Ben is a 17-year-old high school senior who’s experimented with all the classic vices. He’s drunk alcohol a few times—“I like the confidence boost but don’t like feeling out of control”—and twice tried marijuana, which he says only made him paranoid. He vapes on occasion, mostly because “some flavors are pretty good.” But sports betting? Ben’s a daily user.

His gambling habit started when he was 14, playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a first-person shooter video game that pits terrorists against counter-terrorists. While the game is free, players can purchase “skins”—limited-edition cosmetic coverings for guns—which can go for thousands of dollars on the official marketplace. They can also spend $2.50 to open “cases,” which trigger a slot machine with different skin options. Ben never cared for cases, until he saw a video of a kid who paid $2.50 and won a $3,000 skin.

“That was definitely an eye-opening moment,” he told me. “I was like, wow you can actually make money playing these games.”

Despite that realization, he never got too far over his head. Using his dad’s credit card, he’d spend at most $10 or $20 a week. Importantly, it wasn’t a big part of his life: He’d open a couple cases while playing with his friends, then forget about them until they logged in the next day. When he won a skin worth $150, he rushed to sell it and cash out. “I knew if the money stayed in my account, I’d spend it all.”

Ben’s foray into sports betting began last year, when a classmate told him about Fliff, a “social sportsbook” app where users can bet on everything from the Yankees winning to LeBron James scoring 30 points without needing to verify their age. In a 2024 interview, CEO Matt Ricci described the app as an “introductory tool” for people—mainly young men—curious about sports gambling. Having seen tons of ads featuring celebrities and athletes promoting betting—Ben’s favorites are those with comedian Kevin Hart—he decided to give it a shot.

After a month of wagering with Fliff’s virtual coins, Ben got bored. He signed up for the real-money version, gave an older cousin $50 to submit his ID, and began gambling “for real.” He now splits his betting between Fliff and DraftKings, using the same cousin’s account. Asked what sports he bet on, Ben listed them.

“Even hockey! And I don’t even like hockey!”

When we spoke, Ben told me he checked the odds every day. He showed me six active bets for the upcoming Sunday’s slate of NFL games. One was a $2 parlay (a wager that combines multiple bets), which stood to pay out more than $1,000. His logic justifying all that gambling was as simple as it was immemorial: “I’m feeling lucky.”

Since sports betting has swept the country, schools have been caught flat-footed. Most states require instruction on the dangers of drugs and alcohol but say almost nothing about gambling. Some students are even betting during class. A senior at a Manhattan high school recently told me how he and his friends craft parlays while pretending to work on their laptops.

In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, which prohibited sports betting outside Nevada. Thirty-nine states have since legalized the activity, with most proponents highlighting the boost to tax revenue, as states take a portion of user losses—as high as 51 percent in New York—and to personal liberty.

Advocates of expanded gambling have also emphasized consumer protection. Now more Americans are free to transition from using black market, underground sites to legal, regulated ones that are accountable to state gaming commissions and, they argue, more concerned with player safety. As NBA commissioner Adam Silver wrote in a landmark 2014 New York Times op-ed that reversed the league’s longstanding opposition to legalization, “[S]ports betting is [already] widespread. . . . [It] should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.”

One of those highly touted regulations was safeguards to prevent kids from betting. The casino industry’s largest lobbying group, the American Gaming Association, has assured policymakers for over a decade that protecting youth is a priority. As the association’s president testified to Congress in 2013, “Regulated online gambling will provide law enforcement agencies with a willing partner for cracking down on underage gambling. . . . We can use technology to put effective protections in place.”

To a degree, this has occurred. Regulated sites such as DraftKings and FanDuel, where the majority of Americans are gambling, require new users to submit their social security numbers and IDs to become verified, and the names on deposit accounts must match the names on user accounts. Underage gamblers like Ben are not able to use a fake name and birthday and start betting like they can on most unregulated gambling websites.

Yet despite these rules, gambling has clearly reached teen boys. Reliable data remain limited, but a recent Common Sense Media report gives one of the clearest pictures yet. In a nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 boys aged 11 to 17, 36 percent reported gambling or participating in gambling-related activities in the past year, rising to 49 percent among 17-year-olds. Teachers, addiction counselors, hotline operators, and teens themselves all say the same thing: Boys are gambling. A lot.

Harm from betting isn’t only financial. Students who gamble are giving up time and attention that should be devoted to friends and schoolwork, exacerbating a trend of skyrocketing smartphone and social media use that already has teenagers staring at their screens for hours a day. The same Common Sense Media report found that 27 percent of boys who gamble report negative effects such as stress or conflict with parents; among boys who gamble at least monthly, the share rises to one-third.

Industry advocates either deny these findings, argue higher rates of gambling are due to increased awareness and reporting, or shift blame to unregulated operators like Fliff that take bets from minors. Asked about underage users on their platform, a DraftKings spokesperson told Rolling Stone, “Any use of our platform by minors violates both our Terms of Use and the law, and we actively monitor to detect and report this prohibited activity.”

Of course, gambling companies are not responsible for the choices of older friends and family members to aid and abet the gambling habits of minors by giving them their login information. But they are responsible for generating so much of the demand in the first place.

Ad spend for sportsbooks has surged from $25 million in 2017, the year before the Supreme Court overturned PASPA, to $1.4 billion in 2022. The Kevin Hart spots Ben can recite from memory are for DraftKings. The betting odds Charles Barkley touts on ESPN are from FanDuel. The companies that are blanketing the airwaves; sponsoring every league, team, and podcast; marketing gambling as easy, fun, and normal—they aren’t shady illegal bookmakers. They’re publicly traded, state-sanctioned behemoths.

And the next frontier is already here. Prediction markets like Kalshi let users as young as 18 wager nationwide on everything from sports outcomes to Taylor Swift album sales, treating those wagers as financial “trades” overseen by federal commodities regulators rather than as bets governed by state gambling laws. Their marketing follows suit, with legions of paid social media influencers pitching the platforms not as gambling but as savvy investing—a way to turn fandom and hunches into quick cash.

Pulling Back from the Brink

So, what now?

The first step should be to curtail marketing and impose stricter rules on the ways operators are allowed to promote their product. A 13-year-old should be able to watch his favorite sports team without feeling like the game is just a vehicle for betting content. Regulators should restrict campaigns featuring athletes and celebrities, as the UK has done. Marketing rules should reach social media, too. Influencers and affiliates pitching bets and “trades” as easy money should have to disclose every sponsorship, and operators should answer when they don’t. Regulators should consider bans on advertising that frame constant betting as something to be indulged anytime and anywhere. All ads should include disclaimers stating how low the odds of winning really are and how sportsbooks limit or ban users with any real chance of coming out ahead.

Education is also crucial, yet the policy landscape is thin. Only Virginia has passed a statewide mandate; efforts in Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia have all stalled. Voluntary curricula from the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health and Next Gen Personal Finance are already available, and the American Institute for Boys and Men, where I am a fellow, is developing additional resources for parents and teachers.

Efforts to educate teens on gambling should take a cue from what we know teaching them about the perils of drugs, alcohol, and sex: Simply advocating abstinence doesn’t work. Decades of evidence reveal that telling teens to “just say no” fails to reduce engagement and leaves them without the tools they need when they encounter these enticements in the real world. Pretending gambling isn’t a problem merely cedes the conversation to social media influencers, celebrity shills, and older acquaintances with legal betting accounts.

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Gambling education should cover two basic subjects: health and math. The first is teaching students to recognize what compulsive use looks like in themselves and their friends, why adolescent brains are especially susceptible to it, and where to go for help. The second is teaching about probability, expected value, and the hard arithmetic of why a parlay that feels like a good bet is almost always a terrible one.

When I speak at high schools, half my time becomes a Q&A session with boys running their betting theories past me. They want to know whether LeBron going over his point total in eight of the last 10 games means he’s likely to go over again tonight (it doesn’t), whether doubling down after a loss will eventually even out (it won’t), or whether an Instagram tout’s “can’t lose play of the day” actually can’t lose (it can). These are ideas no one has ever pushed back on in front of them.

Age safeguards on regulated sites can also be improved. Just as Citi Bike will soon require age verification before riding, gambling apps can do more than check identity at signup and hope for the best. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has pushed regulators to explore stronger safeguards against underage access. Here, as with social media, technology has outrun the rules. Some fixes will work better than others, and some will raise difficult privacy questions. But the longer policymakers wait, the more entrenched the problem becomes.

The industry’s favorite scapegoat—illegal and unregulated operators—deserves more scrutiny as well. While cracking down on offshore gambling often devolves into a game of whack-a-mole, targeted cease-and-desists from state regulators have proven effective and should continue. States should pursue fines and legal action against U.S.-based grey-market operators like Fliff that circumvent state laws, even when those operators hire the president’s son to shield themselves from oversight. They should also go after gambling in children’s video games, a concept so normalized that the CEO of Roblox—a gaming platform whose users include half of all American kids under the age of 16—has openly supported adding more of it.

More impartial research is essential. The federal government spends billions studying the effects of drugs and alcohol but nothing on gambling. States chip in a small percentage of revenue at best. That leaves the field to industry-funded work, which rarely yields findings that could inform meaningful regulation. While philanthropy has begun to fill the void—last year Arnold Ventures announced the largest-ever independent research initiative on sports betting—it can’t do it alone.

Finally, the most important thing states can do to protect kids from gambling is prevent the legalization and spread of online casino games, which are far more dangerous than sports betting. In the seven states with legal online casinos, user losses are roughly four times as large as those from sports betting. Slots, which account for more than 75 percent of online casino revenue, are engineered to ensnare users and have far higher rates of addiction, particularly for underage users.

Ben has seen those higher stakes and increased harms play out firsthand. A majority of his friends who played video games purchased skins and cases, and most got out unscathed. Those who didn’t were the ones who found themselves in the makeshift within-game casinos that allow kids to convert their skins to coins and play roulette, slots, and other enticing, brightly colored games. When pressed on why he thought those kids got hooked, he told me, “There’s gambling, and then there’s GAMBLING.”

Online gambling is here to stay. The question is whether we treat underage access as a design failure or let the industry write it off as the cost of doing business. Physical casinos check IDs at the entrance. Online, the door is always open, and gambling companies spend billions waving everyone in. Until that changes, kids like Ben will keep walking through.

Isaac Rose-Berman is a fellow at American Institute for Boys and Men focused on gambling research and policy. AIBM partnered with Arnold Ventures on this research.

Suggested citation format:

Rose-Berman, I. (2026). “Teen Boys Are Gambling. A Lot. The tidal wave of legal sports betting has easily infiltrated schools and swept up boys. There’s still time for commonsense guardrails and effective education.” Education Next, 26(2), 27 May 2026.

The post Teen Boys Are Gambling. A Lot. appeared first on Education Next.

At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry one good version of a thing, refuse the other nine, and eat the customers you lose in exchange for the trouble you save everyone else.

Jim Sinegal, his mentee, carried that habit into Costco in 1983. A Costco warehouse stocks around 4,000 items; while a supermarket runs 30,000 or more, and Amazon runs into the millions. A Costco buyer looks after fewer than 200 products and spends the extra time that buys deciding which ones earn the floor space, killing the underperformers, and doubling down on the winners. By the time you push your trolley through the door, someone has already rejected almost everything that could have been there.

Most of the internet runs on the opposite instinct. Pile the shelf higher, add the SKU, take the margin, say yes to everything. And the people using it are worn out.

I'd bet the next decade runs the other way. People don't want infinite choice anymore; they want fewer decisions inside places where someone has already thrown out the worst options.

Call it the Costco theory of the internet.

For 20 years we built the internet around abundance: more products, more creators, more opinions, more newsletters, more podcasts, more apps, more tools, more marketplaces, more feeds. The founding promise was access: anything, from anyone, anywhere, instantly. No gatekeepers, no scarcity, no permission. The shelf went infinite.

For a while that felt like freedom.

And then it turned into drudgery...

Every ordinary decision now comes with a research burden. Buying a toaster means reading reviews, scanning Reddit, distrusting half the reviews, checking YouTube comparisons, searching for "best toaster no affiliate," then wondering whether the person recommending the toaster is paid, deluded, or defending the thing they already bought. Choosing project management software turns into a 6-week intellectual collapse involving Notion, Linear, ClickUp, Basecamp, Airtable, Todoist, Things, a whiteboard, a notebook, and some founder on X insisting that the wrong task app is why your company has no momentum...

The internet gave us access to anything, and then forced us to consume everything, and then made us responsible for sorting all of it.

The modern consumer has become a part-time procurement department. We audit quality, decode incentives, compare vendors, scan reviews, avoid scams, dodge subscriptions, read refund policies, assess creators, inspect screenshots, and attempt, against all odds, to tell actual expertise apart from people who bought a microphone.

This is considered normal behaviour now.

And it's deranged.

The sane response to all this is, I think, a form of bounded trust.

Costco never promised perfect quality or the best product in every category; and it isn't doesn't claim to be a temple of taste. It sells enormous muffins, bulk socks, patio furniture, protein shakes, car tyres, petrol, hearing aids, rotisserie chickens, appliances, and tubs of dip large enough to drown any and all sorrows.

But more than that: Costco sells a higher floor.

Their promise comes down to two things:

1. you probably won't get ripped off, and
2. you don't have to inspect 900 versions of the same item.

Costco doesn't necessarily take judgement away from you. But it does absorb enough of the evaluation that shopping feels sane again, limiting the shelf, buying with discipline, backing Kirkland Signature with its own name, keeping prices legible, and standing behind the lot with a return policy that assumes you're honest. You don't wander a marketplace full of fake brands, sponsored clutter, manipulated reviews, counterfeit risk, and algorithmic sewage.

Nobody walks into Costco believing every item is elite. They walk in trusting that the floor is higher than the open market, and they'll pay for that trust.

The internet doesn't need more curation in the precious boutique sense. It needs operators who cut fraud, noise, decision fatigue, and bullshit, and who clear the garbage off the floor before you arrive.

Amazon deploys abundance logic in soul-destroying reverse. It has everything, which by now means it has too much. You can still find good things there (or so I'm told), but you do the sorting, and it's very much a case of buyer beware - seriously, buyer fucking beware: parsing the brand names, the reviews, the images, the delivery dates, the sponsored placements, the counterfeit risk, and the chance that a product with 18,000 5-star reviews still singes off your eyebrows is down to you.

A world drowning in options will pay good money for someone else's refusal. Because refusal has become a premium service.

More results stop helping once the results are polluted. Reviews that are fake, incentivised, or written by people with no standards don't improve by multiplying. Creators performing expertise for an algorithm don't add up to expertise. Tools that keep making the same bullshit claim to replace every other tool cancel each other out. And more options stop being a gift the moment you have to become an amateur fraud analyst to choose between them.

The internet's problem has moved from access to trust.

We can find anything. We can't easily tell what deserves our belief, our money, our time, our attention, or our adoption. The old internet solved scarcity; the new internet has to solve filtration, and filtration and aggregation are vastly different jobs.

Aggregation scales because it dodges responsibility. Open the gates, index the world, invite the vendors, let the users sort, take a cut. That became the dominant model because it suited the economics of software: more supply made more surface area, more surface area made more searching, more searching made more money.

Every open system becomes a target for the people gaming it. SEO gaming, review gaming, marketplace gaming, social gaming, recommendation gaming, affiliate gaming, attention gaming. The larger the platform, the stronger the pull to manipulate it. Eventually the user starts paying the tax, spending more time verifying, comparing, doubting, checking, and defending themselves against the system.

Costco-style trust starts when the operator takes - at least - some of that tax back.

A trusted operator narrows the field first, making the choices in advance and accepting the cost of everything it leaves out. Then it absorbs the complexity, doing the dull part before you get there: testing, comparing, rejecting, negotiating, standardising. Then it holds the floor. It doesn't have to make every item extraordinary, it only has to clear the obvious junk and keep a baseline you can feel the moment you walk in.

Most internet businesses miss this. You build trust by making the customer feel less exposed. Announcing your own excellence does nothing.

A marketplace makes you inspect everything. A trusted operator lets you relax, and in some categories that relaxation is the entire product.

Think about the felt difference between buying from a chaotic marketplace and buying from a retailer you trust. In the first, you're on guard the whole time, because every image might mislead you, every review might be bought, every brand might be a shell, every discount might be bait, every result might have paid its way to the top. You'll probably still get what you need. You'll get it defensively.

In the second, you still choose, but you choose inside a zone of lowered suspicion, because the retailer has put skin in the game. Sell you something bad and its reputation pays. Price something absurdly and the relationship cools. Make the returns hostile and the trust drains out. You might never put any of this into words. You feel all of it.

The internet is starved for that feeling.

And it goes well beyond retail...

A Costco-shaped media company wouldn't publish 200 takes a day. It would publish fewer pieces with a higher floor. Readers would show up because it spares them the feed, and it would earn its keep through what it refuses to run.

A Costco-shaped software company wouldn't sell a platform with 70 use cases, 11 pricing tiers, and a thousand features. It would make a clear promise to a clear user. It would end the internal debate. It would say: for this kind of team, doing this kind of work, this is the system. Use it and // or move on.

A Costco-shaped agency wouldn't offer every service that can technically be billed. It would define its shelf. It would turn down bad-fit clients, weak briefs, vanity deliverables, pointless retainers, and work that makes the operator richer while leaving the client more confused. Its standards would be part of the offer.

A Costco-shaped community wouldn't confuse growth with health. It would moderate hard, keep its standards visible, and guard the useful conversation from people who treat every room as a stage, because the health of a community depends on who it removes as much as who it lets in.

A Costco-shaped creator wouldn't post every half-formed thought chasing reach. They'd become a reliable filter. Their audience would trust their judgement because they show restraint, and in a world of constant output restraint becomes a signal.

The internet trained all of us to fear leaving something out. More pages mean more search traffic, more products mean more revenue, more posts mean more shots at virality, more features mean more markets, more services mean more deal flow.

Saying yes has become cheap. Yes to more inventory, more formats, more creators, more sponsors, more categories, more features, more partnerships, more slop, as long as it performs.

The next premium goes to whoever can say no and survive the revenue they walk away from.

Bullshit pays, at least in the short term. Low-quality suppliers pay, bad-fit clients pay, sponsored placements pay, mediocre content pulls clicks, extra features close deals, fake urgency lifts conversion, confusing pricing pulls more money out of people, dark patterns move the metrics. A growth team can always find a way to monetise confusion - and plenty of internet businesses start to rot the moment they work out that confusion is profitable.

The Costco theory says: sell relief, instead. Make people feel that someone competent is handling the market for them.

This is why the membership model works as well as it does. Costco runs as a relationship with an institution, and the annual fee puts the trust down in a contract, in black and white. You hand over money, habit, attention, and your default preference, and in return Costco has to keep the thing worth renewing every year.

It's a different game from the open web's casual opportunism. The mass internet wants traffic and optimises for clicks. The Costco internet wants repeat belief and optimises for "I'll just get it there."

"I'll just get it there" means the customer has taken you out of the comparison set. You've stopped fighting transaction by transaction. You've become infrastructure in someone's life - AKA, the default answer before the question is even formed.

Every founder says they want loyalty, but (time and time again) they build the machine that kills it. They overcomplicate the product, dilute the brand, chase adjacent customers, bolt on tiers nobody understands, publish filler, wave bad actors into the marketplace, swap human judgement for engagement metrics, and reach for pricing tricks, urgency tricks, retention tricks, interface tricks...

People commit when commitment lowers their anxiety. They pay when the payment buys them standards, accept fewer options when the survivors are safer, tolerate constraint when it comes from competence, and come back when the operator has proven that trust beats another night of searching.

A brand is a pattern of kept promises. Over time, people learn what you allow, what you reject, what you repeat, what you protect, what you punish, and on what and where you refuse to compromise.

Digital brands (and particularly the current era of influencer founded DTC companies) run this backwards, blurring their standards over time. They start with a point of view and end as a marketplace, or they start with taste and end as inventory, or they start with a community and end as a growth channel, or they start with a product and end as a bundle of loosely related monetisation experiments.

At no point do they stop to answer:

What do you let in? Who do you let near it? What do you push? What do you kill? What do you refund? What do you ignore? What earns the no?

AI means we can now produce content, software, images, video, music, analysis, pitch decks, landing pages, sales emails, reports, strategies, and whole micro-products at near-zero marginal cost - and so the shelf expands again, and the flood rises. The average unit of internet output gets cheaper, faster, and less trustworthy at the same time.

When production turns abundant, selection turns scarce. Raw output stops being the scarce thing - because the scarce thing is someone willing to tell you which output deserves your attention, which vendor is real, which product works, which argument holds, which plan makes sense, which tool is worth adopting, which document to read and which to delete before it costs you another minute.

The winners here will be operators with both A) taste and B) the power to enforce it. Taste without enforcement turns into slop. Enforcement without taste turns into bureaucracy.

The shallow version of this will be boutiques, directories, newsletters, AI wrappers, and "handpicked" marketplaces that wrap a tasteful interface around ordinary affiliate arbitrage; and of course, it won't last. People can smell fake standards. They know when a list exists to help them and when it exists to monetise their confusion. They know when the operator has actually turned down good money to protect the shelf.

The better version will be companies and people who make trust operational. They'll publish their criteria, keep the offering narrow, explain the tradeoffs in plain language, cut the items that underperform, and refuse to become a dumping ground, so that every interaction leaves the customer's life a little simpler.

The test: does dealing with you lower the load in someone's head, or add to it? If it adds, you're part of the noise.

A Costco-shaped business sells:

1. relief from evaluation
2. the feeling that someone competent has gone ahead with a machete and cleared the path
3. a smaller world that works better than the larger one.

The internet's current default setting is actively hostile to sustained attention. Everything asks for a decision, wants a preference, requests a subscription, a rating, a login, a notification permission, a plan, a personalised feed, an upsell, a dashboard, a profile, a follow, a like, a reaction, a review. The strongest customer experience on offer might soon come down to three words: we handled it.

It can be whole business model, if you let it, but only when it's true.

You can't fake the Costco theory with branding. You can't write your way into trust while the shelf is garbage, can't design your way out of weak standards, can't pose as a filter while the market dumps trash through your side door. It takes operational severity, the real kind.

The operator has to disappoint suppliers, partners, clients, contributors, sometimes the customers themselves. They have to pick the long-term trust account over the short-term revenue hit, and accept that every low-quality thing they wave through taxes the whole system. One bad product makes you inspect the next ten. One lazy essay makes you doubt the whole publication. One weak hire makes the team start to lower the bar. One incoherent feature makes the user wonder who's steering.

A low tolerance for bullshit has to run as an operating system, built it into how the place works.

In practice that means you remove things, you simplify, you say no earlier than feels comfortable. You define what good actually means and then make the standard explicit enough that people can test you against it. You refund when you fail, cut the features that confuse the product, stop publishing when you've nothing worth saying, turn down the clients who'd drag the standard down, and refuse any form of scale that lowers the bar.

Anyone can launch a store, start a newsletter, build a course, spin up a community, publish a directory, open a marketplace, wrap an AI model in a UI. Creation stopped being the test a while ago.

Literally, anyone.

The test now is whether people can trust you to exclude.

The Costco theory of the internet is simple. People are tired of sorting. Tired of comparison, fake reviews, infinite tabs, marketplaces that play like casinos, creators who recommend everything, software that needs a consultant to explain its pricing page, experts with hidden incentives, brands that treat their attention as something to strip-mine.

Most of the time they'd take a safer set of things over the theoretically best one. They want fewer decisions and a higher floor. They want someone with the reputation and buying power to bin the obvious garbage before they walk in. They want the kind of constraint that protects them.

None of this kills abundance. The infinite shelf stays. Some people will always want to browse, research, compare, optimise, hunt for the edge. But across a lot of categories the centre of gravity is moving.

The new edition of Permissionless is now free

I’m releasing a new edition of my book Permissionless today. I've rewritten it from the ground up: clearer, sharper, and rebuilt around the ideas I think matter most in this moment. And it’s entirely free.
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A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area.

The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change.

Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So scientists have enlisted some of the animal kingdom’s best flood engineers — beavers — to help.

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.

The beaver-engineered landscape has attracted other animals, increasing the area’s biodiversity:

“By felling trees, they’ve also opened up the canopy, and we’ve seen an abundance of biodiversity,” McCormack says.

Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek, he says, plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers.

Tags: beavers · climate crisis · UK · video

The cracks in American education don’t start in the classroom—they begin at the property line. Math scores have plummeted in a staggering 83% of school districts since 2009 and reading scores are down 70%. Smartphones and pandemic-era lockdowns have contributed to the decline, but well before the iPhone our modern education became trapped inside a geographically segregated housing market. Wealthy families are systematically buying their way into elite, walled-off school districts, leaving middle and lower-income students stranded in underfunded classrooms.

Welcome to The Dividing Line from American Inequality.

These visuals are all interactive and available with more information below.

See the visual story

Education is not considered a ‘fundamental right’ in America

Before the mid-1900s, property tax was mostly a relatively flat tax and public school funding was highly localized, small-scale, and supplemented by various state funds. But after World War II, the GI Bill and massive federal highway investments triggered a suburban boom, fueled by redlining and the systematic exclusion of minority families. Wealthy White homeowners concentrated their growing home equity into self-governing suburbs, creating tax-revenue goldmines for their local schools while hollowing out urban and rural budgets.

By the late 1960s, parents and civil rights lawyers realized that this funding system was wildly unfair. In San Antonio, Texas, parents in the low-income, predominantly Mexican-American Edgewood school district pointed out a stark reality: even though they taxed themselves at a much higher rate than their wealthy neighbors in Alamo Heights, they could only raise $37 per student, while Alamo Heights raised $413 per student.

They sued, arguing that this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) and in a devastating 5–4 decision (nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education mind you), the Supreme Court ruled against the parents. The Court held that:

• Education is not a “fundamental right” explicitly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

• Socioeconomic status (being poor) is not a “suspect classification” (unlike race), meaning the government didn’t have to prove a compelling reason for the funding disparities or protection under the 14th Amendment

• Local control over schools was a legitimate state interest, even if it resulted in massive funding gaps between rich and poor neighborhoods.

The Rodriguez decision effectively shut the door on using the federal courts to force equal funding across school districts. It institutionalized a zip code trap for education, ensuring that states were legally permitted to let a child’s educational funding be determined by the market value of the houses around them.

State funding closes the gap, until it can’t

Defeated at the federal level, civil rights lawyers pivoted to state courts. In 1990, the dam broke open when a court found that Kentucky’s entire public school system was unconstitutional because it failed to provide an adequate education to poor children. Civil rights lawyers used this “adequacy” strategy in dozens of other states, allowing more state tax dollars to flow into low-income districts, helping to overcome the inadequate funding from local property taxes. NBER data shows this specific influx of cash directly caused a gradual, steady rise in reading and math scores for disadvantaged students throughout the decade.

By the early 2000s, state governments were providing the largest single share of public education funding (roughly 49%), while local property taxes had dropped to about 43%.

For over two decades (1990 to 2013), American math and reading scores marched steadily upward. But between 2013 and 2015, that progress abruptly flattened, turned negative, and began a decade-long slide that left eighth-grade students roughly 60% of a school year behind in reading and 40% of a school year behind in math compared to a decade prior.

Researchers point to three major structural shifts during the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s that explain this decline:

1. The Financial Aftershocks of the Great Recession (2008)

When the housing market crashed in 2008, local property taxes and state revenues plummeted. Because schools operate on a lag, the deepest cuts to education budgets didn’t hit until roughly 2010 to 2013. School districts across the country executed massive layoffs, increased class sizes, eliminated counselor positions, and cut academic intervention programs. Students in the mid-2010s were learning in severely under-resourced classrooms compared to students in the early 2000s.

Even though state budgets for education had increased dramatically, when the housing bubble burst state income and sales tax revenues fell off a cliff. Facing massive budget deficits, 31 states slashed their state education aid per student by an average of nearly 10%. By 2014, the share of education funding coming from local property taxes had climbed right back up to its pre-1990s highs.

Student performance since 2009 has declined in almost every state, with math scores down in 83% of school districts and math scores down in 70%. Well before phones fully penetrated the life of children and households, math and reading scores really plummeted in large part when the housing market fell away.

2. The Dismantling of Accountability Standards (2015)

During the 1990s and 2000s, federal policies like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) forced school districts to hyper-focus on standardized test scores. While NCLB was heavily criticized for causing teachers to “teach to the test,” the intense federal pressure kept math and reading proficiency scores rising.

In 2015, Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which dramatically scaled back federal penalties and test-based accountability, handing power back to the states. The data shows that the moment this strict, test-based federal pressure evaporated, student performance in core subjects began to drift downward.

3. The Screen Explosion and Social Media Disruption

The collapse of student focus directly correlates with a massive cultural shift in the mid-2010s: the absolute saturation of smartphones, the rise of algorithmic social media (like Instagram and Snapchat), and the school-led push toward 1-to-1 personalized laptops in classrooms.

Higher property values, higher grades

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford recently released new data on student testing performance across the US and the results are concerning. Almost every state in the country showed a decrease in testing performance, but poorer communities have been hit much harder.

Student performance has declined in almost every state, but local districts reveal a more complex picture. Only 9 states since 2009 have shown an increase in scores, and all improving states are still below the national average. The regions that saw the smallest decline in performance were also the wealthiest regions. The wealthiest districts declined less than middle-class and poorer districts. This highlights a long occurring trend in the American education system that hinders upward mobility and strongly relates income to educational success.

Historically, White families moved from urban neighborhoods into suburban ones, but as minority residents have joined the middle class, the phenomenon of White flight has shifted and segregation continued. Instead, wealthy White families are moving out of more diverse suburban regions into less diverse ones. The demographics of the top 1% of districts are striking. The communities are 72% White, 12% Hispanic and 5% Black. By contrast, the bottom 1% of districts, as measured by school funding, are 51% White, 25% Hispanic, and 15% Black.

Between 2000 and 2010, 150 of the largest metro areas lost at least 20% of their White populations. Areas with strong home values and median incomes show the wealthiest White families leaving as they become more diverse. Over time, these disparities have compounded and the schools with the most funding became havens for majority-White communities. Since 1988, segregation between White and Black students has increased 64 percent in the 100 largest school districts, and 50 percent by economic status since 1991.

The Lower Merion district located in the suburban Philadelphia Main Line boosted its education funding 87%between 2000 and 2015 to more than $23,000 per student. That’s more than double the amount that Philadelphia, one of the poorest cities in America, spent on its students. The school funding gap between a top 1% district and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32% between 2000 and 2015.

Sprawling away from low-income communities

Do rich families just have more means to move to areas where better teachers are already located? Are the schools established in a place and then wealthy families congregate around those institutions? The data shows a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. More money definitely improves how those schools perform, but wealthy families are constantly monitoring where good school districts are and moving to those.

A 2025 study analyzed a 2011 “information shock” in Chicago, when the city publicly released new school safety and support ratings for the first time. In the very next quarter, home prices zoned to the highest-rated schools experienced an immediate 9% to 21% price premium, while incoming buyer incomes in those exact zones jumped by 16%. This indicates that affluent families actively track school quality and possess the immediate capital to outbid middle-class buyers for homes the moment a neighborhood school is verified as “elite.”

In a complementary study from the Federal Reserve, researchers found that parents were willing to pay a 2.5% premium on home prices for every 5% increase in elementary school test scores.

Urban neighborhoods aren’t avoiding school segregation either. Young affluent White families in recent years have moved into urban neighborhoods as well, but urban public schools still have high poverty rates and lower test scores than suburban schools. This is primarily due to wealthy families in urban cities sending their kids to private schools at higher rates than wealthy suburban families. Private school enrollment for high-income families living in urban regions since 1970 has relatively stayed the same, but middle-class families are disappearing.

Even in gentrifying neighborhoods, demographic change does not equate to integration. One study found that among urban neighborhoods that experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2014, student enrollment declined rather than becoming more integrated, primarily when incoming residents were White. In New York City, the White school-aged population in the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods increased from 10% to 29%, yet White elementary school enrollment only increased from 5.7% to 10.4%, suggesting many incoming affluent families remained disconnected from neighborhood schools.

Research also shows that schools with less diversity have worse test scores than more diverse schools. Integrated classrooms encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and exposure to new ideas. Students in integrated schools are more likely to enroll in college, less likely to drop out, and more likely to seek out integrated settings in adult life.

Private Schools are Increasingly for the Ultra Rich

In 1970, 13% of middle-class families enrolled their children in private schools. By 2011, that number plummeted to just 7%. Private schools have become exclusively for the ultra-wealthy, but historically private schools were for the ultra-religious.

K-12 private school fees have increased 553% since the late 1990s, while average incomes grew only 217%, causing the tuition-to-income percentage to rise dramatically for families.

85% of elementary school students in the US who were enrolled in a private school in 1970 were attending a Catholic school. With the decline in religious attendance since then, non-sectarian private schooling increased, along with the price. Between 1970 and 2011 and adjusting for inflation, the average cost for Catholic private schools increased from $873 to $5,858 in 2011 as they lost enrollment and funding, and non-sectarian schools rose from $4,120 in 1979 to $22,611 in 2011.

High income families increasingly secure educational advantages either through expensive suburban housing or elite urban private schools, while middle-class families are excluded from either option and pushed towards more affordable suburban districts. Lower-income students are left concentrated in underfunded school districts with fewer opportunities and limited upward mobility.

The problem is bigger than the phones

We have allowed public education and the real estate market to become so intertwined that it has begun to choke learning outcomes for our children. The classroom crisis in America is now so strongly mapping to the housing-wealth crisis in America, which is actively starving public education based entirely on zip codes.

We cannot continue to blame smartphones or pandemic hangovers for a systemic crisis that we have legally institutionalized. Before screens ever fractured student attention spans, the 2008 housing crash delivered a far more devastating blow to American education, tying test scores directly to a collapsing real estate market.

America needs to ensure that home property values and student success are not attached at the hip. Boston, Denver, New York and other school districts have started using a system where families rank preferred schools. This is put into an algorithm along with schools’ enrollment priorities, student type and random lottery numbers. The output matches students to their highest ranked school with constraints that help to increase integration.

The wealthy are hoarding public resources behind exclusive zoning laws and private school tuition moats all while the middle class is squeezed out and low-income students are left stranded. True educational equality will never be achieved until excellent schools are treated as a fundamental right for every child.

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Wrap the pipes and cover the lawn chairs. It’s winter in edtech. Among other announcements and legislation nationwide, Los Angeles USD announced its draft plan last week for screens in classrooms. They’re planning to limit screen time for kids in grades 4–5 to 30 minutes per day, grade 2–3 to 20, and grade 1 and below to—nothing. Exceptions for testing and accessibility, but beyond that—nothing.

Every edtech executive with >1,000 followers on LinkedIn (including yours truly) has published their #NotAllEdtech post arguing that we should focus less on screen time and more on screen value. These companies all argue we should focus on how kids use their products rather than how much.

Many of those executives should be careful what they wish for. Indeed, to observe how many products are used in classrooms would only validate the fears of many parents—screens that pacify rather than challenge; screens that isolate rather than connect; screens that decrease rather than increase a teacher’s visibility into a student’s learning.

Show Your Cards

I’d like each of my colleagues to show their cards. I’d like to see from everyone engaged in this discourse: one (1) stationary video of a full classroom session.

Speed it up if you want, but that video will do more to illuminate the real-world social and cognitive impact of these products than any company-funded research study, customer testimonial, or LinkedIn post. Just show us how the pieces fit together, how the humans, ideas, and technology add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Our Cards

Here is a video of NYCPS teacher Liz Clark-Garvey teaching an Amplify Desmos Math lesson called Sand Dollar Search. As a treat, I have coded each segment of the video for “what the students are paying attention to.”

How Our Education Technology Works

At Amplify, we know that, yes, certain enterprising students can learn quite well from an LLM or a library card. But most students benefit enormously from the motivation, accountability, and support they receive from their teachers. We also know that if you ask students “why do you put up with school?” the vast majority of them will say, “Because it’s where my friends are.”

So we use technology as a loom and weave together people and their ideas.

In Liz’s class, you’ll see students on their devices together. You’ll see them use those devices for short intervals—none longer than 8 minutes—13 minutes of screen time total. The devices first stir their thinking, letting them play with math in ways that are impossible with pencil and paper. Then the devices make that thinking visible to Liz who uses it in conversation with the whole class—calling kids to the board to elaborate their ideas, contrasting several ideas together, noting their similarities and differences, never speaking for longer than 90 seconds without checking in with students.

You’ll see students come to realize their work matters and react accordingly: working harder, participating actively, and learning more.

How Most Education Technology Works

Every edtech executive on LinkedIn seems willing to stuff at least one education technology into the wicker man and light it on fire. Everyone seems to agree that unrestricted access to YouTube is bad, for example. Everyone hopes this controlled burn will divert attention from their technology. Me, I hope the light from the fire helps everyone pay more attention.

With lots of education technology, students spend too much unaccountable time on their devices. Everyone works on different things. The dashboard gives teachers limited visibility into that work. Kids know that teachers can’t easily check up on them. They come to realize their work doesn’t matter and react accordingly: drifting off task, onto other tabs, and out of any state parents would recognize as “learning.”

I’m an edtech developer and a parent of elementary school-aged students and I welcome greater scrutiny of our industry. After winter comes spring—a time of growth and renewal. Many edtech companies will try to survive this winter by warming themselves next to a fire that is right now consuming several of their peers. But they should show their cards—show a stationary video of a single classroom—and let parents decide whether or not to use their products for kindling as well.

Parents value the human relationships that schools produce, relationships that support student learning and human flourishing. Everyone in edtech should show their cards. Are they weaving those relationships together or pulling them apart?

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.

It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.

— Paul Graham

Tags: writing, ai-misuse, paul-graham, generative-ai, ai, llms