What AI is doing to a generation of disengaged kids

Jenny Anderson is an award-winning journalist and author with 25 years in the field, including a decade covering finance at The New York Times — where she won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2008 for her coverage of Merrill Lynch ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. She later pioneered coverage of the "science of learning" at Quartz, and now contributes to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

She is the co-author, with Rebecca Winthrop (Director of the Center for Universal Education atBrookings), of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (thedisengagedteen.com) — the product of five years of research, including asurvey of more than 65,000 students and 2,000 parents conducted with Brookings and Transcend, into why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence. She writes the weekly Substack newsletterHow to Be Brave, reaching tens of thousands of educators and parents. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Teen Flourishing and co-host of Ask the Kids, a podcast with Transcend Education.

In this episode, Jenny talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The disengagement gap — why 75% of kids love school in primary years, but only 25% still do by 10th grade
• The Four Modes framework — Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer — and why fewer than 4% of students land in Explorer mode
• Why phones and AI aren't the root cause of the teen mental-health crisis — academic pressure consistently ranks higher
• School models built for agency —Big Picture Learning's semester-long internships,Red Bridge School, andValor Collegiate Academies' "school within a school"
• Assessment in the age of AI — competency-based learning, portraits of a graduate, and why parents resist abandoning high-stakes exams like the GCSEs
• The AI silence at home — why most teens use AI regularly whilefew talk to their parents about it
• AI, writing, and "cognitive stunting" — what outsourcing the first draft costs a developing thinker, building onRebecca Winthrop's NYT piece on AI and creativity
• What parents can actually do — testing the tools themselves, and protecting space for productive struggle