Chalkbeat

Virtual school enrollment has doubled in recent years, following pandemic-era surge

2026-08-27T20:29:44+00:00

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

Data analysis by Kae Petrin.

Remote learning during the pandemic was a nightmare for some students, but others have stuck with it, new data shows.

Just over 600,000 public school students attended fully virtual schools in the 2024-25 school year, the most recent data available. That’s about 1 in 80 public school children — a twofold increase since before the pandemic.

This reflects the growth of school choice: In more places, families who want to opt their children out of traditional schooling can and are doing so with public funding. Many families seek out online education because traditional schooling isn’t working for a variety of reasons. Yet prior research has raised pointed questions about the quality of virtual schooling. These concerns once drew significant attention, but ironically they have faded from the national discourse even as digital schooling has rapidly grown.

Virtual school enrollment spiked in the 2020-21 school year in the midst of the pandemic. Some families may have believed that a stand-alone virtual school would be better than the makeshift online programs that many school districts were standing up. This was not just a one-year blip, however, as the new data shows.

A majority of fully virtual students are in charter schools. Two companies that run online schools, Stride and Pearson, account for a large chunk of virtual enrollment. A recent earnings report from Stride said its virtual schools, known as K12, now enroll over 240,000 students in public and private schools. “Demand for educational choices remains strong,” the report said. In recent years, more school districts have also launched their own online options.

Among high school students, 1.6% were in fully virtual public schools, compared to 0.8% of students in grades 1-8.

The Education Department used to regularly report on the number of virtual school students, but like many other statistics, it has not updated these figures recently. Chalkbeat calculated up-to-date numbers, which had not been previously reported.

An additional 195,000 students were enrolled in schools that are categorized as primarily online with some in-person opportunities.

The federal numbers may undercount online school enrollment. For example, according to that data, 1% of Indiana students were in fully virtual schools in the fall of 2024. A Chalkbeat analysis using more detailed state data pegged enrollment at virtual schools at about 3% that year. States vary in the share of students in virtual schools, though differences in response rates and program structures mean cross-state comparisons should be interpreted with caution.

Several studies, based on data from before the pandemic, have found that students tend to make much less academic progress and graduate at lower rates in virtual charters. In 2016, prompted by concerns about quality, a trio of pro-charter school groups issued a high-profile call to close low-performing online charters. Reporting in states including Indiana and Colorado has raised concerns about misspending and inflated student enrollment in certain virtual charters.

Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas professor, noted that existing research may not be able to adequately account for the type of students who opt into virtual schools when assessing the quality of the education in these settings.

“Students who learn remotely may also perform somewhat lower than expected on in-person state assessments, not because of instruction quality, but because the testing environment itself is unfamiliar,” said Brooke Gabbert, a spokesperson for K12 virtual schools. “These students typically learn and test at home.”

A teacher at New York City’s district-run online school previously told Chalkbeat that students go virtual for a variety of reasons, such as disabilities that make attending a regular school challenging; flexibility for students who are caregivers; and difficulties in a prior school.

“Many of our students face social and personal challenges, so our work extends beyond delivering content,” said the teacher, Jude Julien.

Wolf says if test scores are a priority, online schooling is probably not a good option for most. “Parents should be informed about that reality and factor it into their decision making,” he says. The growth of virtual schooling is a sign of the times, though: The priority in education policy in recent years has been responding to parent demand rather than raising test scores.

Since online schools have grown rapidly, up-to-date and better research about the quality of education they’re providing seems like an urgent priority.

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

The problem with an AI tutor: Students don’t want to use it

2026-08-25T23:25:23+00:00

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

If you build it, they may not use it.

This is the emerging problem with artificial intelligence tools designed to help students learn. The latest evidence is a new study finding that middle school students rarely used an AI-powered tutor when given the option to do so.

The study examined Khanmigo, an AI chatbot associated with the popular Khan Academy program. The findings confirm the sentiment of founder Sal Khan, who previously told me that the AI tutor was a “non-event” for most students.

“If a keen, engaged student wants to use the technology as a good tutor, it’s ready to go,” said University of Toronto researcher Philip Oreopoulos. “The issue is that most students don’t use it that way.”

In the study, Oreopoulos worked with a Tennessee school district to randomly assign low-performing students from 18 middle schools to use Khan Academy during the school day. Khan Academy provides online lessons and practice that students work through at their own speed. Khanmigo is programmed to respond to questions without giving away the answers, though students had to actively seek its help.

The study compared Khan students with another group of students who instead used a combination of other digital math programs and small-group teacher-led instruction.

By year two of the study, the researchers found some promising results. Students using Khan Academy made faster math gains than the comparison group. This suggests that Khan Academy has value — a notable finding at a moment of intense backlash to ed-tech.

But the researchers say the benefits of Khan didn’t seem to come from AI. Most of the Khan Academy middle schoolers simply weren’t engaging with Khanmigo productively or at all.

Students only used Khanmigo about a third of the days they were working in Khan Academy. When interactions did occur, many students just sent off-topic messages or tried to convince Khanmigo to provide the correct answers. “Access was nearly universal but engagement was thin,” the researchers wrote. “It may be that human attention is the key ingredient for realizing the full benefits of personalized learning.”

Here are some examples of students’ interactions with Khanmigo from the new study:

Paraphrased examples of students' conversations with Khanmigo from the study "One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment."

“What this has put in huge spotlight — not that it’s a shock to educators — is how much motivation matters,” said Sal Khan in an interview.

The more AI can mirror a human tutor, the better it might become, Oreopoulos says. Right now, it’s not there. Maybe that’s a good thing: It’s not clear that we would want children to experience an AI chatbot as too human-like.

Since the study period, Khan Academy has redesigned its interface to better integrate Khanmigo and encourage more students to use it. “The AI could not just sit next to the content. It had to be woven into it. We had to make productive struggle harder to sidestep,” Khan wrote recently of the changes. The goal, he says, is not AI for its own sake, but to hopefully drive larger learning gains.

Overall, research on AI in education is nascent, but an early theme is that students often won’t use it for learning. “When given AI tutors, many students do not engage,” concluded a recent summary.

In another study released last week, Oreopoulos and colleagues sought to test a solution to this problem. In the same Tennessee school district, the researchers designed their own online math program. Some students were given access to an AI chatbot to help them work through problems. Students could only move on if they answered the questions correctly. In contrast to Khanmigo, the AI chatbot popped up without student prompting.

The students with access to AI moved less quickly through problems, but were more accurate in their answers. A week later when they were quizzed again on similar problems without access to AI, they were slightly more likely to respond correctly compared with a control group. This is preliminary evidence that in tightly controlled settings students can be coaxed into using AI well.

Of course, the challenge is that students spend most of their time outside of tightly controlled settings, and adolescents by their nature often seek the path of least resistance.

“The same technology that can be used as a good tutor, can also be used to make your life easier. But making your life easier equals less effort, less learning,” said Oreopoulos.

This story has been updated with a comment from Sal Khan.

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

The most advantaged students attend the best-funded colleges. Does it have to be this way?

2026-08-18T14:28:17+00:00

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

The prevailing philosophy of American higher education is simple enough: The best-funded universities ought to be reserved for the best-qualified students, who are largely from advantaged backgrounds.

Such is the reality described in a new study set to be released through the National Bureau of Economic Research in the coming weeks. The paper documents the all-encompassing stratification of American higher education. It is not simply that top students go to more selective colleges; it’s that those colleges spend far more on their students’ education. This is not just true of elite private universities; it applies to public colleges as well.

In practice, higher education’s pyramid-like structure means that the rich — both academically and financially — get richer through a well-funded college education. At the moment, higher education is under fire for what critics describe as equity and DEI efforts run amok. Yet its intensely unequal structure remains solidly in place.

The basic facts described in this new study — by Princeton’s Zachary Bleemer and UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein — are not terribly surprising, but they are rarely laid out so starkly from top to bottom.

At hyper-elite private colleges, there are more students from the top 1% of family income than from the bottom 40%. At public flagship universities, students from the top 20% outnumber those from the bottom 80%. “The more selective the college, the higher-income are its students,” the study says. Those schools also, of course, enroll students with much higher test scores.

Young adults who don’t enroll in college at all tend to come from the least-advantaged families.

This income and academic stratification correlates neatly with the money spent on students’ education, Bleemer and Rothstein show. Elite private schools spend by far the most — often well over $50,000 per student on instruction — but the public system is also highly unequal. Selective public four-year colleges spend more than twice as much per student as community colleges.

This resource gap was not always so extreme; it grew substantially between 1980 and 2010.

The study relies on detailed data to connect students’ family income to their college about a decade and a half ago; there is little evidence this relationship has weakened in the intervening years.

Bleemer and Rothstein say this current arrangement reflects a “meritocratic consensus” — the belief that the quality of students’ college education should depend on their success in high school. This is strangely uncontroversial. In K-12 schools, educators and policymakers often make efforts to drive more support and resources to struggling students. In higher education, the prevailing, albeit usually unstated, belief is that such students deserve less support.

The result is that American higher education widens the inequality of opportunity that begins in childhood. This system is not simply the result of free choices in a free market; it is supported, subsidized, and, in the case of public universities, created by the government.

The study is descriptive in nature, but Bleemer and Rothstein eventually acknowledge their own thinking. “There is little economic evidence justifying the status quo on efficiency grounds, and substantial room for skepticism,” they conclude.

Rothstein tells me that he would like to see more funding for community colleges. Bleemer notes that selective schools can exist without such massive resource differences.

Some adherents to higher ed’s “meritocratic consensus” have insisted that less academically prepared students do not benefit from the better-funded education that more selective colleges have to offer. Yet research suggests this is simply not the case, and it would be rather strange if it were.

When choosing a school, “the one number that you want to look up is what is being spent on a student in the college or university,” Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently advised. This is a key reason why equity advocates in higher education have been desperate to get more low-income students into elite schools, albeit with limited success.

The result of the current system is not simply that some students don’t get to attend their dream colleges. It’s that their fallback options often provide a worse-quality education.

Yet efforts to break the “meritocratic consensus” have drawn fierce pushback. At the University of California system, faculty have complained about underprepared students slipping through the admissions sieve since standardized tests were dropped from consideration. The response, faculty and others insist, should be to keep such students out. Little attention is paid to where they would go instead.

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

NYC’s unexplained test score swings prompt experts to question reading results

2026-08-13T19:07:26+00:00

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This year’s startling collapse of New York City’s reading scores, followed by last year’s big gains, has some experts asking: Did something go wrong with the test itself?

There is no clear evidence there is a problem, experts emphasize, but the unusually wide swing in scores warrants careful investigation, multiple testing experts told Chalkbeat this week.

“My instinctive reaction is there may have been an issue last year that we missed,” said Marianne Perie, who consults with states on testing. “This kind of big increase followed by a big decrease is surprising.”

Perie co-chairs New York state’s technical advisory committee, a panel of experts paid by the state to oversee the testing process. She spoke to Chalkbeat about the trends in her personal capacity, she said. The committee is set to meet next month to review the results in detail and seek to better understand what might explain the changes, Perie said.

Half of New York City students were considered proficient in reading on last year’s tests, down 6 percentage points from the year before, according to preliminary results released last week. The share of third, fourth, and fifth graders who met grade-level standards fell to levels similar to 2024 in both New York City and state.

The sharp test score swings in those grades immediately sparked theories about what could explain them. Some educators and families wondered if the transition to computer-based testing was a factor. Others pointed to a literacy shakeup in New York City that has been dominated by one controversial curriculum.

Last week, EdTrust-New York, a nonprofit advocacy group, called for an independent audit of the state’s reading tests. Officials “never adequately investigated or explained last year’s dramatic gains, making this year’s reversal difficult to interpret,” the group said in a statement.

JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department, said the agency “takes this decline seriously and will conduct a detailed analysis to better understand where students are experiencing challenges.”

Simona Beattie, a spokesperson for NWEA, the state’s testing vendor, said in a statement, “At this stage, we have not found any anomalies through our standard due diligence process, which includes corroborating results with an external third party.”

“Given this, we have high confidence in the accuracy of the results,” Beattie added.

In New York City, the share of third graders scoring proficiently on the reading test fell by 14 percentage points, after rising by 13 points the year before. There were also substantial shifts in fourth and fifth grade scores on the test in both the city and state. Seventh and eighth grade reading scores essentially held steady. Math scores ticked up across the state but were flat in New York City.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement that the scores merit “rigorous analysis so we can ensure we’re measuring what students are learning.”

The fluctuations in elementary reading scores were quite unusual and surprising, said Benjamin Shear, a testing expert at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It requires further scrutiny, questioning, and digging.”

What’s behind the reading score drop? Experts weigh different theories

City officials and some outside groups took a victory lap after last year’s dramatic surge in elementary reading scores, arguing that the major literacy curriculum overhaul was paying off.

Now, the teachers union is pointing to the declines as evidence of problems with the city’s curriculum mandate and threatened to withdraw their support. But that does not explain the broad test score declines across the state, including districts that have not made similar curriculum changes.

In general, testing experts, known as psychometricians, say that a number of theories are worth considering to explain large shifts in scores: changes in student demographics, testing practices, opt-out rates, and educational policies.

Figures released by the city indicate there were no major changes in the number of test-takers in early grades. The share of city students considered low-income in elementary grades also held fairly steady. And while the state finished its transition in the spring to computer-based testing, that wouldn’t explain swings in fifth grade, where digital assessments have been the norm since 2024.

EdTrust-New York noted that in contrast to state scores, there was steady progress on interim reading assessments New York City schools administer at least three times a year.

Emily Oster, a Brown University education economist who has tracked test scores across the country, published a post on Substack this week questioning the plausibility of New York’s score changes. She suggested that there may have been a technical error in comparing the results year to year.

In an email to Chalkbeat, Oster acknowledged there is no definitive proof for this. But, she said, the reported results are “not consistent with nearly everything else we know about student learning.” She noted that fourth graders’ reading scores had jumped last year, but that same group of students, now fifth graders, have seen scores fall back this year.

Asked about Oster’s post, O’Hare from New York’s education department said: “Speculation is not a substitute for data … Our ongoing review of the preliminary data has not identified any of the issues she outlines in her conjecture.”

An over 200-page technical report documented the process to ensure the accuracy of the 2025 results.

Scott Marion, a testing expert with the Center for Assessment, said he’s naturally suspicious of a large change in scores that doesn’t persist the following year. To him, it’s implausible that the rise and fall of scores represents real differences in achievement or teaching practices.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.

Marion says that perhaps more questions should have been raised about the sharp score increase last year. In his experience, education officials are eager to have testing experts investigate unusual declines, but not unusual increases.

Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor who serves on New York’s technical advisory committee, said he believes the shifts probably point to real changes in student learning, even if the actual swings aren’t as extreme as the exams suggest.

“We should absolutely look at the test, but we should absolutely also look at what the test is likely revealing,” he said.

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

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

School funding’s surprising U-shape, the future of work, digital tests, and more: A Chalkbeat Ideas roundup

2026-08-11T15:04:09+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas. This is our semi-monthly roundup of interesting takes, tidbits, and links. Feel free to send along links and ideas for the next one.

America’s strange U-shaped school funding system

Conventional wisdom holds that property taxes create deep inequities in school funding between rich and poor school systems. Across the country as a whole, this is not true and hasn’t been for some time, concludes a recent Brookings Institution analysis.

In reality, American school funding is U-shaped, with high- and low-poverty school systems tending to spend more money than those in the middle. In the below graphic from the report, funding per student is broken down by poverty rates from low to high.

Click here to continue reading.

Q&A: The case against blanket screen-time limits in schools

2026-08-06T14:20:59+00:00

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.

It’s a tough time to be an education technology enthusiast.

Ed-tech was once widely touted as key to improving learning, but these days many state officials, school leaders, teachers, and parents want to get students off screens in class.

Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, a nonprofit that convenes and trains educators on using tech, has watched this furor grow with a combination of sympathy and alarm. In his telling, the tech backlash is understandable, but the solutions — blanket restrictions in some cases — are not. Echoing many advocates and companies, Culatta insists that schools not throw the ed-tech baby out with the bathwater. Yet he readily concedes there’s a lot of bathwater.

Incidentally, ISTE recently rebranded from the International Society for Technology in Education to the International Society for Transforming Education. Culatta, who’s led the organization for nearly a decade, says the name shift has been in the works for some time and is not a response to ed-tech’s brand crisis.

I’ve heard a lot recently from skeptics of ed-tech, which is why I wanted to talk to Culatta, who has emerged as a leading defender of the value of tech in schools. I was interested in Culatta’s take on why this backlash happened, how to tell good ed-tech from bad, and what role screens should play in early grades.

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo of Richard Culatta

Why do you think there has been such an intense backlash to ed-tech in recent months?

You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.

The implication is that there has been a lot of bad ed-tech use, right? What does that look like?

People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.

So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.

[The Los Angeles school board recently approved limits on screen time, set by grade level. For instance, in fourth and fifth grades, students will be limited to 30 minutes per day. Before second grade, devices will generally not be used. School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin recently explained the rationale behind this shift to me.]

What do you object to about what Los Angeles is doing?

If you have a technology that is not supporting learning, zero minutes should be used. And if you have cases where technology is being used in thoughtful ways, it should have more flexibility. It’s going to mean that all of the energy is spent on clocking and timing as opposed to actually training teachers.

Do you think first graders and kindergartners should be spending any amount of time on screens?

It depends. All technology use should be aligned to student needs and learning goals. The use cases where that makes sense for young students are fewer and far between. Banning rarely is a good strategy.

I saw, ironically, in L.A. a number of years ago, a great example of kindergartners practicing reading. Instead of doing these traditional book reports — that were just painful and boring — they were making videos explaining the words they were using. So lots of vocabulary repetition, lots of good use of words in context. Should it have been done for a very long time? No, but in this case it wasn’t.

I’m old enough to remember when there was incredible hype about the possibility of ed-tech driving substantial learning gains. Was ed-tech oversold?

I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.

My colleague did a story recently about the sheer number of sales pitches from tech companies that a school district leader gets. And I’m sure every sales pitch came with, ‘oh we’re curriculum-aligned, we’re evidence-based.’

Why would we ever trust the company selling you the thing to tell you that?

Well, right, but then who do you trust? How do you know?

That is the job of education leaders. That is the job of teachers to know when it’s effective. In fairness, we do need to make it easier for schools to make those decisions. We have something that we’re piloting right now, which is called the EdTech Index. It is a database where we are collecting trusted third-party validations of tools and apps.

Do you think the growth of technology in schools over, say, the last decade has had a net positive effect on students?

In the cases where it’s been used in appropriate ways, the answer is yes. The challenge is that for every two schools that are doing this thoughtfully, there are two schools that are doing it in all the wrong ways. What you end up getting is results that are like, eh, doesn’t really make much of a difference. If you aren’t using it in a way that makes a significant difference, you’re guaranteed that it’s going to be distracting and limiting effective learning.

We have well-intentioned schools and educators, and if your theory is true, so many of them are using tech for ill rather than good — that’s a profound challenge.

Totally. I mean, you’re spot on. A follow-up question that you might ask is, well, even if it does make a difference in some places, just to avoid the risk, let’s just not use technology. And that would be reasonable if we didn’t care about our kids being able to get a job in the global economy.

But is it necessary to introduce those tools in, say, elementary school to prepare kids for a global economy?

100%. It’s not about the tools; it’s about behaviors. The behaviors need to happen over a long time. Being a healthy, contributing member of a digital world — that is a complex skill, just like learning to read and write, play an instrument, or play sports.

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

Who should go to college? More students may benefit than we think

2026-08-04T20:40:26+00:00

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

It’s well known that college-educated workers earn more money, on average, than those with just a high school diploma. And there are few middle-class jobs available for workers without a degree, as I found in a recent data analysis.

So does that mean more people should go to college?

The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli is skeptical. Many people who don’t attend college “were nowhere near college ready at the end of high school,” he wrote in response to my piece. Sending academically underprepared students to college does them no favors, Petrilli continues. Only 40% or so of high school students have demonstrated college readiness, he says. Pushing the other 60% to college could just lead them to debt without a degree.

I was curious about this myself. Should college be limited to those who do relatively well in high school? To get a better sense, I dug into the research. The findings surprised me.

It is genuinely complicated to determine the value of college and who should attend. While degreed workers make more money, we don’t know if that’s because they went to college.

Fortunately, researchers have developed a clever strategy to see whether four-year college makes a difference: tracking students who just managed to get into college and comparing them to similar peers who didn’t get that opportunity.

An influential 2014 study by Yale University economist Seth Zimmerman focused on Florida International University, a large four-year public college that provided a sharp admissions advantage to students whose GPAs were above 3.0. Zimmerman compared students right above and right below that threshold. The intuition is that someone with a 3.01 GPA is essentially identical to someone with a 2.99 average, except one person receives an admissions edge and the other doesn’t. This creates a natural experiment.

The students who just managed to get into FIU were not academic standouts — far from it. Their SAT scores, just over 800 out of 1600, were at the 21st percentile of high school seniors planning to attend college. For many, if they didn’t get into FIU, they wouldn’t have gone to a four-year college at all.

Zimmerman found a clear advantage for students who got the opportunity to attend FIU. Roughly a decade later, those students earned 22% more than similar students who didn’t get in. These earnings gains were well worth the cost of tuition.

Only about half of these marginal FIU students went on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. By comparison, the national graduation rate for four-year nonprofit colleges is roughly two-thirds. The study isn’t able to distinguish the effects on graduates versus non-graduates. It can only speak to the average effect. It’s possible that many non-graduates did not benefit or were even harmed. But they may have developed skills in college that helped them in the future, even though they didn’t earn a degree.

This was one paper in one particular setting, but the findings have shown up in other contexts too.

A Georgia study found students who just got into the state’s four-year public university system eventually earned 17% more annually by age 30 than similar non-admitted students. These were students at about the 30th percentile of SAT performance.
Research in Massachusetts found that low-income students who just got into state colleges there received large economic benefits years later. In high school, these students’ test scores were slightly below the average for high school graduates.
A Texas paper, using test-score admissions cutoffs across 35 public colleges, found a clear economic edge for students who won admission to a four-year school.

These studies generally look at students who otherwise would have attended a two-year college rather than no college at all. A different Texas study showed a clear hierarchy: Students fared better in four-year colleges than two-year schools, but a two-year program was better than no college at all. The two-year college advantage was for students at roughly the 30th percentile of high school test performance in the state. (One wrinkle: Another recent study in the state found marginal students didn’t seem to benefit from transferring to a four-year college from a two-year school.)

This body of research should be interpreted with some degree of caution. It looks at specific places and specific groups of students, who typically entered college decades ago. The papers find positive effects on average, but they don’t imply that everyone benefited. The studies can’t speak to whether AI will change the value of a degree, as some predict. The research also doesn’t show whether students are developing skills in college that help them succeed or whether they are getting hired because employers use a college education as a signal of skill.

Still, these papers find that even students who don’t excel in high school often stand to gain from attending college. Many, perhaps most, of these students would not have been categorized as “college ready” by traditional benchmarks. If anything, the research suggests that some states have set college admissions cutoffs that are too high, not too low.

“Given the population of people who want to go, we would benefit from helping more of them go, at least somewhat,” says Zimmerman, the Yale professor.

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

How a years-long rise in teacher turnover reshaped American classrooms

2026-07-30T19:08:33+00:00

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.

There was no single reason why Ryan Higgins decided to leave teaching.

It was a job he loved: invigorating, unpredictable, a chance to make the world a bit better. But several years into his career, Higgins, who taught high school social studies in the Fort Worth, Texas area, was increasingly frustrated.

For one, his salary — decent when he was fresh out of college in 2016 — felt stagnant and mediocre. He coached basketball and football, so his days often stretched from early morning to late evening. And “teacher appreciation week” began to feel borderline demeaning: You can wear jeans all week! There’s free pizza in the teachers’ lounge!

Then there was the time a parent complained after he chewed out and benched a member of the basketball team who was slacking off. The school’s assistant principal didn’t back Higgins up. Yes, maybe he had been a bit too tough, but he was also giving up his Saturdays, doing students’ laundry, and even driving the bus.

Ryan Higgins, during his teaching days, with a colleague.

“You’re running around like crazy trying to solve problems, and yet people who aren’t with you are always telling you what you need to do better,” Higgins says.

What finally pushed him out was the aftermath of the pandemic. Trying to effectively teach students over Zoom was all but impossible. Then when students returned to classrooms, they were breathtakingly behind academically and socially. Behavior was out of control. Parents, it seemed, were less trusting of teachers, too. “It felt like the walls were closing in,” he says.

Higgins left teaching in the summer of 2022. A member of the Army Reserve, he soon took an assignment overseas. Today, he’s going into his third year of law school. He sees himself as part of a “lost generation” of teachers.

The year Higgins left, more teachers departed public school classrooms in Texas than at any point since at least 2007, the earliest year with state data. This was not just a blip: From 2020 to 2025, the state lost 35,000 teachers who would have stayed in the classroom if the state had maintained its pre-pandemic turnover figures. That’s equivalent to nearly 10% of the current teacher workforce.

The pattern in Texas has repeated to varying degrees in states across the country, according to an extensive Chalkbeat analysis of data since 2019 spanning 21 states. Most of those states have experienced four to five straight years of elevated teacher turnover, compounding the losses year after year. High-poverty schools in particular were already having a hard time keeping teachers.

Even though turnover finally appears to be trending down, the consequences persist. Research has linked teacher churn to declines in test scores. At a moment when policymakers are seeking to understand America’s sluggish learning recovery, the loss of teachers and instability in schools deserves to be on the list of plausible contributors.

[See our entire analysis of teacher turnover across 21 states including detailed data from each state. You can also watch our online event about teacher turnover.]

A teacher turnover dip, then a sustained rise

There is no comprehensive national data on teacher exit rates. To fill this gap, I conducted an extensive state-by-state review, using a variety of sources.

Across most states, a pattern emerged: Compared with 2019, fewer teachers left the profession in the summer of 2020 when the economy was at a standstill due to the pandemic. But then teacher attrition began to rise sharply. Rates peaked in 2022 but typically remained elevated for the next couple years.

Only a couple of states in this analysis, Connecticut and Maryland, avoided any meaningful rise in turnover.

A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said the state has “experienced many of the workforce challenges seen nationwide, which is why teacher recruitment and retention remain a priority.” Texas, for instance, has expanded a merit pay program, which has helped retain effective teachers, according to a recent study.

High-poverty schools, which struggled with teacher churn before the pandemic, likely suffered the most from the turnover spike. In South Carolina, for instance, exit rates rose especially sharply at those schools. A number of states have reported increases in uncertified, emergency-certified, and inexperienced educators. Those teachers are typically concentrated in high-poverty schools.

It hasn’t just been teachers departing. In Alaska, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas, and Washington state principal attrition rose too. Turnover often has a cascading effect in schools. When a principal leaves, an assistant principal may take over, a teacher may become an assistant principal — and another classroom vacancy opens up.

Justin Wax became principal of a junior high school in southeast Louisiana in 2021. He was the third leader in three years. That made keeping staff harder since many were looking for stability at that moment. Most of the teachers who were at the school when he started are now gone. “You’re scraping the cream off of the top of all of the most veteran people,” Wax says. “There ends up being a vacuum.”

Turnover appears to be finally coming back down. In the 12 states with figures through last summer, rates were below post-pandemic highs, although some places have not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Wax says he’s had his best year of retention recently and is well staffed going into this coming school year. He’s prioritized making his school a supportive community where teachers are given professional autonomy and backed up on student discipline issues. Today, surveys show that teacher stress has subsided from pandemic-era spikes. Most teachers are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs.

More comprehensive recent data on turnover is not available because many states report figures with a significant lag. Other states don’t report numbers at all. And no state appears to have data yet for the share of teachers who have left this summer.

Teachers face worse behavior, stagnant pay, fewer perks

What drove the sharp increase in teacher exits?

Meghann Seril has been teaching elementary school in Los Angeles for 18 years. These days, she finds students’ behavior more challenging and their attention spans more limited. She’s seen many colleagues who struggled with classroom management leave in recent years.

“It has such a ripple effect because the administrator is focused on supporting those new teachers,” she says. “You’re working on putting out little fires all of the time.” In surveys, teachers often say that student behavior is their top source of stress, and many reported that behavioral issues spiked after school buildings reopened.

Meanwhile, many other professionals have received a valuable new perk since the pandemic: the ability to work from home. “Being a teacher is arguably the least flexible job around,” says Alex Baron, principal of a charter middle school in Washington, D.C. He suspects that’s made it difficult to recruit and retain teachers in his school.

At the same time, teacher salaries, never particularly high, have fallen in real dollars, as inflation soared and school officials used new funds to hire more staff rather than give teachers a raise. The salary gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals has grown in recent years.

Tyra Damm’s decision to leave teaching came down to money. Some of her colleagues with higher-earning spouses saw teaching as a nice-to-have second income. One called it “fun money.” Damm, who lives in the Dallas suburbs, did not have that luxury. She took up teaching in 2013, soon after her husband died of brain cancer. She figured it would provide a stable income with a parent-friendly schedule as she raised two young children.

She loved the job. Damm most recently taught middle school reading and writing to gifted and talented students and was named secondary teacher of the year in her district in 2019. But with only anemic raises and the price of everything rising, “I just couldn’t pay the bills anymore,” she says.

When the American Heart Association, which she had done freelance writing for, offered her a full-time job with remote work and higher pay, Damm felt like she had no choice but to take it. She left teaching in 2024.

“I miss it every day,” she says.

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

When teachers lack confidence in math, their students fall behind, a new study shows

2026-07-28T14:22:02+00:00

Last call to sign up for our next Chalkbeat Ideas online event, which will feature new data on the number of teachers leaving the profession over the last several years. We’ll also have a rich conversation about what to make of this data. Hope to see you Thursday at noon ET.

Plenty of students have math anxiety. It turns out some educators have their own anxiety about teaching the subject, a new study finds. And that appears to affect their students — especially those already struggling in the subject.

The recently published paper draws on an unusually detailed survey of teachers in Indiana. They were asked how much they agreed with statements like “Teaching mathematics does not intimidate me at all” and “Of all the subjects, mathematics is the one I worry about teaching.”

Based on those answers, the researchers created a “math teaching anxiety” score for over 3,000 educators who taught math in grades three through eight. Those grades are when state testing occurs, allowing the researchers to link teachers to their students’ progress.

The good news: Math anxiety was not all that prevalent among elementary and middle school teachers in Indiana. Just over half were highly confident teaching the subject, and nearly 40% reported middling confidence. That left 11% of teachers with significant apprehension about teaching math.

New teachers were especially likely to lack confidence, perhaps reflecting broader struggles in the classroom, the researchers found. Early-grade educators also tended to have a bit less assurance in math. This makes sense since the study included middle school teachers, many of whom specialize in the subject.

Math-anxious teachers were not evenly spread across classrooms. Students with disabilities, low-achieving students, and students from lower-income families were more likely to have such teachers. It’s also possible that teachers became less confident in their ability because they taught more students who struggled in math.

Then the researchers asked the next obvious question: Do students learn less when they’re taught by anxious math teachers? In short, yes.

The differences in learning rates were real but modest. An average student’s scores dipped by about one percentile when taught by a less confident math teacher, the researchers found. The harm could grow if students had multiple anxious math teachers in a row, the study speculated. Girls, Asian American students, and English learners seemed to be affected a bit more severely by having an anxious math teacher.

The study paints a particularly troubling picture of math instruction for students already struggling in the subject. They were more likely to have an anxious teacher, and when they did, their learning suffered more. In other words, the students who needed the most help in math were often taught by teachers least equipped to provide it.

NaYoung Hwang, the study’s lead author and a professor at the University of New Hampshire, said there are a number of potential explanations for the results. Math-anxious teachers may have spent less time on the subject, explained math concepts less clearly, or even made their own math errors. Perhaps their own ambivalence and anxiety came through.

“When teachers are genuinely excited about the content, students tend to engage much more,” Hwang said.

The study partially validates the long-standing concern that elementary school teachers, at least some of them, are not sufficiently equipped to teach math. A National Council on Teacher Quality report concluded that most elementary teacher preparation programs don’t spend enough time on core math content.

The study also offers an insight relevant beyond math instruction.

Teachers who lacked confidence teaching math had correctly self-diagnosed their own weakness. School administrators should keep that in mind when planning professional development and support for educators. Perhaps they should start by asking teachers themselves what they need to get better.

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

70 years after Brown, schools remain separate by race and class. One advocate says integration still matters.

2026-07-21T21:33:12+00:00

Ary Amerikaner is on a mission to make America integrate schools again.

A lawyer and education policy advocate who worked in the Obama Education Department, Amerikaner cofounded and leads an organization called Brown’s Promise. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education prohibited legally mandated segregation.

The group is hoping to influence the national conversation, while also making direct change in a handful of specific states.

Click here to continue reading.

Why digital tests are helping keep Chromebooks in classrooms

2026-07-16T20:40:07+00:00

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

Even some educators skeptical of technology say they can’t go cold turkey on Chromebooks. Why? Because standardized testing is now widely done via computer.

“Third grade is the first year of testing, and we wouldn’t want that to be the first time kids are getting exposed to devices,” Los Angeles school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin told me recently, explaining why the district isn’t banning screens after first grade.

Similarly, Baltimore cut back on tech in early grades, but will continue to provide devices to third graders because of testing, the Banner reported earlier this year. A North Carolina superintendent also said the district must maintain some tech to prepare students for assessments. “But if I had the choice, I’d say bubble sheets please,” Stan Winborne, the superintendent of Granville County Public Schools, told the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, digital testing has had the unintended consequence of promoting tech-powered instruction. This raises a pointed question that more schools and policymakers may soon have to grapple with: Should the mode of testing be driving key instructional decisions?

Scott Marion, a psychometrician at the Center for Assessment, isn’t convinced that there should be a broad tech rollback. But he says it’s concerning when assessment alone is shaping pedagogy. “I don’t like when people do things just for testing purposes,” he says.

Standardized testing has become increasingly digitized over the last couple decades for the same reason many things have: convenience. Instead of massive sheaves of paper shipped to and from schools, tests can be done on devices, which are plentiful these days. Online tests were also promoted as a way to more precisely measure student learning since questions can adapt to student skill level.

A downside, though, is that internet outages and other tech glitches can derail testing, as recently occurred in New York and has repeatedly happened in Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in the last several months, a remarkable backlash to tech in schools has swept the country. Some local school leaders and teachers have cut back on screen time. They’ve been able to move so quickly because there are few school tech mandates — except through testing. The federal government requires math and reading tests in grades three through eight; the format of those tests is set by states. Local leaders don’t control this.

Some research shows online testing can affect how well students perform. “There is a learning curve” to digital testing, says Marion, although he suspects that these days it’s not that steep.

Jared Cooney Horvath — a researcher, consultant, and ed-tech critic — argues that brief practice with online assessment is enough to prepare students. “Just because digital testing is the new norm, it does not follow that schooling needs to be redesigned around this format,” he wrote recently on his blog.

It’s an open question how much tech familiarity students need for such tests, especially in early grades. Regardless, perception appears to be holding some districts back from bigger tech reductions. “We want to limit screen time,” one Texas superintendent told a local news outlet. “We also know that we have to give students the opportunity to learn the skill of using technology, so that they can use it to demonstrate learning.”

States may also have an incentive to keep tech in their classrooms if officials think it can help boost scores on online tests. Although the federal NAEP exams don’t have formal stakes attached, state leaders are eager to use scores to claim success of their policies. In 2018, after NAEP tests went digital, Louisiana’s state chief complained that students there might have seen scores drop because they were unfamiliar with computers. (NAEP officials said then this was carefully accounted for.)

Could states go back to paper-and-pencil tests if they wanted? Sure, though it would add logistical challenges and perhaps costs. Whether it’s worth it depends on what you think of general tech use in the classroom. The evidence at this point is ambiguous and in the eye of the beholder.

But with the ed-tech backlash showing no signs of slowing down, digital testing could become the next target.

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

Iowa school districts quietly agreed to new limits on undocumented students’ course access

2026-07-15T18:31:12+00:00

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Most Iowa school districts have quietly agreed to exclude undocumented high school students from certain federally funded career and technical education programming, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

The move follows the Trump administration’s controversial interpretation of a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, guaranteeing children a free K-12 education regardless of immigration status. Trump officials argue that the ruling protects only a “basic public education,” but not “postsecondary” education. That distinction affects high school students as dual enrollment and career training programs have become increasingly common.

The Iowa records reveal how Trump has made notable headway limiting the educational rights of immigrants without legal permission to be in the country and in chipping away at Plyler. Iowa is at least the second state under Republican control to adopt such a policy — Virginia did so but then changed course after electing a new Democratic governor.

“There is a very strong argument that Plyler as written forbids what Iowa is doing,” said Aaron Tang, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Yet, he said, there’s a plausible counterargument, and the conservative Supreme Court might well agree with this novel interpretation, if the issue were to reach the high court.

Tang said that if the Trump administration’s interpretation wins out it will be difficult to determine what constitutes a “basic public education.” Does calculus class? What about precalculus?

It’s not clear how many, if any, students in Iowa or elsewhere have been affected by this provision. Schools don’t typically ask students about their immigration status so there’s no simple way to know who to exclude.

Trump pushes limits on undocumented students’ educational rights

Last year, the Trump administration announced a sweeping new legal interpretation of a federal law on unauthorized immigrants’ access to public benefits. States were not immediately required to follow this interpretation, but the Education Department could take action to enforce it.

The Iowa Department of Education soon said that under the new rules undocumented students should be kept out of federally funded early college experiences and community college classes “even if the course occurs at the high school.” (This restriction does not apply to concurrent enrollment courses that high schools use to meet basic course offering requirements under state law.)

The state soon began requiring school systems and community colleges to agree to these new terms in order to access federal funding for career and technical education.

The vast majority of Iowa school districts have done so, either directly or through a CTE consortium that they are a part of, according to the records obtained by Chalkbeat. A handful of systems have not submitted reimbursement requests recently, so they have not agreed to those terms, the records indicate. Heather Doe, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education, said the state has not denied any schools funding over the issue.

Among other things, Iowa schools have used CTE dollars, known as Perkins funding, to help students attain industry-recognized credentials in a variety of fields.

It is not clear how school systems could enforce these new restrictions on undocumented students or if they have any intention of doing so. “The Iowa Department of Education does not require the reporting of immigration status but rather confirms the institution’s awareness of federal funding restrictions,” Doe said.

Spokespeople for a number of Iowa-based immigration and Latino advocacy groups did not respond to inquiries about whether any student has been denied programming under this new rule. None of several large school districts in the state responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Iowa superintendents’ association said it has not heard concerns or questions from members about the new rule.

A federal judge has halted enforcement of the federal legal interpretation in a number of states where Democratic officials have challenged its legality. Iowa is not one of them.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson downplayed the likelihood of taking action against states or schools that didn’t comply, saying the agency was focused on “litigation developments rather than on patchwork enforcement” of the guidance.

Still, confusion remains about the policy. On a recent call hosted by the Trump administration for state CTE and adult education officials, at least two people asked for clarification about the current status of the immigration rule, according to an excerpt of the chat obtained by Chalkbeat.

Officials on the call did not respond to those questions, according to a transcript of the conversation.

The Trump administration’s actions here are a small part of a massive campaign to deport unauthorized immigrants and restrict the public benefits available to those who remain. For instance, Trump and a number of Republican governors have prevented undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition at public universities in a number of states.

At the same time, conservatives have been strategizing about how to undermine and reverse the Plyler ruling. Earlier this year, state legislators in Tennessee seriously considered a law meant to challenge the ruling, but the legislation ultimately died.

This story has been updated to clarify that Iowa’s restriction does not apply to courses used by schools to meet certain basic course offering requirements.

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

Test scores have plunged, but voters aren’t making schools a top political issue

2026-07-14T20:44:41+00:00

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

While running for governor of California, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan was eager to talk about the challenges in the state’s public schools. He even compared California unfavorably to Louisiana and Mississippi, which have recently made gains on national exams. “With all of our progressivism, all of our resources, we are failing far too many of our kids,” Mahan said at one point. Few other candidates prioritized education during the campaign.

But Mahan’s pitch didn’t seem to resonate much with California voters. He received less than 4% of the vote in last month’s primary.

Many factors go into election results, but the limited traction Mahan received is a neat encapsulation of a broader phenomenon. The unprecedented recent declines in American students’ test scores have barely registered politically.

“Most voters don’t really care very much,” says Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University. Perhaps that’s why most politicians aren’t prioritizing the issue, at least during political campaigns.

A recent Gallup poll found that just 2% of Americans ranked education as the country’s most pressing challenge. While most people say they’re dissatisfied with the country’s public schools, a strong majority of parents are reasonably happy with their own child’s school.

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, has sought to make education a bigger political issue by arguing that his own party has not done enough to improve schools. This pitch has drawn a great deal of attention from journalists, including me, but so far has not drawn much interest from regular voters. In a potential presidential primary, Emanuel is polling between 0%-2%.

In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet campaigned to be an “education governor.” The former superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Bennet presided over notable gains in student outcomes there. Tellingly, though, the campaign did not focus on education, and Bennet was upset in the primary by Attorney General Phil Weiser.

In Iowa, Democratic candidate for governor Rob Sand has successfully put education at the center of the race by offering a sharp critique of taxpayer funding for private schools. In a recent interview with me, he was less specific on how he would improve public schooling. Despite being a Democrat in a red state, Sand has led in a number of early polls.

In general, most nationally prominent Democrats don’t appear eager to talk about the state of learning in U.S. schools. Yet voters don’t seem to mind. The party has held a clear edge on education in most polling for the last few years, including several recent surveys.

On the other hand, President Donald Trump has been happy to talk about perceived failings of the country’s public schools, including falling test scores. Still, the energizing focus of Trump’s campaign and now presidency has not been to raise achievement but to limit DEI and close the Education Department. (Officials suggest this will help improve schools, but haven’t spelled out how moving the same programs to different federal agencies would do so.)

Unlike policy wonks, Americans may not be all that focused on test scores. In one poll, parents ranked test scores as the least important measure among several for judging their children’s success in school. In school board elections, researchers have found that voters don’t seem to weigh tests heavily when deciding whether to reelect incumbents.

In 2024, Massachusetts held a referendum on whether to allow students to graduate high school without passing a standardized test. Critics across the political spectrum argued this would exacerbate the achievement issues facing the state, yet voters still backed the measure overwhelmingly.

Americans’ seeming nonchalance has come despite the substantial media attention to the country’s achievement woes. Some news stories even offer a clear nudge to voters and politicians that they should care more. “What happened to learning as a national priority?” pointedly asked a New York Times essay last year.

There has also been no shortage of policy advocates, nonprofit executives, and educational researchers clamoring to make this a bigger issue.

Here at Chalkbeat we’ve published dozens of pieces on the state of learning. I’ve been writing about the potential and the reality of learning loss since March 2020. There’s a reason for this focus: Test scores aren’t perfect measures, but they tell us something meaningful about how well American students are learning basic skills.

To be clear, politicians have not been entirely indifferent to the learning challenges. Some governors and legislators have made a number of moves designed to bolster achievement. In particular, they’ve banned cellphones in school and promoted the science of reading, often on a bipartisan basis.

But it’s certainly true that the quality of American education is no longer the center of national political debates in the way it once was. The 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” turned school performance into a national issue for the next few decades. In 2000, voters ranked education as the number one issue in some polls. Nearly one third of all presidential ads that cycle were about education, according to a recent study.

By contrast, a quarter century later, “federal education politics is now increasingly detached from the widely recognized challenge that helped sustain bipartisan action: improving student outcomes,” wrote political scientists in the study. They find that both parties’ platforms have in recent years steered away from a focus on standards and accountability, which were once staples.

What’s changed? Political polarization may have given politicians less of an incentive to appeal to moderate voters, which a commitment to education reform once served to do. Media fragmentation and distrust might have limited the influence of alarming news stories describing learning declines. Grade inflation could have reduced parents’ demand for reform. Perhaps other pressing issues have simply overtaken education.

There may also be a chicken and the egg issue. If more politicians were talking about learning, maybe more voters would care. Or perhaps those who have talked about it have failed to offer solutions that most voters find compelling.

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

Why a new federal school choice program may require a massive marketing budget

2026-06-30T20:48:41+00:00

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

A new federal tax credit is designed to unleash a spigot of funding for school choice, particularly private schools. But getting those dollars may, ironically, require spending a great deal of money. That’s because individual taxpayers must be convinced, one by one, to redirect a portion of their tax bill toward this effort.

Staff at American Federation for Children, a school choice group, have said that it could cost $300 or more in marketing to persuade each taxpayer to donate, according to three school choice supporters who described this estimate to me.

If accurate at a national scale, these figures suggest that billions of dollars could be required to get a large swath of Americans to participate. In other words, it could be harder and pricier to grow the program than many realize.

This new tax provision, adopted in the Trump-backed tax-and-spending bill passed last year, serves as a complicated way to subsidize school choice.

Starting next year, the federal government will reimburse taxpayers who donate to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs, which issue educational stipends for students. Both private and public schools can receive these grants, although the uses in public schools are more limited since they don’t typically charge tuition.

States must opt in for SGOs within their boundaries to receive the tax-credit subsidy. Virtually all Republican-led states have done so, while most Democratic governors have not made a decision either way.

“Donations” of up to $1,700 — for people who owe at least that amount in income taxes — cost nothing on net to the taxpayer. The federal government effectively foots the whole bill.

But most Americans don’t know much about this obscure new tax provision. And even if they learn about it, some will be wary of handing an SGO what amounts to an interest-free loan. That’s why SGOs and their allies are preparing marketing efforts to educate people about the program and persuade them to participate.

The American Federation for Children, which was co-founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was an advocate for the tax credit and recently started its own SGO. The group said it has already raised over $10 million for an “ambitious national awareness campaign.”

Brian Jodice, a spokesperson for AFC, declined to comment on the organization’s internal estimate of $300-plus per donor. But he said that AFC is aiming to match “industry standards” of $1 in spending to generate $5 in donations. For a $1,700 donation that would be $340. Jodice emphasized that “it’s too early to pinpoint donor acquisition costs.”

Estimates vary widely on how much money will be raised via the tax credit. The Trump administration recently pegged the figure at $24 billion, based on the assumption that 30% of eligible taxpayers, about 14 million people, will donate. If each donor requires $300 in marketing, then it would cost over $4.2 billion to reach that benchmark — roughly twice what the state of Wyoming spends on its public schools.

Marketing costs may come down over time as awareness grows about the program.

By law, SGOs are limited to spending 10% of the money they raise through the tax credit — or $170 on a $1,700 donation — on expenses outside of scholarships. This indicates that the AFC figure of $300 or more could not be supported through tax credit money alone. Organizations may be able to raise separate dollars for marketing.

Some in the school choice community believe that will be necessary. “Ten percent is not a lot to do what people would imagine it would take to scale the program up a ton quickly,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN and an advocate of school choice.

Some public school districts and their allies are also considering raising money through the tax credit to support after-school and tutoring programs, among other things. They may also find that this requires a significant up-front investment.

Darla Romfo, president of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, an SGO, said she’s looking at a variety of approaches to share information about the tax credit without a large marketing budget. She wants to keep overhead low to ensure as much money goes to scholarships as possible.

Jim Blew, an adviser to a coalition working to implement the tax credit, thinks it may cost more like $100 in marketing per donor.

Blew and Romfo have heard the AFC acquisition cost estimate. So did a third school choice advocate who did not want to be named to share a private conversation.

An obvious concern is that SGOs’ marketing efforts will amount to time and resources that detract from the main purpose of the scholarship program and drive up overhead costs.

Blew doesn’t see it that way. In his mind, a marketing campaign is a way to cultivate political support for school choice and the tax credit. “I don’t think we look at it as wasted money,” he said. “This is part of a larger effort to change the culture around education in this country.”

The marketing cost is also the price of trying to avoid government regulation.

That’s why school choice supporters and Congressional allies favored the more convoluted tax-credit over a voucher program in which the federal government issues grants to parents and schools.

Schools that receive direct federal funding must comply with various rules including civil rights laws. School choice supporters say this shouldn’t apply to private schools that receive tax credit scholarships, even though they are 100% subsidized by the federal government.

This argument may prevail. But the upside of direct government funding is that money doesn’t need to be spent persuading individual taxpayers to participate.

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

Does teacher merit pay work? Programs in South Carolina and Texas show results

2026-06-25T21:04:08+00:00

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

Performance pay is a fraught topic among teachers. Many are dubious about competing with each other for cash and question prevailing methods for awarding bonuses. To some, merit pay has often been tried and usually failed.

These sorts of policies remain relatively rare, but two new studies suggest performance pay may deserve a second look, particularly when paired with additional resources. The papers, one from South Carolina and another from Texas, both find evidence that salary incentives for teachers benefit students.

In the South Carolina paper, University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes and colleagues studied a comprehensive teacher improvement program funded by the federal government. This effort included pay incentives linked to student test scores, career advancement opportunities, and additional professional development.

The researchers compared students in middle schools that adopted this program, starting in 2007, against similar schools that didn’t participate. They found benefits that carried on into high school. Students’ 10th grade test scores rose and their chances of graduating high school increased, by about 4 percentage points.

Cohodes notes that when a similar program was adopted in Chicago without individual performance pay based on test scores, there were not clear gains for students. But she also believes that the comprehensive nature of the program made a difference in South Carolina. Teachers reported a more positive school climate, perhaps because the initiative raised some of their salaries and created a schoolwide focus on boosting student achievement.

“The merit pay is a key component. I just think it’s not the only thing,” Cohodes says.

In Texas, Jacob Kirksey, a professor at Texas Tech University, studied an ongoing initiative that offers extra money to school districts that participate in a merit-pay plan. Teachers designated as high performing earn salary increases of several thousand dollars or more, paid for by the state.

Kirksey, who consults with some districts on implementing the program, found that test scores rose. Small benefits of the program emerged soon after it was adopted and then grew in the following few years. Teacher retention also increased, and effective teachers in particular were more likely to stay.

This is a key point: While merit pay has sometimes been framed as a way of getting teachers to work harder, the biggest effect may come from reshaping who enters, remains in, and exits the profession.

With some notable exceptions, prior research has also found benefits of teacher performance pay. Yet these schemes sometimes fizzle. President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative encouraged merit pay as part of a broader effort to reform how teachers were evaluated and paid. This garnered intense pushback, proved difficult to implement, and had no clear effect on student learning, according to later research. It also came in the context of significant budget cuts to schools.

It’s not clear what precisely made the South Carolina and Texas programs succeed. One possibility: They both came with meaningful amounts of new money, which may have made the programs easier to implement and to sustain.

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

Non-college career pathways have a math problem

2026-06-23T09:56:46+00:00

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

For much of the last few decades, some young people have heard a simple mantra: bachelor’s or bust. That is, the best and perhaps only path to economic prosperity is through a four-year college education. Now a wide swath of politicians, educators, and philanthropists are rethinking this. Some even suggest that there are numerous lucrative jobs that don’t require a degree.

A New York Times video explained that “Job demand in fields like construction, along with the allure of potential six-figure salaries, have some high schools investing in hands-on classes that are redefining what success looks like for the Class of 2026.”

At the recent Education Writers Association conference, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore suggested high schools are too focused on getting students into college. If a student chooses a different route “and they find something that’s going to make them have economic mobility for them and their family, then right on,” he said.

Amidst this enthusiasm I wanted to take a look at the data to answer a simple but contested question: How likely is it that students can skip a four-year degree and make a good living or achieve “economic mobility?”

The short answer is it’s certainly possible, but the odds are stacked against workers without degrees. “We all want the $70,000 job that a student can access right outside of high school,” says Dom McKoy, executive director of the University of Chicago’s To&Through Project. But those opportunities are rare. “We have to be really clear-eyed about what is a true pathway at scale for young people.”

Some non-college occupations offer solidly middle-class salaries — but the largest ones typically don’t

To analyze this issue, I used federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data on pay by occupation, organized by the share of workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

On average, jobs where degrees are required or encouraged pay more. Notably, though, a handful of jobs in the blue-collar trades also make slightly above the national median. Those include plumbers, machinists, HVAC installers, and carpenters, among others. Although these jobs typically require some form of postsecondary training, and in some cases students take on debt, they don’t demand four-year degrees.

Still, the most common non-college jobs make far below the median. For instance, there are over 4 million people who work as home health and personal care aides in America, the largest single occupation. That’s more than the number of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC specialists, welders, car mechanics, roofers, and power-line installers combined. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts more growth in jobs for home health aides than any other occupation. The median salary is about $35,000 a year.

Other large non-college vocations — each encompassing millions of people — include retail sales workers, cashiers, order stockers, waiters and waitresses, fast-food workers, and janitors. All of these pay substantially below the median. One exception is truck driving, a position that pays relatively well and employs millions of people. But many fear the job is at particularly high risk of automation.

All this maps onto other data showing that college-educated workers have a large wage advantage, on average, compared to those without a degree.

Better-paid, non-college occupations employ few women

Most of these relatively well-paid blue-collar jobs are dominated by men. In some cases, fewer than 10% of the positions are filled by women. Many of the large, lower-paid occupations, including home health aides, have a high share of women.

Some of the lower-paid careers where college degrees are required — including teaching and social work — are also largely staffed by women. Their salaries still outstrip the vast majority of non-college options, though. This suggests that forgoing college is particularly risky for girls and women.

Despite the headlines, six-figure salaries are rare in non-college jobs

The vast majority of non-college roles, including blue collar trades, earn below-average wages. This is different from median wages, which captures the typical worker’s experience. The average salary is usually higher than the median because it includes more of the upside for top earners within a profession.

This data indicates that non-college occupations have relatively low pay ceilings. The slew of headlines and viral social media videos about six-figure jobs in the trades appear to be outliers. In many cases, only the top 10%, or fewer, of those workers make such salaries.

Many occupations have a combination of workers with and without four-year degrees.

So far, I’ve been focusing on the distinction between college and non-college pathways, but as the data makes clear, this is not a simple binary.

In many cases, degree-holders likely have an edge within an occupation. But in other cases, the degree may have little, if any, value. A significant minority of lower-paid jobs are held by college graduates; even more are held by those who attended college but didn’t earn a degree. For instance, nearly half of home health aides spent at least some time in college.

Will AI change all of this?

This data cannot answer whether a particular student should attend college. That depends on what profession they want to pursue, their chances of graduating, the debt they may have to take on, and the quality of college they would attend. It also depends on an unknown future. The economy is always changing and may shift rapidly in the coming decades.

A recent Wall Street Journal survey found some economists predicting that AI will reduce demand for white-collar work. But others predicted no change or even said that there would be more demand for knowledge work.

The bottom line: Considering how the economy is currently structured, it’s risky to bet against the value of a bachelor’s degree.

Methodological note: The data we used here extrapolates hourly pay rates into estimated annual salaries for full-time workers. These figures, including the national median and average, do not count overtime pay, certain bonuses, and some other forms of compensation. We categorized the largest 250 occupations — encompassing the vast majority of workers — by the share of workers who have attained at least a bachelor’s degree. Other forms of postsecondary education are not included in this analysis. Keep in mind that there is substantial variation among workers in the same occupation, including by region, educational level, experience, union status, and more.

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

The rhetoric and reality of ‘returning education to the states’

2026-06-18T10:31:12+00:00

The Trump administration’s big idea for American education is to “return” it to the states.

In practice, though, these efforts have been limited and contradictory — limited because there’s not all that much to return and contradicted by the administration’s own expansion of federal power. This became clear at a recent Chalkbeat Ideas event that I moderated with two state education leaders.

Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner praised the Trump administration’s effort to reduce strings attached to certain federal dollars. But she noted that “our states have always had control of standards, curriculum, [and] assessment.”

Rhode Island commissioner Angélica Infante-Green was more pointed: “Returning it to the states? It’s always been here.” She’s faced more roadblocks from the federal government under this administration, she said.

Here’s why state and local school leaders have seen, at best, only a modest increase in control over their schools.

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Girls’ test scores have fallen faster than boys’. No one knows exactly why.

2026-06-11T14:36:06+00:00

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

New results from a long-running set of federal exams show a striking, persistent, and unexplained duality: Girls’ scores have fallen more sharply than boys’ and then have been slower to recover. In some cases, they haven’t recovered at all.

In math, among both 9- and 13-year-olds, boys’ advantage over girls is higher than at any point since 1978, which is as far back as the data goes. In reading, 9-year-old boys have reached parity with their female peers for the first time on record, largely because girls’ scores have declined.

This pattern has also emerged on a battery of other assessments. To date, researchers have not reached any consensus on what explains this. The latest results suggest this gender gap in learning is not simply a pandemic-induced blip.

To be clear, we should not see this as a battle of the sexes, but as a warning sign that something is going wrong academically for girls. In other words, America’s “learning recession” has hit girls hardest. Understanding why may be a key part of addressing this national challenge.

Soon after the pandemic upended American schooling and life, researchers began showing that learning rates fell most sharply among children whose school buildings were closed longer. Students from low-income families and those who started at lower levels academically were also particularly affected.

Few experts predicted or even noticed the gender disparities that were beginning to emerge. If anything, in recent years there has been growing attention to boys’ struggles in school. There are good reasons for this: Boys as a group are more likely to be suspended and less likely to finish high school or college.

I first noticed the gender gap in learning loss in late 2024 when it showed up on an international math and science exam. I assumed this was a fluke, but just in case I started looking into it. Sure enough, on virtually every U.S. test, girls’ scores had fallen faster than boys. This has occurred in other countries too, at least on certain exams.

The latest federal NAEP results, which track scores all the way back to the ‘70s, confirm that this gender gap in learning has persisted through at least last year.

(One caveat worth keeping in mind: We’re talking about averages across a massive population here. This doesn’t tell us much of anything about an individual girl or boy.)

Experts I’ve talked to have offered a handful of hypotheses to explain these surprising gender disparities:

Girls have previously performed better in school by some metrics, so removing typical school structures, as occurred during the pandemic, may have harmed them more.
As children spent more time at home during the pandemic, girls might have borne more responsibility including caregiving for younger children. This could have limited their attention to schoolwork.
The growth of social media and screens might have harmed girls more than boys.
Even post-pandemic, girls may have been more likely to quietly internalize their academic struggles, which could have caused teachers to overlook their needs.

None of these strikes me as terribly satisfying, though. The pandemic is in the rearview mirror, and if anything the gender gap has continued to widen. Social media is unlikely to explain trends that are affecting 9-year-olds.

Broader theories meant to elucidate disappointing test scores don’t seem especially helpful here either. Less accountability for schools, for instance, wouldn’t obviously affect girls more than boys.

Officials at the Education Department, who released the latest scores, are loath to speculate about what’s driving trends, including the emergent gender gap. “Researchers, policy leaders can do that digging under the hood,” said Matthew Soldner, head of the department’s research arm. Such digging is indeed necessary here.

For the moment, though, there’s no end in sight for the remarkable and unexplained gender divide in learning loss and recovery.

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

Can states run schools better than local boards?

2026-06-09T14:52:55+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas, a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.

This is our monthly roundup of interesting takes, tidbits, and links. Feel free to send along links and ideas for the next one.

Do state takeovers of school districts work?

This question is increasingly relevant at a moment when more states are taking over or weakening traditionally elected school boards, as Chalkbeat’s Lily Altavena has reported. Recent examples include Houston, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, and Memphis.

There’s good evidence that prior takeovers have not improved students’ performance, on average. A detailed study examining 45 takeovers undertaken between 2010 and 2018 found that, if anything, test scores inched slightly downward afterwards. “I find no evidence that state takeover improves student academic achievement over the long run,” wrote Stanford professor Beth Schueler.

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For generations, more schooling meant better jobs. Could generative AI upend that bargain?

2026-06-04T20:45:44+00:00

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.

For more than a century, American education has been transformed by technology.

Various technological shifts have created the modern “knowledge economy,” in which workers with the most years of formal schooling tend to be the best-paid. Economists refer to this dynamic as the race between education and technology, and it’s why each generation of Americans has remained in school longer than the last. Our current education system has been built around this reality.

Enter generative AI, which is not like the technologies that automated parts of farm or factory work, and might not be like the computer or the internet. Instead, AI threatens to upend a paradigm that has existed for generations, in which the economy adapts to new technologies by demanding more education. In theory, AI could do the opposite by replacing large swaths of white-collar workers. That’s why this moment feels so perilous for students and schools.

To be clear, no one really knows how AI will change the economy. But at this moment of uncertainty it’s worth looking back at the historical interplay between technology, the economy, and schooling. Understanding how technology has already transformed education can help understand how it might do so again and why the onset of the AI era feels so different.

For the last century plus, technology in various forms has laid waste to certain farm, manufacturing, blue-collar, and other middle-income jobs. Instead, demand has grown for highly educated white-collar workers.

During this time, American schools and universities have raced to keep up with technology by expanding access. High school education opened up to most teenagers in the early 20th century. The growth of college education followed in later decades. During this time, the U.S. was far ahead of other countries in making schooling broadly accessible, which helped turn the country into an economic powerhouse.

“Because the American people were the most educated in the world, they were in the best position to invent, be entrepreneurial, and produce goods and services using advanced technologies,” wrote Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, in their classic 2008 book “The Race Between Education and Technology.”

The pressure for a more educated workforce continued apace in the following decades. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton liked to quip, “what you earn depends on what you learn.” This was a neat encapsulation of the new economic order.

In response, politicians of various stripes advanced policies aimed at preparing students for postsecondary education and knowledge-intensive work. Kindergarten classes reduced a focus on play and began emphasizing academic content. Schools were held accountable for test scores and graduation rates. High schools expanded college prep programs. Colleges began recruiting more students who wouldn’t have considered higher education previously.

Graphic shows the average years spent in school for 30-year olds, based on when they were born.

Ironically, during this time, there was little indication that technology itself was dramatically improving teaching and learning. In fact, there’s been a cycle of hype followed by disappointment when the radio, the TV, various “teaching machines,” and the computer fail to revolutionize schooling for the better.

Meanwhile, the economy’s voracious appetite for highly educated workers was not fully sated. For the last half century, Americans’ years of education have increased, but at a slower pace than in prior decades. Meanwhile, the relative wages of college-educated workers rose steadily through the early 2000s. This college wage premium — the advantage those with a degree have over other workers — has stopped growing recently but remains at historically high levels.

This has left a modern economy that is fairly polarized. There are many jobs that only require a high school education — like home health aides, retail clerks, warehouse stockers — but their wages are relatively low. Most well-paid professions typically demand a college degree or more: nurses, doctors, lawyers, college professors, business managers, accountants, and engineers.

This economic and educational revolution of the last several decades has led to vastly increased productivity and has benefited well-credentialed workers and the educational institutions that provide those skills and degrees. But it has not been kind to less-educated Americans and has likely contributed to growing income inequality.

The existential question now is whether generative artificial intelligence will change this economic paradigm. AI can already produce research, writing, and analysis previously assumed to be only doable by well-educated workers. One recent study had both educated and less-educated people complete a workplace-like problem-solving exercise. Without AI, the highly educated group did much better. With AI, that edge shrank substantially. That’s why some commentators prophesy a great “deskilling,” in which many well-paid white-collar workers get replaced by AI.

Education has value beyond its economic return. But if that return erodes, demand for the current offerings of American schooling, especially higher education, would likely decline — potentially leading to unprecedented disruption in an industry that has long assumed a growing customer base.

Yet this is hardly an inevitability. Maybe educated workers will be best able to avail themselves of AI. Or maybe the technology will wipe out some white-collar jobs, but expand and create others. Perhaps AI will mostly supplement rather than replace office work or it will prove less useful than some think.

While some claim that AI has already decimated the job prospects of young college graduates, the weight of the data does not support this narrative.

At this point, then, we simply don’t know how AI will reshape the economy and the jobs available to Americans. This leaves students and educators in the profoundly difficult position of preparing for an economic future that feels more uncertain than ever before.

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

The red-state Democrat upending the politics of school vouchers

2026-06-02T14:11:10+00:00

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

Over the last several years, Republicans have offered a fairly unified message on education. They want to expand school choice, eliminate certain liberal ideas from school curriculum, and close the U.S. Education Department.

Democrats, on the other hand, have been casting about for an educational vision. A vocal contingent within the party has said they need to embrace school choice, perhaps even vouchers for private schools. This perspective has received much ink in major publications.

In Iowa, however, State Auditor Rob Sand is taking a different tack in his run for governor. A Democrat in an increasingly red state, Sand is aggressively campaigning against the state’s education savings account, or ESA, program, which passed in 2023. The state now provides publicly funded vouchers for families to pay for private-school tuition and expenses.

“We’re talking about this everywhere we go,” Sand said at an event in April hosted by the Iowa state teachers union. “This is just basically a siphon of hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools.”

Co-opting the language of conservatives, Sand is fashioning himself as a fiscal hawk — “the taxpayers’ watchdog” — who will rein in wasteful spending, including in the state’s ESA program. Republican candidates for governor are arguing with each other about the program, which suggests Sand has landed on an effective wedge issue.

Sand’s campaign is hardly quixotic: He’s leading in some early polling. Nationally, his strategy is significant because it shows the different ways that various Democrats are approaching K-12 education — and the divide within the party on how to do so.

I spoke with Sand via Zoom. I wanted to hear why he’s putting the ESA program at the center of his campaign. Beyond that, I was interested in what ideas he had for improving public schools in the state.

Heather Doe, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education, declined to make anyone available for an interview but said Sand’s critique of ESAs is partisan and without merit. “It is regrettable that the Auditor has used his official capacity to waste time and taxpayer money in an effort to run for governor by targeting a program that is helping Iowa families exercise their statutory right to school choice,” Doe said in a statement.

My conversation with Sand has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is the ESA program an important part of your campaign?

I believe that the vast majority of Iowans think that oversight is important, and we should want public oversight of public money.

We should have income limits on the program. It shouldn’t be going to the wealthiest Iowans. We shouldn’t be allowing private schools to take 7,500 bucks from the state and then just jack up tuition by $7,500, leaving it equally unaffordable. We ought to be able to audit the program.

[Earlier this year, Sand’s office released an audit of the ESA program that did not identify any significant problems. He said then that the governor’s office failed to provide sufficient time for a thorough audit. Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican and ESA champion, countered that Sand’s comments were “just another manufactured opportunity for the auditor to use his official office to advance his political agenda in his run for governor.” Doe said in her statement that the department provided Sand’s office with extensive information. “The politicization of what’s meant to be the Department’s independent, unbiased annual audit is deeply concerning,” she said.]

What would you say to Iowa parents who are using this program and appreciate it?

Everything that I have proposed is reasonable, and I hear from parents literally every week who say, ‘Yeah, I’m glad we have the program, but geez, I want to make sure this money is spent responsibly.’

Do you ultimately want to repeal the ESA program?

[shrugs] There’s no chance of that happening. I mean, we’re talking about a legislature where it’s near supermajorities of Republicans.

Well, I’m asking what you would want in your ideal world.

I hear you asking me, and I’m answering you. I don’t deal with hypotheticals. If we can work really hard and get it to a better place, we’ll see where we are.

Some will hear the various rules you’re proposing and say that’s a stealth way of making it so private schools won’t participate.

If you’re telling me you don’t want tax dollars unless you can have them without oversight, that’s your problem, not mine.

What is your positive vision for Iowa’s public schools?

When I was growing up in Decorah, way up in Northeast Iowa, we were always in the top for public education. I want our schools to be at the top again, and I’m open-minded about how we get there. I’m not ideological about that.

We’ve got to have competitive teacher pay, not just for beginning teachers but also for teachers who have three, four, or five years’ experience, when studies show they are beginning to get very good at their craft. I think that we could be using AI one-on-one tutors right now to help kids learn to read more effectively. I’m a believer in phonics. Iowa did a requirement for phonics, so I think that that’s a good change. I was never bought into the whole language idea.

But the vast majority of our conversations around education are about how that ESA program works. What’s so interesting to me is the people who are advocates for it, say, ‘Oh, we want school choice.’ Well, I want public oversight of public money, and when you allow private schools to take public money but reject students, then you actually haven’t promoted school choice because the school is the one that gets to make the choice.

There are a number of national Democrats who are pushing your party to embrace school choice, even vouchers, and to distance itself from teachers unions. What do you think of that advice?

I know there are people out there like that. I haven’t been paying much attention to it. Specifics matter. Each program is different. I will continue to talk about the ways in which I think Iowa’s program is an invitation to fraud and doesn’t actually promote school choice. [Doe, the Iowa education spokesperson, said Sand’s office’s audit “identified zero financial discrepancies, once again affirming the Department’s responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.”]

I’m proud to have the [Iowa teachers union’s] endorsement. But I’d say what I say to every other group: I’m independent-minded. You’re not going to get 100% of what you want from me, because there’s nobody that I agree with 100% of the time.

What do you disagree with teachers unions on?

That’s a better question for a different time. I’d have to go through what their wish list would be here in the state. I’m just making a point in general.

If you were governor, would you participate in the federal tax-credit school scholarship program?

I don’t think I have been following that one.

Do you consider yourself a fiscal conservative?

Yeah, I mean to me the phrase that’s more important is fiscal responsibility. But I’m open-minded to the importance of making investments that are going to pay off. Oh — you asked about what else we want to do for public education. I want universal early childhood education. If you just did income restrictions in the school vouchers program, you could fund early childhood education [for more students]. To me, that’s money that is well invested.

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

In the era of AI, schools want students to think critically. Experts say they need knowledge to do so.

2026-05-28T20:40:02+00:00

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

On a recent Tuesday morning, dozens of New York City educators gathered in lower Manhattan to discuss an existential issue facing many schools: “Navigating Critical Thinking and Cognitive Offloading in the Age of AI,” as the session’s title put it.

As the training began, nearly everyone raised their hand when asked if they agreed that “critical thinking is an essential skill that we need to teach our students.” Over the course of the day, the teachers considered how to prompt an AI chatbot to get better responses and assess its accuracy. They discussed the risks that students would outsource their thinking to the technology. And they learned about classroom practices to bolster critical thinking, including peer tutoring, socratic discussions, and live journaling.

The professional development was put on by the National Academy for AI Instruction, a multimillion-dollar initiative launched by the American Federation of Teachers and backed by AI companies Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

I sat in on this training, and many teachers I spoke with said they appreciated its message and strategies. But one important idea was largely missing: that critical thinking is directly connected to the content in math, history, and science classes. This is an essential reality often absent from discussions about how schools should respond to the spread of generative AI.

Indeed, the common refrain that teachers should focus on abstract critical thinking skills, disconnected from content, risks de-emphasizing the very thing — fluency with a broad set of facts — that supports critical thinking.

“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”

As technology has made knowledge more accessible — through books, Google, and now generative AI — some observers have said that schools should place less of an emphasis on basic facts that are easy to look up. “Education in the 21st century must go beyond imparting knowledge,” says the World Economic Forum. Instead, schools must impart “future-ready skills” like critical thinking and creativity.

This isn’t a new idea. Over a decade ago, a panel of academics at the National Research Council convened to consider how schools could inculcate “deeper learning” and “21st century skills,” the buzzwords of that moment. Tellingly, though, the experts reframed this assignment. “The committee views 21st century skills as dimensions of expertise that are specific to — and intertwined with — knowledge within a particular domain,” their 2012 report concluded.

To be sure, there are some skills — communication, personal organization, teamwork — that are useful in many settings and subjects. And decontextualized facts — say, memorizing the presidents without a sense of their place in history — aren’t sufficient for critical thinking.

Yet to solve math problems, students must know their times tables. To infer the causes of historical events, they need familiarity with dates and historical figures. To read and analyze complex texts, they need a wide vocabulary. To think critically, say cognitive scientists, people need to be able to seamlessly access and synthesize a large number of basic facts.

Students can look up some missing information, but when people turn to external sources too frequently, the brain struggles to keep track of all the new facts at once. Imagine reading a book and pausing every few sentences to search for an unfamiliar word or idea.

There’s not yet good reason to assume any of this will change with AI. The technology can help find new information, but knowledge is still necessary to prompt AI appropriately, to assess the accuracy of its output, and to apply it to specific tasks.

When I spoke with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, she said that knowledge certainly matters but that “what [AI] compels is that kids really have to learn how to think and how to solve problems.” She offered a similar formulation in a major speech earlier this week.

For example, elementary school students should engage in civics by researching a topic and then figuring out how to push local politicians to make change, Weingarten told me. “Maybe there are other issues or other facts within social studies curriculum that are going to have to be dropped,” she said.

Maria Elena Guzman, one of the AFT Academy instructors, said that the role of knowledge was not foregrounded in the training because teachers already know they have to teach their content-focused standards. “It’s a given. This is part of the work that they do every single day,” she said.

But if teachers are not taught explicitly about the connection between knowledge and critical thinking, some may leave with the impression that factual content matters less than it used to, especially since this remains an evergreen take of popular education commentators.

Jessie Roeder, a high school robotics and computer science teacher in New York City, appreciates the AFT’s effort to help members navigate the complexities of using AI. He’s already attended four trainings put on by the Academy. During the critical thinking session, he raised the importance of knowledge for using AI effectively.

“You have to know enough to be able to say, wait a second, this is BS,” he later told me.

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

Tom Kane has tracked years of U.S. test scores. Here’s what he’s learned — and still can’t explain.

2026-05-21T09:46:23+00:00

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

Just about everyone in education is trying to figure out why student achievement has been declining and how to raise it back up.

If anyone would know the answer it might be Tom Kane, a Harvard University professor who has been poring over data on student learning for the last several years. Kane and several colleagues recently released an extensive database of test scores from most states in the country.

The takeaway: Schools have made some progress recovering from steep learning declines in math, but scores in both math and reading are still far below where they were over a decade ago.

“The U.S. has been in a learning recession since at least around 2013 and that’s especially true in reading,” says Kane. “The challenges we face didn’t start or end with the pandemic.” The implications are alarming. In other work, Kane has found that test scores are linked to a variety of economic outcomes.

The research out of Kane’s center has been so comprehensive that many of its interesting findings have flown under the radar. I wanted to highlight a few of them. And I also wanted to unpack theories to explain poor academic results. What’s striking is that even Kane, a leading expert, doesn’t have clear answers or solutions.

Here are some takeaways from the work of Kane and his colleagues.

There are hypotheses, but no decisive evidence, for why learning stalled before the pandemic

Kane offers two theories. “The slowdown in learning coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use,” his study says. The evidence for both is circumstantial, Kane acknowledges. Other countries have also seen test scores deteriorate, which could be consistent with a rise in social media everywhere. Federal accountability helped drive learning gains in the past, according to some research, so easing the pressure may explain recent declines.

Yet both theories have holes. Test scores have dropped even in early grades where social media use is not prevalent (although general screen use has accelerated for young kids). And accountability policies seemed most effective in raising math scores, but the most persistent recent declines have been in reading.

“We don’t have a definitive answer,” Kane says.

The highest- and lowest-poverty school systems have recovered faster than those in the middle

Kane calls this a U-shaped recovery. You can see it in the graph below, from his recent study. The dark blue and orange lines show learning trends by district poverty rates between 2022 and 2025. In math, the highest- and lowest-need school systems have seen the most progress. In reading, scores in middle-income districts fell the most.

Kane says policymakers should keep in mind those middle-income districts, which are sometimes overlooked in policy and funding formulas.

Federal COVID relief money helped, but it might have gone further

Part of the explanation for this U-shaped recovery is the $190 billion or so in federal COVID relief funding. In the same graph, the line below the actual recovery shows Kane’s estimate of what scores would have been without the money. Scores in high-poverty districts would have been significantly worse, he finds. Those schools benefited more from the money simply because they got more of it.

Kane rejects the commonly heard argument that the federal relief money was largely wasted. But he thinks the test score effect might have been larger had districts been required to spend more on academic recovery.

One caveat: Kane acknowledges he may be underestimating the effect of each dollar of federal aid because he doesn’t have data on how much extra money schools actually spent, just how much they were supposed to receive.

Absenteeism is limiting recovery, at least a bit

Attendance issues have exploded in recent years. Schools have made some progress in getting students back to class, but absence rates remain elevated. Kane and team estimate that this is dragging down learning. The other gray lines in the graphic — above the blue and orange lines — are Kane’s predictions of what scores would be if students were attending school at the same rate as before the pandemic.

The effects are real but fairly modest, indicating absence rates are not the main drivers of sluggish recovery. In reading, for instance, most districts would still have lost ground even with pre-pandemic attendance.

State test scores paint a more optimistic picture of recovery than the main federal test

Kane and colleagues use a combination of state tests and federal NAEP exams to construct their learning estimates. To produce the main trends they rely on NAEP, except for score changes from 2024 to 2025 since NAEP scores aren’t yet available. This matters because state tests tend to produce more positive trends. For instance, NAEP has shown reading scores declining in recent years, even while many states’ results have inched up. It’s not that one set of scores is right and the other is wrong. But this discrepancy is worth keeping in mind.

It’s not clear whether science-of-reading laws are working

Kane doesn’t find a strong correlation between states’ reading gains since 2022 and the number of science-of-reading elements they’ve incorporated. Yet he notes that the states with very few of these tenets have not made progress. Kane emphasizes that this is not especially rigorous evidence, and should be taken as only “suggestive.” More research is needed on whether these laws are changing school practices and improving outcomes.

Progress has happened before and is happening in some places

Kane marvels at the substantial gains in test scores in the 1990s and early 2000s — which went largely unremarked upon at the time. If anything, the prevailing narrative was that nothing in education was working. But if we made progress before, we can do it again, he suggests. That’s also why his report highlights a number of school systems, like Detroit, that are relative bright spots.

“It’s a reminder that improvement is possible,” Kane says.

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

What happened when Los Angeles parents got better school choice information?

2026-05-19T09:47:00+00:00

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

In the fall of 2019, thousands of parents in Los Angeles received letters in the mail designed to help them choose a high school for their eighth graders. Many of these letters included novel data on how effective different high schools were at helping students learn.

What the families probably didn’t realize is that they were part of an unusual experiment designed by University of Chicago economist Chris Campos, in partnership with the Los Angeles school system. Campos was looking to answer a long-discussed question: Can better information help families make better decisions about where to send their children to school?

At a moment when school choice is expanding, this is a crucial issue across the country.

Campos, who had previously studied school choice in Los Angeles, spent months working on how to communicate information about school performance. Many parents may assume that schools with the highest overall test scores are the ones where students make the most progress — but this often isn’t true.

Campos calculated measures of student learning himself, using a complex statistical model, while also conducting focus groups with parents on how to explain these numbers clearly. Such figures are often unavailable or hard to make sense of. Campos also designed a video, disseminated to families, describing the difference between student growth and the incoming test scores of schools’ student bodies.

The letter-sending experiment was remarkable. Such an undertaking is rare, especially at a large scale in a large school system. Yet it turned out the letters on their own didn’t make much of a difference. Parents and students selected schools as they always did, seemingly unmoved by this new information.

But Campos was also testing out an additional idea. What would happen if large numbers of families at a single school got letters with information on student growth? Campos’ theory was that choosing a school is fundamentally a social process, both for students and their parents.

The data bore this out. When a middle school was saturated with informational letters, more students tended to choose high schools with higher growth scores. That was even the case for families that did not get their own letter. In other words, what mattered more than individual information was a community-level shift in thinking. “There seems to be a tipping point,” Campos says.

He continued to track these students as they moved through high school. Those from middle schools where growth information was widely shared were more likely to enroll in college and to report more supportive high school environments. Campos’ theory for why is simple: They benefitted from choosing better high schools based on better information.

The high school choice system in Los Angeles is not a zero sum game since many schools are not filled to capacity. When one student chooses a school, that doesn’t necessarily mean another is bumped out of it. The letters seemed to have led to a modest migration toward more successful schools.

Campos is hopeful that if families prioritize growth measures, that will pressure struggling schools to improve. “They’re going to have an even stronger incentive to perform better on these metrics,” he says.

The findings offer two important, albeit still-tentative insights. First, families do seem to value data on student growth, but they often don’t have access to it. Second, to change parents’ thinking, information needs to be widely shared across a broad network of connected families, not just a handful of individuals.

Campos’ results are intriguing but limited. They should be taken as provisional until they are replicated by other researchers in different settings. Successful pilot experiments like this sometimes don’t work when brought to a larger scale. The study also comes in a context in which the vast majority of students are lower-income. Moving the preferences of advantaged families may be much harder.

Campos’ paper is currently going through the academic peer review process. He is still working with officials in Los Angeles to study and improve its choice system. Now, though, all parents are sent letters he’s designed providing information on student growth.

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

How parent pressure helped push Los Angeles schools to rein in classroom screen time

2026-05-12T22:02:38+00:00

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

Los Angeles, home to the country’s second largest school system, has been at the center of the growth of ed-tech — and its backlash.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who is on leave following an FBI raid of his home, was an enthusiastic promoter of AI in education and i-Ready, a digital assessment and tutoring program. (Carvalho has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing.)

But parents in the city have grown wary about the proliferation of tech. They organized a group called Schools Beyond Screens to push the district to scale back tech use. Their message resonated with school board members, many of whom are parents themselves.

Continue reading the full story here.

School data goes stale after Trump administration cuts Education Department research arm

2026-05-07T00:33:39+00:00

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

If there was one thing the Education Department did that seemed apolitical and effective, it was compiling basic facts about American schools.

But now the work of disseminating this information has effectively ground to a halt. Since the Trump administration decimated the research arm of the Education Department, it has not updated a large swath of data that is part of the Digest of Education Statistics. This means we no longer have easily accessible, relatively up-to-date information about the basic realities of American schools.

“The role of the national government is to collect statistics on K-12 [education],” said Amber Northern, the Fordham Institute’s vice president for research who is on contract with the Education Department to suggest ways to improve its statistical work. “Absolutely the Digest is integral to that. And we need to get it restarted.”

Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, said in a statement that this process has begun and a new contract for the work will be awarded before the end of this fiscal year in September.

Until that happens, our shared knowledge about schools will continue to deteriorate.

Consider just a handful of examples of data tables that have not been updated since at least January 2025:

Spending and revenue per public school student
Federal funding for education
School enrollment among children ages 3-5
The share of students receiving special education services, qualifying as English learners, and participating in gifted and talented programs
The typical student-to-teacher ratio
The number of people enrolled in teacher prep programs
Teachers’ perceptions about the quality of their schools
Average teacher salary
How often school principals leave their jobs
How many students take the SAT and ACT
The number of homicides and suicides in schools
The rate of disciplinary incidents in public schools
The share of recent high school graduates immediately enrolling in college

The stale data is not surprising. DOGE canceled Education Department contracts for this work in February of last year. Most of the staff members at the research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, were also laid off.

Keast, the department spokesperson, notes that key data collection about schools has continued. But since the raw data has often not been turned into accessible tables, it is difficult for the public to access or use it.

Tom Snyder, who oversaw the Digest and other annual reports until he retired in 2020, says this work has been widely used. Some tables might get thousands of citations in a single month. “This I would put as an inherent government responsibility to get information into the public’s hands,” Snyder said. “It needs to be accessible.”

Some of this information can still be found from other sources, like school spending figures in a different federal report or teacher salary numbers from the National Education Association. Even in these cases, the Digest serves two functions: It is a one-stop shop of reliable data, and it often features results over a long time horizon.

Still other information is no longer available to update at all. The Trump administration has canceled surveys about crime and safety in school, high school coursetaking, and the experiences of teachers and principals.

The federal government has been collecting and sharing basic facts about schools since 1870; the Digest of Education Statistics began in 1962. The Digest has marshaled a vast array of data to offer a comprehensive picture of the sprawling, decentralized American system of education.

This work forms the basis of what we know about schools in both the past and present. One widely cited department report, “120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait,” documents the growth of high school education, the opening up of schooling to Black children, and reformulation of school funding systems.

Northern recently released a report defending the necessity of the Education Department’s research and statistics work but recommending a number of changes. Her report does not mention the Digest by name. Northern told me there’s clear value in it, although she would like the data released more quickly.

Meanwhile, a recent analysis estimated that nearly $300 million allocated by Congress for the Institute of Education Sciences is at risk of going unspent. “The Department is committed to using appropriated funds to meet our statutory obligations while supporting high-quality research,” said Keast, the spokesperson.

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

She passed high school math with A’s and B’s. In college, she had to start over.

2026-05-05T21:00:14+00:00

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

Cecilia Lopez Alvarado was scrolling through Reddit one evening in her dorm room when she came across a thread about students at the University of California San Diego who struggled with basic math.

A report had warned of an alarming decline in students’ math skills at UCSD, a highly selective university. It drew international headlines because of what it seemed to say about the state of American education. Commentators blamed high school grade inflation, test-free college admissions, and even the students themselves.

Alvarado read these headlines with a growing sense of frustration. People didn’t understand the full story here, she thought. And she would know: Alvarado is a UCSD student who had to take remedial math at the school. She read Reddit comments about how students should have mastered these topics in high school. She wrote back in the comments that some schools — like hers, a high-poverty public high school in San Bernardino, California — don’t even offer calculus.

The consequences of Alvarado’s challenges in math have been significant. After taking the remedial course, she still fell short on a math exam, which covers high school topics like trigonometry and precalculus. Alvarado therefore couldn’t move on to calculus, which was required for her initial major, business economics. Because of this, she recently decided to pursue a degree in communications instead. She aspires to be an accountant and is minoring in accounting.

Students like Alvarado are at the center of a debate in American education. How do high schools ensure students graduate with sufficient math skills? Who should get access to the resources of an elite college education? What role do universities themselves have in helping students who are underprepared?

High school graduation photo of UCSD sophomore Cecilia Lopez Alvarado

The perspectives of these students have gotten strikingly little attention. That’s why I wanted to speak to Alvarado, a 19-year-old sophomore. Her story does not offer entirely simple answers, but it’s worth hearing. She looks back in frustration at her high school education, where she believes teachers were too lenient. But she’s also convinced she’s benefited from the education she’s received and the peers she’s met at UCSD.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your high school math experience like? How did you do in math classes?

I usually passed with A’s and B’s, but I feel like a lot of the information never really stuck with me, just because we were granted so many opportunities to redo exams and homework. It felt like as long as you retake the exam and get 100% it doesn’t matter if you really know what you’re doing or not.

Do you know why you were given so many opportunities?

I’m sure it’s because they wanted us to not have F’s and D’s on our transcripts. It was just wanting us to be able to move on to the next grade. It never really was to hold us accountable. Instead of being like, hey, you only get one retake, it was just, you can retake it as many times as you like, to get a grade that you’re comfortable with.

Did you feel like it would have been better if they held you accountable more?

I think so, because then you have to face the reality of not just your grades, but what you really know and what you’re really learning. You have to discipline yourself more to be like, hey, I need to start studying instead of doing not so well in class and then just retaking it at a later time.

What did you think about the big national backlash and all these articles about UCSD students like yourself?

I’m very involved on the UCSD social media communities like Reddit, Instagram, and when people are sharing the articles, a lot of it was very negative. A lot of people are saying these students shouldn’t be at the school, their spots should have gone to someone more qualified. It was kind of making me feel bad, like, hey, is something wrong with me because I can’t pass the exam?

I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue with the student. I feel like there’s a lot of things that go deeper than that, like the level of math they took in high school. I think there’s just so many factors that people miss.

What do you mean by the factors that so many people miss?

The culture here is that everyone kind of assumes everyone who’s enrolled comes from a very prestigious background — you know, perfect scores, they have easy access to tutoring. I don’t think a lot of people realize that some students here may have come from low-income communities, low-income schools, where they don’t have resources easily accessible.

I wouldn’t say it makes me envious, but I do wish I had that kind of abundance of resources when I was in high school. I was top of my class in high school, but that’s nothing compared to some of the other students here.

Do you think you’ve benefited from going to a school like UCSD?

I think so. It’s definitely exposed me to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different people. I think I’ve learned more soft skills here through a lot of the classes I’ve been taking. I’m more willing to try things and take courses that I would not have been interested in high school.

Do you feel like being surrounded by peers who maybe went to better high schools pushes you to do better at UCSD?

I think so. I’ve kind of noticed they have more independence. They feel more secure in their academics and what they’re doing, and I feel like I always second guess myself. Seeing how they operate, it makes me want to do better, work harder, especially after my first year. I wanted to make my own self-improvements.

One of the recommendations from the report that caused this whole blowup was that UCSD should reduce the number of students from high-poverty high schools. What do you think of that?

I do not think that should be an option. If they don’t go through the trial and error here, they’re just going to go through it somewhere else. College is a place where you learn new things. Sometimes you’ll fail and you just take the L and learn from it.

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

Chalkbeat Ideas Roundup: Did education reform work? Plus research, reading, and politics

2026-04-28T21:50:33+00:00

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.

Earlier this month, I wrote about efforts to revive the bipartisan school reform coalition that dominated Washington circa 1996 to 2015. It was this coalition that ushered in No Child Left Behind, test-based teacher evaluations, the growth of charter schools, and the Common Core standards.

According to education historian Diane Ravitch, these efforts decisively failed. “The reformers look back to their glory days with nostalgia. Parents and students don’t,” she wrote in response to my piece. Mike Petrilli, of the Fordham Institute, offers a different gloss on the same history: “Reform did work, until we stopped doing it.”

Interpretations of the past can shape how people proceed in the future. That’s why this mini-debate matters. So, who’s right?

Click here to continue reading.

Here’s how the school choice tax credit could affect public schools

2026-04-23T19:27:35+00:00

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.

In the last decade, enrollment in California’s public schools has fallen by about half a million students, or 8%. At the same time, funding for the students who have remained in public schools has shot up, as the state implemented a new funding formula. California once lagged behind the national average in education funding per student; now it’s above average.

These seemingly paradoxical trends are worth considering at a moment when many state governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, are deciding whether to participate in a school choice program subsidized by a new federal tax credit.

Public education associations are urging states to stay away. They say that offering this voucher-like credit will drain students, and thus resources, away from public schools. That could happen, especially if political support for funding education falls.

But the California experience suggests it’s not inevitable. Fewer students in public schools doesn’t necessarily result in less funding. “As enrollments decline, we tend to see total spending at least stay constant and in many cases still increase,” says Bruce Baker, a school funding expert who has tracked school funding patterns for years.

The fiscal impact of the tax credit remains a source of intense debate, confusion — and uncertainty. Here’s how to think about this question.

The federal tax credit is effectively “free” money for states.

The federal school choice tax credit, passed by Congressional Republicans in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” works like this: Americans will soon be able to redirect up to $1,700 of their income tax bill to nonprofits that provide stipends for private school tuition or other educational expenses. This is similar, in many ways, to a government-funded voucher.

But the program includes a loophole. States have the option to participate or not. Nearly every Republican governor has said they will join the program, while most Democrats have not publicly made a decision, according to a tracker from Education Week. The undecided governors are currently facing an intense lobbying campaign from both sides.

A key selling point for advocates: The money comes entirely from federal taxes. States don’t have to put in any funding.

The tax credit could also be used to pay for certain extra programming offered in public schools, like after-school care or tutoring. Observers say it’s unclear how successful public school systems will be at tapping into this money.

Lower enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean less funding.

Even though it doesn’t cost the state money, public school advocates fear that the credit — a new subsidy for private education expenses — will induce some number of students to leave public schools.

It’s not clear this would result in less money for public education, though. Think of school funding as a pie that is divided among students. If there are fewer students, and the size of the pie remains the same, each remaining student could actually get a slightly bigger slice. In recent years, school funding in states like Illinois and Vermont have increased even as enrollment has fallen.

That’s not guaranteed, of course. A state could slash its overall education budget — shrink the pie — in response to declining enrollment. It’s possible that fewer students could weaken political support for public schools, although that may be less likely in the left-leaning states that are still considering whether to participate in the choice program.

In California, there’s an additional backstop: The state Constitution requires a certain amount of state funding to go toward education. “To the extent there actually is any measurable exodus from public schools it would mean more money per kid,” says Julien Lafortune, a school funding expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.

This doesn’t mean every district is financially secure. Even if the overall pie of funding holds steady, districts that lose an especially large swath of students might get a smaller slice. This can lead to layoffs or school closures.

Some critics of the tax credit also say there are other reasons to oppose it beyond its budget implications. “Significant growth of a voucher program could slowly dismantle public education, and I don’t think that’s what most voters want, even if it does save the state some money,” says David Knight, a professor at the University of Washington.

So far Congress hasn’t cut public school budgets either.

The tax credit critics have an additional concern. Every dollar spent on this program is a dollar less in federal tax revenue. The more states opt in, the larger the cost of the program. Estimates vary, but some predict this will amount to several billion dollars.

The money has to come from somewhere. This could leave federal funding for public schools “more vulnerable to cuts,” warns Education Trust’s Augustus Mays, who is urging states not to participate in the program.

But K-12 education is just a tiny fraction of federal spending, and the federal government can, and does, run budget deficits. Recently Congress rejected efforts by the Trump administration to cut school budgets. So while it’s true the tax credit will add a small hole to the federal budget, there’s little reason to assume it will be filled by cuts to public schools.

Correction: April 27, 2026. A prior version of this story misattributed a quote to Denise Forte of Education Trust. The comment was made by Education Trust’s Augustus Mays.

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

For children in poverty, the biggest resource gaps are outside of school

2026-04-21T19:19:55+00:00

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.

Children from low-income families have roughly $80,000 less invested in their development, well-being, and education relative to their peers from high-income households, according to a new study.

The research is significant because it puts a figure on what has long been known: Children do not have the same access to the resources that might help them flourish. While formal schooling is fairly equal, investments outside of school vary substantially, the researchers conclude.

“The findings of this are not surprising,” says David Blazar, the study’s lead author and a professor at the University of Maryland. “What’s most compelling is thinking about investments in kids as a bundle — it’s not just about housing, it’s not just about early childhood. It’s about the investments we make altogether.”

At a moment when there is intense discussion about declines and disparities in student learning, the study is a helpful reminder of the broad array of factors that shapes children’s academic success.

The paper, written by several researchers and published last month, examines “childhood human capital investments” — in other words, the various resources that help children thrive and develop.

This is defined broadly to include formal schooling, as well as informal education, nutrition, health care, and housing, among other things. The researchers rely on a number of recent national surveys and put every item on a common dollar scale, including things that are not paid for, like parental time helping with homework or going to the library.

Under the researchers’ measure, the typical child received about half a million dollars’ worth of investment in their development through childhood. The disparities were significant, though. In addition to gaps by family income, there were also racial gaps. Relative to white kids, Hispanic kids had $73,000, or 14%, less investment. Black children had $55,000, or 10%, less.

There were notable gaps in spending across a variety of domains including housing, nutrition, health care, child care, and college preparation.

The researchers also considered time as a form of investment. They converted parental activities into a standard hourly dollar rate. Here there were also some gaps by income and race, though they were not especially large. Low-income children were slightly less likely to be read to or taken to a museum, but were more likely to get homework help or visit a zoo. This indicates that parents of all types put large amounts of time into their children’s development.

The overall disparities would likely be far larger without government programs designed to equalize opportunity, the researchers say. Investments in formal schooling, largely through public education, were fairly equal. This echoes analyses showing that there are typically not large gaps in spending between high-poverty and affluent schools. If anything, children in poverty had a bit more money spent on their education, the recent study finds.

“We see that the sectors where the disparities are smallest are when government services are the largest,” says Blazar.

His study does not speak to whether particular investments are effective in helping children develop, but in some cases other research does. For instance, low-income children are more likely to be identified for special education; these services lead to large gains in learning, according to a recent study. Research has also found that certain anti-poverty programs can boost test scores.

The latest study likely underestimates gaps in resources between different groups of students, Blazar says. Because of data limitations, the paper does not attempt to parse the quality of school a child attends, the doctor they go to, or the food they eat. The researchers also do not consider the neighborhood a child lives in or whether they’ve been exposed to environmental hazards. Both of these factors have been linked to success in school.

And while the paper includes the striking finding that formal education investments are relatively equal, the study stops at age 18. If the study continued a few more years, though, the findings would almost certainly be different. Children from low-income families are less likely to go to college and if they do, they typically attend less well-resourced schools.

So while K-12 educational investments have been equalized to a meaningful extent, vast disparities emerge after high school.

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

Will bipartisan education reform make a comeback? 3 reasons it could — and 3 obstacles

2026-04-14T21:04:58+00:00

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.

These days there’s a new energy around an old idea: bipartisan school reform.

Reviving this was the quaint but ascendant goal of a recent Washington D.C. event that I attended last month. The Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders from both parties to sketch out a new agenda for school reform.

“The moment is now,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the opening panel. “We have not recovered from COVID fully. We really need to light the fire of urgency.”

This was the sort of thinking that used to dominate Washington D.C. Presidents from both parties once insisted on a muscular federal role to hold schools and teachers accountable for raising test scores. These advocates have been on the outs politically for over a decade, but some see an opportunity to revive the old coalition. A flurry of reports, compacts, commissions, events, and essays have made the case that politicians of both parties need to come together to address the striking declines in student learning and center education as a national priority.

Whatever you think about this mini-resurgence, it’s worth paying attention to. Bipartisan school reform upended schools once before (with a much debated legacy). Could it happen again? Maybe. In many ways the ground is ripe, but it’s not clear advocates have a clear constituency or reform agenda.

Drawing from recent history, here are three reasons this particular brand of reform could return and three obstacles this effort faces.

Why bipartisan reform could be revived: There really is a learning crisis.

Modern bipartisan school reform has its roots in a 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which claimed (with disputed evidence) that the country’s schools were in dire shape. These days the data is clear: Test scores have been on an alarming trajectory for a decade. This has again led to widespread concerns among policymakers, academics, and journalists.

The aspiring reformers are driving the mainstream media narrative about education.

Centrist education advocates and politicians, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have offered a clear theory to explain these recent learning declines. Emanuel argues that Democrats deserve blame for backing COVID-era school building closures, focusing on culture war issues, and downplaying the importance of test scores. He says Democrats should look to Republican-led states in the South, like Mississippi.

A remarkable slew of articles have endorsed versions of this narrative. That includes several pieces in the New York Times. Not many other prominent Democrats are echoing Emanuel, but we can be sure they are reading the Times. Crucially, those Democrats more sympathetic to teachers unions and public education have not articulated a clear alternative theory to explain recent learning declines.

Both parties may have political incentives for moving to the center on education.

The prior iteration of bipartisan reform came at a moment where both parties used education as a strategy to appeal to centrist independent voters. Bill Clinton promised to be a different type of liberal who would take a tough-minded approach to schools, while George W. Bush pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” who would champion the education of disadvantaged children.

Once again Democratic reformers say the party faces a similar political imperative. Emanuel and many others have claimed the party has lost its edge on education with voters. This isn’t true, according to the vast majority of recent surveys, but the talking point has nevertheless proven deeply influential at a moment when Democrats have been casting about for answers following Trump’s election in 2024.

Republicans are not at this soul-searching stage — they’ve leaned into school choice and parents’ rights. But Trump is quite unpopular at the moment, and so is his effort to close the Education Department. Depending on the midterm results, it’s possible that the GOP will make efforts to tack away from Trump’s combative approach to education.

Why bipartisan reform might not happen: Reformers don’t have a clear bumper sticker.

Although the centrist reformers are aligned on what’s gone wrong, their solutions are a bit less clear. This was apparent during a Bipartisan Policy Center panel on education, which I moderated. The group released a number of recommendations about improving schools. These ranged from broad goals (“reimagine the high school years”) to very specific policies (“require transparent, consistent annual reporting” on teacher pension plans). But there wasn’t an overarching idea or takeaway, as best I could tell.

So I asked each participant on the panel what their bumper-sticker pitch for school reform would be.

“Responsive systems and better information,” responded Andy Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether, an education consulting firm, and a former Clinton White House staffer.

“Locals lead; feds fund, measure, and evaluate,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor.

“Education is the way out of your parents’ basement,” said Katie Jenner, the Indiana education secretary.

This range of responses is in contrast with the relatively clear bumper stickers from the political right and the left. (“More choice, less wokeness, no U.S. Department of Education,” on the right. “More money,” on the left.)

Without a snappy message for what bipartisan reformers want to do, I suspect advocates will struggle to coalesce policy elites or regular people around their ideas.

There is little clear grassroots demand for this sort of reform.

Indeed, the push to address learning declines has seemingly not broken through to voters. While Americans have an increasingly negative view of the quality of K-12 schools, very few rate education as a top issue. This is quite different than in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Remarkably, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters sometimes ranked education as the top issue facing the country.

And despite years of headlines about bad test scores, most parents still give their child’s school relatively high marks.

Bipartisan reform may require presidential leadership.

Starting with George H. W. Bush and continuing through Barack Obama there were four straight presidents who championed an overlapping agenda of school accountability and school choice. Each made education a central national issue. In a number of cases, these presidents brought along reluctant members of their own parties. The bipartisan coalition crucially depended on this presidential leadership. In turn, bipartisan school reform has collapsed under Trump and Biden since neither bought into this agenda.

To succeed, the bipartisan reformers may need a like-minded president. That could, of course, be tough to get. Right now, Rahm Emanuel is polling at 0%-1%. The question for these aspiring reformers is whether they can find other presidential candidates to carry their mantle.

This piece was about whether bipartisan school reform will return. It’s a different question than whether it should. What do you think? Share your thoughts with me at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Why Sal Khan’s AI revolution hasn’t happened yet, according to Sal Khan

2026-04-09T21:11:13+00:00

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.

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

Khan’s comments are an acknowledgement that AI has not quickly allowed for the creation of an effective super-tutor, as some initially hoped. It’s an early indication of the limits of AI to drive massive learning gains, long an unrealized goal of various technologies. While Khan remains optimistic about various uses of AI in education, he’s also come to see its limits.

“I just view it as part of the solution; I don’t view it as the end-all and be-all,” Khan said in our interview.

In the summer of 2022, OpenAI leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman reached out to Sal Khan. They were months away from releasing ChatGPT, and were hoping Khan Academy — a large nonprofit that works with schools across the country — could showcase the technology’s potential benefits. “I didn’t realize it yet, but the world was about to be turned upside down,” Khan wrote in his 2024 book “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).”

OpenAI provided Khan Academy with early access to a more advanced AI model, GPT-4. With that the Khan Academy team then built a specialized chatbot, Khanmigo, designed to help students learn and restricted from simply giving them the answer. Khan himself quickly became an evangelist for the technology’s uses in schools.

“We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Khan said in a widely viewed TED Talk in 2023. “The way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

He suggested that eventually AI could turn the average student into an academic standout, citing a seminal but controversial 1984 study on the value of individualized tutoring.

Khan also appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment that featured northwest Indiana’s Hobart High School, which was an early adopter of Khanmigo.

Kristen Musall, a geometry teacher at Hobart High, gave Khanmigo a try when it first rolled out. Musall appreciated its encouraging, teacher-like tone, but she found that students didn’t really care for the bot. They found it frustrating — Khanmigo sometimes made mistakes, but also wouldn’t give away the answer. “If students don’t engage with the material enough to know what they’re looking for, then an AI like Khanmigo doesn’t necessarily help,” she recently told me.

Musall no longer uses Khanmigo in her class. She says there’s been more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers in her school.

A few of Musall’s most advanced students have taken advantage of AI to learn new topics. But, as far as she can tell, more students are using it to just find answers, which has created a massive headache for teachers. Nationally, a majority of teenagers say AI-powered cheating is at least somewhat prevalent in their schools, according to a recent Pew survey.

Peggy Buffington, Hobart’s superintendent, said there’s been a range of reactions from teachers and students to AI. There was initially a learning curve for students to ask Khanmigo questions, but that they’ve gotten a lot better, she said: “It’s like anything in education. You have to learn how to use the tool and use it appropriately.”

Buffington says that schools need to prepare students to use AI responsibly and Khanmigo is preferable to commercial products they would use on their own. Overall, she’s found the tool beneficial. “Our kids can log in at home and they can get help with their homework and it won’t give them the answer,” she said.

But Khan Academy officials have seen that many students won’t take advantage of that option or don’t know how to. Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

DiCerbo was initially hopeful that AI would be able to personalize instruction to students’ needs and interests. That hasn’t happened. “So far I am not seeing the revolution in education,” she said.

AI is still poised to shake up American education in many ways — by making cheating easier, reshaping how teachers approach their work, and changing the broader economy in ways that affect schools. So far the evidence base for AI in education remains “extremely limited,” according to an overview paper released last month.

Khan Academy officials say they’re learning from their experience with Khanmigo and pairing it with other offerings.

A recent study found that when teachers used Khan Academy to help students practice academic content, their classes made slightly faster learning gains. (Lower-performing students, though, saw few if any improvements from Khan Academy.) This was before Khanmigo.

Khan Academy recently announced an overhaul of its product that provides students additional academic practice. Now Khanmigo is incorporated directly as a way students can get advice as they’re working through specific problems. A spokesperson said the organization made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”

“AI is going to help,” said Khan of this reimagined Khan Academy. “But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.”

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

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

2026-04-07T14:43:04+00:00

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.

Seventh-grade math teacher Dylan Kane decided to conduct an experiment in his classes by going cold turkey on ed-tech.

Kane, like just about every other teacher in the country, has seen the use of screens proliferate in his classroom — its own sort of accidental experiment. Then, last December, Kane read “The Digital Delusion,” a harsh critique of ed-tech. Although he was not entirely convinced by its arguments, the book made him pause.

“I had kept some of my technology routines the same for a bunch of years without really thinking twice,” says Kane, who teaches in Leadville, a rural mountain town in Colorado. “So I said, ‘Hey, why don’t I just throw it all out?’”

Kane, who writes a popular Substack about teaching and learning, decided to drop screens from his class for the month of January to see what would happen.

More educators and policymakers are also having second thoughts about the growth of ed-tech — sold as a way of personalizing learning but increasingly criticized for doing the opposite. Some school systems are scaling back the use of screens, and some state lawmakers are adding restrictions to how they can be used in class.

I wanted to talk to Kane to understand the classroom-level pros and cons of winding back the clock on ed-tech. So far his experiment has been a success, he says — so much so that he has not brought screens back. Dropping ed-tech has turned out to be a lot more work for him and his students. That might be why it’s succeeding.

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

More than three months since he began, Dylan Kane's classroom is still tech free.

How were you using tech previously?

All of my assessments were online. That was a shift I made during the pandemic, which most teachers made. And I just kept doing that. They were easier to grade. It was kind of on autopilot.

Number two, I used a math practice website called DeltaMath, which I liked a lot. I would have students at the end of pretty much every class spend five to 10 minutes working through a short online practice assignment.

And third, I would about once a week use part of a Desmos activity. These are free online activities that are interactive, that students do on their Chromebooks. They often give an interesting insight into some mathematical idea, or let students manipulate math in a different way than we often do on pencil and paper.

So how’d your experiment of dropping tech go?

I’m still tech free. I don’t find myself saying, ‘Wow, these things I used to do with technology are totally irreplaceable.’

A couple things I’ve liked. The biggest is just so many fewer little logistical challenges. No more ‘I forgot my charger, my Chromebook’s dead. My screen’s cracked. The internet’s not working.’ All those things are just out the window. We have pencil, we have paper, we have whiteboards, we have markers.

A lot of stuff that I had students doing on their own, I’m now doing interactively in front of the class, like asking questions, having them answer on mini-whiteboards. That has been better than I expected. I feel much more nimble, like I don’t have to get them to put their screens away — we can just talk about it.

I’m seeing a slight increase in effort across the board. Some students, especially students who are less confident in math, can sometimes hide behind their screens. Screens can just separate us into our own little worlds and be really easy to appear like you’re busy behind a screen.

The last thing is I feel more in touch with student thinking. Part of the premise of education technology is that we can see all this stuff about what students are doing, what they know, what they don’t know. My experience is the data is often overwhelming. And with pencil and paper, I just feel much more connected to what students are confused about, what I need to respond to, where I need to adjust.

What do students think of this?

I surveyed them, and they were mixed. The averages were honestly right down the middle. I have some students say they love it. They either just don’t like a lot of the stuff we do on Chromebooks, or they feel fatigued by the amount of screen time across their classes, or they feel frustrated with all the little logistical issues.

One interesting thing is some students say the work is easier on a Chromebook. One reason is handwriting involves more effort. The effort that goes into handwriting might lead to more durable learning — that might be a good type of effort. Another is working on screens often gives instant feedback, and so not having that feedback can feel a little more frustrating for students.

The loss of feedback feels like it could be a downside.

There’s good and bad here. Instant feedback can be really helpful, but students can also become reliant on it, or it can lead to guessing and checking that’s unproductive. In a lot of situations, delayed feedback works better than immediate feedback.

Is there any part of tech that you miss?

All of this is more work. It’s way easier to click a few buttons and assign a couple math problems for students to do online than it is to prepare a piece of paper, and have all that ready for students in class.

I also find that students are a little bit more self-reliant when they’re on technology. I think again, this is good and bad. They need less teacher interaction, because they’re getting that immediate feedback. But also the way that screens kind of divide people into their own world. Sometimes a student is really confused, but doesn’t quite know how to ask for help. There’s definitely higher energy in my class without screens, and I think that’s a good thing, but it can be exhausting as a teacher.

I’m giving quizzes and tests with pencil and paper now, and it’s a lot more work to grade. I’ve loved that because it’s helped me get students to engage more with their mistakes, but again, it’s more work.

Did you run into any sort of difficulties with school policies that made it hard to unwind tech, because it’s just so integrated in so many schools?

I had my formal observation a few weeks ago, and there are a number of items on the state rubric around using technology that were left blank. I am personally not very worried about my score on one very small subset of the state rubric. But that’s built into Colorado law that teachers should integrate technology in their classroom.

So is your plan for the foreseeable future to continue to be no-tech?

Yeah. I don’t want to be someone who just says, ‘Hey, no technology ever again.’ I plan on being a paper-and-pencil first teacher as much as possible. But if some new tools do come along that I think are doing a much better job than what I had access to before, I’m open to it.

Anything else you want to add?

A big belief of mine is that teachers can do their best work when we set clear expectations for what we think great teaching and learning look like, and within reasonable constraints give teachers some freedom. And I think in some cases, technological tools can be a crutch to take away some teacher autonomy. I don’t think it’s a path to a profession where teachers want to stay in the classroom and where teachers can be responsive to student needs.

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

New study finds special education changes students’ academic trajectories for the better

2026-03-30T11:04:55+00:00

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act turned 50 last year. Many advocates and politicians heralded the anniversary. At the same time, some observers have been wondering how well the law has succeeded in helping students.

A study released Monday sheds new light on this question, offering among the most comprehensive and rigorous answers to date. The findings were strikingly positive. Across three states, access to special education services changed students’ academic trajectories for the better.

The gains were “immediate, quite large, and sustained,” says Marcus Winters, lead author of the paper and a professor at Boston University.

The results indicate that special education is working to a meaningful extent for many students who are gaining access to additional services. What the study doesn’t answer, however, is whether special education can work even better, considering the significant costs involved.

To continue reading, click here.

Trump pressured states to limit undocumented high school students’ access to career education programs

2026-03-27T15:51:45+00:00

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At least three states have taken steps to restrict undocumented high school students’ access to dual enrollment and career-technical education programs, according to documents reviewed by Chalkbeat. In one state, the policy was reversed following Chalkbeat inquiries.

These moves come as efforts to limit educational funding for undocumented immigrants ramp up nationwide. They build on controversial guidance from the Trump administration that restricted federally funded preschool and adult education programs to citizens and legal residents.

But these state actions are particularly striking because they chip away at protections based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision, which requires public schools to serve all students, including those who lack legal permission to be in the country. They suggest the Trump administration has made more progress than previously reported in eroding the protections enshrined in the ruling, long a conservative target.

In Virginia, nearly every school district quietly agreed to exclude undocumented students from participating in certain federally funded career-and-technical education programs, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

It is not clear how many undocumented students actually lost access to programming. But at least one school district in Virginia was denied $150,000 in federal funding because it didn’t agree to exclude those students.

On Thursday, after repeated Chalkbeat questions, the state education department said it was abandoning the policy. School districts will no longer be required to restrict undocumented students’ access. The original policy came under the state’s previous Republican administration. The department is now led by a Democratic appointee.

Other Republican-led states have maintained similar policies. The Iowa Department of Education said it expects schools not to offer college-credit courses to undocumented students with federal funds. Georgia recently announced new restrictions on undocumented students’ access to dual enrollment courses paid for with state money.

It is not clear how many other states have taken similar actions. In response to an ongoing lawsuit, a federal judge blocked Trump’s legal guidance in 20 states with Democratic attorneys general.

A U.S. Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat this week that the department is not focused on “patchwork enforcement” while litigation is ongoing. But the initial notice has already had a significant effect on state policy.

Conservative activists have argued that undocumented immigrant students use resources that by right should go to Americans.

The presence of large numbers of English learners “impacts the entire school and American citizens who are losing out on resources,” Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, told a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee during a recent hearing devoted to criticizing the Plyler decision. “The taxpayers are left holding the bag for it.”

Immigrant and civil rights advocates have strongly defended the value of educating undocumented students. Not doing so, they say, would carry far greater social costs.

“Denial is not just a denial of equal access,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Denial is an injury to the whole community because you are then taking away the investment in kids who could make very strong contributions.”

Districts agreed to exclude undocumented students despite concerns

In July of last year, the Trump administration issued new interpretations of a 1996 federal law that restricted certain immigrants’ access to welfare programs. Trump’s changes sought to go further, by blocking undocumented immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, adult education, and postsecondary education programs.

In its legal notice, the administration also said it believes Plyler does not protect programming that goes “beyond providing a basic public education,” suggesting that undocumented students might not have access to the full slate of services offered in many public schools. The change targeted career-technical education programs that often involve partnerships between school districts and community colleges, sometimes blurring the lines between higher ed and K-12.

The next month, an email from Virginia’s then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Emily Anne Gullickson, arrived in the inboxes of school leaders across the commonwealth. It was labeled “URGENT READ.”

To continue to receive federal career-and-technical education funding, known as Perkins, school districts would have to promptly sign an “attestation” that “non-qualified aliens” are “not provided or receiving services funded by the program.” Virginia was allocated $32.5 million in Perkins funding this school year.

Some district leaders were wary of signing. Scott Worner, the superintendent of Mecklenburg County Public Schools in southern Virginia, wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat that he had “big concerns.” In Virginia Beach, school board member Melinda Rogers told local media that “it has always been the right of all students to have access to education.”

The Virginia school superintendents association quickly provided legal guidance in a webinar, which warned schools they could lose funding if they didn’t sign, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by Chalkbeat. Scott Braband, the group’s executive director, said during the meeting that there was some legal argument against signing but recommended that districts do so, according to meeting notes obtained by Chalkbeat. He emphasized the funding that was at stake.

In an interview, Braband suggested that districts were unlikely to actually exclude students based on their immigration status. “We don’t have knowledge that we have undocumented kids because we don’t check,” he said. ”It’s a compliance exercise.” He declined to speak about his comments from the legal webinar.

Ultimately, over 120 school districts, including Mecklenburg County and Virginia Beach, signed the attestation form, according to information obtained through a public records request. Most school districts signed the document months ago, but their decision to do so has not been previously reported.

Chalkbeat sought comment from every school district in the state. Virtually all declined to comment or did not respond.

Rogers, the Virginia Beach board member, said she was not aware that her district signed. “It is a concern,” she said. “I would ask why the federal government would impose that kind of restriction on a child when it is not our responsibility to get involved.”

Only seven Virginia school districts did not sign, according to state records and Chalkbeat reporting. “We can’t attest to that because we don’t collect that information,” Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence said in an interview, referring to students’ immigration status.

In January of this year, the district was denied $150,000 in Perkins funding, including for a program promoting entrepreneurship to students. An email to Loudoun from the Virginia Department of Education, obtained by Chalkbeat, said funding requests would be rejected for school systems that had not signed. The district’s loss of funding was initially reported by local news outlet Loudoun Now.

Gullickson, who served as state superintendent during Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat, “Schools should only spend taxpayer money on students as intended.” She added, “Virginia was unwilling to put federal funds at risk.”

This week, Holly Coy, chief of staff at the Virginia Department of Education, said the agency “has determined that submitting the attestation is no longer a necessary requirement.” She said the state was still determining the logistics for releasing money to districts that had not signed.

The chain of events in Virginia shows the compromises school districts were willing to make to keep federal money flowing, as well as the ways in which student rights are dependent on states’ partisan make-up.

The U.S. Education Department did not explicitly require states to get assurances from districts, but warned it “may conduct a review” to ensure federal funding doesn’t go to “serve illegal aliens.” The department acknowledged that “this guidance is not binding.”

Organizations that represent career education and community colleges sent a letter to the department in August with urgent questions about how to comply, since Perkins funds often go to program costs that benefit large groups of students. They have not received a response, according to two groups who signed the letter.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Department of Education told districts that they cannot use Perkins dollars to pay for undocumented high school students to take college-credit classes “even if the course occurs at the high school.” Although schools are not required to report students’ immigration status, districts “should be prepared to demonstrate that ineligible students are not being served using Perkins funds,” the agency said.

A spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education did not offer comment.

In Georgia, the state announced that beginning this summer, high school students participating in a state-funded dual college enrollment program must prove that they are citizens or legal residents. The state did not provide a public rationale for this move. According to a memo obtained by Chalkbeat, the Georgia Department of Law cited the recent Trump administration guidance as reason to exclude undocumented students.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers the dual enrollment program, did not respond to a request for comment.

One high school in the Atlanta area noted that undocumented students may still participate, but now “must self-pay for courses.”

National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

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

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

America is turning against higher education. Students are still signing up.

2026-03-24T13:44:25+00:00

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.

The narrative is by now familiar.

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen precipitously. More commentators are wondering aloud whether a degree is worth the cost. High school graduates and their families fret about taking on student debt. The Trump administration has aggressively attacked — rhetorically and legally — higher education. Artificial intelligence could threaten the university business model.

And yet, hard data show seemingly positive trends for higher education.

After a dip during the pandemic, enrollment has risen for three straight years. Elite universities continue to have vastly more applicants than seats. College-educated workers still far out-earn those without a degree, on average. College has actually become somewhat more affordable in recent years.

At Chalkbeat Ideas, we recently held an event trying to understand and untangle these confusing facts. The recording is here; the slides featuring my presentation of data are here.

“A lot of discouragement of students around higher education has very little to do with education or economic outcomes,” Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University, said during the event.

The discussion helped clarify my own thinking about the paradoxical state of American higher education — and what the prevailing discourse gets wrong. Here are some key takeaways.

The higher education backlash hasn’t stopped enrollment from growing.

In 2023 and 2024, headlines about Americans giving up on the value of college dominated. Ivy League presidents were filleted before Congress over antisemitism on campus. Trump campaigned on reining in elite schools. Support in polls dropped to record lows.

But a funny thing also happened during this time, although it was less noticed: Actual student enrollment started to trend upward again. Now, overall college and university enrollment is above pre-pandemic levels. The negative sentiment around higher education may have deterred at least some students from pursuing a degree, but in recent years there have apparently been other factors pulling them in.

The backlash has been strongest against elite schools — but they’re still thriving.

It’s hard to know for sure why confidence in American education has fallen so sharply. But I suspect that a lot of it has to do with attention to the country’s most elite schools, the Ivy League and a handful of others. Those universities, which educate a tiny share of American students, have drawn incredible amounts of attention, largely negative: about their purportedly close-minded liberal culture, their remarkably high tuition rates, and their exclusive admissions practices.

Yet demand to attend these colleges remains strikingly high — they still reject the vast majority of students who apply. In recent years, enrollment has only grown at selective colleges, which remain dominated by students from high-income neighborhoods.

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, noted archly during the Chalkbeat event that there is little indication of declining interest in college among affluent families, despite suggestions that young people are pivoting to blue-collar work.

“When you look at the wealthiest people in this country … they’re not having conversations about construction trades. They’re not having conversations about HVAC [work] when it comes to their kids,” said Jeffries. KIPP, the country’s largest nonprofit charter network, serving mostly students from low-income families, continues to prioritize access to college, he said.

The fundamental economics of higher education have not changed much — and are fairly strong.

What drives many people to pursue a degree is economic opportunity. In recent years, a narrative has emerged that pursuing a bachelor’s degree is no longer worth it, due to some combination of higher costs and lower returns. Neither claim is well supported by the data.

Real college tuition — what people actually pay, rather than the sticker price — has been flat or even falling for nearly two decades, according to tracking from the College Board. Meanwhile, the wage advantage for college graduates has remained at very high levels.

Rigorous research has typically found that students on the margin of attending college benefit economically from doing so. “Unambiguously, you see large returns to college-going,” said Bleemer. He pointed to studies in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Texas. That doesn’t mean everyone benefits, just that the typical student considering college does, at least where it’s been studied.

The persistent economic value of college may help explain why enrollment at four-year colleges has not responded strongly to the backlash.

Two-year colleges have also seen enrollment rise recently, though this followed years of declines. Between 2010 and 2023, student counts dropped precipitously at places like Wayne County Community College and Central New Mexico Community College, to name a couple. There were also steep declines at for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix Online Campus.

These were hardly the schools at the center of the recent higher education backlash, but they bore the brunt of enrollment declines.

This again may reflect economic fundamentals in which students see less value from certain schools. Rising unemployment rates, which typically make additional education more appealing, have corresponded with the recent uptick in enrollment.

Politics, shrinking student pools, and AI mean a new era of uncertainty for higher ed.

So if enrollment is growing and the economic case for a degree remains strong, are colleges in a secure spot? Well, no. They face many pressures at the moment. The first is the shrinking pool of potential students. For the foreseeable future, just about every graduating high school class will be smaller than the last, according to projections. Higher education still faces intense political opposition, which could result in less public funding for colleges and universities. Wealthy elite colleges are in many ways best positioned to weather this storm, while lesser-known schools may again be the hardest hit.

The other variable is artificial intelligence. For multiple generations, universities have benefitted from the fact that more-educated workers can often better take advantage of new innovations. This is sometimes called the race between education and technology — in other words, the country has long been racing to get more educated to keep up with evolving tech.

What’s not clear yet is whether this race will continue. It’s possible that AI could lead to even more demand for higher education, but it could also reduce interest by replacing white-collar work. At the moment, it’s too soon to say how this will play out.

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

A viral case against screens in schools is winning converts. Does the evidence hold up?

2026-03-17T14:39:42+00:00

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.

Schools have been struggling for nearly a decade with stagnant or declining test scores. Some have blamed external factors like the pandemic or children’s screen use outside of school. But what if, in a sort of educational horror movie, the call is coming from inside the house?

Such is the provocative theory advanced by Jared Cooney Horvath, a Ph.D-holding neuroscientist who runs an education consulting company. Students’ learning and attention have been derailed by the proliferation of screens in schools. “When tech enters education, learning goes down,” he told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year.

Horvath has offered a synthesis of two anxieties of the moment: poor test scores and rising screen time among children, including in school. It’s a message that is resonating with some parents, educators, and lawmakers.

His Senate testimony has been viewed well over 2 million times on C-Span’s YouTube page. Clipped versions have ricocheted across Instagram. Prominent psychologist and tech critic Jonathan Haidt has promoted Horvath’s work. At least one tech-skeptical parent is attending school board meetings armed with copies of Horvath’s self-published book, “The Digital Delusion,” which is set to be re-released this summer by a major publisher. Meanwhile, some states are considering new restrictions on school-issued devices.

I wanted to figure out how strong the case against ed-tech really is, so I took a careful look at Horvath’s evidence. My takeaway: There’s no smoking-gun data showing that ed-tech is at the root of, or even contributing to, recent learning declines. But Horvath’s case should still give schools and educators some pause. Could the tech tools they’ve adopted be doing more harm than good?

In his book and Senate testimony, Horvath offers a three-pronged case against tech in schools.

First, he notes a basic correlation. On a number of international tests, students who spend more time on school computers tend to do worse, he finds. Both U.S. and international scores also started to drop once schools began giving students laptops, Horvath says.

Second, Horvath summarizes academic research — over 20,000 studies — on ed-tech tools, which he defines broadly. Startlingly, in his telling, they appear to harm learning. “Most general-use educational technologies perform below the effectiveness of ordinary classroom instruction,” Horvath said in his written Senate testimony.

Third, screens are not consistent with learning best practices, says Horvath, drawing from his neuroscience background. Human relationships are an important part of learning, which digital tools can’t match. Screens are also just distracting for students.

Plus, tech can make learning frictionless, which seems like a good thing but isn’t, Horvath contends. For instance, it’s easy to take notes on a computer. Yet the process of hand writing notes requires more consideration of what is being written, and that can help commit it to memory.

Across different strands of evidence, “the same exact pattern pops up again and again,” Horvath tells me — that ed-tech is actively harmful.

Yet this case has a number of significant holes.

His first point about correlation is just that: correlational. It does not show tech has caused lower achievement. Such declines in the U.S. and around the world have coincided with a number of other factors, including the pandemic and the growth of screens outside of school. Researchers are still struggling to pin down the key causal factors here. Horvath readily acknowledges this limitation.

His summary of research is also questionable. The overall impact of ed-tech in the studies he cites is actually positive. Horvath says the effect is too small to justify the use of tech because it’s smaller than the effect of “typical classroom instruction.” Taking that into account turns the ed-tech results negative, he says. This is a key methodological decision on which Horvath’s conclusion rests.

But it’s simply not the right approach, says Elizabeth Tipton, a Northwestern University statistician, who counts herself as an ed-tech skeptic. Horvath’s benchmark is wildly unrealistic, she says. In carefully designed studies, in which two groups are both receiving some sort of instruction, most effects are quite small. In that context, an effect above zero would be encouraging.

Perhaps more importantly, says Tipton, it’s not clear the vast array of research that Horvath is citing should be relied on at all. There are many poorly done studies in education. To do a good summary, low-quality papers need to be ruthlessly weeded out. Another challenge is that tech is constantly changing, making old studies quickly obsolete. She’s worried that there’s a “garbage in, garbage out” problem in Horvath’s summary, which is really an overview of multiple overview papers.

“We are so far from the original data, we have no idea what we’re studying at this point,” says Tipton. She’s not aware of a high-quality summary of research on ed-tech broadly. This would be hard to do because the uses of tech are so diverse.

Horvath acknowledges limits in his cause and effect evidence, but he says that’s inevitable in social science. We should look at the weight of the data and the overall coherence of the case, he argues.

Horvath is perhaps on the strongest ground in his summary of cognitive science research. Although it’s debated among researchers, there is some evidence that students learn less from reading and from taking notes on screens. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, says he’s particularly concerned that tech opens up new avenues for distraction. “If kids have a Chromebook and they can find a way out of whatever they’re doing so they can do something more fun with the Chromebook, they will,” he says.

For his part, Horvath argues the burden of proof should not be on him but on the purveyors of ed-tech. “We are much closer to proving that it’s harmful than we are to proving it’s helping,” he says.

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

Did federal COVID aid allow states to cut back on school spending?

2026-03-12T21:17:52+00:00

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.

Nearly $200 billion in federal COVID relief money left schools in a relatively strong financial position in recent years. But new data highlights a potential unintended consequence of all the federal aid: states cutting back on their own efforts to fund education.

A report, released by the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, tracks the share of each state’s economy devoted to public schools. Researchers call this “fiscal effort.” I like to think about it as the tax rate applied to the states’ economy to fund education (though it’s really multiple taxes). Crucially, this does not count federal dollars, just state and local money.

By this measure, funding effort dropped sharply between 2020 and 2023, as the figure below from the report shows. This doesn’t mean that states are spendinglessin real dollars on schools because the economy has also been growing during this time. They’re spending less as a percentage of the economy.

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Holding kids back in 3rd grade can raise test scores — but a new study shows a long-run cost

2026-03-10T14:31:01+00:00

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. Next week we have an online event on whether college is still worth it. Join us!

It’s an age-old debate with an emerging conventional wisdom: Third graders should not move on to the next grade if they are still struggling to read.

There’s both logic and evidence behind this policy. Studies have found that students have higher test scores after they’re held back. This practice may also have played a role in helping Mississippi make remarkable improvements in recent years. A chorus of policymakers and journalists have insisted with growing confidence that others should replicate the state’s model.

But a new study offers a warning about the downside risks of retention. Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.

“Retaining low-achieving students in third grade further deepens educational and income inequalities,” writes Jiee Zhong, an economics professor at Miami University.

The findings are hardly the last word on this topic. But they complicate the evidence base for retention at a time when more states — like Arkansas, Indiana, and West Virginia — are adopting this policy.

The paper, set to be published in an economics journal, examines an early 2000s Texas policy to hold back struggling readers. Students had three chances to pass the state exam.

Zhong, the researcher, looked at those who just barely missed the passing score versus those who just reached it. These students were essentially identical — the only difference was a few questions right or wrong on the test. Yet those handful of questions changed the trajectory of many students’ lives by determining whether they would be held back. This also created a natural experiment that allowed Zhong to compare the two groups of students, thus isolating the effect of retention.

Failing the exam wasn’t a guarantee that students would repeat the grade — parents could seek exemptions — but it dramatically increased their chances. Relative to the overall student population, the retained students were more likely to be low-income, Black or Hispanic, and still learning English.

In the short term, the results were promising. By the time retained students finished fourth grade, their test scores were much higher. But there were warning signs. Students missed more school after they were held back. As the years went on, the test score gains, relative to non-retained students, started to fade. In middle school, the students who had been held back were more likely to exhibit violent behavior (although this remained rare).

By the end of high school, retained students were 9 percentage points less likely to graduate, compared to similar students who weren’t forced to repeat third grade. This is a very large effect. Even those students who graduated typically did so a year later, reflecting the extra year from being held back.

At the age of 26, the previously retained students, now young adults, earned less money than if they hadn’t been held back. Again, the effect was substantial: nearly $3,500, a decline of 19%.

So what happened?

Holding back a student essentially adds a year to the time in school required to graduate. Those students then reach minimum drop-out ages at earlier grades. Zhong notes that retention could have led to “stigma and school disengagement.” Even those who do graduate may be delayed in entering the workforce, which could reduce their earnings.

Prior research has been mixed on the long-run consequences of early-grade retention, with some negative effects found in studies in New York City and Louisiana but not Florida. In Texas, retention did not necessarily come with additional remediation, the paper notes.

That’s a key difference from the Mississippi policy, says Carey Wright, who was state superintendent there. Students who were held back received extra small group instruction. Her focus was never on retention, she adds. “Let’s talk about prevention and intervention,” Wright instructed her staff.

Wright says she’s not sure if there have been efforts to track retained students in Mississippi through high school. She notes that one study found that through sixth grade those students had higher reading scores and comparable attendance to similar non-retained students.

The Texas study should not be taken as decisive against retention. That’s because it doesn’t consider a key part of the policy: motivating teachers, parents, and students to improve reading scores to avoid retention.

“In theory you wouldn’t have to have retention,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan education professor. “In practice, the stick in the background may make everyone in the system more focused.” This seems very possible, but we should understand that retention may very well be a stick, not a carrot.

Many parents resist having their children held back, and this study suggests there may be good reasons for that. Students from more advantaged families are more likely to receive exemptions from retention, according to some previous research.

For her part, Wright is not sure whether Mississippi would have seen the same gains without the retention law, though some research suggests it did play a role. In Maryland, where she’s now superintendent of schools, students can only be held back if parents agree.

“It’s a different climate here,” Wright says.

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

Teachers, parents, and students: What’s your take on homework? Is it worth it?

2026-03-09T15:56:01+00:00

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.

Homework is one of the most foundational aspects of American schooling. It’s also intensely debated and in flux. Some teachers swear by homework; others say it simply doesn’t work. Parents, too, have differing views on the value and role of homework. Researchers examine its effect on learning, with varying and disputed results.

Some educators have changed their approach in recent years to give less homework or to stop grading what they do give. Artificial intelligence is creating new complications, making it harder for teachers to ensure work done at home is students’ own.

We want to understand what’s going on here: how teachers are using homework, how that’s changed in recent years, and what the benefits and downsides of homework are. We also want to hear thoughts about making homework more beneficial when it is assigned.

If you’re a teacher, parent, or student, we want to hear from you about homework. Now’s your chance to sound off on this hotly debated topic.

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

Fordham Institute’s Amber Northern says federal education research is worth rebuilding after DOGE cuts

2026-03-05T22:46:45+00:00

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.

It was a move that stunned many in the world of education research. Nearly a year ago, the sleepy, wonky, somewhat obscure research arm of the Education Department was rapidly decimated by Elon Musk’s DOGE. The Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, saw a slew of research contracts canceled and most of its staff laid off.

IES had for two decades funded research, collected basic data on schools, produced guides on “what works” in education, and run the national testing program. You may not know much about IES, but you’ve likely encountered its data.

In the year since the DOGE decimation, parts of IES have been restored and recently the administration released a report with recommendations on “reimagining” its work. The report was authored by Amber Northern, who took on a temporary role with the Education Department and whose day job is as vice president for research at the Fordham Institute, a center-right education think tank.

The lengthy report features a combination of high-level ideas (like making research more accessible and actionable) and wonkily detailed recommendations (like improving procurement processes). It also offered a staunch defense of the value of federally funded research.

Continue reading this article here.

Trump aims to shrink the Education Department — while Washington tightens its grip on schools

2026-03-03T21:45:00+00:00

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.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has offered a consistent message: It’s getting the feds out of the way of schools by trying to abolish the Education Department. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has vowed to “break up the federal education bureaucracy,” “return education to the states,” and “empower local leaders.”

Yet many local and state leaders whose politics differ from Trump’s are not feeling empowered — quite the opposite. “We have seen unprecedented federal interest,” says Aaron Spence, the superintendent of Loudoun County schools, a suburban Virginia district outside Washington D.C. that has been at the center of a number of high-profile culture-war controversies.

In July of last year, the Education Department found Loudoun and a number of other Northern Virginia districts had violated Title IX by allowing transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. The decision was startling to Spence because Loudoun was following a 2020 appeals court ruling that required bathrooms in Virginia schools be made available to trans students.

The federal government had reopened an issue that seemed settled. This has taken up “an inordinate and significant amount of staff time,” says Spence. Now Loudoun is threatened with a loss of federal funding as the issue plays out in court. The district wants to follow federal law but doesn’t know how, Spence says: “We would frankly love some resolution.”

Loudoun’s experience underscores Trump’s efforts to stamp out local school policies that the administration disagrees with and the challenge that’s created for local school leaders. Despite his promise to reduce federal involvement in education, D.C. influence hasn’t gone away.

In response to a request for comment on this story, a spokesperson for the Education Department pointed to a website touting the administration’s accomplishments.

The Trump administration has launched a flurry of investigations into local school systems and states. That includes probes into a California law prohibiting teachers from being required to disclose students’ gender identity to parents and Black student achievement programs in Chicago and Portland. The Education Department has also sought to restrict a gender-neutral bathroom at a Denver high school and to restore a Native American mascot at a Long Island high school.

Some state and school leaders say they’re monitoring federal policy more closely than at any point in recent memory.

“The Trump administration will keep coming after us because that’s their values, and I understand that,” says Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of Washington state. “But it’s totally inconsistent with their idea of returning education and policy back to the states.” Trump is investigating Washington, and a number of other states, over policies to allow transgender girls to compete in female athletics.

To be clear, many voters agree with Trump’s approach to these social and cultural issues. Some observers also contend turnabout is fair play: Democrats wielded federal power in aggressive ways, so it’s more than fair for Republican presidents to do the same.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, who has criticized some of Trump’s moves, says it was predictable that conservatives would use the tools pioneered by progressives. “There’s a degree of schadenfreude,” he says.

For their part, administration officials say they are simply following civil rights statutes. “As long as this agency exists, we need to be sure we’re enforcing the law,” the Education Department’s Lindsey Burke said at a recent Chalkbeat event.

But the administration is going further than enforcing existing law; it is seeking to reinterpret and create new law, often in ways that maintain a powerful federal role in education.

Consider, for instance, the interpretation of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. The Biden administration contended this protects transgender students, which infuriated many conservatives and was struck down in a number of courts.

Others argue that the law is silent about gender identity and that the issue should be left up to states. “Why would we at this point … jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country while there’s still uncertainty and debate?” said Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral arguments in a pending case on transgender athletes.

The Trump administration is taking a third position, which is that Title IX broadly prohibits transgender students from sex-separated spaces and sports. In Virginia, it’s pushing that view even where an appeals court decision says otherwise. (The administration did notch a win this week after the Supreme Court said parents likely have a right to know if their child’s gender identity changes in school.)

Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College, has criticized Democratic presidents for what he sees as too much federal meddling. But he says Trump has taken federal power to a new level. “The more you reinforce that these tools can be used in a heavy-handed partisan way, the more you’re going to make sure that happens the next time the administration changes,” he says.

Trump has sought a vast swath of changes from universities including on antisemitism, DEI, grade inflation, intellectual diversity, admissions practices, transgender accommodations, and more. The administration has aggressively, and often successfully, leveraged federal funds to push colleges to change some of their practices.

Meanwhile, Congress and Trump have enacted a large school choice tax-credit program through the “big beautiful bill.” This means the federal government will now provide subsidies to private schools and perhaps certain public schools. States don’t have to participate, but the Trump administration is seeking to limit what rules states can put in place if they do opt in.

This law could ultimately lead to more federal regulation of private schools, which is one reason some conservative groups have historically opposed federal choice measures. The Trump administration has indicated it will include few if any regulations, but future administrations may not do the same. Just ask private universities, which have grown accustomed to federal funds and are now facing unprecedented federal pressure.

The persistent, and even growing, federal power over education has been obscured by Trump’s high-profile effort to close the Education Department. This gives the impression that the federal role is shrinking. It’s true that there are fewer people doing education research and investigating civil rights claims in schools. There’s also no longer a health clinic at the Education Department building, which officials have repeatedly touted. The administration has issued guidance on how schools can use federal funding more flexibly and recently granted modest funding flexibility to the state of Iowa.

Yet some school officials say the overall effect of all this so far has been minimal.

“The promise was deregulation,” says Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director of AASA, the association of school superintendents. “The reality has been paperwork, guidance, and reminders.”

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

Can the politics of schools be fixed?

2026-02-26T12:02:43+00:00

America’s schools exist to educate students — right?

Not exactly, says Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at the Ohio State University. In his recently published book, “No Adult Left Behind,” Kogan lays out a provocative thesis: public education is not set out to maximize student learning. Instead, it prioritizes the various demands of adults.

Employee groups protect their members’ jobs, voters without children reject additional funding for schools, and activists derail a focus on academics by complaining about school mascots or the types of books in the library, he says.

“Kids can’t vote,” writes Kogan. “Most people who can (and do) aren’t particularly concerned about their learning.”

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Schools are adding adults even as they lose students. Is that a problem?

2026-02-24T21:42:38+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Join us next month for our online event on whether higher education is still worth it.

Are American schools facing an imminent financial bubble?

More people are working in public schools, even as fewer students attend them. To some observers, this math just isn’t math-ing. Schools, some fear, are setting themselves up for disaster by spending beyond their means. This has led to broad concerns about the financial state of American public education.

“Where staffing and enrollment are diverging, something eventually has to give,” says a recent analysis from the Edunomics Lab, a school finance think tank. “Current staffing levels are unsustainable,” agrees a report from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

The reality, though, is more complicated. Schools have been hiring additional staff for well over half a century. This is not inherently unaffordable, so long as the economy keeps growing and the public continues to support using additional tax revenue to fund schools.

Adding staff may be “more sustainable than people tend to assume for a lot of districts,” says Paul Bruno, a school finance expert at the University of Illinois. “If there are fewer students in the system, you can make the choice to spend more on each student.”

Yet there’s no guarantee that politicians will choose to keep spending more or that the economy will continue to grow. Whether staffing increases are fully sustainable will depend on a number of factors and will vary from place to place.

Here’s how to understand what’s going on.

The long-sustained staffing surge

The oft-cited graph below comes from Edunomics Lab. Based on federal data, it shows a divergence in the number of students and school employees in the last decade. Some are teachers, though most are non-teachers, including paraprofessionals, support staff, instructional coaches, counselors, assistant principals, and others.

An Edunomics Lab graph showing trends in students and staffing in public schools

Below is another graph using essentially the same numbers but presented differently. This simply turns the student and staffing numbers into a ratio (students per staff) and extends the time horizon.

Here the recent trends look less stark. The dips in staffing ratios in the last few years may have been slightly faster than normal but not dramatically so.

In fact, American schools have been lowering staffing ratios for quite some time. Private schools have done so too. Over the years, critics have warned that such trends were not sustainable. Yet, with the exception of budget cuts in the wake of the Great Recession, they have been sustained.

How is this possible? Won’t schools eventually run out of money?

That’s not what has happened because school funding has tended to increase over time. As the U.S. economy has grown, tax revenue has gone up, and politicians have tended to give a bit more to schools each year. Taxpayers don’t usually revolt because their tax rates aren’t necessarily rising. The same tax rates on a larger economy generate more funding.

What would be alarming is if the share of the economy devoted to K-12 schooling were sharply increasing. That would be tough to maintain. But that’s not what we see.

What about the recent decline in student enrollment, which will likely continue for years? Won’t that finally mean that schools will have to make cutbacks?

Not necessarily. Lower enrollment could actually mean more money for schools on a per-student basis if the same amount of money is spread across a smaller number of students. This is possible because enrollment drops do not necessarily affect the tax revenue that goes toward funding schools.

Recent reports nationally and in California have described this phenomenon in more detail.

Uncertainty, politics, and trade-offs

Yet schools can hardly rest easy. Here are the financial risks and challenges that lie ahead.

Some of the staffing increase may have been funded with temporary federal COVID aid that has run its course. It’s not clear precisely how many new staff were funded with this money or whether other revenue can sustain these positions.
Losing students can add complications and costs to districts. They may keep underenrolled schools open or face added transportation costs after closing schools. In those cases, the same amount of money may buy less.
Schools have benefited from a rising economic tide and politicians’ continued willingness to use extra revenue to fund education. Neither is guaranteed to last. Policymakers and voters may decide they don’t want to keep investing as much in school systems with dwindling numbers of students. Increasing demands for other public services, like health care, may crowd out education.
Enrollment declines have not been evenly spread across school systems. Some places have seen much sharper drops. Those schools are facing increasing financial strain since state funding is tied to the number of students.

Even if schools can afford to continue adding staff or at least maintain staff, that doesn’t mean that they should. There is an open question about whether that’s the best use of scarce funds.

Research has found some benefits of additional teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, and teacher coaches. One trade-off, though, is that new funding is not going toward raising teacher salaries. Adjusted for inflation, teacher pay has actually declined in recent years. Meanwhile, in part due to the growing economy, many other professionals have seen their salaries rise. This could have troubling long-run consequences for who enters and stays in teaching.

“What if instead [of adding more staff] we had really spectacular teachers in the classroom who are paid really, really well?” says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab. “If so, maybe we wouldn’t need so many specialists.”

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

Top teachers’ performance drops in high-poverty schools, showing school context is key

2026-02-17T21:45:00+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Please join us for our next event: It’s about whether a four-year college degree is still worth it. With a panel featuring the CEO of the KIPP Foundation and a Princeton University economist, we’ll try to separate fact from fiction about the value of American higher education. This online event will be at 2 p.m. ET on March 16. You can sign up and submit questions here.

In 2009, the federal government launched a remarkable educational experiment. Effective teachers were paid large bonuses ($30,000, adjusted for inflation, over two years) to move into a low-performing, high-poverty school.

This reflected the moment’s zeitgeist: use test scores to identify the best teachers (and also the worst). This so-called Talent Transfer Initiative worked, according to a 2013 study: Test scores rose by 3 to 5 percentile points among students taught by transferring educators. It was an example of the tangible benefits of having an excellent teacher.

Yet the story does not end there. A group of researchers recently released a paper reexamining this study and offered an intriguing twist. If the transferring teachers remained as effective as they had been in their prior school, test scores would have risen even more.

But in fact, in their new schools, these great teachers transformed into merely pretty good teachers. This reflects a profound and sometimes underappreciated fact about teacher performance: It’s not just about the inherent skills of an individual. It’s also about the school environment.

“Teacher effectiveness is dynamic,” says Matthew Kraft, a Brown University professor and coauthor of the new paper. “Teaching is a team sport.”

The study is important because there’s been a vacuum in policy efforts to improve teacher quality since the 2010s. The bevy of teacher evaluation laws during that period produced little in the way of overall student learning gains, according to a widely cited study coauthored by Kraft. Teachers are still very important, though. This new study is one small step in understanding how to bolster the profession.

In the original study, the researchers recruited 10 large districts. Some low-performing schools within each district got the chance to hire highly effective teachers with the lure of large bonuses; other schools did not. Genuine experiments like this are rare in education.

The study relied on “value-added” scores, which are statistical estimates of how much an individual teacher contributes to classroomwide test score gains. These measures were highly controversial when used to evaluate teachers, but remain widely used by academics for research purposes. Teachers were eligible for the transfer bonus if they were in the top fifth of value-added scores within their grade and subject.

The study was done through the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education that has since been gutted by the Trump administration. Its future remains in flux.

Ultimately, 80 top teachers took the bonus and switched schools. In their new jobs, though, these teachers’ performance fell from the 85th percentile districtwide to the 66th percentile. (And for stats nerds, no, this probably wasn’t just regression to the mean.) So what happened?

Teachers’ context had dramatically changed. They reported lower student motivation and more behavior problems. Many more students were from low-income families, and their incoming test scores were lower. The value-added measure accounts for differences in student population, so it wasn’t inevitable that transferring teachers’ performance would fall. Teachers may simply have been less equipped and experienced for the challenges in their new schools.

Some of the challenges may have come from the schools themselves. Teachers reported having fewer resources and less autonomy over their classrooms compared to their prior school.

Other research has found that teachers perform better when they find a school they like, when they work with more effective peers, and when their school is conducive to learning and collaboration. Teachers also tend to do better when they’re teaching the same grade or the same group of students as in years past. Years of teaching experience matter a lot, too.

This adds nuance to the common sentiment that a child’s individual teacher is the most important in-school factor affecting learning. It’s really the teacher plus the various contexts that make it more or less likely that the teacher will succeed.

Teachers are not widgets in multiple senses. They cannot be simply moved around to different schools or classrooms or grades and expected to perform. “We need to move beyond thinking about teacher effectiveness as a fixed characteristic,” says Kraft.

Yet it’s not precisely clear how policymakers can take advantage of this insight. Yes, teachers do better in schools with strong leadership, good collaboration with colleagues, and support for handling student behavior challenges. Making sure all these things are in place is the tough part.

This new study hardly means that policymakers should give up on trying to use pay to get good teachers in high-poverty schools. The original Talent Transfer Initiative didn’t work as well as it might have, but it did make a difference. Kraft says it may have worked even better if the money was sustained over time and went toward retaining top teachers already working in those schools.

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

When is a good grade not good enough? A debate over selective college admissions.

2026-02-12T11:42:47+00:00

Read the full piece here.

Despite recent efforts to make change, top colleges are still home to mostly wealthy students

2026-02-10T20:12:00+00:00

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.

It’s hardly news that America’s elite universities are largely populated by students from America’s wealthiest families.

Yet in recent years this has drawn increasing alarm. Research has documented just how large the admissions advantage is for well-off students. Bloomberg Philanthropies has pumped tens of millions of dollars into efforts to get talented lower-income students into better colleges. The College Board, which administers the SAT, vowed to help in this effort. For some, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning race-based affirmative action added more urgency to the task. In the wake of the ruling, a number of schools pledged to step up recruitment and end legacy admissions.

Have these efforts paid off? A look at university press releases might suggest so. A number of schools — including Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Princeton — have recently touted a record share of students who receive Pell grants, education stipends that go to students from low- and middle-income families.

Most press releases did not mention a salient fact, however: The Pell qualification rules have changed in recent years, skewing comparisons over time. A careful parsing of the data suggests that America’s top colleges are still filled largely by students from advantaged backgrounds. Individual universities have seen some progress, but the aggregate changes appear to have been modest.

“There are benefits to enrolling more rich kids — untold benefits — for these selective institutions,” says Paul Tough, an author who has chronicled efforts to improve college access. “And there are very few benefits to enrolling more low-income students, except that it’s the right thing to do.”

This matters because enrollment at top universities has been linked to higher graduation rates and higher incomes post college. Selective schools typically provide a better-funded education, while offering more generous financial aid. They also often open the door to institutions of power and influence.

It’s important to be clear about how incremental progress in increasing economic diversity has been. If schools can get positive attention for addressing this without making substantial changes, they may feel even less pressure to undertake further reforms.

Researchers have often counted students as lower-income based on whether they receive a federal Pell grant. But since eligibility expanded in 2024, Pell numbers across the country have spiked. “My suspicion is that much of the uptick in Pell representation at these selective colleges and universities is a measurement issue,” says Sarah Turner, a University of Virginia professor who studies higher education.

Some universities acknowledge the changing Pell definition but say that their economic diversity has genuinely increased. To figure out whether this is the case, I looked at data from the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks university enrollment, broken down by the income level of students’ neighborhoods.

Total enrollment at “highly selective” colleges has been going up in recent years, but the economic background of the student body has barely budged. The share of students from the two groups of lower-income neighborhoods has shifted from 13.2% in 2019 to 13.4% in 2025. In raw numbers, that’s an uptick of about 20,000 students, which is far less than the 95,000 student increase from the two highest-income neighborhoods.

Three-quarters of students at these selective schools come from those affluent areas. This is just 1 percentage point lower compared to six years earlier.

Another analysis, recently published by the College Board, looked at the year after affirmative action was banned. At very elite colleges, the share of first-year students from low- and middle-income neighborhoods rose by only a “minimal” amount, researchers found.

The clearinghouse income data only goes back to 2019. Would a longer time horizon change the picture? Not much. A recent analysis by James Murphy, a higher education analyst at the nonprofit Class Action, found that between 2013 and 2023, first-year Pell enrollment at highly selective private colleges increased from 16% to 18%. This uptick was a bit higher at Ivy League and elite liberal arts schools. Still, at selective public colleges, Pell shares fell by 2 points. (This was when the Pell definition was broadly consistent.)

The data I’ve described is imperfect. The clearinghouse measures students’ neighborhoods, rather than their individual economic circumstances. Those are highly correlated but are not the same. The clearinghouse also includes a variety of colleges, nearly 200, under the banner of “highly selective,” not just the very elite schools. Turner of the University of Virginia says more detailed data is needed to fully understand the trends here.

I asked the universities touting their record Pell numbers for any data beyond Pell showing that more low-income students were enrolled. None responded with that information.

The challenge of making substantial change is epitomized by the American Talent Initiative, an organization supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies (which is also a funder of Chalkbeat). In 2016, ATI set a goal of adding 50,000 low- and middle-income students to 350 or so colleges with high graduation rates. Many of those schools joined ATI as members, but even more did not participate in the initiative. Initial reports from the group showed that its members were making progress, but non-participating schools were actually enrolling fewer and fewer lower-income students.

Tania LaViolet, an ATI leader, says the original hope was to influence the broader ecosystem of top colleges by sharing best practices across institutions. “That hypothesis didn’t pan out as we had anticipated,” she says.

In 2024, ATI dropped its initial goal to focus just on colleges that opted to participate in the work. Its latest report, released last month, touts an increase in lower-income students among ATI members, though the authors acknowledge it’s challenging to compare trends over time because of the changing Pell definition. The organization no longer tracks data for non-members.

ATI officials note that even if the share of low-income students in selective schools hasn’t changed much, their raw numbers have increased, as overall enrollment has grown. “This increased number means thousands of lives changed for the better,” says LaViolet.

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

The downside of ending snow days

2026-01-29T15:45:00+00:00

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.

In New York City, and some other parts of the country, snow days are turning into a relic of the past. As snow buried New York over the weekend, the country’s largest school system shifted to remote learning on Monday rather than calling off school altogether.

Kate Gutwillig, a fifth grade teacher at P.S. 134 in Manhattan, said about 70% of her students showed up for virtual instruction. It proved challenging to quickly pivot to remote learning.

“You can’t teach these kids all these social norms on Zoom today,” she said. About half the students who logged in to her virtual classroom kept their cameras off. Gutwillig noted it has been years since the pandemic, when students were consistently on Zoom for school.

She largely did not cover new material since attendance was lower than usual. Instead, Gutwillig made time for her students to read independently, then delivered brief review lessons on how to write a conclusion to a literary essay and how to find the area of a rectangle with fractions. All things considered, she said, the day went well.

Research suggests that Gutwillig’s decision not to cover new topics was a wise one. A major 2014 study found that a small number of snow days did not have any noticeable effect on test scores. On the other hand, keeping schools open on snowy days when attendance was low did seem to harm learning.

This research points to the limits of replacing snow days with virtual instruction. At worst, doing so could backfire if teachers spend time covering new material when student engagement is low, as was the case in New York City. At best, it might be an opportunity for teachers to review prior topics, but not move forward with regular instruction.

The New York City Department of Education gave schools discretion over how to approach remote instruction, including introducing new content or focusing on review, according to teachers and principals. A spokesperson for the district said that teachers “thoughtfully adjusted content to meet the needs of their students in a remote environment.”

To study the effects of snow days, Joshua Goodman, now a professor at Boston University, examined a rich set of data on weather, attendance, and test scores in Massachusetts from 2003 to 2010.

Goodman compared test scores in years where there was more or less snow. A year with lots of heavy snow (days with more than 10 inches) had no effect. Yet math scores were lower in years with more days of moderate (4-10 inches) snow.

These counterintuitive results can be explained by how schools responded to different levels of snow. Heavy snow meant more snow days. Moderate snow meant more days when schools stayed open but attendance was sharply down, particularly among low-income students.

In other words, snow days did not seem to set students back much; missing regular school days due to snowy conditions did.

The takeaway is not that schools can close indefinitely without consequence, and Goodman did find some small negative effects of closures for high-poverty schools. But the study suggests that a few snow days won’t be terribly harmful because teachers figure out ways to adapt.

Yet when schools are open and a big chunk of students are missing, teachers are in a tough spot. Some may continue teaching new material, and then try to help students who missed the original lesson catch up. This creates a dual challenge, though: The makeup work isn’t quite as effective, and teachers’ time and energy is diverted from moving everyone else forward.

“Snow days, maybe surprisingly, are less disruptive than other forms of lost instructional time,” said Goodman. “Coordinating everyone being absent at once is actually easier to deal with than the messiness of other kinds of lost instructional time.”

Other studies have broadly backed up these findings. Individual student absences affect achievement more than schoolwide calendar changes. Some research has found that students also learn less when their peers are frequently absent, perhaps because that makes whole-class teaching less effective. (This could help explain some of America’s current achievement challenges at a moment when student absences have spiked.)

Although there doesn’t appear to be much or any research on the relatively new phenomenon of virtual snow days, the pandemic showed that remote learning was challenging for many students.

In New York City, parents, teachers, and students also reported technical glitches and disengagement on Monday. About 1 in 5 students didn’t sign on for virtual instruction at all. (Attendance was similarly low on Tuesday when schools reopened.) Manhattan mom Tiffany Rodriguez-Noel elected not to log her kindergarten twins on for remote learning due to their hyperactivity and speech delays.

“I wish they could just let a snow day be a snow day,” Rodriguez-Noel said. But she noted the experience was relatively smooth for her sixth grade son and she understands the desire to avoid missing an entire day of instruction.

With engagement and attendance sporadic, the research suggests that teachers shouldn’t feel bad about focusing on review during virtual learning days. This also offers guidance to state policymakers as they consider what should count toward instructional-day minimums. Virtual school days may be an opportunity to help a subset of students review old material, but they’re unlikely to move instruction forward in many cases.

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

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

How will we know if new school choice programs are helping students learn?

2026-01-27T22:30:19+00:00

In 2023, the research firm RAND received a large grant to study education savings accounts, which provide parents with stipends to support various forms of private education.

Susha Roy, a researcher on the project, was eager to figure out whether these rapidly growing programs were helping students learn. Roy and colleagues began looking for places to study. Perhaps Arizona, they thought, which launched the country’s first ESA with universal eligibility in 2022. This quickly proved to be a dead end, though, because the state doesn’t require ESA students to take any sort of standardized test.

Continue reading this article here.

Rahm Emanuel has a plan to fix schools and the Democratic Party. Will it work?

2026-01-22T15:40:00+00:00

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.

Rahm Emanuel — who once said, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — sees two crises at the moment.

One is the well-documented learning decline plaguing American students. The other is the similarly declining favorability of the Democratic Party with voters. Emanuel has an answer to both: Democrats need to embrace reform-minded education policies to boost achievement, while pivoting away from what he sees as an overemphasis on race- and gender-related topics.

“We weren’t worried about what was going on in the classroom or the corridor,” Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, said in an interview. “We were worried about a bunch of ancillary issues.” He was fresh off of a high-profile trip down to Mississippi, where improvements in fourth-grade test scores have drawn national accolades.

Emanuel is openly considering a run for president. If he takes the plunge, education will be core to his campaign, he says.

Already, though, his media blitz has reshaped the conversation about schools. Most other prominent Democrats have consigned education to the veritable kids’ table of issues. Although some of Emanuel’s pronouncements are up for dispute, he’s stepped in to fill a large void within his party. “I’ll say this: He’s talking about schools. That’s a good thing,” said Joshua Cowen, an education professor at Michigan State University, who briefly ran for Congress as a Democrat.

Emanuel cut his teeth in a different political era when leading Democrats were eager to talk about overhauling public schools. As Barack Obama’s chief of staff, he helped design Race to the Top, which promoted charter schools and the use of test scores to judge teachers. Then as Chicago mayor he pushed for a longer school day and closed 50 schools amid declining enrollment.

Emanuel acknowledges the bitter disputes over these policies. Race to the Top helped spur a nationwide backlash to testing. School closures in Chicago unleashed widespread anger from teachers and parents in the city, imperiling Emanuel’s reelection, although he ultimately won a second term. “My life would have been a hell of a lot easier had I left those schools open, even though parents were fleeing,” he said, after rattling off statistics about improvement in the city school system.

Whatever the flaws of the prior reform era, Emanuel says, at least Democrats had a clear agenda. Now he dings his party for extended virtual schooling during the pandemic and for allowing Republicans to own education issues. “You know that the Republicans are for vouchers. You can’t tell me what the Democratic calling card is,” said Emanuel, who served as ambassador to Japan under Joe Biden.

Indeed, while Trump campaigned on a far-reaching education platform, including closing the Education Department and getting “wokeness” out of schools, Biden and later Kamala Harris didn’t emphasize the issue. The Biden administration also quietly dropped an early proposal to create a Race to the Top-style innovation fund for schools.

Emanuel is alarmed that relatively few leaders from either party have made recovering from historic test scores declines a major priority. “Nobody’s going to break a sweat trying to solve it,” he said.

Some of Emanuel’s other claims are questionable, though. One of his key talking points is that Democrats have lost their edge on education with voters. This isn’t backed up by most recent polling. Well, he counters, the Democratic advantage is smaller than it used to be.

One long-running survey shows Democrats with a 10 to 15 point edge on education, which is smaller than the high points of 2007 and 2008, but comparable to many other times in recent decades.

As for COVID school closures, it’s not at all clear this is dragging Democrats down. Most voters say that, looking back, these closures were “largely necessary,” according to one recent poll.

And although Emanuel refers to identity issues as distractions, they’re quite resonant with students who are transgender or conservative parents critical of policies to accommodate trans students. (For voters particularly concerned about this issue, Emanuel is blunt: “If I run for office, I’m not your guy.”)

Yet Emanuel’s strategy of using education to try to redefine the party brand has historical precedent. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” who would improve schools for disadvantaged children. Before him, Bill Clinton promised to be a “New Democrat” who would reform failing schools and stand up to “special interests,” including labor unions and gay rights advocates. Both men were elected in part thanks to their approach.

Today, even if Democrats still have an edge on education, they do have a problem with voters who see them, fairly or not, as too focused on social issues. To address this, Emanuel is trying to rerun the New Democrat playbook that worked in the ‘90s. “It’s a sense of deja vu,” said Patrick McGuinn, a Drew University political scientist who has studied how education plays out in national politics.

Asked about specific policies, Emanuel ticks through ways he’d like schools to improve. He wants more to adopt the Mississippi model — which includes phonics-based instruction and holding back struggling readers — and he wants high schools to require students to have a clear plan for when they graduate. He also suggests addressing low attendance rates by cutting funding to schools where too many students are absent.

The president doesn’t control schools like a mayor or a school board. They can leverage federal money to push schools to make changes, though doing this effectively is not easy. Emanuel has floated the idea of a new Race to the Top-style program.

If he does run for president, Emanuel will face skepticism and perhaps outright opposition from public school interests and teachers unions, which are major Democratic funders.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers whose local Chicago chapter frequently clashed with Emanuel, agrees Democrats need to lean in on education again. “There are pieces of Rahm’s agenda — such as boosting literacy and investing in Pre-K — that are foundational, but so are neighborhood public schools, which Rahm closed en masse as mayor of Chicago,” she said in a statement.

Cowen, the Michigan State professor, who is a leading critic of school vouchers, says that aside from Emanuel, though, national Democrats have largely failed to sketch out a clear vision on education. “Improving public schools is part of defending public schools and vice versa,” he said.

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

What’s Trump’s theory of action for improving schools?

2026-01-20T12:03:11+00:00

At a recent Chalkbeat event, Education Department official Lindsey Burke toggled between two different messages.

On the one hand, she offered sharp criticism of the agency, suggesting it was to blame for disappointing test scores. On the other hand, she repeatedly reassured anxious teachers and parents that little would change as the department’s programs are moved elsewhere.

The Education Department is “a bureaucratic boondoggle that has not led to the types of outcomes that we would all have hoped to have seen over the past 45-plus years,” said Burke, a Trump political appointee and author of the education chapter of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint.

Read the full story here.

Project 2025 author and top Trump official: Special education protections and funding will remain

2026-01-14T23:07:59+00:00

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The future of special education remains up in the air, but the Trump administration is feeling pressure to assuage the concerns of parents of students with disabilities that efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education could put their children at risk.

That was one of the key takeaways from Chalkbeat’s conversation with Lindsey Burke, a Department of Education official and author of the education chapter of the conservative blueprint Project 2025.

Burke, though, said that some of Project 2025’s most controversial ideas, including deep budget cuts to schools, aren’t currently on the table. She also said there’s “no reason to anticipate” funding freezes similar to the temporary withholding of $7 billion that threw school districts into chaos last summer.

But the Education Department is just one “decision point” on federal spending, and the department remains committed to ending grants it deems wasteful or not aligned with their priorities, Burke said. In her confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon indicated the department would not cut funding to schools, but is currently seeking cuts to a number of programs and has already cancelled $2 billion in funds, according to Burke.

A year in, the Trump administration has surprised many observers with its far-reaching efforts to close the Department of Education, often a conservative hope but rarely a presidential priority. Late last year, the administration moved a number of education programs to the Labor Department. These efforts face ongoing legal challenges and sharp criticism from congressional Democrats.

The administration has also invited state leaders to seek waivers from federal requirements. It recently approved a waiver in Iowa, though the changes were relatively modest. At the same time, Trump’s Education Department has aggressively used its civil rights arm to target left-leaning education policies related to race and gender.

Burke, the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, acknowledged that the administration’s efforts to move education functions to the Labor Department might seem like a “blunt instrument.” Ensuring that education supports the development of a strong workforce is an important federal role, she said, but it’s not the only purpose of education.

“Education really is about forming human souls,” Burke said in response to an audience question, “and about really preparing individuals, preparing students to inherit the blessings and liberties of a free society.”

Here are some of the most interesting things we heard in our conversation with Burke.

The administration wants parents of students with disabilities not to worry

The administration has no plans to cut federal funding for special education and may even increase spending, Burke said.

“Fully funding IDEA has been of interest to many people on both sides of the aisle over the decades,” Burke said.

Burke said she didn’t want to preempt budget negotiations, but the administration plans to fund IDEA at “the current levels that are out there now, and potentially additional support moving forward.” She strongly disavowed the idea of cuts: “There is no world in which anybody’s talking about any reductions in support for IDEA.”

The federal government provides about $15 billion a year to help districts cover special education costs. Under the 50-year-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, school districts are required to educate all students, regardless of disability, but the federal government has never lived up to its obligation to pay 40% of the cost. Trump’s most recent budget proposal called for flat funding for IDEA.

Money is just one concern for advocates for students with disabilities, who also oppose any plan to move oversight out of the Education Department. The administration’s reorganization push has not affected special education yet — though most of the staff who work on special education were fired during the government shutdown only to be brought back later in response to a lawsuit.

“We are still evaluating the future of things like special education programs,” Burke said. “We do not have an answer yet.”

Regardless of what happens, current protections for students will remain in place, she said.

Burke tacks away from some controversial Project 2025 ideas

Burke said there are no current plans to convert federal special education money into vouchers or to do away with Title I funding that supports schools serving low-income communities. Both those ideas appear in Project 2025, a flashpoint for critics of the administration.

“I’ve written on many ed policy areas over the years, and that’s not something that we are currently contemplating here at the agency,” she said of converting IDEA dollars into education savings accounts. “And of course, anything like that is something that would have to go through Congress.”

And asked whether, in her ideal world, Title I would be phased out, Burke said “no.”

That money currently provides about $18 billion in Title I money that funds extended school days, teacher training, reading tutoring and more.

“Speaking on behalf of the department, what our priority is right now is making sure that these grants are serving families well,” she said.

Nor, Burke said, has the administration taken any steps to prevent children who are undocumented immigrants from attending public school at no cost to their parents. Back in 2024, Burke was the co-author of a separate Heritage Foundation memo that proposed that states charge immigrant parents tuition — a step that would set up a challenge to the landmark Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision.

Burke is still hoping to persuade Congress to fully dismantle the department

Congress created the Education Department and Congress would need to approve its elimination. Burke acknowledged as much, and said the hope is that the administration can provide “proof of concept” by moving key functions to other agencies.

“Congress does have to codify this,” she said. “And so we’re hoping they look at what has transpired so far and see that it’s been effective.”

Yet Burke did not point to any concrete engagement with Congress and demurred when asked to name any Democrats who supported the effort. Some bipartisan support would be needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

The administration has leveraged robust interpretations of executive authority to go around Congress. Litigation about the department remains pending, but the U.S. Supreme Court allowed initial cutbacks at the Education Department to move forward.

It’s unclear if department officials will follow recommendations to re-envision its research arm

Last year, the department temporarily brought on Thomas B. Fordham Institute Senior Vice President for research Amber Northern to help reimagine the department’s research arm, known as the Institute for Education Sciences. IES was decimated by early cuts from DOGE.

Northern, who has returned to her prior role at Fordham, recently delivered the recommendations to department officials, Burke indicated.

Burke said there have not been any decisions made on the future of IES. She also would not say what the recommendations were or whether Northern’s report would be publicly released. Burke did praise Northern’s work and the value of IES generally. It’s “the gem in the crown” of the Department, Burke said. Northern declined to comment.

Watch the full event here or in the recording below.

National editor Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

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

What Colorado’s ‘public Christian school’ means for the nation

2026-01-14T00:01:26+00:00

What some are calling a “public Christian school” has opened in Southern Colorado.

Riverstone Academy is unusual in many ways. A grade school, it has just 31 students and sits in a former office building outside the small city of Pueblo. It promises “trades-based learning” with a “Christian foundation.” Riverstone is receiving public funding, but it remains in a legal gray area. In fact, the school was created to test legal boundaries, according to an email obtained by Chalkbeat Colorado, although it is not yet the subject of any litigation.

Riverstone faces an additional barrier. Local authorities recently ordered the school to close its building because of various fire and safety concerns. Its future is in flux.

Read the full story here.

Test scores are down, but experts don’t know exactly why

2026-01-08T22:30:00+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas, a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Next week we have an online event with Education Department official Lindsey Burke. You can sign up to join here.

It’s hardly breaking news that American students are behind academically from where they used to be.

But the specifics can get lost in a haze of headlines and data points. To start the new year, I wanted to level-set on where we stand on learning loss and recovery — to unpack what we know and don’t know. To speak to this, I reviewed multiple pieces of testing data.

In sum: Test scores have been trending down for over a decade. There are some signs of recovery in math, but not many in reading. Learning declines are not a distinctly U.S. phenomenon and are not even limited to schoolchildren. Researchers are only just beginning to wrap their heads around the causes of this.

Confident claims about what’s going on here are unwarranted, though policymakers can’t wait for perfect evidence to act.

“We should resist the notion of trying to put our finger on the one thing we can change that will solve this problem,” says University of Virginia researcher James Wyckoff, who recently released a paper on declining achievement. “I think it really results from many things in and out of school.”

Here are some key takeaways from my review of the data.

Learning declines have been substantial and pervasive.

Consider one example from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP: In 2013, 74% of American eighth graders scored at the basic or above level in math, the highest figure since the test started in 1990. In the most recent round that number fell to 61%, hitting levels last seen in 1996. Scores have fallen in other grades and subjects, too.

Despite a small handful of relative bright spots, these declines have been remarkably widespread. Eighth grade math scores fell in almost every single state during this period; no states saw increases. Although schools that were closed longer during the pandemic tended to experience bigger declines, even those that quickly reopened have been hit hard by learning loss.

This trend started before the pandemic.

Test scores, particularly in math, had generally been marching upwards for a few decades until about 2013. Then a period of stagnation and decline hit. The aftershocks of the Great Recession on families and school budgets may have been an initial cause. Yet even by 2019 there was still no sign of recovery. Then the bottom fell out further after the pandemic.

Two groups have been hit hardest: low performers and girls.

On a wide variety of tests, starting before the pandemic, the gap between the lowest- and highest-performing students has grown. That’s not because high performers have surged ahead but because low performers have fallen further behind.

More recently, since the pandemic, girls’ scores have tended to fall more sharply than boys’.

Some good news: Math scores are starting to trend up again.

Every state with consistent testing data shows that more students are reaching proficiency in math now compared to 2021. Math results have also ticked up on the NWEA exam and on the fourth grade (but not eighth grade) NAEP. Still, most data indicates that these scores have not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels.

There’s been inconsistent recovery at best in reading.

Reading and math results have followed curiously different trajectories. On the most recent NAEP, reading scores actually fell even further. On state exams, reading achievement has been all over the map. Pennsylvania, for instance, has had solid recovery in math, but reading scores have kept sliding downward.

The U.S. is hardly alone in its achievement woes.

Many other countries are grappling with falling test scores too. This has shown up on an exam of 15-year-olds known as the PISA, as well as on the TIMSS, a math and science test of fourth and eighth graders. Relative to the rest of the world, the U.S. trends look a bit worse on TIMSS, but a bit better on PISA.

The U.S. is unusual in its sharply growing gap between highest- and lowest-performing students.

Also: Test scores may be lower among adults and very young children

Some data indicates that children who are just entering school are doing so with lower levels of readiness in reading and math. Another study of adult skills showed drops across the age distribution between 2017 and 2023 in literacy and numeracy.

This adds a new wrinkle. “Factors outside of school might play a considerable role” in learning declines, writes Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute in a report from last year.

How concerned should we be? Pretty concerned!

When children know more, as measured on tests, they tend to lead more productive lives. Countries with higher test scores tend to see stronger economic growth. These scores are incomplete measures of students’ skills, but they do matter.

Test scores are not in entirely uncharted territory, though. A long-running test of 13-year-olds shows that math scores in 2023 were at the lowest point in recent decades but remain comparable to scores from the ‘80s and early ‘90s and higher than those in the ‘70s. Reading scores have dipped to levels last seen in the early 2000s.

So what explains all this? Researchers aren’t quite sure.

Two detailed analyses, by Wyckoff and Malkus, have tried to parse what is driving these trends. Neither concluded with definitive answers. “There is remarkably little understanding of the nature of either the sustained achievement gains prior to 2013 or the subsequent losses thereafter,” writes Wyckoff in his paper, titled “Puzzling Over Declining Academic Achievement.”

That said, it’s very likely that the pandemic and its associated disruptions to life in and out of school played a significant role. Another theory is that easing off school accountability pressure — which research found drove learning gains in the early 2000s — has contributed to recent score declines.

Perhaps the leading hypothesis is the proliferation of phones and screens, although Wyckoff notes that “direct causal evidence” on this question “is limited.” That’s beginning to change.

One recent study linked school phone restrictions to better test scores.

These learning challenges are not particular to American schools and may not even be largely caused by changes within schools. Yet they remain a challenge that schools and educators must confront.

I expect to be writing about potential ideas and solutions for these challenges throughout this year. Feel free to send yours to mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Can better schools help address affordability?

2026-01-06T15:52:13+00:00

Happy New Year and welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas! This is a monthly ideas roundup. If you’re not signed up for the newsletter, you can do so here.

The debunking that wasn’t

A small corner of the internet briefly lit up last month when Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman suggested in a blog post that Mississippi’s much-discussed reading gains might have been artificially inflated by holding back struggling readers.

As avid readers know, I don’t think we fully understand the “southern surge” or “Mississippi miracle,” but this critique doesn’t make much sense. The key point, which I discussed in a 2023 piece, is that retained students eventually move forward and sit for standardized tests. Retention might explain short-run improvements but not the long-run gains seen in Mississippi. Kelsey Piper at The Argument also debunked the debunking. In a follow-up, Gelman partially walked back his initial post.

Click here to read the full newsletter.

The Future of the Education Department with Lindsey Burke: A Chalkbeat Ideas event

2025-12-22T18:04:04+00:00

Join us for our next Chalkbeat Ideas event, where our journalists examine the big ideas and debates shaping American schools.

The Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to unwind the U.S. Department of Education, in line with a long-standing conservative goal and President Trump’s campaign promises.

On Jan. 14, we’ll explore the department’s past, present, and future with Lindsey Burke, deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department. Chalkbeat editors Matt Barnum and Erica Meltzer will discuss with Burke why the administration wants to eliminate the agency, how officials are already working to do so, and what all this means for students, educators, and parents.

RSVP to join this important conversation. There will be time for audience-submitted questions. Please share yours upon registering.

Charter school advocates fear their future at the Labor Department

2025-12-18T12:35:16+00:00

Unlike many other education advocacy groups, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools stayed publicly silent after the Trump administration announced last month that it was outsourcing key parts of the Education Department.

Privately, though, leaders there were worried — and busy.

In an initial email to supporters, which I obtained, National Alliance CEO Starlee Coleman listed a string of “concerns that are top of mind.” One fear, Coleman wrote, was that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose department would manage a number of education programs, was too aligned with labor unions.

Click here to read the full story.

What Diane Ravitch has learned in her decades on both sides of the school reform fights

2025-12-16T15:51:07+00:00

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.

For much of the last several decades, Diane Ravitch has had the ear of powerful people.

As a college student at Wellesley in 1958 Diane Ravitch spent two hours in a class seminar talking with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy before later working on his campaign for president. A few decades later, after she had become a conservative intellectual — championing academic standards, testing, and school choice, while opposing busing for integration — presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan sought her advice. She stayed in the Arkansas governor’s mansion with Bill and Hillary Clinton and then served in the George H. W. Bush administration.

A longtime New York City resident, Ravitch declined an offer from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani to run the city’s schools, she says. Later she entertained the next mayor, Michael Bloomberg, in her home, before turning against his education policies.

To read the full piece, click here.

What the internet backlash over remedial math at UC San Diego misses

2025-12-09T12:00:00+00:00

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 on time 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.

Correction: A prior version of this story imprecisely described a study’s conclusion about the effect of attending a UC college. The study found that attending such a school increased students’ chances of graduating on time, not their chances of ever graduating college.

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

Would more emphasis on high-stakes testing help address America’s learning woes? Here’s what the evidence says.

2025-12-02T22:30:36+00:00

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.

A striking wave of nostalgia is rippling through the education world these days.

A number of commentators and advocates have harkened back to the early aughts when test scores were rising and No Child Left Behind was the law of the land.

“This was an era when elected officials from both political parties came together around a reform agenda,” Harvard University professor Marty West said at a U.S. Senate hearing earlier this year. “That approach had plenty of critics and, as implemented, some real flaws, but it produced results.”

Federally imposed high-stakes testing kept the heat on schools, but after the repeal of No Child Left Behind, we’ve let them off the hook, say these accountability hawks. This is one reason, they argue, why test scores were stagnant before the pandemic and have fallen since.

To keep reading click here.

How do we know which states have the best schools?

2025-11-25T15:51:12+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas. We’re trying something a little different today: A roundup of interesting tidbits, data points, and links rather than a single piece. My plan is to do this once a month. Feel free to let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Wonking out

How should we judge states’ educational performance?

Mark Weber, a researcher and teacher, has a differing take from many on the Southern surge, which I also wrote about last month. Recall that Louisiana and Mississippi’s test scores look particularly strong when controlling for their high poverty rates, according to a widely cited Urban Institute analysis.

Weber argues that this is the wrong way to evaluate states because lower income levels may be a result of state policies, particularly the historic quality of their schools. He points to his home state of New Jersey, which does well in raw scores but is less impressive in Urban’s adjusted comparisons. Such statistical adjustments are “wiping away one of the primary outcomes of good schooling that public education advocates want: higher incomes,” Weber writes.

To continue reading, click here.

Why Trump’s effort to dismantle the Education Department matters very little and also quite a lot

2025-11-20T12:01:46+00:00

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The Trump administration’s latest actions to dismantle the Department of Education can be hard to make sense of.

On the one hand, this is a milestone moment in conservatives’ long-running campaign to gut the agency. On the other hand, the administration has promised that most of the underlying programs will be protected.

There is very little reason to think that moving various programs to other agencies will matter much for schools. Running the same programs, just out of a different department, is unlikely to affect the typical student.

Click here to read the rest of this story.

Have Democrats lost voters’ trust on education? Not according to most polls.

2025-11-18T16:04:16+00:00

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Democrats are in disarray on education — according to a growing chorus of Democrats.

A variety of left-leaning journalists, politicians, and advocates have all recently claimed that voters have become disillusioned with the party’s approach to schools. Often, these commentators cite anger over pandemic-era closures and argue that Democrats need to embrace tougher academic standards or school choice.

“For decades, when pollsters asked voters which party they trusted more on education, Democrats maintained, on average, a 14-point advantage. More recently that gap closed, then flipped to favor Republicans,” wrote former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel last month.

Is this emerging conventional wisdom true, though? This assertion has typically relied on one or two surveys, rather than a comprehensive look at the data. So I compiled all publicly available polls I could find that asked voters which party they preferred on education.

The verdict was clear: In more than a dozen surveys conducted this year by eight different organizations, all but one showed Democrats with an edge on education. This ranged from 4 to 15 points. Among all 14 polls, the median advantage was 9 points. Although Democrats appear to have briefly lost this edge a few years ago, voters again now tend to trust Democrats on the issue of education, broadly defined.

The narrative that Republicans had wrested the issue of education from Democrats emerged in 2021, after Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin won a come-from-behind victory in the governor’s race after campaigning on parents’ rights.

Long-running data from the Winston Group, a political consulting firm, showed that in late 2021 and early 2022 Republicans really had eroded Democrats’ lead on education. The parties were even briefly tied for the first time since the early 2000s, when former President George W. Bush was championing No Child Left Behind. Polling commissioned in 2022 and 2023 by Democrats for Education Reform, a group that backs charter schools and vouchers, also showed Democrats falling behind on education.

Since then, though, Democrats appear to have regained their edge. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the party held at least a 10-point lead, according to Winston Group. Other polls from last year also found that more voters preferred Democrats’ approach on education, even as the party lost the presidency.

Emanuel pointed me to polling from 2022. “Democrats have not gained ground as much as Trump has cost GOP gains they have made,” he says when asked about the more recent surveys.

This year in Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger easily won in her bid to replace Youngkin. Education was one of her stronger issues, according to a Washington Post survey.

Some argue that these election results disprove the idea that Democrats are losing on schools. “That’s not what panned out at all,” says Jennifer Berkshire, a progressive author who writes and teaches about education. She notes that the Republican governor candidate in New Jersey also tried to make schools an issue and lost badly.

The Winston poll shows Democrats’ advantage is currently below its peak between 2006 and 2009 but is comparable to many other periods, including the tail end of the Obama administration and part of the first Trump administration.

Keep in mind: These surveys ask about education broadly, not just K-12 schools. When given the option, a good chunk of voters don’t endorse either party’s approach. For instance, a YouGov survey found Democrats up 39%-32% on education with another 29% saying they weren’t sure or that the parties were about the same.

The one public poll in which Democrats did not have an advantage came from Blue Rose Research, a Democratic-aligned firm. Ali Mortell, its head of research, says different survey methodologies can lead to different results.

Regardless, she wants to see Democratic politicians lean into the issue more. “Say they do have that trust advantage right now, [education] is still not something that they’re really talking about a lot,” Mortell says.

One of the top messages that resonates with voters focuses on addressing teachers’ concerns about stagnant pay and large class sizes, Blue Rose polling finds.

Democrats’ lead on education doesn’t appear to have grown much over the last year, according to surveys from Winston, YouGov, and Ipsos. That’s somewhat surprising since Trump’s approval has sunk generally and is low on education specifically.

Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, points to a survey it commissioned showing the two parties tied when it comes to making sure schools emphasize academic achievement. “Democrats should be focused on delivering results,” he says. “When we ask voters about that, it’s a toss up.” A separate DFER poll found the party with only a 1-point lead on who voters trust to ensure “students are prepared for success after high school.”

Democrats’ overall polling advantage on education does not necessarily speak to the substantive merits of their policies, however. One analysis found that Democratic-leaning states have seen bigger declines in student test scores in recent years. At a national level, Democrats have not offered a particularly clear message on K-12 education, unlike Trump.

“For the last six years there’s [been] no proactive agenda for Democrats on educational excellence,” says Emanuel.

The party’s approach to schools has clearly lost a segment of America’s political tastemakers including center-left nonprofit executives, political strategists, and even some Democratic politicians. Yet, despite insistent assertions otherwise, regular voters don’t seem to share this view, at least at the moment.

I relied on the following polls from this year, with Democrats’ lead in parentheses: Blue Rose Research (February, tied); Fox News (July +15); Ipsos (February +6, April +4, October +7); Napolitan News Service (August +9, October +6); Navigator (August +9); Strength in Numbers (May +11, October +15); YouGov (May +7); Winston (April +15, June +14, August/September +11). To find these surveys, I conducted my own search and asked a variety of large pollsters, as well as a number of advocates. Differences in results between polls can come from random error, as well as differences in sampling and question wording. Although the precise wording varied, each poll asked voters which party they preferred on education.

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

We’re still fighting about pandemic-era school closures — but do they still matter?

2025-11-13T22:47:41+00:00

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.

In the fall of 2020, many school systems remained closed for in-person instruction citing concerns over the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic. Some did not fully reopen until the following school year.

It was an unprecedented decision that sent political, societal, and educational shockwaves that are still rippling. This was intensely debated then and continues to be a source of scrutiny now. Studies have found that schools that stayed closed longer experienced greater drops in student test scores.

Is that still true? In short, yes, though the lasting effect is smaller than might be suspected considering the large role school closures continue to play in the American psyche and in our politics.

Read the rest of the story here.

The curious disconnect between the data and the vibes of higher education

2025-11-11T22:50:00+00:00

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American colleges are under siege.

The Trump administration has waged a legal and rhetorical battle against the country’s elite universities. Voters have grown increasingly skeptical of higher education. Some high school students are questioning the value of a college diploma. In turn, there’s been a veritable firehose of news stories about a generational pivot away from college due to some combination of ruinous costs, close-minded campus cultures, and appealing alternatives.

It is a disorienting experience, then, to examine the cold, hard data of higher education.

College tuition has become more affordable in recent years. The economic return on a bachelor’s degree has stopped growing but remains near historic highs. After a post-pandemic dip, four-year college enrollment has almost fully recovered to near-record levels. Students are increasingly flocking to flagship public universities like UCLA and the University of Michigan.

Whatever the problems of higher education, the narrative has raced far ahead of the reality.

Much of this mistaken story stems from a simple confusion: conflating enrollment in two-year and four-year colleges. While it’s true that fewer people are in community colleges, the number of students seeking bachelor’s degrees hasn’t changed much. “It’s been roughly flat for the last 10 years,” says Joshua Goodman, an education economist at Boston University. “That’s very much not the narrative.”

Let’s unpack the disconnect between the data and the vibes.

The costs vs. benefits of college

It is often treated as a well-established fact that the price of college is soaring. That is no longer the case. For the last couple of decades, net tuition has, if anything, trended down at private and in-state public universities, according to data compiled by the College Board. Since household earnings have gone up during this period, college tuition appears to have become somewhat more affordable in recent years, not less.

“When I talk to members of the public this has not penetrated at all,” says Dominique Baker, a higher education professor at the University of Delaware.

The reality has been underappreciated because colleges’ sticker prices have been rising at an almost linear rate. But list price has become increasingly disconnected from the real price thanks to growing financial aid.

What about the economic benefits of a four-year college education?

On average, those with a bachelor’s degree still earn far more than those without. The “college-wage premium,” as economists call it, stands at about 75%. This figure has stagnated since the early 2000s, but it remains at or near its highest point in a century.

You may have seen headlines about careers that don’t require a degree but that come with lucrative salaries. Such examples certainly exist, but they are exceptions to the average. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the non-degreed occupations with the most new positions all earn under $40,000 annually. Those include home health aides, order stockers, and fast-food workers.

This does not mean that every student who attends college will see a return. The wage premium is a simple correlation and refers to those with a degree, which about one-third of college enrollees do not obtain. The decision for any individual student about whether to go to college depends on their chances of completion, the careers they’re interested in, and the cost.

Still, rigorous studies have repeatedly found that, on average, students benefit economically from seeking a four-year degree.

“There’s not a case to be made that it’s a worse deal now than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” says Jeff Denning, a higher education researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “I’m not aware of any data that would suggest that.”

Four-year college enrollment has held steady, though two-year enrollment has fallen dramatically

For the last few decades, a little more than 40% of recent high school graduates have enrolled in a four-year college. These numbers have been fairly stable, even as high school graduation rates have risen.

Other data shows a dip in four-year enrollment in the wake of the pandemic, followed by a bounceback in recent years. The number of people pursuing bachelor’s degrees is now just 1% below pre-pandemic levels, according to a recent estimate.

While flagship state universities have generally seen enrollments rise, colleges with worse student outcomes, like the University of Phoenix, an online for-profit college, have seen drops, notes Preston Cooper in a report for the American Enterprise Institute.

The biggest decline in college enrollment has been at two-year schools, which are largely open-enrollment public institutions that most students attend part time. Until a recent upturn, attendance at these schools’ has been falling consistently since 2010.

Here’s where the conventional narrative about the college decline falls apart: Community colleges’ costs are very low and they have not been at the center of the cultural and political backlash to higher education. The prevailing narrative has focused on bachelor’s degrees, which community colleges typically don’t issue.

What explains the two-year college decline, then? A new study coauthored by Goodman of Boston University, shows that much of this is driven by economic trends. When job options are plentiful, community college is less appealing. Recently, as unemployment has ticked up, so has two-year enrollment. Another explanation is that more potential students have become wary of the value of two-year programs since the completion rates are quite low.

Reality may soon mirror perception

We may one day look back at this particular moment as a golden age of four-year colleges, even though it doesn’t feel like one.

There are signs that real tuition is going up as schools face new cost pressures. The perception of higher education has in fact declined markedly, which could eventually limit public funding and depress enrollment. (Or perhaps not: Enrollment has been rising over the last couple years at the height of the college collapse narrative.)

Another imminent challenge: At least for a while, each year’s high school graduating class is likely to be smaller than the last due to lower birth rates. Generative AI is an additional curveball, as some suspect it will devalue white-collar work and, in turn, a college education.

The irony is that the colleges likely to bear the brunt of these challenges are the country’s less-selective, less-known schools, not the elite institutions that have come to embody higher education in the public mind.

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

IEPs, cheating, and math: MagicSchool’s founder on the potential and perils of AI

2025-11-06T22:30:28+00:00

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Adeel Khan was a former principal looking for his next act. It was late 2022 and ChatGPT had just been released. As he began to tinker with it, Khan had a revelation: Artificial intelligence could make teachers’ jobs dramatically easier. He decided to launch a company, MagicSchool, to help teachers harness the technology.

Today, MagicSchool is one of the most popular AI tools used by teachers. It offers a user-friendly interface where teachers can create worksheets, give students feedback on their writing, and create classroom presentations. The tool is powered by ChatGPT and Claude, another major AI tool.

MagicSchool has raised $60 million from investors and has a staff of 160. The company also has 20,000 schools that pay for the premium product. A basic version is free.

Khan says that 3.5 million U.S. educators have signed up to use MagicSchool, though he acknowledges that’s an overestimate of its true user base. In October, about 700,000 teachers in the U.S. actively used MagicSchool, he said. (There are about 4 million teachers in the country.)

I wanted to speak to Khan because his company is at the leading edge of the AI-inspired shifts in American education. I was curious whether he shared concerns about students, and even teachers, offloading their thinking to the technology. His answer was yes, somewhat to my surprise.

We also discussed whether it’s appropriate to use AI to write special education plans and AI’s struggles in math. These struggles were apparent when I tested out MagicSchool.

To continue reading, click here.

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

3 ways AI will (and won’t) change schools

2025-11-04T15:49:53+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up to attend our first virtual event focusing on new insights from learning loss data with Emily Oster.

At a recent education technology conference in New York City — where companies were hawking their products and speakers were predicting great benefits from artificial intelligence — one attendee offered something of a heretical perspective.

“Right now, as it is, AI has had a net negative impact on students,” said Dacia Toll, co-founder of Coursemojo, an AI-powered teaching assistant.

Later, Toll told me that she’s convinced that there are many potential benefits of AI in education.

“It’s going to be a complex situation — there are going to be bad use cases, good use cases,” she said. “The jury is out on what the net impact will be.”

At this moment, our understanding of the impact of generative AI in schools is muddy and uncertain. But some clear realities are emerging. These are my three theories for what AI will and won’t mean in classrooms over the next several years.

Cheating is a big problem and it’s not going away

Ask a high school student or their teachers about AI, and there’s a good chance they will say that an alarming number of teenagers are using AI to write their essays, solve their math problems, and finish their assignments.

In one recent survey, fully 100% of high school principals said they were concerned about “academic integrity” challenges created by AI. A majority reported being “very concerned.”

Cheating is difficult to quantify, so it’s hard to prove there’s been an increase in it. AI advocates emphasize that cheating is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that generative AI has made it easier and therefore more tempting.

“The degree to which you can relatively easily find students who will tell you that they are doing complete assignments — and large numbers of them — entirely with this machine is different,” says Justin Reich, an MIT professor and ed-tech expert. He recently hosted a podcast series called “The Homework Machine” based on interviews with dozens of teachers and students. The theme: Many students are taking advantage of this innovative new cheating tool.

The implications are troubling. Some students are simply doing less work and learning less. Even a majority of high school students in one poll said they fear AI will harm their critical thinking.

In turn, classroom trust may be falling as teachers become worried about cheating and students fear being falsely accused. “You become a paranoid person. You distrust every single thing your students give you,” Sara Falls, a high school English teacher, explained on one of Reich’s podcast episodes.

It’s hard to see a clear way out of this conundrum. Efforts by teachers to monitor misuse lead to counterefforts to avoid detection, often with the help of sophisticated cheating tools.

Many teachers want more support, but most say they’re getting little. In the next few years we will see if schools start creating systematic strategies to combat cheating or if teachers continue to be left largely on their own.

AI will become a ubiquitous teaching assistant

Sandy Mangarella, a high school English teacher in New Jersey, used to spend upwards of an hour apiece on letters of recommendation for her students. Now, with artificial intelligence a letter takes only a few minutes.

“I write really good ones now, even better than I used to,” she says. Mangarella, who has been teaching for 44 years, typically uses AI multiple times a week for other things too, like brainstorming lesson ideas or getting a second take on a student essay.

Teachers are text generation machines. They are constantly drafting worksheets, classroom newsletters, special education plans, rubrics, presentations, notes home, quizzes, essay outlines, exit tickets, take-home work packets, and more. What generative AI is very good at is producing text.

AI is not yet a daily part of the work life for most teachers. Only 1 in 8 use it on a weekly basis for teaching-related work, according to a recent poll. About half don’t use it at all. Yet the experiences of Mangarella and others suggest that as more teachers get comfortable with the technology, AI will become a common, perhaps universal assistant for educators.

This comes with some risks. Teachers themselves could engage in the “cognitive offloading” we fear for students, using less care putting together lessons or relying on lower-quality material. Some advocates also worry about bias, particularly if AI is drafting special education plans.

But the upside of AI as a teacher’s assistant is substantial: It could free up teacher time — one of the most valuable commodities in schools.

AI will never be a supertutor (but it could help some students)

At last month’s ed-tech conference in New York City, OpenAI’s Vice President and General Manager of Education Leah Belsky touted the great benefits of tutoring. “We all aspire for every student to have that one-on-one tutoring experience,” she said. “ChatGPT and AI could one day make that possible.” This could be incredibly impactful, Belsky said, citing a 1984 study that claimed tutoring could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

This paper, by the late University of Chicago professor Benjamin Bloom, has been the touchstone of technologists for decades. The hope has been that technology can replicate the value of a human tutor at a fraction of the cost. I learned about this work several years ago when computer-based “personalized learning” advocates, like Mark Zuckerberg, were citing it.

Yet those aspiring for such dramatic learning gains from AI are likely to be disappointed. This was the case for personalized learning enthusiasts.

Through a spokesperson, Belsky of OpenAI declined to comment for this piece.

The problem is that Bloom’s results were wildly unrealistic, as detailed in a 2024 Education Next article. Gains of such size have not been widely replicated on math and reading tests. Bloom only found these improvements when applied to the novel subjects of cartography and probability. Modern studies of large-scale human tutoring programs show it is one of the most effective strategies for boosting learning — but results are about a tenth the size of what Bloom reported.

It’s risky for AI advocates to tout massive potential gains. “If that’s the bar, then the current AI capabilities are not set up to achieve that goal,” says Toll of Coursemojo, noting that AI is not as good as a human tutor. Still, she believes the bar shouldn’t be set unrealistically high and that the technology does have the potential to boost student learning.

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

The former Republican education secretary who wants to save the Education Department

2025-10-30T21:46:06+00:00

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

Margaret Spellings was the education secretary in a distant-seeming era that was actually not so long ago.

Spellings, who led the department from 2005 through 2008, presided over the implementation of No Child Left Behind. It was the heyday of a Washington consensus in which politicians of both parties insisted that schools should face stringent federal oversight for student performance, largely test scores.

That consensus eventually unraveled due to backlash from parents, teachers, and politicians who were concerned about excessive testing, unrealistic expectations, and federal meddling in local schools. In 2015, a new statute, the Every Student Succeeds Act, scaled back federal requirements for school performance.

I wanted to speak with Spellings, who now leads the Bipartisan Policy Center, to get her take on the effort to close the department she once led.

Click here to read the full interview with Spellings.

The ‘Southern surge’ offers lessons for student learning — but we don’t fully understand it yet

2025-10-28T13:53:27+00:00

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.

“The Southern surge” — learning gains in a number of Southern states — has drawn a remarkable wave of attention in recent weeks.

A growing chorus of voices say these states offer a playbook to reverse a decade of nationwide learning declines. It’s “the biggest education story of the last few years,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times. It’s even come up in the New Jersey governor’s race.

So I wanted to understand more about what’s been happening. Is the Southern surge real? And if so, what can other states learn from it?

Here’s what I found: While there has not exactly been a region-wide “Southern surge,” there have been some notable Southern success stories, especially in fourth grade. There appear to be lessons to learn from these states, particularly around a specific set of policies designed to help young children learn to read.

Yet some questions remain unanswered — and they’re important ones for people looking for a recipe for improving learning across the country.

We don’t know exactly what has driven these states’ gains, particularly in math. We don’t know why progress in eighth grade has been modest. And we don’t know why some other states with similar policies have not made large improvements. Research also raises concerns about the long-term effects of holding back low-performing students in early grades, which is often part of those states’ playbooks.

The data behind the ‘Southern surge’

Southern surge promoters have focused on National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, scores in four states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Mississippi’s ascent has been particularly meteoric and long-running. Since 1998, the share of fourth graders reading at a basic level on NAEP has increased from 47 to 65%. I looked into this for a story in 2023 expecting to see some clear red flags in the data, but I didn’t find any. During that same time, the national rate has barely budged, going from 58 to 59%.

Louisiana has also made progress in fourth grade math and reading and is now near the national average in both, after long lagging behind it. Gains in these two states are all the more striking because they have among the highest child poverty rates in the country, which correlate with lower scores.

Meanwhile, between 2022 and 2024, Tennessee made a relatively fast recovery from pandemic declines. Alabama students made a striking improvement in fourth grade math and have managed to hold steady in fourth grade reading since 2019, while scores dropped in most other places.

Eighth grade results have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars, though.

Alabama’s eighth grade reading scores have been falling and are among the lowest in the country. Mississippi’s eighth grade reading scores are about the same as they were in 1998. Louisiana’s are similar to those in 2002. These two states are closer to the national average than they used to be, though this mostly reflects declines elsewhere.

Holding steady while everyone else is falling is worth appreciating, and it may still take time for early-grade gains to show up in later years.

In another Times piece, David Brooks notes that Black fourth graders in Mississippi substantially outscore Black students in California in reading. However, these results are reversed in eighth grade, with California having an edge.

As a broader region, trends in the South in eighth grade look fairly similar to the rest of the nation. Most Southern states have lost ground on eighth grade NAEP math and reading in recent years.

Was the science of reading the secret to success?

One of the key explanations for the four Southern success stories has been their adoption of science-of-reading style policies focused on boosting early grade reading. These policies have included third grade retention, phonics-based curriculum, and statewide teacher training, among several others.

A 2023 study linked this suite of reading reforms to higher NAEP scores. This appears to be the best cause-and-effect evidence to support these policies,although this only includes NAEP scores through 2019.

Yet gains in Mississippi were even larger than the study would predict, suggesting there were other factors at play. The surge states have also experienced some improvements in math, which have not been well explained.

Another question is why more states have not seen such clear progress at a moment when many places have adopted new reading policies. Esther Quintero, a senior fellow at the Shanker Institute, notes that several states with reading policies that “on paper” are similar to Southern surge states have not seen clear gains.

In Ohio and Philadelphia, policymakers are currently puzzling over anemic reading scores despite recent adoption of some science-of-reading policies. One answer is that it may just take time. Another is that there are many factors that affect student learning.

Promoters of the Southern surge have actually offered a number of different explanations for the states’ success, even debating with each other about the precise cause. Some have emphasized a focus on test-based accountability.

In an interview, Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley touted the state’s “back to basics” approach and efforts to make teaching a more sustainable profession, in addition to its focus on early reading.

“Patterns in NAEP data are the jumping off point,” said Marty West, a Harvard professor and vice chair of the board that oversees NAEP. “They can’t be the last word.”

A final complication involves the policy of holding back students who are reading far below grade level. A number of studies have found that retention does improve test scores.

Yet the long-run effects of holding back struggling readers remain up for significant debate. A recent Texas study found that retaining students in third grade reduced their chances of graduating high school and decreased their earnings as young adults. A paper from Louisiana found that retention led more students to drop out. (Some studies find no long run effect on high school completion, though.)

There is widespread agreement on one thing: We need more and better research on what, specifically, has gone right in certain states. At a moment when student learning is moving in the wrong direction in so many places, we should be on the hunt for solutions, and remember how complex it is to find them.

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

Introducing Chalkbeat Ideas

2025-10-27T18:41:55+00:00

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American schools are at a historic inflection point.

Now more than ever, we need good journalism to understand the convulsive and sometimes confounding trends shaping schools. That’s why we’re launching a new section devoted to explaining, examining, and elevating ideas about the policy, politics, and practice of American education.

I’ll be the editor and lead writer for Chalkbeat Ideas. I’m returning to Chalkbeat after two years covering U.S. schools for the Wall Street Journal. While there, I wrote about the efforts to close the federal Education Department, the way technology is changing education, and challenges facing underenrolled school systems. Before that, I helped launch Chalkbeat’s national coverage as the team’s first reporter in 2017, covering education policy and politics, while finding a niche writing about research on improving schools.

I decided to rejoin Chalkbeat because I’m convinced that there is a void in journalism at this moment. The traditional confines of news can make it difficult to step back and examine the big ideas and debates within education.

We’ll still be looking at topics in the news — the potential and perils of AI in schools, the future of the Education Department, the state of learning loss and recovery — but we’ll be taking a step back to offer deeper exploration. We’ll be approaching these and other issues as ideas worth dissecting, debating, and explaining.

In practice, that means we’ll be asking and trying to answer questions like: Why exactly did test scores start to slide even before the pandemic, and what are some solutions? Is AI changing schools and is that exciting, alarming, or both? What can the history of education technology tell us about the future of AI? How and why are Democrats debating each other over education? How should we make sense of Trump’s effort to close the Education Department at the same time he’s increasingly wielding its power?

We’ll also be covering under-the-radar ideas that deserve attention — say, compelling academic research or an intriguing classroom innovation. We’re interested too in the people and institutions that drive the ideas changing schools. And we’ll sometimes be looking backwards to understand how the past, including the unprecedented upheaval in American schools during the pandemic, continues to affect the present.

I’ll be writing a regular column about ideas in education. This will be a bit different than Chalkbeat’s regular news coverage because I’ll share my own perspective and analysis at times. The voice will be mine — sometimes in the first person, as here — rather than the omniscient voice that defines normal news coverage. And we’ll be trying out lots of different formats: explainers, Q&As, book reviews, and events with interesting people. (Don’t worry: Chalkbeat’s existing national coverage isn’t going anywhere. We expect this new section to complement it.)

At the same time, Chalkbeat Ideas will maintain the commitment to rigorous, open-minded reporting and fact-based analysis that defines all of our journalism. Like the rest of Chalkbeat, we’ll be covering this topic as a beat. That means I’ll be talking to people with a variety of perspectives: parents, teachers, policymakers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and anyone else who’s interested in schools and the ideas that shape them.

I’ll also be collaborating with the rest of the Chalkbeat newsroom to elevate interesting ideas and insights from our local bureaus.

We’re still developing this section and I’d love your help. Please consider following our work by signing up for the Ideas newsletter, which will get you access to my columns when they’re published. Sign up to join our first event, a webinar with fresh insights on learning loss and recovery data, featuring Brown University professor Emily Oster.

Finally, reach out to me directly to share your thoughts on how to approach this work.

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

Could religious charter schools upend American education? A Chalkbeat explainer.

2025-01-25T00:05:52+00:00

Editor’s Note: This story first published in 2023. Since then, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court rescinded the charter of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, and the school appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear this case in spring 2025.

For decades the phrase “private religious charter school” seemed like an oxymoron. Charter schools are deemed public by state law, and must be secular just like any other public school.

Now, there’s a burgeoning effort to change that. An Oklahoma state board just approved an application by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to run what would be the country’s first religious charter school. The move is a direct challenge to existing charter laws, which critics say discriminate against churches and other religious entities.

The prospect of religious charter schools threatens to upend American education, far beyond Oklahoma. If religious charter schools become a reality, they could rejuvenate religious education, particularly Catholic schools, which have been losing students for many decades. Such schools could continue the successful conservative campaign to allow more public funding to go to religious education. They could lead to fewer students, and thus less funding, for public schools. Charters of all types could be deemed private schools for legal purposes, reducing anti-discrimination protections for students and teachers.

This is a startling possibility. Charter schools have long enjoyed bipartisan support because they were seen as a compromise to private school vouchers. Advocates promoted charters as innovative options within the public sector. Leading national charter organizations maintain this view and oppose religious charter schools. But it’s not clear they will be able to keep a hold on their own movement.

The recent push for private religious charter schools is a sign of the shifting times. The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has knocked down legal barriers to public money going to religious education. The bipartisan consensus around charter schools has weakened. Conservative education advocates are trying to limit certain instruction on race and gender, including by funding alternatives to public schools.

As yet, it’s unclear if a religious charter school will ever open — they still have to clear a dense thicket of legal issues. In Oklahoma, a coalition of groups has already filed suit to block the approved religious charter school. The broader issue could well reach the Supreme Court at some point.

Here’s what to expect and how we got to this point:

A string of recent Supreme Court decisions opened up new discussions of religious charter schools.

Charter schools were first created in Minnesota in 1991, and charter laws now exist in 45 states plus the District of Columbia. All of the laws, including Oklahoma’s, prohibit charter schools from offering religious instruction. (Some states allow religious organizations to run schools — but they have to remain secular in their operation.) So at present openly religious charter schools do not exist.

But for many years, legal scholars have raised the possibility of such schools, including a 2001 law review article titled: “Charter schools and religious institutions: A match made in heaven?” At first, this was just an academic discussion. Litigation focused on private schools.

In 2002, a divided Supreme Court ruled that public money may go to private religious schools through voucher programs. The majority emphasized that such funding was directed by parents, not by the government. More recently the court has gone further. Not only may religious schools get money, they must receive funding if other secular private schools are eligible, the court concluded in a string of cases culminating in a 2022 ruling. “The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the latest decision, Carson v. Makin. “That is discrimination against religion.”

These cases have not had far-reaching consequences because most states with voucher programs already allowed religious schools to participate. The rulings also did not speak to charter schools directly. But in one case Justice Stephen Breyer raised the issue in dissent. “What about charter schools?” he wrote, before pointing out that the court had no clear answer. Indeed some experts told Chalkbeat in 2022 that this would be the coming legal dispute. “Charter schools are the next frontier,” said Preston Green, a University of Connecticut professor.

That’s exactly what has happened. Some choice school advocates pointed out that the logic of these rulings might apply to charters. If a state cannot bar religious private schools from public support, why can it bar religious charter schools, they asked.

That was the case made by Nicole Stelle Garnett, a Notre Dame law professor, in an influential 2020 report for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Charter schools, she argued, “are effectively private schools and can be religious without running afoul” of the Constitution. In fact, the logic of the court’s decision suggested that “current laws prohibiting religious charter schools likely violate” the First Amendment’s guarantee of free religious exercise, Garnett concluded.

A Catholic charter school in Oklahoma won approval to open. A lawsuit has quickly followed.

Earlier this year, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma proposed a virtual charter school that would teach religious doctrine, just like a private Catholic school would. To craft the application, the church worked with Notre Dame law school’s Religious Liberty Initiative, including Garnett herself. “What state has the most ripe opportunity for religious charter schools? The answer for Notre Dame is Oklahoma,” Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, told the Tulsa World in February.

The idea was bolstered after the state’s former attorney general issued an opinion that Oklahoma’s ban on religious charters was likely unconstitutional. Highlighting the legal ambiguity, though, a new attorney general promptly withdrew that opinion.

In April, the proposed school was unanimously rejected by Oklahoma’s charter board, which cited legal uncertainty and a variety of other issues in the application. But the board narrowly approved it in June after the school submitted a revised application. Board members who supported the school said they believed that Oklahoma’s bar on religious charter schools is unconstitutional.

This sets up an inevitable legal fight since the decision clashes with state law. In July, groups that support strict separation of church and state filed a lawsuit seeking to block the opening of the proposed Oklahoma school.

“A school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious would be a sea change for American democracy,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It’s hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing a public school that is run as a religious school.”

The question of religious charter schools may turn on whether charters are deemed public or private actors.

Since charter schools were formed, advocates have also insisted that they are public. Some groups, like the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, emphasize this in their names. State and federal law describes charter schools as public. Charter schools also operate in many ways like other public schools — they are funded by public dollars, they must be open to all students, they administer state exams, and they’re often required to comply with public records law. “There’s 101 reasons why they are state actors and none why they are not,” Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, previously told Chalkbeat.

But charter schools have always been a sort of public–private hybrid. After all, they are typically governed by private, nonprofit boards, which are not elected. (To form a school, these boards are awarded a performance contract or “charter” by an authorizer, which itself is usually a public body.) This ambiguity has put charter schools in a legal gray area. Are they public — “state actors,” in legal jargon — or private entities? Different courts have reached different conclusions, based on a complex legal doctrine.

If charter schools are public actors, then there is little question that they may not be religious. The First Amendment bars governmental establishment of religion, and the Supreme Court has said that public schools cannot conduct sponsored prayers.

But if charter schools are private, as advocates like Garnett argue, then there is a stronger case that they can be religious. Private schools are not limited by the First Amendment, which only applies to the government. Moreover the legal precedent in Carson v. Makin — which says that private choice programs must be open to religious and secular schools alike — would seem to apply to charters.

The public–private question is the “heart of the matter” in the religious charter debate, as the Oklahoma board’s legal counsel put it.

The Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case on whether charter schools are public or private actors.

The case turned on whether a North Carolina charter school could impose a dress code — banning pants for girls — that some parents believed to be sexist. A federal circuit court ruled for the parents, concluding that the school is a public state actor. The school, with the support of a number of conservatives, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Biden administration said that the circuit ruling should be allowed to stand.

In June, the Supreme Court agreed with the Biden administration and decided not to take the case. But this just adds more uncertainty since the court has still not weighed in on the legal status of charter schools. This question has divided lower courts. A similar case could emerge later.

“The issue will percolate and the Supreme Court will eventually hear a case,” predicted Green, the education law professor.

Leading charter school organizations oppose religious charter schools. Conservative groups are taking the other side.

Two major charter school associations oppose the possibility of religious charter schools and say charters should be considered public for legal purposes. They say that religious instruction is not consistent with the charter model. They also likely fear a political backlash if charters are considered private — a charge often leveled by critics.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools condemned Oklahoma’s approval of a religious charter school. “The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City is trying to make charter schools into something they are not,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement.

Similarly, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which represents entities that approve charter schools, says that charter schools are public and criticized Oklahoma’s decision. “Charter school students deserve and enjoy the same civil and constitutional rights protections as any peer attending a traditional district school,” the group said in a statement about the North Carolina case.

Even some leaders of religious schools are wary of the concept of religious charter schools. Kathleen Porter-Magee, who runs a network of private Catholic schools, says that moving to the charter model could divide the school choice coalition and entangle religious schools with excessive bureaucracy. “In order for religious schools to access government funding, we would be knowingly giving up autonomy in exchange for what would likely be excessive government bureaucracy and regulation,” she wrote.

However, school choice advocates at the Manhattan Institute have been advancing the case for religious charter schools. There was also a string of opinion pieces by conservative writers urging the Supreme Court to use the North Carolina dress code case to rule that charter schools are private and therefore not bound by the U.S. Constitution. For instance, columnist George Will suggested that such a ruling would protect charters to make “pedagogical and cultural choices without being vulnerable to suffocating litigation” Ten Republican attorneys general weighed in for the North Carolina school in a brief to the Supreme Court.

Ultimately, as mentioned, the court declined to hear this case, though this did not settle the issue.

Private religious charters would raise big questions about discrimination and access.

The possibility of religious charter schools raises myriad questions. For instance, how would such schools deal with charter schools’ open access requirements? Would they have to admit students who are gay if that clashes with the school’s religious doctrine? What about students from other religions?

The Oklahoma archdiocese that applied for a charter would not say whether the school would admit gay or transgender students. In its charter application, church officials indicated that they would seek “religious exemptions” from state and federal law “with priority given to the Catholic Church’s understanding of itself and its rights and obligations pursuant to the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

The school’s proposed employee handbook notes: “All employees are expected to adhere to and support the positions and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church in the performance of their duties.” There have been a number of reported instances of private Catholic schools firing staff members for marrying a same-sex partner.

If religious charter schools become a reality, courts would likely have to determine how existing charter school statutes apply to religious schools, which typically operate with far less regulation than charters.

Religious charter schools could spread to blue states too.

Oklahoma’s approved religious charter school had the support of many state officials, including the governor, state schools superintendent, and members of the charter board. But religious charters would likely not get such a welcome reception in more liberal states with large charter sectors, like New York or California.

That may not matter. Advocates for the concept say state officials should not be allowed to deny charter schools just because they are religious. “If they can be religious, states with charter schools must permit religious charter schools,” argues Garnett, the Notre Dame law professor. If a religious entity applies for a school in such a state and is denied, the organization could bring a lawsuit making that argument.

If that argument carries the day in court, that would mean that every state with charter schools would have to consider religious charter schools on an even playing field as all other applicants.

What happens next? We’ll see you in court.

If they are to exist, religious charter schools will almost certainly have to go through the courts, as the case in Oklahoma shows. More cases could follow if religious entities elsewhere apply for a charter or if state lawmakers lift bans on religious charter schools. The question of whether charter schools are legally public or private will continue to percolate.

This could take years to play out, particularly since there are many different legal questions in play. Ultimately, the Supreme Court itself may have to tackle the question of religious charter schools.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Are KIPP students more likely to graduate college? A recent study offers a complex answer.

2023-10-12T20:23:13+00:00

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KIPP, the country’s largest charter school network, touts its commitment to getting students to and through college, so a recent study offered a compelling test of its model.

Researchers compared students who won a random lottery to attend a KIPP middle school versus others who lost the lottery. The result: Both groups earned college degrees at similar rates: 22%. “KIPP middle schools had little to no impact on four-year degree completion rates,” researchers with the company Mathematica concluded.

But the story did not end there. Researchers then examined a subset of those students who also attended a KIPP high school. Although this was not based on a random lottery, these results were encouraging. Attending a KIPP middle and high school dramatically boosted students’ chances of entering and completing college.

This result was emphasized by KIPP officials and in news coverage of the study when it was released last month.

Put together, though, the findings offer a complex verdict for KIPP charter schools. The results for middle and high school combined are promising, and KIPP already has a track record of boosting student learning. But the less-encouraging middle-school-only results apply to a broader group of students and are more methodologically robust because they are based on a lottery.

That has some experts saying that more research is needed before firm conclusions about KIPP are made.

“This is suggestive evidence,” said Jon Baron, president for the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy, referring to the middle and high school results. “This really needs to be tested in further study before being accepted.” (Baron was previously an official at Arnold Ventures, the philanthropy that funded this research.)

The study examined over 2,000 students who applied to attend one of 21 KIPP middle schools in 2008, 2009, or 2011. Researchers tracked and compared lottery winners versus losers for the next decade plus.

Prior research has found that KIPP improves test scores, but this new study showed limited longer-term benefits from attending a KIPP middle school. While there was some hint that students were more likely to enroll in college, they persisted and graduated college at similar rates as students who lost a KIPP lottery. This was the study’s “primary analysis.”

But then the Mathematica researchers undertook a further “exploratory analysis.” This is researchers’ way of saying that they are a bit less confident in these findings. Here, the study used an approach that is rigorous, but not based on a random lottery. (Nevertheless, a number of news outlets and commentators inaccurately described these exploratory findings as lottery-based.)

This secondary analysis focused on a smaller group of KIPP middle school students who also attended a KIPP high school. Those students appeared to benefit quite a lot from the longer KIPP experience: 39% of them earned a four-year college degree, compared to 20% of a comparison group.

These results, which were distributed to reporters last month ahead of the release of the study, were touted by KIPP leaders.

“The Mathematica study shows that a continuous KIPP education, spanning middle school and high school, is life-changing and would essentially close the educational-opportunity gaps facing Black and Latinx students,” said KIPP foundation CEO Shavar Jeffries in a statement.

Mathematica researchers say the gains may be due to the focus of KIPP high schools in getting its students into college. “It is possible that this large effect results from combining the well-established benefits of attending a KIPP middle school (a substantial boost to students’ academic achievement) with the strong emphasis on college-related supports found in KIPP high schools,” the study says.

The two findings create something of a puzzle, though: the group of KIPP middle and high school students who saw big gains in college completion were a subset of the larger group of middle school students who did not experience any improvements. And yet the overall effect on college completion for middle school was estimated to be close to zero. This is possible because the middle and high school group was a small subset of the whole sample, said Ira Nichols-Barrer, one of the Mathematica researchers.

He said that further research would help explain the disconnect between the study’s two big findings. “Our hope is that this is not the last phase of this study,” he said.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

What I learned covering national education issues for Chalkbeat

2023-10-11T19:36:42+00:00

This is my last week at Chalkbeat.

Since joining our then-nascent national team in 2017, I’ve written hundreds of stories about many topics — the often derailed ambitions of presidential administrations and educational philanthropies, the flawed way we rate schools, the initial and then lingering consequences of the pandemic, and a stream of interesting research studies. (Fortunately, I’ll still be reporting on K-12 education, soon at the Wall Street Journal.)

I’ve learned an incredible amount, most of which I’ve tried to communicate in my published stories. But as journalists, we rarely get a chance to reflect on the broader takeaways from our reporting. So I thought I’d use my last week to do so.

Education issues usually aren’t federal, but often are national

Because U.S. schools are so decentralized, covering national education issues can be tough. There are nearly 100,000 public schools, over 19,000 school districts, and 50 states. That’s where most of the important decisions about education are made.

We do have a U.S. Department of Education, but at the moment that’s not where the action is. The policy agendas of both presidential administrations I’ve covered, Trump and Biden, mostly did not or have not come to fruition.

But that doesn’t mean there is no national education story. I’ve learned that what is happening in one school is often happening in many others, all across the country.

There has been, for instance, a rise in teacher turnover since the pandemic in a pattern that has been strikingly similar in different places. Schools almost everywhere have seen a rise in chronic absenteeism, too. Before the pandemic, most states experienced stagnant or declining test scores.

National policies also have a way of trickling down into classrooms, even without any national edicts. Two recent examples: The science of reading and high-dosage tutoring are education ideas that have been embraced, at least in rhetoric, across the country.

Now, whether these big ideas end up working as intended is another story, one that reflects a different tendency in education: The way that policies can get muddled in the game of telephone from idea to implementation.

Research is valuable, but it can’t simply be “followed”

I’ve spent a lot of time covering education data and research, which means talking to researchers frequently. Sometimes they lament to me that cutting-edge research about what works in education is not being heeded by educators or politicians.

I get the sentiment, but I’ve also come to realize that research can’t dictate school policies. That’s because education is shaped by values, priorities, politics, costs, and local context. A research study can help us understand what might work to improve some outcome, usually student test scores. But it can’t, on its own, say whether a school should adopt a given policy. Parents, teachers, and politicians might care about something other than test scores, they might object to a policy for political reasons, or they might find the policy difficult or too costly to implement.

Plus research itself is often complicated, context-specific, contested, and sometimes quite limited. To name one example: Despite many studies on the topic, researchers still don’t have a clear answer on whether holding students back a grade is worthwhile.

I still earnestly believe that research can help improve schools, but I’m also more aware of its limitations.

Parents look at schools differently than journalists and pundits

Education journalists and others who write about schools are often surprised to learn that parents typically rate their own child’s school as good or great.

This contrasts with how we as journalists approach covering education — we tend to focus on highlighting problems and holding people accountable. Indeed, the American public gives schools writ large mediocre grades, which may reflect how journalists and others write about them.

I like to think of this as the parent–pundit divide. Once you’re looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere. For all sorts of reasons — geographic, educational, political, professional — pundits often have different perspectives about schools than most parents and others involved in education.

Another example is the four-day school week, which is derided by pundits as an ill-conceived idea that hurts students. (And indeed research suggests shorter school weeks are harmful to learning.) Yet four-day weeks are widely popular with parents and teachers in districts that have adopted it.

There is good reason for journalists and others to focus on problems in the system, and I’ve done so in my own reporting. But I think those of us who write about education should be cognizant of this disconnect.

History rhymes with the present

Our high school history teachers were right: History repeats itself or as some historians like to say, it “rhymes.” After dabbling in historical research myself and reading compelling histories written by education journalists, I’m convinced that all of the history-teacher cliches are true in education policy.

Consider the recent experiment in sending a boatload of COVID relief money to schools in a bid to make up for learning loss. We shouldn’t be surprised how this has played out, because there was a strikingly similar experience in the late 1960s after the enactment of Title I, which provides federal funds for high-poverty schools.

In both cases, there were high expectations: the money was supposed to solve poverty in the ‘60s and fix learning loss now. That was quickly followed by disillusionment after the problems weren’t solved. Poverty persisted then and learning loss persists now. In both cases, there were complaints about how the money was tracked and spent, sometimes based on eye-catching but unusual examples: like Olympic-sized swimming pools then and a new football field now.

This also reflects a historical pattern in education, identified in journalist Dana Goldstein’s book “The Teacher Wars:” The hype-disillusionment cycle. This tendency means to swing wildly from hope that a policy will be a silver bullet to disappointment when it’s not.

Progress can and has happened

Since I’ve been covering education at Chalkbeat, headlines, including many I’ve written, have painted a grim picture of American education. Student test scores were flat or declining before the pandemic and have cratered since. Various touted reform efforts have failed to deliver hoped-for gains. That can lead to a nihilism about improving school and student performance. (See hype-disillusionment cycle.) But I think that’s unwarranted.

The flip side to the depressing results during the pandemic is that it also shows that schools matter — students learn when they are in school. Moreover, in the decades before the last one, students made substantial academic progress, particularly in elementary and middle school math. I’ve also reported on plenty of studies that find benefits from various efforts to improve schools or improve children’s lives outside of school.

We should not be Pollyannaish about American education at this moment, but we shouldn’t give into fatalism either.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor and before that was a national reporter at Chalkbeat.

Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn’t go as planned.

2023-10-04T20:59:38+00:00

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Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg had grand designs for American schools.

The Facebook founder and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, poured well over $100 million into an online platform known as Summit Learning that initially aspired to be in half of the nation’s schools. In 2017, Zuckerberg suggested that technology-based “personalized learning” could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid off dozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary.”

It was an acknowledgement that the company’s prior education strategy had fallen short of its hopes. Through a spokesperson, Huang declined an interview request, but noted in her blog post that the company is continuing its work in education, albeit with a different strategy. “This moment demands not just investment but innovation — and that’s why we are building a team of experts and partners to identify opportunities where technology and grantmaking can drive coherence,” she wrote.

CZI’s shift in approach marks something of a coda to an era when various advocates and funders believed that computer-based “personalized learning” could dramatically improve education. Summit, CZI’s pet project, has not spread as far as once hoped, and there’s little evidence that it or similar efforts have led to the large learning gains that Zuckerberg envisioned. This gap between ambitions and results underscores the difficulty of using technology to dramatically improve America’s vast system of decentralized schools.

“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a book on the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”

A big bet on “personalized learning”

In 2014, Zuckerberg and Chan both visited Summit Public Schools, a Bay Area charter school network that had recently integrated technology into the school day. Zuckerberg was impressed and wanted to know how to scale their model nationally.

The following year, Facebook announced a partnership with Summit to help develop software that would be made available outside the charter network. “It came onto the scene with quite a bit of fanfare,” said Sarah Reckhow, a professor at Michigan State University who has studied education philanthropy. 2015 was also the year that Zuckerberg and Chan pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook fortune to charity, through the newly formed CZI.

Summit would be a key part of the couple’s education strategy. A case study from the time described Summit as a multipart model, which included time that students spent with an adult mentor, project-based learning, and “expeditions” in various fields like arts or computer science.

Summit also featured 16 hours a week of “personalized learning time.” Students worked at their own pace on a computer, which fed them a “playlist” of content where they learned specific skills. Students could move on once they got eight of 10 questions right on an online quiz.

That seemed to be the biggest draw for Zuckerberg, who contrasted the approach to “having every student sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way.” He suggested this could lead to transformational improvements in student learning. The goal, he wrote in 2017, was “scaling this approach to every classroom.”

Zuckberg was also a part of a $100 million investment in AltSchool, a private network of schools run by a former Google employee who hoped to spread innovations to the public schools.

At that point, the excitement was based more on hope than hard evidence. Still, Zuckerberg and Chan were hardly the only enthusiasts for technology-infused learning. Other funders, including the Gates Foundation, promoted similar ideas. (Gates is a supporter of Chalkbeat.)

“Personalized learning” had emerged as “a reliable buzzword in education circles, and right now, its star is rising,” wrote Michael Horn for Education Next in 2017. “Leading foundations, school networks, and nonprofits are putting it front and center in their efforts.”

Summit comes under scrutiny

Over the years, Zuckerberg ended up pouring large sums of money into Summit Learning. In April of 2019, The New York Times reported that CZI had made $99 million in grants to Summit. More recently, between 2019 and 2022 according to CZI’s grants database, the organization channeled $125 million to Gradient Learning, a nonprofit that now administers Summit.

These are vast sums in the world of education philanthropy.

Much of the money has gone to develop and maintain the Summit Learning Program and provide training to educators. Schools can receive the program and training free of charge.

Hundreds of schools have adopted Summit, and some parents say it’s helped their child. “Students who may understand a concept more quickly are able to move forward instead of having to wait for the rest of the class,” wrote Annie Thomas, a Colorado parent who defended the program in an op-ed last year.

But in other cases, parents complained about the newfangled approach to education or worried that students’ data would be shared with Facebook. (Summit says Facebook does not have any access to its data.) Some students said there was too much time on screens. In 2018, students at a Brooklyn high school walked out in protest, prompting a flurry of news stories. The following year, the New York Times published a piece featuring complaints from parents in Kansas. “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” one parent told the Times.

It wasn’t clear how representative either the success or the horror stories were, though.

That’s in part because Summit struggled to produce evidence that its program was leading to the large learning improvement that Zuckerberg had hoped for. Summit declined to participate in a study of the program designed by Harvard researchers. (Asked about Summit’s effectiveness now, both CZI and Gradient Learning pointed to positive experiences in a number of schools, as well as a survey of school leaders in which nearly all said Summit had made a positive difference for their schools.)

Reich says the apparently varied experience of schools using Summit shows how contextual factors, like strong leadership or community buy-in, can make or break a school regardless of the technology. “Without all of the other things that the Summit Public Schools were doing to make that platform work, they were not scaling or transporting the most important parts of Summit,” he said.

Data previously obtained by Chalkbeat showed that 1 in 4 schools that began the program had dropped it by the 2018-19 school year, at which point just short of 400 schools were using Summit.

Presently, Gradient Learning says that over 300 schools are using Summit, indicating that in recent years more schools have left the program than have newly adopted it.

A post-pandemic pivot for CZI

In 2020, the pandemic thrust students online all across the country. It was a real-world experiment in the potential — and limits — of technology-based learning.

Zoom school was a struggle for many students and teachers alike. Test scores cratered. But the shift likely had the enduring effect of infusing more technology into the typical school day even when students returned in person.

More schools invested in laptops or tablets and tout that they are 1:1, meaning every child has a device. Some places have bought online learning programs in a bid to help catch students up. Some school districts have maintained fully online schools.

“Aspects of the technology-mediated ‘personalized learning’ do seem to be present in a lot of places,” said Reckhow. “It so clearly got accelerated by COVID.”

The scope and efficacy of these changes is not yet clear. But there’s little indication that this shift has delivered the large gains in student learning that Zuckerberg once touted.

And some of CZI’s own big bets have fallen short of its ambitions. By 2021, AltSchool had sold its schools and turned into a consulting firm. Most significantly, CZI now appears to be reducing its focus on Summit, apparently backing off of hopes that the model would spread to vast swaths of American schools. There are plans in place to “transition” the “core features of Summit Learning to a third-party platform,” CZI says.

What this means for Summit isn’t entirely clear. Both CZI and Gradient Learning have indicated that they are not giving up on the model altogether.

“We continue to have a firm commitment from the CZI team about their continued support of the Summit Learning program, in its current and future iterations,” according to an email sent to supporters by Gradient Learning, obtained by Chalkbeat.

Asked about CZI’s broader experience in education over the last several years, a spokesperson said, “Thanks to the work of our grantees and partners, more schools are embracing a whole-child approach to learning; educators increasingly have access to professional learning opportunities that incorporate the latest learning science research; and researchers and educators are developing new ways to measure student progress that more accurately reflect their full potential.”

CZI is not getting out of education. Huang, the company’s education head, said the company will now focus on “creat[ing] educational tools” that can help “address chronic learning and teaching challenges.” That includes exploring how artificial intelligence can improve education, according to a document obtained by Insider. (A spokesperson for CZI said in an email, “The public discussion about AI in education is evolving rapidly, and we are approaching it thoughtfully and cautiously.”)

John Bailey, a fellow at CZI and the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote an optimistic essay about the potential of AI, with a headline that marked the end of one era and the dawn of a new one: “The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different.”

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Will bipartisan education reform be revived? Maybe not any time soon.

2023-10-03T23:11:44+00:00

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Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants the country to adopt a unifying set of ambitious education goals, but he doubts any politician will lead the way in doing so.

“I would love us to try to agree on some goals,” he said Tuesday afternoon, before noting later, “I don’t have a lot of optimism that it’s going to come at the national level.”

Duncan, who was a member of the Obama administration, spoke at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank at an event titled, “A Way Forward for School Reform.” But Duncan and Frederick Hess, AEI’s director of education policy, suggested that there is no clear way forward.

In the background of this discussion was recent history: A particular brand of bipartisan education reform — which emphasized charter schools and accountability for student test scores — dominated Washington during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Now it’s in the rearview mirror, and there’s no indication it’s coming back.

The forum highlighted how the parties are further apart on education than at any point in recent memory. And the discussion pointed to why no bipartisan collaboration on education appears to be in the offing, despite nascent efforts to create one and unprecedented challenges faced by the country’s schools. In short, the politics have changed and there’s no education agenda that is unifying both parties.

“How do you think about solutions that are going to feel relevant and are capable of building broad support in a different political landscape?” said Hess. “Anybody who says we do that by going back to the playbook that resonated between 1992 and 2012 is, I think, probably misleading themselves.”

The forum was the latest rumbling about the idea of reviving what had been a dominant strain of education policy.

Last month, a small cadre of nonprofit leaders published a manifesto titled “A Generation at Risk: A Call to Action.” (This is a reference to “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 federal government report that spurred a national bipartisan focus on improving schools.)

The report was the result of covenings of “a group of education advocates from the Left, Right, and Center,” as part of a “building bridges initiative” organized by Democrats for Education Reform and the Fordham Institute, a right-of-center education think tank.

“We all agree that we need a bold vision for change, leadership that works across lines of difference, and decisive action if we are to make good on America’s promises to our children, today and in the future,” the report says.

Duncan, who now runs an organization that seeks to reduce gun violence in Chicago, said he wants agreed-upon national goals focusing on access to prekindergarten, third grade reading, high school graduation, and college completion. He also suggested that he would like to see a renewed cross-party effort to improve schools. “I really miss trying to work in a bipartisan way,” said Duncan.

That seems a bit quixotic at the moment.

Former President Donald Trump appears likely to be the Republican nominee. His campaign has emphasized culture-war issues in education and Trump has said he would try to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

President Joe Biden has been quiet on K-12 education policy. Policy-wise, his administration has focused on increasing spending for schools, while Congressional Republicans have sought to cut education budgets.

Duncan suggested that a new focus on improving education might come from families, but acknowledged that most parents like their own child’s school — a fact that has persisted even in the wake of the pandemic.

Another challenge for reassembling the old coalition is that it’s not clear what their policy agenda would be. The Generation at Risk report promotes high-level ideas like “set goals aligned to recovery,” “rethink how time and staff are used,” and “evaluate emerging innovations.” It’s not clear how these would be translated into federal policy that would affect schools, though. At the AEI event there was only limited discussion of specific ideas for improving schools.

This contrasts with the heyday of bipartisan school reform when advocates were aligned on a number of concrete policies, like the Common Core standards, increasing the number of charter schools, and test-based accountability for teachers and schools.

Those policies have a mixed — and still-debated — legacy. Research found that No Child Left Behind contributed to improvements in math test scores and graduation rates. But studies on Common Core and teacher evaluations showed little if any benefits. Recent research on charter schools have leaned more positive.

At the moment, though, education policy has been dominated by debates over what gets taught in school, particularly around race and gender. Hess noted that as a historical matter that’s hardly unusual.

“Most of our history has been fighting over what books do you read and about how do you teach our history,” he said. “However we want to define school reform, maybe that’s not how the families and the people who schools are serving are actually thinking about the work of school reform.”

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Blizzard of state test scores shows some progress in math, divergence in reading

2023-10-02T09:00:00+00:00

This story was co-published with USA Today.

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When it comes to how American students are recovering from the pandemic, it’s a tale of two subjects.

States across the country have made some progress in math over the last two years, while in English language arts some states made gains while others fell further behind.

“In math, almost every state looks pretty similar. There was a large decline between 2019 and 2021. And then everybody is kind of crawling it back,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist. “In ELA, it’s all over the map.”

That’s according to recently released results from over 20 state tests, encompassing millions of students, compiled by Oster and colleagues. The scores offer among the most comprehensive national pictures of student learning, pointing to some progress but persistent challenges. With just a handful of exceptions, students in 2023 are less likely to be proficient than in 2019, the year before the pandemic jolted American schools and society.

“Schools are getting back to normal, but kids still have a ways to go,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit that works with states to develop tests. “We’re not getting out of this in two years.”

Oster’s analysis of test data tracks the share of students who were proficient on grades 3-8 math and reading exams before, during, and after the pandemic. Every state showed a significant drop in proficiency between 2019 and 2021, a fact that has been documented on a variety of tests. (Testing was canceled in 2020.)

Prior studies from Oster and others have found that while schools of all stripes saw test scores decline during the pandemic, those that remained virtual for longer experienced deeper setbacks.

The recent state test data offers some good news, though: 2021 was, for the most part, the bottom of the learning loss hole.

In math, all but a couple states experienced improvements between 2021 and 2023. Only two — Iowa and Mississippi — were at or above 2019 levels, though.

In reading, a majority of states have made some progress since 2021 and four have caught up to pre-pandemic levels. However, numerous states experienced no improvement. A handful even continued to regress.

It’s not clear why state trends in math versus reading have differed. After the pandemic hit and closed down schools, math scores fell more quickly and sharply than reading, but now appear to have been faster to recover.

Testing experts say that standardized tests may be better at measuring the discrete skills that students are taught in math. Reading — especially the comprehension of texts — comes through the development of more cumulative knowledge and skills. “Is the test insensitive to what’s really going on in classrooms or are kids just not learning to read better?” said Marion. “That’s the part I can’t quite figure out.”

Oster suspects the adoption of research-aligned reading practices, including phonics, may explain why some states have made a quicker comeback. Mississippi, well known for its early adoption of these practices, is one of four states to have fully recovered in ELA. But more research is needed to understand why some states appear to have bounced back more quickly than others.

“Some people are doing a good job. Some people are not doing as good a job,” said Oster. “Understanding that would tell us something about which kind of policies we might want to favor.”

Some schools look to phonics to boost stagnant reading scores.

In Indiana, which made gains in math but not reading, officials are hoping a suite of recent laws embracing the science of reading will boost scores. In Michigan, which also saw no progress in reading, lawmakers pointed to recent investments in early literacy efforts and tutoring.

At Sherlock Elementary, part of the Cicero 99 school district in Illinois, just west of Chicago, Principal Joanna Lago saw how the pandemic set students back. Students are still climbing out of those holes, she said.

“Our scores are somewhat stagnant,” she said.

But Lago is hopeful a series of new initiatives will lead to gains for her students. This year, her district is adding an extra 30 minutes to every school day so staff can zero in on reading and math skills. This is the second year that teachers within the same grade level are working together more closely to plan lessons and review student performance data.

The district has also adopted a new reading curriculum aligned with the science of reading. Over the last two years, Lago, a former reading teacher herself, and her team got training on using decodable texts to emphasize phonics. Teachers visited each other’s classrooms to observe as they tried out new lessons. Pictures of mouths forming letter sounds now hang on classroom walls, instead of pictures of words.

It’s “a more strategic approach to help reach kids and fill some of the gaps of what they need,” Lago said. “How could this not lead to results? How could this not lead to more kids reading more fluently, having better reading comprehension?”

Educators are confronting persistent learning loss going into the last full school year to spend federal COVID relief money, a chunk of which is earmarked for learning recovery. Some school districts have already begun to wind down tutoring and other support as the money dwindles.

Marion of the Center for Assessment fears this extra programming will vanish too soon. “I’m pessimistic because I’m pessimistic about politicians,” he said.

The state test scores offer a slightly different picture of learning loss than a recent analysis by the testing company NWEA. While NWEA found little evidence of recovery last school year, most state tests showed gains in math proficiency last year.

There could be a number of reasons for this discrepancy, including the fact that some large states — including California and New York — have not released state test data yet, so the picture is still incomplete.

The new test score data comes with a few other caveats. Because states administer their own exams and create different benchmarks for proficiency, results from different states are not directly comparable to each other. Experts also warn that proficiency is an imprecise gauge of learning since it captures only whether a student meets a certain threshold, without considering how far above or below they are.

Plus, each year’s scores are based on different groups of students since regular testing ends in eighth grade. That means students fall out of the data as they progress into high school and some may never have fully recovered academically, even if state average scores have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“There are kids who will forever be behind,” said Oster.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools face a funding cliff. How bad will the fall be?

2023-09-13T15:13:30+00:00

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It’s an ominous phrase that is top of mind for many school district officials: the “funding cliff.”

This refers to the imminent end of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief money that schools have been relying on during the pandemic. “The feds pushed a lot of money into the K-12 system,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University. “Now the districts are being weaned off of that funding — they’re losing that shock absorber, that cushion.”

This has educators and experts nervous: the money might be gone before students have fully recovered academically and could lead to painful layoffs and other budget cuts. Some schools have already begun cutting back on recovery programs including tutoring, summer school, and extra staff, like college advisors.

But what is not yet clear is how steep the fall from the funding cliff will be. That’s because there are many other factors that will shape school budgets, including money from other sources. Plus, schools are making spending choices now that could lead to bigger or smaller cuts later.

What we do know is that high-poverty schools face a bigger cliff, that more federal money won’t be forthcoming, and that school budgets will be shaped both by districts’ own financial decisions and those made by state politicians. How precisely this plays out could affect classrooms and students for years to come.

Here, Chalkbeat offers a guide to the federal school funding cliff and what factors will make or break school budgets after the federal money runs out.

Schools got a lot of federal money, but it’s running out — and no more is coming

Schools have received a large infusion of federal money since the pandemic: roughly $190 billion or close to $4,000 per student.

The money was meant to address the consequences of the pandemic on schools, including learning loss. In practice, local officials had wide discretion over how to spend it. Money from the final pot has to be earmarked by the end of September 2024 (though schools can seek an extension for when that money is actually spent). The latest data shows that schools still have funding left, but are on track to use it all by the deadline.

Some advocates had hoped that even more federal dollars would be on the way. For instance, the Los Angeles teachers union had sought to make federal relief permanent. But this is not going to happen. The recent deal that President Joe Biden struck with Congressional Republicans limits new federal spending on education for the next couple years.

In sum, the infusion of temporary federal money really will be temporary. Once it’s spent, it’s gone.

High-poverty schools got more federal money, so face a steeper cliff

The COVID relief was not spread evenly across schools. Nationally, districts in more affluent areas received just over $1,000 per student, with some getting even less. High-poverty districts, on the other hand, got over $6,000 per student. A handful of very high poverty districts, like Detroit, received massive sums of money. There was also variation from state to state, with schools in the South getting more federal money as a percent of their total budgets.

This means that some schools will face little or no funding cliff while others will face steep cliffs. “Districts serving our neediest kids have further to fall,” noted a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution.

The scope of cuts will depend on how schools have chosen to spend federal money

“A lot depends on how prudent they were in their use of the federal funds,” said Taylor. “Federal funds should have been interpreted as one-time money.”

It’s clear that a good chunk of the funding was indeed used for one-time expenses: HVAC and other building upgrades, personal-protective equipment for COVID, bonuses for staff.

Detroit, for instance, earmarked over half of its COVID relief for long-deferred facilities upgrades. “One thing that I’ve tried to do as superintendent is be disciplined with finances,” superintendent Nikolai Vitti recently told Chalkbeat. “I always think about recurring revenue with recurring expenditures, and one-time revenue with one-time expenditures.”

On the other hand, at least some districts have used COVID money for ongoing operating costs like paying teachers’ salaries and maintaining buildings. State data show that schools have been adding staff in recent years. As federal aid runs out, layoffs might follow.

There’s also a third, mushier category: supplementary expenses that schools have added to try to make up for learning loss or address other needs. Those might include expanded summer school programming, after-school tutoring time, vendor contracts, temporary new staff. Some have already begun cutting. Detroit eliminated some positions like college transition advisors. Districts in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Reno, Nevada have cut back on tutoring.

As the funding cliff approaches, these recovery add-ons may start to vanish even more rapidly. This programming may be easier to cut because it’s not part of core instruction, but could still be painful to lose, especially when students remain behind academically.

Generous state or local funding could cushion the fall

The biggest chunk of education funding comes from states, and they have been increasing spending on schools of late. One recent analysis found that most states have increased education spending in their budgets this year, often by substantial amounts. Last year, California passed a record state budget, which included a one-time $7.9 billion learning-recovery grant to schools, on top of the one-time federal aid.

If state funding continues to increase, districts could be protected from major cuts even as federal money dwindles.

David Lauck, CFO of Alliance College-Ready, a charter network in Los Angeles, says he’s not expecting immediate cutbacks thanks to funding increases from California. “We do not anticipate any major dropoff in programming,” he said.

More local funding could also help cushion schools. Officials in Kansas City are planning to use higher property tax revenue to keep some of the staff they added with federal aid. “We’ve done the work so we can retain them,” said Jennifer Collier, the superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. “The cuts were not as deep as we originally thought.”

But states could soon face budget challenges, limiting their ability to help schools

States governments also received a separate $195 billion worth of temporary federal money. This has supported the generous education funding for schools, but it also means states face their own funding cliff. Moreover, many states are projecting that revenue from state taxes will decline next year.

“With more fiscal data coming in, the long-term health of state budgets looks murky,” concluded Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate with the Urban Institute.

That could create a double whammy for schools: federal funds run out and states don’t have the ability to provide an additional buffer. Once again, high poverty schools are more at risk because they tend to be most reliant on state funds. Local funding is also not a guaranteed backstop. The higher-poverty schools that face the greatest fiscal cliff typically have less property wealth to draw from.

The budget situation will likely vary by state. A number of Republican-leaning states have adopted tax cuts and private school choice programs, which could strain state budgets.

But there is some good news for public schools. States have built up substantial “rainy day” funds that could bolster budgets. Plus the broader economy, contrary to some predictions, is looking relatively strong. That’s a more promising indicator for state revenue, since a strong economy tends to mean higher funding from sales and income taxes.

Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor and school finance researcher, says he suspects the upcoming funding cliff won’t be as bad as what happened after the Great Recession, when schools made deep cuts after federal aid runs out. But he said this will vary from place to place and that schools are to some extent at the mercy of state politicians.

“A lot of these cliffs are going to be a function of state choices,” said Baker.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Is public education dead or just redefined? Author Cara Fitzpatrick on the history of school choice.

2023-09-12T10:00:00+00:00

Journalist Cara Fitzpatrick offers a dramatic thesis in the form of the title of her new book, “The Death of Public School.”

In it, Fitzpatrick chronicles the history of school choice in America — a decades-long political effort that she says has culminated in victory for its advocates. Charter schools have grown rapidly. More states are using public money to help parents pay private school tuition. The pandemic combined with a backlash against school curriculum on race and gender have energized this effort.

Fitzpatrick is agnostic on whether this shift has been a good thing for American education, but she’s convinced that it’s a big deal.

“The war over school choice has been the fiercest of this country’s education battles because it is the most important: it is a struggle over the definition of public education,” she writes. “These thorny questions — about what type of education the government should pay for, whose values are reflected in schooling, and what these issues mean for society and democracy — have been waged since the country’s birth.”

Chalkbeat recently spoke with Fitzpatrick, who as a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times won the Pulitzer Prize for documenting the resegregation of schools in Pinellas County, Florida. Currently, Fitzpatrick is a story editor here at Chalkbeat (and a valued colleague of this reporter). She did not play a role in selecting questions for this interview or editing it.

Chalkbeat asked Fitzpatrick about the early history of school vouchers that started with resistance to desegregation; the more progressive arguments for school choice; choice advocates’ recent focus on culture war issues; and how the title of her book could be true when most students still attend a public school.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Journalist Cara Fitzpatrick, author of “The Death of Public School”

Tell me why you wrote a book about the history of school choice. What interested you in this topic?

I was a reporter in Florida, and I had written a lot about segregation. As part of that, I spent some time following families around who were leaving these segregated, low-income public schools. In Florida, there’s a lot of choice options, so I often encountered families who were moving to a charter school, or they were going to a private school with a voucher, or maybe they were going to a magnet public school. One of the questions that I had was essentially: Were they finding better choices?

Let’s start with the early parts of this history, where you start the book. Can you talk about the role that school choice played in resistance to desegregation starting in the ’50s?

In the few years before Brown v. Board of Education, and then after Brown, there was an effort by segregationists in the South to get around desegregation by using a variety of mechanisms, including school vouchers. It varied in states, but it was basically an effort to abandon the public schools and use state support to prop up entirely white private schools. But it was ultimately unsuccessful, because the courts were united in striking down every attempt that was made, including the voucher programs.

Some school choice critics still use this history to attack the concept of school choice, especially private school choice. Do you think that’s fair?

I don’t know that it’s a reasonable critique of what’s going on now. What I ended up finding, and thought was compelling, was that at the same time that segregationists were using school vouchers to try to exclude Black children from receiving a fair education, there were other voices in there who were viewing school vouchers in a very different way.

Economist Milton Friedman gets credited as the father of school vouchers. He was looking at it as an economic tool. Virgil Blum was a priest in Milwaukee who was interested in vouchers for religious liberty, because he thought that it was discrimination against religious families who had to pay taxes for a public school system and then also pay tuition for private religious education.

It was really striking even in the years that the courts were striking down school voucher programs in the South, progressive voices were also raising this issue of school vouchers as a tool of empowerment. Kenneth Clark, who was involved in Brown v. Board, was one who raised that idea.

So I think understanding that is crucial for having a good sense of whether or not that’s really a fair charge to make against contemporary advocates for school choice.

Can you elaborate on why Kenneth Clark, who was a Black psychologist who testified in Brown v. Board and was cited by the Supreme Court, was interested in school choice and school vouchers?

He was disappointed in the years following Brown with how integrated school systems were working out, not just in the South, but in the North, where many school systems were just as segregated. He was looking for different ways to improve education for Black students. It wasn’t just vouchers. He also made some recommendations that sound a lot like what charter schools are today, which I thought was really interesting to see that far back.

What happened to the idea of private school choice in the decades after desegregation?

So the court struck down the school voucher programs in the South, and then it’s kind of just in the realm of theory for a while — it’s people basically debating it.

Milton Friedman keeps alive his economic argument, which was for every kid regardless of income to have a voucher. Harvard professor Christopher Jenks has an idea of targeted vouchers for low-income children, as a tool of empowerment. There’s a small, sort of failed effort by the federal government in California to try out vouchers.

There was a pretty solid push from a number of quarters in the ’60s and ’70s to provide some kind of government aid to religious schools, especially Catholic schools, because they were struggling during that time period. That didn’t end up going anywhere meaningful.

In the ’80s, President Reagan was an advocate for vouchers. That also didn’t really go anywhere. Then the first modern school voucher program happens in Milwaukee in 1990. That’s when you start to see the beginning of this latest era.

Your book has many characters, but to me if there was a main character, it was Polly Williams. Can you describe her and her role in the school choice movement?

Polly Williams was a Black Democratic legislator in Wisconsin. She was kind of a contrarian. Probably the best explanation for her would be that she was a Black nationalist. She was very interested in education in Milwaukee, and she was very concerned that Black students were not being well served by the Milwaukee school district. She tried legislatively to do a number of different proposals to help Black students in Milwaukee. She was shot down at just about every turn, and so became kind of frustrated with Democrats, with her own party, and willing to look at alternatives.

That’s when she and Tommy Thompson, who was a white Republican governor at the time, became allies on the issue, and were able to successfully push through a small experimental voucher program in Milwaukee.

Walk me through Polly Williams’ evolution on her thinking about school choice.

Polly Williams had a very particular view about vouchers — this progressive model very much for low-income children, Black and Latino children, very much as a form of empowerment. She viewed it as being somewhat small and experimental and intended for a particular group of kids.

She became disillusioned with some of her conservative allies who had different ideas about what choice should be like and who it should be for. She was concerned when religious schools were allowed to participate in the program, because religious schools had more white students. She feared that a program that was largely for Black students might also change to be more of a benefit for white religious families and especially ones who could already afford to pay tuition.

Do you see Polly Williams’ vision for school choice as the opposite of white Southern sector segregationists’, or was it the other side of the same coin?

She viewed it as something that was meant to aid children who were the least well served by the school system, which is different than saying we want all white kids to be separate from all Black kids. That’s not what she was about.

She was, however, very unapologetic about being focused on helping her race, and what she viewed as her people. As a Black nationalist, she thought that integration policies were harming Black kids. She thought that it was taking power out of Black neighborhoods when you had kids bused all over.

Can you talk about when charter schools entered the equation, and why they have been, at least until recently, more politically successful than private school vouchers?

In the ’90s, those ideas were kind of coming up at the same time. Milwaukee’s voucher program passed in 1990, and the first charter school law was in Minnesota in 1991.

I think one of the reasons that charter schools took off was because they were meant to be public schools. It was appealing because it was an alternative to school vouchers, and so it gave Democrats something that they could hold up to say: We are for choice, but we’re for choice within the public school system. Republicans also backed charter schools as maybe not as great as school vouchers would be, but something they also could get behind. So charter schools enjoyed bipartisan support for a long, long time, and that helped the ideas spread all over the place.

It actually seems like the charter school movement was detrimental to the private school choice movement by sucking up some of the political oxygen.

I think that’s mostly right. I think charter schools were just an easier thing to support in some ways, and because there were fewer legal questions, I think that helped propel them.

But in some ways, charter schools are more far-reaching, creating totally new schools, and have been much more disruptive to the traditional public school system than private school choice.

I think that’s true for a period of time — we’ll see how this current wave of choice legislation plays out. But you see that especially in urban areas, and people grappling with what does this mean for the public school system, if suddenly 20%, 30%, 40% of kids are going to charter schools. But it varies so much, because you do have states where they pass a charter school law, but then the law itself was so restrictive that you didn’t have the same explosion of charter schools.

Can you describe how the school choice movement has changed since the start of the pandemic, and why it has been so successful in getting a string of far-reaching private school choice programs passed?

The pandemic gave Republicans a moment politically where there are discussions happening about education. There are parents who maybe are exploring other options for their kids or did for a period of time during the pandemic. It gave Republicans room to seek expansions and pass new programs.

There’s also an argumentative shift happening during the pandemic where we saw advocates go from talking about school choice as a civil rights issue to embracing school vouchers for everyone. This idea that it’s really about parental freedom and about values has taken off. And Republicans are going on the attack against public schools and embracing this idea of using the culture war to win policies for choice.

The cover of Cara Fitzpatrick’s book, “The Death of Public School.”

Let’s talk about your title: “The Death of Public School.” How can public school be dead if the vast majority of students still attend a traditional public school?

I liked that title because I was thinking about, what is this ultimately about? What is the argument that people are having? And why is it such a heated argument? I was thinking about: Can these things coexist? Can you have a robust traditional public school system, and also have state dollars going to private education, especially in greater and greater numbers?

Ultimately, it’s about what happens to the public school system and whether or not it thrives or is diminished in some way by these programs. I felt like the current moment in time was pointing in not a great direction for the public school system.

I also had kind of a wonkier question in mind, which was: What is a public school ultimately? I tried to trace that idea in the book. Republicans really were pushing for a definition of public education that is quite different than the traditional one. Republican governors say right now that any education paid for with tax dollars is public education.

One response to the title would be that the empirical research doesn’t support the idea that the expansion of private school choice kills or even harms public schools.

I don’t know if we know what the effects of this current wave of private school choice are going to be when you’re talking about having every student in a state be eligible, including kids whose families were already paying for private education. We’re seeing numbers of participants balloon in places like Arizona, and the cost projections are so much higher than what they had initially talked about in those places. With the universal programs there’s just a lot that we don’t know about how that’s going to shape up.

Do you think the triumph of school choice has been a good thing for American education?

It’s not for me to say if it’s been a good thing for American education. I very deliberately do not take a viewpoint in the book, partially because I think school choice is a fairly complicated and nuanced thing, which is part of what attracted me to writing about it in the first place.

I had some driving questions in the introduction about what does this mean for community, and what does this mean for democracy, and what does this ultimately mean for the public school system. I very deliberately do not answer, because I think those questions are for the reader to think about by the end of the book.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Schools are cutting recovery programs as U.S. aid money dries up. Students are still struggling.

2023-09-06T04:01:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get essential education news delivered to your inbox.

DETROIT – Davion Williams wants to go to college. A counselor at his Detroit charter school last year helped him visualize that goal, but he knows he’ll need more help to navigate the application process.

So he was discouraged to learn the high school where he just began his sophomore year had laid off its college transition adviser — a staff member who provided extra help coordinating financial aid applications, transcript requests, campus visits, and more.

The advisers had been hired at 19 schools with federal pandemic relief money. In June, when Detroit’s budget was finalized, their jobs were among nearly 300 that were eliminated.

“Not being able to do it at this school is kind of disappointing,” Williams said in August at a back-to-school event at Mumford High School.

An unprecedented infusion of aid money the U.S. government provided to schools during the pandemic has begun to dwindle. Like Williams’ school, some districts are already winding down programming like expanded summer school and after-school tutoring. Some teachers and support staff brought on to help kids through the crisis are being let go.

The relief money, totaling roughly $190 billion, was meant to help schools address needs arising from COVID-19, including making up for learning loss during the pandemic. But the latest national data shows large swaths of American students remain behind academically compared with where they would have been if not for the pandemic.

Montgomery County schools, the largest district in Maryland, is reducing or eliminating tutoring, summer school, and other programs that were covered by federal pandemic aid. Facing a budget gap, the district opted for those cuts instead of increasing class sizes, said Robert Reilly, associate superintendent of finance. The district will focus instead on providing math and reading support in the classroom, he said.

But among parents, there’s a sense that there remains “a lot of work to be done” to help students catch up, said Laura Mitchell, a vice president of a districtwide parent-teacher council.

Mitchell, whose granddaughter attends high school in the district, said tutoring has been a blessing for struggling students. The district’s cuts will scale back tutoring by more than half this year.

“If we take that away, who’s going to help those who are falling behind?” she said.

Districts have through September 2024 to earmark the last of the money provided by Congress in three COVID relief packages. Some schools have already started pulling back programming to soften the blow, and the next budget year is likely to be even more painful, with the arrival of what some describe as a “funding cliff.”

In a June survey of hundreds of school system leaders by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, half said they would need to decrease staffing of specialists, such as tutors and reading coaches, for the new school year. Half also said they were cutting summer-learning programs.

As the spending deadline looms, the scope of the cuts is not yet clear. The impact in each district will depend on how school officials have planned for the aid’s end and how much money they receive from other sources.

State funding for education across the country has been generous of late. But states may soon face their own budget challenges: They also received temporary federal aid that is running out.

Many school officials are bracing for the budget hit to come. In Shreveport, Louisiana, officials say that next year they might have to cut some of the 50 math teachers they added to double up on math instruction for middle schoolers.

Schools there added the teachers after identifying deep learning gaps in middle school math, and there’s evidence it helped, with a 4-point increase in math scores, officials say. But at a cost of $4 million, the program will be in jeopardy.

“Our money practically is gone,” Superintendent T. Lamar Goree said.

Some researchers have questioned whether the money was sufficient or sustained enough to address the deep declines in learning. But with a recent deal limiting federal spending increases in education, more money from Congress will not be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers and commentators have pointed to anemic academic recovery to suggest schools didn’t spend the COVID relief money wisely in the first place.

Experts note that district officials had wide discretion over how to spend the money, and their decisions have varied widely, from HVAC upgrades to professional development. “Some of the spending was very wise, and some of it looks, in hindsight, to have been somewhat foolish,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University.

To date, there is limited research on whether the federal money has helped address learning loss. One recent study of eight districts’ summer school programs found no impact on reading scores but improvements in math. Since only a fraction of students in each district attended, this made only a small contribution to learning recovery, though.

School officials insist the money has made a difference.

“I wonder what the counterfactual would have been if we didn’t have the money,” said Adriana Publico, the project manager for COVID relief funds at Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada. “Would students have been even worse off? I think so.“

The Washoe system has cut hours for after-school tutoring in half this year and eliminated teacher coaches from many elementary schools. The district just finished a dramatically expanded summer school program, but officials aren’t sure if they’ll be able to afford to continue it next summer.

Some school systems are trying to maintain COVID-era additions. In Kansas City, Missouri, district officials say they’re planning to keep a number of the positions that were added with federal money, including intervention teachers and clinicians who work with students who have experienced trauma. The district will be able to do so, said CFO Erin Thompson, because of higher property tax revenue.

“This might not be as bad as what we thought,” she said. “We’re optimistic at this point.”

In Detroit, which received a windfall of federal COVID money, district officials say they budgeted carefully to avoid steep cuts when the money runs out. This included earmarking more than half of their federal relief — some $700 million — for one-time building renovations to aging campuses across the city.

But ultimately, officials said some reductions were necessary. Expanded summer and after-school programs have been phased out, in addition to the hundreds of staff positions, like the college advisers.

“In an ideal world, I would rather have college transition advisers,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “But it’s another example of making hard decisions.”

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Barnum reported from New York and Binkley reported from Washington, D.C.

The public is souring on American education, but parents still give own child’s school high marks

2023-09-05T17:22:48+00:00

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There remains a startling disconnect between the public’s perception of American schools versus parents’ views of their own child’s education, according to the latest polling data from Gallup.

Americans’ views of the country’s schools have continued to fall, with just 36% saying they’re satisfied with U.S. education. This is tied for the lowest point on record since Gallup’s survey began in 1999.

In contrast, parents give their own child’s schools and teachers high marks: 76% say they’re completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education, a figure that is similar to levels before the pandemic.

The 40-point gap between the public’s and parents’ perception of schools is the second highest on record. And it suggests that while critiques of American education seem to be making inroads with the public, they don’t appear to reflect most parents’ own experiences.

“Americans’ satisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in the U.S. has fallen to a record low point as a new school year begins,” wrote Megan Brenan, a research consultant at Gallup. “Still, parents of elementary and secondary school students remain quite satisfied with the education their child is getting, and they offer mostly positive reviews of the performance of their children’s teachers.”

Contrasting views about American schools between parents and the broader public has been a long-standing phenomenon, shown since Gallup began polling.

The pandemic appears to have turbocharged this gap. Republican politicians have castigated many public schools for remaining virtual into the fall of 2020, imposing mask mandates, and — in their telling — advancing left-wing curriculum on race and gender. Consistent with that, Gallup found a particularly steep decline in satisfaction with American education among Republicans: it fell from 49% in 2020 to 25% this year.

The public’s declining perception may also reflect a variety of other, widely publicized challenges that schools have faced of late: steep academic learning loss, rising teacher turnover, and a stunning increase in student absenteeism.

A separate recent survey from EdChoice, a group that backs publicly funded private school choice, found a spike in the share of Americans who say K-12 education is headed in the wrong direction.

But despite the unprecedented upheavals in American education, parents have remained fairly satisfied with their own child’s school, including how officials have handled the pandemic and how teachers have taught about race. Close to three-quarters of parents rate their child’s teacher as excellent or good, according to the latest Gallup data. A recent EdChoice poll found that while only 30% of non-parents said local schools were going in the right direction, 59% of parents said they were.

Gallup’s poll does not break down parent satisfaction by school type. Other surveys have found that parents whose children are in private school tend to be more satisfied, although public school parents also give their child’s education high marks. Since the pandemic, enrollment has shifted toward charter, private, and homeschooling, although the vast majority of children are still educated in district public schools.

Notably, parents’ sunny views about their own child’s schooling do not extend to education writ large. They hold similarly pessimistic views as non-parents about schools in the country as a whole, according to Gallup.

This seems to mirror polling data about the economy: While most Americans say their personal finances are in good shape, they give the broader economy low marks.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Is school integration a path to racial equality? Journalist Laura Meckler on her new book ‘Dream Town.’

2023-08-28T10:00:00+00:00

America’s approach to racial integration of schools can be divided into roughly three periods: hostility, embrace, and finally, indifference.

The period of embrace came in the late 1960s, more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional. Pressured by civil rights groups and empowered with new laws, the federal government began demanding school desegregation through executive action and court mandates. This worked to integrate schools, especially in the South, and improved the education of Black students.

But this period was fleeting. By 1974, a narrowly divided U.S. Supreme Court limited courts’ ability to order integration across school district lines, which assured stratified schools in metropolitan areas, like Detroit, with a predominantly Black city surrounded by whiter suburbs.

And thus began the current period, which has been characterized by declining attention to whether students of different races and family incomes go to school together.

Not surprisingly, then, there remains a substantial degree of segregation across schools.

But what if the country had never given up on the goal of integrated schooling?

“Dream Town,” a new book by Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler offers something of an answer, almost an alternate history. The book tells the story of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a town of roughly 30,000 outside of Cleveland. The schools there are unusual because officials voluntarily adopted a busing program in the 1970s to ensure racial balance across schools. Ever since, schools there have maintained a mix of Black and white students, as well as those from both low- and high-income families.

Meckler, who herself grew up and attended schools in Shaker Heights, asks what happens to a community that never gave up on integration. Her answer offers a tantalizing window into what might have been if the country as a whole had taken the same approach.

But contrary to the book’s title — which Meckler says is aspirational — the answer speaks to both the power of school integration and its limits.

The schools have had long-standing test score gaps between Black and white students. Throughout the district’s history, this fact has been a source of attention and frustration. It’s also contributed to classroom-level segregation, with fewer Black students in advanced courses.

More recently, Meckler reports, Shaker Heights has undertaken a number of efforts in the name of racial equity. Most significantly, it de-tracked advanced courses through ninth grade — in a bid to racially integrate the schools on the inside and not just the outside. Meckler documents the benefits and challenges from this move.

Chalkbeat spoke to Meckler over Zoom about the lessons from the Shaker Heights’ experience and her own takeaways from the book. “Is this a story about people who tried and failed because there is this yawning achievement gap? Or is this a story of something more optimistic and more hopeful?” she asks rhetorically at one point.

The interview had been edited for length and clarity.

What makes Shaker Heights schools worth writing a book about?

For decades, Shaker schools have been held up as an example of the success of school integration. This is a place that voluntarily bused students starting in the 1970s, absent a court order, absent really any external pressure, and has maintained that commitment ever since. So it’s worth asking how that has gone.

Why did Shaker Heights voluntarily integrate its schools in the seventies? And how did it go about doing so?

One person gets the lion’s share of the credit: the superintendent, Jack Lawson, who arrived in the mid-1960s. At first, the two junior highs were out of balance racially and then more significantly there was one elementary school that was overwhelmingly Black.

This was in the context of a conversation around school integration happening all over the country, the civil rights movement happening around the country. He decided this was the right thing to do. What followed was a community embrace of the plan and that was, in some ways, the even more remarkable thing.

His original idea was to essentially distribute the students who were at this predominantly Black school to the majority of white schools. The Black parents were not particularly happy about that. But what really got the plan changed was white parents who said, “This doesn’t seem right. This should be a two-way busing plan.” They volunteered to bus their own kids into the predominantly Black school. That ultimately changed the plan into a two-way busing plan.

How has Shaker’s approach to integration changed since then?

This program was popular in the beginning and then it started losing some of its luster and the numbers were going down. The district really worked hard to try to get volunteers into this program.

The time when it really changed was in 1987 when there was a conversation about facilities. They didn’t need nine elementary schools anymore. They ended up closing four of them and in the process redrawing the boundaries so that all of the schools were racially balanced and it was no longer dependent on volunteers. You went to the school that you were assigned to and some kids of both races were bused in order to make that happen.

This was again done voluntarily. But there was nervousness on the part of school leaders about whether they might be pressured into doing it. Even though they have this voluntary magnet program, many of the elementary schools were still out of balance. There was pressure from the state of Ohio to try to get schools better integrated. And there was a big court case unfolding right next door in the city of Cleveland, which ended with mandatory busing. There was nervousness that Shaker Heights would be pulled into the Cleveland case. They felt like they needed to do a better job with their own community in part to forestall that.

Is that approach what essentially still exists today?

That is exactly what exists today.

So has the Shaker Heights school experience worked? What have been some of the successes and challenges faced by the schools?

As I was reporting and writing this book it was constantly in my mind: What is my ultimate conclusion here? Is this a story about people who tried and failed because there is this yawning achievement gap? Or is this a story of something more optimistic and more hopeful?

Where I landed was that this is a hopeful story, because while they haven’t actually solved these problems — not by a long shot — this is a community of people who are still committed to trying to do this work. That is not nothing, given the pressures that communities everywhere face.

In most of America, wealthy kids are going to school with other wealthy kids and poor kids are going to school with other poor kids. Is it a shock that you end up with school districts where you are filled with kids from families with high needs who don’t have the same kind of resources, and that they struggle?

Can you describe the challenges of classroom-level segregation in Shaker Heights?

They have had upper-level classes dominated by white students and lower-level classes dominated by Black students, which has been the case for a very, very long time.

Some of the interventions have actually backfired. For instance, one of the things they did to try to get more Black kids into upper-level classes is create an open enrollment policy. You don’t need a recommendation to get into the upper-level classes. But the result was that more white kids got into the advanced level classes. More of the white parents were like, “Okay, I’m gonna take advantage of this.”

All this is a precursor to what happened in 2020, which was a pretty remarkable step: They decided — right in the middle of the pandemic — in the summer 2020, that they were going to de-track fifth through ninth grade.

So how’d it go?

Well, it was pretty rocky, certainly at the start. A lot of teachers felt that they hadn’t been prepared.

Keep in mind this was the fall of 2020: These were rough times for schools. They started remote, and then we ended up with these horrible hybrid situations where some kids were being taught in the room and other kids were being taught online. That takes an already practically impossible teaching situation and makes it even harder.

There were complaints from high-achieving students and their parents saying that they weren’t being challenged in the same way as they were before.

The place that school officials were mostly worried about — and I think for good reason — was middle school math. Essentially, you had everybody in honors eighth-grade Algebra I, regardless of whether you had had pre-algebra, regardless of whether you had done well in your math class the year before. That’s not easy.

On the flip side, I watched several classes and I saw a few moments where you can see what this is supposed to look like and where the potential is.

One example: I was in seventh-grade math class. It was near the end of the unit and the teacher asked all the students to write down on a piece of paper, every topic they could remember covering during that unit. There was this white girl, she’s writing on and on — a whole page. She ran out of space. Next to her was this Black boy who was basically writing nothing and just sort of staring out the window. She looked over at him and said, “Wow, you haven’t written anything.” That prompted him to start writing.

That’s a small thing. But it shows that being in a room with somebody else who is more focused on the assignment, and taking it seriously, that kind of positive peer pressure — maybe that made a small bit of difference for that kid in that moment.

Has Shaker Heights maintained de-tracking?

Yes.

Beyond the anecdotes, is there any data to support one way or another whether de-tracking has been successful in some measurable sense in Shaker Heights?

There is some data that is promising, and that school district officials are feeling optimistic about. Specifically, one of their key measurements is what percentage of students show competency in Algebra I in eighth grade. What they found is that the percent that are showing competency has risen both for all students and also for Black students.

I take it there has not been an external or academic evaluation of Shaker Heights attempt to de-track, right?

No.

Do you think white students in Shaker Heights have benefited from attending racially diverse schools?

Absolutely. I think that attending racially diverse schools, and schools that are diverse in other ways as well, is beneficial for all students. It’s important for all of us to be in schools that reflect the world that we live in. By being around people who are different than we are, it helps give us different perspectives — that includes different perspectives on the academic work we’re doing in a class discussing a novel or discussing something in history. Race is such a defining factor in this country that having people who are different races is enormously beneficial just from a purely academic point of view. But beyond that, from a social point of view, there’s enormous value to being with people who are different, who help us see the world in different ways. It also prepares us to live in the diverse world that we will all be launched into eventually.

It seems like there were instances, throughout Shaker Heights’ history, where integration or de-tracking was prioritized on racial justice terms by progressive officials, without paying particular attention to what Black families said they wanted. Is that fair?

One of the problems that the school district has is they don’t always know what Black families want, because the Black families tend to be the least engaged in terms of community feedback. That’s a challenge for school districts to really engage with your community. You need relationships with your community, on the day-in, day-out basis.

Anecdotally, from some of the interviews I did with Black families, I didn’t necessarily find a great desire for de-tracking, I found much more of a desire for the schools to address issues of implicit bias and low expectations.

And, it’s worth saying, the district has been trying to address issues of implicit bias too. But turning to your own experience growing up in Shaker Heights, how did that shape how you viewed the schools and how you reported this book?

Growing up in Shaker Heights, I was all in and on message about the Shaker successes in terms of race. I felt it was a special place. I knew from a very young age that the community had been committed to integration. I knew the story of the busing plan. I was proud of being a part of a community like that. The way I viewed it was: “The rest of you out there in America, you have problems with racism, but we’ve got this figured out.” This was somewhat of a naive view. I certainly was aware of the disproportionate racial makeup of the advanced classes that I was in. I wondered why that was, but I did not have a sophisticated understanding of it.

Reporting this book allowed me to look back on that from my own personal point of view. It allowed me to realize that, even if I was sitting there in a calculus class, not understanding what the teacher was saying, and feeling like I’m not smart, that’s fundamentally different from a Black student who is feeling the same way in that class, but also has this extra layer of “Oh, and people are going think I don’t belong in this class.” I never thought for a second that I didn’t belong in the classroom. Of course, I was in the advanced class — where else would I be?

Beyond my own personal experience, coming back it was very interesting to me to see how the community shifted over the last maybe 20 years from that glow of “We’ve got this figured out, and we’re an integration pioneer” to “Hey, is this really working, and are we really delivering this racial equity that we advertised?”

What do you think the lessons for the rest of the country are from Shaker Heights?

The first lesson is that if you want to do this kind of work — if you want to try to address these issues of racial and economic diversity — it takes an enormous amount of work and commitment. This is a year-in, year-out, decade-in, decade-out commitment that you’re signing up for because I don’t know if these issues will ever be “solved.” It’s something you have to continually work at.

The second thing I would say: One of my takeaways was that a lot of this comes back to a sense of belonging, and whether we are creating spaces where students and parents really feel like it is their place, their space. I think Shaker has done some of those things and could do more along those lines. That’s not something you can initiate a program — “Let’s have a belonging program.” Maybe you can, but it’s much deeper than that. It has to do with everything you do.

Am I right to read your title, “Dream Town,” as half earnest, half ironic?

I certainly don’t mean the title to imply that this is a place that is perfect. The title for me is meant to be almost like a verb. To dream — a place that is dreaming. So it’s a little less like a slap in the face kind of thing like, “Oh, you think this is a dream town?” Obviously, everyone can interpret it as they see fit, but in my mind it’s more of an aspiration.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Schools can host frank discussions of racism, but likely can’t create race-limited groups, feds say

2023-08-25T15:48:40+00:00

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Schools can facilitate frank discussions about race and racism, but likely cannot create groups that exclude people because of their race — even if done with the stated purpose of combating racism — according to new federal guidance.

The document, which the U.S. Department of Education issued Thursday, comes at a time when schools across the country are wrestling with how to manage various issues related to race — from how to help students write college admissions essays to how to facilitate discussions about race and racism in class.

The guidance, which was praised by a coalition of civil rights groups, is the Biden administration’s latest attempt to provide clarity on what is and isn’t allowed. It suggests that common practices employed by schools — curriculum that explores race, efforts to support specific groups experiencing racism — are permitted. But it also indicates that race-exclusive groups, an approach that has been employed in some schools, would trigger a civil rights investigation.

Written as a letter to school officials from the department’s Office for Civil Rights, the guidance does not hold the force of law. But it does suggest how the current administration would approach legal questions, and such guidance is often closely watched by school officials.

“This resource aims to assist our nation’s schools to fulfill Congress’ longstanding promise that no student experience discrimination based on race,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon in a statement.

The guidance explains what would and wouldn’t trigger a civil rights investigation under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on race and national origin. The letter runs through a number of hypothetical examples to illustrate the department’s approach.

For instance, the document explains that a “program that requires all students to read a book about race discrimination and racial justice” would be perfectly fine. So would a requirement that all students take a Mexican American history course, the guidance says. That’s because neither instance singles out students because of their race.

On the other hand, the Office of Civil Rights would open an investigation into a school district if, after high-profile police shootings, officials created an assembly for “Black students in order to provide a forum for them to express their frustrations, fears, and concerns” — and excluded white students from the assembly.

The Department would also investigate a class where “students of different races read different materials based on their race … and participate in different discussion groups based on their race.” The investigation would proceed even if the instructor justified the practice by saying that “students often feel more comfortable reading works by authors of their own race.”

An investigation on its own does not indicate that such a practice is illegal. But school officials would have to justify such race-conscious policies by showing that they further a “compelling interest” and are “narrowly tailored.” This is an exacting standard that officials would have a hard time meeting, especially in light of Supreme Court precedent, including the recent ruling barring race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Some school districts across the country have reportedly created “affinity” groups that are limited to students or teachers of certain races, which have in some cases triggered civil rights complaints by conservative groups. The guidance suggests that the Biden administration will look skeptically on such practices insofar as they limit participation to people of specific races.

Still, the guidance offers a number of other examples that would not run afoul of civil rights law.

A school could, for instance, support an Asian American students’ group that created an event that offered a “safe space for students to discuss hate incidents against Asian students” — so long as such an event does not exclude any student based on their race.

Similarly, a school could sponsor a “National Black Parents Involvement Day.” It could also host focus groups and support groups focusing on Black students and parents.

“While the groups and event expressly limit their agendas and focus to Black students and/or parents, none of the groups or events exclude or limit individuals’ participation based on race,” the guidance explains.

The letter, signed by Lhamon, notes “that many schools, colleges, and universities offer spaces and activities for students … in order to cultivate inclusive communities that feel welcoming to students from populations that have traditionally been underserved.” These efforts are allowed so long as they “are open to all students regardless of race,” Lhamon concludes.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

The science that’s missing from science of reading laws

2023-08-21T20:29:54+00:00

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In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won.

States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading.

States, schools of education, districts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a greater emphasis on phonics. Meanwhile, the “three-cueing” method, which encourages students to guess words based on context, has been marginalized. It’s been a striking and swift change.

But there has been much less attention paid to another critical component of reading: background knowledge. A significant body of research suggests students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. This has led some academics, educators, and journalists to call for intentional efforts to build young children’s knowledge in important areas like science and social studies. Some school districts and teachers have begun integrating this into reading instruction.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to this issue, according to a recent review. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement. That suggests that while new reading laws might have real benefits, they may fall short of their potential to improve how children are taught to read.

“It’s an underutilized component,” said Dan Trujillo, an administrator and former teacher in the San Marcos Unified School District in California. “There’s a lot of research about that: The more a reader brings into a text, the more advanced their comprehension will be.”

However, translating this research into legislation or classroom instruction — at a moment when curricular decisions are increasingly fraught — may not be straightforward.

Reading requires comprehension, not just decoding

Researchers sometimes speak of two major components of reading: decoding words and then comprehending their meaning. (This is known as the “simple view of reading,” although researchers now say it’s a bit oversimplified.)

Decoding means turning the text into cognizable words. Phonics — using letter sounds to determine a word — is a critical part of this process. This has been a key focus of the science of reading movement and the laws that have followed.

But the ability to read doesn’t end there. Readers also need to be able to comprehend the words they have sounded out. It’s not just the dictionary definition that counts either, but the meaning in specific contexts. That’s where background knowledge comes in.

“The main determinant of understanding a text is how much knowledge a reader brings to reading,” noted a 2020 review published in the journal Reading Research Quarterly.

Consider the knowledge required to understand the following seemingly simple sentence, which summarizes a recent Chalkbeat story: “House Republicans seek to cut Title I funding by nearly $15 billion.”

It assumes the reader knows that “House” is a legislative body in the federal government (not a place where someone lives); that “Republicans” make up one of the major U.S. political parties; and, most importantly, that “Title I” is a source of funding for schools. Readers who know all this can easily interpret the sentence; otherwise, it’s all but meaningless. Decoding skills are necessary to read but not sufficient.

That’s because all writing assumes that readers have some level of background knowledge. After all, it would be unwieldy to pause to describe, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives.

“A whole lot is omitted when a person speaks or writes on the assumption of common ground, on the assumption that you and I both have knowledge that we share,” said Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Some argue that knowledge is less relevant today with the availability of internet search engines. Why do students need to memorize basic facts if they can just Google them?

But looking up every unknown word or concept is time-consuming and gets in the way of comprehension. Imagine stopping to search for a key term every few sentences of this article — it would be exhausting and difficult to keep all the new information straight. Plus, searching for the right terms or interpreting searching results may also require background knowledge.

In other words, Google can help fill in gaps in knowledge, but it can’t easily fill a chasm.

“Background knowledge is not just an incidental aspect of reading instruction,” one recent review of research concluded. “Instead, explicitly teaching background knowledge should be considered foundational to increasing competency in reading.”

State laws don’t address knowledge — and solutions aren’t easy

In the last few years most states have enacted legislation that seeks to improve students’ reading skills. These laws typically emphasize multiple tenets of effective reading instruction, including phonics and comprehension — but the role of knowledge in reading comprehension has gotten scant attention.

“Building content and background knowledge as a foundation for reading comprehension are almost completely absent from this legislation,” concluded a recent report released by the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. (A handful of states mentioned knowledge in their legislation, but only briefly.)

This omission has been noticed already. “Unfortunately, the Science of Reading has often been interpreted far too narrowly as exclusively focused on foundational skills,” the Knowledge Matters Campaign, which focuses on raising awareness about the role of knowledge in reading, noted last year. “Our charge is to bring knowledge into the vibrant and dynamic conversation about the Science of Reading.”

Part of the challenge is that — unlike the lessons from phonics research — it’s not obvious how schools should address the importance of background knowledge. There is, after all, a near infinite amount of knowledge in the world. Schools can’t give students all the knowledge they need to read all the texts they will encounter.

“It’s daunting,” said Willingham. “There’s not a quick fix here.”

Some educators have said the answer is adopting a curriculum that integrates important texts in science, history, and other topics into reading instruction. That way, students will start to build their knowledge on issues that they will likely encounter in what they read. That’s the approach a number of districts have adopted, including San Marcos Unified, a large district north of San Diego.

“They have to read about something,” said Trujillo, the San Marcos administrator. “You might as well read about something in science — sound or how plants grow — or social studies — the area, the people, the Constitution.”

Some have also argued that schools should devote more time during the school day for regular instruction in science and social studies, which get relatively little attention in elementary grades.

But there aren’t clear research-based answers here. Although there is solid evidence that knowledge is an important part of reading, there is less research on how schools should go about building knowledge in a way that translates into improved reading skills.

One recent study provides some encouragement to advocates of knowledge building: Researchers found that students who attended charter schools that taught a knowledge-focused curriculum made large reading gains on state tests. Still, the study could not show whether these improvements came from the curriculum itself or other features of the charter schools.

Separately, there are political and cultural questions about what sort of knowledge — and whose knowledge — is taught. Some have worried that codifying essential knowledge will privilege elites’ conception of what is important, while giving short shrift to the contributions of historically marginalized groups. This issue may be particularly challenging for policymakers to navigate at a moment when classrooms have become a cultural battleground.

Esther Quintero, a senior fellow at the Shanker Institute, rejects this dichotomy. She says that careful attention should be paid when designing a curriculum to include a broad swath of history and culture. Ultimately, she believes a knowledge-focused approach may benefit disadvantaged students the most.

“There’s an equity argument to be made for knowledge-building curricula — it levels the playing field for kids,” she said. “Everybody is exposed to the same content. Otherwise, you leave it up to chance.”

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

NYC must slash class sizes under a new law. The neediest schools stand to benefit least.

2023-08-17T10:00:00+00:00

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When Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new law last year that would slash class sizes in New York City, praise came in from many quarters.

Teachers, along with their union, hailed the move as a victory that would improve classroom conditions and boost learning. Education activists said smaller class sizes would benefit the most vulnerable students. Lawmakers in Albany, who overwhelmingly passed the bill, rejoiced.

There are good reasons for this enthusiasm. Studies have found that students often learn more in smaller classes. Some research suggests that children from low-income families, who constitute a majority of New York City students, benefit the most. Plus, smaller classes are popular with parents and teachers alike.

But in recent months, some of the new law’s costs and tradeoffs have come into sharper focus. A Chalkbeat analysis shows that because the city’s highest-poverty schools already have smaller classes, they stand to benefit the least from the state’s class size cap. This aligns with recent reports from the New York City Department of Education, the city’s Independent Budget Office, and The Urban Institute.

Researchers who have studied class size say that these findings raise troubling equity concerns. The class size cap could mean that new resources will be funneled not to the schools that have the greatest needs or lowest test scores but to some of the city’s better-off schools.

The cap could exacerbate teacher shortages in high-poverty communities by creating a hiring spree that encourages more advantaged schools to poach teachers. And city officials, including Mayor Eric Adams, said they’ll be hard pressed to afford the class size mandate absent additional state money.

“Some of the less advantaged schools already have smaller class sizes — in that way, it’s not putting the additional money you have into the schools that probably need it the most,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University researcher who has studied New York City schools.

Highest-needs schools already have smallest class sizes

The new cap dramatically reduces the number of students allowed in a single classroom.

Under the previous rules, classes were generally capped at 30 to 34 students, depending on the grade, with 25 students in kindergarten. Under the new law, classes may not exceed 20 students in kindergarten through third grade, 23 students for grades 4-8, and 25 students in high school. Physical education and classes involving “performing groups” are limited to 40 children.

But the reductions in class size will not be shared evenly once the law is fully implemented over five years.

At the city’s highest poverty schools, only 38% of classrooms are larger than the new caps allow, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of city data from last school year. By contrast, at low- to mid-poverty schools, 69% of classrooms are above the caps.

To bring schools into compliance with the law, which will take full effect in 2028, the city will need thousands of new teachers at an annual cost of $1.3 billion to $1.9 billion, according to projections from the Education Department and the city’s Independent Budget Office. That’s at least 4% of the department’s operating budget.

At overcrowded schools that need more classroom space to reduce class sizes, the School Construction Authority estimated the costs could run tens of billions of dollars.

But since the state has not earmarked new funding attached to the class size law, it remains unclear how the city will pay for it. Experts warn of difficult tradeoffs. Additional dollars spent reducing class sizes on lower-need campuses could instead be directed to the city’s highest-need schools — to, say, hire more tutors to combat pandemic learning loss or additional social workers to address student mental health challenges.

In Brooklyn’s District 16, which includes much of Bedford-Stuyvesant and where the vast majority of students come from low-income families, 36% of classrooms were above the new class size caps. That’s the second-lowest rate of the city’s 32 districts.

NeQuan McLean, the president of District 16’s local parent council, said he wasn’t aware that higher-need districts are less likely to benefit from the new law, noting there wasn’t much public debate of that issue when the law passed.

“I would definitely have a problem with resources being pulled from low-income districts to go to high-income districts when investments need to be made in underserved districts,” McLean said. “We can’t use the method of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

He said additional investments in his district are sorely needed, from upgraded gyms and bathrooms, to additional wraparound services in schools to combat food insecurity. He also wants more on-campus health services and dental clinics, as students often miss school to go to those appointments.

There will be tradeoffs at lower-need schools, too, as school leaders may be required to direct more resources to staff smaller classes, potentially forcing cuts to other programs. City officials may also have to cap enrollment at some schools.

“Maybe principals have decided they want slightly larger class sizes [in exchange] for a math coach,” said Matthew Chingos, an Urban Institute researcher who recently published a report about the impact of the class size caps and serves on a city advisory group on the issue. “It may force some tradeoffs that people didn’t fully appreciate.”

Supporters point to advantages of small classes

The law’s backers contend that small classes are a basic necessity with broad benefits to students.

Jake Jacobs, a Bronx art teacher, said it is difficult to offer individual support when his classes exceed 30 students. “Those classes were nightmares because of it,” he said. Despite some of the tradeoffs of the law, “as a teacher I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”

As for concerns about equity, supporters point out that most students in New York City are from low-income families, so much of the class size cuts will still redound to their benefit.

“The law actually lowers class sizes for a higher number of high-need kids compared to lower-need kids,” said Christina Collins, the director of education policy at the United Federation of Teachers, which pushed for the new caps.

Collins and other supporters emphasize that the law also requires the Education Department to prioritize higher-need campuses first as the new caps phase in. (However, experts note this doesn’t address the key equity issue, since all schools regardless of poverty level will be required to meet the new class size limits within five years.)

Asked about concerns that the law would still require the city to funnel resources to schools with fewer high-need students, Collins pointed to education programs that give students access to the same resources regardless of family income, such prekindergarten or free meals.

Proponents also contend that there is funding available to cut class sizes, pointing to recent boosts in state education dollars that stem from a decades-old lawsuit that argued New York’s schools were not properly funded.

“The courts mandated that every kid get a sound, basic education. And their mandate cannot be achieved when kids are still in excessively large class sizes,” said state Sen. John Liu, who sponsored the class size legislation.

The city’s Education Department may use increases in state funding to reduce class sizes. But officials note the department has already committed the money to other priorities, including for the first time fully funding the city’s own school budget formula, which channels more resources to schools that enroll higher-need children.

Mayor Adams has warned that complying with the class size mandate will restrict city officials from spending education dollars as they see fit.

“Clearly we should use taxpayers’ dollars to focus on equity — not equality, equity,” Adams said at a press conference last September. “There are certain school districts that need more,” he added. “We’re taking away the chancellor’s ability to focus on where the problem is, and the governor made the decision to sign it.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Hochul did not respond to questions about the equity implications of the law.

Unintended consequences loom large

Hiring thousands of new teachers in New York City could prove a particular challenge, especially at a moment of rising teacher turnover. A hiring spree might force schools to bring on less skilled or less qualified educators, which could limit the gains from smaller classes.

In one study of New York City, Michael Gilraine, an economist at New York University, found that when schools reduced class size without having to hire a new teacher, there were large improvements in student test scores. But when they had to add a teacher to get class sizes down, the benefits from smaller classes were swamped by a decline in teacher quality.

“The results indicate that smaller class sizes do improve student achievement,” wrote Gilraine. “Policy makers and school administrators need to be mindful, however, that these gains can be offset by changes in teacher quality.”

Research in California has highlighted a similar tradeoff, though it suggests that the problem dissipates over the longer term.

Higher-need schools typically bear the brunt of teacher shortages. For instance, an older study in New York City found that better teachers were more likely to migrate from lower-performing schools to high-performing ones, a concern echoed in the city’s working group on class size reduction.

One leader of a Manhattan middle school, where most classes already met the new class size caps last school year, said he’s concerned that higher-performing schools in the district may poach quality educators.

“How many teachers from the lower-performing schools are going to go [to higher-performing schools] because they can get paid the same amount and have an easier life?” said the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the class size cap’s impact on their campus. “That’s my bigger worry honestly.”

New York City does not offer additional pay to teachers working in higher-needs schools to potentially counteract this effect.

“It’s hard to recruit teachers right now” and high-poverty schools typically have a harder time doing so, said Loeb, the Stanford professor. “Adding class size reduction may in fact escalate that.”

Collins, of the UFT, says there should be efforts to expand the pipeline of new teachers to meet rising demand.

For now, officials don’t have clear answers to these challenges and much remains uncertain about how the city will implement the new law. The Education Department has convened a task force that includes advocates and policy experts to gather input.

The law also includes a handful of exemptions to the class size mandate, including for schools that are overenrolled, would face significant economic hardship to comply, or or have insufficient teachers in subjects that are difficult to staff. The Education Department and the unions representing teachers and school administrators must all agree to those waivers. If they don’t, the decision falls to an arbitrator.

“It’s not clear how those decisions are going to be made — and school communities that wind up losing valuable dollars are going to be up in arms,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied New York City schools.“I would like that process to be as open and transparent as possible.”

Regardless of the challenges, Liu, the state senator who championed the law, remains sanguine. “I don’t think anybody will say 10 years from now that, ‘Oh, this was the wrong thing to do,’” he said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Pandemic-era summer school boosts math scores, but barely makes a dent in steep learning loss

2023-08-15T20:26:31+00:00

Summer school might be more popular than ever — at least among educators trying to address unprecedented declines in student learning.

With the help of COVID relief money — some of which was earmarked for this very purpose — schools across the country have expanded learning opportunities over multiple summers. Officials say summer school is no longer just for kids who need to make up classes to move up a grade, but for a broader swath of students who have fallen behind since the pandemic began.

So has summer school worked as a learning loss recovery strategy?

A new study, the most comprehensive analysis to date of pandemic-era summer learning, says the answer is: kind of.

Students who attended school over the summer of 2022 saw their math scores improve, according to the research. This offers some of the first concrete evidence that a key learning loss strategy is working. However, those gains were modest, and there were no improvements in reading. And since only a fraction of students went to summer school, it barely made a dent in total learning loss.

Overall, the latest research suggests that some catch-up efforts are paying off, but may be insufficient to return students to their pre-pandemic trajectories.

“It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story,” said Dan Goldhaber, coauthor of the study and a professor at the University of Washington. While summer school had a positive impact, he said, “only a small slice of the damage that was done from the pandemic is recovered from summer school.”

Summer learning helps, but benefits are modest

The new research, released by a team of scholars with the education research group CALDER, examines the impact of summer school last year in eight districts, including those in Dallas, Portland, and Tulsa.

Summer programs varied from place to place, but they typically ran between 15 to 20 days, with an hour to two of academic instruction each day. Districts usually allowed anyone to participate, but also targeted invites to struggling students. Summer school was open to students in elementary and middle grades, and, in a few places, high school.

Somewhere between 5% and 20% of students participated in summer school, depending on the district. Goldhaber noted that some districts had open spots, perhaps indicating low demand among families or insufficient recruitment efforts. Participating students attended about two thirds of the time — highlighting the perennial problem of absenteeism in summer school.

On the more encouraging side: Summer school students were more likely to be struggling academically, suggesting that officials were successful in recruiting kids who were most in need of extra learning time.

Researchers compared test scores of summer school students versus similar kids who didn’t attend over the summer. To start the next school year, summer school students had slightly higher scores in math, though not reading. There was clear evidence of math gains in five of the eight districts.

“The simple takeaway is something’s working,” said Goldhaber.

The researchers note that it’s possible that those students made more gains not because of summer programming, but because their families were more motivated to help them catch up.

Still, the new research offers some support for one of the most common learning-loss recovery strategies since the pandemic began, including over this most recent summer.

Newark Public Schools, for instance, required 10,000 struggling students to attend summer school this year, double that of last year. The district is selling it as an extension of regular schooling. “We’re working to engage parents and make sure they understand that their kids aren’t done just because it’s summer,” a summer school principal previously told Chalkbeat. “If you miss school, we make calls.”

Denver launched a “summer connections” program which focused on “accelerating” students by providing instruction for their incoming grade level, rather than reviewing material. An internal analysis found, unlike the CALDER study, that participating students did not make noticeable test score improvements compared to those who didn’t go to summer school. (Teachers and parents did say that students had made social growth, and nearly all students said they had made friends in the program.)

But even when it is effective, summer school can only go so far in making up pandemic-era learning loss.

The CALDER researchers estimate that summer learning closed only 2% to 3% of the pandemic-induced learning gap in math. In other words, the impact, relative to the size of the problem, was tiny. This reflects the fact that summer school is, by its nature, limited in scope. Summer learning added only a small bit of time for a small fraction of students.

The researchers say that summer school could close the math gap only if every student attended over multiple years. This would amount to extending the school year — an idea that has not proven popular with school officials or parents.

Schools have also added staff, tutoring programs, and after-school time, among other catch-up efforts. To date there is limited research on the efficacy of these approaches. Some of them, particularly online tutoring, have faced challenges reaching struggling students.

Data from the testing company NWEA through the end of last school year found that students remain substantially behind where they would be if not for the pandemic. Results from a handful of state tests also show that students remain behind, but suggest that students in some states have been catching up to pre-pandemic levels.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Biden taps education researcher known for work on school funding as economics adviser

2023-08-11T20:22:59+00:00

President Joe Biden tapped education economist Kirabo Jackson to serve as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers on Friday.

Jackson is well-known in education research circles for his work finding that more money spent on public schools tends to boost student performance. His appointment suggests that Biden will continue to promote education funding as a strategy for improving education — and perhaps for winning votes in the coming presidential campaign. At minimum, it’s a rare sign of interest in K-12 education from a White House that has not made schools a centerpiece of its agenda.

“It signals that the administration absolutely wants the CEA to have serious expertise in education policy,” said Josh Goodman, a professor at Boston University who previously worked as a senior economist at the CEA.

Jackson, who will take a leave of absence as a professor at Northwestern University, has focused his academic research on a wide range of issues relating to schools. “[He] has made a number of major contributions in the economics of education literature,” said Goodman.

For instance, while many other economists have shown that effective teachers improve test scores, Jackson went one step further. He found that teachers affect a number of other outcomes including attendance, behavior, and grades. Those factors, Jackson concluded, may be even more important than test scores for students’ long-run success.

Some of his other research has found that parents are good at choosing effective schools. Another recent study of his found positive results from a Chicago program to grant principals more autonomy over their schools.

Jackson’s research has been most influential on the issue of school funding. He coauthored a seminal paper in 2016 concluding that court-ordered school finance reforms boosted children’s economic futures.

He followed that with a recent summary of studies on the relationship between money and school performance, finding a positive link. “I was genuinely curious as to whether [the finding] would hold up if you looked across studies,” Jackson said in an interview earlier this year. “And it turns out, it holds up remarkably well.”

His research has been frequently cited in school funding court cases, and Jackson himself has served as a paid witness in a couple of those cases.

In one recent case in Pennsylvania, a witness for the defense described Jackson as “the individual who, in my view, kind of most singularly effectuated the consensus shift” about money and school performance. The judge in that case ultimately ruled that Pennsylvania’s funding system was unconstitutional.

Jackson will join the three-member Council of Economic Advisers, which uses empirical evidence to advise the president. “The simplest way to think about it is as an internal research group within the White house,” said Goodman.

News of Jackson’s appointment was first reported by Reuters.

Biden’s education policy has already drawn from — or at least been consistent with — Jackson’s academic work. The White House championed a massive infusion of relief funds for schools that passed under the American Rescue Plan.

The president has also pushed to more than double funding for Title I, which sends money to school districts based on the number of students in poverty they serve. This proposal has gone nowhere in Congress. And a recent debt deal with House Republicans means that any funding increase for education will be anemic at best for the rest of Biden’s term.

Outside of funding, Biden has not articulated a clear vision for K-12 schools — despite a series of challenges in the sector, including persistent learning loss. In this year’s State of the Union, Biden only briefly mentioned K-12 education.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

What research shows about universal school meals programs as more states adopt them

2023-08-10T21:51:07+00:00

Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch, after all.

Chalkbeat recently reported that a growing number of states — including California, Maine, and Michigan — are now offering breakfast and lunch at school to all students free of charge.

Statewide policies like these are new, but the practice of providing universal free meals isn’t. And researchers have been studying this for years. That means we have a good sense of what these state policies will mean for students, families, and schools.

In short, research suggests that universal school meal programs accomplish their main goal: expand access to breakfast and lunch at school. Relatedly, families with children at schools with universal meals are less likely to struggle to afford groceries. Free meals may also reduce lunch stigma and school administrative burdens.

Universal meals may create academic benefits, too: Some studies show that they improve students’ test scores or attendance rates. Here, though, the evidence is equivocal. Other studies do not show clear benefits or only find them for certain groups of students.

Whether providing universal meals is a good idea may not come down to empirical evidence, though, but moral judgments. Critics point to the costs of the program and argue that it may foster dependency on government.

To some supporters of universal free school meals, the academic benefits are nice, but the case does not rest on them.

“It’s fundamentally immoral to suggest that the public should only provide meals to hungry kids if we can prove that we get better scores on math tests,” said Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “We should provide meals to hungry kids … because we’re a rich country and kids deserve a dignified childhood where their basic needs are met.”

Here’s what we know from research on free school meals.

(Read Chalkbeat’s accompanying coverage on why many states have adopted universal school meals and whether more will follow.)

Universal meals expand access — including for poorer families

Universal free school meal programs do in fact increase the share of students who grab that slice of pizza or fruit cup. One national study found that the shift increased the number of breakfasts served by 38% and the number of lunches by 12%. Other research shows similar increases.

This makes sense: When school meals are free, more students take advantage of them. The shift is significant but not dramatic because many kids already got lunch from school while others will still prefer to bring food from home.

Research also hints at a less intuitive result: Universal meals may benefit students from poorer families. This is more surprising because kids from low-income families already have access to federally subsidized school meals. (Children from a family of four qualify for reduced-price meals if their household income is below $55,500 and free meals below $39,000.)

Still, research in New York City has found that universal access increases participation among students from low-income families in both breakfast and lunch programs.

There may be a number of reasons for this. Reduced paperwork and stigma could lead more students to participate. So could the shift from reduced-price to free meals. And students whose families have modest incomes may be ineligible some years when their families earn a bit more than the eligibility threshold.

Free school meals help families afford food

Research also suggests that universal breakfast and lunch in school affect families’ grocery budget more generally.

One study found that the expansion of free school meals led to a small drop in nearby food bank usage. Another paper found that universal meals reduced families’ grocery bills by 5% each month. Similarly, it cut the share of families considered “food insecure” by 5%, including among families who were previously eligible for subsidized school meals. This suggests, the researchers say, that “the stigma of free school meals may be declining after universal access.”

A third study also found a reduction in grocery spending after universal school meals. This in turn led grocery stores to cut their prices by about 2.5%. “This paper demonstrates that the National School Lunch Program delivers a substantial indirect benefit to communities,” researchers wrote.

Keep in mind: These studies do not consider the costs of universal school meals, which could come through slightly higher taxes or reductions in other government spending. How this is paid for will vary from state to state.

Universal free meals may improve school climate

Advocates have long suggested that offering free meals for all reduces school meal–related stigma — which can come from peers or administrative “lunch shaming” due to unpaid meal debt.

There do not appear to be many studies on this, but one recent paper finds support for the idea. In New York City, universal meals led to reductions in bullying, according to surveys of students.

“What I found pleasantly surprising was that it improves the school climate for all students,” researcher Emily Gutierrez previously told Chalkbeat. “It’s sort of this whole school ripple effect.”

Inconsistent evidence of academic benefits from free meals

Research on the academic effects of free school meals has produced a range of findings.

For instance, studies in New York City found improved test scores due to free lunch, but not free breakfast. In South Carolina, free meals boosted math test scores and attendance rates among elementary school students. There weren’t clear effects for middle schoolers.

In some cases, there were improvements on certain dimensions but not others. A Tennessee study found lower discipline rates, but no impact on test scores or attendance. In North Carolina, universal meals improved attendance rates in elementary and middle school and reduced suspensions in middle and high school, although test score effects were uneven. An Oregon study found declines in suspensions, while a Georgia paper found no impact on attendance.

Broader studies have also produced uneven results. One national study showed that universal meals did not improve test scores overall. But for schools that had low rates of meal participation beforehand, test scores in math improved slightly. Another national paper showed reductions in suspension rates for certain student groups. An experimental study found that universal breakfast programs had no clear impact on test scores, attendance, or tardiness.

Overall, the research suggests that there may be some academic benefits from expanding free meal access. But such gains are not consistent. This is not too surprising. Free meals do not target academics and only change meal access for a small share of students, since many previously got meals at school.

In other words, while policymakers might not want to pursue universal meals as a strategy for raising test scores or other academic outcomes, some improvements might be a welcome side benefit.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Teacher loan forgiveness, one national strategy for solving educator shortages, isn’t working

2023-07-31T21:03:30+00:00

Many schools struggle to find teachers, and many teachers struggle with student loan debt.

So the federal government’s long-running Teacher Loan Forgiveness program seems like a win–win.

But new research suggests that the federal government’s educator debt forgiveness program is not keeping teachers in the classroom and probably isn’t attracting new ones either. Researchers say the program’s complexity limits its reach, and few teachers take advantage of it each year. The bottom line: One of the few tools that the federal government has deployed to combat teacher shortages doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference.

This disappointing finding comes as the pandemic-era pause on federal student loan payments expires in the fall, while many schools have faced crippling teacher shortages.

“The program has really good intentions,” said Brian Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the study. But, ultimately, “it’s not effective as it’s currently structured.”

Loan forgiveness does not help retain teachers.

The Teacher Loan Forgiveness program, established in 1998, does exactly what its name says: forgives a chunk of federal student loan debt for public school teachers. This applies to those who teach for five consecutive years in a low- or moderate-income school. The baseline forgiveness amount is $5,000. But for those who teach in chronic shortage areas — science, math, and special education — that figure jumps to $17,500.

This should be appealing to new teachers, many of whom enter the classroom with significant debt. And, in theory, this perk should help schools attract and retain teachers.

Jacob, along with Damon Jones at the University of Chicago and Benjamin Keys at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to test this theory. They compared schools in Michigan on each side of the eligibility threshold that allows teachers’ loans to be forgiven. Eligible schools were those where 30% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty. If the program was working, those schools should have had a leg up in getting teachers.

That’s not what the researchers found, though.

Eligible schools didn’t have a higher teacher retention rate. They also didn’t seem to be able to recruit better teachers (though this couldn’t be measured as precisely). A separate study from four other states produced similar non-results.

“The teachers in schools where they would have qualified for loan forgiveness, their patterns of retention or attrition or mobility, were exactly the same,” said Jacob.

But why? The researchers considered a range of options.

Could it be that the loan forgiveness amounts weren’t large enough? Or that financial incentives just aren’t appealing to teachers? Probably not. Prior research has found that even small bonuses can help keep teachers in the classroom.

Perhaps teachers just don’t value loan relief that much? But the researchers conducted a survey experiment showing that teachers say they would be more likely to work at a school that offered debt forgiveness. In fact, they value a loan write-off nearly as much as a cash bonus.

Maybe teachers just don’t know about the program? That could be part of it. In a survey, only 38% of teachers with loan debt said they were very aware of the Teacher Loan Forgiveness programs rules. Most could not correctly answer how many years it took to be eligible for forgiveness.

So researchers sent a select group of teachers mailers informing them of the program and even offered help applying by phone. But that still didn’t move the needle on teacher retention.

“The information alone, or the information with a little bit of assistance, wasn’t enough,” Jacob said.

Complexity, bureaucracy may derail program

To receive forgiveness, a teacher has to know about the program, meet the precise eligibility standards, get a school administrator to submit paperwork, and work with their loan provider to enroll. Each step of the process, while certainly doable, could trip up an applicant. It could make the potential benefits less salient when choosing where or whether to teach. It might even stop some teachers from getting the benefit at all.

“Our research team, highly motivated to encourage take-up of the program, struggled to find clear guidelines on how to navigate the enrollment process,” the study says. For instance, when researchers called loan providers, representatives often did not know details of the program.

Trying to provide teachers with accurate information about the program also proved challenging. In focus groups, teachers described “a lack of trust in offers that sound too good to be true, in some cases doubting the promises laid out in the outreach materials our research team developed,” the study explained.

The researchers suggest simplifying and streamlining the process as much as possible. “Our results suggest that if any future loan forgiveness program is implemented in the U.S., ease of application and eligibility determination may be key to achieving broad participation,” they write.

One other potential explanation for the disappointing results is that teachers have another option to get their loans wiped out: Public Service Loan Forgiveness, an alternative program available to those working in government or nonprofits. This option may be more appealing to some teachers because it will eventually forgive all remaining loan debt. Unlike the teacher-focused forgiveness, though, it only applies after 10 years rather than five.

What’s clear is that relatively few teachers take advantage of Teacher Loan Forgiveness each year. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 32,000 teachers received forgiveness through the program. This is a small fraction of teachers who have student loan debt, although it’s not clear how many would have been eligible for Teacher Loan Forgiveness. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office warned that “awareness among potential participants continues to be a challenge.” More recently, the Department of Education noted that it “is working on ways to raise awareness among current and incoming students.”

This is not the only federal teacher shortage program that has been beset with bureaucratic challenges. TEACH Grants help fund the education of aspiring teachers. The grants must be paid back by those who do not teach in low-income schools for at least four years. However, NPR reported in 2018 that paperwork snafus left thousands of teachers who should have benefitted from the program with substantial debt. In 2021, the Department of Education announced an overhaul to protect teachers from having grants unfairly converted into loans.

Meanwhile, student loan debt is likely on many teachers’ minds these days: the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel $10,000 worth of federal student loan debt and the pause of loan payments is coming to end this October.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Politicians and pundits say parents are furious with schools. Polls say otherwise.

2023-07-25T18:11:18+00:00

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The polling company Gallup has been asking American parents the same question since 1999: Are you satisfied with your oldest child’s education? Every year through January 2020, between two-thirds and 80% said yes.

The pandemic upended many things about American schooling, but not this long-standing trend. In Gallup’s most recent poll, conducted late last year, 80% of parents said they were somewhat or completely satisfied with their child’s school, which in most cases was a public school. This was actually a bit higher than in most years before the pandemic. A string of other polls, conducted throughout the pandemic, have shown similar results.

“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

“It would be natural to assume that in 2020, 2021, parental support for schools would have cratered,” said Smarick. “But it didn’t.”

But that’s not the prevailing narrative that has emerged. Instead, many commentators have seized on another part of the Gallup poll: Only 42% of American adults are happy with the country’s public schools — this figure has dropped several points since 2019.

“The last few years have been historically convulsive ones for education in America,” a recent New York Times Magazine piece said. Tellingly, satisfaction with public schools had dropped to “a 20-year low,” the story continued, citing Gallup. Some outlets implied or outright stated that the declining view of schools was driven by parents. An article in the conservative news outlet the Washington Free Beacon, for instance, mischaracterized Gallup’s results to claim that parents’ satisfaction had “plummeted.”

In reality, Gallup’s poll suggests a divergence between parents’ views of their children’s schools versus the public’s view of the nation’s schools: There was a startling 38-point gap between the two — which had also hit a 20-year record.

This and other data suggests that dissatisfaction with American public schools — and the policy changes that have resulted — has not been driven by most parents’ own experience with public schools.

Despite pandemic upheaval, most parents say their schools are doing fairly well.

Gallup’s finding is not an outlier. A Pew survey last year found that over 90% of parents were at least somewhat satisfied with the quality of their child’s education. A New York Times poll found that 77% were satisfied. Focusing just on parents with children in district schools, Education Next reported that 85% were at least somewhat satisfied; more recently EdChoice found that 84% were.

“Despite all the disruptions of the past two years, there is no sign of a pandemic-era drop-off in parents’ positive views of their children’s schooling,” wrote Gallup researcher Frank Newport. “Parents remain solidly positive about their kid’s quality of education — as they have been for over 20 years.”

It’s a striking finding in light of the massive upheavals to American schooling since the pandemic, which led students to fall behind academically. There have also been pitched debates about how schools should teach about race and gender. What could explain this? Local schools may have taken parents’ preferences into account in how they approached the pandemic and what they teach. Smarick said that in general people also tend to give institutions that they interact with directly, including schools, the benefit of the doubt.

“You know what they’re dealing with. You know what they’re trying to solve,” he said.

Polls do show that parents whose children attend private schools tend to be more satisfied than those in public schools, a pattern that existed before the pandemic. Certainly some parents aren’t happy with public schools, and have likely become more energized since the pandemic. And even parents who give decent marks to their child’s schools often say they could be better.

Dawn Delfín joined her school’s parent teacher association after her son entered kindergarten in the fall of 2020. The schools in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were still only offering virtual instruction. She supported that decision and sympathized with the challenges schools faced, but was frustrated by both the communication from the school and the quality of online instruction. “They did their best,” she said. “It was never going to be ideal, but it could have been handled better.”

In the years since, she’s been quite happy with her son’s school. She’d give it a B+ or A-, she said. It’s been “mostly great,” said Delfín, who is now president of the New Mexico PTA. “The teachers are excellent. They work hard.”

The polling results may seem surprising since there has also been an unprecedented decline in students enrolled in public schools. Between 2019 and 2021 the number of students attending public schools dropped by nearly 3%, from 50.8 million to 49.4 million. (More recent data is not available nationally.) Some of this reflects falling birthrates and immigration, while other children have shifted to private or home schooling. There’s also been a shift within the public school system from district to charter schools.

Some see this as at odds with the polling data. “While survey respondents express that they’re generally satisfied with how public schools responded to the pandemic, the enrollment numbers reveal a very different story,” wrote Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Satisfaction rates may also be higher because families moved their kids into schools they were happier with.

Although the enrollment shift is historically large and may prove disruptive to school districts, it still constitutes a small fraction of the nation’s children. This is consistent with the polling data, which shows that a small but meaningful chunk of parents — comprising millions of people — were dissatisfied with their child’s school. Moreover, much of the enrollment shifts came not from students who were already attending public school, but those in early grades who were entering school for the first time. “I would call these modest changes in school enrollment compared to what it could have been,” said Smarick

Those without schoolchildren are particularly unhappy with public schools.

Surveys actually show that it’s people without school-age children who are especially dissatisfied with public schools.

A recent EdChoice survey found that 57% of parents said their local school district was moving in the right direction, which was 10 percentage points higher than in January 2020, before the pandemic. (This is a bit different from the other parent surveys in that it was not asking about parents’ own experiences directly.) But among non-parents, only 29% said the local schools were on a positive trajectory.

This same gap between parents and non-parents has also showed up in polls by Education Next and the New York Times. The views of those without school-age children may be shaped by news coverage, which has advanced the narrative that schools are in disarray and parents are upset.

Nevertheless, the perception that parents have turned against public schools has justified a slew of proposed and actual policy changes. Republican-led states have passed new curriculum restrictions and expansive school choice programs under the banner of advancing parents’ rights. The polling satisfaction data does not speak to parents’ views on these various policies. But it does indicate that these changes are not a response to widespread parental unhappiness with public schools.

Delfín says that while she’s seen anger directed at schools on social media, she hasn’t heard much about it from parents she knows. “I really don’t see the same thing translating in everyday life,” she said. “Most families I know have their pluses and minuses about school and that always has been and always will be.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Mississippi made big test score gains. Here’s what to make of them.

2023-07-18T17:26:47+00:00

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Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle.” Others say not so fast.

In the last decade, Mississippi students have rapidly closed the test score gap with the nation as a whole, particularly in fourth grade. State officials, education wonks, and national journalists have attributed these improvements to the state’s 2013 early reading law, which included emphasizing phonics and holding back third graders who struggle to read.

The purported link between the state’s policies and its upward trajectory has become one of the nation’s most talked-about education stories.

“Mississippi has shown that it is possible to raise standards even in a state ranked dead last in the country in child poverty and hunger,” New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote in May.

State policymakers elsewhere are paying attention: Some say they’re modeling new laws after Mississippi’s.

But a few commentators have pushed back on this rosy narrative. Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik recently claimed scores had been “gamed.”

So who’s right?

In short, the state’s educational improvement appears to be legitimate and meaningful. It’s true that calling these gains a “miracle” seems overstated, and some questions about them warrant further investigation. But there’s little if any evidence they’re artificially inflated.

There is still one big question that hasn’t been conclusively answered, though: Why did the state experience such large improvements?

Some research supports the prevailing explanation that Mississippi’s early literacy policies contributed to better test scores. But other states have implemented similar policies and not seen gains nearly as large. It’s not clear what explains the Magnolia State’s outsized improvements.

Call it the Mississippi mystery.

Mississippi closes the gap on national tests

For decades, Mississippi’s test scores have been far below the national average. But between 2013 and 2019, the state’s students made big strides on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a closely watched test given periodically to fourth and eighth graders. These gains are all the more striking because national test scores stagnated during this time.

By 2019, Mississippi was at about the national average in fourth grade math and reading. In eighth grade, it was still below average, but the gap with the nation had shrunk.

Mississippi’s schools look even better after taking into account the fact that it has an extremely high child poverty rate, which is correlated with lower test scores. An analysis of 2019 scores by the Urban Institute showed that — adjusted for demographics, including family income and race — Mississippi was one of the country’s top-rated states in fourth grade and above average in eighth grade.

In 2022 in the wake of the pandemic, the state saw sharp drops in test scores, but the same was true in the country as a whole.

Critiques of the state’s gains fall short

Hiltzik, the Los Angeles Times columnist, advanced two major critiques of the state’s test score gains in a recent column.

First, he argued that by holding back struggling third-graders, the state had inflated its test scores by removing those students from the pool of fourth grade test-takers.

In reality, this could help explain test scores jumps for a short period of time, but it doesn’t make much sense for longer-term gains. Eventually, students who are retained in early grades will move up to the next grade — they are not held back forever. Because Mississippi has seen sustained improvements, retention gaming appears to be an unlikely explanation.

Another critique is that the gains in fourth grade had “vanished by the eighth grade,” as Hiltzik put it. This claim is misleading. Between 2013 and 2022, Mississippi had roughly cut in half the test score gap in eighth grade between itself and the nation. Although this is not as large as the gains in fourth grade, it is still substantial.

Some of the disconnect between early and later grades may also reflect the fact that fourth graders who took the NAEP in 2019 and saw improved scores had not yet reached eighth grade for the 2022 exam.

Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard University and previously a member of the board that oversees NAEP, said his instinct is to question big test score gains. But in the case of Mississippi, he said, “I don’t see any smoking guns or red flags that make me say that they’re gaming NAEP.”

Impact of state test change may be worth examining

One sometimes overlooked change in Mississippi education policy in the last decade involved not curriculum or instruction, but its testing regimen.

In 2015, Mississippi overhauled its state test, including by aligning it more closely with NAEP.

“When writing the new assessment, the Mississippi Department of Education looked at NAEP frameworks — the blueprints for the content and design of each assessment — to ensure that the new state assessment mirrored expectations on The Nation’s Report Card,” according to a publication from the board that oversees NAEP.

Testing experts say that focusing on the content of a particular exam might improve scores because educators teach to that specific test. This is not necessarily bad if the content reflects what students should know.

Still, NAEP is supposed to be an external check on state assessments and if the two tests are very similar, it might not serve that purpose as well. “To the extent you prioritize NAEP, you risk inflating NAEP scores,” said Ho.

However, the state testing shift began in 2015, while NAEP gains began in 2013. Additional scrutiny might shed more light on this issue.

Early literacy law might be part of explanation

The commonly told story for why Mississippi has apparently seen substantial improvements in student learning has a clear protagonist: Its early literacy law.

“Progress began after the 2013 passage of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act,” former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant wrote recently. “The genius behind this law comes from its ability to reach students when it counts and identifies K–3 students who need additional reading help as early as possible.”

NAEP scores on their own cannot show cause and effect, but some research supports this explanation.

One study found that retained third graders in Mississippi subsequently made large test score gains. Another recent study looked at a number of states, including Mississippi, that had adopted comprehensive early literacy policies. This was defined by a set of sixteen policies supported by the advocacy group ExcelinEd, including training in the “science of reading,” grade retention, reading coaches, and more. (ExcelinEd, founded by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, encourages states to model its policies after Florida’s and played a key role in supporting Mississippi’s 2013 law.)

The researchers found that states with all these policies in place made bigger gains on the NAEP reading tests than states without those policies or only some policies in place. The improvement amounted to four to five points in fourth grade reading several years after the enactment of a state’s early literacy law.

“Retention, coupled with this wide range of supports for teachers and students, may be the most effective way to improve students’ literacy learning,” said Amy Cummings, a graduate student at Michigan State University and coauthor of the study.

Mississippi’s fourth grade reading scores jumped by ten points between 2013 and 2019 — more than other states that enacted similar laws. Some of those gains came between 2013 and 2015, before the law had been fully implemented. For instance, the law’s third grade retention mandate didn’t begin to apply until 2015. The state also saw similarly large gains in math.

This implies the state’s gains were partly but not entirely due to the reading law.

What else could explain the improvements? Rachel Canter, executive director of the education advocacy group Mississippi First, hypothesizes that the state’s focus on aligning its standards, testing, and accountability system — and sticking with it for many years — paid off.

“We were raising standards, raising expectations — teachers were actively trying to meet those raised standards and expectations and then we were testing on them,” she said. Perhaps this was particularly helpful since the state’s students were starting at a low level of performance.

But many other states also adopted new standards and testing during this period and didn’t experience much growth.

Ultimately, this uncertainty suggests that states that adopt Mississippi-like early reading policies might expect to see some meaningful gains, but shouldn’t expect Mississippi-sized improvements.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

House Republicans seek 80% cut to federal program for students from low-income families

2023-07-14T20:24:05+00:00

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Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to dramatically slash funding for Title I, the long-running federal program that sends money to schools based on the number of children from low-income families that they serve.

A bill advanced by a Republican-controlled House subcommittee on Friday seeks to cut Title I grants by 80% or nearly $15 billion.

The proposal is part of a broader package of GOP-backed cuts to schools and other federal programs. The bill would also ban the use of funding to teach “critical race theory,” although the concept is not defined.

Since Democrats control the Senate and White House, the deep cuts appear unlikely to be enacted. Even some Republicans may blanch at the idea, which would lead to spending reductions in their own districts’ schools. Still, the move highlights Republicans’ growing critique of American public schools — in how they’re funded, what they teach, and how they responded to the pandemic.

“While Title I grants do support school districts everywhere, including rural schools in districts like my own, these funds disproportionately support big city public schools: the same public schools that failed to educate the most-vulnerable children entrusted to them, by closing their doors for almost two years,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, a Republican from Alabama, said in a subcommittee hearing Friday.

It also underscores just how far apart the two parties have moved on education issues: President Joe Biden has sought to dramatically increase Title I funding.

“I don’t think this can pass Congress, but it’s incredibly concerning that this is what the leaders of this committee think is a reasonable thing for Congress to do,” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of education associations that supports more money for schools.

The House proposal represents an initial volley in how much to fund various federal programs in the upcoming fiscal year. The cuts to Title I are justified, Republicans on the subcommittee said in a messaging document, because some COVID relief funding provided to schools ”remains unspent and further investments will not be provided until these funds are used responsibly.” A major chunk of the proposed cut would come by rescinding Title I money that was approved by Congress last year.

House Republicans are also seeking to eliminate Title II, which among other things provides professional development to teachers — or as the subcommittee’s Republican members put it, “teacher training programs that send teachers to expensive weekend workshops.”

The proposal would hold steady funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which helps schools educate students with disabilities. It would also provide a modest boost for the federal Charter Schools Program, which supports the expansion of charter schools.

Although the legislation received initial approval from subcommittee Republicans, it’s a long way from being enacted. Any final spending law will have to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president.

What is clear is that the big education funding increases that Biden initially hoped after being elected for will not be forthcoming: The president has already made a deal with Republicans to limit discretionary federal spending, including for education.

The vast majority of money that schools receive come from state and local sources. Funded most recently at $18.4 billion, Title I accounts for a small share of the several hundred billion spent on education each year. But by design, the money flows disproportionately to schools serving more students from low-income backgrounds. That means any cut to Title I would hit those schools hardest. It would also have a larger impact on schools serving more students of color.

The proposal would affect district, charter, and private school students alike. (Private school students in poverty receive Title I services provided by their local district in coordination with the student’s school.)

How Title I funding is used varies from school to school. But it typically supports instruction for students from low-income families, including by hiring more teachers to reduce class size, adding class time, and providing coaching to help teachers improve. Most research has found that more money for schools boosts student performance. Studies on Title I in particular are more limited and mixed, though.

Republicans link COVID aid with Title I cut

House Republicans’ effort to cut Title I appears motivated by the fact that schools have received large sums of federal COVID relief money, which was distributed through the Title I formula. The biggest tranche came from the Biden-championed American Rescue Plan. Republicans have questioned whether that money has been used effectively and suggested that schools have been slow to spend it. Republicans have also voiced concern that high levels of federal spending have contributed to inflation, which some research supports.

Nat Malkus, a fellow at the American Enterprise, a conservative think tank, said some of these concerns are legitimate. “Boatloads of money went out in ARP, more than school districts were ready to use effectively and without any of the guardrails that could guide the spending,” he said.

School officials, on the other hand, say that the money has provided crucial support throughout the pandemic. And they now appear to be on track to spend down the relief dollars as part of a multi-year plan. They have until fall of 2024 to do so, and may seek extensions.

“They haven’t spent it all yet because they didn’t have to,” said Abernathy. “If you want to give local control, that’s what happens.”

House Democrats predicted that if the Republican bill were enacted, it would result in tens of thousands of teachers losing their jobs. “We are witnessing a widespread attack on public education that should horrify all of us,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. A number of education groups also condemned the proposal.

Malkus agreed that if the cuts are ultimately enacted it would have harmful effects. “There’s no doubt that it’s going to hurt students,” he said. But he also emphasized that the proposal faces long odds and perhaps should be seen as more of a messaging document: “It’s something that you should take seriously, but not literally.”

Title I was enacted in 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson as an effort to improve the education of disadvantaged children by providing additional funding to their schools. Ever since, various Republicans — including presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump — have been trying to cut or eliminate the program.

In 2020, Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos proposed combining Title I and other federal education programs into a sharply reduced block grant that districts could spend as they see fit.

But Title I has persisted, even when Republicans have fully controlled the federal government, in part because it has developed a constituency of teachers and school administrators who support the program. And most school districts in the country receive some Title I funding. Even many Republicans have been loath to back cuts in funding to their local schools.

“It’s a program that a lot of schools get,” said Abernathy. “It is generally very hard to slash funding for big formula programs that go to most Congressmembers’ constituents.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Recent school year saw little academic recovery, new study finds

2023-07-11T04:01:00+00:00

There’s been little, if any, progress making up large learning gaps that have emerged since the onset of the pandemic, according to a new analysis of data from the testing group NWEA.

In the 2022-23 school year, students learned at a similar or slower rate compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year, the analysis found. This left intact the substantial learning losses, which have barely budged since the spring of 2021.

NWEA offers only one data point based on a subset of American students, and more data from other exams will be needed to produce a clearer picture of academic progress during this last school year. Still, NWEA’s analysis is a concerning indication that the steep learning losses seen since the pandemic have proven difficult to ameliorate and could have lasting consequences for students and the country.

The results are “somber and sobering,” said NWEA researcher Karyn Lewis. “Whatever we’re doing, it’s not enough,” she said. “The magnitude of the crisis is out of alignment with the scope and scale of the response and we need to do more.”

Since the onset of the COVID pandemic, NWEA, which develops and sells tests to schools, has been measuring students’ progress on math and reading exams in grades three through eight. By the spring of 2021 — according to NWEA and a string of other tests — the typical student was far behind where they would normally be. Test score gaps by race and family income, already yawning, had grown in many cases. This coincided with dramatic disruptions outside and inside schools, including extended virtual instruction. Students were learning during that time — but much more slowly than usual.

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, NWEA offered some reason for optimism. Gaps were still there, but students in many grades had started to slowly make up ground. Learning during the school year was back to normal, perhaps even a bit better than normal. State tests also indicated that students were starting to catch up.

But NWEA’s results from the most recent school year are more pessimistic. For reasons that aren’t clear, progress stalled out, even reversed. In most grades and subjects, students actually learned at a slightly slower rate than usual. Growth in middle school reading was particularly sluggish.

In no grade or subject was there evidence of substantial catch-up this year. Instead, the learning gap this spring was not much different than in the spring of 2021, according to NWEA. Students of all types remain behind, but NWEA shows that Black and Hispanic students have been hurt somewhat more than white and Asian American students.

“This is not what we were hoping to see and it’s not the message we want to be sharing at this time,” said Lewis. “But the data are what they are.”

Frustratingly, though, the data does not come with a clear explanation.

Schools were beset with challenges this past year: Chronic absenteeism remained at an alarmingly high level in many places. More teachers left the classroom than usual. Educators reported difficulties managing students’ behavior and supporting their mental health.

But it’s not clear why there was more progress in the 2021-22 school year, which was also an unusually taxing year in many ways, according to teachers. Lewis said this was puzzling, but speculated that an initial burst of motivation upon returning to school buildings had fizzled.

Learning loss recovery efforts have also run into hurdles. Tutoring has reached only a small subset of students. Few districts have extended the school day or year to guarantee all students more learning time.

But NWEA researchers cautioned that their data cannot speak directly to the effectiveness or particular recovery efforts or to the federal COVID relief money more generally. “We have no access to the counterfactual of what life would be like right now absent those funds — I think it would be much more dire,” said Lewis.

It’s also possible that some combination of out-of-school factors may be driving trends in student learning. Researchers have long noted that a complex array of variables outside of schools’ control matters a great deal for student learning.

What the NWEA study does suggest is that students are not on track to catch up to where they would have been if not for the pandemic. Lewis says the takeaway is that policymakers and schools simply aren’t doing enough. “If you give someone half a Tylenol for a migraine and expect them to feel better, that’s just not reality,” she said.

NWEA’s analysis is based on data from millions of students in thousands of public schools. Outcomes may not be representative of all students or schools, though, since the exam’s administration is voluntary.

NWEA researchers say other data would be helpful to confirm the results. That could come soon: State test results from this year are beginning to emerge and other testing companies will be releasing their own data.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

What did a big new study of charter schools really find?

2023-07-05T11:00:00+00:00

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In the small world of education research, the Stanford-based institute CREDO is a big name.

The organization has produced a series of much-cited, oft-debated studies on charter school performance since 2009.

Its latest research, released in June, concluded that charter schools outperform district schools on both reading and math exams. The results have drawn significant attention: The Wall Street Journal editorial board, for instance claimed the findings are “unequivocal” and show that charter schools are “blowing away their traditional school competition in student performance.”

The study is likely to be a key data point for years to come in continued policy debates over charter schools. But are the results as conclusive as the Journal and others have suggested? Not quite.

The research provides credible evidence that charter schools now have a test-score edge over district schools, although the advantage is small. But CREDO’s methods — which other researchers say have significant limitations — mean the conclusions should be viewed with some caution. Moreover, CREDO’s description of “gap-busting” charter schools may be widely misinterpreted.

CREDO: Charter schools have small performance edge

CREDO researchers draw on a vast swath of data across 29 states plus Washington D.C. to compare students’ academic growth in charter and district schools from the school years 2014-15 to 2018-19. CREDO concludes that achievement growth is, on average, higher in charter schools.

How much higher? Charter schools add 16 days of learning in reading and six days in math, CREDO says. This “days of learning” metric is controversial among researchers, though, and hard to interpret.

Here’s another way of thinking about the same results: CREDO found that attending a charter school for one year would raise the average student’s math scores from the 50th percentile to the 50.4 percentile and reading scores to the 51st percentile. By conventional research standards and common sense, these impacts are small.

“Generally, those aren’t seen as big effects,” said Ron Zimmer, a professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied charter schools. “They’re modest.”

That said, moving the needle on educational achievement even slightly is challenging, and these effects apply across a large swath of students who attended charter schools.

The charter effect varies widely across the U.S.

Generally, charter schools in the Northeast, including New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, posted larger test scores gains, according to CREDO. Charter networks outperformed stand-alone schools. Some of these networks improved test scores quite substantially, which is consistent with prior research looking at so-called “no excuses” charter schools, such as KIPP.

Overall, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students seemed to benefit more from attending a charter school. Here, the size of improvement might be described as small to moderate.

On the other hand, virtual charter schools had large negative effects, according to CREDO. Notably, since the pandemic these schools have expanded substantially. (CREDO’s data did not include any post-pandemic years.) Students with disabilities also appeared to perform worse in charter schools than in district schools.

CREDO’s methods come with important caveats

CREDO reaches its conclusions by matching charter school students with one or more “virtual twins” from a nearby district school. The “twins” are other students who have a similar set of characteristics, including test scores and free-or-reduced price lunch status (a proxy for family income). Then the researchers compare test score growth across millions of students in charter schools versus their virtual twins in district schools.

CREDO’s methods are a serious attempt to understand the effects of charter schools, but this strategy has limitations that are well-known among researchers. The basic problem is that the “virtual twin” approach does not guarantee a truly apples-to-apples comparison.

For instance, CREDO researchers compare two students who both have a disability — but those students may have very different types of disabilities. CREDO also cannot directly account for numerous other factors such as student or parent motivation that may lead to enrollment in charter schools.

These methods may be particularly problematic for examining students in unusual situations, such as those who opt for virtual schools because of personal challenges like bullying or illness. (Another problem is that CREDO has to exclude one in five charter students because they can’t find a suitable “virtual twin.” We don’t know if those students would shift the overall findings.)

Macke Raymond, the director of CREDO, says she is confident in the center’s findings but acknowledges that the methods are constrained by the data.

”There is no way with the amount of data that is available to researchers that we can measure every single possible dimension of all students and their backgrounds,” she said.

CREDO’s prior analysis suggests potential for small bias in results

No research method is perfect, so it is common for researchers to subject their conclusions to a battery of statistical tests to confirm the results.

CREDO did not do this in its most recent study. Instead it features an appendix from a 2013 study that compared findings from its main “virtual twin” method to those from a different, commonly used statistical approach. CREDO showed that the results from these two methods were not far off from each other.

But they were not identical. The CREDO researchers found in 2013 that charter schools had slightly worse results under the alternative method — by about 12 days of learning in math, to use the study’s metric. Again, this difference was small, but a shift of 12 days of learning would be enough to flip the recent math results from slightly positive to slightly negative.

James L. Woodworth, a researcher at CREDO, acknowledged this point, but said the alternative method was not necessarily preferable to the main model. CREDO also points to analyses by other researchers who have shown that its findings are fairly close to those of other methods. As for not doing further checks in the most recent study, Woodworth said, “We felt we had done our due diligence.”

Zimmer, the University of Kentucky researcher, says there is no perfect way to study the effects of charter schools and that CREDO’s approach is defensible. But he said the study would have benefitted from additional tests to support its results.

“It sure would be nice to say, here’s our model and here’s what we’re relying on, and we also checked it in other ways to see if it came to similar substantive conclusions,” he said.

CREDO’s description of ‘gap-busting’ schools may be misunderstood

One particularly evocative conclusion from CREDO’s latest study is its description of “gap-busting” or “gap-closing” charter schools. “These ‘gap-busting schools’ show that disparate student outcomes are not a foregone conclusion: people and resources can be organized to eliminate these disparities,” CREDO researchers write. “The fact that thousands of schools have done so removes any doubt.”

Typically when people talk about the “achievement gap,” they mean disparities in absolute levels of performance between, for instance, low-income and more affluent students. But that’s not how CREDO defines these gaps.

CREDO considers a “gap-busting” school one with overall achievement above the state average and where the historically disadvantaged students make similar levels of growth as more advantaged students in the same school.

A school could meet this definition without closing gaps in student outcomes, though. Research has long shown that students from low-income families, on average, enter school with lower achievement levels compared to better-off peers. That means that similar rates of growth would not eliminate disparities in performance. CREDO does not examine whether actual gaps in overall achievement had closed in the schools it defines as “gap-busting.”

“A lot of those schools where we’re not seeing a growth gap, they’re still going to have an achievement gap,” said Woodworth.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

9 big ideas to bolster the teaching profession and boost student learning

2023-06-28T11:00:00+00:00

This is part two in a two-part series. Part one focused on four major challenges facing the teaching profession. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get these stories and more delivered straight to your inbox.

America’s schools face a number of warning signs about the teaching profession: higher turnover, lower morale, declining interest in the profession among college students, persistent shortages in certain subjects. These problems could have big consequences for students.

“I don’t want to sound alarmist, but it’s been bad,” said Luis Rodriguez, an education researcher at New York University. “The concerning thing is that we as a nation aren’t doing anything systematic to address some of these causes.”

So what should policymakers do?

Chalkbeat reviewed dozens of studies and spoke to a number of researchers and teachers. Although there are no foolproof answers for strengthening the profession and improving teacher quality, the following are some ideas that research suggests might help.

Raise early- and mid-career teacher salaries

There is substantial evidence suggesting that higher pay attracts more talented people into the classroom and keeps them there. But teachers’ take-home pay has fallen further and further behind other college-educated workers’. Surveys show that relatively low pay is a source of frustration among teachers and deters college and high school students from choosing the profession.

A higher starting salary may be a particularly good way to draw new people into teaching. Raising salaries beyond the first year and through the middle of teachers’ careers is also important, both for attracting new teachers and retaining existing ones. Some research finds that schools are most likely to lose effective teachers after the first couple years in the classroom.

One way to raise salaries might be to shift some of teachers’ compensation from benefits to take home pay. Teachers receive a greater fraction of pay through benefits compared to other workers, and retirement benefits make teacher compensation heavily backloaded. This might be unappealing to people considering teaching and may cause them to underestimate total teacher pay.

“I think right now current compensation overweights investments in career teachers’ long-term benefits and under-invests in the first year teacher’s starting salary — we back-weight the benefits,” said Matthew Kraft, an education researcher at Brown University.

Pay teachers more in shortage areas

Severe teacher shortages tend to be clustered in certain schools and subjects — often high-poverty schools and subjects like math, science, and special education.

Again, pay can help solve this problem. Schools might consider targeted salary increases for those shortage areas. This approach is surprisingly rare, but research shows it can work to draw in and keep teachers. This, in turn, has been shown to boost student learning in some cases.

One recent study examined a Dallas program that offered large bonuses for teachers to work in struggling schools. The initiative drew an influx of new teachers and boosted student test scores. However, once the bonus program ended, student achievement fell as effective teachers were more likely to leave. That suggests that to make a sustained difference, schools should consider sustained salary increases rather than temporary stipends.

“We have a lot of pretty good, compelling evidence that it can work,” said Rodriguez, who has studied salary incentives in Tennessee.

Turn the first year in the classroom into an apprenticeship

One of the most consistent findings in education research is an intuitive one: Teachers struggle the most in their first year. New teachers are especially likely to leave the classroom, too. To a degree, this is natural. Experience matters. But what is unusual about teaching is its flat structure. New teachers are often doing the exact same job as their veteran colleague across the hall.

“It was a little rough coming from other jobs in the past where you have a little bit more transition time,” said Michele Koopman, who recently switched careers to enter teaching. “Here it was like: Here’s the key to your classroom, good luck.”

New teachers might benefit if their first year in the classroom is reinvented into more of an apprenticeship. This could be structured in different ways, but the key would be to give teachers a lighter workload — perhaps half as many classes to teach — and a dedicated mentor or coach. Research shows teachers learn from colleagues and benefit from quality mentorship and coaching.

Assign teachers to students more strategically

The benefit of teaching experience is not just about time in the classroom; it’s also about experience working in a specific grade or subject or with specific students. A number of studies have found that teachers perform better when they remain teaching the same grade or subject in back-to-back years. This may also reduce teacher turnover.

Teachers regularly switch between grades or even subjects from year to year. One study in New York City found that more than 1 in 5 teachers switched roles within the same school. In some cases, there may be good reasons for that. But school leaders might also not appreciate the costs of constant teacher churn.

If teachers do switch grades, they perform better if they follow the same group of students up to the next grade, a practice known as “looping.”

Policymakers might consider trying to disseminate information about looping and grade stability and creating incentives to encourage these practices.

Provide teachers with a strong curriculum

Teachers have many responsibilities — often including cobbling together their own lessons and curriculum. Schools could help ease teacher workload by providing quality curriculum and lesson materials that ensure teachers are not creating their own from scratch. One study found that simply providing middle-school math teachers with access to off-the-shelf lessons boosted student learning.

Koopman, who teaches in west central Illinois, said she didn’t have a math curriculum until half way through her first year as a special education teacher. “So many teachers too don’t feel like they have a great, full curriculum to use, and then they’re constantly trying to find other things to supplement,” she said.

Give teachers more support to manage student discipline

One recent survey asked teachers what their schools could do to support their mental well-being. Among nearly two dozen options, the second most common response was “more/better support for student discipline–related issues.” Sixty-two percent of teachers said this would help (which was only slightly behind a pay increase). This aligns with numerous anecdotal reports from teachers describing heightened challenges with student behavior and mental health since the pandemic.

Research does not provide simple solutions to this challenge — neither school suspensions nor an alternative of restorative justice has a proven track record, according to existing studies. Schools might consider investing in other support staff, like counselors and social workers, who may reduce disciplinary incidents and are valued by teachers. Schools could consider instituting school-wide behavioral support systems. They could also target extra support to the small number of teachers who appear to have major challenges managing student behavior. And policymakers could experiment and study new approaches to provide schools with actionable ideas.

Ease the teacher certification bureaucracy

Unnecessary or overly bureaucratic teacher licensure rules can keep good teachers out of the classroom and contribute to teacher shortages.

Many states, for instance, make it cumbersome for out-of-state teachers to get certified. But there is little evidence this is beneficial. In fact, some studies suggest it’s actively harmful to student learning by limiting the supply of teachers. In one survey of former teachers, over 40% listed a lack of certification reciprocity between states as one factor that would make it more likely they would return to the classroom.

Simply fixing bureaucratic challenges may help, too. Many former teachers say that “easier and less costly renewal of certification” might lure them back.

Prioritize recruiting and retaining teachers of color

A large body of evidence suggests that students of color, especially Black students, benefit from having teachers of the same race. And yet the share of teachers of color lag far behind the share of students of color.

This diversity gap starts early in the teacher pipeline. College graduates of color are much less likely to enter teaching than white college graduates. This gap has actually grown with successive generations of teachers. This suggests that schools of education could do a far better job recruiting people of color into the profession.

Teachers of color also often have higher turnover rates because they work in higher-needs schools. Targeted incentive pay, as mentioned above, might help. So could improving working conditions and recruiting more diverse principals.

States could also experiment with reducing certification barriers, including licensure tests, that disproportionately exclude teachers of color. Some states waived certain requirements during the pandemic and should carefully examine the consequences of this move.

Consider alternatives to seniority-based layoffs

Education budgets are in flux right now. With COVID relief money running out, some districts may face teacher layoffs in coming years, particularly if politicians don’t step up with additional funding. In some places, the teachers’ contract stipulates that layoffs be done in reverse seniority: last in, first out or LIFO.

Research suggests that this has harmful consequences. First, it requires more layoffs since less experienced teachers are lower paid. Second, such layoffs often disproportionately impact teachers of color. Third, this approach typically means high-poverty schools lose more teachers (since they usually have more novice staff). Fourth, LIFO may deter new entrants into teaching who fear they will quickly lose their jobs in the event of cutbacks. Finally, schools end up losing a number of effective early career teachers.

“LIFO layoff policies are inequitable, lead to more total job losses, and undercut efforts to recruit talented and diverse teachers,” wrote one pair of researchers after reviewing the evidence.

Districts might consider changing policies or contracts to consider a broader set of criteria when layoffs are necessary, including teacher performance and school-level needs.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

The teaching profession is facing a post-pandemic crisis

2023-06-27T11:00:00+00:00

This is part one in a two-part series. The second part focuses on potential solutions to challenges faced by the teaching profession. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get these stories and more delivered straight to your inbox.

Howard McLean is worried.

The superintendent of a rural school district 50 miles outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, McLean is not sure how he is going to be able to fill every classroom next year with a qualified teacher. He’s considering some drastic alternatives, like having a certified teacher instruct students virtually while an aide supervises the class in person.

The issue is not altogether new for Anson County schools, which as a high-poverty rural community is doubly disadvantaged in the hunt for talent. But McLean said the challenges have heightened since the pandemic destabilized schools and demoralized teachers. He faces a daunting equation: More teachers are leaving and fewer are applying for open positions.

“The pandemic created a perfect storm for us,” he said. “The results are: public education, we’re in trouble.”

Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic, and are sometimes overblown. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.

More teachers really have left the classroom, according to a new Chalkbeat analysis of data, the most thorough national look at teacher turnover to date. A number of them, including North Carolina, saw more teachers exit last year than any time in recent memory. Teachers who remain appear demoralized and stressed. Fewer young people want to join the profession. And there are long-standing shortages in certain subjects and schools.

“We are in an acutely serious and severe moment for the health of the teaching profession,” said Matthew Kraft, a Brown University researcher who co-authored a recent study titled “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession.” The study showed that across an array of metrics, the profession was “at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.”

These problems could get better as the pandemic recedes and policymakers respond, or they could shape a generation of teachers and their students.

More teachers left the classroom last year, new data confirms

In the first couple years of the pandemic, teacher turnover didn’t look much different than normal: down a bit in the summer of 2020, then up a bit the next year.

But more recently the story changed, as data has trickled in in the last few months. Chalkbeat obtained numbers from 15 states: Every single one showed an increase in teachers exiting the classroom, compared to the year before the pandemic. A number of individual districts have also reported jumps in teachers leaving.

In some cases this change was small, but in many states, more teachers left than any other year on record.

Consider Texas, a large state that now employs over 370,000 teachers. In the decade before the pandemic, just over 10% of the state’s teachers (35,000 people, give or take) departed each year. The numbers were strikingly consistent. But going into this most recent school year, turnover jumped to 13.4%. That meant the state lost nearly 50,000 teachers, by far the highest since at least 2007, the last year on record.

Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Washington all also saw more teachers leave than at any point on record. So did Iowa and Virginia after the summer of 2021. (More recent data in those two states is not available.)

“We were surprised to see that change coming in now, a couple years out,” said Sarah Fuller, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, who co-authored a report on the state’s turnover rate.

Bailey Fern, who taught elementary school in the Denver area until last year, said it wasn’t one thing that pushed her out of the classroom. It was the constant demands of the job. It was the lockdown drills that made her fearful of a school shooting. It was the feeling that she wasn’t equipped to give her students the support that they needed.

She recalls one incident when a student had an emotional breakdown in the middle of class. “He lost it. He was crying really, really hard. And then I started crying,” she said. “I was like I don’t know how to help him. All the social workers were gone and not available.”

“It just wrecked me,” she said. Fern left teaching after five years and now works in IT at a nonprofit. “And I love it — much, much better.”

Teacher turnover has a disruptive effect on schools. When a teacher like Fern leaves, students lose a trusted face, the school loses institutional knowledge, and the remaining teachers often shuffle between grades. Not surprisingly, researchers have linked the loss of teachers to lower student test scores.

Teacher morale has dropped sharply since the pandemic

Teachers have been experiencing higher stress and lower morale since the start of the pandemic, according to multiple surveys.

There’s been a steep drop in teachers saying they’re enthusiastic about their work or that the stress of the job is worth it, for instance. Nearly three-quarters said that the 2021-22 school year was one of the worst in their careers. Another survey from 2021 found that teachers had experienced higher levels of job-related stress than most other workers.

Some teachers say they’re struggling with more student misbehavior and classroom disruptions. Others feel that they’ve been villainized in the political discourse. Some are frustrated at what they see as a rising workload.

Have things gotten any better of late? Perhaps. A RAND poll found that teachers’ job stress had dropped back down to pre-pandemic levels, but was still higher than other workers. A recent Education Week survey found that 20% of teachers were very satisfied with their job. This was an increase from 12% last year, but it was still much lower than in prior years.

Carrie Dennis, an eighth-grade science teacher in San Antonio, Texas, says she and colleagues have been much more stressed than usual. “This most recent school year was one of the harder ones coming back from COVID,” she said.

Students, she said, got used to laxer academic standards and doing school virtually. The transition has been tough for them and their teachers. Ultimately, Dennis said, teachers’ own struggles enter their classrooms. “The whole reason you get into this is to help others,” she said. “If you’re not good, you can’t help others.”

Higher stress also means teachers are taking more days off, which is then putting more of a load on colleagues, especially since there’s a shortage of substitutes.

The news is not all dire. One poll found that most teachers planned to stay in the classroom their whole career. Another recent survey found that most teachers were still glad that they went into teaching. Dennis counts herself in this group.

But would she recommend the profession to someone considering their options? It depends, and it would come with a warning. “It is a grueling schedule when we’re in session,” she said. “You have to be willing to struggle with these kids.”

Fewer people want to become teachers

Since 2006, the number of people earning a teaching license has plummeted — from over 320,000 to 215,000, according to an analysis of federal data by Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon, a professor at University at Albany. A separate analysis showed that the number of people training to become teachers has fallen from a peak of 700,000 in 2009 to just over 400,000 in 2020.

Data through 2020 suggests this decline in teacher supply has stopped but not come close to rebounding. There’s little indication that it will bounce back any time soon. Surveys show that fewer college and high school students are interested in teaching careers. There’s even been a persistent drop in the share of parents who want their kids to go into teaching. Last year, just 37% of parents said they wanted their children to go into teaching, the lowest since the question was first asked more than five decades ago.

Why do fewer people want to be teachers? Researchers don’t have definitive answers, though many point out that teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind those of other college-educated workers.

Whatever the reason, the results are concerning. “If a friend says, are you worried about the prestige and desirability of the teaching profession? My answer would be yes,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington.

In extreme cases, this might mean schools do not hire as many teachers as they might like or fill jobs with long-term substitutes. In North Carolina, for instance, far more teachers left than were hired last year.

Texas, on the other hand, was able to hire more than enough teachers to replace those who left last year (despite the higher exit rate). Even then, the decline in supply is worrying. School leaders nationally have reported having a harder time filling empty teaching roles in 2020 compared to 2011. States might then lower their standards for who becomes a teacher, and schools might end up hiring someone who isn’t a good fit.

Hiring challenges could get better as COVID relief money runs out and schools have less money to bring on new staff. But the problem could remain if higher turnover rates persist.

Some schools and subjects have longed faced major shortages — and continue to

The challenges facing the teaching profession are not spread evenly across subjects and schools, though.

Schools face persistent challenges hiring in certain subject areas — typically special education, English as a second language, math, and science. One national survey from 2020 found that school officials were two to three times as likely to say they struggled to fill open positions in those areas, compared to social studies, English, and general elementary education.

High-poverty schools also face particular hurdles in attracting and keeping staff. Teachers in those schools leave more frequently, creating harmful churn. This problem is not new. A recent analysis in Virginia found that the highest-poverty schools lost more teachers than the most affluent schools all eight years before the pandemic and in the years after. A study in Washington state showed an identical pattern.

“If it’s a crisis now because attrition is up,” said Goldhaber, “well then it’s always a crisis when you look at the differential between high- and low-poverty schools.”

This helps explain why McLean, the North Carolina superintendent, is worried that his high-needs, rural district will bear the brunt of the teaching staffing challenges in the state. “We’re competing for the same teachers,” he said. “Somebody’s going to be left out.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Supreme Court won’t weigh in on whether charter schools are legally private or public

2023-06-26T14:14:57+00:00

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a case that hinged on whether charter schools are considered public or private.

The decision to punt indicates the highest court won’t offer an early hint on the validity of religious charter schools. It also leaves in place a patchwork of rulings on whether charter schools are considered private or public for legal purposes.

But the legal debates are not over.

“The issue will percolate and the Supreme Court will eventually hear a case,” predicted Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut.

The case, Charter Day School. v. Peltier, focused on a dispute over a charter school’s dress code. The “classical” school in southeastern North Carolina had barred girls from wearing pants, as a part of an effort to promote “chivalry,” according to its founder.

Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, some parents sued over this policy. They argued that the dress code amounted to sex-based discrimination and is illegal under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The school countered that it is not a government-run institution so is not bound by the Constitution, which does not apply to private organizations. (Charter Day also maintains that the dress code is not sexist.)

Last year, a divided circuit court sided with the parents. The majority ruled that charter schools, at least in North Carolina, are bound by the Constitution and that the dress code amounted to illegal discrimination.

The charter school appealed to the Supreme Court. Attorneys for the Biden administration argued that the lower court decision was correct and urged the court to accept that ruling. A string of conservative writers and groups had urged the court to take on the case.

On Monday, though, the Supreme Court declined to grant a hearing, leaving the circuit court decision in place. This indicates that there were not four justices who wanted to take on the case. As is typical, the court did not issue any further comment.

The case turned on whether Charter Day School is a private entity or a public “state actor.” This issue is also crucial for the brewing legal dispute over religious charter schools. If charter schools are state actors then they likely cannot be religious. If they are private, though, religious entities would have a stronger case for running charter schools. These debates will likely be tested in Oklahoma, which recently approved what could be the country’s first religious charter school. Ultimately, this may end up being sorted out via years of litigation — which could end up back at the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the court’s decision to pass on the case is a win for the parents who sought to change the North Carolina charter school’s dress codes.

“Courts may not subjugate the constitutional rights of these public-school children to the facade of school choice,” concluded the majority opinion for the Fourth Circuit court of appeals.

The majority also noted that the school’s founder said the dress code was intended to promote “chivalry,” including the idea that women should be “regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.” The court responded: “It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of a rationale based on impermissible gender stereotypes.“

The circuit court ruling applies to North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Appeals courts elsewhere, though, have found that charter schools are private for certain purposes.

The school itself and allies had suggested that the decision would chill innovation in the charter sector. It would limit charter schools’ “autonomy, subjecting them to the same rules, regulations and political machinations that have crippled government-run school systems,” wrote Charter Day leaders in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

Leading national charter school groups disagreed. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers have maintained that charter schools are fully public and thus the constitution applies. Both groups have said they support the parents over the charter school in this case.

On Monday, the Alliance praised the Supreme Court’s decision not to take the North Carolina case. “We are pleased that the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case, allowing the Fourth Circuit’s decision to stand,” Nina Rees, the group’s president and CEO said in a statement. “The actions of the high court affirm that as public school students, charter school students are entitled to the same federal protections as their counterparts who attend district schools.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Latest national test results show striking drop in 13-year-olds’ math and reading scores

2023-06-21T04:01:00+00:00

American 13-year-olds remain far behind in key math and reading skills, according to the latest data from a long-running national test.

Scores were substantially lower in the fall of 2022 compared to the last time the test was administered three years earlier. Making matters worse, even before the pandemic hit, 13-year-olds had lost ground on the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP.

That adds up to a striking collapse in achievement scores since 2012, after decades of progress in math and modest gains in reading. In reading, 13-year-olds scored about the same as those who took the test in 1971, when it was first administered. Math scores were now comparable to those in 1992.

The data is just the latest evidence that the pandemic and school closures exacted a steep toll on student learning. These scores do not shed light on whether schools have made any progress in closing these learning gaps, since they offer only a snapshot in time. Other analyses show that students have made up some of what they have lost. Regardless, the new data suggest that most students remain far back from where they would normally be if not for the pandemic.

“The learning disruption further undermined the development of basic skills that students need at this age,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the arm of the U.S. Department of Education that administers the exam. “This is a huge scale of challenge that faces the nation today.”

Tuesday’s results come from NAEP’s long-term trend exam, which has tested students’ basic skills since the 1970s. Between October and December of last year, the test was given to a representative sample of 13-year-old students, who are typically in seventh or eighth grade.

These students scored nine points worse in math and four points worse in reading, compared to 13-year-olds in 2020. That year marked a notable decline compared to 2012, the high point of scores on both tests.

For instance, in 2012, 85% of 13-year-olds had demonstrated skills in basic problem solving and math operations, like multiplication. In 2020, that number fell to 79% and now is at 71%.

The declines affected large swaths of students, but Black 13-year-olds saw particularly steep drops in both subjects. The gap between the lowest- and highest-performing students also widened — continuing a pre-pandemic trend that has alarmed and befuddled experts. (Unlike the main NAEP exam, these results are not broken down by state or city.)

In a survey accompanying the test, students reported being absent from school far more frequently and reading for pleasure less often.

The test score results align with a variety of other assessments, including NAEP’s long term trend tests of 9-year-olds and the main NAEP given to fourth and eighth graders. This and other data have told a consistent story:

Since the pandemic, students have learned at a slower rate than usual, creating a gap compared to their expected trajectory, dubbed by many as “learning loss.”
This learning loss has applied across student groups, states, and school types — but in general, historically disadvantaged students have fallen further behind.
Students in schools that spent more time in remote learning typically have lost more ground. It’s not clear what other factors explain why some schools have done better or worse, though.

“It’s really a body of evidence that is setting up an urgency for the need for policymakers, for researchers to figure out what we need to do moving forward,” said Mark Miller, an eighth grade math teacher and a former member of the board that oversees NAEP.

Standardized tests are only one measure of academic achievement, but these scores matter because they are predictive of students’ — and the country’s — success. One recent study found that state scores on a separate NAEP eighth-grade math test predicted high school graduation, adult income, and incarceration rates.

Through the fall of last year, students appear to have recovered some — but not nearly all — of the lost ground. An analysis by NWEA, a testing company, tracked students’ progress through the beginning of this school year. The group found that students had made up between 10% and 40% of learning loss depending on the grade and subject. (Students in eighth grade, which most closely corresponds to the 13-year-olds tested by NAEP, were on the lower end of this range.) A separate study using state tests from last year found similar results.

“Even with continued rebounding, student achievement remains lower than in a typical year and full recovery is likely still several years away,” wrote NWEA researchers.

Supported by tens of billions of dollars in federal money, schools have launched a variety of catch-up strategies, including summer school, small-group tutoring, and hiring more teachers and other staff. Although there has been evidence of modest recovery, researchers say it’s not yet clear how successful particular approaches have been. “There is nothing in this data that tells us what is working,” said Carr, referring to the recent results.

A recent Chalkbeat analysis found that many large districts’ tutoring programs have reached less than 10% of students. A popular online tutoring program has also had low uptake. Adding extra time to the typical school day or year has been rare, and some experts fear that optional programming will not reach students most in need of help. Still, the NWEA analysis found that students lost less-than-usual academic ground in the summer of 2022, which could be due to extra summer programming.

Miller, who teaches in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said his school has used COVID relief money to ensure all students now have a computer or tablet, to offer free summer credit recovery, and to provide after-school tutoring. He’s seen some of his students improve from the after-school help through the extra time and practice. “If they get it in the morning of my class and the afternoon again, it’s beneficial,” he said.

In his own class this year, Miller intentionally focused on building relationships to get students bought into his lessons. He says it paid off: “I was able to get kids to engage in mathematics more so, not because they loved the math, but because we had built a trusting relationship where they were willing to work and put in some extra effort and time for me.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Should struggling students be held back a grade? Why researchers don’t have a clear answer.

2023-06-12T21:25:39+00:00

Holding kids back a grade has always been controversial practice, even as it’s had an enduring appeal to policymakers.

Of late, there’s been more attention to improving young children’s reading skills — including by limiting “social promotion” and requiring struggling readers to repeat third grade. Mississippi in particular has been held up as a success story, since the state saw substantial growth in fourth-grade reading scores before the pandemic, even as the country as a whole has flatlined. Officials there credit the state’s third-grade retention policy. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called this “perhaps the most important single element” of Mississippi’s apparent success. Other states, including Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana, have recently adopted or are considering tougher retention laws.

But these policies are often unpopular with educators and parents of kids who might be held back. Critics argue that retaining students doesn’t help and may end up hurting them. Some contend that the practice isn’t applied fairly. Not all states are moving in this direction either. Earlier this year, Michigan rolled back its third-grade retention law amid concerns that it was unfair and ineffective.

So who’s right? Well, that’s the problem. Despite decades of research, there’s no clear answer on whether grade retention in early grades is a good idea. Existing data is open to competing interpretations, and big questions about the policy remain unanswered.

Brian Jacob, a professor at University of Michigan, has studied retention for many years, but he still is ambivalent about the policy. “I do really come out kind of in the middle,” he said.

While middle-school retention seems to be harmful, said Marcus Winters, a professor at Boston University, “The evidence on grade retention in the earlier grades is more ambiguous at this point. We have some places where we see some pretty meaningful positive effects and other places where we haven’t seen those positive effects.”

Retention appears to boost test scores – at least in the short term.

Researchers have developed a clever way to study the effects of grade retention. Since schools often use a pass–fail test threshold to determine whether a student should be held back, studies can compare students who scored just below that benchmark to those just above. The students are nearly identical — except one group is held back a grade, while the other moves forward. Researchers call this a natural experiment. (There are often exceptions below the cutoff that allow students to still be promoted, but there are ways to account for this. Also these studies focus on test-based retention policies; they don’t look at school-driven decisions to hold students back, which may be more common.)

This is the strategy of a recent paper from Mississippi, co-authored by Winters, who has studied retention policies for decades. Third grade students who were held back scored substantially higher on reading exams up through sixth grade compared to similar students who weren’t retained, the study found. (There was no apparent effect in math or attendance rates.) Studies in Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and New York City have also found test score gains from retention. Often these gains are quite large.

These results are not too surprising. Retained students have an additional year of school and are a year older than the non-retained kids when they take a grade-level test. That means that age, natural development, and more time in class might explain the higher scores. That is part of the idea behind retention: giving students extra time to learn.

Another potential explanation is that retention policies aren’t just about retention. The Mississippi researchers note that “schools are required to provide retained students with 90-minutes of reading instruction and intensive interventions with progress monitoring and other supports.” It’s not clear what part of the gains came from retention versus these other efforts or some combination.

Still, recent research suggests that holding kids back in early grades improves their test scores in the short to medium term. This is encouraging news. But the story does not end there.

The long-run effects of early grade retention are not clear.

Perhaps the more important question about holding students back is how it affects them in the long run.

For later grades, the research is fairly clear. Multiple studies have found that holding back middle schoolers increases their odds of dropping out of high school. “The evidence on retaining students in the later grades — I think that’s unambiguously negative,” said Winters.

But the research for elementary school retention — which is the focus of current policy discussions — is more complicated.

Perhaps the most comprehensive study on this question looked at Florida, which in the early 2000s was the Mississippi of the moment. The state’s large fourth-grade NAEP gains had some policymakers seeking to replicate it. Researchers, including Winters, tracked students there all the way to high school. By 10th grade, the retained students still had higher test scores than 10th graders who weren’t retained (and therefore were younger). They also had higher grade point averages and took fewer remedial courses. Retained students were no more or less likely to graduate, but they took longer to do by over half a year. This reflected being held back a year. Retained students also earned slightly fewer class credits.

Another study in New York City found that elementary grade retention neither helped nor hurt students’ chances of graduating. Students were slower to accumulate high school credits, which again probably reflected being a year behind. There was some evidence that retained students had higher test scores.

Finally, a Louisiana study found that being held back in fourth grade led to higher dropout rates, by 3 percentage points. Like the other studies, retained students had higher test scores at first, but in this case those gains faded out by eighth grade.

All in all, there are only a handful of long-run studies of early grade retention. Unlike the studies of test scores, they reach mixed conclusions.

A big question is whether retention policies benefit those who are not retained.

Even when states ratchet up retention rules, relatively few students are actually held back each year. But students who aren’t held might also be affected by these policies too. Maybe students themselves make more of an effort in class or show up to summer school to avoid being held back. Perhaps the threat of retention motivates schools to focus more on reading in early grades or institute summer catch-up programs. “There’s nothing like a really high-stakes negative consequence for children to get the adults moving,” said Jacob.

There’s only limited evidence on this, though.

In New York City, a combination of grade retention and school accountability seemed to substantially improve math test scores and attendance rates. A national study found long-term benefits from retention in early grades. Students who went to school in a state with higher retention rates ended up earning slightly higher wages as adults (by 0.7%).

But the incentive effect of retention may not be all good. In some cases, high-stakes testing has led schools to shift time away from other important subjects, transfer the worst teachers to different grades, or spend more time on test prep. A study conducted by Jacob in Chicago found that accountability policies, including retention, improved scores in early grades on the high-stakes exam, but not on a low-stakes test. This might point to teaching to the test.

Retention policies may not be applied equally across individual students or student groups.

Separate from the question of whether retention is beneficial, some argue that it is unfair and arbitrary. This is especially concerning if retention ends up having harmful long-run effects, which has occurred in at least some cases.

Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are disproportionately held back. Part of this reflects the fact that those students, on average, score worse on state tests. But that does not appear to be the only reason.

Typically even when promotion is based on a single exam, there are a number of ways for students who fail to avoid being held back. Oftentimes there is significant school discretion, which can raise the possibility of bias. In New York City, Black and Hispanic students who failed the state exam were more likely to be retained than white students who also fell short. In Florida, children who did not score proficient on the state exam were less likely to be held back if they had highly educated mothers. Those families were more likely to take advantage of discretionary exemptions to the policy. “Florida’s third-grade retention policy is in fact enforced differentially depending on children’s socioeconomic background,” researchers there concluded.

The overall costs and benefits of retention are not well understood.

Fundamentally, grade retention is an attempt to require struggling students to spend an extra year in school. This comes with both potential costs and benefits, and it’s hard to sort them all out. “There are so many different components,” said Jacob.

On the one hand, it costs school systems more money to provide that additional year (since it’s more expensive to operate schools with more students). Retention also has a direct cost to the students themselves: Many are delayed a year from entering the workforce because they have to spend another year in school. That can reduce their short- and long-run earnings. Plus, requiring students to take an extra year to graduate may cause more of them to drop out. (Though as previously noted, there is mixed evidence of this with early grade retention.)

On the other hand, students learn when they’re in school. So, as seen, adding an extra year seems to boost students’ test scores. That may help them in a number of ways, including getting a better job. Plus, retention policies may improve results across the board, which could have major benefits.

How do these pros and cons add up? Ultimately, researchers say there’s no clear answer. It’s similarly hard to know why some retention policies seem to work better than others. These unsatisfactory conclusions help explain why debates about retention are likely to continue for many years to come.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

First religious charter school approved in Oklahoma despite state ban

2023-06-06T00:59:45+00:00

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A state board in Oklahoma voted Monday to approve an application for the country’s first religious charter school, despite a state law prohibiting such schools.

If it opens as planned, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School would offer students an explicitly religious curriculum based on the teachings of the Catholic Church.

The move sets the stage for a lengthy legal battle that could well reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The ensuing debate could also splinter the charter school movement. And the result could ultimately lead to the growth of religious charter schools around the country.

“Politicians in Oklahoma and some of these other states want this. They see the Supreme Court moving in that direction,” said Preston Green, an education and law professor at the University of Connecticut who has long written about the possibility of religious charter schools. “It has major implications nationwide. “

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve the application. Last month, board members unanimously rejected the school’s initial proposal, citing a number of issues including constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

On Monday, board members were divided on the legal implications of approving a religious charter school. Before the vote, Robert Franklin, the board’s chair, called the vote “weighty,” and warned the board that a religious charter doesn’t align with the state constitution and was “outside” the advice of the board’s legal counsel.

Another board member, Scott Strawn, said he received more than 3,000 emails about the issue. “We’ve heard… the entirety of an argument and a constitutional debate in this room today,” he said.

Franklin voted no, while Strawn voted yes. Both said they were acting according to their oaths as public officials.

A new board member, Brian Bobek, also voted yes. Franklin had asked Bobek to abstain since he had only been appointed Friday. He replaced Barry Beauchamp, who had continued to serve after his term expired, according to the Tulsa World.

Oklahoma’s charter statute states that such schools must be “free from sectarian control.” But supporters of religious charter schools insist that this prohibition amounts to religious discrimination and violates the U.S. Constitution. They cite a string of U.S. Supreme Court cases that concluded that states cannot bar private schools from receiving public funds just because they are religious.

“Recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court make clear that states may not exclude religious schools from participating in public benefit programs that support K-12 education,” the charter’s application states.

However, those rulings do not speak directly to charter schools. Such cases “concerning private schools have little precedential value as it relates to charter schools,” wrote current Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond earlier this year. (Drummond withdrew an earlier opinion from the prior attorney general, John O’Connor, who argued that Oklahoma’s bar on religious charter schools was likely unconstitutional.)

The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State said Monday that it was preparing a lawsuit over the charter approval.

Ultimately the legality of religious charter schools may hinge on whether charter schools are considered private or public entities. On Monday, the board’s legal counsel called that distinction the “heart of the matter.”

If charter schools are deemed public — “state actors” in legal terms — they would likely not be able to be religious. If they are private, the Supreme Court’s recent rulings would logically seem to apply.

Supporters have long argued that charter schools are public, and state laws define them as such. But charter schools are run by private boards, and courts have split on how to treat them for legal purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering taking a case on whether charter schools are public or private for the purposes of a discrimination suit under the 14th Amendment.

Some legal experts believe the Supreme Court’s conservative majority would be sympathetic to religious charter schools — continuing a two-decade march of cases that have made it easier to subsidize private education with public dollars.

“I just think if this case comes up to the Supreme Court, they’ve got the numbers,” said Green.

Charter schools could face existential moment

The prospect of private, religious charter schools would amount to a stunning shift for the charter school movement. Charter schools have long garnered bipartisan support, including from many progressive supporters as an alternative to private school vouchers.

The country’s leading charter school advocacy group has staunchly opposed religious charter schools and quickly condemned Monday’s approval of the Oklahoma school.

“The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City is trying to make charter schools into something they are not,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in a statement. “We stand ready to support charter school advocates on the ground in Oklahoma as they fight to preserve the public nature of these unique schools and protect the religious and civil rights of the students and teachers who choose them.”

Leaders of the planned Oklahoma charter school have not said whether they would admit gay or transgender students. Oklahoma law requires charter schools to offer open enrollment and to conduct a lottery if there are more applicants than seats.

In its charter application, the church vowed to comply with state and federal law — while indicating it would seek “religious exemptions … with priority given to the Catholic Church’s understanding of itself and its rights and obligations pursuant to the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

The school’s proposed employee handbook notes: “All employees are expected to adhere to and support the positions and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church in the performance of their duties.”

Some private Catholic schools have fired teachers for marrying a same-sex partner.

“Charter school laws were passed based on assurances that they are public schools open to all students,” said Robert Kim, executive director of Education Law Center, a legal advocacy organization that is typically critical of charter schools. “Allowing a religious charter school upends the very notion of public education by endorsing a school that has signaled it does not consider itself fully bound by state or federal laws, including non-discrimination requirements, that are essential to a public education system.”

The possibility of religious charter schools could also spill beyond conservative states like Oklahoma and into blue states with charters, like California and New York. That’s because advocates of religious charter schools have argued that not only are such schools allowed, but that prohibiting them violates the Constitution.

“If they can be religious, states with charter schools must permit religious charter schools,” Notre Dame law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, a leading advocate of religious charter schools, has argued.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City proposed the online charter school as a way to reach students in rural areas with few local schools. Named for the patron saint of the internet, the St. Isidore school aims to enroll students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“The mission of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is to educate the entire child: soul, heart, intellect, and body,” the application states. It would seek to merge “the best of online instruction with its capacity for individualized flexible learning.”

Before Monday’s vote, several people told the board that they opposed religious charter schools.

Doug Mann, a lawyer from the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee, a group that supports public education, said it was clear from St. Isidore’s application that the school “will seek to indoctrinate” students in Catholic beliefs. He warned that the board could face a court challenge.

“There are dire consequences to this board if it goes forward with this,” he said.

Some board members who voted to approve the application Monday said they were ultimately persuaded that a no vote would violate the U.S. Constitution. Bobek, the board’s newest member, said it could “hardly be clearer to me” that it is the Oklahoma statutes that are unconstitutional.

Strawn, who had previously expressed some concerns about the application, said he concluded that voting it down would violate his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

Franklin, the board’s chair, said he took the same oath, but “I just can’t get there.” He said a yes vote was a “hard no.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed to this story.

Cara Fitzpatrick is a story editor at Chalkbeat.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Do school vouchers ‘work’? As the debate heats up, here’s what research really says

2023-05-31T18:38:26+00:00

Private school choice programs have exploded in the last couple years. A string of Republican-led states have launched far-reaching initiatives that allow families to use public money to access private education.

This has drawn fierce debate and raised big questions. Do vouchers raise test scores or lower them? Do they help or hurt students over the long term? Do they damage public schools or push them to improve? What will the financial impact be?

Chalkbeat combed through the academic research to get some answers.

Two caveats before we begin. First, context matters. Private school choice programs differ from place to place and have evolved. Recently passed programs have been broad based — often they’re open to all students, including those from affluent families or those who already attend private school. Prior programs were usually limited to a subset of students — say, those in low-achieving schools or those whose families are low-income. Studies have been done on some of these older programs, but not yet on the new ones. That means that prior research may be an imperfect guide for future results.

Second, the voucher debate is often about values. The recent expansion of private choice has been driven as much or more by cultural issues than questions of school performance. But research studies can’t answer philosophical questions on whether public money should go to religious schools or if providing more choices for parents is an inherent good. They can’t speak to debates about access for LGBTQ students or what type of curriculum is taught in class.

With that in mind, here’s what we know from research:

Recent studies find little evidence that school vouchers improve test scores — in fact, they’ve sometimes led to score declines. Older studies are more positive.

In the last several years, major studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington D.C. have shown that low-income students do not see improved test scores from attending private schools. If anything, students’ scores tended to decline. Choice advocates initially suggested that results would bounce back over time, but in three of the four cases achievement was worse in math, even after multiple years.

What are school vouchers and other forms of school choice?

A voucher provides families with a government-funded stipend to pay for private school tuition.

An education savings account, or ESA, provides families with a set amount of funds that can be used to pay for educational services outside of public schools. This includes, but is not limited to, private school tuition and home-schooling expenses.

A tax credit is a different way of administering and financing either a voucher or ESA program by providing indirect public support. Here’s how it works: The government offers individuals or businesses the choice to redirect some of the taxes they owe to a private organization, which then uses the money to fund private school tuition grants or ESAs. In practice, tax credit programs are not that different from publicly financed choice programs. The money is diverted from public coffers and used to fund private education. But the workaround has helped choice programs survive legal challenges and avoid government regulations.

“While the early research was somewhat mixed … it is striking how consistent these recent results are,” said Joe Waddington, a University of Kentucky professor who has studied Indiana’s voucher program. “We’ve started to see persistent negative effects of receiving a voucher on student math achievement.”

In Louisiana, after four years in the program, students had substantially lower test scores in math, English, and science. The negative effects were quite large. In Indiana, students in the program saw dips in math that persisted for four years. In English, there was no meaningful change either way. The Ohio study found that “overwhelming evidence indicates a substantial negative effect on test scores of attending private schools under an EdChoice voucher” for the subset of students they were able to study.

Data in D.C. tells a different story, though. Students’ math test scores fell two years into the program, but by year three they had recovered. Overall, vouchers had no clear effect on test scores. Students who used a voucher were less likely to be chronically absent from school, a positive outcome.

What’s different about D.C.? It’s not clear, but one possibility is that other programs were evaluated with state tests that have higher stakes for public than private schools. In D.C., the researchers used a different national exam. Some argue that using state tests gives public schools an unfair leg up.

These more recent papers differ from older research on private school choice. Prior studies tended to show a mix of positive and null results. It’s not clear what has changed, but one theory is that public schools have improved — or at least gotten better at raising test scores — in response to accountability measures like No Child Left Behind.

It’s worth reiterating that these studies typically focused on choice programs that are targeted at low-income students, which is quite different from newer voucher initiatives.

Students sewing during a class at the School for Community Learning, a progressive Indianapolis private school that depends on vouchers.

Studies show that school vouchers have a neutral or positive impact on student outcomes later in life.

A different way of looking at private school choice is to track students over time — are they more likely to complete high school or attend college, for instance? Some school choice advocates say this, rather than test scores, is a better gauge of program effectiveness. There are fewer studies on this, but what exists is more favorable for private school choice: There are a combination of positive and zero effects, and no indication of negative effects.

For instance, one study of Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program found that participants were more likely to graduate high school and attend four-year colleges. A recent follow-up study confirmed these results, but found that vouchers had no clear effect on students’ likelihood of completing college.

A 2010 federal analysis of the D.C. voucher program found that its students were 21 percentage points more likely to complete high school (according to a survey of their parents, not a direct measure of graduation). But a follow-up analysis found that voucher recipients were no more or less likely to enroll in college.

A private school scholarship program in New York did not lead to improvements in college enrollment on average, but did seem to have a positive effect for Black students specifically. A later study of the same program also found no overall effects, but some benefits for “moderately disadvantaged” students.

In Florida, a 2017 study and 2019 follow-up found that its tax credit program led to small increases in college enrollment and degree completion. Specifically, 12% of students who went to a private high school using a tax credit grant earned a bachelor’s degree; that compares to 10% among demographically similar students in public schools.

Keep in mind: There are only a handful of studies available on long-term outcomes. Researchers also had to look at students who entered voucher programs many years ago — a necessary trade-off when examining long-term outcomes. What will the long-term effects be for programs that had negative impacts on test scores? That’s not clear.

There is one helpful data point on this question. A study of Louisiana’s program — the one that initially showed big declines in test scores for elementary and middle school students — found that it did not have any clear effect on college enrollment among older students.

Attending a private school may improve parent or student satisfaction.

There’s some evidence that families tend to be more satisfied with private schools. For instance, an older D.C. study showed that parents who won a voucher gave their schools higher marks. There was no difference for students though. The latest D.C. analysis found the reverse — parents were no more satisfied with private schools, but students were. Voucher students gave their private schools higher ratings and perceived them as safer. An analysis of national data showed that private-school parents generally were more satisfied with their child’s education than those sending their children to public schools. “Whether students enrolled in their choice program through lottery or self-sorted into their private school of choice, the results have shown that providing choice in education leads to higher levels of parent satisfaction,” concluded one overview study.

Research on prior programs suggests that vouchers lead to small improvements in public schools.

There is a large body of evidence suggesting that public schools get slightly better in response to competition from school vouchers, at least as measured by test scores.

This has been seen in studies of Florida, Louisiana, Milwaukee, Ohio, San Antonio, and even Canada. As one research overview put it, “Evidence on both small-scale and large-scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve.”

The impact is usually small and may vary depending on the program.

A study in Louisiana, for instance, found some evidence that vouchers boosted math scores in public schools, but they didn’t seem to have any effect on reading scores. Another recent study in Florida found more consistent impacts: Tax credit–funded vouchers led to small improvements in math and reading test scores, as well as suspension and attendance rates. Effects were largest for lower-income students.

Again, however, these studies tend to focus on more targeted voucher programs rather than the universal programs that are currently spreading — and those could have very different effects on public schools.

Targeted school voucher programs may not be costly, but universal programs probably will be.

A key factor driving the costs of choice programs is whether a student would have attended a public school if they didn’t have access to a voucher. In that case, the added cost may be small. After all, public dollars would fund that child’s education either way. Some choice advocates have produced analyses concluding that private school choice would actually save money because vouchers are typically funded at a lower rate than public schools.

But if a large share of voucher recipients would have attended private school on their own dime, the cost calculations change. That seems likely to happen with universal programs. In that case, students’ education that had been privately funded is now being publicly funded. That increases costs. Arizona, which passed a universal private school choice law in 2022, has seen the program’s projected cost this year jump from $33 million to $276 million. (There’s also some evidence that universal programs will lead private schools to raise their tuition.)

“By making choice scholarships quickly available to non-public school student populations with little incentive not to take the taxpayer funds, universal school choice programs have … higher up-front costs for governments and, thus, taxpayers,” wrote Christian Barnard, an analyst with the libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation, which supports school choice. Ultimately, the price tag and how it’s paid for will depend on the state and the voucher program’s design. If there are major added costs, policymakers will have to decide how to pay for them — whether through higher taxes or by providing less money to public schools or other public services.

It’s worth keeping this in mind alongside the above section suggesting that private school competition improves public schools. If new programs lead to less funding for public schools, that could negate any benefits from competition.

School voucher programs targeted at low-income students are not likely to increase racial segregation — but larger-scale programs might.

Although there is limited research on the effects of private school choice programs on segregation, existing studies have not found that voucher programs targeted at low-income students worsen segregation. A study in Louisiana found vouchers led to slightly more racial integration, while an older analysis of Milwaukee showed no impact.

However, there is reason to think that larger-scale voucher programs open to families regardless of income could exacerbate segregation. For instance, research on charter schools, a universal choice option, has found that they lead to modest increases in racial and economic segregation.

This article has been updated from its original version in 2017.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.