Mike Goldstein on Teen Flourishing

I sat down with a veteran education reformer to learn more about his new initiative focused on youth habits and culture outside of school.

Editor’s Note: For more than two decades, I’ve admired Mike Goldstein as one of the true pioneers of modern education reform. As the founder of Match in Boston—one of the most relentlessly thoughtful, data-driven, and high-performing charter schools in the country—Mike built a reputation not just for results, but for an unusually rigorous way of thinking about how those results are achieved. He has never been content with slogans or easy answers. He interrogates assumptions, tests ideas, and follows the evidence wherever it leads.

Now he’s turning that same disciplined, clear-eyed approach to a challenge that sits largely outside the reach of schools, and in some ways dwarfs the academic debates that have consumed us for decades. His new effort, the Center for Teen Flourishing, starts from an uncomfortable truth: Even the best schools can’t get kids all the way to flourishing. Not when so much of what shapes their character, habits, happiness, and sense of purpose happens “from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m.”—in the unstructured hours where too many teens today drift toward passivity, isolation, and screens. If we are serious about helping teenagers truly flourish, we need to think beyond classrooms and curricula and confront the broader social, emotional, familial, and civic conditions that shape their lives.

I recently sent Mike a series of questions about this emerging initiative, how his thinking has evolved, and why he believes our field must expand its ambitions. His answers, characteristically, are sharp, honest, and provocative. I’m delighted to share them here. – RP

1. What is the Center for Teen Flourishing?

The Center for Teen Flourishing is an R&D lab for the 3pm to 3am hours.

I started Match as a lab when ed reform was cooking. We tried things. Many failed! Some worked. High-dosage tutoring got its start at Match and scaled up. We also piloted an unusual teacher prep program and a new kind of college. The coin of the realm was achievement gains as measured by state tests.

CTF also wants to experiment, but with a different outcome metric: “hours per week of flourishing.” Many teens describe themselves as not doing much out of school besides scrolling on their phones. Some try to change their behavior but struggle. The conventional wisdom does not seem to be helping, so let’s try some new ideas (and measure the results). We’ll collect field notes along the way.

2. You helped invent one of the most influential charter school models in the country, Match. Now you’re working on something that sits outside of schools. What led you to conclude that even great schools can’t get kids all the way to flourishing?

Those teens I met in 1999 when I started Match Charter High? Now they’re 40. Some had the story they and we had hoped for: worked hard in high school, first in family through college, got good jobs. Others struggled—including a number who went on to become college graduates. Their labor outcomes weren’t what we’d hoped for. They’re still poor. Charter Growth Fund has led research in this area, to their credit.

We’ve seen some entrepreneurs create great schools. KIPP, P-TECH, and Harlem Children’s Zone are all intriguing school models (college-for-all, career, wrap-around). The kids’ educational experience improved, and that matters. But randomized trials have shown disturbingly low impact on life outcomes. A 2023 Mathematica study found that attending a KIPP middle school increased the likelihood of a student enrolling in college, but not of graduating. MDRC found that P-TECH had no effect on college enrollment or graduation. Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie found that Texas charter schools didn’t seem to bolster later-in-life earnings.

So I’m not sure that great schools alone get poor kids out of poverty.

But then something happened. A new problem appeared, and, unlike the achievement gap, it plagues poor and rich teens alike. I call it teen languishing. I’m referring to kids who, for the most part, from 3pm to 3am, do almost nothing besides screen time.

3. The Center for Teen Flourishing’s focus is on “languishing teens”—kids who aren’t clinically depressed but who aren’t exactly thriving either. What does languishing look like in real life? And what convinced you that this is an urgent problem?

A suburban Boston-area teacher emailed me this weekend. This, he wrote, is his median student:

• Heavy screen time after school, over the weekend, and during the summer

• Little time outdoors, reading books, walking, engaged in fitness, working or volunteering

• Apathy; maybe low-grade anxiety/depression (unclear if clinical)

• Going through the motions, little direction or ambition

• No clear out-of-school “passions”

• Haven’t found “their people”

Once upon a time, boredom nudged teens to…do things. The smartphone and the trillion dollar companies who sell them defeat boredom. That leads to an idleness that I think is bad for young people.

4. This reminds me Yuval Levin’s essay on “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown” and his observation that “the challenges to America’s social order now seem less like exorbitant human desires driving people’s lives out of control and more like an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing and enervated.” Are you seeing what he’s seeing?

Loved that Levin essay. I’m seeing what he’s seeing.

He makes an interesting point in that essay. He notes that his professional peers see this social issue as a class divide; he cites a study indicating that wealthier Americans are getting married and having kids at higher rates than those with lower incomes. But Levin argues that the broader issue, which he calls “pathological passivity,” is across the board.

That’s what we believe at CTF as well. The “sitting around” problem is prevalent everywhere, even among teens in the wealthiest families.

5. A lot of what you’re describing happens “from 3pm to 3am,” outside the reach of K–12 education. What kinds of activities or environments do you think actually move the needle for teens in that window? How do we know?

Flourishing teens build busy calendars: sports, restaurant jobs, Starbucks hangouts with friends, church youth groups, scouting, playing guitar. Each domain (fitness, music, work, sleep, socialization) has its own vein of research showing benefits. Some flourishing teens do this the easy way: they join activities that the school offers. Other flourishing teens busy themselves with cool things that aren’t part of the school menu.

What we don’t know is precisely how to increase languishing teen participation in all of these things. There aren’t many field experiments. That’s what our center wants to do: challenge the conventional wisdom and do some R&D on how to help teenagers live healthy and meaningful lives.

6. Jonathan Haidt and others have focused on reducing screen time through restrictions or “digital sabbaths.” You’ve suggested an alternative: substitution—filling teens’ lives with more engaging, real-world activities. What makes you think substitution might work better than suppression?

Haidt has been invaluable for bringing more attention to the problem. And the school cell phone bans he’s championed have been great. He also backs a favorite thinker of mine, Lenore Skenazy, and her organization Let Grow, which encourages young kids to play together outside.

But outside of school, is the tactic of 3pm to 3am screen suppression working for languishing teens age 14 and above?

China has tried since 2019 with various moves, including video game limits. A Nature Human Behaviour paper found “no credible evidence” the tactics worked.

Britain’s Online Safety Act took effect a couple months ago; VPN downloads multiplied by twenty times.

Teens find workarounds.

Big Tech offers a Maginot Line of blockers and parental controls. Those don’t seem to work. Have you ever tried? You’re peering over your teen’s shoulder and asking, “Hey is that really science homework, or is it TikTok?” It’s tough.

All of that suggests we may not see the gains we want from out-of-school suppression. We should try! But substitution’s advantage is that it inherently works. If you’re rock climbing, you’re probably off your phone. (Well, except for the selfie.)

7. You’ve noted that teen flourishing straddles at least six different research silos: mental health, parenting, K–12 education, youth development, screen addiction, and workforce development. Your center touches all six and doesn’t fit neatly into any one of them. This makes fixing schools seem easy by comparison.

My wife Pru is a doctor and made this analogy:

Have you ever heard of pediatric “failure to thrive” (FTT)? FTT isn’t a single-organ disease. It’s a syndrome: poor weight gain, lethargy, sleep trouble. The causes interact: feeding routines, sleep, parental capacity, reflux, mild infections, stress.

The fix is never just “see GI” or “see psych.” You need a coordinated plan: pediatrics + nutrition + lactation + sleep hygiene + social work, all aimed at the daily schedule (feeds, naps, play) with one shared outcome metric—the growth chart.

What Center for Teen Flourishing is chasing is perhaps akin to teen FTT. It addresses several issues at once, all unified by the need to fix teens’ daily schedules.

The research silo problem is a barrier. The education people are understandably mostly worried about how 3pm to 3am affects, say, chronic absenteeism. A teen who sits on the sofa all evening but shows up to school isn’t high on their list of problems to solve. The mental health people care about teens who meet clinical thresholds. And so on.

8. You spent years in the charter world. What lessons—good and bad—from the education reform era are you applying to CTF? And what mistakes do you want to avoid repeating?

a. Education reform is at its best when we focus on details of practice. I so admire what happens at, say, Brooke Charter Schools from 8am to 3pm. Our sector needs similar fascination with the 3pm to 3am lives of teens.

b. Sometimes you need to recruit a new tribe of talent. Charters had Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, Fisher Fellows, BES—at its peak, the sector was able to mobilize a whole new pool of talented young people. For teen thriving, I think we need a similar effort, somehow pulling in energetic adults and trying fresh ways to deploy them.

I don’t think that typical mentor programs are the answer. These programs are usually relaxed and unstructured—“Hey, you want to go to a ball game?” But that doesn’t seem to work with languishing teens. Because of screens, they’re not bored, so anyone trying to engage them has to be really good at motivating them try new things in the real world and helping them persist with the two or three things they’re interested in.

c. Stay humble. Ed reform got high-dosage tutoring right with a few thousand kids but scaled up wrong. We improved teacher prep but got the branding wrong. We got more kids to earn college diplomas but got the poverty-escape mechanism wrong. I hope to stay curious, be wrong, change my mind, and maybe occasionally be right!

9. Where does AI play into all this?

There are at least 20 large funders seeking more AI in schools. They have a good cause: achievement! Ed tech, including AI, has always had the allure of scalability, so the interest in AI tools is understandable. If computers can solve education problems, you can help a lot of kids.

A downside is that even good AI use cases are probably more screen time.

My friend Kyle playfully says that our Center for Teen Flourishing should be funded as a hedge, akin to a carbon offset. If you’re building things that will cause kids to spend even more time on screens, perhaps also help them reduce their total screen time in other ways.

10. What’s the North Star metric? How will you know if you’re succeeding?

The north star metric is hours of flourishing each week.

That’s counting the weekly hours on fitness, in-person time with friends, any sleep above 5 hours a night, volunteering or working up to 10 hours a week, pleasure reading, gardening, or walking the dog.

Instead of a pediatrician’s annual physical, we’re experimenting with a structured “life report card” process where a willing teen and parent are interviewed.

We estimate that, currently, the 75th percentile teen has about 20 hours per week in a flourishing state. That looks like an after-school sport, a hobby, a babysitting job, some in-person hangout time. The 25th percentile is closer to 2 hours per week.