Twenty years from now, some of your current students will be running companies. Others will be therapists. A few might be teachers themselves.
But here's the split that Dr. Renata Gusmão-Garcia Williams thinks about every day: which ones will be able to handle a stressful meeting without melting down?
The principal of UCLA Lab School has spent two decades watching schools make a choice. Some build emotional regulation capacity in students through deliberate budget decisions—funding teacher training on coaching skills, tracking emotional growth alongside test scores, treating anxiety as a skill gap instead of a discipline problem.
Others assumed good academics would be enough.
The students who get that training? Well, they're the ones who don't spiral when life gets hard.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Which graduate is your budget creating?
Reading Rainbow: Focus gyms, $25k teachers & "good job"
From Our Desk: Last conference of the month
Watch of the Week: Teaching life skills with burger puns
Partner Highlight: S/o to Portage High School
Which graduate is your budget creating?
Two seventh graders sit in their respective classrooms. Both are smart enough to master pre-algebra. Their report cards are nearly identical.
But when a group project goes sideways, everything diverges.
Frazzled Fran (Student A) spirals into anxiety. The disagreement becomes a full-blown crisis. Fran can pass every test but can't handle a conflict without falling apart.
Grounded Grace (Student B) talks through the disagreement and moves on. Grace has the same academic abilities as Fran, but something else too: a toolbox for handling stress that Fran never got.
No difference between these students’ genetics, or family income. Grace's school spent years building emotional regulation infrastructure. Fran's school figured test scores were enough.
Frazzled Fran's school poured money into test prep software, hired based on content expertise alone, and reacted to student anxiety with more rules.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the gap between these two schools became impossible to ignore.
"Even households who had strict no-tech rules until eighth grade suddenly had school on the computer—and then socialized on the internet, too,” Renata points out, assessing how 18 months of social isolation ate into critical development years.
Grace's school understood this gap and built explicit instruction to fill it.
How can schools tailor their annual budgets to solve for this? Software, teacher prep, or something else?
Your Kid Can't Focus? Blame the Algorithm, Not the Screen: A librarian at Charles Sturt University argues that the real literacy crisis isn't about screens destroying civilization (calm down, everyone). It's feeds versus focus. Libraries aren't dying. Think of them becoming "gymnasiums for attention" where people learn to build containers for deep work instead of drowning in seven browser tabs and three notification streams.
She Won $25,000 for Making Math Not Terrible: Shana Engel, a sixth-grade math teacher in Colorado Springs, just won a Milken Educator Award (basically the teaching Oscars) for having the "magic touch" with algebra. When students get stuck, she asks them questions until they figure out where they're actually confused. Her secret weapon: small groups, whiteboards, and letting kids talk through problems using actual math vocabulary. Her students consistently crush assessments, and she also runs STEM club, robotics club, and math tutoring club.
Stop Saying "Good Job" and Start Being Specific: Edutopia breaks down why feedback like "Great work!" is basically useless and how to give students information they can actually use to improve. Turns out "Not quite there yet" doesn't tell anyone how to get there. The research says: tell students exactly what they did well, explain why it matters for the learning goal, and give them clear next steps. Also, feedback works best when it's immediate (not three weeks later when they've already forgotten what they wrote), future-focused, and treats students like capable humans instead of projects to fix.
Politicians Suddenly Care About What Kids Eat: Ten governors across both parties just made school nutrition a priority in their 2026 State-of-the-State addresses. Kansas wants free meals for all reduced-price-eligible students. Idaho wants to ban artificial dyes. Three governors want to remove candy and energy drinks from summer food programs. California's pushing to eliminate ultra-processed foods from cafeterias without actually proposing funding for healthier alternatives. So… we're all agreed kids should eat better, but nobody wants to pay for it. Cool, cool.
One conference left in March! Reach out to [email protected] to find time to chat!
NCASA Education Leadership Conference (March 25-27)
Our pick of the week: Bob’s Burgers
Why We’re Obsessed: The Belcher kids get to be their whole chaotic selves without apology. Tina's anxiety spirals, Louise's scheming, Gene's unhinged creativity—and the family just… accepts them. Each episode is a 22-minute masterclass in unconditional positive regard, which is exactly what social-emotional learning philosophy is all about (except with more burger puns).
Recommended lesson integration:
★ (Economics) Small business operations and budgeting: Track the restaurant's financial decisions and discuss why Bob keeps making terrible business choices. Guess following your passion doesn't pay the rent, but it does make for great TV!
★ Food science and entrepreneurship: Students design their own "Burger of the Day" with real culinary explanations for why their ingredient combinations work (the "Baby You Can Chive My Car Burger" is genuinely brilliant, fight us on this)
★ Social-emotional learning aka managing big feelings: Tina's anxiety, Louise's anger, Gene's impulsivity. The show models healthy emotional expression without making feelings the problem… though Tina's erotic friend fiction might be a bridge too far for some districts.
★ (Creative Writing) Unreliable narrators and perspective: Use episodes where different characters tell competing versions of the same story to teach point of view. A bonus is that students learn that everyone thinks they're the hero, even when they're clearly the villain.
How Portage High School’s PACE program is helping more students graduate with Subject.
If your school is serious about increasing course completions and protecting graduation rates, look at what’s happening in Portage Township Schools in Indiana. Portage Township Schools’ PACE program is using Subject to expand access and the results speak for themselves:
267 PACE enrollments
79% completion rate
1,929 total high school enrollments
709 course completions this year
By integrating Subject into both their virtual and in-person programs, Portage is improving student outcomes, supporting teachers, and giving more students a path to graduation.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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