are engaged.

I also think that schools should really be sticking with it for the long haul, because we have seen some improvements in absences, which is a very hard thing to move. And so, I think we're going to continue to see some upward trends and benefits from these cell phone bans so long as there's actually consistent enforcement of them.

Deanna Lee

Excellent. And now that you have a child with a cell phone, you have to be a little bit more bullish, right?

Heather Schwartz

Uh, yeah, true, and I really want her teachers to be enforcing those bans.

Deanna Lee

So far, we've talked about AI, how it could help students learn, and the challenges it presents for both students and teachers, what schools are doing to keep cell phones out of the classroom. But let's talk about an even more elemental challenge for schools. That's the fact that many students may not even show up on a given day. So, RAND's latest estimates suggest that about 22 percent of public school students are chronically absent from school. This means they miss at least 10 percent of days in a school year. And that amounts to roughly 10.8 million students, which is down from the peak we saw during the pandemic, but it still sounds quite high. Can you frame this problem for us and kind of explain how we got here?

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, so chronic absenteeism means missing, it's defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year. So, think 18 or more days in a 180-day school year, so put really simply a little over three weeks—three weeks of missed school. And not surprisingly, absences matter, like, the more absent a student, the lower the academic performance and the poorer their outcomes over the long run. Like you said, during COVID, absenteeism absolutely skyrocketed: national rates of absenteeism basically doubled. Pre-pandemic, it was about 15 percent of students were chronically absent, which is already high. And it went up to about 30 percent in the school year 21-22.

It has been coming down, so that's the good news. And we just published new estimates showing that 18 percent of students were chronically absent this last school year, the one that ended a couple of months ago. So, 18 percent of students chronically absent now, as compared to 15 percent pre-pandemic. It's still a lot. Like you said, it's a lot of students. And absences are absolutely cutting into students' performance. It's also dragging down a really slow learning recovery process from the hit that students took during COVID. Urban districts are hit hardest. I think about half of urban districts, the largest districts, had 30 percent or more of their students chronically absent as of one or two years ago. So, it's a really big problem for sure.

We've been asking about why students miss school, and illness is still the number one reason, yep. We wanted to get students' perspectives on whether attending school mattered, if they skipped school, why? What's the causes? And so, illness was still the most common reason, as we would expect, but mental health is still a big factor too. Many students said they take unofficial mental health days if they're feeling down or overwhelmed. And then there's just like everyday obstacles, like oversleeping or just not wanting to go or feeling like they need a day off.

I think that what we're seeing here is that there's been an attitudinal shift with COVID that's been hard to spring back from, which is like a greater acceptance of missing school for more reasons. I think parents are more lax about students not attending school, or more likely to keep you home and are more cautious with you now. If you have a cold, I'm going to keep you home rather than sending you in. Whereas before COVID, I might've sent you in if you had those sniffles. So, there's more caution. There's more acceptance of students not going to school for a wider variety of reasons, whether it's not feeling like it, or I'm feeling down, or I need that mental health day.

And so, schools have had a hard time changing these attitudes back to pre-pandemic norms. And frankly, pre- pandemic wasn't that great, either. So, it is a really stubborn problem that schools are working on but have like not full agency to control.

Deanna Lee

Right, so what tools do schools and school leaders kind of have in the toolbox that they can use against this? Because like you said, there's a little bit of an attitude shift that maybe is required, and there's only so much a school is going to do to be able to affect that.

Heather Schwartz

Yeah, I mean, the most obvious thing that is important to keep doing is calls home. And calls home early on, meaning like early warning systems, early in the year, catching this—nipping it in the bud—and calling parents to say that their students have been absent before 15 days elapses, or 18 days elapses, like well before that, getting in front of by calling, texting, home visiting, or hiring staff, like attendance coordinators. These are some of the go-to moves of school districts. Obviously larger districts have more capacity to have those kinds of attendance coordinators as opposed to the smallest and really rural districts that have much more skeletal staff.

Another move that districts have tried [is] community partnerships, because there are often many reasons that students are missing school, and it might relate to health care or tutoring or counseling. So, some districts have entered into partnerships, so that they can refer the families to those kinds of services to help coordinate and help them get their kids back to school. It's definitely been a hard nut to crack. Districts have told us that the strategies that they've tried, they haven't found to be all that effective, frankly. But the good news is that there is modest improvement—it's not nearly as large as we'd like to see in those reductions in the proportion of kids who are chronically absent.

Deanna Lee

For my own curiosity in thinking about this problem, how common is it in this post-COVID world for kids to have an online option if they're missing school? Is that a common practice or not really anymore?

Heather Schwartz

No, you're right. It is still common, because a lot of schools are issuing school devices like Chromebooks. And so, the idea is that on a snow day or some other school interruption that, instead of you just simply not having school at all, we transition to the remote work. I don't have hard numbers on the proportions, but my impression from various things that I've been reading is that that's becoming less common, but it's not eradicated. It's still there. It's sort of a poor cousin to being in school in person. Maybe better than nothing, but it's not a good replacement or analog to the in-person experience.

Deanna Lee

Right, and we learned that during COVID, to be sure. Okay, we've covered a lot of ground today. I'm thinking about these three areas we've discussed. They're distinct issues, but there's a common thread, and that's maybe how schools are adapting in a world that's changing really fast. So how do you think it's going for educators and for students? At a high level, what's the most important thing that you think can help schools meet these challenges right now?

Heather Schwartz

It's been a rough road, right? COVID was really hard. Recovering from COVID has been very slow and it's not fully achieved yet. I think it's ever more important in our age of ubiquitous screens for schools to be a place where students feel known and that they belong. So, the cell phone bans that we've been seeing, I think, are a good step towards getting schools back to a place of human interaction and direct [interactions]—whether it's students-with-students interactions, instead of looking around a classroom and seeing students' faces buried in a screen, you're seeing students interacting with each other more. And schools have definitely worked hard on trying to make students feel known even with naming every single student by name as they walk into the building. Is that a panacea? Absolutely not. But it is an important part of making kids feel like they're part of something, and that adults care about them.

Another trend that I'm seeing that I find optimistic is a real focus on high-quality instructional materials in math and reading. I feel like there's greater discipline about using evidence-based instruction that, I think—well, we know from the research—does make a difference. So, I'm seeing more and more schools in our very decentralized United States system getting on [the same] page about focusing on those basics and improving that instructional quality. So, I think that schools are working in the right direction, they're rowing in the right direction. But there's funding cuts, there's enrollment drops, all of these things are taking a hit on schools that are shrinking or consolidating. So, there's stiff headwinds right now, nevermind what AI might do for cognition. But I do think there are some optimistic trends that we're seeing in K–12 public schools.

Deanna Lee

Well, that's a good note to end on, and we'll certainly be watching the research that comes out of your division that continues to track these trends and these issues. Heather Schwartz, thank you so much for being here and sharing your expertise today.

Heather Schwartz

Thanks.

Deanna Lee

And thank you to our listeners. You can find links to the research we discussed today at rand.org/policyminded. Today's episode was recorded and produced by me, Deanna Lee. It was edited by Emily Ashenfelter. RAND's director of digital communications is Pete Wilmoth. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.