The researchers found that in 2016 there was no discernable difference between the chronic absenteeism rates of English learners and non-English learners. But around 2021, there was a marked shift: suddenly English learners were absent more frequently than their peers, both in the raw data and when controlling for other variables like socioeconomic status.

This trend was particularly acute for older students and those who had been classified as English learners for six or more years. 

The magnitude of this shift is small but “troubling,” according to the study, especially because previous research has shown a disproportionate effect of absences on English learners’ achievement in reading and math. 

And these results seem to match statewide trends: the most recent data from California (2022–2023) show that the chronic absenteeism rate among English learners was close to 28%, four percentage points above the rate for non-English learners. 

Across the nation, chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — surged during the pandemic, from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022, and remained high in 2023. While most acute among students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike cut across districts regardless of size, racial breakdown or income.

“I think our findings really highlight this as an issue that should be looked at with a sense of urgency,” lead researcher Lucrecia Santibañez told The 74. She noted that missing a significant amount of classroom time has a negative impact on both test scores and social emotional learning, effects that can compound over time. “Clearly this population has struggled to recover to where they were before. So if we were already worried about them before the pandemic … these higher absenteeism rates are probably going to make that worse.”

Santibañez, who is Mexican and a mother of three, said her personal experiences helped spur her interest in studying Latino populations in schools. During the COVID recovery period, she began hearing from English language development teachers who were struggling to engage their students and get them back to school.

Santibañez and her co-researchers analyzed data from 444,000 students in four urban, rural and suburban mid- to large-size school districts over eight school years, from 2014 to 2022. The researchers did not disclose the names of the districts in the study.

Data was also broken down by grade level, year and type of English learner status. Although English learners are often treated as a homogenous group, they’re made up of five different categories of students who typically have different needs, outcomes and prevalence of chronic absenteeism, according to Santibañez. This study is the first to disaggregate this group, which Santibañez said will allow district leaders and policy makers to better understand how to best serve students’ unique needs.  

“It’s important, I think, for the research community to look at these groups differently, because they’re going to exhibit things that — when you lump them all together — it’s going to wash out some of these nuances,” Santibañez said.

The rising absenteeism trend is most evident and persistent for students currently identified as English learners and long-term English learners — students who have been classified as English learners for at least six years, the research found. Reclassified students — those who were previously identified as English learners but have since demonstrated English proficiency— are less likely to be absent, which matches previous research. Although they also saw a rise in chronic absenteeism in 2021, they’ve since returned to previously lower levels.

The study also found that as English language learners enter middle and high school, they’re more likely to be absent. Santibañez said that this mirrors when these students tend to get put into lower-rigor — often lower-quality — classes, which might lead to a dip in engagement.

English learners are a growing population, representing just over 10% of students enrolled in public schools nationally. The vast majority (76%) speak Spanish or Castilian as their primary language, followed by Arabic (2%) and Chinese (2%).

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said she’s not surprised by the outcomes of the study and has noticed similar trends across California over the past year and a half. It’s harder to nail down national trends, she said, because they’re not tracked the same way, but the 2021-22 federal data shows that the English learner chronic absenteeism rate was about 36% — six percentage points higher than average. 

‘Something changed’

While English learners often face persistent barriers to educational success — stemming from lack of services, deficit-laden instructional practices and inconsistent inter-district policies — researchers hypothesize a number of demographic factors may have historically encouraged strong attendance. For example, the majority of English learners are the children of immigrants who tend to move less and support regular attendance at school.

After the onset of the pandemic, though, absenteeism among English learners rose disproportionately as additional factors came into play, including a lack of access to services and support. 

English language learners and their families were often among “the essential workers and the communities most affected economically — and health-wise — by the pandemic [so] they may experience extreme death and trauma,” according to Chang. Parents who were essential workers were also less likely to be home to make sure their kids were attending remote classes.

“Now coming back from the pandemic,” she added, “you still have issues of access to health care to prevent kids from getting sick in the first place.” And families may still be confused and overly cautious about when to keep sick kids at home. 

There are also safety and bullying concerns, Chang said. According to the 2023 Family Needs Assessment — which surveyed 980 families, the vast majority of whom identified as Latino with kids who are English learners — almost two-thirds of families reported having concerns about gun violence, 79% reported they were worried about an illness outbreak and 1 in 3 said they do not have access to medical care. 

Chang emphasized the need to understand and combat the root causes of chronic absenteeism since “remediation is always more costly than making sure kids get what they need in the first place.”

“I think we should be understanding the reasons from an assets-based perspective,” said lead researcher Santibañez, “from a sense of knowing that this was not a group that was disengaged with school before. This is not a group that’s been traditionally absent from schools. So something changed, and I think we need to understand how it changed and how can we go back to re-engaging these students and their families with schools.”

The paper, released last week through the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that charter students in the Bay State are significantly more likely to enroll in a four-year college and obtain a degree than their non-charter peers.

But an odd wrinkle emerged: Students in urban charters also experience a noticeable bump in their test scores, while those enrolled outside cities actually see their scores fall. 

The overall effects offer yet more evidence that the Massachusetts charter sector, cited by some researchers as the highest-performing in the country, substantially improves the life outcomes of its charges. The state has long won praise for holding choice schools to high standards, shuttering programs that fall short of expectations and allowing only charter organizations with a proven record of success to open new campuses. By the 2000s, charter students in Boston had begun out-scoring children in much more affluent towns on math and English. 

But the new research seems to indicate a paradox. Unlike in Boston, charters in suburban and rural areas boost their students’ chances of attending and graduating from college while also dragging their test scores downwards. The divergent measures of educational achievement make it unclear exactly how the schools are working and what truly matters for kids.

Sarah Cohodes, a professor at the University of Michigan and the paper’s lead author, said her work reflects the simple reality that schools can change students’ lives in a multitude of ways.

“The whole premise of test-based accountability is that test-scores predict longer-term outcomes,” Cohodes wrote in an email. “And that is likely still the case, writ large. But this situation shows it is not always the case, and other things are going on in schools.” 

Cohodes’s analysis revisits the conclusions of a study published in 2013 by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joshua Angrist. That experiment showed Massachusetts’s urban charter schools significantly beating the results of nearby public schools, while non-urban charters lagged far behind local competition. 

The latest study makes use of the same sample of 15 urban charter schools and nine non-urban charter schools. It also relies on the same identifying data from the schools’ attendance lotteries, which include information on student race, class background, special education status, and previous scores on the state’s annual standardized test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). 

Through the use of the school lotteries, which randomly assigned similar students to either receive a slot at a charter school or not, both studies are able to pinpoint the effects of enrollment. But Cohodes extended her observations further in time, capturing high school graduating classes between 2006 and 2018, and gathered further figures on college enrollment and completion from the National Student Clearinghouse. 

Importantly, she identified large differences between charter students based on whether or not they lived in a city. Black and Latino students made up 54 percent and 27 percent of applicants, respectively, at urban charters, while fully 90 percent of applicants to non-urban charters were white. Urban applicants were also much more likely to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (a common proxy for poverty), and had previously scored considerably below the state average on MCAS; non-urban applicants tended to score above that average.

After two years of attending their charter school, urban students saw their scores in both math and English leap upwards compared with students in traditional public schools. By comparison, those in non-urban charters fell by somewhat smaller, though still significant, amounts.

That finding replicates both the results from the 2013 study in Massachusetts and those of several other investigations, which have broadly pointed to a divide between urban charters and those in rural and suburban areas. The consistency of the result suggested to some observers that it could simply be easier to create a charter school that improves upon existing offerings; in more advantaged areas, however, newer alternatives must compete against schools where students already score fairly well.

Surprisingly, though, the same students whose scores fell in non-urban charters were also 11 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year college than their counterparts in traditional public schools. They were also 10 points more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. Urban charter students also saw their college chances improve — 27 percent earned a bachelor’s degree within six years of graduating high school, compared with 23 percent of their peers in non-charters — but the effect was only about half that enjoyed by students outside of cities.

What could account for the difference? According to Jon Valant, a political scientist who leads the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, charter-curious families in non-urban areas could be selecting for schools that don’t focus explicitly on raising test scores. Instead, their target schools might attempt to set themselves apart through a focus on the arts or social-emotional learning. Such an emphasis could boost chances of college completion while also leading to lower academic achievement in the short-run.

“In those areas, parents might not be looking for schools that are better at doing the same things as their local public schools,” Valant wrote in an email. “They might be looking for schools that do something different — even if that comes at the expense of their state test scores.”

That sentiment was echoed by Macke Raymond, the director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which conducts comprehensive reviews of charter school performance around the United States. While cautioning that the Cohodes study’s sample of just a few dozen schools made its findings difficult to generalize, Raymond argued in an email that suburban parents often strike a bargain when selecting charters: The alternative school model might provide academic and social resources that help their children excel in college, even while their explicit focus on core subjects falls somewhat behind that of local schools.

“Our team has seen that many non-urban charter schools across the country intentionally offer students an experience that does not focus on maximizing academic gains,” Raymond wrote. “Knowing that families are well resourced, suburban charters may offer a different experience, either with thematic focus or emphasize an environment that stresses non-academic development of their students.”

For her part, Cohodes said that while the correlation between test scores and later-life success is solidly established, it was important not to dismiss educational programs too hastily on the basis of setbacks on student assessments. She and her colleagues plan to conduct a follow-up study examining the practices in non-urban charters that might be contributing to their students’ post-secondary attainment, including smaller class sizes and college counseling.

“I think it’s important to find school models that work, and to define ‘work’ broadly such that it does not incorporate only test scores,” Cohodes said. “And I think we should replicate and expand school models that work, regardless of the sector.”

Turns out the perception is more true of math than science.

Senior Pew researcher Brian Kennedy put those STEM performance beliefs into context by looking at the most recent results from PISA, an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics and science literacy in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. The U.S. is indeed lagging behind in math, his research shows, but is performing — if not the best in the world — better than average in science.

In math, U.S. students ranked 28th out of 37 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a ranking similar to the last time the test was administered in 2018, despite an alarming 13-point drop on the exam post-pandemic. In science, however, the U.S. ranked 12th out of 37 OECD countries, following a 3-point drop in scores. In both subjects, the average U.S. score was within 15 points of international averages. 

“Broadly, we’re interested in where science interacts with society — where those touchpoints are,” Kennedy told The 74, “and one place is through STEM education. People experience STEM education in their own lives or they experience it through their children’s lives. So we think it’s important to get an understanding of how the public rates STEM education in this country.”

Pew Research Center surveyed 10,133 U.S. adults from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 this year using the Center’s American Trends Panel, an online survey panel. Kennedy noted that the findings are largely consistent with societal perceptions going back about a decade, based on similar previous studies by the research center. 

This year’s numbers remain mostly consistent across the political spectrum, but diverge when broken down by race, with white respondents showing the most pessimism. They were the least likely (24%) to think K-12 STEM education in the U.S. is the best or above average, behind Black respondents (31%), Hispanic respondents (37%) and Asian respondents (43%).

And fewer women (25%) than men (32%) say K-12 STEM education is at least above average, a difference Tom Jenkins, a middle school science teacher in Ohio, attributed to the historic lack of representation of women in science and math curriculum.

Jenkins, a 25-year veteran teacher in low-income urban and rural settings, also spoke to why American students may be scoring better in science than math. 

“Based on my experience with this [as an educator] — and also being a product of an inner-city school that was first-generation college and lower-socioeconomic myself — I really think a lot of it has to do with the way that we teach math and the way we teach science and how there’s different expectations for both subjects,” he said.

Historically, there’s an expectation in science classes that students will be highly engaged with hands-on, experiential learning that’s connected to real-world issues, he said, adding that those same expectations don’t necessarily exist in math classes. This is “unfortunate because there are so many teachable things [in math] that we could use in a hands-on, practical way that’s culturally relevant, that’s project-based.”

Amid precipitously declining math scores post-pandemic, Jenkins is not alone in his urgent call for a shift in the way math is taught. 

It’s important when students walk into his — and all — classrooms, he said, that they know they’ll be learning skills that are going to help them not only better understand the academic content but also prepare them for a wide variety of careers. 

“If we really want to have an impact in math and science and STEM subjects,” he said, “and we want to get it to stick with our lower-socioeconomic or traditionally under-represented groups in STEM, then we really need to make it have some relevance.” 

In reflecting on American students’ PISA performances he added, “I do think that while [the] middle is not the worst — I do think it’s very important that we understand that while this acknowledges that we’re doing well — we still have a long way to go and we have a lot of disenfranchised groups or historically underrepresented groups that we’re not… impacting well enough in STEM subjects.” 

Education advocate Talia Milgrom-Elcott echoed this point, noting there’s no reason American students should be in the middle of the pack. Milgrom-Elcott is the founder and executive director of Beyond 100K, a national network focused on ending the STEM teacher shortage with a particular focus on Black, Latino and Indigenous communities.

She also noted that average scores often mask disparities, which is especially true in STEM.

“A lot of us have an outdated — what should be an outdated — idea about STEM that only some people are good at it, that only some people will ever excel in it, and often that they look a certain way — are a certain gender, race, income level, etc. And so there’s something in our gut that’s not activated when we see a lot of kids at the bottom.” 

She said that if the U.S. hopes to move up in the ratings, there must be a commitment to eradicating these disparities.

“And ‘up in the rating,’ by the way, is not in itself a goal,” she added. “It’s only a goal because being competitive in math and science — having more kids having those classes and that knowledge and those opportunities — is going to drive social mobility, economic mobility. It’s going to drive global competitiveness. It’s going to help the United States continue to be an innovation factory to solve the most pressing challenges.”

But the social scientists who authored the research argue that federal dollars could have been spent in ways that would have helped scores bounce back faster. The per-dollar returns of ESSER, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, measure up poorly in comparison with those of previously studied efforts to boost achievement, from reducing class sizes to implementing more rigorous curricula.

Dan Goldhaber, the lead author of one of the studies and the director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said he believed the crisis conditions of the pandemic made it “hard to spend the ESSER funding in thoughtful, effective ways.”

By his own estimate, 35% of the math recovery achieved during the 2022–23 school year was directly attributable to ESSER funding. Fully 87% of English recovery was credited to ESSER, though he found that gains in that subject were statistically insignificant. Still, he said, that upward movement was limited. 

“Candidly, I think the impact was small, and there are some reasons why it wasn’t larger,” Goldhaber said. “Only 20% of ESSER money was even earmarked for learning loss, and I don’t think there was a lot of oversight of whether that 20% was well spent.”

The findings offer a split verdict on the post-COVID academic recovery, while somewhat strengthening the case that putting more resources into schools can elevate their results. The advances measured in both studies are virtually identical not only to one another, but also to earlier, wide-ranging estimates of the impact of additional money on schools.

ESSER was one of the best-known and longest-lasting pillars of Washington’s pandemic response. Years after stimulus checks and free nasal swabs stopped arriving in the mail, many districts are still spending down the aid they received through the program. The last of the supplemental aid will not expire until this September, four years after schools first began to reopen for in-person instruction.

Notably, however, both papers project that American students will not have returned to their pre-COVID learning trajectories by then, and that the cost of a full restoration could amount to hundreds of billions more. With no sign of any further assistance coming from Congress, that bill will need to be picked up by states — if it is paid at all. 

In the meantime, ESSER’s backers can point to real, if incomplete, progress.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon helps lead the Education Recovery Scorecard, which released a second study on Wednesday. In an interview, he noted that the federal cash injection was the equivalent of only about one-quarter of the country’s annual K–12 spending, spread over multiple years. While it might have been used more efficiently to stem further learning loss, he added, both national and state leaders were simultaneously focused on goals like reopening schools and alleviating the severe emotional distress that many children are still facing.

“One can certainly imagine ways to spend the money that would lead to even more learning gains,” Reardon said. “But that wasn’t entirely what was on policymakers’ minds when they sent out the money.”

‘A huge missed opportunity’

To pinpoint the impact of additional money on COVID-era learning, the two studies take advantage of differences in how the federal funding was awarded to individual districts.

The total ESSER expenditure was fueled by three laws setting aside $13 billion in March 2020, $57 billion in December of that year, and a further $122 billion the following March. Because there was no data showing where learning loss was most concentrated at that time, dollars were allocated to school districts based on their pre-pandemic grants from Title I, the Department of Education’s main program benefiting disadvantaged children.  

But not all districts received comparable amounts, even if they served similar numbers of needy students. Instead, a number of regulations governing Title I — including rules that ensure small states receive minimum allotments, as well as larger sums being granted to states with higher per-pupil spending — introduced significant spending gaps between different schools. Those disparities were significantly magnified as each new emergency funding bill was passed, said Harvard economist Thomas Kane, Reardon’s co-author. 

“With the second two ESSER packages, the federal government was essentially pushing $175 billion through pipes that were meant to handle $16 billion in Title I,” Kane said. “So what might have been a $500 or $600 difference per student in Title I dollars became a $5,000 or $6,000 difference in ESSER funding per student.” 

Both Goldhaber and the Education Recovery Scorecard team accessed standardized test results from the Stanford Education Data Archive, which compiles student scores from different local exams to allow for cross-state comparisons. In each of their studies, $1,000 in ESSER spending per student was found to raise math scores by 0.008 of a standard deviation (a scientific measure showing the distance from a statistical mean).

In the world of education research, an improvement of that size is considered small: something like one-tenth of a medium-sized effect. But the average conceals substantial variation across different states, and many school districts received much more than $1,000 per student. 

As an example, Reardon, Kane, and their collaborators identified 704 districts in which over 70% of students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch — a commonly used proxy for poverty — then compared the results for those that received unusually large ESSER allocations (more than $8,600 per pupil) to those that received much less (less than $4,600 per pupil). 

The differences were striking. The working-class district of Brockton, Massachusetts was awarded $3,224 per student from the second and third ESSER funding bills, and its students’ math achievement improved by the equivalent of .06 grade levels between 2022 and 2023; but in Dayton, Ohio, per-pupil funding increased almost three times as much ($11,444), and math scores jumped by a factor of 10 (.65 grade levels).

Goldhaber argued that figures like those cast considerable doubt on the proposition that the U.S. government’s emergency relief to schools was mostly wasted.

“One of the ideas that’s out there is that we spent $190 billion and got nothing,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right answer.”

Yet he also voiced disappointment that neither Washington nor states had directly measured what kinds of ESSER spending (tutoring programs or school renovations, improved ventilation or increased staffing) were correlated with higher performance. Despite its huge cost and high stakes, Goldhaber concluded, ESSER was simply “not designed to learn from what districts do.”

“To my mind, that makes it a huge missed opportunity. We can see that there are pretty big differences across states and districts in the degree of catch-up.”

‘Who’s going to pick up the reins?’

While the studies can shed little light on the most successful aspects of ESSER, they will be collectively seen as a major contribution to the research on school finance reforms. This is true both because of the scale of the government’s intervention — perhaps the single greatest natural experiment on the effects of windfall cash on schools that has ever been attempted — and the consistency of the papers’ results. 

Not only do the findings of both studies mirror one another, they also hew closely to those of an influential meta-analysis, published in January, that gathered the results of dozens of previous experiments in increased school funding. That paper also pointed to an average test-score increase of about .032 standard deviations per $1,000 spent over four years, or roughly .008 annually.

Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown University’s finance-focused Edunomics Lab, called the coinciding findings “reassuring.”

Yet she also noted the “wildly expensive” cost of sending operating aid to states that was not specifically dedicated to learning recovery. According to Goldhaber’s calculations, the government would need to spend an additional $450–$650 billion to fund a full return to levels of academic achievement last seen in 2019; Reardon and Kane tallied a likely cost of just over $904 billion. 

Whether or not those figures represent the true price tag, Roza said, states that intend to replace federal dollars should be more consistent in disbursing them and more stringent about what they pay for.

“Why repeat the same strategy given how unevenly the dollars were distributed and how uneven the effects were on districts and states?” Roza asked. “Given what we know now, any new federal dollars for recovery should probably be structured differently.”

But in Kane’s view, that recommendation may be too optimistic. With just a few months left before the deadline to spend ESSER funds, he observed, too few state authorities had even committed to picking up the torch of learning recovery. 

“In most states, there hasn’t even been a discussion started about what the state role will be now that the federal money is running out,” he said. “Our results are basically saying that there was a positive effect, but it wasn’t enough. Now who’s going to pick up the reins?”

Seemingly minute differences in the length of a school day or year, whether stemming from state laws or local rules governing school districts, eventually grow into colossal gaps in learning opportunities. Over the course of their K–12 careers, the authors estimate, children living in jurisdictions requiring the most time in school benefit from over two years more education than those living in areas that require the least. 

“It’s hard for me to understand why some students should have access to a 180-day school year, and others in a district down the road get two weeks less instruction,” said co-author Matthew Kraft, an economics professor at Brown University. “Why would we want that inequity baked into our system?”

The paper, published Monday in the American Education Research Journal, relies primarily on figures collected before the emergence of COVID-19. But its resonance will inevitably be heightened by the post-pandemic crisis of chronic absenteeism, during which one-quarter of students nationwide missed at least 10 percent of the school year in 2023–24. At the same time, owing both to budgetary challenges and popular choice, a growing number of school districts are shifting to a four-day week.

The pronounced geographic divergences in access to instructional time are largely the product of state laws. While 37 states mandate a minimum number of days in the academic year, their requirements range from 160 days in Colorado to 186 days in Kansas; among the 37 states that set a floor for instructional hours in a year, Arizona is at the bottom with 720, while Texas is at the top with 1,260.

In other words, while the average American K–12 school is in session for 179 days a year, for just under seven hours each day, local variation is much wider. 

Drawing on data from the U.S. Census’s nationally representative National Teacher and Principal Survey, the study finds that schools at the 90th percentile of instructional time nationwide offer 1.17 more hours of school each day than those at the 10th percentile. Throughout the school year, those approximately 70 minutes per day accumulate into a disparity of 196 hours of teaching, or about five and a half weeks of school annually.

Some school districts set their own requirements for time in school higher than those set by their respective states. But at the median, schools in the five states that set highest minimum amount of instructional time (Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama) are open for 133 hours more per year than those in the five states with the lowest minimums (Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Oregon, and Rhode Island). Cumulatively, students in the first five states will receive 1.4 more years of schooling from kindergarten through the twelfth grade.

Even acknowledging those differences, some kids are actually exposed to less instructional time than their state or district stipulates. As a case study, Kraft and co-author Sarah Novicoff examine the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island, which offers 1,174 annual hours of instructional time for elementary schools and 1,215 hours for secondary schools.

After using state data to tally students’ excused and unexcused absences, teacher absences, tardies, suspensions, and a host of outside interruptions — Kraft has previously found that intercom announcements, staff pullouts, and principal “fly-bys” can disrupt the typical classroom as many as 2,000 times each year — the authors calculate that a typical Providence elementary schooler misses 16 percent of their intended instructional time. The average high schooler misses as much as 25 percent.

Novicoff, a former middle school teacher now pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, said that school staff and administrators should aim to harvest low-hanging fruit during the school day by doing everything in their power to minimize in-class disruptions.

“They can say, ‘If I want to pull a kid from that classroom, I’m going to shoot their teacher a chat message instead of banging on their door,’” she suggested. “The difference there is the degree to which students notice and are disrupted.”

Effects on achievement

But while some educators work to maximize the time available to them, others have happily embraced a shorter school week over the last few years.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of school districts operating on four-day weeks has climbed from about 662 to almost 900, according to a count kept by Paul N. Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University. The switch has been especially popular in more rural districts that tend to face greater transportation challenges and welcome a simplified schedule.

But Thompson’s research shows that districts in Oregon that made the change have seen substantial losses in achievement. Although the schools compensated for the missing day by lengthening the four remaining, students still lost out on several hours of school each week. Notably, the learning losses at those schools grew the longer they stayed on a four-day week, suggesting that the effects were compounding as students lost more instructional time.

Recently, Thompson undertook a new study of four-day weeks around the United States, again concluding that they were associated with significant declines on test scores. The academic slippage was greatest in schools that lost more instructional time, as well as those in less rural settings. 

Emily Morton, a co-author of that study and a researcher at the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research said she thought her findings about the benefits of more instructional time generally dovetailed with those of Kraft and Novicoff. But she recommended that, before changing the law to require more school hours and days, states should heed the example of Providence and find ways to maximize the instructional time already being provided.

“It seems wise and more cost-effective to first focus on recovering time that currently is ‘lost’ during the school day or year (through interruptions, announcements, absences, etc.),” Morton said. “I would also say we have good evidence that summer school can positively impact student achievement, particularly in math.”

Indeed, schools and educators sometimes resist when pushed to remain in session for longer. After New Mexico passed a law last year that significantly lifted the minimum number of annual instructional hours s, the state education department declared that districts had to implement the new rule by offering a 180-day year. In response, over 50 school districts sued. 

Kraft suggested that state authorities consider approaches that would allow communities to opt in to longer school years or experiment with ways of increasing instruction.

“We have to be conscientious about the potential unintended consequences of increasing minimums,” he said. “It has to be done in a way that schools and districts feel supported.”

The most important task lying ahead for education leaders is reversing the tide of disengagement and absenteeism that has rocked schools the last four years. Kraft and Novicoff’s data from Providence dates back to 2016, but nationwide attendance plummeted during the era of virtual schooling and has not recovered. It is reasonable to expect that, during the 2023–24 school year, millions of absent students missed tens of millions of classroom hours. 

Jennifer Davis, a former official in the U.S. Department of Education and the co-founder of the National Center for Time & Learning, called chronic absenteeism a “huge problem” that schools would have to overcome to keep their students on-track for graduation. Additional resources, including community outreach navigators and alternative learning experiences, might be necessary to rebuild the connections between students and schools, she added.

“Without this,” Davis wrote in an email, “we are going to lose the COVID generation.”

But research suggests that both men might be wise to play their cards close to the vest. According to a paper released this spring, presidents who weighed in on education policy debates between 2009 and 2021 — such as COVID-era school closures or the adoption of Common Core — tended to polarize the public much more than galvanize them. Only when endorsing proposals that cut directly against the traditional position of their parties do they succeed in generating overall public support, the authors write. 

The findings seem to counsel caution in an election year, particularly with attitudes on national politics diverging as widely and consistently as they have in the history of polling. They also raise challenging questions about whether federal leadership on K–12 schools can be viable in the absence of the bipartisan consensus that largely favored school reform in the 1990s and 2000s. If not, state-level actors like governors and legislators may be left in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future.

David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University and the paper’s lead author, said the gulf separating Democrats and Republicans on education questions resembles some of the biggest divides in the American cultural landscape.  

“We really disagree on a lot of education issues, and that trend has accelerated over the last decade,” he said. “The difference in positive evaluations of teachers’ unions is of approximately the same magnitude as the partisan gap on legal abortion under any circumstances.”

If the politics of education has taken on some of the acrimony surrounding other issues, it represents a break with historical patterns. Schools have traditionally been insulated from national trends by their unique governance structure, with elected boards attracting little public attention as they decide questions of funding and curriculum. When presidents have entered the fray — as in the case of school desegregation in the 1950s, or the push to pass the No Child Left Behind law in the early 2000s — they have encountered resistance, but seldom failed entirely.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, agreed that the past decade has brought heightened partisanship. Yet he also voiced hope that future presidents, perhaps including some now occupying state-level office, could notch greater education policy successes than Washington has seen recently.

“I could imagine having national leaders who were charismatic and had powerful views about the role of federal education policy again,” said Polikoff. “We just don’t have them currently, and we didn’t have them in the previous administration.”

The Obama exception

To estimate the influence of high-profile politicians like the current and former presidents, Houston built his study on public opinion research dating back to 2007.

The annual Education Next poll, developed and administered by researchers at Harvard, is one of the only measures that regularly surveys the public on their attitudes toward education topics. The paper relies on responses drawn from five separate editions of the poll, which included questions on topics like school choice, merit pay for teachers, and allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition to attend public universities. (Houston, who formerly served as Education Next’s survey director, has previously used similar data to show that general opinions on schools are becoming more partisan with time.)

“I look at questions that have been asked in the exact same way, or nearly the exact same way, over the course of at least 10 years,” he said. “Regardless of the imperfections of the survey questions — and every survey question has imperfections — those are true over time, so we can capture trends.”

Before giving their own views of 18 policy proposals, a random assortment of participants were first primed by hearing the incumbent president’s opinions on them. Because respondents included Democrats, Republicans, and independents, Houston was able to measure their reaction to hearing that a highly visible figure of either the same or opposing party had opined on a particular policy.

The overall result of receiving a partisan cue — effectively becoming aware of the president’s endorsement, regardless of one’s own political preferences — was statistically insignificant, moving respondents’ attitudes by just .02 points on a five-point scale. But that average accounts for larger effects that moved Democrats and Republicans in opposite directions: If someone learned that a president of his own party favored a specific education policy, they warmed to it by an average of .37 points. If a president of the opposite party was revealed to favor a policy, whether school vouchers or universal pre-K, the respondent moved away from that proposal by .32 points. 

In other words, voters carefully weigh what high-profile figures like U.S. presidents say about schools. But their pronouncements tend to be counterproductive, splitting the public along partisan lines. 
Recent history offers some support for the paper’s hypothesis. For example, multiple studies of school districts’ behavior during the pandemic found that their local partisanship, much more so than the prevalence of COVID in the surrounding area, was highly associated with whether they heeded President Trump’s 2020 exhortation to open schools for in-person learning.

Notably, one subset of results actually showed the opposite effect, bringing both sides somewhat closer to one another. When a president backs policies that are not traditionally associated with their party and its backers — the key example being Barack Obama, whose endorsement of charter schools, merit pay and higher academic standards were revealed to partisans in three separate polls — it actually depolarizes responses: Democrats moved .28 points toward the previously unfavored proposals, while Republicans moved in the opposite direction by .14 points.

Charles Barone, the vice president of K–12 policy for the pressure group Democrats for Education Reform, said his own observations of voters during the Obama era largely dovetailed with the study’s conclusions. 

“Obama’s support for education reform, and particularly charter schools, did help with Democrats,” Barone said. “We saw higher poll numbers among Democrats on issues like charters after Obama came out in favor of them.”

Elusive common ground

Education observers generally agreed that polarization around schools has clearly escalated since the Obama administration, and that many everyday voters rely heavily on their party leaders to form judgments on policy initiatives they’re unfamiliar with. 

But while Polikoff agreed that the receding center ground represented a “huge problem” for those attempting to improve the way schools deliver education, he added that President Biden’s most recent predecessors might have been particularly good at exercising partisan energies.

“You wouldn’t necessarily want to extrapolate from these two presidents to all of them,” he said. “Obama and Trump, if nothing else, were very visible and almost ubiquitous in ways that other presidents might not be — and that state and local leaders, who are actually influencing these policies — are not.”

State leadership may provide some cause for optimism as well. While rancorous fights over school closures and contentious classroom material have won headlines in recent years, long-awaited support from both parties has also led to efforts to incorporate the science of reading in early literacy instruction. And in further illustration of Houston’s findings, a slew of Republican governors have taken the opportunity to lift teacher salaries, winning popular approval in part by embracing a stance that is most often associated with Democrats.

Margaret Spellings, formerly the U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush, now serves as the CEO of the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center. An enthusiastic proponent of No Child Left Behind-style education reform, she said she was struck by the “vacuum of federal leadership and cohesion” that now prevails in Washington.

In her office, she said, she still keeps mementos of the law’s passage, which was supported by mammoth margins in both the U.S. House and Senate. That occurred during the administration of a much more unifying president — Bush was riding sky-high approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and NCLB was seen as a major bipartisan compromise — but the victory reflected what political will and energy could accomplish, she added

“I wish someone would tell me what the Biden K–12 policy is,” Spellings said. “There is none. And the Trump administration was just about vouchers. But I haven’t given up on bipartisanship, period, or I wouldn’t be doing the job I’m doing.”

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak during the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.

Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was “undoing the decline in residential segregation.”

“While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time,” Owens said.

Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public, though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the Segregation Explorer, which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis measures children’s exposure to peers of different racial backgrounds, comparing the average African American student’s proportion of white classmates with the average white student’s proportion of African American classmates in the same district. The difference between the two figures, measured on a 0–1 scale, is deemed the district’s “segregation level.” 

As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students. 

But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.

Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute “anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of this issue.”

“I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,” Kisida said. “But I don’t know if I would look at the trend from 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”

The charter factor

Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a “very solid finding” that dovetailed with his own prior work.

In 2019, he co-authored an article examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of data than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)

The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points — from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent — had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000. 

Another, smaller factor in pushing back integration, the authors argue, was the gradual eclipse of desegregation orders that began in the 1990s. As federal courts released one district after another from injunctions requiring them to evenly balance racial groups across schools, campuses became about 1 percentage point more segregated than they otherwise would have been. 

Boston College professor Shep Melnick, who published a book last year on the halting efforts toward desegregation that began in 1954 with Brown, said that the lifting of injunctions accelerated during the early 2000s, eventually releasing more than half of the districts that had previously been under court oversight. In some instances, though, local enforcement — or even awareness — of the orders was so paltry that their sunsetting would not have made much difference.

“Some of these schools that were formerly under court order didn’t even realize they were under court order,” said Melnick. “So the effects of the orders in those cases probably were not that great.” 

Melnick and Owens agreed that the public needed to be conscious of the differing definitions of racial segregation that underlie research studies. For example, multiple waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America have made the U.S. population significantly more diverse than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Efforts to quantify desegregation simply as the exposure of African American students to white classmates must account for the fact that white students represent a much smaller share of the total student body.

“When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,” Owens concluded. “But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids — because there are fewer white kids around.”

The research, led by a prominent expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, is attracting attention as authorities in the United States and several other countries voice louder concerns about the influence of technology on kids. Its conclusions could add to the calls for more strict regulation of their access to social media, which have already led to phone bans in classrooms and contentious hearings in Congress about the fate of TikTok. 

In February, Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower released a working paper that used survey evidence to show a pronounced increase in sadness and hopelessness over the past 15 years affecting people between the ages of 14 and 24. That trend mirrored a similar and dramatic rise in the time that young people, and especially young women, spent in front of a television, computer, smartphone, or gaming console over the same years.

All told, in 2022, more than 10 percent of young women said that they had a “bad mental health day” every day of the preceding month, a threefold uptick from the levels measured in 1993. Meanwhile, the proportion of young women absorbing four or more hours of screen time each day climbed from 8 percent in 2003 to 61 percent in 2022. 

In an interview, Blanchflower called the twin developments “a crisis of our kids” that would harm their ability to lead worthwhile lives and hamper social progress in the long run. While the tight correlation between rising unhappiness and the growth of screen time isn’t enough to decide the question of whether one causes the other, he added, the relationship was too obvious, and too dangerous, to ignore.

“You need a variable that starts in 2011 and is especially true for women, and you get screen time,” he said. “I don’t know of anything else, so if that’s not it, what is it?”

Blanchflower is hardly the first to offer this hypothesis. In the mid-2010s, just as American children’s declining mental health began to be noticed by both experts and the public, psychologist Jean Twenge accused smartphones of “destroying a generation” of kids. More recently, she has been joined by social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, whose new book, The Anxious Generation, levels a similar indictment. 

But with the arrival of Blanchflower’s critique, one of the world’s leading economists has entered the chat. And while pointing to similar data and results, his conclusions paint a distinctly new picture of the emotional trajectory experienced by much of the world’s population. Hundreds of studies previously tracked a consistent pattern to people’s long-term moods — one in which most start off relatively happy, become somewhat less so in their 40s and 50s, and then rebound later — but those rhythms have, for the moment, been upended.

Still, not all observers are as convinced as Blanchflower that technological shocks lie at the heart of the problem. While conceding that an excess of social media very likely leads to harmful consequences, researcher and commentator Will Rinehart said it would be exceedingly difficult to identify their exact effects, let alone change them for the better.

“The technology itself brings new social opportunities and new ways of interacting with your peers,” said Rinehart, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “When that box is open, it’s kind of impossible to shut it again.”

The shape of happiness

Blanchflower, a labor economist who gained public recognition by accurately forecasting the 2008 recession as an advisor to the Bank of England, has spent much of his career studying the economics of happiness — essentially an inquiry into the welfare and life satisfaction of people around the world. 

Such questions have often been left to psychologists, who traditionally take a broader view than social scientists of human motivation and behavior. As more economists expanded the sub-field, however, they generated new insights about the growing happiness of African Americans compared to whites and the particularly adverse reactions of women to the experience of the pandemic.

Perhaps the most noteworthy finding has been that people tend to experience their greatest happiness in both childhood and old age, while enduring a trough during midlife. That consistent dropoff, usually coincident with the growing responsibilities of career and parenthood, is referred to as the “U-shape” of personal well-being — high on either side, low in the middle. Its reverse, a depiction of negative emotion, would be conceived as a “hump shape.”

But according to another paper, released by Blanchflower and his co-authors earlier this month, those descriptions are no longer accurate. In an analysis of over 1.4 million survey responses across 34 countries, Blanchflower and his collaborators discovered that young adults’ widely-reported increase in fear, depression, and anxiety in recent years has contorted the hump shape of unhappiness; instead, people appear to be most unhappy around age 18 and become less so as time goes on.

Blanchflower said that reports of freefalling indicators of mental health for teenagers and young adults, including increased hospitalizations for self-harm and greater suicidality, led him to check on the latest data from benchmark surveys such as the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which conducts health-related interviews with 400,000 adults every year. The results from the past half-decade were eye-opening, he recalled, and were equally present in figures from the United Kingdom as well as the United States.

“I got in there early and said, ‘I’d better take a look at this because I’ve got endless research saying there’s a happiness U-shape,’” he said. “And I started to look and said, ‘Holy moly, it’s gone!’” People in their late teens and early 20s are now the most likely to report experiencing despair, with people in their late 60s and early 70s substantially less apt to say the same.

An additional overview of findings from the Global Mind Project, which polls a vast swath of international respondents, also demonstrated a steep rise in fear, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among adults in dozens of countries (again including the U.K. and the U.S.).

COVID has often been cited as a major force playing on the anxieties of young people. But the survey responses strongly indicate that the pandemic actually accelerated pre-existing trends, Blanchflower and his co-authors noted. The sense of displacement brought on by online instruction in the early 2020s may have only intensified the same alienation triggered by online interaction in the 2010s. 

Devorah Heitner is a parent and author who has personally canvassed children around the country to learn how they and their peers navigate a world mediated by screens and social networks. While intermittently skeptical of the most vocal critics of smartphones and social media, including Twenge, she said many young people express a desire to limit their interactions with technology.

“Kids are very aware of their relationships with their phones,” said Heitner, whose book on the virtual lives of kids, Growing Up in Public, became a bestseller last year. “They wish they could take a break from it, or that they could get their friends to use them less.”

The ‘cost of not doing something’

Educators, parents, and politicians are increasingly open to considering restrictions on how children can engage with the internet and social media.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law banning social media accounts for children younger than 14 and requiring 14- and 15-year-olds to obtain parental permission. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force the sale of the Chinese-owned platform TikTok, citing concerns both about users’ data security and the app’s effects on its youngest users. (The proposal has since been tied to a comprehensive package of foreign aid that is expected to win approval in the Senate.)

Heitner said that social media companies should curb their most “manipulative” features, including location sharing, which allows users to see where their friends are at a given time. Yet she also believes that full-on bans risk curtailing some of the constructive ways that adolescents use technology. While many are bullied or harassed online, for example, others find outlets for their stress and connections with new friends.

“Many of the girls I’ve talked to are using social media in really positive ways: to stay connected to friends, to do activism, to do creative work,” Heitner said. “It really does vary.”

Mitch Prinstein, a neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina and the chief science officer of the American Psychological Association, struck a similar note. The existing research revealed a correlation between the introduction of mass smartphone use and the decline of youth mental health, but not a firm causal connection, he argued. While some studies offered more suggestive evidence — including one experiment that paid students to deactivate Facebook, which left them happier and less polarized than before — potential contributors to the well-being crisis could also include a worsening political climate, along with the frequently circulated fears of environmental disaster and school shootings.

“We can certainly demonstrate that some features of social media are bad for kids,” Prinstein said. “They don’t fit kids’ brain development, they’re depriving kids of alternative experiences — absolutely. I just bristle at the idea of saying this is the singular cause of the youth mental health crisis.”

In both of the new papers, Blanchflower and his co-authors identified additional factors that may have contributed to rising rates of depression and dismay. In particular, the after-effects of the Great Recession may have altered the family lives of huge numbers of children by putting their parents out of work. A significant majority of the young women feeling despair between 2020 and 2022 also reported having suffered one or more adverse child experiences, such as cohabitating with a mentally ill person, living through their parents’ divorce, or being physically or sexually abused.

But the mounting data pointed to a clear role played by the shift of socialization to the internet, he remarked. While adding that it could take 50 years or more to establish the relationship conclusively, Blanchflower said that all the existing evidence argued in favor of enacting hard limits to the exposure of young people to social media and smartphones. Acting decisively could save lives, he said.

“We could fart around about causality, but the potential cost of not doing something is so much greater than the cost of doing something and being wrong. It doesn’t look to me like there are actually detrimental consequences of acting.”

During that same period, about 11% of 12-grade students reported using a lesser-known product, delta-8-THC, a psychoactive substance typically derived from hemp. It can produce a fuzzy, euphoric high similar to — but typically milder than — the THC effects delivered in cannabis. 

Delta-8-THC is of particular interest because despite health risks, it’s still widely considered to be legal at the federal level after the 2018 farm bill removed hemp from the list of controlled substances. It’s legal in 22 states and Washington, D.C. with limited regulation, and in a number of states — including Illinois and New Jersey — there are no age restrictions at all on purchasing it. Concerns are compounded by the fact that it can be found in kid-friendly products, like gummies and chocolates, and can be bought online or from easily accessible vendors, like gas stations.

The results on pot and delta-8-THC use came from the newly released Monitor the Future study, which annually surveys teens across the U.S. and is conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The study, which was the first to report the extent of delta-8-THC use, included 22,318 surveys given to students enrolled in 235 public and private schools across the country between February and June 2023. Questions about delta-8-THC were administered to a randomly selected one-third of 12th-grade students, or 2,186 seniors in 27 states.

“(Eleven percent) is a lot of people — that’s at least one or two students in every average-sized high school class who may be using delta-8. We don’t know enough about these drugs, but we see that they are already extremely accessible to teens,” National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow said in a statement. “Cannabis use in general has been associated with negative impacts on the adolescent brain, so we must pay attention to the kinds of cannabis products teens are using, educate young people about potential risks, and ensure that treatment for cannabis use disorder and adequate mental health care is provided to those who need it.” 

The latest study adds to the understanding of how young people are using cannabis and related products at a time when legalization is far reaching and overwhelmingly favored — 74% of Americans now live in a state where marijuana is legal for either recreational or medical use and 88% support legalization for those two purposes, according to two Pew Research Center analyses released over the last month. 

Ryan Sultan, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a cannabis-use expert, said the current climate calls for a more nuanced approach to marijuana’s effects.

“The narrative of cannabis as a ‘reefer madness’ and ruining everyone’s life — that one was a lie,” he said. “And the narrative that cannabis is a magical, natural, benign panacea for everything — that one is also not true.”

At the same time, Sultan warns that young users remain particularly vulnerable. 

“The biggest consequence that we think about in the field of child development … is that using substances that are potentially psychoactive and addictive and have effects on development … the younger you are, the more problematic they might be,” he said. “And cannabis is included in that.”

A number of teenagers believe that marijuana is helpful for anxiety and depression, which doesn’t appear to be true in the long term, Sultan said. “The problem is that chronic use seems to not do that. Chronic use seems to actually result in a worsening of that symptomatology.” 

Cannabis today is far more potent than it was decades ago, allowing it to bind to receptors in the brain more effectively. So when you stop using it, you end up with even worse symptoms, according to Sultan. 

Sultan published a study last year showing that adolescents who recently used cannabis but did not meet the criteria for a marijuana use disorder had two to four times greater odds of major depression, suicidal ideation, difficulty concentrating, lower GPA and a number of other negative outcomes. These results reinforce those of earlier studies as well. 

Sultan analyzed responses from 68,263 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2015 and 2019.

He noted, though, that the study did not demonstrate causation: it’s not clear that the marijuana use directly led to these mental health issues and other outcomes.

“It’s more like a cycle,” he said, in which people who are depressed and anxious are more likely to use cannabis in the first place to self-medicate their symptoms but this can end up “spinning out of control.”

“So rather than which came first, the chicken or the egg? They both came and they’re both happening and they’re both interacting with each other.” 

Yet, most adolescents don’t think of weed as harmful: Over the past decade, the perceived risk of harm decreased by nearly half, while use for people 12 and over increased from about 12% to about 18%. Several studies demonstrate that they think of edibles, in particular, as less harmful, failing to account for concerns around potency, regulation and delayed effects. 

A 2023 study at UC Davis Health and the University of Washington, which surveyed teens over a six-month period, found that they get high for enjoyment and to cope. Those who used it to forget their problems typically experienced more negative consequences like difficulty concentrating. Lead author Nicole Schultz noted that understanding teens’ motivation for getting high is an important first step in developing strategies to intervene early. 

Post-pandemic, marijuana remains one of the three most common substances used by adolescents, along with alcohol and nicotine vaping. 

In 2022, the percentage of young adults 19 to 30 years old who reported marijuana use reached record highs, according to a National Institute of Health-funded study: About 44% of those surveyed reported use in the past year — a significant increase from the 25% who reported the same in 2012. Young adults also reported a record-high use of marijuana vaping in 2022: 21% up from 12% in 2017, when the measure was first added to the study.

A meta-analysis published in 2020 found that adolescents and adults who vape nicotine were also more likely to also use alcohol and marijuana. In adolescents, the relationship was much stronger: those who vaped were 4.5 to six times as likely to report alcohol and marijuana use and were particularly likely to report binge drinking.

According to a recent paper, vaping has emerged as one of the two most popular methods for teens to get high, despite its unclear long-term health implications. In fact, it may actually be associated with greater risk than smoking for lung injuries, seizures and acute psychiatric symptoms. 

Vaping is also a more accessible and discreet way to consume marijuana, allowing teens to use it in more settings, including schools, without getting caught. New York City teachers and students have reported more and younger students are coming to school high and are smoking throughout the day, with some educators hypothesizing that kids are using weed to blunt residual pain and anxiety from the pandemic. 

This harder-to-detect delivery method puts a lot of pressure on individuals to manage how often they’re using it, according to Sultan, which is particularly challenging for adolescents who may struggle with impulse control. 

Ultimately, though, much of the research that exists on cannabis generally is outdated because it’s based on weaker strains of the substance from years ago, Sultan said: “We are behind the eight ball on cannabis.”

The study, commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, surveyed more than 1,700 high school juniors and seniors, with 83 percent saying they value professional development leading to a job compared to 72 percent who value a four-year degree.

In collaboration with HCM Strategists and Edge Research, the study also surveyed more than 3,000 non-enrolled adults ages 18-30 who either chose not to attend college or left their postsecondary program.

Both groups not only placed higher value in on-the-job training, but also licenses and professional certificates.

But a panel of experts came together yesterday to discuss the report’s findings — expressing concern over the growing apathy high schoolers and non-enrolled adults are showing in a college education.

“This is an acute concern to us particularly because our North Star is pretty simple,” said Patrick Methvin, director of pathways and postsecondary success strategies at the Gates Foundation, “to dramatically increase opportunity for the socioeconomic advancement of Americans and to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student success.”

“Because we know a postsecondary credential is the most sure path to that, these attitudinal changes are a concern,” said Methvin.

Despite the empirical value of a college degree, Methvin said high schoolers’ waning trust comes from the negative media they consume, including the Supreme Court decision ending race conscious college admissions — which students view as an attack on campus diversity — along with crippling student loan debt.

But Methvin insisted a college education is still the most valuable option.

“People are living in very different worlds where they’re getting their information and what that’s doing in terms of influencing their choices,” Methvin said.

This data builds on a fall 2022 study that examined students’ declining enrollment in higher education.

“The postsecondary value narrative has been prevalent in policy wonk circles for some time, but the interesting thing from this research is we’re hearing those exact same words now from students themselves,” Methvin said. “They are talking about value. They are talking about [the return on investment] in ways they weren’t 10 years ago.”

Here are four key takeaways from the report:

1. High schoolers and non-enrolled adults value on-the-job training the most out of all postsecondary options.

Terrell Dunn, founding partner and consultant at HCM Strategists, said students value on-the-job training because they’re “shorter and cheaper options” that lead to well-paying jobs — such as careers in the oil and gas industry that offer six figure salaries without needing a college degree.

Adam Burns, chief operations officer and senior research analyst at Edge Research, said there’s “uncertainty” that investing in a college degree will help students reach their career goals.

“When it comes to paying for college, this is when the gloves come off [and] folks really seem to have a lot of problems,” Burns said. “They’re really lost in understanding how much college really costs, how financial aid works and even just managing when to fill out the forms and how to fill out the forms.”

2. High schoolers are more likely to align college importance with future job placements and income.

High schoolers that value a college education are focused on real life concerns such as earning more money and getting a better job — as opposed to learning or networking.

Pam Loeb, principal at Edge Research, said high schoolers main focus is finding the best pathway to a well-paying job.

“How do I find the right job once I’m finished? How do I choose what classes to take so I’m not wasting my time and money as I go through the college process,” Loeb said. “A concerted effort to engage and reach out to [high schoolers] is really needed.”

3. The importance of a college degree declined among non-enrolled adults compared to those surveyed in the fall of 2022.

The top reasons non-enrolled adults value earning a college degree aligns with high schoolers — to earn more money and get a better job.

But every reason for getting a college degree declined across the board for non-enrolled adults compared to those surveyed in the fall of 2022.

Burns said non-enrolled adults’ declining value stems from the “opportunity cost” of transitioning away from their full-time jobs to work towards a college degree they’re already skeptical about.

“They need help from someone who can connect the dots [and] make sure they can see the return on investment,” Burns said, such as ensuring they will secure an internship or full-time job after graduating.

4. Most non-enrolled adults see more value in licenses, professional certificates, and trade schools compared to a four-year degree.

About 75, 72 and 63 percent of non-enrolled adults respectively value licenses, professional certificates and trade or vocational schools — an increase of five percent compared to those surveyed in the fall of 2022.

But just 57 percent value a four-year school — a three percent decline.

“A lot of their concern is around making the right choices…at each juncture of their journey,” said Jessica Collis, director of advocacy and change management at HCM Strategists.

Dunn said non-enrolled adults might find value in a college degree if higher education institutions were more intentional about reaching out to them.

“They’re pretty rational in weighing their opportunity costs as they think about higher education,” Dunn said. “So although they’re skeptical…they’re also persuadable.” 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Since the mid-20th century, the town of Highland Park has resisted annexation and today operates a separate, roughly 6,700-student school district that is surrounded on all sides by the 139,723-student Dallas Independent School District. Student demographics between the two school systems — and the services they’re able to offer — are markedly different, according to a just-released report from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, which explores how school district borders across the U.S. create racial and economic segregation — often intentionally. 

Included in the report is an in-depth, interactive map that allows users to explore school district segregation by race and class in their own communities. 

In Dallas, students of color comprise 94% of enrollment and in Highland Park,  just 18%. Such segregation extends beyond race. In Highland Park, less than 4% of students live in poverty. In the Dallas school system, a quarter of kids are impoverished, with some of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from Highland Park. 

Such jarring school district disparities, which create real-world gaps in learning opportunities for students, exist across the country. America’s patchwork school district borders carry serious consequences for communities and children’s academic outcomes, according to the report by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nationally, about 30% of school funding is generated by local property taxes, a reality that creates haves and have-nots between property-wealthy districts and those that serve predominantly low-income families. 

Much of the disparities can be blamed on inequitable housing policies, such as redlining and exclusionary zoning, which were explicitly implemented to segregate neighborhoods along race and class lines, ultimately showing up “not just in residential patterns but also in school budgets,” said Zahava Stadler, a project director at New America who shared the findings of her research during a workshop last week at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. 

“These are policy choices that are being made not just in the way we’ve designed school funding systems, but also in the way we actively maintain school funding systems year to year,” she said. “All of those things are policy choices that are being made by state policymakers every single year.”  

In total, researchers analyzed more than 13,000 school districts across the country, along with more than 25,000 pairs of neighboring school district borders, to identify how such arbitrary divisions work to generate inequality. Nationwide, they found that, on average, enrollment of students of color fluctuated by 14 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Along the 100 most racially segregated school district borders, however, the average difference was 78 percentage points. In other words, in one school district, students of color comprised 2% of the total enrollment while, in a district directly next door, they accounted for 80% of the student body. 

Economic segregation was similarly stark. On average, the enrollment of impoverished students fluctuated by 5.2 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Yet along the 100 most economically segregated school district borders, researchers found the average divide was roughly six times that, at 31 percentage points. One example, the Utica, New York, school district where 33% of students live in poverty, compared to the neighboring New Hartford district where 5% do. 

While school district border changes have been used by communities interested in concentrating their affluence, Stadler said the opposite — district consolidation — should be viewed as “a tool in the toolbox of creating more equitable school districts,” establishing schools that are more diverse while ensuring that all students have fairer access to educational resources. 

But local context matters. Simply merging school districts to eliminate racial and economic segregation isn’t always the most equitable solution, the report argues, as each area has its own individual policies and contexts. In South Dakota, for example, researchers observed striking racial and economic segregation between the predominantly white Custer School District and the neighboring Oglala Lakota School District, located on the high-poverty Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Indigenous students represent 96% of enrollment on the reservation and less than 4% in Custer. 

An influx of federal and state dollars has left the Oglala Lakota County Schools among South Dakota’s best-funded, but they remain among its lowest-performing. These high levels of funding “do not ensure our children a rich education,” Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, argues in the report. Along with historical challenges and the scars of trauma and colonialism, Cournoyer said, the reservation’s schools also have to contend with bureaucracy and limitations on how they can spend those government dollars. That creates barriers in how they can use funds “to address the unique needs of Native students, which results in inequitable access to opportunities.” 

Despite the imbalance in school resources, Cournoyer notes that students on the reservation benefit from cultural and language support — something they could miss if they attended schools in Custer, even with its “nicer facilities and more advanced technology.” The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn. 

“They would not be in a school environment that reflects or values their native culture,” Cournoyer wrote. “They would be isolated, away from the protection of their family and tribal leadership. They would be more likely to encounter racism and stereotyping, making them less comfortable with expressing their Native identity.”

When confronted with this “age-old story,” as King calls it, she starts asking questions. Do you not like the class? Is something else going on? She checks their grades. And once she identifies the core issues, she provides the student with wraparound services, engaging school counselors, social workers, teachers and parents.

The main goal? To get students the support they need to return to class as quickly as possible. She calls school nurses “the sentinels,” arguing it’s their role to identify when there’s an issue and then pull together as many people as they can to support that child.

Her current school, World Language Middle School, a bilingual language immersion school in Columbus, Ohio, electronically tracks when students go to the nurse’s office so they can quickly identify these patterns.  

“My primary focus — and a school nurse’s primary focus — is that children are in school,” she said. “Many people think our primary focus is to send children home, but actually our focus is to keep kids in school.”

King’s experiences mirror the results of a new study of 21 nurses out of the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing. Researcher Knoo Lee, himself a registered nurse, found that students who have many partial-day absences often seek out school nurses as a source of comfort and support. This puts school nurses in a unique position to intervene before their absences become chronic. 

“We discovered something that we haven’t seen before,” Lee told The 74, “where school nurses are actually in a position where they are able to identify students who are going through the early symptoms of partial-day absences.” Knowing that partial-day absences often lead to full-day absences, “we believe from these results that school nurses have the potential to play a key role in terms of really helping out with chronic absenteeism.”

Despite this, school nurses are often left out of policy-making decisions and conversations, Lee found. They also need access to greater support and resources to respond to the challenges students face that impact chronic absenteeism, including mental health concerns, homelessness, lack of transportation and food insecurity. And in order for school nurses to be effective, the report recommends that districts work to make sure schools are staffed with an adequate number who are trained and certified and that they have the needed supplies.

Especially post-pandemic, chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10% or more of school days a year, has proved to be an intractable problem. In the 2020-21 school year, at least 14.7 million students nationwide were chronically absent — more than double the number pre-COVID, according to Attendance Works, a nonprofit that aims to reduce chronic absenteeism. Children living in poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent. Students from communities of color as well as those with disabilities are also disproportionately affected. 

Historically, researchers looking at chronic absenteeism have largely ignored partial-day absences, according to Lee, even though they are more prevalent and can be a precursor to full-day absences. And both types impact academic outcomes. Lee’s study is the first to examine the effect school nurses can have on partial-day absenteeism, which is tracked differently from state-to-state and sometimes not at all.

The study is based on interviews with the nearly two dozen school nurses in six online focus groups between June and August 2020. Their years of experience varied and they worked in rural, urban and suburban schools across greater Minnesota. Nurses were also asked to complete a pre-interview survey. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Minnesota Youth Sex Trading Project, which is associated with the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and works to prevent the sexual exploitation of young people.

The research is the first to reveal that students who miss school partially are inclined to initiate their own visits to the school nurse’s office, according to Lee. These scenarios could involve a student trying to avoid a particular class; proactively stopping by the nurse’s office each morning to receive a meal they weren’t getting at home or needing to lie down after working late hours to help support their family. Once there, the nurses were able to intervene with these students and provide support. Since they didn’t have to seek out these “at-risk” students, identifying them was a relatively low lift with potentially big positive outcomes.

This demonstrates the importance of advocating for a more holistic understanding of the role of a school nurse, the study argues, particularly when it comes to offering mental and emotional support.

It becomes much more challenging for nurses to identify these absenteeism patterns if they’re not in the school building every day, according to King, who also serves as president of the more than 17,000-member National Association of School Nurses. On average, about two-thirds of public schools have access to a full-time school nurse, according to the association’s  workforce study. In rural districts, this drops to 56% and in the West, it plummets to 16%. About 40% of school nurses rotate between at least two schools. 

Parents — especially those whose kids have chronic illnesses — feel more comfortable sending their kids to school when there’s a nurse in the building every day, according to King. This is particularly true when students lack access to medical care outside of the school building. “We’ve seen so many times, the school nurse is the only health care provider that students see,” King said.

 In addition to taking away that much-needed health care opportunity, when there is no school nurse for a student to see, they are more likely to be sent home: 18% of the time versus 5% of time, according to King.

While the number of schools that have full-time nurses has substantially increased since before the pandemic, King thinks that’s likely due to COVID relief funding. She worries a number of schools will once again lose access to a full-time nurse when that federal money runs out later this year.

Notably, the study took place during the first few months of the pandemic. Since then, chronic absenteeism has only gotten worse. While there have been lots of attempted interventions over the last few years, most school districts are still struggling to find the right mix, according to Lee, the researcher. 

His study, he hopes, will highlight that “school nurses can really take a huge role in this.”

The researchers found these schools, five out of six with high numbers of students of color and those on free and reduced-price lunch, asking how to offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success, beyond just college, without lowering academic rigor or expectations. Chosen because they had a track record of innovation, the schools were questioning whether the accommodations given to students during the throes of remote learning or right after the return to in-person instruction were still serving them well.

In doing so, they are expanding their visions of success and reimagining their purpose, a move which researchers note could mark a departure from past understandings of schooling. They titled their study “A ‘Good Life’ for Every Student.”

“We saw high schools starting to adjust the goal posts, where they were taking on more responsibility for student success in the long run,” said Chelsea Waite, senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

Between April 2022 and November 2023, Waite and her partner, Maddy Sims, from Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership, did 266 interviews with current high school students, graduates, parents, teachers and school administrators. Of the six schools, including some in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, four were traditional public and two were charter schools. 

Two were alternative programs for students who are overage and undercredited, pregnant or parenting or have a history of chronic absenteeism. These students, administrators said, would have once been considered a success if they just reached graduation. Three other schools were focused on increasing access to Advanced Placement and other rigorous academic courses and to “Early College Experience” offerings.

Participating students and families identified three major priorities for post-high school futures: happiness, fulfillment and stability. For some, this included college. For others, it meant immediately entering the workforce. The concept of a “happy life” included financial security, but no one interviewed said salary was the main determinant of success.

These schools were not just trying to get students across the finish line to graduation and then directly to college, Waite said. Instead they were asking “What are students’ individualized understandings of who they want to be as adults and what they want to be in the world?” And “How can we set them up with a corresponding, individualized plan that can help them on that path to a good life?”

Each of the six schools prioritized students graduating with a “good plan” in place, but educators also acknowledged that “there really hadn’t been full alignment on what constitutes or what defines a ‘good plan’ in practice,” said Sims.

Looking to provide roadmaps for other high schools, researchers asked what success means to school communities, especially for students who have been historically marginalized; what solutions schools were exploring to help all students achieve; and what obstacles they were facing in this attempt. 

Challenges they observed across schools:

• Educators’ concerns that increasing flexibility could decrease rigor
• Desire to give students room to define their own paths to success without perpetuating historical “opportunity gaps”
• Overreliance on traditional data (such as test scores or graduation rates), despite recognizing that these are insufficient to meaningfully track success

 Examples of innovations they observed schools introducing to ensure students were academically engaged and supported:

• Shifts to interdisciplinary units and coursework. For example, in one school students were learning about marketing, social science, financial literacy and ratios in a multi-week course on the loan industry. One administrator said, “I think we can do a much better job of trapping kids in the honey of each content area. To be a writer is such a powerful thing. To be a scientist is such a powerful thing.”
• AP courses and “Early College Experience” courses, which partner with local colleges and universities
• Shift in grading towards “grading for equity” practices that focus on measuring what students know rather than how they behave
• Moving toward using the classroom as a space of exploration of identity and student-driven learning. One school allowed students to build credit-bearing “personalized learning experiences,” essentially independent studies with an advisor
• Individualized mentoring and counseling. For example, two schools used a “primary person” model, in which each student has one adult mentor who they check in with regularly 
• Alternative approaches to discipline, such as “restorative circles,” which they defined as “conversations intended to repair relationships and find mutually-agreeable solutions, after a behavioral incident or conflict”

“We did feel ourselves really compelled to illustrate how many different actions— taken by different people at different levels of the system— are necessary to support high schools systemically to be the kinds of places that set students up for a life of their own choosing,” said Waite.

While most of the schools started this transformational work before 2020, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study high school reform, according to the researchers. These challenging few years “strengthened educators’ dedication to achieving new designs for high school,” while increasing their focus on race, racism and equity.

Waite and Sims noticed that educators and administrators across the board were reflecting on how to provide students with flexibility and support without compromising rigor and high expectations. As teachers welcomed students back from remote learning, they needed to prioritize creating a supportive environment to see young people through a disruptive, traumatizing period. But now they’re questioning what comes next.

In discussing leniency during the pandemic, one teacher said, “We didn’t teach coping mechanisms, we just protected [students].” Teacher turnover and burnout also made it hard to hold students accountable. At two of the schools studied, the teaching staff was so new that they didn’t know what the classrooms looked like before COVID hit.

As for “college for all,” the researchers found a number of reasons some students are moving away from that mindset, including financial stress and risk, burnout, high-stakes testing and applications, and an understanding that there are an increasing number of jobs that don’t require a college degree. Schools wanted to ensure that college doesn’t become a privilege for a select group of students, while also communicating that a wider variety of options exist. 

High schools alone cannot be held wholly responsible to address all of the challenges presented in the report, the researchers said. “Instead, what we really observed is the incredible power of bridge building between high schools and the higher education sector, as well as between high schools and local employers.”

Waite acknowledged the study’s limitations, noting that these six schools don’t necessarily represent the entire country or even the Northeast. “What we do believe is that the themes and ideas and challenges that came through in the research … are really widespread and challenging issues that feel relevant to many different kinds of high schools.”

But many states don’t adequately train or help teachers to carry out those ambitious plans, according to a new analysis.

The report, released today by the nonprofit National Center on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), identifies five key areas where education authorities can arm teachers with better skills to teach the fundamentals of literacy — from establishing strict training and licensure standards for trainees to funding meaningful professional development to classroom veterans. While a handful of states were singled out for praise, others were criticized for inaction or half-measures. 

Dozens of states use licensure tests with little or no content related to the “science of reading,” the extensive body of research into how people understand written language (including one, Iowa, that administers no licensure test that deals with reading whatsoever.) The vast majority do not require districts to choose reading curricula that reflect the science of reading. 

NCTQ President Heather Peske, a former high-ranking K–12 official in Massachusetts, applauded recent changes in state law as “well-intentioned,” but cautioned that they could only meet with success if executed with care.

“Passing state policy is the very beginning stage of doing this work,” Peske said. “It’s really the implementation that we need to focus on now.”

Though it has germinated in academic and policy circles for years, the legislative push around early literacy first gained public prominence in Mississippi, which enacted a rash of new laws around reading instruction a decade ago. That dramatic overhaul included changes to public pre-K offerings, new resources provided to districts (including special coaches assigned to underperforming schools), and even the controversial practice of holding back third graders who failed an end-of-year exam. 

Mississippi was identified in the report as one of the national leaders implementing necessary reading reforms, along with Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. By contrast, Maine, Montana, and South Dakota were rated “unacceptable” across the five recommended action items.

Even as aspiring teachers are being trained, the authors argue, many are being set up to fall short in their first assignments. Just 26 states provide detailed standards for what teaching candidates need to know about the science of reading, including critical aspects like phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency. Twenty-one states don’t establish any standards for the specific instruction of English learners, who account for as much as 20 percent of all K–12 students in places like Texas.

In spite of the clear signs that thousands of teachers are minted each year with incomplete or inaccurate notions of the science of reading, a majority of state education departments allow outside entities and accreditors to approve literacy offerings in schools of education and other teacher preparation programs. Just 23 states administer their own process of approval, and only 10 consult literacy experts in the decision of whether to approve individual programs.

Once those new teachers enter the classroom, many will be stuck using materials that are poorly aligned with the best research on how to improve reading outcomes, the study concludes. Only nine states — Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina — require that districts use high-quality reading curricula, such as those approved by vetting organizations like EdReports. The remaining states, accounting for 40 million K–12 students, make no such requirement; 20 states don’t even collect data on which curricula districts are using, so families must make their own inquiries into whether their children have access to effective instruction.

Even while popular early literacy approaches, such as “guided reading” and “balanced literacy,” have fallen out of favor with education experts in recent years, hundreds of school districts still spend millions of dollars each year to access them. Some include wealthy suburban districts in high-achieving areas like Greater Boston, where high average reading scores are complicated by large disparities between high- and low-performing students.

Peske said that while the report did not delve into regulatory questions like whether to introduce universal dyslexia screening or to retain low-scoring elementary students for extra reading instruction, those issues were also important parts of state rules around foundational literacy. But teacher preparation and support stood above the rest, she concluded.

“We know teachers matter most; they’re the most important in-school factor in impacting student outcomes,” she said. “So if we’re actually going to see improvement in student reading rates, we need to make sure teachers are prepared and supported to implement and sustain scientifically based reading instruction.”

Outcomes are starkly different for those who have that opportunity. High-achieving Black, Latino and lower-income students who do gain access to advanced math classes in high school have better academic outcomes across multiple measures: stronger high school graduation rates, higher GPAs and greater college admission and persistence rates. They were also more likely to attend a highly selective college and earn more STEM credits there, a pathway to landing lucrative jobs in those fields.

Just Equations and The Education Trust released their report Thursday. Together, they analyzed eight years of data following 23,000 ninth graders from 900 private and public schools throughout the country, information collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. The study group was tracked through high school and college starting in 2009. 

Both Ed Trust and Just Equations advocate for educational equality with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved. Earlier research cited in the report shows Black, Latino and impoverished students, regardless of their capabilities, are less likely to be assigned AP math courses, enroll in STEM majors or attend top-tier colleges than their wealthier, white or Asian peers.

“This study challenges the notion that access to advanced math courses is purely the byproduct of talent and academic achievement,” said Melodie Baker, national policy director at Just Equations. “Our analysis confirmed that all too often, factors such as race, wealth and privilege — rather than students’ aptitude and proficiency — can be hidden prerequisites for access to courses that lead to STEM and college opportunity.”

While 46% of high-achieving Asian students, 19% of white students, and 29% of students from high socio-economic backgrounds took college-level AP/International Baccalaureate calculus by the end of high school, just 10% of Black, 15% of Latino and 11% of lower-income high-achievers did the same. 

Race and income disparities in high school graduation rates appear to level off for this high-achieving, underrepresented group when they take advanced math courses: 99% of Asian and white students, 98% of Black students, and 96% of Latino and lower-income students graduated in four years. Four-year high school graduation rates declined among all high-achievers who did not take advanced math classes and gaps opened up along racial and socioeconomic lines, although the drop in graduation rates was starkest for Asian students and least-felt by affluent students.

“We know that it is so important for students to feel engaged and that their learning experiences are relevant,” said Ivy Smith Morgan, EdTrust’s director for P12 research and data analytics. “What this conjures for me is the anecdotes about students who are so smart but stop paying attention in class because they are not challenged. They are not getting the opportunities that align with their ability.”

Smith Morgan noted U.S. students’ performance in mathematics as compared to their peers internationally has been highly scrutinized for years, with last week’s release of the latest PISA scores showing unprecedented 13-point declines for American students and an average 15-point loss globally. The U.S., still reeling from COVID learning loss, along with other countries, now ranks 26th in its math scores. Smith Morgan said a failure to mine students’ talents will have dire economic implications. 

“What we are talking about is losing a future workforce with the skills, training and technical knowledge we need to fill all of the STEM jobs that will exist — not the ones we have right now, but the ones we have not even thought of yet,” she said. “We are shooting ourselves in the foot.” 

The study notes the disparity in opportunity starts well before students enter high school: Just 24% of Black students, 34% of Latino students, and 25% of students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds took Algebra I or higher in eighth grade, compared with 39% of white children, 64% of their Asian peers and 57% of students from higher income backgrounds. 

“Anyone who is paying attention knows that our mathematics education systems are deeply inequitable,” said David Kung, director of strategic partnerships at The Charles A. Dana Center in Austin. “Black, brown and poor students get shafted when it comes to access, teaching and advising.”

The Dana Center, which seeks to ensure all students have access to excellent math and science education, has been working with several states across the nation as part of its Launch Years Initiative to revamp mathematics curriculum, making equity and student interest a top priority.  

“This report is another reminder that whenever there are decisions to be made —  to take algebra in 8th grade, to enroll in an advanced math class, to apply to college, to choose a STEM path — equity gaps open,” Kung said. “We must reform our systems so those critical transitions are smoother, especially for students from groups we have historically under-supported.”

The new study found, too, that high-achieving underserved students who took more challenging high school mathematics coursework often had math teachers who established clear goals and school counselors who set high standards. Such positive influences may have aided in their success. 

Researchers say 74% of Black and 81% of Latino high-achieving students who were enrolled in advanced high school mathematics courses went on to follow a standard process of getting into and staying enrolled at college after high school. 

Not so for those who did not: Only 58% of Black students and 53% of Latino high-achieving students who did not take these classes had that same outcome. Results were similar for students from lower-income backgrounds: 77% of those who took advanced math courses experienced standard college enrollment and persistence versus 53% who did not take more challenging courses.  

The study showed Black and Latino high-achieving students who took advanced math courses in high school had better first-year college GPAs: roughly 0.5 points higher. Lower income students had a 0.6-point gain. 

EdTrust and Just Equations recommends Congress support and incentivize state and district leaders to greatly expand access to challenging coursework in all topics, including math. 

They said, too, that the government should increase funding for whole-child support services that would allow districts to hire an appropriate number of well-trained restorative justice coordinators, school counselors, psychologists and nurses. 

States and districts should also boost professional development efforts and coaching with the goal of reducing bias and incorporating anti-racist mindsets. 

They can also automatically enroll students in higher-level math courses, like the Dallas school system, which moved from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. The entire state of Texas followed that example: Gov. Abbott, earlier this year, signed a bill that requires the automatic enrollment of children in advanced math based on their test scores, not on a recommendation. 

The Commit Partnership, a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on education, applauded the move. Chelsea Jeffery, its chief regional impact officer, said she looks forward to other districts doing the same, not only changing their policies but providing students with the support necessary to graduate high school ready for college and the workforce. 

“We celebrate Dallas ISD for their innovative approach to this critical subject area and to policymakers for passing legislation that will benefit our students and community,” she said. 

The study classified a student as high-achieving if they passed — with an A, B, or C — Algebra I or higher in middle school. Others who made the cut scored in the highest one-fifth on a math assessment given to students in ninth grade. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations, The Education Trust, The Charles A. Dana Center and The 74.

The analysis, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, looked at federal data that found more than 14 million chronically absent students during the 2021-22 academic year — an increase of nearly seven million students compared to 2017-18.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said an “all hands on deck” approach is needed to address widespread absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“If you can imagine a rising tide, students who were a little underwater are now underwater more and those that weren’t underwater before now are,” Balfanz told The 74.

This analysis served as a second look into the attendance trend which previously showed how two out of three students across the country were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism — more than twice the rate compared to the 2017-18 academic year.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days.

Although the attendance trend affected students of all ethnic backgrounds, Latino students took the brunt of the declines — increasing from nearly 2.4 million in 2017-18 to five million in 2021-22, a 53 percent jump.

Pacific Islander students saw the second biggest jump of 46 percent, white students by 39 percent, Black students by 36 percent and Native American students by 29 percent.

Balfanz said pandemic-era challenges for low-income and immigrant families pulled students away from school and contributed to the widening attendance gaps.

“Many kids got jobs because their parents lost theirs and became a lot more restricted,” Balfanz said, adding how Latino students often faced this burden compared to other ethnic groups.

He added how “caregiving” also played a major factor in declining Latino student attendance — often coming from multigenerational families with stronger cultural expectations to look after younger siblings.

The attendance trend was also observed geographically, particularly impacting students in both suburban and rural areas.

Chronic absenteeism in suburban and rural school districts jumped to 5.1 million and 2.5 million students respectively in 2021-22 — a 46 percent and 47 percent increase compared to 2.8 million and 1.4 million in 2017-18.

Schools in cities experienced an increase of 44 percent and districts in towns jumped by 42 percent.

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said “inequitable access to needed [healthcare] services and poor transportation” during the pandemic contributed to the attendance gaps in rural areas.

The greatest increases in chronic absenteeism occurred among schools serving larger numbers of students living in poverty, the analysis found.

Among schools with 75 percent or more students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, chronic absence nearly tripled — from 25 percent to 69 percent. 

Chang said poverty was the driving force behind student chronic absenteeism nationwide.

“Kids who are living in poverty are much more likely to have all of these barriers when it comes to aversion and disengagement,” Chang told The 74.

“It’s hard for students to keep going when they feel like nobody knows them or nobody cares,” Balfanz added. “Solving that disconnect they have is a great first step.”

Announced Tuesday morning, the scores represent more proof of steep learning loss in math during the pandemic and its aftermath. But they also provide the first international context for COVID’s impact on American children, indicating that many students abroad — including in countries that have previously ranked among the world’s top performers — may have experienced even worse setbacks.

Eighty-one countries participated in PISA in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental authority that administers the test. Among that group, average scores fell by 15 points in math and 10 points in reading since 2018, while science scores were not significantly changed. 

As in several other standardized tests conducted since COVID’s emergence in 2020, those declines are unprecedented; over 20 years of PISA testing, average math and literacy scores have never moved by more than four or five points between consecutive assessments. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Monday that even highly developed countries across Europe and Asia “suffered tremendously” from the learning disruptions triggered by the pandemic. 

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Carr said. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

But while American students’ 13-point drop in math fell within the international average, their relative stasis in PISA’s other testing domains of reading and science (minus-one and minus-three points since 2018, neither of which is considered statistically significant) provide surprisingly positive news. Indeed, while U.S. scores slumped across all three subjects, the ranking of the United States among PISA participants actually improved since 2018: from 29th in mathematics to 26th, from eighth in reading to sixth, and from 11th in science to 10th. 

Those shifts in relative performance result from even greater COVID-era slides in other countries. Among those seeing especially large reversals in math were Iceland (minus-36 points), Norway (minus-33 points), Poland (minus-27 points), and Slovenia (minus-24 points). Fifteen-year-olds in Finland, which has built an international reputation for top performance on exams like PISA, saw a 30-point drop in reading skills over the last four years. 

In a somewhat curious turn, the index of four Chinese provinces where students have traditionally taken the PISA (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang) did not report scores for the 2022 round. In previous administrations of the test, those students yielded the top scores on all three subjects — although those results were also criticized by international observers for allegedly being “cherry-picked” from China’s wealthiest and highest-achieving areas.

According to the OECD, the four provinces participated in the 2022 test, but their performance couldn’t be measured because schools were closed during the intended data collection period. Impressive scores were posted by students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Macau, though these will likely also be considered atypical of learning across that country’s vast mainland. 

Among PISA’s top-scoring nations in math were East Asian participants like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Korea. Singapore, Ireland, Estonia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan boasted the strongest readers.

‘I would have expected a larger drop.’

The scores will undoubtedly be used as an indicator of how learning was affected by COVID. Two-thirds of participating countries reported that they closed schools for longer than three months for the majority of their students during the pandemic. Students in countries that experienced briefer periods of closure did see smaller drops in math scores, the OECD reported, but Carr said the statistical correlation was “weak.”

A wealth of research conducted since 2020 has drawn close connections between virtual learning and academic harm. But prior standardized testing releases, such as that of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown that states that kept schools open also endured significant learning damage, muddying the argument over the ultimate impact of shuttered schools.

In surveys accompanying the test, large numbers of American students reported that they’d experienced particularly lengthy school closures. Twenty percent said their school building had been closed between six and 12 months over the previous three years (compared with 15 percent of respondents across all OECD member nations), while another 20 percent said their school had closed for over a year (compared with just 12 percent of respondents across the OECD).

Tom Loveless, a researcher who previously headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that America students’ math decline, while significant, was not “enormous.”

“Compared with the other OECD countries, we definitely had schools closed for a longer period of time,” Loveless said. “If you take this as a pre- and post-pandemic indicator, I would have expected a larger drop.”

Other learning observers were more bearish on the Americans’ showing, especially compared with comparable youths in countries far poorer than the U.S. Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, argued that the international averages concealed significant disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving test takers.

“The results are disappointing, but not surprising, and consistent with all of the other data we’ve seen post-COVID,” Khan added in an email. “In general, I think the state of math education is pretty bad globally — but there is less of an excuse in wealthy countries like the United States.”

Whatever the prevailing trends in other countries, some in the K–12 policy community will agree with that glum appraisal. Overall, 34 percent of American test takers demonstrated only basic or below-basic math skills — slightly higher than the OECD average of 31 percent. And while their reading and science scores held their ground during the COVID era, they are also not measurably improved from the years when PISA first assessed those subjects (2000 and 2006, respectively.)

The findings also raise the question of how school leaders in the United States and other countries will boost student performance in the long run. Local and state test data in the U.S. confirm that many students are still performing substantially worse than children of the same age four years ago. And with the imminent expiration of federal emergency funds that have underwritten extra staffing and programs over the last several years, authorities will need to move fast to effect a turnaround.

Bob Hughes is the director of K–12 learning programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has launched school reform and improvement efforts across the U.S. for over two decades. Last year, the organization announced that it would commit over $1 billion to improve math instruction by making the subject more engaging and relevant to students.

While calling the PISA scores “upsetting news,” Hughes added that schools and school districts could jump-start significant progress in math by employing a host of evidence-based strategies: high-impact tutoring for struggling students, improved professional learning for teachers, and more rigorous curricular materials (the “Singapore math” approach, which has shaped elementary math instruction in that country since the 1980s, has spawned a legion of fans in the U.S. as well). 

“We actually have much better data than we’ve had in the past, and we have a clearer view of what the interventions need to be,” Hughes said. “We just need to get to the business of doing it rather than spending a lot of time wringing our hands.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Now research evidence demonstrates that they face racial isolation simply by entering the classroom. A recent study of wealthy California suburbs finds that white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them — and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures. 

Circulated this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the paper offers an unusually granular view of population-level changes in a highly affluent and desirable milieu. It also reveals a stark and somewhat disturbing response to the presence of Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing and highest-achieving ethnic groups in the United States.

In measure after measure, Asian Americans are shown to be America’s top-performing student racial category. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, has historically found large gaps separating Asian students from their white, African American, and Hispanic peers. Asians achieved similar results on college entrance exams, tallying 43 percent of all test takers scoring over 700 on the SAT math section while making up less than 6 percent of all K–12 students. 

Older federal data also show that, apart from testing, Asian high schoolers earn higher GPAs than students of other backgrounds, and the proportion of Asians earning college credit through Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate coursework is nearly double that of whites. 

While they’ve ascended to lofty altitudes in U.S. schooling — significantly ahead of whites, America’s most historically advantaged group, and vastly more so relative to other non-whites — Asian Americans have often received a frosty reception from policymakers and communities. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian applicants in order to cultivate more racial diversity on their campuses, a historic blow to the legality of affirmative action. And for nearly two decades, news accounts have highlighted areas (including in California cities like Cupertino) where white families disenrolled from local schools following an influx of Asian children, with some parents openly complaining of increased academic competition from the new arrivals.

“I would have thought that a school district with a growing number of Asian students would be seen as a positive thing,” Boustan reasoned. “Because we have these perceptions — partially based on real data about the educational background of Asian parents, but also partially stereotypes that are expanded beyond the reality — that somehow, Asian kids would be better prepared, that they would be better peers who would elevate classroom discussion.”

‘White kids are generally falling behind’

Those assumptions may indeed have guided the white parents featured in the research, though perhaps not in a predictable direction.

Boustan and her colleagues collected public school enrollment figures from the California Department of Education between 2000 and 2016, which included demographic information about families’ racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. They focused on a group of 152 school districts that were suburban and comparatively well-to-do, determined by their local average incomes and percentages of students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (a common measure of poverty in education research).
They also used U.S. Census records to determine the growth rates of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian students within those districts. Over 6 million people of Asian descent live in California, roughly one-third of their numbers within the United States as a whole, and Asian students make up proportionally larger shares of suburban districts than urban ones. While large divergences exist between Asians of different national origin, on average, households headed by Asian Americans earn 38 percent more than the U.S. median income.

The results of the authors’ calculations were unmistakable: With each arrival of an Asian American student in a high-income suburban district, .6 white students left — mostly departing the community entirely, rather than relocating to a private or a charter school. After adjusting their observations for moving patterns (different sub-groups enrolled at schools at markedly different rates, with South Asian and Chinese populations growing faster than Koreans and Japanese) the effect was even greater, such that each Asian student was associated with the departure of 1.5 white students.

The strength of the correlation between Asian entrance and white exit was clear, even if the motivation wasn’t. The research team considered multiple explanations behind the trend, but found reason to doubt each.

First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics; therefore, white movement was a reaction not to the broader emergence of non-white neighbors, but to Asians specifically. 

But additional qualitative evidence indicates that the movement was unlikely to have been primarily generated by anti-Asian prejudice either. In responses to the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of public attitudes administered by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, highly educated participants were vastly less likely than their less educated peers to say they “feel cool” toward Asian Americans, or to say they don’t trust them. And yet the suburbs included in the study were overwhelmingly populated by high-income residents with college and advanced degrees.

“If we just look at the basic correlations, we don’t see this kind of white flight from low-income suburbs,” said Boustan. “To me, this very clearly rules out basic racial animus.”

But the out-migration could be related to another factor: relative performance in school. According to results from California’s mandated math and reading tests, as well as its high school exit exam, the presence of Asian students in a given school during the period under observation was tied to elevated average test scores in that school — but typically not for white students. In other words, the new Asian American pupils were bringing stronger academic performance to the schools they enrolled in, but also potentially making their white classmates look somewhat worse by comparison.

Boustan said that possibility could be viewed with dread during college admissions season, when high school seniors are often considered on the basis of their class GPA rank. 

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do. On some of the tests, maybe that pulls the white scores up a bit too, and on other tests, it looks like white scores might even be falling. But in relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

‘Race at the Top’

The theme of white and Asian families jostling for educational opportunity has been sounded more frequently in recent years, especially in highly educated, middle-class settings. This summer, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard showcased the comparatively superior academic credentials of many Asian applicants to elite universities, as well as the various alternative criteria — including legacy and donor status, racial preferences, extracurricular activities like sports — that colleges use to select their classes.

A similar dynamic plays out during the K–12 years. In 2022, Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo published Race at the Top, an account of fierce academic competition among high schoolers in a wealthy, but unidentified, East Coast community. Some of the white parents she spoke with expressed worry about the high-stakes atmosphere building in their local schools and fear that their own children would struggle to keep pace with their Asian classmates.

Lurking behind the discourse is the decade-old cultural figure of the “Tiger Mother”: a hyper-motivated Asian parent who pushes her child to excel in high-level coursework and seek extra instruction outside of class. Viewed as a model by some and an offensive stereotype by others, the notion appears to guide how some white parents perceive their Asian neighbors.

It may also reflect some bedrock truths about what different families prioritize in education and child-rearing. In a study published this summer, researcher Ziyao Tian used microdata from consumer surveys for different families across the U.S. to show that white and Asian families differ dramatically in their annual expenditures on K–12 education. Not only did Asian families outspend white families overall, they were also more likely to direct their spending toward tutoring and instruction outside of school. By comparison, whites outspent Asians on sports and cultural activities like trips to parks, concerts, and museums. 

Notably, the gap in expenditures was at its greatest among highly educated families like those populating the California suburbs that Boustan studied. Asian parents with graduate degrees spent 22 percent more on tutoring for their children than similarly credentialed white parents; among parents with a high school education or less, Asians spent just 6 percent more on tutoring. In spite of the escalating disparities in spending, the Asian-white achievement gap is actually greater among families with less educational attainment.

Those findings provide an echo of a 2021 study looking at the incremental growth of private tutoring centers. The number of such brick-and-mortar centers (including many employing the popular Kumon method) more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, an explosion that was heavily concentrated in highly educated and high-income cities and towns. They were also disproportionately likely to be located in areas with larger percentages of immigrant and Asian residents.

Eddie Kim, a mathematics professor at Bentley University and one of the tutoring study’s co-authors, said that the purchase of additional learning opportunities outside of traditional schooling might be a partial outgrowth of middle-class status. While the top priority for many striving families is to move to a neighborhood with strong public schools, the same households must pursue alternate routes for their children’s academic development after that step has been taken.

“Once you’ve moved to a particularly good school district, and you see that everyone else is already [academically] good, how do you give your child an advantage? It can’t be through the school system because every child gets the same thing,” Kim posited. “The only advantage is to look outside the school system.”

The findings of the Boustan paper “clicked with” some of Kim’s own instincts about middle-class parents’ strategies around education and admission. If they feared that their children would be outshone in the classroom, they might well change schools — or even move — he said.

“When you say it out loud, it sounds very intuitive: Of course, parents aren’t just going to lie down and do nothing. If they notice something, even semi-subconsciously, they’re going to take action to support their individual child’s success.”

Meanwhile, Hawaii appeared at the bottom, with students there learning the equivalent of a year-and-a-half less than the typical charter school student.

The study, by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel of Harvard University and published Tuesday in Education Next, finds that students in Alaska turned in the strongest academic performance as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Students in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and New Jersey followed closely behind, the researchers found, while charter school students in Hawaii, Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon and Pennsylvania performed the worst.

Peterson said using NAEP data for the analysis offered researchers an opportunity for a fresh, unvarnished look at charter school performance, one not often seen via state achievement tests, which for years have been criticized for manipulating proficiency levels. 

NAEP, he said, is “a low-stakes test” that’s not tied to teacher pay or school rankings. And the data is “very clean because exactly the same test is being administered to every single student. So we are comparing student performances on the same tests and no other.”

The disadvantage is that the results are much more constrained than typical state tests, offering scores in just fourth and eighth grades. That makes it impossible to analyze high school performance, a key concern. But Peterson noted that most charter schools are elementary or middle schools, so the data actually capture a more accurate picture of how the sector performs.

One thing the NAEP data revealed: a serious achievement gap among charter school students in several states.

In D.C. and five states — Missouri, Wisconsin, Delaware, Michigan and Maryland — the  gap between Black and white charter school students was roughly the equivalent of  three-and-one-half years of learning.

They found the largest score differences between white and Hispanic students in D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho and Massachusetts. 

In a statement, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said the new data are “sobering in many respects,” showing that charter schools in many places have “room to grow.” But it said the data show “many bright spots in the charter sector, and we are especially proud of the exceptional work being done in states like Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma to produce positive outcomes on NAEP.” 

Peterson said he was most surprised by Alaska’s performance, but soon realized he shouldn’t be: It’s got a highly educated population and an unusual education culture. Because it’s so remote and sparsely populated, he said, correspondence schools have had a presence there since the 1930s. “And not just a few, a lot of them,” he said. “So the idea of having alternatives to the neighborhood school is very much part of their history.”

He also theorized that Alaska’s charters may have the resources to staff and equip new schools more easily than elsewhere.

As for Hawaii, he noted that half of its charter schools are explicitly serving the indigenous Hawaiian population — and half of those are teaching not in English, but in Hawaiian, as their purpose is to preserve that disappearing language.

States’ rankings based on charter students’ NAEP scores, the researchers said, were “only weakly correlated” with state rankings based on NAEP data for all public school students. And they found no significant difference in performance among states with different per-pupil charter funding levels or percentages of students enrolled in charter schools.

And though the study looked at charter schools nationally, the analysis isn’t all-encompassing. 

Peterson and Shakeel looked at 145,730 NAEP results for fourth- and eighth-graders in 35 states and D.C. from 2009 to 2019, but excluded 10 states without enough data: Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Washington, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In five other states — Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont — there were no charter schools during the time period studied.

Management, authorizers matter

The researchers also found that the type of charter school matters, as does the governmental body authorizing it.

Students in schools managed by a nonprofit network scored better on NAEP tests, while those at freestanding independent charters and for-profit charter schools did more poorly.

Though just 20% of charters are in networks, said Harvard’s Peterson, “It’s clear that if you have a network, you have more opportunities for promotion within the organization. So you can keep people for a longer period of time. You’ve got more management roles that people can grow into.”

Charter schools in networks can also share practices and standardize back office functions. “A lot of the problems that the little mom-and-pop school faces when it’s starting up, it’s got to sort of invent the whole wheel all over again.”

Who authorizes the school also matters: Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency fared better than those whose schools were authorized by a school district, mayor’s office or a university. Peterson said that shouldn’t come as a surprise either, since a state department of education’s job is to supervise schools’ performance. “They have been doing this for 100 years. So if they’re now given a task to also do this for charter schools, they have the institutional capacity to do it. If you ask a university to do it, the university has never done this before. So they’re probably not going to be likely to have the equipment to do a great job of it.”

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which supports the U.S.’s largest public charter school network, said the new findings “confirm our experience, which is that public charter schools perform better when they are part of a larger network.”

The new analysis differs from the recent Stanford University CREDO study, which compared charter school performance to that of students in nearby district schools. In its statement, the alliance said the CREDO study affirms that students who attend charter schools “generally have better academic outcomes when compared to their peers at nearby district schools. And we maintain our commitment to serving all students well, especially those who have been chronically underserved.”

The paper, published in late September in the journal of the American Educational Research Association, effectively tests the usefulness of what its authors call “contextualized” indicators of academic performance: a university applicant’s grades, test scores, and course selection compared not just against those of his fellow applicants, but also the rest of the students in his own high school. Advocates say that this additional nuance allows admissions officers to view applicants with a more informed sense of the instruction available in their classrooms and the academic results that typical students see there. 

“I don’t think there’s any way to fairly evaluate a student from an American high school without knowing what opportunities are available to them at that school, because we have such a highly stratified high school system,” said study co-author Michael Bastedo. “We have schools that offer 26 APs [Advanced Placement courses] and schools that offer zero APs.”

Bastedo, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, has studied the huge divisions separating American schools along lines of spending levels, demographics, and academic achievement. Given those disparities, simply weighing aspects of one student’s college resume against another’s could yield “manifestly unfair” effects, he said.

That basic argument underlies admissions criteria that have been used for decades. University administrators have long focused on where applicants fall in their class GPA rankings, and states like Texas grant college slots to all high school seniors who place into the top 10 percent of their graduating classes. A few years ago, the College Board (the highly influential testing organization that administers the SATs) released a tool called Landscape, which provides colleges with background information on prospective students’ schools and neighborhoods. 

To analyze the success of the practice, Bastedo and his collaborators gathered an enormous bank of data from the education department of an unidentified Midwestern state. The figures included academic records from all public high schools within the state between 2010 and 2015, including student grades and course selection; individual scores on the ACT exam, which students in the state were required to take during the period under examination; and grades and enrollment status for all of the state’s 15 public universities. The team eventually developed a sample of over 77,000 subjects, amounting to more than three-quarters of all first-year, in-state students at each university. 

In the end, they found that high schoolers’ contextualized academic profiles were significantly correlated with their freshman-year GPA, retention (i.e., their likelihood of still being enrolled in college in the fall of their second year), and college graduation, with high school grades being a particularly strong predictor. College GPA was the outcome most reliably predicted by high school factors, with graduation and retention somewhat less associated.

Measuring applicants’ high school grades within the context of other students at their high schools proved to be an especially powerful approach. The authors found that applicants who earned grades that were significantly better than the median student at their high school ended up receiving an average GPA that was .66 points higher in their first year of college. 

ACT scores — both contextualized by high school and “raw,” or uncontextualized — were also correlated with college success, though less than high school grades. At one university, students with relatively higher high school GPAs were five times more likely to graduate within four years than former classmates whose grades fell at the median of their high schools; by comparison, students whose ACT scores were measurably higher than their high school’s median performance were just 1–2 times more likely to get their degree on time. 

Of all three factors measured, rigor of high school coursework (how many honors-type classes applicants took in high school) were the least predictive of success in college; whether or not it was placed in the context of applicants’ high schools, their choice of courses was not consistently related to later academic performance across 15 universities. 

The findings gesture toward one possible road for colleges to follow after the Supreme Court’s move this summer to disallow race-based affirmative action. With schools forbidden from relying on strict racial preferences when constructing their student bodies, many are looking toward novel means of assessing applicants’ backgrounds and experiences overcoming life obstacles. 

Consider two 18-year-olds with roughly identical GPAs and test scores: One might place directly in the middle of the pack at her well-resourced high school, while the other dramatically outpaces the rest of his class at a school that enrolls many more low-income pupils and employs far fewer high-quality teachers. By revealing the relative performance of each, colleges might gain a better sense of which is most likely to excel at the next level.

Bastedo, who has previously conducted fieldwork to study how admissions professionals consider applicants, said that contextualized indicators could help identify strong candidates who might otherwise be overlooked. 

“This is a good opportunity to evaluate students’ credentials contextually and hopefully provide some level of equity,” Bastedo said. “It’s very unlikely to fill the gap left by the elimination of race-conscious admissions, but it is a positive step toward equity.” 

The rankings backlash

David Hawkins, the chief education and policy officer for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, said that he had observed admissions practices transform over nearly a quarter-century, with an increasing number of competitive institutions attempting to take a holistic view of their applicants rather than simply admitting or denying them based on raw test scores and grades. Some have always attempted to gain a contextualized perspective on applicants through measures like GPA ranking, which indicates where a particular student falls within the rest of their high school class. 

But colleges and high schools have both deemphasized their reliance on such metrics in recent years, partly because competition among students over highly public rankings has produced hurt feelings and unhealthy jostling. In some cases, families have even sued schools to contest their children’s ranks.

Hawkins said that admissions offices had to strike “a delicate balance” between conducting acceptable scrutiny of their applicants and encouraging invidious comparisons between young people.

“You might have to give something up in transparency so as to not provoke the negative behaviors that come with a class ranking scheme,” he said. “But at the same time, you have to be invested at some level in understanding how a student stacks up against their peers in high school.”

The balance can be extremely difficult to achieve. In 2019, the College Board tried to implement an “adversity score” that would distill the degree of environmental advantage or disadvantage that prospective college-goers experienced in their families, neighborhoods, and high schools. Though hailed by its backers as a step towards leveling the playing field between students of different backgrounds, the idea provoked a backlash from both left and right. It was eventually withdrawn in favor of Landscape, which has since been adopted by dozens of colleges.

Hawkins said that tools like Landscape would likely grow in acceptance with the passage of time, particularly as schools look for alternative paths to socioeconomic and racial diversity.

“Holistic review will be with us for as long as we’re doing admissions. And yes, it will remain an intrinsic part of ensuring that there are opportunities available to people who may not have the same advantages as their more privileged peers.”

Not only is the program — called OnYourMark — targeted to students who especially struggled to learn remotely during the pandemic, but the study was conducted by experts who typically advocate for in-person tutoring.

“I was nicely surprised,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and leader of the National Student Support Accelerator, which has been tracking efforts to expand high-dosage tutoring. “The trick is to get [tutoring] to as many students as we possibly can. Being able to do it virtually could really help in the scaling and expansion of this kind of intensive, individualized attention that many students need.”

The evaluation, conducted in 12 Texas elementary schools as part of the Uplift Education charter network, found that over 1,000 K-2 students in the program scored higher on literacy tests than students without the extra support. The results translated into 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds for kindergartners and 55 extra days on decoding for first graders with a one-on-one tutor. Second graders did not benefit as much from the intervention.

While the virtual program was still less effective than in-person tutoring, the model could be a breakthrough for schools in rural areas and those that have struggled to recruit tutors, Loeb said. Districts’ pandemic recovery efforts have sometimes fallen short because they can’t find trained educators or volunteers to do the job. And research by Loeb and others has found that only a fraction of students who need extra help take advantage of on-demand virtual tutoring programs. 

OnYourMark Education, a nonprofit, is a contrast to the virtual models that researchers like Loeb have long criticized. It’s offered four times a week during the school day. The tutors, which include college students, retired educators and those who have worked for other virtual tutoring companies, receive training in the science of reading.

“We’ve put a stake in the ground that our focus as an organization is to really support students to become proficient readers by the time they reach third and fourth grade,” said Mindy Sjoblom, a former Teach for America middle school teacher and principal who founded OnYourMark in 2021. 

But when the program started with Uplift as a pilot, she wasn’t sure if the tutors would be able to form strong relationships with young children remotely. 

“We had to get the timing right,” she said. The 30 minute-blocks they started with didn’t work well. “Honestly, that was too long to expect a 5-year-old to sit and attend to anything, not to mention be in front of a screen.”

Twenty minutes, she said, has proven to be the “sweet spot,” allowing tutors to have informal chats with students — about what they had for dinner last night, for example, or how their basketball game went — before diving into a solid 15 minutes of work on decoding and fluency. 

OnYourMark now works with 22 schools in seven states, and Sjoblom said she expects to add more students before the end of this school year. Last fall, Accelerate, an organization funding effective tutoring programs, awarded the nonprofit $250,000 to support the research effort. The organization is also a semifinalist for the Yass Prize, a $1 million award that recognizes successful education providers.

‘A great option’

Loeb’s team used two common assessments to evaluate the impact of the program — Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, and MAP Reading Fluency from NWEA, a testing and research organization.

Kindergartners randomly assigned to OnYourMark recognized 3.5 more letter sounds per minute than students who didn’t receive tutoring. First graders’ mastery of sounds and decoding skills also improved.

Loeb said while the one–to-one model is clearly stronger, the program is still effective when students work in pairs with a tutor. 

“This is a great option when staffing is hard,” she said, alleviating the need for tutors to commute and get acclimated to a school. 

The results among second graders were not significant. Sjoblom sees a few reasons for the disappointing outcomes. First, last year’s second graders were in kindergarten during the 2020-21 school year, when many schools were closed for the pandemic. They didn’t master a lot of the foundational skills that most kids get in kindergarten and first grade.

Older students struggling to read, she added, get embarrassed and have a harder time staying engaged with tutors remotely.

But Loeb said to get such results from a startup is still impressive. Yasmin Bhatia, the CEO of Uplift, added that future research will focus on the specific skills tutors should focus on with second and third graders.

OnYourMark, she said, has met the network’s needs in a few ways. First, it’s hard to find tutoring companies even willing to work with younger students. Most, she said, focus on the “tested grades” — third and higher. School leaders, she added, are “putting their best talent in those upper level grade levels.”

Uplift, she added, serves a high-poverty population that typically would be unable to afford a private tutor. And when the network offered at-home virtual or afterschool tutoring, participation was inconsistent. Bhatia called OnYourMark “another way to support parents” and ensure young readers are getting the extra help they need.

“We view it as such a high priority,” she said, “that we made it a part of the school day.”

Disclosure: Overdeck Family Foundation provides support to OnYourMark Education and The 74.

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

The analysis, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent. 

In addition, the researchers released an early look at 2022-23 figures from 11 states. The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a negative impact on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.  

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked. 

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the White House said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students can’t take advantage of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when research showed that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said. 

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down. 

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues contributed to high absenteeism before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school bus driver shortage has further complicated daily commutes. And in focus groups, she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture. 

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s Stay in the Game initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message. 

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member. 

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism. 

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday. 

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem. 

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones. 

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said. 

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties. 

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped federal relief funds for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. Research shows the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

Issued by the U.K.’s secretary of state for education, the new guidance builds on controls already in place in many schools across the country, most of which take explicit aim at both online bullying and student inattention during lessons. But it may have the further effect of encouraging advocates, both at home and abroad, to pursue further-reaching policies limiting children’s access to tech and social media. 

Parents, teachers, and education leaders across the United States have entertained similar proposals in recent years as devices have increasingly become a fixture in students’ daily lives. The near-ubiquity of electronics in American homes (a 2021 study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media showed that 43 percent of children aged 8–12 personally owned a smartphone), as well as their potential links to worsening mental health for young people, moved U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy to release an advisory warning against excessive social media use. 

Still, it is doubtful whether similar prohibitions can be attempted in the U.S. Unlike in most other Western countries, K–12 education in America is administered at the state and local level, leaving decisions about school management and culture mostly up to district boards. In addition, fears of school shootings and other on-site emergencies mean that some parents want to remain in contact with their kids at all times — even as most research shows that the presence of phones in classrooms tends to harm academic achievement. Among older students, the removal of cell phones during courses is correlated with lower anxiety and higher levels of course understanding, while adolescents engage in more physical play when phones are barred from recess.

Doug Lemov is a well-known educator and expert on classroom practice whose book Teach Like a Champion has become an international bestseller and a highly influential text among both novice and veteran teachers. He has also come out strongly against the use of phones in school, arguing that they meaningfully hamper instruction and prevent children from forming real-world relationships. 

Bans such as the one proposed in the United Kingdom might be difficult to enforce, Lemov acknowledged, given kids’ attachment to their devices. But clever methods of evasion are no reason not to seriously contemplate restrictions on phones in schools, he said. 

“If a kid feels like he has to sneak off to the bathroom and hide in the stall to use his cell phone, it’s still a win. Because it means that in 99 percent of the places in the building, people are walking around without their cell phones out, they are concentrating in class, and they’re having fully present relationships with one another.”

Effects on academics, exercise

The United Kingdom isn’t the first country to impose restrictions on phones in school. According to a UNESCO report released this summer on education systems in roughly 200 countries, about one-quarter have enacted comparable rules. But some of the most compelling research on the effects of cell phone bans comes from England.

In a study published in 2016, academics Louis-Phillipe Beland and Richard Murphy found that across the large English cities of Birmingham, Leicester, London, and Manchester, dozens of high schools that instituted bans on mobile phones saw significant improvement in scores on high-stakes tests. The increase was especially large for the lowest-performing pupils, who saw a jump in scores more than twice as large as the average student. 

Overall, the authors argued, the greater effects on these students of banning mobile phones — roughly equivalent to adding an hour to each school week — suggested that their higher-achieving classmates were better able to ignore distractions and focus on their work. The lure of texts and apps, therefore, might be expected to increase achievement gaps over time. 

Play and exercise are also linked to the use of electronics. A Danish study published in 2021 showed that a four-week ban on phones during recess significantly increased both the frequency and intensity of physical activity of children aged 10–14. And the consequences of a lack of movement can be strongly negative: In a study of nearly 25,000 U.S. teenagers, about 20 percent used screened devices (smartphones, tablets, or video games) more than five hours per day; that group was 43 percent more likely to be obese than participants who experienced less screen time.

While comparatively few studies have been conducted on the impact of information technology on K–12 learning, some have focused on its presence in university settings. One paper, published in 2014, studied cell phone use and texting in a large sample of college students, ultimately finding that they were associated with relatively lower grades and higher levels of self-reported anxiety. Relatedly, subjects who texted and used their phones less experienced higher “satisfaction with life.”

Far beyond its measured influence over grades or test scores, huge public concern has increasingly been directed at the effects of phone and internet use on adolescent mental health. Psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have pointed to the recent explosion of screen time (generally pegged to the widespread adoption of home internet access and the emergence of smartphones) as a key culprit in rising rates of youth depression and anxiety.

The chorus of critics gained a powerful new voice in May, when Murthy issued his cautionary guidance on the use of social media. While stopping far short of recommending a blanket ban on youth access to apps like Instagram and Snapchat, the document struck a distinctly foreboding note.

“The current body of evidence indicates that while social media may have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” the surgeon general wrote.

Whether the advisory will exert any influence on local authorities — and whether it is widely interpreted as a warning about phones as well as social media — is difficult to tell. Districts attempted to curb the use of phones in school throughout the 2000s through a variety of means, most unsuccessful: New York City implemented a full-on ban in 2005 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, only for it to be reversed a decade later by his successor, Bill de Blasio. In Spokane, Washington, one high school even used a signal jammer to keep students from texting during class (the experiment was quickly abandoned when its legality was called into question). 

Some jurisdictions have taken a fresh look at restrictions over the past few years, however. This spring, Massachusetts’s state board weighed the idea of providing grants to districts that tightened their policies.

‘Bans do not stop bullying’

Good reason exists to doubt the efficacy of strict prohibitions. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2019–20 school year, 77 percent of public schools said they disallowed the non-academic use of phones during school hours. But a data analysis released earlier this year revealed that 97 percent of children aged 11–17 used their phones during the school day, suggesting that the restrictions were not widely observed. 

Those figures were a stark reflection of the pre-COVID penetration of cell phones into school spaces. But students and families became even more accustomed to relying on technology during the pandemic, when instruction shifted online for months at a time. School districts loaned out thousands of devices and rushed to bring internet connectivity to students who lived in remote areas so that their learning would not be interrupted.

By most indicators, the migration online led to significant learning losses. But students also reported that during the worst stretches of isolation, social media helped them stay in touch with their friends and teachers — in cyberspace, if not real life. Many are reluctant to let go of their phones even with the return to in-person learning. 

American parents, too, have come to appreciate the convenience of having their children accessible during the school day. Many find it reassuring to be able to stay connected in the event of extreme events, including mass shootings, that have seized national attention in recent years. (Notably, security experts are more ambivalent on the benefits of phones during emergencies, with some arguing that trapped students would be better off directing their attention solely at teachers and administrators.)

Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education technologies at the University of Michigan, said that while cell phones represent an undeniable source of distraction in academic settings, barring them from schools could also curtail opportunities to role model their constructive use. 

“Bans do not stop bullying, harrassment, FOMO [fear of missing out], feelings of depression or suicide, or accessing harmful content,” Kolb added in an email. “So schools that ban cell phones need to be explicit about still addressing these issues, even if they are not seeing phones every day.”

Lemov said that while some pushback from students was to be expected, most would likely change their minds in response to academic and social environments improved from the lack of phones. And while strict bans might be particularly challenging to implement, schools could also turn to solutions like Yondr pouches, which allow schools to collect and seal away phones during the day, but selectively offer students access to them if necessary. 

Lemov, who said his own daughter’s school district used Yondr pouches, said they might help assuage parents’ worries about safety. Looking past methods of restriction, he encouraged schools to go further by proactively building a more engaging social and educational space; seductive objects should not only be removed, but replaced with opportunities for kids to learn, interact, and have fun, he argued.

“We have to eliminate an engine of distraction and disconnection, but we have to make sure we do it really well,” Lemov said. “It’s not just about banning cell phones, but also building vibrant student culture to make sure skeptics buy in.” 

The study, circulated as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, focuses on a Florida policy that has previously been shown to boost achievement among young learners. In so doing, it adds a new wrinkle to an evidence base that has not only expanded substantially over the last few years, but also coalesced around a consistent discovery: grade retention, at least for low-scoring children in early grades, meaningfully improves their test scores. 

How that improvement is accomplished is still up for debate. While some believe schools foster the learning gains through extra instruction, others point to the simple advantages of children studying the same material after undergoing a year of cognitive and social development. And the latest results — referred to as “spillover effects” on younger brothers and sisters — raise further questions as to how retention works.

Umut Özek, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and co-author of the latest Florida paper, said that while the academic growth he measured was likely attributable to multiple causes, families and educators could be motivated by the “threat effect” of students being flagged to repeat a grade.

“When you have this goal set in third grade, such that you need to score above a certain level to be promoted, it provides a clear signal to schools and parents that they need to do something in earlier grades so their students aren’t retained,” he remarked.

However promising the research outcomes, grade retention remains one of the most contentious planks of the education reform agenda. Since 2013, over two dozen states have passed laws either allowing or requiring school districts to make grade promotion decisions based on elementary reading performance. But parents have increasingly expressed frustration with the policy, with some suing for the right to opt-out of third-grade reading exams. Legislators in Michigan and Ohio significantly relaxed their elementary reading mandates earlier this year. In Tennessee, which adopted its own retention policy in 2021, 60 percent of third graders scored below the threshold for promotion this spring, and over 25,000 retook the exam in an effort to demonstrate proficiency.

In the wake of generational learning loss stemming from COVID-related school closures, some experts expect retention to gradually affect larger numbers of K–12 students. Katharine Strunk, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said that the prospect of seeing their children fall short of promotion was having an “eye-opening effect” on many families.

“One thing that’s come out of the pandemic is that we know that parents are not always made aware of the challenges facing their kids at school,” Strunk said. “Maybe for the first time, parents are being told, ‘Your kid is really struggling in a way that’s much worse than his or her peers.’”

A ‘very clear signal’ for parents

Florida’s reading retention law, first enacted in 2002 under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, requires pupils to score above the minimum achievement level on a literacy exam in order to move onto the third grade — though “good-cause” exemptions are often granted to children who receive special education or English learner services, who have already been held back, or who can demonstrate reading proficiency via other means. Due in part to energetic lobbying from Bush and his think tank, ExcelinEd, a slew of other states adopted similar proposals over the last decade.

To reveal the impact of the original policy, Ozek and his collaborators gathered a comprehensive set of student-level data from 12 anonymous school districts, including standardized test scores, special education status, demographic indicators and teacher characteristics. That information was combined with birth records from the same areas, allowing the researchers to link the progress of older students targeted for retention with that of their closest younger siblings. 

The paper encompasses the first seven years of the state’s grade retention system and subsequent test scores for both older and younger siblings through 2011–12; during that period, Florida’s portion of third graders retained was approximately 10 percent, though the annual rate declined from 15 percent in 2002 to just 6 percent in 2010.

Comparing kids who placed below the retention cutoff score against those who placed above it, the team found that repeating the third grade was associated with a statistically significant increase in state test scores in both reading and math. That finding largely echoes those of prior research into retention in Florida, including an earlier study co-authored by Ozek. 

To account for the growth, Ozek cited the breadth of resources that schools are required to provide children who are not promoted. Such students are assigned to highly effective teachers, receive 90 minutes of dedicated reading instruction each day and are given the option of attending an intensive, literacy-oriented summer camp.

“These students receive substantial support in the following year, and that support is more personalized and tailored toward their needs,” Ozek said. “That’s probably a key element behind the success of some of these policies.”

That observation echoes the conclusions of a paper circulated this spring by a pair of researchers at Michigan State University. Their analysis, which examined the effects of early literacy policies on both state test scores and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that achievement growth was greatest in states that implemented “comprehensive” policies — including some form of retention, but also extensive assistance for affected students and coaching for their teachers.

“Altogether, these results indicate that the full set of interventions available under early literacy policies is important in improving literacy achievement and skills,” the authors wrote. (Strunk, until recently an education professor at Michigan State, helped review the paper.)

Beyond the direct improvements, however, Ozek’s Florida paper finds that retained students’ younger siblings also saw a bump in test scores compared with the brothers and sisters of children who were promoted to the fourth grade. That advancement was measured at approximately 30 percent the size of the main effects; it was also particularly concentrated among boys, as well as immigrant families and those including a disabled child. 

The authors offer several theories to explain why younger siblings experienced positive, albeit smaller, movement. Among them: Having an older sibling held back was correlated with being assigned to a classroom with relatively higher-performing peers, perhaps because parents of retained third-graders influenced the classroom placements of their younger children. 

Additionally, in instances where retained students attended schools that received a state accountability score lower than an A over the preceding two years, their parents were more likely to move younger siblings to schools with better reading results, higher-performing teachers (as measured by value-added scores on state tests) and those specializing in reading instruction. 

Ozek said he could understand why having a child repeat a grade would seize parents’ attention. A father of two, he noted that retention was a much starker message than performance on state tests, and one that would likely cause adults to take notice.

“It’s really hard for me, even as an education policy researcher, to assess what those [state test] scores mean,” he said. “But when you get a signal that says, ‘Your kid is not performing at a level that will allow them to be promoted to fourth grade,’ that’s a very clear signal that will likely induce a response from parents, and schools as well.”

The harms of being held back

Little outside evidence exists to either validate or undermine the new study’s claims around spillover effects on younger family members. But competing explanations have recently cast doubt on the fairness and effectiveness of retention in early grades. 

Mississippi’s third-grade “reading gate,” which largely resembles Florida’s law, has been nationally lauded for pushing up historically dismal literacy scores over the last decade. At the same time, some policy observers argue that much of that climb is due to a form of statistical sleight of hand; since a healthy portion of the state’s fourth-graders have been held back, their additional year of intellectual maturity — not the effects of retention and supplemental instruction — could be responsible for their progress. (Advocates have responded that while that claim may be applicable elsewhere, it is dubious in the case of Mississippi, where the “reading gate” appears not to have increased the average age of fourth graders.)

Meanwhile, studies of students retained in higher grades have found that being held back in middle or high school makes students less likely to graduate and significantly more likely to be convicted of a crime. While younger children are seemingly less fazed by repeating a year, the practice may be salient, and damaging, when it coincides with transitions to middle and high school.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Strunk, who has investigated some of the effects of Michigan’s now-weakened retention system, agreed that students who repeated third grade had “more opportunity to develop and learn,” theoretically allowing them to achieve at higher levels on that basis alone. Beyond that possibility, she added, there is something of a paradox in sending low-achieving students back to the same classrooms and teachers that failed them the first time around.

“Is it really a good idea to give kids an extra year of school if the schooling is not working the way we want it to?” Strunk wondered. “It’s like the Einstein quote: ‘The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’”

Leaving aside the precise causes of post-retention growth, however, the bulk of the recent research suggests that retaining floundering readers can produce notable short- and medium-term gains. Another recent study of a Florida-style literacy standard, focused on schools in Indiana, showed that third graders who scored just below the threshold for promotion ended up significantly out-performing their classmates who were narrowly promoted. Those effects extended into the middle school grades, with no sign that retention increased disciplinary or attendance problems.   

Cory Koedel, a co-author of that study and an economics professor at the University of Missouri, said he was agnostic about which explanation for the progress mattered most, or even whether the effects would eventually fade out.

“In my view, whether it’s the extra year of instruction or the extra year of maturity that’s allowing them to catch up isn’t that important. What’s important is that they’re catching up.”