Board games and card games make great gifts because they can provide lots of fun for years to come, and people who enjoy games always seem to like trying a new one. Another type of game I’d submit as highly giftable is the role-playing game, or RPG. The most famous RPG is Dungeons & Dragons, but it can also be one of the most intimidating RPGs to start with because the mechanics — essentially the rules and procedures that dictate how the game is played — are pretty complicated. With lots of character stats and abilities to keep track of and a very technical approach to gameplay (plenty of math and very structured rules), there is a lot to figure out before you can even really begin.

But there are hundreds of other RPGs out there with every kind of setting, theme, or style that you could imagine. And many of them are actually more beginner-friendly and easier to play than D&D itself. Unlike board games, the main thing you need to play most RPGs is the book that lays out the rules and story along with a few accessories like dice or pen and paper. As a bonus, RPG books are usually filled with thematic artwork — sort of like a nerdy coffee-table book — so they can be especially gift-worthy to the right person. To find the best RPGs that aren’t D&D, I asked game-shop owners, RPG podcasters, and experienced players to recommend their favorites. The 16 games below span a variety of settings and skill levels, and they’re listed in order, albeit very roughly so, from the easiest for new players to learn to the slightly more complex.

‘Mice and Mystics’ Board Game

Number of players: 1 to 4 | Game master needed? No | Accessories: None | Time commitment: Multiple sessions to play through all nine chapters

For someone looking to make the jump from traditional board games to role-playing games, Mice & Mystics is a great entry point. Players portray a prince and his allies who have been transformed into mice and have to go on an adventure to save the kingdom. The game comes with a board, pieces, and dice that make it feel like a board game, but it uses simplified RPG mechanics to guide you through different challenges and battles. You don’t have to keep track of as many character stats as you would in many RPGs, and the board has lots of visual elements. For example, there’s a wheel full of cheese pieces that players can earn or lose; they can spend from the wheel for advantages but face consequences if all the pieces are lost. There are nine “chapters” of the game; depending how long you want to play, you could play through one or two per session. I played this with friends earlier this year and really enjoyed how the simple mechanics let us have fun with the story. Mice & Mystics would also make a great introduction to RPGs for kids.

$73 at Amazon

$73 at Walmart

$80.95 at Noble Knight Games

‘Fiasco’ Game

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? No | Accessories: None | Time commitment: Single session

Fiasco requires neither a game master nor prep, making it just about as easy to jump into as a traditional board game. The game will guide you through everything you need to do to play right on the spot. Designed to tell “cinematic tales of small time capers,” it’s all about playing through situations where everything goes wrong due to the characters’ faults and flaws. “It’s like a Cohen-brothers film where everything goes totally chaotic by the end,” says Lauren Bilanko, owner of the Twenty Sided game shop in Brooklyn.

$29.79 at Amazon

$40 at Bully Pulpit Games

‘Goblin Errands’ Game

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Single session

In this no-prep-required game, everyone plays goblins who have to run an errand in the human world. “You’ve got to work together and be scrappy to get what you need and get out without causing a huge commotion,” says Emma Scaggs, a co-host of the Read, Play, Game podcast. The fun is that the goblins will inevitably be noticed and hilariously cause a commotion among the humans.

$19.99 at Twenty-Sided Store

$20 at Board Game Barrister

‘Wanderhome’ Game

Number of players: Any (best with 2+ but can be played solo) | Game master needed? No | Accessories: None | Time commitment: Single or multiple sessions

This Animal Crossing–eqsue game is easy for beginners to learn, says Jessica Enloe, a co-host of Read, Play, Game, because it doesn’t use dice and there aren’t many rules. The way the book is written is also very accessible, Enloe says. Players create anthropomorphic “animal folk” characters who travel around a peaceful, pastoral world completing challenges to earn tokens. It’s a very open-ended, player-driven game, which doesn’t technically require anyone to facilitate as a game master, with adorable artwork that’s inspired by the worlds of Moomin, Redwall, and Studio Ghibli.

$69.99 at Amazon

$70 at Warehouse 23

‘One Year of One-Page RPGs Bundle: Volume 3’

Number of players: Variable depending on the game | Game master needed? Variable depending on the game | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Single session

For beginners or those who don’t have time to dedicate to routine gaming sessions (most RPGs are designed to be played over multiple sessions), Scaggs also recommends one-page RPGs, which are shorter, quicker games that you can complete in a single session. Many are available for free or as inexpensive downloads online, but a compilation book like this one from publisher Rowan, Rook, and Decard makes a nice gift. It features 13 games, including one of Scaggs’s favorites, Sexy Battle Wizards.

$33 at Rowan, Rook, and Decard

‘Slugblaster’ Game

Number of players: 2 to 4 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

Scaggs also recommends Slugblaster as a good entry-level RPG. The setting is the small town of Hillview, and everyone plays as teens who ride hoverboards and go on adventures into other dimensions. Scaggs says it’s quick and easy to pick up; the rulebook is well structured, and the onus on players is light in terms of what they need to keep track of.

$39.95 at Powell's Books

$42.99 at Noble Knight Games

‘Monster of the Week’ Game

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

In this game inspired by TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural, the main cast of characters are a team of monster hunters. Each character is built around a monster-hunter archetype, such as the Chosen or the Gumshoe. It’s very simple without too many rules and simplified dice rolling. (I can attest to that myself — it’s one of the first RPGs I ever played.) There’s a lot of flexibility to create different stories in Monster of the Week, but the game is especially fun for those who like solving mysteries.

$32.97 at Amazon

$34 at Walmart

$40 at Evil Hat

‘Mothership’ Game

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories? Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

For sci-fi fans, Enloe recommends Mothership, an alien horror game that’s all about trying to survive in outer space. The game is fairly streamlined, so it’s easy to pick up quickly — there’s even an app to help guide players through creating their characters. She says it’s also a good game for newer game masters (called Wardens in this game), because the information provided in the manual is so well organized.

$59 at Tuesday Knight Games

‘Ten Candles’ Game

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice, candles | Time commitment: Single session

The basic setup of this cooperative horror game, recommended by Whitney Wolfe, owner of the Last Place on Earth board-game café in Brooklyn, is that there are ten candles on the table and each candle represents a scene. “All of the players at first have collective narrative power before the game master does,” Wolfe says. “So they are building this horror story together.” Everyone will die in the end, when only one candle is still lit. The whole point is to make something scary, Wolfe says, so it’s very suspenseful and it gets really spooky if you do it right.

$28 at Cavalry Games

‘Brindlewood Bay: A Dark & Cozy Mystery’ Game

Number of players: 2 to 6 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

Brindlewood Bay is a cozy-mystery-meets-cosmic-horror story. “It’s such a cute game where you get to play these little grandmas or grandpas, and you are investigating a mystery,” Wolfe says, “But it turns out you are actually investigating something paranormal.” The game is low prep and easy to jump into, even without much experience, and it comes with six different mysteries to play.

$40 at Atomic Empire

$40 at Amazon

‘Good Society’ Base Set (Hardcover + Cards)

Number of players: 2 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: None | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

Wolfe also recommends this Jane Austen–inspired game in which players portray Regency-era characters like a striving socialite or a gentleman suitor. “You’re around other high-society people, going to the ball, falling in love, or having some kind of dramatic financial thing with your dad,” Wolfe says. Whatever the story, there will be drama: Each character has a secret desire they’re striving to achieve by using their social connections.

$64.9 at Storybrewers Roleplaying

HOME - Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking RPG

Number of players: 1 to 4 | Game master needed? No | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Single session

Bilanko likes this kaiju-themed game that can be played solo or with friends. The story is about a mech pilot (the person controlling a giant robot from inside) who has to defend their home from an invading monster. But it’s up to the player(s) to create the world, the monsters, and the characters. “You can play it as a solo journaling game where you’re developing your home world,” Bilanko says, “and then you can run it for your friends as an adventure.”

$20 at Indie Press Revolution

‘Mouse Guard’ — Roleplaying Game Box Set (2nd Edition)

Number of players: 2 to 6 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice (the boxed set comes with custom dice, but it can be played with regular dice too) | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

Mouse Guard also has a Redwall-ish vibe — the characters are anthropomorphic mice in a medieval fantasy world — but it’s actually based on a comic series of the same name. No knowledge of the comics is necessary to play, though. The main characters are members of the Mouse Guard, tasked with protecting the mouse territories from predators and other threats. The game has a similar vibe to D&D, thanks to the setting, but the gameplay style and the character creation are different. For example, combat is played with cards that allow a limited range of actions. While I found it simpler than D&D in some ways, it is a bit more complicated than some of the games above.

$69.99 at Amazon

$69.99 at Thriftbooks

$175 at Noble Knight Games

$69.99 at Atomic Empire

‘Daggerheart’ Core Set

Number of players: 3 to 6 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

Created by the makers of Critical Role, one of the most popular D&D podcasts, Daggerheart is “designed to be an easier to approach fantasy game that has a lot fewer rules,” says Isaac VanDuyn, founder of the Carcosa Club gaming space in Brooklyn and creator of the game Outcast Silver Raiders. It’s set in a similar Tolkien-like fantasy world as D&D but is more narrative-driven, so the improvisational and imaginative storytelling are at the forefront with less emphasis on doing lots of math and following ultraspecific rules. It would make a great gift for fans of Critical Role as well as those looking for an approachable entry to table-top role play.

$59.99 at Amazon

$59.99 at Hot Topic

$59.99 at Barnes & Noble

‘Apocalypse World’ (Second Edition)

Number of players: 3 to 5 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

The aptly named Apocalypse World is a survival story set in a postapocalyptic, Mad Max–style society 50 years out from an inciting event. The game comes recommended by VanDuyn, who says it has “a very interesting mechanical system that is very simple to understand”: Players roll a pair of six-sided dice and add a number between negative two and positive two to the results. That’s the only dice roll needed to do anything in the game; otherwise, the game is played through storytelling and collaboration among players. Players cooperatively build out the world in the first session as they create their characters. Rather than planning everything ahead of time, the Master of Ceremonies (the game’s version of a game master) will ask players questions to expand the world and develop characters.

Apocalypse World has actually inspired a whole subcategory of RPGs, which are called Powered by the Apocalypse (PBtA) games because they borrow from Apocalypse World’s mechanics. Because it’s been so influential in RPG game design, it’s a great pick for both newbies and experienced players. “I have played many Powered by the Apocalypse Games, and I still think that the original one did it best,” VanDuyn says.

$39.99 at Atomic Empire

$39.99 at Gather and Game

$125 at Noble Knight Games

‘Vampire the Masquerade’: 5th Edition Core Rulebook

Number of players: 2 to 4 | Game master needed? Yes | Accessories: Dice | Time commitment: Multiple sessions

VanDuyn also likes this gothic game of “personal and political horror” from the ’90s where players portray vampires in a secret society. Like Apocalypse World, it’s more narrative-driven, focusing on the plot and characters more than combat or challenges.

$54.99 at Amazon

$49.27 at Walmart

$55 at Atomic Empire

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I came to Stanford University in 1981 after serving as a district superintendent for seven years on the East coast. I taught four courses during the academic year and advised a small number of doctoral and masters students. After the hectic daily schedule of being a superintendent, responding to frequent requests from individual school board members, and visiting schools weekly in addition to meeting with individual principals, teachers, and disgruntled parents, being a tenured professor at Stanford was like a leisurely walk in the park.

Then, after being at Stanford for five years teaching and advising students, both of which I enjoyed a great deal, a newly-appointed Dean asked me to serve as his Associate Dean. He wanted someone who had administrative experience.

Being superintendent of a school district answerable to my five bosses–the School Board- and then tasting the privileged life of a full professor for five years, I had no inclination to return to being an administrator whose influence on tenured colleagues, was at best severely limited and at worst, non-existent. The Dean, however, wanted me bad enough that he and I negotiated a higher salary–I would be working twelve months rather than nine (it is, after all, a private institution where everything is negotiated). Furthermore, we agreed that I would only serve two years as Associate Dean and, in addition, I could teach at least one or two courses each year. Finally, I would get a sabbatical quarter after completing the second year as Associate Dean. I said OK.

What did I do as Associate Dean?

I had to insure that all of my colleagues taught at least four courses over three quarters of the academic year. Some did not and I had to badger them to do so. I handled students’ complaints with particular professors’ poor teaching or the few faculty who were habitually inattentive to students’ work, that is, didn’t read student papers, ignored students’ contributions to discussions, or seldom met with their advisees. I also followed up on doctoral students’ complaints about unavailability of their dissertation advisers, and I represented the Dean on occasions he could not attend campus meetings or social events. So with the help of an skillful administrative secretary, the first year went smoothly.

The second year I had an idea. University professors seldom get observed as they teach except by their students. As a superintendent I had observed over a thousand teachers in my district over the seven years I served. Even prior to that when I ran a project in the Washington, D.C. public schools, I supervised groups of first-year teachers. Observe and discuss observations with teachers, well, I could do that. Why not observe university professors?

I sent out a personal letter (this was before email became standard communication) to each of my 36 colleagues asking them if they wanted me to observe one of their classes and meet afterwards to discuss what I had seen. I made clear that I would make no judgment about their lesson but describe to them what I saw and have a conversation around what they had intended to happen in the hour or so I observed, what they thought had occurred, and what I had seen. Nothing would be written down (except for my notes which I shared with each faculty member). It would be a conversation. I did ask them to supply me with the readings that students were assigned for the session I observed and what the professor wanted to accomplish during the hour or 90-minute class.

Of the 36 faculty who received the letter, 35 agreed (the 36th came to me in the middle of the year and asked me to observe his class). None of them–yes, that is correct–none had ever been observed before by anyone in the Graduate School of Education or University. Two professors, however, I had observed previously because of student complaints; I had discussed those complaints with the professor and then observed their lectures and discussions and followed up with another conversation..

So for each of the ten-week quarters of the academic year, I observed professors until I saw all 36 colleagues. Each faculty member scheduled a follow-up conversation with me that we held in their office.

What happened?

For me, it was a fine learning experience. I got to read articles in subject matter I knew a smattering (e.g., economics of education, adolescent psychological development, standardized test development). I heard colleagues lecture, saw them discuss readings from their syllabi, and, for me, I picked up new knowledge and ways of teaching graduate students I had not tried in my courses.

As for my colleagues, a common response during the conversations we had following the observations was gratitude for an experience they had not had as a professor. Simply talking about the mechanics of a lecture or discussion, what they thought had worked and had not, the surprises that popped up during the lesson–all of that was a new experience for nearly all of the faculty. A few asked me to return again and we negotiated subsequent visits. Overall, I felt–and seemingly most of my colleagues agreed–that the experience was worthwhile because I and they wanted to talk about the ins-and-outs of teaching and had lacked opportunities to do so in their career as professors.

Those conversations over the year got me thinking more deeply about the gap between rhetoric and practice among premier universities like Stanford. Research universities preach the importance of teaching–the rhetoric is omnipresent. Moreover, professors and graduate students receive annual teaching awards, and there are programs to help professors to improve their teaching. Yet the University had not created the conditions for faculty to share with colleagues the how and what of their teaching through observation and discussion of lectures and seminars.

That year as Associate Dean sitting in on faculty lectures and seminars led me on an intellectual journey plumbing a question that nagged at me as I observed and conversed with colleagues: how come universities say teaching is all-important yet all of the structures and actual (not symbolic) rewards in tenure, promotion, and salary go to professors who publish research articles and books?

To answer that question I did a historical study of teaching and research at Stanford in one department–History and one professional school, the School of Medicine. In completing How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890-1990, I learned how universities like Stanford, have both structures and incentives that insure teaching will be subordinate to the primary tasks of doing research and getting it published.

To my knowledge, no voluntary observations of professors and conversations about teaching have occurred in the Graduate School of Education since 1986-1988.

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

An obscure university report has unleashed a cascade of criticism over high school grade inflation and university admissions standards.

Last month, a committee at the University of California San Diego described a sharp increase in the number of college students there who need remedial math, in some cases even below middle school levels. The report pointed to California’s decision to drop standardized tests from admissions and the increasing number of students from the state’s high-poverty public schools.

“Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” warned the 13-person committee of faculty and administrators. This report caught fire across the internet because to critics it represents something bigger: an example of lower standards in education and equity efforts run amok.

The learning declines in American schools are indeed alarming and present new challenges for colleges. I want to focus, though, on a specific claim in the report and many associated commentaries: that students with weak math scores are harmed by being admitted into UCSD.

In reality there is a significant body of research that suggests precisely the opposite, says Zachary Bleemer, a Princeton University economist who has studied University of California admissions extensively. “There’s no advantage to the student to being pushed into a less selective university,” says Bleemer. “Instead, you’re just taking away the advantages that a school like UC San Diego offers them.”

This suggests that selective universities like UCSD aren’t helping underprepared students by rejecting them, even though that might be the easier option for professors and administrators.

In one paper, Bleemer examined a policy from the early 2000s that automatically admitted students to certain UC schools, including UCSD, based on their high school class rank, without regard to their SAT scores.

At first glance, these good-GPA, low-SAT students, who were typically from high-poverty high schools, struggled in college. They had lower grades and were less likely to graduate than their UC peers.

But that’s not the right point of comparison, says Bleemer. The better question is what would have happened to those students had they not been admitted to a UC school. He was able to disentangle this by comparing them to an essentially identical group of students who just missed getting in.

Here the results flipped on their head: Attending a UC school increased students’ chances of graduating college by several percentage points and their early career wages rose by several thousand dollars annually.

This undermines the notion that students suffer if they are admitted to selective schools where they may have weaker preparation than their peers. In the context of affirmative action, this is often referred to as a potential “mismatch.” In another paper, Bleemer examined this directly. He found that banning race-based affirmative action in California hurt underrepresented students’ chances of earning a college degree as well as their income later in life. Again no evidence of mismatch — just the opposite.

A separate study of Bleemer’s looked at a more narrow access question. In 2008, UC Santa Cruz’s economics department set a GPA threshold for majors of 2.8. The likely logic here was understandable: Students who couldn’t manage even a B average in introductory economics weren’t well equipped to major in the subject. Yet Bleemer found that students who were just short of the GPA cutoff earned substantially less money in their early 20s as a result.

I’ve focused on Bleemer’s work because it’s on the UC system. Other research generally finds similar results.

Jack Mountjoy, an economist at the University of Chicago, studied students in Texas who were denied admissions to certain public colleges because their test scores were too low. Several years later, he found, those students were less likely to hold a degree and made less money compared to all-but identical students who barely reached the admissions threshold.

The students who did get in were typical high school graduates, not academic superstars. Some didn’t graduate or struggled in college. Yet overall their “outcomes are significant improvements over the typical trajectories these marginal students would have experienced had they been rejected instead,” writes Mountjoy.

Although there remains some debate about the mismatch theory, an overview from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, acknowledged that in the undergraduate context “students are at least as likely to graduate if they attend more elite schools—indeed, often more so.”

The takeaway from these papers is the same: Limiting students’ access to colleges or courses because they are deemed underprepared does not seem to do them any favors. It actually just holds them back, at least in many contexts where this has been studied.

This makes sense. Selective colleges tend to have more resources, so may be better equipped to help students who need remediation. Students themselves are opting into these schools, so they apparently think it’s the best choice.

All of this is relevant to the current discussion over the admissions standards at UCSD and other selective schools. Obviously we want high schools to better prepare students academically. (I spend much of my time writing about how K-12 schools can improve.) But when students graduate lacking specific skills, as inevitably will be the case for some, colleges have to decide how to respond.

The UCSD committee recommends more aggressively screening out students who struggle in math. It also proposes scaling back the number of students from high-needs public schools. This figure has increased particularly sharply at UCSD recently and accounts for some of the rise in remediation.

The report emphasizes the university’s “limited instructional resources.” Yet less-selective public universities in the state tend to have even less funding than UC schools.

A spokesperson for UCSD did not make someone from the committee available for an interview and declined to respond to written questions.

For his part, Bleemer understands the preferences of faculty for fewer students who need extra help or who attended higher-needs high schools. “There’s nothing easier than teaching a class where everyone gets an A,” he says. (“I’m at a university that passes the buck. I should emphasize my own hypocrisy here,” acknowledges Bleemer, who teaches at Princeton.)

In competitive college admissions, there are many potential objectives for a school. Some applicants will always lose out. Faculty and staff at UCSD are free to make the case for whatever admissions standards they like. But we should be skeptical of the suggestion that students are being rejected for their own good.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s a sentiment that’s pretty common to hear from teachers:

The sentiment is, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Teachers teach, but we can’t force the student to learn. If they choose not to learn, that’s up to them.

“She didn’t do anything for her essay. She’s going to find out how much a 0 affects her grade.”

“I’ve given him every resource he needs. If he doesn’t open the book, there’s nothing more I can do.”

High Accountability Teaching

I try to teach in a very different way. It’s what I call “high accountability teaching.” The message is: you are here to learn, I care about your learning, and I expect you to participate and do your part to learn.

I think this is a real dividing line between teachers. Some teachers say it’s their job to teach, and students can choose whether they want to learn. Others say they will do everything in their power to make sure every student learns.

A Mental Model

Before getting into some of the nitty gritty of this type of teaching, we need a mental model. Credit to Adam Boxer, from whom I learned this mental model.

In any group of students, motivation to learn will fall on a bell curve. We can roughly divide that bell curve into three groups.

On the right are “ducklings.” Ducklings will generally do what you ask. They don’t particularly need high accountability teaching. They’re the students every teacher wants to have.

On the left are “rascals.” Rascals will test boundaries, challenge the teacher, and generally see what they can get away with.

In the middle — the largest group — are “swingers.” (Lol, blame Adam, his word not mine.) Swingers can go either way. They tend to follow the crowd. If everyone else has their nose to the grindstone working hard, they will get to work. If everyone else is diligently paying attention, they will follow suit. And if everyone else is goofing off, they will happily join in. 1

The core of high accountability teaching is to get as many of the swingers on board as possible.

There will always be a few rascals. It’s absolutely possible to get rascals motivated and learning. But motivating rascals takes a lot of individual effort and relationship-building. If I’m playing whack-a-mole because the swingers are causing a ruckus, I’ll never have the time and energy to motivate the rascals. If I can get some momentum with the swingers, I can focus my efforts on the final few students who need individual attention.

Also, rascalhood is relative. If a bunch of other students are stealing pencils and having a chat instead of doing math, rascals will up the ante and throw a calculator at someone’s head across the room. If the rest of the class is focused, rascals will push boundaries by humming when I ask them to work quietly, or sneaking cheez-its in their sweatshirt pocket and eating them while I’m not looking.

The Teacher Moves

What does a high-accountability classroom look like? It’s really the sum of dozens of little teacher moves. They won’t all fit in this post, but I’ll outline a bunch of my favorites.

Be seen looking. This is my number one, a teaching fundamental that I find absolutely essential. When I ask students to do something — try a few math problems, put their whiteboards away, turn and talk with a partner — I stand and actively scan the room, looking to make sure students follow through. My goal isn’t to catch students doing the wrong thing. In fact, if Jimmy doesn’t get started, I avoid saying, “Get to work Jimmy,” because that signals to the entire class that Jimmy isn’t working. Instead, my goal is to use eye contact, proximity, and gestures to get as many students following directions as I can. One classic behavior of swingers is that, when I ask the class to do something, they will look around the room to see if everyone else is doing it. I often make eye contact with those students and communicate with my facial expression that I meant what I said. The goal of “be seen looking” is to communicate with body language that I am serious, that yes I expect everyone needs to try these problems, and I am following through to make sure that happens. It’s helpful to contrast with two non-examples. Don’t say, “here are some problems for you to try,” and go sit at your desk. That communicates that you don’t care whether students try them. And don’t ask students to get started, then immediately start running around the room helping students. Those swingers are looking around to see if everyone else is working, and you’re missing an opportunity to nudge them in the right direction.

Be quick, be quiet, be gone. Ok so Jimmy still isn’t getting to work. I avoid calling Jimmy out in a way that brings attention to him. Instead, my goal is to quickly and quietly stop by his desk and give him an extra prompt. Then, I walk away. That last piece is important: I don’t stand over him waiting for him to start. That’s a recipe for a power struggle. Instead, I give him a minute, and follow up again if he doesn’t do his part.

On-ramps. Often, swingers swing toward low effort or disruption because they aren’t sure what to do. As often as I can, I start an activity or sequence of questions with something I know students can answer. This acts as an on-ramp, to get students started and building confidence with independent work. Does this always work perfectly, or guarantee that students are suddenly perfect little mathematicians? No. But that positive momentum to start an activity makes a huge difference in the collective feeling of motivation and effort in the room.

Habits and routines. I have a ton of routines I use literally every day. When students walk into class, it’s always a Do Now with the same structure and format. I have routines for quick chunks of independent work, for mini whiteboards, and more. Every routine is a chance for students to build positive habits. Those habits become automatic, and spread to the vast majority of students.

Seating. There’s a common teaching strategy where you take the rascals and the swingers with the worst behavior and you stick them in the back of the room. It’s a kind of detente: I’ll put you in the back of the room and let you cruise by without putting in much effort, and you’ll be a bit less disruptive to the students who are here to learn. Don’t do this. Stick them up front. This takes some courage, but the message is clear: I care about every student’s learning. Seating rascals up front is tough. And sure, there might be occasional exceptions. But in my experience, the vast majority of kids who a teacher sticks in the back of the room to minimize disruption are capable of learning if we set them up for success and hold them accountable. This probably isn’t something to try all at once, to completely upend your seating chart and expect learning to skyrocket moments later. But the detente of putting students in the back and ignoring them is contagious. You can’t have a high accountability classroom without making these types of decisions around seating.

Academic support. All of those strategies above are little nudges to push students toward higher effort in class. But often, the reason students aren’t motivated is that they are lacking some skills. Those nudges don’t do much good if students put in effort but constantly feel dumb and can’t keep up with the class. When a student seems unmotivated, I will do my best to find some time to work with them one-on-one. I use this time to shore up relevant foundational skills, and maybe pre-teach an upcoming topic. I have limited time for this type of one-on-one work, so I can’t do this for everyone and I can’t always do it consistently. But even occasional one-on-one support can make a big difference because it sends the same message as the rest of these teacher moves — I care about your learning and I know you can do this.

Cautious with extrinsic incentives. I avoid giving students rewards for effort in math class. Most extrinsic incentives are helpful in the short term but can be harmful in the long term. I am generous with praise, and I try to recognize effort, growth, and high-quality work each class. The best long-term motivation strategy is for students to feel accomplished when they know they’ve put in the effort to learn something. That doesn’t always work, but I resist the urge to use bribes and short-term rewards to compensate.

Connect consequences with behavior. In many schools, and for many students, consequences become a kind of game. Detention isn’t so bad, all my friends are there, so I might as well wander the halls rather than going to class. What was the detention for? Who knows. The most effective consequences are tied directly to the behavior we want to change. Your mileage will vary, every school has different systems. But one tool I’ve found helpful is that if students aren’t putting in effort in class, I’ll have them come in for the first few minutes of lunch and we’ll work on the task together. Students don’t like this very much, which is the point. But it’s short, typically under 5 minutes, and it’s focused on the specific academic tasks they weren’t doing in class. And they get some extra help, so I can figure out if there’s some extra support or missing skills I need to address. This exact thing might not work for you. The point is, if I’m going to give a consequence, I want it to be clearly tied to the behavior I’m hoping to change.

And many more. I could go on for a while. Giving clear directions. Keeping transitions tight and efficient. Using whole-class response systems so every student is engaged and answering questions. Getting routines right from the start of the year. Contacting home for persistent issues. There’s no one magic bullet. But you add up all these teacher moves, and over time they can make a big difference.

There’s a logical mistake you can make when thinking about motivation. There will always be some intransigent rascals who are tough to motivate. You can try all sorts of nudges to get them learning and fall short. The logical mistake is to focus on those students, and forget that for the large majority of students, small nudges can add up to a big difference. That’s where the mental model of ducklings, rascals, and swingers can be helpful. Sure, these teacher moves don’t work for every student. That’s normal. But they do work for many students. Focus on that big group in the middle, get as many students as possible learning with whole-class teacher moves, and work with the rest on a case-by-case basis. If you can flip the momentum of the swingers, that leaves a lot more of your energy to support the rascals.2

Going It Alone Is Tough

If you are the only teacher trying to create a high accountability classroom in your school, you will have a hard time. All of this works way better if you are on a team where all of the teachers are using the same teacher moves and the same language, coordinating their interventions and multiplying each other’s work.

High accountability teaching isn’t much of a value at my school. I have some great colleagues, and there are absolutely some other teachers pushing accountability for students. But there’s not much common language for me to lean on, and it’s not a priority for the folks in charge.

It’s a tough place to be in. Some schools have a strong school culture, or have students who arrive with strong motivation and academic skills. Others don’t. You might read this post and think, “Wow, my students do all this stuff without me having to put in all that effort.” I’ve worked at schools like that! It’s nice.

The toughest thing about working in a school like mine is that high accountability teaching is slow to impact motivation. It looks something like this:

Sure, you might be able to find a few teacher moves that make a difference in your classroom overnight. But my experience is that the vast majority of changes are slow and incremental.

One reason is because the swingers follow the crowd. It’s tough to move the needle when many of your students are playing follow-the-leader in the wrong direction. That doesn’t mean that your efforts are worthless, but it does mean you need to persist even if it feels like progress is excruciatingly slow.

I also think this idea can help us understand why motivation has felt like such a challenge for the last five years. Many teachers feel like they’re teaching in a totally different world than before the pandemic. Have students changed that radically? I don’t think so. But because swingers have such a strong influence on the culture of a classroom, a disruption to the system can cause a reset to a new equilibrium that feels very different from before.

A Final Thought

I totally understand why teachers choose to teach with less accountability. High accountability teaching is a lot of work, and if you’re on your own it can feel like rowing upstream without making any progress. I can’t promise any specific outcome in your classroom. Teaching is hard. But I can say that I have spent a lot of time trying to increase accountability in my classroom. For a while progress was slow. It felt like two steps forward and one step back. But eventually, things shifted. I reached a tipping point in my ability to get that big group of swingers on board. My classroom is in a much better place now. But only because I stuck with it. It’s a slow road, but all those nudges add up eventually.

I also think a lot of teachers have a misconception about accountability. Accountability can feel like we’re trying to catch students doing things wrong, or mete out consequences for bad behavior. That’s not it at all. The goal is to send the message, with everything that I do, that students are capable learners and I will follow through to make sure they are learning. I’m not following through because I want to get anyone in trouble. My goal is to help students build habits so they’re putting in effort without even thinking about it, because that’s what we do in math class, because that’s how we learn.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — When Edgar Rosales Jr. uses the word “home,” the second-year college student with a linebacker’s build isn’t referring to the house he plans to buy after becoming a nurse or getting a job in public health. Rather, the Long Beach City College student is talking about the parking lot he slept in every night for more than a year. With Oprah-esque enthusiasm, Rosales calls the other students who use LBCC’s Safe Parking Program his “roommates” or “neighbors.” 

Between 8 and 10:30 p.m., those neighbors drive onto the lot, where staff park during the day. Nearby showers open at 6 a.m. Sleeping in a car may not sound like a step up, but for Rosales — who dropped out of a Compton high school more than 20 years ago to become a truck driver — being handed a key fob to a bathroom stocked with toilet paper and hand soap was life-altering. He kept the plastic tab on his key ring, even though he was supposed to place it in a drop box each morning, because the sight of it brought comfort; the sense of it between his fingers, hard and slick, felt like peace.

When Rosales and his son’s mother called it off again in the fall of 2024, just after he’d finished a GED program and enrolled at LBCC, he stayed with his brother for a week or so. But he didn’t want to be a burden. So one day after work at the trucking company — he’d gone part-time since enrolling, though he’d still regularly clock 40 hours a week — he circled the block in his beat-up sedan and parked on the side of the road, near some RVs and an encampment. The scariest part of sleeping in his car was the noises, Rosales said: “I heard a dog barking or I heard somebody running around or you see cop lights going down the street. You see people looking in your car.” He couldn’t sleep, let alone focus. Without the ability to bathe regularly, he began to avoid people to spare them the smell. The car became his sanctuary, but also, a prison. As he put it, “It starts messing with your mental health.”

First, Rosales dropped a class. A few weeks later, he told his LBCC peer navigator he couldn’t do it anymore and needed her help to withdraw. Instead, she got Rosales signed up for the college’s Safe Parking Program, and everything flipped on its head. With the LBCC lot’s outlets and WiFi, the back seat of his car morphed into a study carrel. Campus security was there to watch over him, not threaten him like the police had, telling him to move along or issuing a citation that cost him a day’s pay. For the first time in a month, Rosales said, “I could just sleep with my eyes closed the whole night.”

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Forty-eight percent of college students experience housing insecurity, meaning “challenges that prevent them from having a safe, affordable, and consistent place to live,” suggests the most recent Student Basic Needs Survey Report from the Hope Center at Temple University. That number rises to 60 percent for Black students, 67 percent for students who are parenting and 72 percent for former foster youth. The problem also tends to be worse for veterans and those who identify as LGBTQ+ or have been labeled undocumented, said Sara Abelson, an assistant professor and the Hope Center’s senior director of education and training. Fourteen percent of the nearly 75,000 students surveyed experienced homelessness, the most severe form of housing insecurity. Other analyses produce similar estimates.

Of course, rates differ by institution. The Hope Center found that housing insecurity at two-year schools, like LBCC, was about 10 points higher than at their four-year counterparts. A similar gap divided institutions that serve high proportions of students classified as racial and ethnic minorities from those that don’t. Geography also matters: It’s much easier to find a rental unit in Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, than in Portland, Oregon. And yet, the problem is a national one, said Jillian Sitjar, director of higher education for the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, affecting both rural and urban areas and “not just a California thing.” That’s partly because of a national housing supply shortage and the fact that eligibility rules for affordable housing programs often exclude students; and it’s partly because the cost of college has risen nationwide as both government investment in higher education and the purchasing power of financial aid have fallen over the decades. The second Trump administration’s threatened and actual changes to Pell Grants, the largest federal student aid program, haven’t helped, nor have its cuts to the social safety net generally and erosion of laws meant to ensure equitable access to housing. 

For years, colleges have primarily referred homeless students to shelters, nonprofits and other external organizations, but “there’s kind of a shift that’s happening,” Sitjar said: “Institutions are starting to look internally, being like, ‘OK, we need to do more.’” LBCC’s Safe Parking Program is one of the most visible of a new crop of programs addressing student housing insecurity by giving students unorthodox places to sleep: cars, hotels, napping pods, homes of alumni and even an assisted living facility. What sets these stopgap efforts apart from longer-term strategies — such as initiatives to reduce rents, build housing (including out of shipping containers), rapidly rehouse students, cover housing gaps (like summer and holidays) and provide students with more financial aid — is that they’re designed to be flawed. College administrators know full well that Band-Aid programs are insufficient, that they’re catching blood rather than addressing the source of the bleeding. And yet, while long-term projects are underway, what’s woefully inadequate can be quite a bit better than nothing.

An oversize sink sure was for Mike Muñoz. Decades before earning his doctorate and becoming the president of LBCC, Muñoz was a community college student who worked in a mall as the assistant manager of a portrait studio. After coming out as gay, he couldn’t go home, and then the family lost their house to foreclosure so “there wasn’t a home to go back to,” he said. Many nights, he’d crash on friends’ couches, but in the week leading up to payday, he couldn’t afford the gas to get there from work. Feeling hopeless, Muñoz would find a parking spot near the mall and spend the night in his car, dealing with the exact same stressors Rosales would endure years later. In the morning, he’d take a sponge bath in the oversize sink that the studio used to develop film. His No. 1 concern, after survival, he says, was keeping anyone from finding out about his homelessness, especially on campus.

President Muñoz — who is warm like Rosales yet more self-contained, often listening so intently as to become motionless — said the Safe Parking Program is about more than providing physical safety for students who sleep in their vehicles. Muñoz wants these students to feel safe bringing their full selves to college, in a way he didn’t until transferring to a four-year school and moving into student housing. “The mental load that I was carrying, I was able to set that down,” he said, “and I was able to then really focus that energy” — on classes, on who he wanted to be. That’s Muñoz’s answer to those who say emergency housing is a distraction, ancillary to the mission of a college.

Indeed, research suggests that asking a student to thrive in college without a reliable place to sleep is no more reasonable than asking them to ace a test without access to books or lectures. Multiple studies find that housing insecurity is associated with significantly lower grades and well-being. Lacking a stable housing arrangement has also been shown to negatively affect class attendance, full-time enrollment and the odds of getting a degree. What’s more, a 2024 survey found that housing-insecure students rely more on risky credit services like payday loans and auto-title loans. This Gordian knot of need and peril, which often also includes child care obligations and food insecurity, makes it hard to prove that emergency housing alone will improve students’ lives. But Rashida Crutchfield, a professor of social work and executive director of the Center for Equitable Higher Education at California State University, Long Beach, said, “It’s one of those ‘obviously’ moments that if you house students, they do better.” 

Related: Housing insecurity derails foster kids’ college dreams

When a pandemic-era survey revealed at least 70 LBCC students living in their cars, Muñoz asked the college’s board to support him in implementing a safe parking program. They agreed something had to be done, but issues like legal liability concerned some LBCC staff. Additional worries included the cost and that it would mean less money for longer-term solutions, the risk of sending a message that it’s OK for students to have to sleep in their cars, and “the sky is falling kind of stuff” — visions of drugs, sex, trash, urine. But Muñoz pressed, and in 2021 the school piloted a program with 13 students and a startup budget of $200,000 from pandemic relief funds. That money covered private overnight security and paid for the nonprofit Safe Parking LA to train LBCC staff and help develop an application, liability waiver and more. The school’s facilities team installed security cameras, scheduled more cleaning and figured out how best to handle the extra opening and closing of the lot’s gates.

Similar efforts sprang up during the pandemic but later shuttered. For example, a collaboration in Oakland between Laney College and West Side Missionary Baptist Church wound down as did the safe lot program near the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. “The funding isn’t there anymore,” explained Marguerita Lightfoot, a professor at OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Yet still to this day, she said of sleeping in cars, “There are students who are doing that at every institution.” 

Knowing that, LBCC was determined to keep the Safe Parking Program running even after the federal tap ran dry. The school moved the program from its original location to the lot Rosales would call home, which has a clear line of sight from the campus security office. One extra campus security position replaced the private company, cutting LBCC’s overall spend in half. In other words, Muñoz made it work.

Other schools have swung different hammers at the same nail. Some colleges and universities with dorms maintain “in-and-out rooms,” beds set aside for short-term, emergency use, the way Roosevelt University in Chicago and Fort Lewis College in Colorado do. But Sitjar says a lot of red tape and considerable expense make in-and-out rooms uncommon. For specific student populations, some schools offer year-round housing, like West Chester University’s Promise Program for former foster youth and qualifying homeless students and a similar program at San Diego State University. But “during the summer, it’s really, really, really hard for institutions to try to keep those rooms set aside,” Sitjar said, since they otherwise generate revenue via summer camps, reunions and more, and during the academic year mean room-and-board money.

And community colleges — which educate the majority of American college students — mostly don’t have dorms that allow for this option. A few have teamed up with four-year institutions to house students at a discounted rate. In New Jersey, Rider University hosts students from Mercer County Community College. Through a pilot program launched in 2019, Massachusetts reimburses four-year campuses for the cost of keeping dorm beds available for community college students experiencing homelessness. A review of the program, through which eight colleges and universities have hosted students, found that 72 percent of participants showed academic improvement and even more experienced improved mental health.

Other types of partnerships also put roofs over students’ heads in short order. Cape Cod Community College works with a local health center to get students into hotel rooms on days the temperature falls below 32 degrees. And Norco College in Southern California is just one of dozens that contracts directly with a hotel. Religious organizations help too, such as Depaul USA in Philadelphia, which houses homeless college students in a converted convent. Around 400 miles south, in Wake County, North Carolina, HOST is a nonprofit that began with members of the NC State University community inviting students to move into their homes. And New York City’s LaGuardia Community College partners with Airbnb to house students short term, with the company reimbursing hosts.

Related: From Pony Soldier Inn to student housing: How an old hotel shows one solution to community college housing problems

A particularly unusual partnership resulted when Winona Health, a health care system in Minnesota, acquired a nursing home that had a mansion sitting on the same parcel of land. The century-old building, Watkins Manor, wasn’t ideal for assisted living, so in 2021 Winona invited students from nearby colleges to move in for a very low monthly rent plus volunteer hours. Students help senior citizens do things like troubleshoot tech, go shopping and participate in therapeutic recreation programs. “The residents love it, the students love it,” said Linda Atkinson, the administrator who oversees the program. While students don’t need to experience housing insecurity to apply, the program has provided emergency housing for those who have been kicked out of a parent’s home, experienced domestic violence and more.

Some schools combine these solutions, inching toward more comprehensive support. At California State University, Sacramento, the CARES program maintains four beds in on-campus dorms for immediate use. It also partners with the Hampton Inn and offers rent subsidies, eviction-avoidance grants (a utility bill here, a late fee there) and move-in support grants (think security deposits), among others. Additionally, the program has helped connect students with members of local churches willing to open their homes. Understanding that some students don’t have cars, LBCC too offers much more than the Safe Parking Program. As Crutchfield put it, “Different people have lots of different needs, and we have to have a buffet of options.”

At Howard Community College in Maryland, one smörgåsbord item is a place to nap. President Daria Willis doesn’t have anywhere to put a shelter for housing-insecure students, as Harvard, UCLA and the University of Southern California have done. “We are pretty much landlocked,” she explained, “I’ve got a hospital on my left side, and I’ve got neighborhoods on the right, back, and front side of the campus.” But she wanted to do something to help the exhausted students she walked by on the way to her office morning after morning. Students who worked night shifts, parented young kids or didn’t have a place to sleep at night were curled into chairs and draped over benches. In a pilot program, the school bought five chairs, known as sleeping pods, designed for rest. After Willis posted a picture on social media of herself relaxing in one, “it exploded,” she said: “Students were in them every single moment of the day,” often needing to be asked to leave when buildings closed at 11:30 p.m. So the school bought more sleeping pods. And more again. 

No one, though, believes napping facilities and parking lots are really the answer.

Rosales has leg issues and a bad back. “I’m a big guy,” he said as he folded himself into the back seat of his car in an origami-like series of steps in early September. The WiFi on the lot is spotty, one bathroom for more than a dozen people often means a line, there’s no fridge to store leftovers or microwave to reheat them, and Safe Parking Program users aren’t able to sleep in or get to bed early. Last semester, when he took a class that didn’t get out until 10 p.m., Rosales had to move as fast as his busted knees would carry him to make the cutoff at 10:30. And he was still homeless. He’d go to a restaurant, spending dollars he couldn’t spare and eating too much just “to feel like a normal person,” Rosales said. He’d say hello to everybody and strike up a conversation with his server, to try to “be normal for a minute.”

Yet despite its limitations, the Safe Parking Program let Rosales “breathe, relax, continue on,” he said. And the lot offered a chance to build community. He began encouraging new arrivals to connect: “Trust me, we’ll help you,” Rosales would say. And they do often require help like that. Even when campus resources exist, two-thirds of students in need lack awareness about available supports, the Hope Center researchers concluded. Stigma is part of the problem. As Rosales put it, “We’re scared that we’re going to get judged or someone’s going to give us pity or give us a look … like, ‘Oh, there goes the homeless one.’” He didn’t even tell his family about his homelessness. In fact, Rosales’ peer navigator was the first to know — and he only had one of those to turn to because of LBCC’s surveys and targeted outreach.

Recently, Rosales organized a free breakfast to connect his “roommates and neighbors” with campus resources and each other. He felt terrible that he still couldn’t do much for the son he’d barely seen since moving out, especially after being laid off by the trucking company on Christmas Eve. But gathering participants in the Safe Parking Program, helping them — now he could add value to someone. And he felt valued by LBCC, having been given comprehensive support and case management meant to find an on-ramp to stable housing, as well as money for car repairs. (Each year, between $23,000 and $115,000 from the LBCC Foundation — which swelled after a $30 million gift from MacKenzie Scott, the philanthropist formerly married to Jeff Bezos — goes to students for vehicle registration, insurance, repairs and daytime parking permits.) Rosales felt like he mattered at LBCC, even after bringing his whole self to campus, just as Muñoz had hoped.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California community college students 

At some point in the nation’s history, homelessness on college campuses was nonexistent, a rounding error when it did occur, because students had to have wealth behind them to access higher education. As efforts to democratize admissions and attendance (like the GI Bill) have borne fruit, “more of those who are facing these issues are getting to institutions,” said Abelson, the Hope Center’s senior director of education and training, combining with housing and funding shortages to create need that “has largely gone under the radar and unrecognized.” Efforts to equalize opportunity have been insufficient, and yet, they’ve made it possible for someone like Muñoz to graduate and then rise through the ranks. They’ve made it possible for his days of rationing gas and sink-bathing to open an institution’s eyes to the need for a net to catch students who are slipping off its ivory tower, and for Muñoz to push to create one, even if it must be stitched together from imperfect materials.

But the reality is that the majority of schools have massive holes in their nets, or to return to Crutchfield’s metaphor, they don’t offer any of these emergency housing dishes, let alone the whole spread. For the most part, colleges and universities still just create a list of resources and refer students out, suggesting they try their luck with local shelters and Craigslist. It’s inadequate. “Our shelter systems are overtaxed,” Crutchfield said, “there’s just not enough capacity.” And even when there is, “students don’t see shelter systems as for them,” she said. In some ways, they’re right: Shelter rules, including the need to queue up and turn lights off when there’s homework still to be done, often clash with students’ needs. 

“If I fall down and I’m bleeding, definitely get me medical attention, get me a Band-Aid,” Crutchfield said. “But if the road is broken, and that’s why people keep falling down, you have to deal with the road.” So yes to safe parking, she said, but also, “What are we going to do next?” 

In addition to building housing, participating in rapid rehousing models and advocating for financial aid that covers the true cost of college, some schools have hired homeless liaisons, staff members dedicated to assisting students experiencing homelessness. According to SchoolHouse Connection, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and Tennessee require schools to establish these roles. Maine encourages doing so, and California, Minnesota and Washington even set aside funds that can be used to pay for them. The impact appears to be significant. In Washington, 22 out of 25 community colleges surveyed said they provide some sort of emergency housing. Sitjar said, “For institutions and states that have these individuals, that have these roles, we’re then seeing those colleges make the really unique solutions of addressing housing.”

She pointed to bipartisan federal legislation, two bills that are expected to be reintroduced this session, that would require homeless liaisons as well as force colleges to develop plans for housing during academic breaks, do a better job of identifying students struggling with homelessness and more. One of the bills would update the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program to allow full-time students to live in LIHTC housing if they’ve experienced homelessness within the last seven years. Abelson said the Hope Center and others support this reform as well as similar efforts aimed at “reducing the many barriers that students face to accessing [government] benefits.” 

These days, Rosales still eats his feelings sometimes, he said, but “it’s slowly getting better because I see a therapist every two weeks through the school.” When LBCC told him in September that he’d been offered housing through a rapid rehousing program called Jovenes — a two-bedroom, two-bath to be shared with three roommates — Rosales began to cry, from relief but also from fear. “I never thought I was going to get out of here,” he said of the Safe Parking Program. “This is my home, this is where I live, this is where I’ve been — holidays, weekends, a birthday.” He finds comfort in knowing that the lot is always an option, as it is for the dozens of LBCC students living on the brink who have signed up for the program just in case. But he doesn’t sleep there anymore. “I’m not going back,” Rosales said, and for the first time, he believes in his ability to make that happen. He can feel in his truck-weary bones that he’ll graduate, that he’ll get that house he’s been dreaming about: “I’m moving ahead.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about emergency housing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post A new ‘solution’ to student homelessness: A parking lot where students can sleep safely in their cars  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District set up a fabulous all-encompassing AI chatbot friend to students and teachers, called Ed. Unfortunately, Ed didn’t work. AllHere, the company running Ed, went broke. The founder was arrested for fraud.

LAUSD’s scheme for 2025 is to give every kid in Los Angeles an unmanaged iPad and/or Chromebook to do their work in class.

Some parents have a few objections. In particular, how their kids are having a lot of trouble studying on a tablet with completely unfiltered access to the Internet without going off to YouTube or other sites in class. LAUSD is not blocking the AI sites on the classroom iPads or Chromebooks either. They would like much greater control and management of screen time, especially in class. [NBC]

And you’ll be delighted to hear the kids are now being told to use AI in class too!

One fourth-grade class in LA was reading the Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren. You know the ones. Pippi is usually drawn as a little girl with red hair in long pigtails and she always wears long stripy socks.

The class was told to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking. Not using pencils and paper — no, this is the AI era! So this was an exercise to teach the kids how to prompt an image generator.

The kids were using Adobe for Education. This calls itself “the creative resource for K–12 and Higher Education” and it includes the Adobe Express AI image generator.

Adobe even has a gallery of kids’ work with Adobe Express! You and I might wonder how on earth prompting an AI slop bot is supposed to teach kids anything.

One kid typed in a description of Pippi Longstocking: “long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out”.

What they got back was four pictures of a woman dressed in what looks like schoolgirl fetish or goth nightclub gear. One of them is wearing a leather bikini outfit. But, they all have long red braids. And stockings. Real sexy, boss, just like you asked. [Bluesky]

 

 

So that was unexpected, probably not the result anyone would have wanted, and the kids’ parents weren’t very impressed. Adobe Express is pretty clearly not filtered for school use at all.

You’d almost think Adobe tuned its Firefly image generator for maximum engagement. And apparently, that means sexy ladies.

I tried this prompt myself in Adobe Express. I told it I was a high school student, K–12, using Adobe Express for schoolwork, and I put in the same prompt the fourth-grade kid did: “long stockings a red headed girl with braids sticking straight out”.

I got back four pictures of women who look like they’re in indie rock bands. These Adobe Express images might lead kids to turn into emo brats. I think this is a close enough result that the original Bluesky image post is entirely credible.

 

 

Adobe Express completely mangled the hands and the braids, ’cos it’s 2023? I guess it’s early days for Express, you can’t expect them to get hands right. Or I was prompting it wrong.

The LAUSD Guidelines for the Authorized Use of Artificial Intelligence say: [LAUSD, PDF archive]

In accordance with the District’s Responsible Use Policy, students under the age of 13 are not permitted to use generative AI tools.

That rule’s just being flat-out ignored.

The schools are blaming the parents for not opting out. The parents are blaming the schools for not giving them an opt-out, if they even told them. The administrators are blaming the teachers for not restricting how the kids use the unfiltered iPads. The software vendors are blaming the schools for not setting up proper blocking.

The vendor has its tools, and the kids will use them. Edtech job number one: keep paying the vendors. We’re preparing your kid for the glorious AI future. That is, a life of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporate parasites feeding off public money.

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