‘Maslow before Bloom’: A Call for Collectivism
- Greg Mullen
- 12 minutes ago
- 14 min read
Nearly six years have passed since I published my article Maslow before Bloom and, in that half-decade, many classrooms have felt like triage centers:
Pandemic aftershocks are still felt in attendance records. Chronic absenteeism ( ≥ 10 % of school days missed) leapt from ~15% (in 2018-19) to 31% (in 2021-22) and eased only to 28% in 2022-23. Twenty states still reported ≥30% of students chronically absent in 2022-23.
Community food banks are operating at record pace. The Blue Ridge Area Food Bank (VA) served roughly 153,000 people per month and moved 16.4 million pounds of food, its highest demand in 43 years. Philadelphia’s Share Food Program saw demand soar 120 percent above 2022 levels, setting a new record for the organization. The Capital Area Food Bank (D.C.) is scrambling to replace 670,000 meals lost to USDA cuts while continuing to face record need.
Stories of teacher burnout and chronic teacher absenteeism have replaced "lost-instruction” headlines. National surveys are flagging unprecedented burnout, mainstream press has seen an increase in themes regarding teacher burnout, and teacher absenteeism has surged post-COVID. The original article’s rallying cry, that the students struggling to meet Maslow's lower tiers cannot develop cognitively, remains painfully true, yet the context has broadened.
Bottom line: Schools are not failing to teach their way out of this moment; they are being asked to function under conditions where learning itself is biologically, socially, and institutionally constrained. Maslow before Bloom is not merely a slogan for addressing individual barriers, but a framework for examining the collective systems responsible for those barriers.
The common thread here is not a lack of effort or innovation.
Systemic issues have consumed disproportionate cognitive, economic, and institutional capacity for basic needs for so many that whole-class and whole-school expectations for higher-order learning, creativity, and long-term planning are crowded out.
Addressing this reality requires moving beyond solutions that focus only on individual students or teachers and toward a collective shift towards reducing strain at foundational levels. What follows reframes Maslow before Bloom as more than a pedagogical slogan; it calls to clarify and address two issues responsible for the struggle many well-intentioned reforms experience under these conditions:
(1) Bandwidth. This is the amount of attention and capacity people and institutions have at any given time. When survival concerns (i.e. food, housing, health, safety) dominate this capacity, higher-order work like teaching, learning, problem-solving, and civic planning is crowded out. This article provides evidence for how, when people are worried about basic survival (i.e. food, housing, safety), both individuals and institutions don’t have enough mental and practical capacity left for learning, planning, or long-term improvement. This issue of "bandwidth scarcity" is shown to be hidden in the averaging of district and national test scores. This article offers a reframing of Maslow's hierarchy not as a ladder but as needs happening all at the same time and constantly under threat and crowding out everything else automatically by design. In this way, we don’t “choose” to ignore learning; survival systems just take over so all levels of Maslow's hierarchy are all competing for the same limited attention and resources.
(2) Collectivism. This word does not mean uniform thinking or centralized control. It means recognizing that some problems impacting an individual cannot be solved by that individual alone. When communities share responsibility for meeting foundational needs, they reduce the strain on individuals and create the conditions under which schools and other institutions can successfully apply the ideas behind "Maslow Before Bloom".
What follows reframes Maslow before Bloom as a question of shared capacity balanced with individual will: when bandwidth is available, and responsibility for basic stability is carried collectively, learning and civic progress can be addressed more effectively.
Maslow before Bloom was never only about a student who can’t learn because they’re hungry. It was a preview of a larger truth: a society that keeps too many people in survival mode will struggle to teach, create, or plan its way out of distress and into a healthy future.
I. The Bandwidth Lens: Scarcity Science Meets Maslow
Scarcity & Cognitive Load
Economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (2013) coined the phrase bandwidth tax to describe how poverty, housing insecurity, and food scarcity devour the brain’s finite processing power. Functional-MRI studies show that chronic stress floods the prefrontal cortex with cortisol, shrinking working-memory capacity by up to 13 IQ points and tilting decision-making toward short-term fixes. In classrooms, this looks like unfinished homework and impulsive behavior; in households, it shows up as late fees, payday loans, and skipped health appointments. Scarcity is therefore not merely a lack of resources—it is an active, cognitive drag that keeps the mind orbiting the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Large-scale assessments such as NAEP and the Education Recovery Scorecard further demonstrate the academic cost: national “flat” averages actually hide a split trend in which higher-income students inch upward while lower-income peers fall sharply behind, a divergence that maps perfectly onto scarcity’s cognitive drag.
In the original article, I included a quote by NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr who observed: "Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains,” a pattern that leaves the overall national average “virtually flat.”
Now, I am arguing that this idea of “lower-achieving students” losing ground is a poverty story in disguise, because the NAEP data she was summarizing show that almost all of the students clustered in the bottom quartile are also those flagged as economically disadvantaged (eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch). Recent releases make the overlap explicit:
2024 NAEP mathematics and reading tables report that students who are not economically disadvantaged gained or held steady, while scores for economically disadvantaged peers fell, further widening the gap by 8-12 points in many states.
The National Conference of State Legislatures’ briefing on the 2024 NAEP results notes that “the most proficient students (from higher-income groups) gained ground, while economically disadvantaged students who struggle the most fell further behind.”
In other words, Carr’s “lower-achieving students” are overwhelmingly the same students whose basic physiological and safety needs (food security, stable housing, reliable health care) are under constant stress, which is precisely the Maslowian bandwidth drain this article is unpacking. To be clear: we are not only reinforcing this Maslow before Bloom extension of “unmet lower-tier needs throttle learning” but connecting the national score “plateau” directly to the communities that need bandwidth-widening interventions the most.
Scarcity, in this context, is not merely an absence of resources but a very real cognitive load on mental bandwidth that traps minds, classrooms, and communities in the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy.
The Simultaneous Pyramid
We often learn about Maslow’s poster-pyramid hierarchy of needs as a tidy climb up five distinct levels. Unfortunately, this is not how the hierarchy functions. Daily life behaves more like five high-definition video streams competing over one shaky Wi-Fi connection. Each tier runs simultaneously, demanding a share of the same limited cognitive (individual), economic (social), and institutional (societal) bandwidth. When the pipe narrows, the lower-tier streams auto-prioritize and crowd out everything above them.
The lower tiers do not need to be fully realized for higher tiers to develop, but when those lower tiers are constantly under attack, the higher tiers cannot fully engage.
Like auto-play ads you can’t mute, the physiological and safety streams demand constant, lossless delivery: a skipped meal or looming layoff triggers stress circuitry that overrides higher-order planning within milliseconds. Studies show the prefrontal cortex literally down-regulates when the amygdala flags survival risk, meaning the “bandwidth grab” is baked into our biology (Liston et al., Hermans et al., Kogler et al.)
When one stream buffers, others deteriorate. A housing eviction (Safety) forces a school transfer, fracturing friendships (Belonging) and erasing hard-earned reputation (Esteem). Likewise, city-wide wildfire recovery (Safety) drains funds from libraries and arts grants (Self-Actualization), reducing public gathering spaces (Belonging) in the very moment communal healing is needed.
Similar to individual development, we find at the civic level that chronic underfunding of tier-one needs across communities inflates policing, healthcare, and emergency-relief costs, which in turn crowd out parks, museums, and research (the public equivalents of esteem and self-actualization).
Consider the following:
When those lowest tiers go unmet, public systems spend more on policing and acute care. Medicaid expansion in 2014–2016 reduced arrests 20-32 % in the first three years, showing that better health coverage (a tier-one investment) shrinks policing demand.
Poorer cities channel a bigger share of their general fund into police. A dataset of 473 municipal budgets shows police absorb ~30% of all general-fund dollars, with the share rising as median income falls, which is money not spent on community health, housing, education, or parks.
Budget trade-offs starve parks, libraries, and museums. In Houston’s 2025 budget, the largest slice ($1.1 billion) goes to police, while the departments that citizens value most (parks, libraries, neighborhoods) face fresh cuts because “after public safety and debt service, there isn’t room left for much else.”
The point here is that Maslow's Hierarchy is not a series of sequential elevators; they are simultaneous data streams. Until bandwidth is widened at the base, the top tiers will keep buffering, whether the end-user is a third grader learning how to multiply or a nation trying to fund city initiatives. Recognizing this connection allows us to reframe Maslow before Bloom as an issue of continuous load-balancing where we don’t climb past hunger once and for all; instead, we secure bandwidth for long-term security so higher-order learning, creativity, and civic foresight have the bandwidth to stream without lag.
II. Rotating Maslow's Hierarchy from the Individual to the Collective
This section rotates each layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy to show how each personal “bandwidth hog" (e.g. hunger, rent anxiety, social isolation) has a civic twin: record food-bank demand, spiking eviction filings, plummeting social trust, and thinning city budgets. The evidence reveals a connected bandwidth pipe highlighting how, when a community’s tier-one needs jam the line, higher-order outputs like upward mobility, innovation, and investment in climate stall just as surely as a student who isn't eating.
Physiological: Infrastructure Bandwidth
Rotate the lowest tier to find an infrastructure gauge. For example, a learner’s empty stomach shows up city-wide as America’s food-bank network distributing almost six billion meals in FY 2024, its heaviest load on record; a signal that the entire community’s “calorie pipe” is jammed. Emergency departments echo the strain: record, non-emergency walk-ins reveal preventive care has nowhere to flow.
Safety: Fiscal Shock Absorbers
Rotate the next tier up to find rent anxiety at the kitchen table morphing into community eviction filings and wildfire-suppression bills that now outstrip prevention spending. Like an overdue notice that hijacks attention, these redirected general-fund dollars leave less bandwidth for everything else.
Belonging: Social Trust Reserves
A student iced out of a peer group represents a wider rupture: only one-third of U.S. adults now say “most people can be trusted.” Low-trust neighborhoods vote less, volunteer less, and pool fewer resources—collective proof that the belonging stream is throttled.
Esteem: Mobility Lanes
The missed praise in the classroom is reflected as a national social-mobility slowdown. OECD data call the United States a “broken social elevator,” where family income still predicts future earnings. Without an appropriate esteem channel (e.g. wage growth, fair recognition), entire zip codes stall below their potential.
Self-Actualization/Transcendence: Innovation & Altruism Feed
Finally, rotate the highest tier of Maslow's Hierarchy to find personal creativity in the classroom reflected in public research and development, basic science research, and investments in climate-sustaining energy solutions. Nationally, R&D hovers near 3% of GDP, yet the federally funded share has slipped below 0.7%, evidence that even top-tier streams sputter when lower pipes vibrate with stress.
III. Bandwidth Bottlenecks in Schools Impact Surrounding Communities
When lower-tier needs overwhelm a school, the shockwaves ripple outward, draining local hospitals, housing courts, and police budgets, and those same strained systems bounce the pressure right back into classrooms. Below are four interlocking choke points that illustrate how under-resourced schools and communities form a single, self-reinforcing bottleneck:
School-Level Bottleneck | Community-Level Echo | Loop-Back Effect |
Hunger in the cafeteria Breakfast lines grow, students lose focus. | Food-bank demand sets new records, signaling chronic calorie scarcity. | Families depend even more on school meals, raising district food costs and staff workload. |
Teacher burnout and absenteeism Classes covered by subs or combined. | Regional nurse and social-worker shortages escalate, limiting family care options. | Sick children return to school untreated, and teachers shoulder even more emotional labor. |
High student mobility Records lost, friendships severed, achievement dips. | Eviction filings climb above pre-pandemic levels, especially in low-income ZIP codes. | Each move forces new placements, IEP reviews, and catch-up plans, multiplying administrative drag. |
Overloaded counseling staff Ratios triple recommended levels. | Emergency-room boarding surges for non-trauma mental-health visits. | Untreated anxiety and depression resurface as classroom disruptions, suspensions, and absenteeism. |
Take-away: A district cannot “teach its way out” of hunger, unstable housing, or untreated illness. Until every community receives dependable tier-one supports (e.g. food security, affordable housing, accessible health care) both the school’s bandwidth and the broader community's bandwidth will remain chronically throttled, stalling progress on every higher-order goal.
IV. What Can We Do? Expanding the Pipe at Both Scales
This section translates the bandwidth metaphor into action, outlining concrete “micro” steps schools can take to free cognitive space for individual students and teachers.
Additionally, “macro” policies widen lower-tier supports for whole communities. Together, these paired strategies show how localized relief and systemic investment can work in tandem to clear the pipeline for higher-order learning and innovation.
Micro fixes create pockets of breathing room for individuals; Macro fixes widen the main pipeline for entire communities.
Micro Fixes — Classroom & Campus
Intervention | How It Widens Bandwidth | Practical Roll-Out | Early Evidence |
Universal “Breakfast After the Bell” | Guarantees calories for every student, eliminating the stigma of a separate free-meal line and boosting first-period attentiveness. | Serve pre-packaged fruit, yogurt, and whole-grain items during attendance. Custodial staff collect waste on their normal hallway sweep; no extra cafeteria shifts required. | Denver Public Schools saw a 25 % jump in math engagement and a 7-point rise in attendance within two years of district-wide adoption. |
Trauma-Responsive Routines | De-activates fight-or-flight responses so working memory is available for learning. | Start each class with a two-minute “grounding sequence” (box breathing, stretch, quiet observation). Teachers receive a half-day workshop and a pocket card of cues. | A 2024 Johns Hopkins randomized pilot across 10 Baltimore middle schools recorded a 36 % drop in office referrals and statistically significant gains on reading benchmarks. |
Whole-Staff Wellness Release Days | Provides collective breathing room without singling anyone out and uses predictable coverage rather than ad-hoc sub requests. | One existing PD half-day per quarter converts to wellness time. Neighboring campuses share a pool of retired teachers and district “rovers”; dates are published a year ahead so families plan for early dismissal. Federal Title II or ESSER carry-over can fund stipends for roving subs. | Austin ISD’s “Staff Restoration” pilot (2023) reported a 14 % drop in mid-year teacher attrition and 11 % fewer sick-day requests at participating schools. |
On-Site Service Hubs | Cuts families’ survival errands—food, laundry, legal aid—so students arrive fed, clothed, and focused. | Convert an unused classroom into a “Community Closet & Pantry.” Local non-profits stock shelves; parent volunteers manage two afternoons a week. Rotary grants cover commercial washers. | Kentucky’s FRYSC (Family Resource & Youth Services Centers) network credits school-based pantries with a 10-point attendance boost and lower nurse visits across 800 sites. |
These MICRO actions give students and educators immediate “breathing room,” but they work best when paired with MACRO investments that widen the community’s entire pipeline.
Macro Fixes — City, State, Nation
Policy Lever | How It Adds Capacity | Recent Evidence | Key Findings |
Expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) | Direct cash lifts families over the food and rent line; 2021 pilot cut child poverty by 30 % in six months. | Columbia Center on Poverty found every $1 in CTC returned $8 in lifetime earnings and health savings. | Lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty; cut the national child-poverty rate by ~30%. (JEC) |
Affordable-housing bonds & right-to-counsel for renters | Stabilizes housing; reduces disruptive school moves. | Choice Neighborhoods study: Memphis students, 2015–2023 panel. | Moves to less-poor schools improve ELA; support matters. (Lab) |
Disaster-resilient infrastructure | Moves spending from reactive relief to proactive safety, freeing future budgets for parks, libraries, and research. | FEMA’s 2018 study shows each $1 in mitigation saves $6 in post-disaster costs; California’s micro-grid grants kept 600 schools open during 2022 wildfire outages. | |
Universal broadband | Converts “homework deserts” into learning zones; boosts GDP 0.9 % for every 10 pp increase in high-speed adoption. | FCC data: students with stable broadband score a full grade level higher in digital-literacy assessments. | County broadband adoption predicts higher math/ELA scores. (DIRECT) |
V. Reimagining Bloom When Society’s Bandwidth Shifts from Individualist to Collectivist at All Levels of a School District
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a beautiful model for understanding cognition, but it is not a guarantee. It doesn’t create the conditions for analysis, synthesis, or creativity; it simply describes what the mind can do when the mind is available.
When a child’s morning begins with hunger, housing instability, or untreated anxiety, Bloom doesn’t “fail”, it just never gets a fair chance to run. The same is true for teachers who are operating in chronic depletion, or for schools that have become service hubs for needs that the broader community cannot meet. Under scarcity, people don’t rise through the cognitive layers; they cycle through survival tasks.
But the reverse is also true: when societies invest in foundational stability, cognition expands. Collective supports don’t replace individual will; they protect it. When the base tiers of Maslow are made more reliable (i.e. food access, stable housing, basic health care, safe transportation) schools stop spending so much of their day triaging emergencies and start recovering time, attention, and emotional space.
That recovered bandwidth shows up in predictable ways:
Attention returns before achievement. You see it as fewer disruptions, fewer nurse visits, fewer mid-year transfers, and stronger attendance, conditions that support learning.
Working memory returns before rigor. Students can hold multi-step directions, persist through productive struggle, and revise instead of shutting down.
Belonging returns before self-actualization. Stable relationships and consistent environments restore trust, participation, and willingness to take academic risks.
Long-term thinking returns before long-term outcomes. Districts and cities with fewer crisis drains can plan, invest, and maintain programs rather than constantly rebuilding after collapse.
This is the key reframing:
"Bloom" is not just a learning framework; it is an output.
It is what emerges when the inputs of Maslow are not constantly in dire jeopardy. When we treat "Maslow before Bloom" as a collective slogan, we are not lowering expectations for individual achievement; we are refusing to confuse aspiration with infrastructure. We are saying: if we want higher-order thinking at scale, we must build the shared conditions that make higher-order thinking neurologically and institutionally possible.
VI. Call to Action – Sync the Hierarchies
If this article is right, then the most urgent question for schools is not, “How do we accelerate learning?” but “What is stealing the bandwidth required for learning... and who is responsible for restoring it?” The answer can't be “the child alone,” and it can't be “the teacher, "the school principal", "the state governor", or even "the parents."
Bandwidth is inherently a shared collective resource; therefore, responsibility for developing and sustaining it must also be shared. Here’s what syncing the hierarchies could look like in practice:
For educators and school leaders:
Name the bandwidth drain before you name the intervention.
Track the visible signals: chronic absenteeism, mid-year mobility, recurring behavior crises, nurse visits, unfinished work, staff burnout.
Ask the Maslow question as a systems diagnostic: Which foundational tier is unstable for the greatest number of people? And what does that instability cost us instructionally every day?
Pair academic reform with bandwidth protection: routines that regulate stress, predictable supports, and school-based access points that reduce survival errands.
For district and community partners:
Invest where schools can’t.
Treat food security, housing stability, and basic health access as learning infrastructure, and not as side issues.
Coordinate supports so families don’t need ten different offices to survive.
Fund stability like you fund safety: proactively, consistently, and before the crisis hits.
For readers, voters, and civic-minded community members:
Stop confusing individual effort with collective capacity
When you hear “flat scores,” ask: Flat for whom? What is being averaged away?
When you see schools labeled as failing, ask: Failing at instruction—or absorbing society’s unmet needs?
Support policies and partnerships that reduce the survival load at scale, because that is how communities reclaim the cognitive and institutional space to build, innovate, and thrive.
Ask Yourself: Which tier of Maslow is most unstable in your community right now—and what higher-order goals are being delayed because of it?
FInal Thought: A Collective Pyramid Worth Exploring
My original article Maslow before Bloom was never only about helping a single student who can’t learn because they’re hungry. It was a preview of a larger truth: a society that keeps too many people in survival mode will struggle to teach, create, or plan its way out of distress and into a healthy future.
When we stabilize the foundations of our society together, we don’t just raise test scores… we open the floodgates of possibility for improving more than individual student learning and explore the full upper tiers of collective flourishing—health, trust, creativity, mobility, and the kind of long-horizon innovation a community can’t afford while it remains stuck in survival mode.
Greg Mullen
December 26, 2025
