Last summer, I was visiting a Head Start center in rural Ohio when a teacher offhandedly mentioned to me that student behavior has become markedly worse since the pandemic. The teacher was confident she knew why: too much time on iPads at home.
The comment stuck with me as another in a long stream of anecdotes I had been hearing about worsening behavior. I wrote about the trend that teachers are talking about — and potential solutions — in a story that ran this week in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.
Educators and experts had a host of reasons they believe explains this trend. Like the Ohio preschool teacher, other teachers told me that excessive screen time is affecting children’s attention and social and emotional development.
Children are also experiencing more poverty, which can affect brain development, health, well-being and behavior. Between 2021 and 2023, the child poverty rate nearly tripled to 14 percent, from a historic low of 5.2 percent, after pandemic-era aid to families ended, for example. Last year, nearly half of families with young children reported difficulties meeting their basic needs, according to a report by Stanford’s Rapid Survey Project.
Some experts blame parenting practices to a degree. Scott Ervin, a former teacher and superintendent who now provides consultations and training to schools and teachers on behavior management, says there seems to be more of an emphasis on parents talking about behavior with children — sometimes to an extreme degree — and fewer consequences. That overload of “attention and control” when children are misbehaving at home is “just absolutely catastrophic,” Ervin said. “Teachers are having to deal with the aftereffects.” (These children are also entering schools where even the youngest must focus on more challenging academic tasks while getting less time for recess — even though recess is proven to improve behavior and learning.)
Likely, it’s a confluence of many factors. And as I found from my recent reporting, it’s forcing educators, districts and states to reexamine their approach to behavior and figure out how to address it. For some, like a Northern California teacher I visited, that means taking a more holistic approach to understanding what children are dealing with outside of school, and throwing out punitive or potentially embarrassing behavior management techniques, like public “clip charts” where student names are moved up or down to reflect “good” or “bad” behavior.
Other states, however, are doubling down on giving teachers more power to punish students — something President Trump supports as well.
This story about student behavior was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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