Nearly a decade ago, Cecil County Public Schools had some of the lowest-performing elementary schools in Maryland, and teachers used a variety of homegrown curriculum and curated resources to varying effect. Loud calls for change were coming from the teachers’ union and Central Office.

Today, our schools all use Bookworms, a highly structured, open-source curriculum published by the University of Delaware. We adopted and implemented Bookworms districtwide at a rapid clip in 2016 and quickly saw gains in the share of students in grades 3–5 scoring proficient on statewide tests. We have consistently fine-tuned our practices to maintain progress in the years since.

Most major changes don’t happen without a long lead time or thoroughly debated pilot. And many changes cannot be sustained over the long haul. Our experience with Bookworms is a counterexample to both. It is possible to move fast and build reforms that last. Here’s how.

Start with this: Standards are not curriculum

In part, our sustainable change may be rooted in the fundamentally unsustainable practices we sought to replace.

In the past culture of Cecil County schools, teachers were expected to “teach the standards.” In day-to-day life, this meant unpacking state standards as they related to their particular students and designing curriculum, including by picking and choosing among far-flung resources and tried-and-true favorite texts. Too often, this approach didn’t work. Students’ educational trajectories were unpredictable and disjointed. Beloved books were not always at grade level. Meanwhile, teachers were overtaxed, and the local union was calling for public hearings to discuss curriculum and workload.

Around 2015, the district convened a committee to select a standard English language arts elementary school curriculum, one that would allow teachers to focus on instruction and more reliably connect students with rigorous, grade-level learning. The committee selected Journeys and Wonders, by heavyweight publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill. Both were costly, comprehensive literacy programs with leveled readers and a suite of related activities and resources.

I was appointed Associate Superintendent of Education Services in 2016 and given a clear mandate from the superintendent: Raise reading scores, now. I reviewed the work of the curriculum committee, and then cast a wider net. 

The traditional curriculums that were being considered were bulky and based on teacher choice, which essentially tasked teachers with daily lesson design. It seemed likely that almost no real change would occur.

Ask for expertise and evidence

There had to be more options. I started by tapping trusted colleagues in my professional and personal networks. What districts were making literacy progress? What high-quality, evidence-based programs were they using? Through these queries, I heard about the Christina School District in Newark, Delaware. The Bookworms curriculum, published by the University of Delaware, was helping “move students in Newark,” I was told.

My district is about six miles from the University of Delaware, where I am an alumnus. I made some calls, and with senior colleagues from Cecil County, soon visited a school principal and observed reading instruction in Newark.

Bookworms was a clear fit for our needs. Rather than using leveled readers, instruction is rooted in published grade-level books that students can find at the local library. The Lexile levels were far higher that what we had been using in our district, which was crucial. Just as important, Bookworms lessons are designed so all students can access challenging grade-level books, even if they cannot yet read them independently. We saw that this could help Cecil County students break out of their guided reading groups.

The curriculum is highly structured, standards-based, and taught in three 45-minute periods: an interactive read-aloud that engages all students, a writing and literacy instructional period, and a tiered support period. Teachers’ time and planning energies are reserved for practicing instruction and working to meet individual students’ needs, not designing curriculum on their own.

I also found that the Newark teachers were enthusiastic ambassadors for the curriculum, which as an open-source publication would cost us far less than the prepackaged traditional programs. In my experience, when a group of teachers raves about a resource, you should probably take a look and see why. And by spending less upfront, we could invest more resources in aligned, ongoing professional development to help teachers improve their instructional practice.

Support sustainable change

I recommended Bookworms to the superintendent, who agreed and opted to proceed full steam ahead: no pilot, no public comment period. We did plenty of salesmanship and relationship-building to support a smooth rollout. But the move to Bookworms happened quickly and was not up for debate. We wanted to make a move and keep things simple, and Bookworms was sufficiently streamlined and structured to allow us to do that.

It was important to protect morale and ensure teachers felt supported during the shift. One powerful strategy was to direct all school-based administrators not to base performance evaluations on observations of Bookworms lessons in the first year. Our teachers and administrators were learning the curriculum at the same time and with varying levels of prior expertise. Attaching stakes to classroom evaluations of those lessons was not fair. That took a lot of the pressure off, and both teachers and administrators became more comfortable with the curriculum and with one another. We also brought eight literacy coaches in from the University of Delaware to train and assist, which was helpful.

Another move that helped create a stable transition was allowing elementary level teachers to choose subject specialties. Cecil County also changed math curriculums at this time, and teachers in grades 3–5 were given the opportunity to teach either reading and social studies or math and science. This allowed teachers to really focus on one curriculum and set of instructional strategies. 

We also built in out-of-classroom supports for the curriculum, such as an innovative relationship with the county library system. Our students can check a book on the Bookworms reading list out of the library and have it delivered to them in school.

Finally, we did not count on universal enthusiasm right away. I believe that there are times and places where leaders have to take a stand and ask that others come along with them. Then, people need time to experience and come to their own conclusion about whatever change is underway. That’s been my experience with teachers, who may first encounter a planned reform with skepticism but are almost always immediately won over when they see benefits for their students. Decide and act, and then wait.

Four months after we first implemented Bookworms, one of our early skeptics sent me a note that said, “I just love the fact that we are building good little readers.” That’s the sort of evidence that will keep enthusiasm high and maintain curriculum improvement over the long term.

Teachers say Struggly, available for at-home or classroom use, is a game changer for K-8 students discouraged by math or having a hard time with traditional tasks because of language barriers or learning disabilities. In game-like tasks aligned with common core standards, students manipulate shapes, animals, and algebraic formulas to build foundational understanding. 

The platform’s potential reach is hard to overstate as educators urgently search for ways to address the math learning crisis: On average, only one in four kids are proficient in 8th grade math; the number hovering between 9-14% for Black, Native and Latino children.

In approximately 340 schools across 28 states and 21 countries, Struggly has become the go-to supplemental learning platform for some educators whose students had difficulty socializing or collaborating after missing in-person learning in early childhood during the pandemic. School sites range from gifted programs and large Title I district schools to smaller private schools serving students with special needs and juvenile detention centers. 

Tasks, pulling from concepts at times across five grade levels, “put the student in the driver’s seat, don’t make them reliant on any sort of literacy, but also don’t make them rely on an adult to tell them what to do,” said Tanya LaMar, CEO and cofounder, adding its unusual design was intended to “allow all students to have access to math regardless of language, socioeconomic status or any kind of diversity markers.” 

Many educators have found the platform via conferences across the U.S. At SXSW EDU, the platform won this year’s Community Choice Award for the Launch Startup Competition, celebrating digital innovations helping to bridge learning gaps. 

Levels designed to become more challenging as students go on can be solved multiple ways, encouraging learners to talk to each other about their strategies and challenge common misconceptions that math is more about memorization than reason or logic. The video game-like design, with no time restrictions, also keeps students calm and engaged longer, teachers say. 

After using Struggly for one month – 20 minutes, three times a week – 63% improved scores on state tests and 68% felt more engaged in their math classes, according to independent research from WestEd. Teachers have also noticed fewer outbursts and negative self talk, more confidence and less math anxiety.

One district survey revealed students were more likely to agree with statements like, “if I work really hard, I can become very good at math” and to disagree with “people can’t change how good they are at math.”

Struggly was originally imagined by designer Alina Schlaier, whose daughter came home from first grade one day saying, “I hate math.” Schlaier found Stanford math expert Jo Boaler’s resources online, but knowing that it wasn’t sustainable for her to prep each lesson for her daughter, the designer reached out to Boaler with the idea of forming a company that would blend their skills. 

Boaler’s former PhD student Tanya LaMar joined the effort, bringing an educator’s lens to its creation, once a Los Angeles Unified teacher. There, she had faced compounding challenges: teaching math while teaching kids to see math beyond the narrow way they’d been taught it must look – facts, procedures to be memorized.

“Meanwhile, neuroscience research tells us that there’s no such thing as math brain … I felt like I was up against a lot trying to convince my students they could be math people, when struggling in math is seen as a sign that something’s wrong,” LaMar said. “So Struggly is about supporting students to embrace struggle as an integral part of the learning process.”

Such a shift has been transformational for educators like Gregg Bonti, a math group teacher at Mary McDowell, a quaker school in Brooklyn serving students with language-based learning disabilities.

Typically, his 4th and 5th graders arrive with some “resistance to learning and school.” At the start of the year, as soon as something felt challenging, many would shut down or push back on tasks, or start to talk to themselves disparagingly. Many also struggle with impulse control, but the games’ design has helped them “slow down” and “strategize.”

“It’s really rare and challenging for us to find websites that meet students where they’re at with their language skills,” Bonti said. Removing language from the tasks and letting them dive in has “neutralized” the playing field for his students, who come to class with a range of reading abilities. 

Since introducing Struggly in December, he’s finding students are more eager to persevere in math tasks and ask each other questions like “what if we tried this?” It’s also helped their teachers distinguish between their conceptual misunderstandings of math versus difficulties with language. 

Across the country in California’s central valley, one rural educator has been finding similar impacts. 

At Semitropic, a small school of predominantly Latino, multilingual students living in poverty, 3rd grade teacher Jennifer Fields was looking for platforms that would encourage and engage – they felt burnt out by Prodigy, but she needed something standards based. 

The first day she introduced it, one student went home and played on their own for three hours. It’s become so desired she can use it as a motivation for them to finish their other in-class work. 

Conceptually, it’s helped them grasp onto geometry concepts like manipulation and transformation easier than in traditional workbooks. They’re learning how to better communicate math concepts verbally, something she worried about seeing the difference in this group of children who had the equivalent of Zoom kindergarten. 

“That in itself has been my biggest success for the year is the fact that now they will work in cooperative groups with each other … they’re being more verbal and realizing it’s OK to talk about, ‘oh man, I didn’t get it.’ They go find that person and they immediately go to try to help them out instead of just having them just sit there, freak out, suffer and get mad,” she said.  

And because the platform is so visually and sonically engaging, teachers are finding it’s helping students learn independence and staying on-task. That has enabled Shelly Anderson, a 4th grade teacher in Salt Lake City, to be able to conduct small groups with students who need more specialized support; the others are able to work on Struggly independently, helping each other, as she provides more individualized attention. 

One student, who had a tendency to swear and give up, sometimes leaving the classroom, is now self-regulating his anger and frustration better. He no longer says he “can’t do this” or that “I’m dumb at math,” even during usual instruction.

“It’s just refreshing to have something for the kids to do where they can untether from the teacher more,” Anderson said. “They can start to get some of their own confidence and build their identity as math learners rather than just thinking, ‘well, either I have a math brain or I don’t.’ Everybody has the ability to seek out patterns, look at problems and look at logic.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation sponsored SXSW EDU’s Launch Startup competition and provides support to The 74. 

First, for chronically low-performing systems, policymakers can disrupt the “district as monopoly” education provider by pursuing a portfolio management model (PMM) strategy that takes districts out of the business of running schools and instead has them provide performance-based oversight in a diverse ecosystem of regulated, but still autonomous, schools of choice. While charter, magnet, and traditional district-run public schools would all be free to pursue their own strategies, they would only be permitted to continue operating in the ecosystem if they meet agreed-upon performance objectives.

Finally, all districts can and should adopt a series of commonsense governance reforms that more tightly link political accountability to student-centered outcomes: (1) establishing on-cycle and nonstaggered school board elections; (2) providing more transparency about student outcomes timed to coincide with election cycles; and (3) creating mechanisms to change district leadership when students perpetually fail to improve.

• America’s one-size-fits-all school governance system is outdated and ineffective.

• School districts should provide oversight for schools using a variety of strategies to reach agreed-upon educational objectives.

• Electoral success should be linked to student-centered outcomes.

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

Despite its bold rhetoric and urgent call for action, A Nation at Risk (ANAR) notably said nothing about reforming “education governance”—the institutions and actors empowered to decide which education policies will (and will not) be put into practice. Nonetheless, shortly after the landmark report ignited a wave of reforms across the states, it became clear to many observers that the nation’s governance system—known colloquially, if not derisively, as the one best system—makes it exceedingly difficult to enact reforms that improve student learning at scale.

For example, in their pathbreaking book Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe presaged their indictment of public education at the end of the 1980s by noting: “[The one best system] is so thoroughly taken for granted that it virtually defines what Americans mean by democratic governance of the public schools. At its heart are the school district and its institutions of democratic control: the school board, the superintendent, and the district office.” Thirty years later, America remains wedded to this same system, one in which the school district is a sacred cow that often serves the interests of adults more than students. Even the most committed and visionary reformer will make little headway when constrained by a political system that makes it easier for reform opponents to defeat bold ideas and uphold the status quo.

The simple truth is that the actors who occupy and benefit from our current political institutions have a vested interest in perpetuating the existence of those crusty institutions irrespective of their performance behind the wheel. “It is tempting to think that the public schools must be different somehow,” Moe explains. “Their purpose, after all, is to educate children. So it might seem that everyone would want what is best for kids and would agree to change the system . . . [to] make sure it is performing effectively. But this is a Pollyannaish view that has little to do with reality.”

Irrespective of their virtues in other contexts, federalism and localism in K–12 education have evolved to produce a governance system that, due to special-interest capture, is neither responsive to consumers (families and students) nor accountable for producing results. As Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli argue, this one best system offers the “worst of both worlds.” “On one hand, district-level power constrains individual schools; its standardizing, bureau- cratic, and political force ties the hands of principals, keeping them from doing what is best for their pupils with regard to budget, staffing, and curriculum. On the other, local control [as practiced in the united States] is not strong enough to clear the obstacles that state and federal governments place before reform-minded board members and superintendents in the relatively few situations where these can even be observed.”

Why is the united States saddled with this patchwork quilt system of school governance? With some simplification, it all boils down to a historical accident followed by a combination of what political scientists call policy diffusion and path dependence (a fancy term for institutional stickiness). Most notably, the key developments that brought and then locked the current system into place had everything to do with adult concerns and very little (if anything) to do with designing a coherent education system to best serve kids. Political scientist Vladimir Kogan outlines the “bottom-up” origins of the first key development — US education’s commitment to governance that is local and diffuse rather than centralized and coherent:

In much of the developed world, schools are typically overseen by centralized national agencies. [The uS] model is largely a historical artifact, dating back to the first public- education law adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. As evident from the law’s title, the Old Deluder Satan Act [1647], it was the moral concerns of adults, rather than a desire to address the holistic educational needs of children, that mainly drove the public-school effort The Massachusetts law, which charged local government with the responsibility for funding and operating local schools so kids would become literate enough to read the Bible, was copied across the country in one of the earliest examples of what political scientists now call policy diffusion.

Later, in the early twentieth century (1890–1930), the moral concerns that Kogan highlights here were superseded by more modern, secular ones: leaning on public schools to assimilate immi- grants and prepare workers for a second wave of industrialization. Governance experts Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim deftly summarize the most important changes that accompanied this latter development, the ones that ultimately gave us the one best system that we have today:

Progressive Era reformers sought to rationalize and centralize control of the system. . . . They hoped to create more capable schools—better than the fragmented one-room schoolhouses that dotted the rural landscape and less political than the patronage-driven system that dominated urban centers. Thus emerged the local education agency (lEA). The core of an lEA was an elected school board with power to make most [education] decisions and a bureaucracy largely staffed by professional educators. The lEA was insulated from normal local politics by off-cycle nonpartisan elections. . . . [This] rationalized system . . . gave way to a larger and politically fragmented system in the second half of the 20th century. laws to encourage and broaden the scope of collective bargaining among public sector employees . . . greatly strengthened teachers’ unions.

One final development warrants a brief mention: the district consolidation movement. As Christopher Berry and Martin West document, between 1930 and 1970, the nation’s tiny one- room schoolhouses were steadily supplanted by the age-graded schools we know today. This shift, Kogan explains, “necessitated consolidation into larger school systems, moving the locus of political control from boards overseeing individual schools to districtwide bodies [lEAs].” Ultimately, the nation eliminated one hundred thousand districts, and consolidated lEAs became larger bureaucracies. What did all this mean for students? Berry and West found that “although larger districts were associated with modestly [better student outcomes], any gains from the consolidation of districts . . . were far outweighed by the harmful effects of larger schools.”

The key point in all of this is that the forging of education governance in the united States was, as Kogan emphatically states, “not intentionally designed with student academic out- comes in mind and has become less local (and perhaps less democratic) over time.” In other words, largely through historical happenstance, today we are saddled with the worst of both worlds: a system that is neither especially responsive to community (and especially parental) concerns nor efficient at ensuring that system leaders prioritize student learning outcomes.

The aim of this chapter is straightforward: to assess what the education community has learned since ANAR about the challenges to good governance and the most promising solu- tions for reform. The chapter proceeds in four parts. I first summarize the major political obstacles that have kept a lid on education reform in the united States. After laying out these challenges, I discuss some of the governance reforms that have been tried and what the scholarly evidence says about how those efforts have fared. The third section of the chapter condenses the research into some lessons for policymakers who are considering different governance changes. Since America’s students cannot afford to wait for politicians to con- struct the perfect governance system from scratch (an impossible task), the chapter con- cludes with two types of recommendations for how state and local policymakers can move toward more student-centered governance systems: (1) an ambitious alt-governance frame- work well suited to troubled districts that need immediate and dramatic turnaround, followed by (2) a more modest set of reforms that are likely to do no harm and some reasonable amount of good in most any district. The guiding ethos in both sets of recommendations is the belief that enough lessons have been learned about governance in the intervening years since ANAR to identify a set of best practices for adopting political structures that incentivize the adults in districts and buildings to put student outcomes at the center of policymaking and day-to-day decision-making.

Before proceeding, the reader should be aware of two scope conditions. First, because of their relative fiscal contribution (large) and their central role in implementing policy on the ground, governance issues related to state and (especially) the local school district (rather than the federal government) are the primary concern addressed in the chapter. Second, when discussing problems and solutions, the chapter starts with the point that improving student academic outcomes is the central purpose of public education and that other values and “community interests” are of secondary importance. Focusing on how governance can enhance (or impede) reforms intended to bolster student learning outcomes is consistent with the spirit of the goals of ANAR (student achievement) and the public’s primary concern with their schools. With these two caveats out of the way, let us turn to discuss the many challenges of America’s traditional model of school governance, better known as the “one best system.”

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

The excellence movement that arose out of ANAR had two primary objectives: to raise stu- dent achievement and to close performance gaps between poor and advantaged students. As is well illustrated by the other chapters in this series, while the federal report helped drive education reforms in several different areas (often with mixed results), all these efforts faced a common hurdle: overcoming political resistance and governance challenges.

While all reforms faced these challenges, two proposals garnered outsized political resistance: school choice and consequential accountability. This is hardly surprising. As Terry Moe explains, “The two great education reform movements of the modern era, the movements for accountability and for school choice, are attempts to transform the traditional structure of the American education system—and the changes they pursue are threatening to the [teachers’] unions’ vested interests.” Since ANAR, the choice and accountability move- ments’ most significant political victories have been (1) the rapid expansion of charter schooling (1990–present) and (2) the consequential test-based federal accountability regime that endured during the Bush and Obama presidencies (2002–2015).

A complete assessment of the impact of these policies on student learning is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, research has shown that both choice and accountability reforms can improve student achievement and promote education opportunity for under- served kids but that success has often been uneven and difficult to sustain, especially at a statewide (let alone national) scale. For example, the demise of consequential test-based accountability and the difficulty of increasing the number of high-quality school choice options (e.g., charter schools) can both be traced to major shortcomings in the policies and practices of our traditional system of K–12 governance and politics. Three persistent challenges stand out.

ADULTS ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED TO PRIORITIZE STUDENT OUTCOMES

First, the current governance system does little to nothing to ensure that education profession- als are sufficiently incentivized to prioritize student learning above all else. In 2009, for example, just four in ten superintendents surveyed by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) said that student learning was an “extremely important” factor in how they were evaluated by their school board employers. These results mirror a more recent analysis of North Carolina superintendent contracts that showed fewer than 5 percent of these agreements contain provisions to hold leaders “accountable for student achievement and attainment [outcomes].”

The failure of too many school boards to prioritize and focus on student outcomes is a wide- spread problem with tangible consequences. For example, one analysis of the NSBA data uncovered a strong relationship between a school district’s academic performance and the extent to which board members prioritized student achievement outcomes in their board work. Alarmingly, though, while two-thirds of school boards agree that “the current state of student achievement is unacceptable,” nine out of ten boards said that “defining success only in terms of student achievement is narrow and short-sighted . . . and one-third are ner- vous about placing ‘unreasonable expectations for student achievement in our schools.’” School districts send the wrong message (and the wrong incentives) to the education pro- fessionals they employ (e.g., teachers, superintendents) when they make student outcomes a secondary concern. Indeed, elected board governance may not work at all if boards aren’t held accountable by voters for learning outcomes or they don’t expect to be held account- able at the ballot box.

COORDINATING MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE IS A CHALLENGE

Everyone seems to acknowledge that K–12 governance has too many cooks in the kitchen such that “if everybody is in charge then no one is.” This “tangled web” of school gov- ernance challenges the public to hold any single entity or public official accountable and encourages political buck-passing. Unfortunately, this problem is inherent in our federal political system. Political scientist Patrick McGuinn refers to it as the 50/15,000/100,000 problem, noting: “We have fifty different state education systems which collectively contain approximately 15,000 school districts and almost 100,000 schools. While the uS now has clear national goals in education, it lacks a national system of education within which to pursue these goals, and the federal government can only indirectly attempt to drive reform through the grant-in-aid system.”

Uncle Sam tried to step up to the plate in 2002 with the federal No Child left Behind (NClB) law. By requiring that student performance outcomes be made public, the law was intended to put pressure—including electoral pressure—on school boards to either improve or face consequences. unfortunately, the devil was in the details, and federal accountability man- dates failed for two primary reasons. First, the law prioritized student academic proficiency over student learning gains (growth), leading many schools where students were improving to be classified as failing. Second, as political scientist Paul Manna has documented, NClB erred by taking the sound logic of public administration (management) theory and turning it on its head. For example, rather than have the principal (the federal government) set rigorous standards and free up the agents (states and local districts) to innovate and meet these stan- dards in creative ways, the law let states set their own standards while Washington dictated weak and specific consequences for failure.

Perhaps the problem is not so much too many cooks in the kitchen, but rather that the kitchen lacks thoughtful coordination, and we have not placed each cook at the station where they have a “comparative advantage.” For example, NClB was born out of a real problem whereby localities gave insufficient attention to (and often hid) poor academic outcomes and achieve- ment gaps, but the federal foray into accountability also served to remind us that localities are functionally needed to implement reform from afar. Yet, as previously noted, those localities are easily captured by vested interests, and they themselves have incentives to focus on maintaining their institutional existence rather than holding themselves to account. For example, under both NClB and Race to the Top (RttT), states and districts “took the easy way out,” rarely opting to impose the toughest forms of restructuring on themselves.

VESTED INTERESTS DOMINATE EDUCATION POLITICS

The third major obstacle to effective governance is the fact that too many adults—be they union leaders, school employees, administrators, colleges of education, or vendors—either benefit from existing K–12 policies and procedures or are reluctant to consider any reforms that may bring about changes that leave them materially worse off. Such opposition ensues even if proposed reforms could be shown to benefit student learning. Because vested inter- ests pursue concentrated occupational benefits whose costs are widely distributed, these actors tend to be more politically organized and influential than groups like parents, whose own connection to their public schools is transitory in nature. What’s more, the widespread use of nonpartisan off-cycle school board elections often ensures low voter turnout and a lack of robust competition among competing interests. This anemic electoral environment enables teachers’ unions to win seven out of every ten school board elections when they make an endorsement. The consequence: rather than management (school boards) representing parents and taxpayers by serving as a “check” on labor, the relationship becomes reversed, with management owing its very election and political survival to the employees it is supposed to hold accountable. This well-documented dynamic has been shown to lead directly to pro-union school boards that (1) agree to more restrictive collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), (2) authorize fewer charter schools, and (3) spend more on salaries with little to no improvement (and often worse outcomes) in student achievement gains.

Although they arguably face greater political competition in federal and state politics, teachers’ unions are still rated the top education lobby in most statehouses, limiting experimentation with choice and accountability, especially on issues related to teacher accountability and pay reform. Finally, teachers’ unions are not alone in opposing new approaches to public edu- cation outside of the traditional district delivery model. School board members (regardless of party) are far less enthusiastic about school choice and charter schooling than are parents and the public. yet many states still have charter school laws that either make boards the sole authorizer or limit growth through caps that unions and board associations lobby for in state law. All in all, the politics of education reform remain constrained by governing structures (formal and informal) that empower the producers of education (e.g., teachers’ unions, district central offices) at the expense of the consumers of it (parents and students).

ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

Looking back on the history of education in the united States, one can’t help but notice the governance pendulum swinging back and forth between decentralization and centralization. The hyper-localism that originated in the mid-1600s held sway until the turn of the twenti- eth century before yielding to the Progressives’ centralized and professionalized lEA. A few decades later, that bureaucratic one best system became a focal point of contention between teachers’ unions and minority communities in New york City who wanted more of a say in their kids’ schools—what they called “community control.” While the unions, led by then united Federation of Teachers (uFT) leader Albert Shanker, mostly won that battle and the primacy of the central office endured, by the 1980s advocates of a new strategy they called “site-based management” (SBM) were pinning their hopes on giving schools, rather than dis- tricts, more autonomy. When student outcomes again failed to improve in any meaningful way, especially in large urban districts, reformers once again saw potential in recentralizing, pur- suing alternatives to school board control through mayoral control of the district or through state takeovers. At the federal level, after promising for decades to “end federal meddling in our schools,” in the 2000s a Republican president embraced more centralized account- ability with NClB, ushering in a decade of bipartisan support for a test-based accountability regime overseen by Washington. After political and practical considerations rendered NClB unworkable, a new breed of school reformers focused on building “parallel” school systems, abandoned trying to bring political reform to the one best system itself, and turned their attention to expanding local autonomy linked to greater school choice (charter schooling). In some cases, such efforts have even included trying to partner with or reconstitute districts under a “portfolio” management model (PMM) that combines district accountability/oversight with local school autonomy/choice. Have any of these governance reforms worked, and if so, where and under what conditions?

SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT

The earliest efforts to rethink K–12 governance after ANAR were a series of “site-” or “school- based” management reforms that spread across several states (e.g., Kentucky) and cities (e.g., Chicago). It is difficult to provide a coherent definition of SBM because the specific changes implemented across states and districts that all claimed to be using “SBM prin- ciples” varied significantly. However, some common SBM themes that emerged at various implementation sites included decision-making councils at the school level rather than the district level, formal representation for stakeholders like parents and educators, and direct involvement in hiring building leaders and instructional staff.

SBM’s “theory of action” is that taking power away from central-office bureaucrats and giving more autonomy to school leaders (with input from educators and families) promotes innovative and customized solutions that result in more effective teaching and learning in buildings and classrooms. According to one estimate, as many as 30 percent of all US school districts tried some variation of SBM by 1990. However, little systematic evidence emerged to show that the SBM model—at least as it was put into practice—widely improved student learning outcomes across implementation sites at scale.43 To be clear, this is not because the idea of having local councils or providing greater autonomy to building leaders is wrongheaded. To the con- trary, a recent study from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) found that “schools with high-quality principals and student populations requiring atypical policy decisions [benefit] from more autonomy.” However, that analysis showed that leader quality is often the linchpin to making governance reforms work in practice. As the author of that CPS study concluded, “[school] autonomy should be granted to effective and motivated school leaders [but it may] lead to worse outcomes in settings with agency problems or low principal capacity.” In other words, successful governance reforms cannot rely solely on building better institutions. Better people (human capital) is a prerequisite to reaping the rewards of well-designed institutions.

Finally, retrospective evaluations of SBM reform frequently mention another challenge that inhibited success: the lack of political will in following through on authentically devolving power and autonomy to building leaders. In practice, many state and district leaders talked a big game about handing over decision-making authority through SBM but were subsequently unwilling to yield on big-ticket items (e.g., budgeting, hiring) when push came to shove or vested interests resisted. As Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim explain:

School boards and state governments may promise to give schools a great deal of freedom, but over time they take it away This first became evident with SBM. In the early 1990s, many districts encouraged schools to use time and money in novel ways. . . . Superintendents encouraged principals and teachers to think big, but no rules were changed. Schools were encouraged to think of new ways to organize teaching, but they were still bound by the collective bargaining agreement. That meant school leaders had little control over who was assigned to teach in the school and the kinds of work they could do. Schools were encouraged to use time and materials differently, buttheydid not control their budgets or make purchasing decisions. And so on. In any clash between school autonomy and actual practice, school leaders soon learned that for every freedom they were promised [under SBM], a rule existed that effectively took it away.

ALT-GOVERNANCE (MAYORAL CONTROL, STATE TAKEOVERS)

Because they are keenly aware of the linkage between education and economic growth in their states and cities, political executives like governors and mayors were often in the van- guard of the excellence movement right from the outset of ANAR. Frustrated with the outright failure of their cities’ largest school systems to improve academically, in the 1990s several mayors sought more authority in especially long-troubled districts (e.g., Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New york). The two primary approaches to robust executive involvement became state takeovers and mayoral control/involvement. While these alternative or “alt- governance” arrangements often involve different mechanisms, they share the common feature of removing or demoting elected school boards, either replacing them with a mayor- appointed board or relegating the board itself to have mere “consultative” status in lieu of policymaking authority. Importantly, in such cases, the district superintendent is chosen by and serves at the pleasure of the mayor—or in the case of takeover, the state education agency (SEA).

Mayoral control’s “theory of action” arises from the belief that political executives are more likely to focus on their political legacies (what’s best for their city) than parochial-minded legislators (e.g., school board members) who are more prone to single-issue interest-group capture. “Mayors,” Terry Moe explains, “are constantly in the public eye; they have larger, more diverse constituencies than school board members do; they have far more resources for wielding power; and they may decide to make their mark by reforming the local schools.” Additionally, one benefit to vesting education authority in a mayor or governor is that it can streamline political accountability under a single actor, making it easier for the public to know whom to hold accountable. Indeed, some research has shown a linkage between greater state-level centralization and student performance: gubernatorial authority to appoint state boards/chiefs has been connected to better outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and reduced achievement gaps.

Admittedly, efforts to evaluate the impact of mayoral control or state-led takeovers are ham- pered by small sample sizes and obvious selection biases: districts that turn to mayors for help or those that are taken over by SEAs are difficult to compare to districts that do not have these governance reforms imposed on them. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the most comprehensive empirical assessment of mayoral control tends to show positive effects on both academic outcomes and fiscal efficiency. yet it is equally important to keep in mind that not all mayoral involvement is similar in nature. Mayoral involvement in education in cities like Cleveland and Boston operated very differently than it did in New york City and Washington, DC. In the latter two cases, the political executives of those cities were given complete autonomy to choose the district’s superintendent, and there was no policymaking school board with which the superintendent had to deal politically. Moreover, in the case of Washington, DC—arguably the most successful mayoral turnaround story—the mayor won additional governance changes that empowered the superintendent in hiring and evaluation, removing these policies from the collective bargaining process. Therefore, while research shows that mayoral control in Washington led to reforms that improved student achievement outcomes in the nation’s capital, it does not necessarily follow that more minor forms of mayoral involvement (e.g., appointing a few of a city school board’s members) will replicate this unique success story. Indeed, one factor stands out in helping to explain why mayoral control in Washington led actors to prioritize student, rather than adult, interests: centralized political accountability. One anecdote from that city is especially telling. years after depart- ing his post as president of the Washington, DC, teachers’ union, George Parker explained, in retrospect, why mayoral control forced his hand in accepting a student outcomes–focused teacher evaluation system:

One of the most important things is that we went from board governance to mayoral control   Previously I was able to use politics to block a lot of reforms. But once mayoral control came into place, and there was only one person who had all the control, I no longer could prevent a lot of the reforms, so I had to decide: do I take a good look at these reforms and how do these reforms impact students, or do I try to continue to fight?

In my previous contract [negotiations] when the Superintendent put things on the table that I didn’t like all I had to do was go to several of the board members that we supported financially and just say, ‘We helped get you elected’ And I come back to [the] negotiating table the next day and it’s off the table. When we had mayoral control there was only one person. And I tried it with Mayor Fenty. I remember I went down to his office, but he made it clear that he promised Michelle [Rhee] that he was going to support what it was she was going to do. So, for the first time, to be very honest, I had to take a different position for negotiations because I had no one to go to [to] block reform.

In a similar vein, advocates of state takeover can point to impressive turnarounds like New Orleans, where the bold post–Hurricane Katrina choice and accountability reforms overseen by that state’s “Recovery School District” (RSD) led to dramatic improvements in student outcomes in both achievement (test score gains) and attainment. To be sure, New Orleans does not represent the typical state takeover. As Terry Moe explains, the all-charter system that emerged in the aftermath of the storm was an extreme outlier that was made possible by the sudden elimination of vested interest opposition (united Teachers of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board). In fact, the most comprehensive empirical study of state take- overs to date found little systematic evidence that abolishing local control (elected boards) leads to higher student achievement at scale. Moreover, critics can and do point to a clear downside of state takeover: disempowering communities from having a direct hand in running their local public schools, with communities of color being disproportionately targeted for takeover.

On the other hand, the average effect of state takeover may not be the right quantity of interest to focus on given the theory of action for granting states temporary control. As with may- oral control, state takeover advocates rightly note that democratic accountability can become so broken in some school districts that boards can no longer be trusted to do right by their kids and that dramatic leadership change is needed. Of course, not all state takeovers are created equal; for example, some are driven by fiscal concerns and others are provoked by chronic student achievement failure. What seems to matter most is what policymakers (state leaders) do with their newfound authority when takeover occurs. For example, research shows that when states can use takeovers to close a district’s lowest-performing schools and replace them with higher-performing schools, student outcomes can and do improve substantially. But the key to an SEA succeeding in this endeavor is ensuring that students will, in fact, move to a higher-performing school. If students are instead relegated to another low-performing school (or even a middling school), then the instability associated with moving schools can be a net negative for student learning. It is not altogether surprising, then, that state takeovers have been a mixed bag. Takeovers in Camden (NJ), Newark (NJ), and especially New Orleans—where the close and replace strategy was pursued—stand out as successful. In contrast, both Michigan’s and Tennessee’s efforts to replicate Louisiana’s success in New Orleans fell short.

PORTFOLIO FRAMEWORK OR PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT MODEL

Frustrated by the lack of progress in turning around chronically low-performing schools in the late 1990s, political scientist Paul Hill began to advocate for a new governance framework for large city school districts: the portfolio management model. In one sense, PMM was partly an effort to fix a core failure of SBM—the unwillingness of states and districts to hand over the car keys of autonomy on key issues like budgeting and hiring to school leaders. But PMM pro- posed even more.

PMM reimagines the district’s role as the monopoly education provider (e.g., “district schools”) and instead sees its role as a chief incubation officer that simply oversees “schools.” In other words, PMM envisions getting districts (e.g., school boards, central offices) out of the business of running school buildings and into the business of gently overseeing an ecosystem of autonomous schools of choice. But PMM is not an unfettered school choice program. To the contrary, the framework melds autonomy and choice with a centralized accountability system for all schools (irrespective of type) and (often) a single districtwide application process. While charter schools, magnets, and traditional district-run schools are all free to innovate at the school building level under the PMM framework, all schools, irrespective of type, are only permitted to continue operating if they meet agreed-upon performance objectives. In part, the allure of the PMM approach is that it helps soften the unhelpful charter versus traditional public school debate because the district and charter sectors are incentivized to collaborate with all schools in the portfolio, as every school is seen as an equal member of the same citywide ecosystem.

Where has it been tried and how well has it worked? Standouts include New Orleans, Denver, Indianapolis, Washington, DC, and New York City. Notably, several of these cities pursued alt-governance models first or along the way, which helped provide (at least temporary) political cover for this choice ecosystem to blossom and gain constituents (families) whose favorable experience in this new system could create a new constituency that would protect the model from being undone by vested interest opposition. However, alt-governance clearly is not a prerequisite to embracing PMM, and there is no single definition of the approach in practice, perhaps other than sector agnosticism (charters and district-run schools are equal in the eyes of the system). In fact, in some cases, because traditional district-run schools have seen firsthand some of the advantages of site-based autonomy in personnel and school calendar/time use, for example, PMM has led to state legislation that spawned charter-like district schools, called “innovation schools,” in Indianapolis and Denver. On the other hand, progress has been uneven in many of the other systems that have incorporated PMM principles. In 2022, Hill and Jochim reported that “of the 52 districts that participated in CRPE’s portfolio network and nominally adopted the strategy at some time or another, few sustained it for more than a few years.” Moreover, the charter-district détente that PMM imagines has been far less successful in systems with strong teachers’ unions, such as Los Angeles.

One aspect of the theory of action behind PMM is that offering more options whets the appe- tites of and expectations among families for the district to provide them with a variety of learning models from which to choose. One of the most powerful levers of policy reform is the ability to create new constituencies who have a vested interest of their own in new school models and delivery systems. Creating value for education consumers (parents) and potential consumers will give more voters reason to defend the entire fleet of options in a district’s portfolio, and future board members who wish to go back to “the way things were” (with the district as sole provider) may find themselves facing political resistance that rivals the power of locking in a formal governance change in law or regulation. This matches the well-known (successful) mobilization effort among charter school parents to prevent New york City’s then incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, from diminishing the charter sector that they had a personal stake in continuing to use. In that way, PMM helps reshape the politics of education more generally.

LESSONS AND RECURRENT TENSIONS IN GOVERNANCE REFORM DEBATES

What broader lessons can policymakers, reform advocates, and educators take away from past and present efforts to use governance changes to spur school improvement? Relatedly, what are the key tensions in our governance reform debates that are likely to persist moving forward?

1: DEMOCRATIC PROCEDURES ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN DEMOCRATIC OUTCOMES

“Fundamentally, democracy is really about representing the interests of adults,” Vladimir Kogan explains. “Whether school board elections are democratic tells us absolutely noth- ing about whether public schools are doing a good job delivering on their core mission [of educating kids].” In other words, when policymakers sit down to evaluate K–12 governance models, they should recognize the difference between democratic procedures (important) and the substantive outcomes that public education is trying to achieve: creating an educated populace that is equipped to participate in self-governance (most important). Consider, for example, the tension between the right for students to go to school and learn without inter- ruption and the right of school employees to pursue their occupational self-interests through a labor action. This is not a hypothetical. Teachers’ unions often claim that the right to strike fundamentally promotes democracy for workers (their members), yet we know that keeping

children out of school for prolonged periods of time is not in their best interest. How should policymakers wrestle with these tensions, ones where democratic procedures collide with democratic outcomes? Consider the following thought experiment (again) from Kogan:

In many communities drinking water is delivered by public agencies. yet very few people ask if these agencies are democratic. They ask whether they deliver clean and safe water. I think few would be okay with these agencies delivering cholera contaminated water just because they were satisfied with voter turnout and other metrics of democratic process or procedure. In many parts of the uS, we also have publicly run hospitals. Again, when we’re evaluating their performance, I think most people care about how all these hospitals are serving patients, not about whether their board meetings follow Robert’s Rules and allow opportunity for community engagement.

As agencies of government (subject to the demands of interest groups and voters), public schools will always be in the political arena. And to be sure, many adults will have a vested interest in upholding school board governance and in maintaining the traditional district/lEA as the sole provider of public education. These actors have obvious incentives to oppose alt-governance arrangements or portfolio management approaches. Policymakers should expect nothing less. However, at the end of the day, policymakers will need to prioritize, while remembering, most of all, that public education systems exist to serve students, not adults.

2: THERE’S NO “FOOLPROOFING” A GOVERNANCE SYSTEM IN THE ABSENCE OF POLITICAL WILL AND BOLD, CAGE-BUSTING LEADERSHIP

Well-defined governance arrangements with clear lines of accountability are typically neces- sary to deliver improved outcomes for kids, but they are almost always insufficient to the task at hand. Well-designed governance systems are only as good as the leaders who make use of them. As the author of a recent book on the delivery of government services in our digital age put it, “culture eats policy’s lunch.”69 In the case of education reform moving the needle for kids, this means that governance reform can create new possibilities and provide political cover, but it takes bold leaders to step up to the plate and make use of those new institutional levers. For all their faults (noted below), the architects of the turnaround in Washington, DC— then chancellor Michelle Rhee and then mayor Adrian Fenty—were each willing to put it all on the line and make tough decisions to change the culture of the city’s school system (and its future trajectory) even when those decisions cost them their jobs. In a similar vein, recall the key finding about the importance of leadership from economist Kirabo Jackson’s study of school autonomy in Chicago that was discussed earlier in this chapter. Jackson found that providing more school-level autonomy to principals improved student learning outcomes in schools with high-quality leaders. In places where leaders had a poor or middling track record, providing greater autonomy predictably did not lead to better decision-making and did not improve student outcomes; it led to worse performance. In sum, strong district and school leadership both matter immensely.

3: LOCK IN GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL REFORMS TO INCENTIVIZE STUDENT-CENTERED DECISION-MAKING WHENEVER POSSIBLE, BUT REMEMBER THAT ETERNAL VIGILANCE WILL REMAIN ESSENTIAL

As we’ve seen with the history of both the SBM and PMM governance reform models, politics always has a way of undoing progress, and a reform-minded majority today is no assurance of one tomorrow. When in power, reformers should try to lock in governance reforms that will maximize the chances that future district leaders will remain student centered in their decision-making. For example, in New Orleans, state lawmakers ensured that even after RSD transferred authority back to the local Orleans Parish School Board, the superintendent would retain authority to hold schools accountable without meddling from individual board members. This was crucial, because the entire PMM framework functions only when school renewals are based on transparent and objective student performance criteria, not political criteria such as whether a school is in a board member’s electoral district. Similarly, as we saw in Washington, DC, the fact that some key decisions (around teacher evaluation) were taken out of collective bargaining enabled the system leader to make more efficient student- centered decisions when it came to managing human capital. This would not have been possible without changes in the governance protocols centralizing authority in the mayor’s office. In Indianapolis, empowering the mayor to authorize charters has helped ensure that the PMM framework can remain in place even if there is board turnover, as has happened in Denver in recent years, putting reforms that helped improve district performance in jeopardy.

4: IN EDUCATION REFORM, A MANTRA OF “MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS” OFTEN BACKFIRES

Bedside manner matters in education reform. On the one hand, Americans appear comfort- able with their state, rather than local government, addressing chronically failing schools. However, when it comes to formal takeover proposals, issues related to race and the loss of political power become salient in city school systems that were often important sites where racial minorities gained a foothold in politics or found a pathway to the middle class in a teaching career. For example, a survey commissioned by journalist Richard Whitmire found that while many Black Washingtonians believed Michelle Rhee’s tenure improved their schools, they also believed her reform methods (e.g., school closures, firings) were overly dra- conian and unnecessary. Irrespective of whether the critics are right or wrong on the merits, reformers will come up on the short end of the stick if they refuse to consider the timing, tem- perament, and input of local actors in an authentic manner. Rhee’s own tenure as chancellor was cut short because voters soured on her and Fenty’s “move fast and break things” ethos. In contrast, by being more intentionally “collaborative and accessible,” Rhee’s successor managed to maintain the very same reforms that put the city’s children first while keeping her post for three times as long. This isn’t a criticism of Rhee per se, but a warning to other reformers who have been turned out of power swiftly because community perception and a lack of engagement did them in (e.g., in Memphis and Detroit).

To avoid alienating potential allies in the local community, reformers should consider the timing and sequence of their actions. School closures are invariably controversial. When nec- essary, they should be done using a consistent and transparent set of metrics so that critics cannot claim bias in sites chosen. Additionally, some reformers have been able to put clo- sures off until goodwill has been established in the community, and, especially in the context of takeovers/alt-governance, local actors believe that reform efforts are well intended. This won’t please everyone, and opposition will surely remain, but acting capriciously and without any attention to bedside manner is both counterproductive and an unforced, self-inflicted error. In places like New Orleans, Memphis, and Detroit, where takeovers led to complaints about outsiders imposing closures without community input, it is essential for reformers to ensure demographic representation on charter boards and other bodies, for example, so that alt-governance is not interpreted as an effort to disempower local communities.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Given the immense size and scale of public education in the united States, it would be foolish and impractical to conclude this retrospective by recommending that a single governance model be applied everywhere. Instead, the broader lessons that have been outlined here rec- ommend two paths forward on governance reform, with careful attention to context.

In the first case, large school districts with poor academic outcomes that have remained unchanged under the constraints of the traditional “district as monopoly” education provider should give serious consideration to an alt-governance model that would allow for a portfolio framework to blossom. While formal governance changes are not a prerequisite to incorporating the portfolio framework, the author of that reform approach notes that in the absence of “a galvanizing event” or “the entrance of new [often nontraditional] leadership,” the “adoption of [the portfolio] strategy [is] often precipitated by a major shift in education governance via state takeover or mayoral control.” The reason is simple: “these events [help] to restructure local education politics such that traditional actors . . . [are] sidelined, creating a window of opportunity for new reform ideas to take root.”

Since these districts can and will rarely initiate alt-governance on their own (Washington, DC, being a rare exception), leaders who wish to pursue a portfolio framework may do well to begin their effort by working with their counterparts in state government. To avoid the nega- tive perceptions that invariably arise from “outsiders” ignoring local context and concerns, advocates could benefit by framing their effort to leverage state support as an exercise in “freeing” local schools to enjoy more autonomy or “innovation” opportunities even if they remain under traditional district governance. Alternative governance arrangements need not mean the formal elimination of an elected school board en route to a portfolio frame- work. As Indianapolis has shown, having an executive (mayor) with charter-authorizing power opens new possibilities. likewise, Denver Public Schools also remained under elected board control, but innovation schools there nevertheless provided autonomy and choice consistent with the portfolio framework.

The second path forward is probably more appropriate for the nation’s (smaller) suburban and rural school districts that maintain the traditional elected board-appointed superinten- dent structure. Although these districts (which are more numerous but enroll far fewer students) may not need to abandon traditional governance structures, states should nonetheless require (or at least encourage) them to adopt a series of more modest reforms aimed at promoting a political structure that creates stronger incentives for aligning democratic accountability with improved student academic achievement outcomes.

First, state governments should move to on-cycle school board elections. A political system that allows one special interest group to dominate low-turnout, low-information elections isn’t a model of robust democracy. A large research literature shows that off-cycle elections unfairly advantage unions over other stakeholders and decrease the representation of parents, the poor, and racial minorities in school board elections. Most importantly, shifting to on- cycle elections increases the likelihood that voters will reward/punish incumbent school board members based on student achievement growth in their district during their tenure. In sum, this is a small but important policy change that comes with few downsides and a big upside.

Relatedly, states might consider (or at least investigate) the benefits of using non-staggered school board elections. Currently, with staggered board elections, the ability for the public to make a wholesale change in district leadership is deferred across election cycles. If voters are constitutionally empowered to “throw the bums out” of Congress every two years, per- haps they should have that same opportunity in local school politics. This reform would, in theory, also simplify participation in school politics, encourage slate running, and make it easier for the public to identify whom to hold accountable at a given point in time (since all incumbents would run at the same time, there would be a de facto referendum on their performance).

Second, as A. J. Crabill has argued, state governments should require school board training or coaching that focuses specifically on student outcomes. Ideally, states could find ways to make this more than a compliance exercise. In fact, Crabill makes a good case that states could add to this the incentive for board candidates to get certified before running for office. One benefit might be dissuading candidates who do not want to do the serious work and who are running for reasons other than raising district achievement.

Third, states must ensure that their accountability systems provide useful and easy-to-understand information about the performance of each district’s public schools. Those metrics should include and emphasize information on student growth, not simply proficiency. letter grades, though imperfect, often make it easier on the public. Importantly, SEAs need to be prepared (and required under state law) to release report card data earlier on and preferably in the month prior to when school board elections are held, to maximize the likelihood that voters will prioritize student learning outcomes during board elections.

States should consider electoral reforms that provide information about student performance on the ballot, identifying any incumbents seeking reelection so that voters know how their board members have fared in raising achievement when they decide whether to rehire them for the job. As a gentler form of “takeover,” states could first have a policy whereby an automatic board recall election is held when a district’s academic improvement stagnates for a period under the same leadership. Relatedly, similar legislation could call for a superintendent’s replacement in the event of severe achievement failure or stagnation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A total governance failure is typically observed only in an ad hoc fashion. Examples might include a district embezzlement scheme or a school cheating scandal. This leads to the mistaken belief that K–12 governance problems are rare and isolated to specific districts or leaders. yet in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the broader dysfunction beneath the surface of America’s traditional system of K–12 board-based governance. While more centralized education systems in other parts of the world reopened far more quickly, in our highly decentralized system partisanship and the lack of political will to negotiate reopening agreements with teachers’ unions played no small role in keeping half of all students out of school for a full year. In fact, numerous studies revealed that in the absence of thoughtful state polit- ical leadership, too many local school boards made decisions to keep schools closed more because of adult politics than in response to thoughtful reflection about neutral public health criteria, including the cost-benefit calculation regarding what was best for students.

As the second epigraph of this chapter noted, the root of the K–12 governance problem, Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim explain, is that ever since the turn of the twentieth century, “[school] reformers have been busy trying to take politics out of schools rather than considering how politics—of which governance is a part—can be managed, constrained, and transformed to serve public purposes.” This failure of imagination is a key reason that our public schools are encumbered by bureaucratic structures and work routines that too readily prioritize the interests of adults rather than the students they serve. Ironically, then, one hundred years after progressive reformers dismantled the nation’s large and unwieldy urban school boards, America’s fourth-largest school district, CPS, is returning to this relic of the past. Despite making real strides under mayoral control, at the behest of the city’s powerful teachers’ union, CPS will soon be governed by a large (twenty-one members!) elected board begin- ning in 2024.87 Meanwhile, the SEA in Texas has decided to pursue takeover of the nation’s third-largest district, Houston Independent School District (ISD). The Texas Education Agency recently tapped former Dallas ISD superintendent Mike Miles to bring to Houston the muscu- lar human capital reform strategy previously pursued in Dallas. Miles has announced that he will use his authority to introduce pay incentives that induce top teachers to work in struggling schools, an approach that some research shows can make a positive impact on student learning. Despite the obvious similarities they share in size and demographic challenges, Chicago and Houston suddenly appear to be two ships passing in the night. They remind us once more that the decentralized nature of K–12 politics and governance too often influences a child’s chances of receiving a high-quality education and obtaining a shot at upward mobility in this patchwork quilt we call public education in the United States.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: A Nation At Risk +40. 

When schools closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact was deep and long lasting. In Maryland schools, test scores fell to an all time low, particularly in math.

In 2021, counties received funds to provide high-dosage (intensive) tutoring to students to close gaps caused by school closures. This funding ensured that students consistently engaged in targeted, supplemental instruction at least two to three times per week for 30-45 minutes per session.

In fall 2021, the Reach Together Tutoring Program (RTTP), a partnership program of the George and Betsy Sherman Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County collaborated with Baltimore City Public Schools to provide high-dosage tutoring that helps students access and master rigorous, grade-level mathematical concepts.

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The partnership was not new. In fact, UMBC staff and students have long worked with educators to not only support professional development and community programming, but also to educate, develop, and place UMBC graduates in teaching positions in Baltimore through the Sherman Scholars Program. Our growing partnership with city schools, ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund) funding, and our access to college students, allowed us to scale our previous efforts.

The program supports students in second through eighth grade who are selected based on diagnostic assessment scores. RTTP participants scored in the bottom quartile, which equates to two or more grade levels below where they should be. Tutoring occurs during the school day utilizing the “personalized learning” block, in order to minimize disruption to the core curriculum.

What makes RTTP unique is the hiring of UMBC students as math coaches. Math coaches work with a small group of students two to three times a week during the academic year for approximately 24 weeks. Using an acceleration model, coaches focus on high-leverage foundational skills that align to grade-level content. They receive extensive preservice and ongoing training highlighting cultural competency, mathematical mindsets and student engagement.

Our mission is simple: “We will facilitate purposeful math experiences that enhance each student’s math identity and accelerate their learning trajectory.”

In 2021, we were in four Baltimore City Schools serving 355 students and had 85 UMBC math coaches. Fast forward to today and we just completed our third year of programming in nine Baltimore City schools (Arundel Elementary, Cherry Hill Elementary Middle School, Lakeland Elementary Middle School, Westport Academy, Park Heights Elementary, Dickey Hill Elementary Middle, Fallstaff Elementary Middle School, Bay Brook Elementary Middle and Curtis Bay Elementary) serving 644 students.

Since 2021, UMBC math coaches have completed 45,586 tutoring sessions. This spring we partnered with the city schools to increase capacity and serve more students through the MSDE Tutoring Corps Grant with a focus on grades six-eight. We are looking forward to expanding to 10 schools in school year 2024-25.

Is it working? We partnered with faculty from UMBC’s Public Policy and Education departments to complete a two-year program evaluation. Results indicate that participants of RTTP made greater progress when looking at test score gains and percentile gains from beginning of year to end of year when compared to non participants. Student survey data indicates that 85% of students felt more confident in math after participation in RTTP, with one eighth grade student from Cherry Hill saying, “I could get help, and if I got it wrong, they didn’t put me down.”

But there’s more. RTTP has not only supported students in Baltimore City, but has created a lasting impact and shifted career trajectories for UMBC students. Math coaches are undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from all majors, races, genders, and ethnicities.

We increased from 85 math coaches in school year 2021-22 to over 165 in school year 2023-24, when more that 1,100 UMBC students applied to be a math coach. Candidates from the Sherman Scholars Program participate in RTTP as part of their academic learning experience, giving them a hands-on opportunity to engage with students prior to beginning their teacher internship year.

Over the last three years, we have had several math coaches decide that they wanted to become teachers. They earned a master of arts in teaching and are now teaching in schools where they tutored.

Rehema Mwaisela is one such scholar who, after her first year as a math coach in her junior year at UMBC, said, “Before I was math coach in Baltimore City, I thought I wanted to be a mathematician, or just keep with math in grad school, but now I know my place in math is empowering Baltimore City scholars as much as I can with mathematical knowledge.”

She now teaches at Westport Academy. RTTP has created an exciting space where community engaged scholarship and partnership intersect and the impact is complex and far-reaching.

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and X.

While older children are showing encouraging signs of academic recovery, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math.

New data released July 1 points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit.

“It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning was disrupted somehow,” said Kristen Huff, the vice president for research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, which provides math and reading tests to millions of students each year and authored the new report. “It’s striking.”

Researchers and other experts have suggested several potential reasons for this trend. One is that the pandemic disrupted early childhood education and made it harder for many kids to learn foundational skills — gaps that can compound over time. Fewer children enrolled in preschool and kindergarten, and many young children struggled with remote learning. Increased parental stress and screen time may also be factors.

It’s also possible that schools targeted more academic support to older children and teens.

“We can see it as a call to action to make sure that we, as an educational community, are prioritizing those early grades,” Huff said. Those are critical years when children learn their letters and numbers and start reading and counting. “These are all the basics for being able to move along that learning trajectory for the rest of your schooling career.”

A slew of recent reports have examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic. Some researchers found that students in third to eighth grade are making larger-than-usual gains, but that most kids are still behind their pre-pandemic peers. Meanwhile, academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened.

The new Curriculum Associates report, which analyzed results from some 4 million students, is unique in that it includes data points for younger children who haven’t yet taken state tests. Researchers looked at how students who entered kindergarten to fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year performed in math and reading over three years, and compared that against kids who started the same grades just prior to the pandemic.

Children who began kindergarten in the fall of 2021, for example, scored close to what kindergartners did prior to the pandemic in reading. But over the last few years, they’ve fallen behind their counterparts. Kids who started first grade in the fall of 2021 have been consistently behind children who started first grade prior to the pandemic in reading.

In math, meanwhile, students who started kindergarten, first grade, and second grade in the fall of 2021 all started off scoring lower than their counterparts did prior to the pandemic. And they’ve consistently made less progress — putting them “significantly behind” their peers.

Younger children made less progress than their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they went to schools in cities, suburbs, or rural communities. And the students who started off further behind had the most difficulty catching up.

Schools may want to consider changing up their academic interventions to focus more on early elementary schoolers, researchers said. It will be especially important to pinpoint exactly which missing skills kids need to master so they can follow along with lessons in their current grade, Huff added. This year, many of the report’s struggling students will be entering third and fourth grade.

In Charleston County, South Carolina, where younger students are outperforming others in their state, especially in math, the district is using a few strategies that officials think have helped.

The district made improving reading instruction a top priority. Officials purchased a new curriculum to better align with the science of reading, gave teachers extensive literacy skills training, and started providing families more information about their kids’ academic performance.

Crucially, said Buffy Roberts, who oversees assessments for Charleston County schools, the district identified groups of kids who were very behind and what it would take to catch them up over several years. Taking a longer view helped teachers break down a big job and ensured kids who needed a lot of help got more support.

“We really helped people understand that if our students were already behind, making typical growth is great, but it’s not going to cut it,” Roberts said. “It was really thinking very strategically and being very targeted about what a child needs in order to get out of that, I hate to call it a hole, but it is a hole.”

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The “science of reading” is a trending topic in state legislatures and gubernatorial speeches — over the past decade, 38 states and the District of Columbia passed new laws or implemented new policies that require evidence-based literacy instruction. This past January, my home state of Maryland joined the list when the Board of Education required all schools and districts implement evidence-based literacy instruction by the 2024-25 school year. 

This is a major shift for many districts, where leveled readers and balanced literacy have long ruled the day. It’s also more complex than a simple mandate, since the “science of reading” isn’t a single program or technique. To successfully bring research-backed reading instruction into the classroom, districts will need to identify and invest in high-quality materials and ensure teachers and communities are prepared to make sustainable, lasting change.

While advocates and educators have been engaged in wide-ranging conversations about reading proficiency in Maryland for many years, relatively few communities have undertaken the specific work of changing curriculum and instruction to follow the science of reading. Washington County Public Schools, where I lead curriculum and instruction as an associate superintendent, has been focused on this work since 2020. Districtwide, preschool and K–5 teachers are now using a new high-quality, knowledge-rich literacy curriculum: Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA.

How did we do it? 

We have learned a lot over these past few years. Bringing the science of reading to the classroom requires careful research, strong collaboration and consensus-building, aligned professional learning, and robust ongoing support for school leaders.

Study the Evidence

Washington County started this work with a clear look at kindergarten-achievement data, which showed that just 39 percent of students met benchmark targets in reading in 2019. It was evident that although everyone worked hard, our students were not reading as well as they should. That helped us reflect on our beliefs and practices and ask big questions. Teachers, coaches, and administrators can ask similar questions by looking at their own data as they consider what students stand to gain from new evidence-based literacy instruction.

It’s important to understand the evidence before adopting sweeping change. We established partnerships to ensure that we thoroughly understood the research and create a vision for local success. Through our first partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, we collaborated with Nell Duke to reflect on and elevate our approach to early literacy. 

Duke, who is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee at the Knowledge Matters Campaign, helped us look beyond leveled texts and shift toward instructional expectations aligned with the principles of the science of reading. For example, rather than encouraging students to read independently at their comfort level, our teachers could use a variety of strategies to engage students with appropriately rigorous texts that built on their knowledge of the world, such as read-alouds, partner reads, and activities to learn vocabulary specific to a theme or topic.

Co-Create Consensus

We also engaged TNTP to help facilitate our vision. A diverse group of participants, including elementary and secondary teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, special-education teachers, and district leaders, worked together to identify our beliefs, priorities, and what would be needed to update reading instruction. We presented these ideas to school leaders, community stakeholders, and families, as well as our elected Board of Education. Through this transparent process, we created clear, shared beliefs and expectations for improved literacy instruction in Washington County.

That meant choosing a new curriculum, which would serve as the foundation and guide for our efforts. With the district’s English Language Arts leaders, Washington County teachers chose Amplify CKLA because it is both evidence-based and knowledge-rich. Through our research and work with Duke, we knew that content knowledge is essential for enhancing reading comprehension because it allows students to better connect with and understand text. Our vision-building community exercises were helpful in this step as well. Background knowledge helps students make meaningful inferences and draw on relevant prior knowledge, which is critical for deep comprehension and learning from reading — priorities for our students. Best of all, knowledge-building curriculums like Amplify CKLA are organized into units that explore a single topic, like farm animals or mythology, students can talk about what they are learning, since they are all reading about the same thing at the same time.

Prioritize Professional Learning

Washington County teachers had access to the new curriculum in the spring of 2023, nearly six months before implementation. Teachers participated in curriculum-based professional learning during the school day, as well as before and after school. Instructional leaders developed new protocols to practice and prepare units and individual lessons, and an instructional coach from Amplify offered support. Teachers have opportunities to study the curriculum, ask questions, and practice instructional techniques together. 

In addition, the district purchased a training course for educators on evidence-based reading instruction techniques created by TNTP. The course emphasizes foundational skills and guides teachers on how to apply these principles in the classroom. District leadership, teachers, administrators, and paraprofessionals all completed the training to build a shared understanding of the science of reading.

Offer Ongoing Support for School Leaders

The success of any school-based initiative depends on the principal, who works with teachers daily and knows their staff and students best. We meet with our principals for a full day once a month, with half of that time dedicated to instruction and coaching. In addition, elementary-school principals routinely visit other schools to watch instruction and share observations with peers and Central Office staff. Principals also participate in quarterly data meetings where district and school leadership work together to analyze student achievement data. These structures create an ongoing dialogue focused on instructional excellence among principals and between principals and district leaders.

At the heart of these efforts is collaboration and a shared set of beliefs. Transitioning to a high-quality, knowledge-building curriculum and instruction based in the science of reading isn’t easy, and I am grateful for the efforts of our teachers, administrators, and central office staff. With their hard work, and by establishing partnerships, fostering open dialogues about data, and providing structured professional development, Washington County has created an environment where change can and has happened—proof positive for districts across Maryland and the country facing similar challenges in the months and years ahead.

Gary Willow is Associate Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Washington County Public Schools in Hagerstown, MD.

Released Tuesday, the data from over 7.7 million students who took the widely used MAP Growth tests from NWEA doesn’t bode well for teens entering high school this fall. Finishing 4^th grade when the pandemic hit, many students not only lost at least a year of in-person learning, but also transitioned to middle school during a chaotic period of teacher vacancies and rising absenteeism.  

The 2023-24 results reflect the last tests administered before federal COVID relief funds run out. Districts must allocate any remaining funds by the end of September — a cutoff that is expected to cause further disruption as districts eliminate staff and programs aimed at learning recovery.

Older students don’t make gains as quickly as younger kids and will have to work harder to catch up, the researchers said. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic “continue to reverberate” for children in the early elementary grades, many of whom missed out on preschool because of COVID. On average, students need at least four extra months of schooling to catch up.

“It’s not fun to continue to bring this bad news to the education community, and I certainly wish it was a brighter story to tell,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA. “It is pretty frustrating for us, and I’m sure very disheartening for folks on the ground that are still working very hard to help kids recover.”

Thus far, only two states, California and Colorado, have asked officials for extra time to spend the diminishing relief funds that remain, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That means the question for most leaders is how to keep paying for extra tutoring and staffing levels for students still learning below grade level — especially those belonging to groups that weren’t meeting expectations before the pandemic.

Relief money “made a difference, but it certainly did not eliminate the learning loss,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. A recent paper he authored showed that recovery linked to those dollars was small, in part because the federal government gave districts few restrictions on how to spend it. 

The American Rescue Plan’s requirement that districts devote 20% of the $122 billion toward reversing learning decline was “super loosey goosey in terms of what that actually meant, how it was measured and what programs counted,” he said.

Some districts that hired teaching assistants to give students additional practice in reading and math have now lost those positions. Dothan Preparatory Academy in Alabama, a seventh- and eighth-grade school, had several staff members who gave students “a few extra lessons” throughout the day based on their MAP scores, said Charles Longshore, an assistant principal. Now those positions are gone. 

He hopes a new sixth grade academy opening next month will better prepare kids for grade-level material. Two years ago, when he joined the Dothan City Schools, just north of the Florida Panhandle, he attended a districtwide administrator meeting where every school’s data was posted on the walls.  

He remembers looking at elementary school scores with “really low” student proficiency rates of roughly 20% to 30%; teachers have been trying to fill those gaps ever since. 

“We’re trying to go backwards to go forwards,” he said. “What third, fourth and fifth grade standards did you miss that are essential for your understanding of seventh and eighth grade standards?”

The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.

In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, NWEA’s Lewis added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe. 

But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids.

The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.

“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”

School closures were especially hard on students with learning disabilities. Both of Tracy Compton’s daughters, who are entering fifth and seventh grade this fall, have dyslexia and didn’t receive services during the pandemic when they were in the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. 

“The time they were learning to read was during the school board’s shutdown of schools,” she said. Under a federal civil rights agreement, the Fairfax district still pays for makeup services with a private tutor. 

But Compton also moved to a Massachusetts district where she feels her girls are getting the support they need, like access to audio books and noise-canceling headphones during tests to help them focus. “They have made progress, but [have] not fully recovered,” she said.

She said too many parents don’t know their children are behind.

“They see the report card with A’s or whatever and think all is fine,” she said. “They don’t know where else to check and how to weigh things like standardized tests.”

That’s likely because different tests often tell different stories. The MAP results, for example, are worse than what many states have reported about student performance on their own assessments, which are used for accountability. 

Several states last year noted at least partial recovery, and a few showed students had even reached or were exceeding 2019 scores. Lewis explained that state tests measure the “blunt designation between proficient or not,” while MAP tests capture the full spectrum of student achievement levels during the school year.

Districts, particularly low-income districts that received the most funding, need to contend with the latest snapshots of students’ learning as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds, Goldhaber said. 

“How districts go about dealing with the fiscal cliff is going to have pretty significant consequences, particularly for the kids that were most impacted by the pandemic,” he said. If districts have to lay off staff — and newer teachers are the first to go — they should limit the impact on the neediest students. “They’ll be shuffling teachers within districts, and that shuffle itself is harmful for student achievement.”

As more time passes since the pandemic, Lewis added that school leaders might be tempted to stop comparing their students’ performance to pre-COVID levels, when states were making progress in closing achievement gaps. 

“What keeps me up at night is this idea that these persistent achievement gaps are inevitable, that this is just how it’s going to be,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think it takes innovation and creative thinking … to get us out of this mess.”

New state standardized test results show stagnant progress among Hoosier students in grades 3-8, signaling a continued struggle to reverse widespread learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic.

New ILEARN scores show 41% of Indiana students who were tested earlier this spring were at or above proficiency standards in English and language arts (ELA), according to new data released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE). That’s on par with the year prior, when 40.7% of students were proficient.

The percentage of students at or above proficiency standards in math, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease — from 40.9% in 2023 to 40.7% in the most recent school year.

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Data released by IDOE reported 30.8% of Hoosier students passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. That’s slightly up from last year’s spring test results, which showed that 30.6% earned dual passing scores.

Nearly 493,000 students sat for both exams this spring.

“While many grades have seen increases in both ELA and math proficiency over the past three years, we must continue to keep our foot on the gas pedal to ensure all students have a solid academic foundation in order to maximize their future opportunities,” Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said in a statement. “A number of key tactics have been put in place to support educators, parents, families and students. It is essential that our local schools and parents/families continue to work together and stay laser-focused on improving student learning in ELA, as well as math.”

Test results breakdowns

ILEARN scores continue to trail behind 2019 results, when 47.9% of Hoosiers in grades 3-8 earned passing scores on the English portion of the ILEARN, and 47.8% did so in math. That year, 37.1% of students were proficient in both sections.

But due to instruction changes spurred by COVID-19 and disruption of 2020 assessments, state officials use the 2021 ILEARN results to represent the current Indiana baseline.

When using that baseline, ELA proficiency has increased across most grade levels; third graders decreased 0.1%; fourth graders increased 2.2%; fifth graders increased 0.8%; sixth graders increased 1.2%; seventh graders increased 0.7%; and eighth graders increased 1.3%.

IDOE officials emphasized that many students who were in third grade in 2024 received instruction in either a fully or partially virtual setting during kindergarten due to the pandemic, which likely contributed to decreased student success.

The 2024 statewide ILEARN results show a slight increase in English proficiency across most grade levels compared to 2023.

The highest year-to-year increases were in grade four, up 1.5%, and grade seven, up 2.3%.  Proficiency in those grades is the highest since the pandemic, according to IDOE.

Since the 2021 baseline, math proficiency has additionally increased across all grade levels.

But compared to 2023, the latest ILEARN results in math proficiency decreased across the board — except in grade seven, which had a 1% increase in 2024.

ILEARN was first implemented in 2019 to replace the ISTEP exam for students from third to eighth grade. The exam measures proficiency in various subjects starting in third grade, but the main focus is on English/language arts and mathematics. All schools test in-person and electronically, unless an accommodation requires a paper assessment.

With federal permission, the assessment was not given in 2020 due to pandemic-related school closures.

A look at certain student populations

Since 2023, Black students had the highest percentage point increase in English — 1.2% — and also saw an 8% increase in math proficiency. The 2024 results show 20.9% of Black students scored proficient on the ILEARN in English, and 17% in math. About 11.7% of Black students earned passing scores on both portions of the test in 2024, according to the latest numbers.

Compared to the 2021 baseline, Black students have seen a 3.5% increase in English proficiency and a 5.4% increase in math.

Jenner called the data “notable,” given that “it’s not as common to see” such continued improvements. Rather, she said, education officials expect to see more “ups and downs” year over year.

Even so, Scott Bess, head of the Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis and member of the state education board, cautioned that more rapid improvements are needed.

“While it’s great that our Black students have shown progress, our English language learners have shown progress, the bar was really, really low, right?” Bess said. “If we keep on that trajectory, I’m going to be in a home before we get to any kind of acceptable results,” Bess continued.

Among other student populations, proficiency in both English and math decreased slightly for Hispanic students.

Students in special education and students receiving free or reduced price meals, meanwhile, had slight gains in both English and math from 2023 to 2024.

English learners — who were identified in 2023 as needing continued targeted support in English — have since had a 0.8% increase. IDOE officials said additional targeted support is still needed in math, though, given a 0.3% decrease on that section of the ILEARN. Total English proficiency on the ILEARN among English learners this spring was recorded at 13.8%, and math proficiency at 17.6%.

Changes on the horizon

The new results come amid an ongoing undertaking to redesign the ILEARN assessment and allow an option for schools to divvy up portions of the exam across the academic year.

The assessment plan includes what state education officials call “flexible checkpoints” for schools to administer ILEARN preparation tests in English and math before the typical end-of-year summative tests. A dozen other states already have similar models.

The redesigned assessment will have three “checkpoints” and a shortened summative assessment at the end of the school year. Checkpoints will consist of 20 to 25 questions and hone in on four to six state standards. The exams are designed to be administered to students about every three months, but local schools and districts can speed up testing if they wish.

Checkpoints won’t be punitive; if a student does not master a particular standard, they’ll receive additional intervention and instruction before having a retest option.

So far, 72% of schools across Indiana have opted-in to participate in a pilot of ILEARN checkpoints during the upcoming 2024-25 school year, according to IDOE. The overall system will take effect during the 2025-26 school year.

Jenner and other education officials reiterated on Wednesday that the new checkpoints will provide improved, real-time student data that can be used to better target supports for students throughout the year — rather than waiting until the end of the year for results, “when it may be too late” for teachers to provide support.

Also upcoming are changes to the state’s IREAD tests, which gauges students’  foundational reading skills.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers approved a separate requirement for schools to administer the statewide IREAD test in second grade — a year earlier than current requirements. Local educators must direct new, targeted support to at-risk students and those struggling to pass the literacy exam.

But if, after three tries, a third grader can’t meet the IREAD standard, legislators want school districts to hold them back.

Those changes take effect in the upcoming 2024-25 school year.

Data from 2023 showed one in five Hoosier third graders were not reading proficiently. Jenner said IREAD exam results from the most recent academic year are expected to be made public next month.

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on Facebook and X.

Three high-profile education advocacy and research groups crossed political lines in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to announce an ambitious goal: cutting chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years. 

For the first time, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to confront an issue that continues to plague K-12 classrooms four years after the pandemic first hit. 

“This is not a problem for some schools. This is not a problem for some subset of students. This is a nationwide rising of a tide that’s going to harm [all] students,” said Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy studies. 

While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — cuts across districts regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism surged from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022 and remained high in 2023. 

Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. The three organizations are eyeing a return to those pre-pandemic percentages.

“The goal is to get us back to a baseline where we knew we needed to do a lot more work anyway, but at least we can work towards that and do so aggressively,” Lynn Jennings, The Education Trust’s senior director of national and state partnerships told The 74. 

Five years from the launch would be 2029, but the groups are hoping that districts further along in their efforts will be able to hit the benchmark by 2027 — five years after chronic absenteeism’s 2022 peak.

The goal is doable, according to Topeka schools Superintendent Tiffany Anderson, who spoke at a panel discussion Ed Trust, AEI and Attendance Works held in D.C. this week to launch their initiative. The 12,858-student district was able to lower its chronic absenteeism by investing in families through home visits. In Topeka, if a student is absent for more than two days without parent contact, it warrants a visit.

“You cannot serve needs you don’t know. So the key is understanding … it works,” she added.

Numerous experts at the event discussed the importance of a tiered approach to confront an issue that has resisted various interventions. Schools, they said, must create trust and communication with families so they can learn why students are absent — as officials did in Topeka — but then, they must work to actually remove those barriers. 

Anderson said in speaking with her Kansas families she learned that chronic health issues, such as asthma, were impacting student attendance. So, she brought health care to the school, partnering with a local hospital. Now students and their families can see a pediatrician on site.

Some schools, panel experts noted, get stuck in that first tier: understanding families’ struggles in getting their children to school, but never implementing the solutions. Another remedy discussed at the panel, which included the vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Caitlin Codella Low, was emphasizing career pathways so school feels more meaningful to students and necessary to their own futures.

At the event, Attendance Works presented a six-step roadmap to assist states in achieving a 50% reduction in chronic absenteeism and will develop resources to share with state leaders moving forward.

“Our work over the past 10 years shows us that state leaders are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge,” they wrote. And these three organizations, they believe, are uniquely positioned to help.

Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang said her organization brings the “how:” They’re able to provide states and districts with the advice, tips, and resources to take action. Education Trust brings the advocacy lens and helps keep school districts accountable through data. And The American Enterprise Institute brings a more conservative audience to the conversation, along with the data.

Malkus’s Return to Learn Tracker, where he compiles and analyzes district-level attendance data for over 14,700 school districts and charter schools nationwide, will serve as the hub to help states see if they are on track to meet the five-year benchmark. 

“We’ve got to take a long-term approach, and we’ve got to use our data to call everyone,” Chang said. “It needs all hands on deck.”

Denise Forte, president and CEO at Education Trust, noted the importance of the cross-organization partnership, saying that while she and Malkus haven’t historically always agreed on policy issues, this was one where they knew they could — and needed to — come together. 

The urgency of the issue created a shared sense of purpose, all three groups said.

“We’re in a pretty partisan world. People feel so divided on so many things,” Chang added. “But we can’t risk our children’s future by being divided on this one.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to better reflect the timeline in which the three organizations aim to cut chronic absenteeism by half.

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

Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David C. Banks unveiled the initiative, “NYC Solves,” earlier this week, saying they hoped to build off the success of “NYC Reads.” 

Starting in the fall, 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will use the free, open-source Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, which is already being piloted in various locations in the city. Schools in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle also use the curriculum.

Like many school systems across the country, New York City, the nation’s largest, has long struggled with the subject. Math proficiency increased from 37.9% in 2022 to 49.9% in 2023, but the figure is stubbornly low and is even worse for some student groups: Two-thirds of the city’s Black and Latino children are not performing at grade level in the subject. 

“Schools all over the city, even on math, were just kind of doing their own thing — people just creating their own curriculum,” Banks said during a televised press conference. “That’s no way to run a system.” 

I’m proud to be following the groundbreaking rollout of ‘NYC Reads’ with ‘NYC Solves,’ reimagining math education and ensuring students and educators have access to high-quality instructional materials and support. pic.twitter.com/t8GTiBl1CV

— Chancellor David C. Banks (@DOEChancellor) June 24, 2024

The chancellor did not blame teachers, administrators or students for their struggle, saying they just needed a better framework. Marielys Divanne, executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, said her group has been pushing for change for years: More than 1,000 of her 16,000 members signed a petition urging the city to act on the issue.

“Our educators feel that NYC Solves is a much-needed step forward in making progress in addressing our crisis in math instruction,” Divanne said, adding that the previous, school-by-school approach left “thousands of students with low quality instructional materials and uneven support for educators.” 

In addition to the mathematics initiative, Adams also announced the creation of the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, which aims to support multilingual learners and students with disabilities. The division will have a $750 million budget — and roughly 1,300 staff members.

Maria Klawe, president of Math for America, a non-profit organization founded 20 years ago to keep outstanding math teachers in the classroom, lauded the city’s choice of Illustrative Mathematics, calling it a very strong curriculum. She had already reviewed some of the materials and praised its approach in taking math from the theoretical to the practical.

“The whole idea is trying to help students understand that a mathematical concept, even if it’s abstract in nature, is actually something that you encounter in your daily life,” she said. “You have a sense that what you’re learning is … something that you can actually use.”

William McCallum, Illustrative Mathematics’s CEO and co-founder, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards in math. He said, through a spokesperson, that IM’s work “has evolved far beyond its original focus on illustrating the standards.”

The Common Core had a bumpy roll-out, was maligned by some parents and quickly politicized. The math portion became a cultural punching bag, though it has won favor in academic circles.

McCallum strongly recommends teacher training for those who seek to implement Illustrative Mathematics. 

“The curriculum supports a problem-based instructional model that is a shift for many teachers, and they have the most success when they have the support they need to make that shift,” he said. “IM and its partners offer professional learning for those districts that want it.”

Klawe also credited Department of Education officials for making the curriculum the standard for schools. She said it allows teachers to work together across the city to share best practices. 

“It’s also very helpful for students who move from one school to another,” she added. 

New York City officials say each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by EdReports, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization. The curriculum also has undergone a formal review by a committee of New York City Public school educators including those with expertise in mathematics, special education and multilingual learners — in addition to district-based mathematics specialists. 

Minus charter schools, there were close to 1,600 schools and more than 900,00 students in the NYC school system as of fall 2023. Nearly 73% of students were economically disadvantaged. 

Like Klawe, Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, executive director of The Education Trust–New York, favors the uniform curriculum, though she notes it might not be the preference for all. 

“Different schools have different feelings about that,” she noted. She added that the approach does, however, relieve teachers from the arduous task of having to develop their own curriculum, allowing them to instead focus on implementation.

But teacher Meredith Klein, who worked for more than a decade at International High School at Union Square before switching to West Brooklyn Community High School, which serves under-credited students, said the new curriculum might not satisfy all kids’ needs. 

“I’ve always worked with a really specialized population of students and the curriculum is usually not designed with them in mind,” she said.

Klein has spent the past year implementing Illustrative Mathematics as part of the pilot program and said she struggled to adapt the materials for her students. While the city initially pushed for strict adherence to a pre-set learning schedule, the coach who visited with her to help with the rollout soon recognized the need for adaptation. 

“The curriculum is written like a story and you need to teach the full curriculum without any alterations for a full year,” she said, but that’s not the educational experience of so many of the students she’s served. “There wasn’t any guidance about how to break it up … how to retrofit it to our existing system. Not all students are the same.” 

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?”

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2024 Kids Count Data Book examines the causes driving the “astonishing” rates, resulting in bleak educational outcomes and disproportionately impacting Native, Black and Latino children. 

The national report, which explores social, health and economic factors across all 50 states while also highlighting programs that work, paints a stark portrait of the state of child well-being. From a decline in the number of 3 and 4 year olds in school to an increase in the rate of child deaths, it warns the United States “stands on the precipice of losing our economic standing.” 

Without urgent, targeted investments in family engagement, social emotional health and tutoring, a generation of Black and brown kids may soon be shut out of fast growing, high-paying STEM fields, researchers say.

Today 2 in 5 or 40% of kids have experienced at least one of what experts call adverse childhood experiences – trauma such as the loss of a parent from incarceration, divorce or death; housing or food insecurity; exposure to violence or substance use; and forms of abuse. In Mississippi and New Mexico, half of children experienced such trauma, according to 2021-22 data. 

“I think we should all be astonished that kids in this country are experiencing ACEs [trauma] at the rate that they are,” said Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs with the Casey Foundation, which has published data books on the state of childhood and funded related initiatives for more than 30 years. 

“We also know that post-pandemic, chronic absence is twice the level that it was before … it’s critically important that we understand what are the factors that are affecting kids as they enter the classroom and what’s preventing them from showing up for school.”

Alaska, Arizona, Washington D.C., and Oregon saw the highest chronic absenteeism rates, between 42 and 46%. Idaho, Louisiana, New Jersey and Washington saw the lowest, with between 4 and 18% of kids chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, the latest available data.

Several New England states that invest heavily in early childhood education — New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont – ranked highest in Kids Count’s latest annual state by state comparison for overall child well-being. Utah and Minnesota round out the top five, based off of 16 education, health, economic and family indicators. 

Beyond traumatic experiences, the data book points to rising economic or housing instability; limited or costly childcare options, which results in siblings caring for each other or working; and transportation challenges as common factors impeding children from attending school consistently. 

“What we’re seeing is many kids don’t have those basics met … Most of the country now accepts that we’re in a reading and literacy crisis but to break down, what does it actually look like and what does it mean? It is particularly alarming,” Boissiere said. 

While the report unveils some bright spots that will improve childrens’ well-being — an increase of kids who are insured and a decrease in the teen birth rate — the reality facing educators is that only one in three kids are reading at grade level by 4th grade.

One in four kids are proficient in 8th grade math. Racial breakdowns reveal alarming inequities: only 9% of Black kids, 11% of Native kids, and 14% of Latino kids are proficient.

Additionally, 54% of 3 and 4 year olds, roughly 4.3 million, are not in school, up from pre-2018 numbers, which has alarmed experts who point to the age as critical for mastering basic literacy and numeracy. The share is much higher for young Native and Latino children, 60% and 61% of whom are not in school, respectively. 

“The demographics of the public school system are only growing more and more diverse, so to ignore these disparities would really disservice most students in public schools,” Boissiere added.

Over $40 billion of federal pandemic relief funds for education remain unspent; states have until September 30 to allocate funds, which could be used through 2026. 

Authors urge every school to track absenteeism and invest in family engagement to better understand the challenges facing families in their particular context. They recommend implementing high dosage tutoring and point to the community school model, which offers wraparound physical and emotional health support alongside academics. 

Virginia’s Richmond Public Schools, for instance, dropped its chronic absenteeism rate from 37 to 18% by investing strategies such as installing washer and dryers on campuses, rolling out a chatbot to address common questions about transportation and other barriers, and altering their automated call system to better track absenteeism and its causes. 

On one campus, a barber comes monthly to offer free haircuts. They’ve added additional van transportation for the coldest days to serve kids who don’t have adequate winter clothing, and launched a housing resource center to assist families experiencing homelessness who need support navigating local services.  

“It is going to take educators, administrators, parents and communities coming together,” Boissiere said, “to go back to hopefully better than pre-pandemic levels, make sure that kids are attending school regularly, and that they show up prepared to learn.” 

That bothered Jacqueline Kronk, CEO of the clubs in St. Joseph County, so she leapt at a chance to add students this summer as part of statewide expansion of a promising Indianapolis effort.

Started in 2021 to help students catch up after the pandemic, the Indy Summer Learning Labs will receive more than $5 million from Indiana to expand into the Gary and South Bend areas, along with more rural Salem and Wabash. The five-week mix of academic work and fun activities for first through ninth graders has grown each year and is credited by the state with giving students strong gains in both math and English. 

The “Expanding What Works” grants let Kronk grow her program from 1,500 students last year to 2,500 in five counties around South Bend. She has also hired more teachers from local schools and upgraded the program’s curriculum.

“We’d be foolish to not address the fact that COVID and the implications of that are still here and rampant amongst our young students…and their ability to learn and thrive,” Kronk said. “We should be really, really scared about that reality and realize that we need to be throwing all but the kitchen sink at this issue.”

The nonprofit The Mind Trust and the United Way of Central Indiana created the Indy Learning Labs in 2021 for 3,000 students at 35 sites around the city, allowing students a chance to catch up on lost school time. The labs also offer field trips and other activities students in more affluent students can afford.

The labs have grown each year and The Mind Trust expects to have up to 5,500 students at 49 sites in the city — schools, churches, youth centers, or nonprofits — this summer. Though there are no income limits, nearly 90 percent of children qualify for free or reduced school lunches, a common measure of low family income, allowing the labs to reach families eight times less likely to enroll in summer programs than affluent ones.

Summer programs like the labs have been a widespread strategy for cities and school districts to catch students up after the pandemic. A Rand Corp. survey in 2023 found more than 70 percent of school districts have added or expanded summer programs since the pandemic, making them the most common use of federal COVID relief dollars.

Results are usually low on math and reading gains, but a new study this week found large gains last year from the Summer Boost program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies in eight cities, including Indianapolis.

Researchers have found the small reading and math improvements in summer programs are often because programs don’t offer enough academic work.

Results from both the Bloomberg study and last summer’s Learning Labs are more promising because the programs offered more academic work — about three hours a day devoted to math and English instruction.

Bloomberg based Boost on the Indy Summer Learning Labs and sponsored the labs last summer. The study did not include any lab programs.

The Bloomberg study found 22 days of summer learning helped students make, on average, three to four weeks of reading gains and about four to five weeks in math gains.

That let students make up 22 percent of COVID losses in reading and 31 percent of math, researchers estimated.

The Learning Labs had previously released data from tests given to students at the start and end of the program. Last year, those tests showed proficiency rates in both math and English increased more than 20 percent during the program.

Organizers credit time spent on learning, hiring teachers from local schools to teach some of the sessions and using a curriculum carefully chosen to align with state learning standards for the gains.

Those results, along with the ability to add more students and upgrade the curriculum were all appealing in South Bend, Kronk said.

“The impact that we saw that it had down in Indianapolis for the last several years and for us to be able to scale and replicate that and bring that to counties that we’re serving up here…that really excited us,” she said.

Indianapolis parent Chavana Oliver said the labs were a huge help last year for her son Leanno, 7, who was about to enter first grade but has issues with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and needed extra help.

“He saw a lot of improvement,” Oliver said. She signed him up again this year, as well as her older son Kaden, 8. “ Now he’s very excited, because it will help even more for the second grade.”

Deborah Hendricks Black, a former teacher who helped the Urban League and others apply for the state grant to bring the labs to Gary, said the test score gains and reports from parents in Indianapolis like Oliver caught her eye. The grants will allow 750 students from high-poverty Gary and surrounding communities including East Chicago to avoid summer learning loss and catch up when behind.

“Now we’ll have a chance to at least affect a small amount of students,” she said. “But we know they will be supported effectively with a proven curriculum that provides gains in a short amount of time and we’re looking forward to that.”

Cassandra Summers-Corp, executive director of the Creating Avenues for Student Transformation (CAST) nonprofit in Salem said her rural area about 100 miles south of Indianapolis has a lack of tutors to help students who have fallen behind. Her organization has offered summer programs focused on reading lessons to about 40 students in surrounding counties the last few years. The new grant will let her add math classes and grow to 75 students, along with increasing from three days a week to five.

“We really wanted a partner to help us to expand,” Summers said. “Even though a lot of COVID learning loss money is sunsetting, we know that the crisis of COVID learning loss is not over.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

A philanthropic initiative launched in 2022 to get students back on track from COVID learning loss is returning promising results, a new study suggests: just four weeks spent in the Summer Boost program last year helped students regain nearly one-fourth of their reading skills and one-third of math skills, compared to students who didn’t participate in the program.

The initiative, underwritten by Bloomberg Philanthropies and other funders, serves charter school students about to enter grades 1 through 9.  

Researchers at Arizona State University examined over 35,000 Summer Boost students in eight cities, finding that in just 22 days of programming, on average, students saw about three to four weeks of reading progress and about four to five weeks in math. In reading, that works out to making up about 22% of COVID learning losses; in math, it’s about 31%.

While students across all demographic groups got a boost, English Language Learners saw the strongest growth, achieving about seven to eight weeks worth of learning in just over four weeks. Researchers said students moving into grades 4-8 saw particularly accelerated growth.  

Students took part in the study in Baltimore, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, New York City, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. 

Schools participating in Summer Boost are free to use either a provided curriculum or a high-quality one of their choice, but researchers found that about a third of schools used a “balanced kind of curricular approach” that reserved time for both academics and engaging enrichment activities, said ASU’s Geoffrey Borman, who led the research.

Schools that struck that balance, he said, had “the most positive impacts for kids.” 

In summer school more broadly, Borman noted, the biggest challenges are getting kids to show up and stay engaged across the summer — and attracting high-quality teachers at a time when “both teachers and kids would probably rather be on summer break.”

To that end, schools in the program are encouraged to use as much of their budget as possible to pay teachers, said Sunny Larson, K-12 Education Program Lead at Bloomberg. The incentive, she added, “really got those veteran educators back into the classroom.”

Many prioritized hiring teachers who had already worked with these students during the school year. That allowed a continuity “that I also think was beneficial,” said Borman. 

Previous research suggests that pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most students, with many needing the equivalent of about four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Ninth-graders need a full year of extra school to catch up, according to 2023 findings from the assessment provider NWEA.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the findings were promising, but that he’d like to know whether the effects persist throughout the school year.

“While I think many have the perception that summer school is rarely effective, these results show that well designed summer programs can indeed be a helpful tool to help catch children up or accelerate their growth,” he said. The results suggest the impact of Summer Boost is “very promising — on par with regular school-year learning rates.”

‘Effective guardrails’ in place

The program includes at least 90 minutes each of English Language Arts and math instruction daily with a 25:1 student-teacher ratio. Summer programs must maintain an average daily attendance rate of 70% to get full funding — “effective guardrails” that ensure high quality, Borman said.

While they have flexibility in how they recruit, they’re encouraged to seek out students who can most benefit. 

Summer Boost originated in 2022, when Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, likened stalled academic progress from the pandemic to “the educational equivalent of long COVID.”

“Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally,” said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser to the research. “With so many students far behind, I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options.”

Kane noted that Texas’ program to expand the school year beyond 180 days incentivizes districts “to replace what students lost during the pandemic, which was instructional time.” 

Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, whose i-Ready tests helped gauge the program’s effectiveness, said she was glad to see its positive impact. 

“There is real urgency to use summer programs to provide specific, personalized support for struggling students so that they can return to school ready for grade-level work,” she said. “Assessing students relative to grade level standards is the most accurate way to understand where they are and what support they need.”

Huff noted that Curriculum Associates will soon release research showing student academic growth “still has a way to go” to recover to pre-pandemic levels, especially for the youngest students. “The Summer Boost program results underscore this, and show that when given the right supports, students can accelerate their learning.”

In the new ASU study, researchers noted a few caveats. For instance, they admitted that the findings are based on only one year of data and can’t provide evidence of impact over time. It’s possible, they said, that the findings may change as more years of data are added and the sample size increases. 

They also noted that many student records in the sample were incomplete, missing either math or reading pre- or post-test scores.   

Also missing: key student demographic data, meaning that researchers couldn’t analyze all of the students’ scores in relation to indicators such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. And the data don’t include how students ended up in the program, limiting researchers’ ability to compare it to other types of summer learning programs that may have different enrollment requirements. 

But Borman noted that research on such large groups rarely yields such strong results, “And the fact that these outcomes are seen pretty consistently across thousands of kids and multiple cities, I think that lends even more power to these results.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Michael Bloomberg’s party affiliation when he ran for president in 2020.

When it comes to summer learning, the benefits are well documented. Students who consistently attend well-planned, high-quality programs achieve higher scores on math and language arts testing. They also earn higher ratings from teachers on their social and emotional skills, research shows. Unfortunately, research also shows that students from low-income and minority backgrounds are less likely to attend – and benefit from – summer learning programs than their affluent and white peers.

That’s when the kids in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, start getting into more fights — or, as he puts it, when “business is booming.” Walden is the assistant chief juvenile officer of the local circuit court, charged with overseeing the probation of minor offenders across two counties. He also helps lead the city’s Group Violence Intervention, a program designed to curb feuds in schools and neighborhoods before they take a deadly turn.

He and his colleagues keep a busy docket in Pine Bluff, a community of about 40,000 nestled in the Arkansas Delta. A stunning number of its residents are poor and unhealthy, but the city’s abiding concern the last few years has been crime. Multiple analyses have named it one of the most dangerous places in the United States, with murder rates several times higher than the national average, and a tragically high share of the violence is committed by and against children.

The wave seemed to crest in 2021. That year saw a record 30 homicides, including that of a 15-year-old boy shot by a classmate inside Watson Chapel Junior High School. The building has since been demolished, its students relocated while awaiting the construction of a new campus. But Walden said the killing, and dozens like it over the past few years, have shaken young people in ways he can sense during trips to classrooms.   

“When we bring it up, we can feel the trauma in the room,” Walden said. “We know it’s hard: You were at school with Billy just the other day, and now he’s gone. Maybe you know the kid who killed him, and now one is locked up and the other is deceased.”

Little by little, Pine Bluff is in danger of being hollowed out, with Census data revealing that one out of every eight inhabitants either died or left town between 2010 and 2020. A number of factors are driving them away, from the area’s relative lack of economic opportunity to its generally poor school performance. But among them is the specter of death hanging over middle and high schoolers. 

As Superintendent Jennifer Barbaree told The 74’s Linda Jacobson, without more trust that children will be safe in district schools, “nobody’s going to send their kid here, and we’ll never raise our enrollment.”

Both in Pine Bluff and across the United States, education authorities fear that pre-COVID levels of learning can’t be restored until schools are made safer, with stronger relationships and more trust between students and faculty. Those fears are supported by a wealth of research showing that violence in schools is closely tied to lower academic achievement and life prospects. Students exposed to chaotic behavior, whether inside or outside of school, tend to learn less than their peers in well-ordered environments, and negative perceptions of school environment lead to lower attendance. 

Worry among families has clearly risen since the pandemic. In a recent Gallup poll, 38 percent of American parents — down somewhat since 2022, but higher than any other period in the last two decades — said they were anxious about their children’s physical safety in school. Researcher Jennifer DePaoli said that while mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Parkland receive disproportionate attention in national news, the bulk of school safety problems stem from much less sensational causes.

The conversation about school safety largely comes up after school shootings, and that really diminishes the acts of violence that students typically experience in schools.

Jennifer DePaoli, Learning Policy Institute

“The conversation about school safety largely comes up after school shootings, and that really diminishes the acts of violence that students typically experience in schools,” DePaoli told The 74. “The bullying and threatening behavior really do make students feel unsafe on a day-to-day basis.”

A changing gang culture

Walden has an unusually keen understanding of those everyday safety problems. He first moved to Arkansas two decades ago, at age 18, after a troubled childhood in Nevada and Kansas. He’d been involved with gangs as a teenager, even facing adult charges while still a juvenile. 

“I came to Pine Bluff to get out of trouble,” he said, mingling a note of irony with real appreciation.

We see a lot of that, kids getting put on virtual, because they’re trying to prevent situations from happening.

Eric Walden, juvenile officer

Hoping to stop local kids from making the same mistakes, Walden signed on as a youth mentor while attending the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He has been involved in the juvenile justice realm ever since, coordinating grants and working as a training officer before assuming his current role as the assistant chief of staff at the Sixth Division Circuit Court. When he’s not supervising a dozen probation officers, he ministers to the faithful as associate pastor at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. 

Walden said the complexion of youth crime has changed significantly, and for the worse, throughout his career. He attributes that transformation in part to the nationwide evolution of so-called “hybrid gangs,” decentralized cliques of young men engaged in criminal acts with little planning or hierarchy. Where conflict in cities like Pine Bluff was once channeled through foundational groups like the Crips or Gangster Disciples, Walden said one recent case involved the killing of a young man by an acquaintance who’d recently appeared alongside him in a YouTube music video.

“I’d give anything to get back the kids we were seeing 10 years ago because you knew what you were getting then,” he remarked. “The kids we’re dealing with now, there’s no regard for adults or teachers. It doesn’t matter if you’re best friends, there’s a good chance you’ll get harmed.” 

The Group Violence Intervention — an idea developed in the 1990s by celebrated criminologist David Kennedy and road-tested in an array of high-crime cities — was launched in Pine Bluff last year as a response to widespread concern. But it will also take a coordinated effort with state and even federal law enforcement agencies to suppress the gang violence problems in central Arkansas. In a single five-day span last July, the city saw four homicides of victims aged 17 or younger. 

Erika Evans serves as the president of the Pine Bluff High School Parent-Teacher Organization. She said she was glad that her daughter attended local public schools and that her two older sons graduated as honor students. But safety issues needed to be taken seriously by everyone in the city, she added.

To have some of my children's classmates killed, that's a grave concern for me. We have to make sure that if we see something, we say something.

Erika Evans, Pine Bluff High School Parent-Teacher Organization

“To have some of my children’s classmates killed, that’s a grave concern for me,” Evans said. “We have to make sure that if we see something, we say something. It’s a community effort, and you can’t just say, ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’”

‘Always looking over my shoulder’

As in other cities, most violence in Pine Bluff occurs outside of school. But too often, parents complain, it has spilled into classrooms and hallways as well. 

When students returned from summer vacation in fall 2021 for their first year of full-time, in-person schooling since the start of the pandemic, a spate of brawls tore through Pine Bluff High School. Some victims said they were chased through the halls by groups of their classmates. 

Such incidents may not grip the conscience of the community to the same degree as the school shooting at Watson Chapel Junior High, but they meaningfully impede learning for the affected kids. The high school was closed the entire day after one 2021 fight, and Walden said that in one district he works in, it wasn’t uncommon for administrators to proactively send home students they believe to be instigators, or even targets, of violence. 

“If they get wind that a kid might be getting into it with somebody — even if the kid was a victim because he was threatened — they’d tell him not to come to school,” he observed. “We see a lot of that, kids getting put on virtual, because they’re trying to prevent situations from happening.”

Results from social science suggest a connection between the fear of in-school violence and poor academic results. Some of the most compelling evidence comes from New York City, where a 2020 study used survey responses from over 340,000 middle schoolers to chart a clear connection between feelings of physical threat in school and lower standardized test scores; the academic harm was greatest in cases where students reported staying home from school because of safety concerns.

Data from other cities point to similar trends. A 2011 paper on perceived safety in Chicago Public Schools found that large numbers of both students and staffers worried about being victimized in school buildings — especially in areas where fewer adults congregated — and that schools enrolling larger proportions of low-performing students were more likely to see safety problems. Another study, this one based in Philadelphia, showed that the closure of underperforming schools led to a substantial decrease in crime in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Economist Matthew Steinberg, an author of both papers, said it was hard to identify a direct causal relationship because of the nature of the population enrolled in failing schools: largely disadvantaged students who are more likely to be exposed to poverty and instability at home. 

One needs only to have eyes and ears and to have lived in the world to know that if someone feels unsafe, it affects their ability to focus.

Matthew Steinberg, Accelerate

Still, he added, it was undeniable that in schools with greater behavioral challenges, teaching and learning are often subordinated to the need for classroom management.

“One needs only to have eyes and ears and to have lived in the world to know that if someone feels unsafe, it affects their ability to focus,” Steinberg said. “If I’m a kid in school, and I’m always looking over my shoulder, how does that support my learning?”

Those sentiments were echoed by Stanley Ellis, director of education at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ Institute for Digital Health & Innovation. Last fall, the institute received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to combat youth violence through partnerships between the Pine Bluff School District and several community and faith-based organizations. The funds will help target at-risk students for services and train school employees in trauma-informed education. 

Pine Bluff has a very rich, storied history — a good history. We want students to be contributors to that history, and we need to reduce violence so they can be around to do that.

Stanley Ellis, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

Ellis identified social media as a particular conduit of stress between peers, through which bullying and conflict are carried over from school to the wider community. 

“It travels with you from school to the house,” Ellis said. “You can’t concentrate in class because you’re trying to respond to the negative stuff that’s been said about you or your friends or your family members.”

Recalling a ‘rich, storied history’

A native of the Arkansas Delta, Ellis said that Pine Bluff’s reputation as a place of crime and disorder was belied by its much older record of achievement. 

Freed slaves flocked there during and after the Civil War, establishing businesses and occasionally winning local office. Opportunity surged through the mid-20th century with the growth of employment in the defense and paper industries. While the emergent African American population there was also subjected to terror and lynchings during and after Reconstruction, he said, young people were inheritors of a legacy of uplift.

“Pine Bluff has a very rich, storied history — a good history,” he said. “We want students to be contributors to that history, and we need to reduce violence so they can be around to do that.”

Sources agreed, however, that if the city is going to see a revival, it will have to stem the departure of its inhabitants, more than 10,000 of whom left over the last 14 years. One of the keys to that turnaround will be better academic performance from a school system that has recently posted some of the worst results in the state.

Many parents cheered last fall when the school district was returned to the control of local officials after years under state supervision. The handover is seen as a reflection of better financial management and real, if modest, growth in student performance.

Now Evans and other parents are looking forward to 2026, when the city has pledged to complete a new high school. Besides offering an upgrade in overall facilities, it is hoped that a new campus will offer new safety features — the existing campus, spread across multiple structures, is too diffuse for administrators and school resource officers to oversee, parents have complained — that will relieve students’ and teachers’ fears about disruptive behavior. 

Evans, who helped lead the campaign to raise funds for the new building, said she hoped a renewed commitment to education would not only improve public schools, but also reset people’s expectations of what is possible in Pine Bluff.

“When we’ve been out discussing the building of a new high school, we saw the community enthralled,” she said. “They were happy to see a brand-new school, and when you bring a new school, the mindset shifts: Here is an opportunity for improvement.” 

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/gaps-widening-between-indianas-highest-and-lowest-performing-students/ Wed, 24 Apr 2024 14:30:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=725826 The exact date varies across grades and subjects, but Indiana’s student achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling since. 

The decline started well before COVID-19 and has not affected students evenly. Perhaps not surprisingly, Indiana’s lowest-performing youngsters have suffered the largest losses. 

This wasn’t always the case. In the early 2000s, the state’s achievement scores were rising, and those gains were broadly shared across student groups. In a recent project for The 74 Million, I called this “a tale of two eras.”

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The graph below shows the Indiana story visually. It shows fourth-grade reading scores, broken out by student group. The statewide average is in gray, the highest-performing 10% of students are in yellow and the bottom 10% are in red. 

The left side of the graph shows that average scores went up by 7 points from 2003 to 2015, led by an 11 point gain among the lowest-performing students (roughly equivalent to about one grade-level’s worth of gains).

But since then, the bottom has fallen out from under Indiana’s reading performance. While top performers have suffered a 1-point drop and the statewide average has fallen 10 points, the scores of the lowest-performing students have fallen 22 points.

What happened to cause this sudden reversal? 

It’s tempting to jump to quick conclusions — Was it the Common Core? Is it the increased use of cell phones and other technology? But any good explanation should align with the exact timing and magnitude of the declines.

COVID-19 certainly exacerbated these trends, but they also pre-date the pandemic, so the story neither starts nor ends there. 

It’s also not just an Indiana problem; achievement gaps are growing all across the country. As I noted in my original piece, “49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP” — the Nation’s Report Card — “saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade.”

Many readers have posited that the shift to the Common Core state standards was to blame. The timing does fit, but it doesn’t explain why the same patterns are playing out even in states that never adopted the Common Core, and in subjects like history and civics that weren’t covered by the standards. 

It also can’t be money or teachers. In Indiana, for example, per-pupil spending was more or less flat, in inflation-adjusted terms, while achievement was rising, and then spending started to rise around the same time achievement scores started to fall. Teacher staffing levels have also been rising over this period. Indiana schools went from having 17.4 students for every teacher a decade ago down to 15.8 as of the most recent data. 

What about technology and social media? This one’s harder to disprove. As psychologist Jean Twenge has pointed out, the rise in smartphone usage aligns pretty closely with a decline in teen mental health and in-person social activities. It would make sense that the same trends are affecting academic achievement. 

And yet, the technology argument has some flaws. For one, it doesn’t explain why achievement gaps are growing faster in the U.S. than in other developed countries. Two, the achievement declines in the U.S. are not limited to teenagers; they have been just as large among younger students who presumably have less access to phones and other technology. And three, it’s not clear why phones or social media would affect the lower-performing students but would not cause similar harms at the top.

But something must have happened about a decade ago to change the trajectory of student performance. In my original piece for The 74, I argue that the weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop. The timing of the change fits with the patterns both nationally and in Indiana. It also explains the growing achievement gaps. After state and district policymakers stopped focusing on the performance of kids at the bottom, their scores started to decline. 

Regardless of which of these theories offers the best explanation, or whether it’s a combination of several, the data point to an alarming increase in achievement gaps in Indiana schools. It’s not just an Indiana problem, but the state’s policymakers will need to reverse these trends if they want to get achievement back on track.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/study-lengthy-school-closures-were-especially-hard-on-high-achieving-students/ Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:30:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=725210 A version of this essay originally appeared in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Advance newsletter.

To gauge the magnitude of global learning loss during the pandemic, a team at the World Bank examined data from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds in math, reading and science, from 2018-22. Among the report’s many notable insights is a counterintuitive finding about outcomes: In countries with the longest closures, high-achieving students experienced larger learning losses than their low- and medium-achieving peers.

Harry Anthony Patrinos, one of the authors, explained it like this in a Fordham Institute piece last month:

In countries with school closures of average duration — about 5.5 months — learning losses were similar for low-, average- and high-achieving students. However, in countries with shorter closures, the best students experienced minimal setbacks, with the learning losses mostly being incurred by average- and low-achieving students. In countries with longer closures, the largest learning losses were experienced by high-achieving students.

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And these achievement drops were sizable. “In countries with the longest closures, the low-achieving students lost around 16 to 17 points,” note the authors, “while those at the top of achievement distribution lost 25 points or more.” 

Learning loss estimates depending on student achievement quantiles and the length of closures

The U.S., at least as a whole, avoided this outcome, despite very lengthy closures in some places. U.S. learning losses by achievement group match the average of countries participating in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the PISA exam. Patrinos told me this means low achievers lost more than high achievers. But perhaps that’s because decisions were so locally determined and politically charged, with, for example, big red states like Florida and Texas keeping kids in classrooms far more than big blue states like California and New York. 

Indeed, because of this state autonomy, the U.S. was only one of three countries in the report that had zero “full closures,” per UNESCO, which defined these as “government-mandated closures of educational institutions affecting most or all of the student population” and tracked them worldwide throughout the pandemic.

Whatever the causes are, however, they’re beyond the scope of the report and my powers of divination, and speculation has limited value. Some takeaways and consequences, however, are worth exploring.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that being in school appears to be quite valuable for high achievers’ learning. This runs counter to cynical assumptions that these students attain their level of achievement primarily because of out-of-school factors like household income, parent education level and various forms of evening, weekend and summer enrichment. Of course, these things play a significant role, but the report’s findings suggest that classroom instruction is integral to the magnitude of these students’ achievement.

If what happens in school matters for high achievers even more than for others, it follows that these students will not be fine regardless of the type of instruction they receive. If formal schooling benefits high achievers this much, then the quality of that schooling — teachers, curriculum, rigor, etc. — likely matters greatly as well. This is another way of saying that advanced education programs designed to maximize the achievement of these students are worth pursuing, and efforts to curb or scrap them are quite damaging.

Think of what these learning losses among high achievers mean for them, their nations and the world.

First, the students themselves. All children deserve an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures. They have their own legitimate claim on leaders’ consciences, sense of fairness and policy priorities. When ill-considered policies and adult preferences led to pandemic-related school closures in many countries that were far longer and more numerous than necessary, all students were harmed, but none worse than those who had been high achievers.

Other significant costs were levied against countries’ (and perhaps U.S. states’) long-term competitiveness, security and innovation — which translate to global impacts, too. High achievers are the young people most apt to become tomorrow’s leaders, scientists and inventors, and to solve current and future critical challenges. Most economists agree that a nation’s economic vitality depends heavily on the quality and productivity of its human capital and its capacity for innovation. While the cognitive skills of all citizens are important, that’s especially the case for high achievers. Using international test data, for example, economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann estimate that a “10 percentage point increase in the share of top-performing students” within a country “is associated with 1.3 percentage points higher annual growth” of that country’s economy, as measured in per-capita gross domestic product.

Recall that the World Bank’s PISA analysis focused on math scores. Considerable research suggests that “math skills better predict future earners and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school,” and, as the Wall Street Journal has observed in reference to U.S. NAEP results, “math proficiency in eighth grade is one of the most significant predictors of success in high school.” This suggests that the huge drops shown in the PISA data may reverberate through the rest of these students’ lives, their countries’ futures and even the fate of the globe.

Bottom line: Leaders must not minimize the importance of formal education and, by extension, the value of advanced programming for high-achieving students. At a time when these opportunities are under attack, schools have lost their sense of purpose and families’ relationship with education seems to have become optional, the costs are much too high.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/after-literacy-wins-oakland-reachs-parent-liberators-take-on-math-tutoring/ Wed, 17 Apr 2024 07:17:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=725454 The Oakland REACH and the Oakland Unified School District have teamed up to pilot a math tutoring program that has shown early positive results and is modeled after one that has already delivered significant student gains in reading.

MathBOOST began last fall with six trained tutors — all of them parents or caregivers — working across four of the district’s 50 elementary campuses. It will expand to more than 20 tutors assisting children in 11 schools next year, said Oakland REACH’s CEO, Lakisha Young.

The tutors, or Math Liberators, as Oakland REACH calls them, work inside the classroom alongside teachers and also pull children out for small group instruction, said Alicia Arenas, the district’s director of elementary instruction. 

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“We really want our kids to be algebra-ready by the time that they enter middle school and high school,” she said, adding that at least one principal reported that participating children truly enjoy the program. “And the teachers bring up the great math progress they’re seeing from students who work with the math tutors.”

She added that students who are not involved in the program regularly ask if they could join. 

Tutors are paid an hourly rate and qualify for full benefits. Most assist third- through fifth-grade students and two of the six work with younger children. All have strong ties to the district and were carefully chosen, Arenas said. 

“We were looking for that connection and that investment in Oakland and OUSD,” she said. “We also wanted our tutors to represent the community that they serve.”

Some are graduates while others have children in the district. Math tutor Janine Godfrey, 55, works primarily at Garfield Elementary School. She said she helps children better understand their lessons and maintain their focus on the subject during class. 

“I chose this work because I have spent the last three years working through the middle school math curriculum with my son and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed math and teaching,” said Godfrey, who has run her own catering business for 25 years. “It felt like it was time to give back to the community and this felt like a perfect fit for me.”

Godfrey said she’s been moved by the students’ openness and by their ability to forge a solid bond with her.

“I truly hope that the work we have done together will somehow inspire them to work hard in math — and perhaps even enjoy it once in a while,” she said. 

As part of the new tutoring effort, Oakland REACH launched a series of outreach-focused “Math Mindset” meetings at the Think College Now Elementary School campus. 

The organization uses the time to help parents confront their own insecurities around the subject — they remind participants of the groundbreaking strides African and Mayan cultures made in the topic — as a means to improve their own students’ success. 

REACH secured several respected math educators of color to inspire families, Young said, adding that she hopes the gatherings will also serve to identify possible math tutors. 

Recruitment has been a challenge as many people in the Oakland school community identify themselves as “bad at math,”  an idea that leaves parents thinking they can’t help their children progress in the subject, Young said.  

“We have to employ a different strategy when it comes to bringing our communities along in math,” she said. “We need to do the work of building the confidence and awareness they need to feel like math is something in my ancestry.”

Young said REACH’s math-related efforts will extend beyond the school year as the organization recently secured a summertime partnership with the district. SummerBOOST will allow math tutoring at two pilot sites serving some 350 children in kindergarten through fourth grade. 

Children all over the country have long struggled with math. Systemic inequity has caused Black, Hispanic and poor children to fall behind even further than their peers nationwide, a gap that grew worse because of the pandemic. Fourth-grade NAEP scores fell a stunning five points in 2022 from 2019. Eighth graders suffered an eight-point drop in that same time period, erasing decades of growth.

Results are equally troubling in the Oakland district: Just 19.03% of its sixth graders scored proficient on the 2022-23 state math assessments. High school students fared even worse, with just 14.11% of 11th graders reaching that same benchmark.  

“The mindset shift is key,” Young said. 

Young started REACH eight years ago with the goal of empowering Black and brown families to advocate for a high-quality education for their children. During the pandemic, REACH launched the Virtual Family Hub, providing online learning opportunities to families that resulted in significant literacy gains for students. 

In its December 2021 Hub parent satisfaction survey, 88% of families wanted more math intervention support for their children. So, after crafting an effective literacy model, the group turned its attention to math. 

“Let’s go back to K-2 when they are most flexible around deficits and excited about learning,” Young said. “This is a full frontal attack.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and The 74.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/schools-new-normal-post-covid-must-emphasize-attendance-tutoring-summer-class/ Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:01:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=724261 Four years after the global COVID shutdowns, the pandemic’s effects are still being felt. Within education, a variety of data sources — including NWEA’s MAP Growth and state, national,and international tests — all show that students today are well behind their peers from four years ago.

However, focusing on that type of COVID recovery framework feels less and less meaningful with each passing day. Since the start of the pandemic, most students have moved up multiple grade levels (or graduated!), and districts are already in the last year of spending down their federal emergency COVID relief funds. 

There isn’t and won’t be an educational equivalent to the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaiming the end to the global health emergency. But it’s time for a new framework that shifts from a temporary recovery mindset to a more lasting and permanent emphasis on growth, equity and continuous improvement. 

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What could that look like? There’s a growing consensus around three key levers: getting kids back in school, expanding and monitoring high-dose tutoring and increasing summer or afterschool learning time. Along with the Biden administration’s recent proposal for $8 billion in Academic Acceleration and Achievement Grants, researchers such as Harvard’s Tom Kane and the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus are all pointing to the same problem areas and potential solutions. 

Three structural shifts must happen to address the needs of the next generation.

First, students must get back in school. Research consistently finds that attendance, behavioral infractions and successful completion of academic coursework are strong predictors of outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance and college persistence. That’s true even after controlling for a student’s standardized test scores. In fact, in recent research, NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford found that measuring academic behaviors such as regular attendance also did a good job of capturing other social-emotional skills like self-management, a belief in one’s ability to succeed, growth mindset and empathy for others from diverse backgrounds. 

Their work also uncovered a promising nugget for policymakers. Given how strongly partial-day absenteeism predicted long-run outcomes, policymakers could consider tracking and monitoring it closely. Other factors, such as tardiness, referrals for in-school discipline and participation in extracurricular activities are also relatively easy to measure and potentially contain rich information about students. Tracking these interim outcomes — and then helping students improve on them — is likely to help boost longer-term outcomes as well. 

Second, students who need it most should receive high-dosage tutoring. There’s a large and growing body of research finding that students who complete high-dosage tutoring post impressively large gains in test scores when those programs are implemented appropriately. That research has convinced districts across the country to create or expand their tutoring programs. But as the federal ESSER funding cliff approaches, policymakers should work with local education leaders to sustain high-quality, high-dose tutoring programs that are delivering the biggest gains for academically at-risk students. 

Third, schools should provide extra learning time through summer programs. Like tutoring, intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks have shown success in raising student achievement. Multiple studies on the effects of summer learning programs have found positive impacts on student outcomes, especially in math. Those producing the strongest gains tend to offer supports for at least 20 days and pair struggling students with the most effective teachers.

Learning programs during shorter school breaks can also boost student achievement. For example, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, district offered week-long acceleration academies to students who were having difficulty in a particular subject. They were placed in small groups of 10 to 12 and taught by carefully selected educators. In total, students received about 25 hours of extra instruction per week, and the program was a key part of the district’s successful turnaround effort. 

As the sun sets on the COVID recovery era, state and district leaders will need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments in things like tutoring, summer programs and acceleration efforts. It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost. Those questions must now be part of the new normal.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/meet-the-stem-superstars-4-inspiring-teen-inventors-who-set-out-to-tackle-cancer-anxiety-suicide-more/ Wed, 13 Mar 2024 21:01:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=723833 Thursday is officially Pi Day, offering Americans the annual opportunity to geek out over math, geometry and all things STEM. (It’s also recently become #DressForSTEM Day, celebrating women in science — more on that below) 

In honor of 3.14, we recently canvassed the country, searching out STEM students with noteworthy projects and inventions. You can see all our recent profiles on our STEM Superstars microsite; here are our most recent video profiles of four remarkable teenagers: 

Helping Amputees — Virginia’s Arav Bhargava

The 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia has developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms. (Read the full story) 

Confronting Depression & Suicide — New York’s Natasha Kulviwat

The 17-year-old from Jericho researched a biomarker to help identify those at risk of suicide. (Read the full story) 

Easing Anxiety — Philadelphia’s Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur

The 18-year-old senior at Pennsylvania’s Julia R. Masterman High School gave fruit flies anxiety to gain a deeper understanding for what makes us anxious — and to pave the path for better treatments. (Read the full story) 

Improving Rural Health Care — Maryland’s William Gao

The 18-year-old from Ellicott City’s Centennial High School created an AI-enabled diagnostic app that could help save rural cancer patients. (Read the full story) 

And in honor of March 14 and Women’s History Month, The 74’s Trinity Alicia explores women’s ongoing impact in STEM and how a hashtag is driving the Pi Day conversation to representation of women in the field:

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/americans-have-yet-to-accept-covids-tragedy-and-are-taking-it-out-on-schools/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:30:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=723661 In my District of Columbia neighborhood, everything pretty much ground to a halt on Friday, March 13, 2020. My kid won the school’s bilingual spelling bee in a crowded auditorium buzzing with speculation that the school probably wasn’t reopening next week. Hours later, an announcement from administrators confirmed it: our pandemic had begun.

By March 20, I’d realized that this was one of Those Moments, a historical signpost when your choices and behavior will echo back at you later, whenever someone asks, “Where were you when?” By the middle of that summer, though, as my social world filled with people shocked that their vacations and family reunions had become superspreader events, I’d also realized that we were collectively going to spend most of this catastrophe wishcasting it away. 

The rest, as they sort of say, became history. The pandemic’s consequences were — are — too dire to ignore, but also too inconvenient to fully acknowledge. Four years later, we’re also at an awkward remove from its most dramatic moments: The pandemic is largely concluded as an historical event, yet we’re not yet far enough out to have anything like a clear view of what’s happened. Most of us are still too battered from the burdens we carried to pause and genuinely reflect. We’ve all spent so many hours of the past four years jabbering into webcams at screenfuls of tiled faces. March 2020 was so many pixels ago. 

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That’s why this anniversary should also be an invitation to extend a modicum of grace to ourselves, our peers and our schools. These were four punishing years. Pretending they can be quickly shaken off is yet another effort to shuffle the pandemic away without really grappling with it. Both individually and collectively, Americans have not yet accepted the scope of the tragedy and we’re taking it out on our schools. 

This odd unwillingness to recognize the pandemic as an unavoidable calamity is part of why we’re still endlessly relitigating pandemic mitigation measures in schools — closures, masks, quarantine policies, and the like. If, in 2019, we’d conducted a thought experiment, asking folks to predict the educational impact of a then-hypothetical viral pandemic that would be transmitted via breathing and would kill nearly 1.2 million Americans, most of us would agree that kids wouldn’t steam forth making the usual academic progress. 

And indeed, the real pandemic unquestionably harmed U.S. students’ academic trajectories, even if they appear to have weathered it better than their peers in most other countries. Yet here on the other side of that disaster, we’re determined to assign blame for dips in U.S. students’ academic achievement, as if learning loss could have — should have — been avoided in a moment of widespread viral transmission and mass death. Say it plain: There was no educational and public health playbook that could have wholly averted the pandemic’s impacts on kids. As The New York Times’s David Wallace Wells put it in 2022, “[T]he declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.”

But because we can’t face that, we’re now in an educational “One Weird Trick” era, as the field floods with quick-fix solutions to reversing the pandemic’s impacts (particularly with federal pandemic recovery ESSER funds sunsetting). While it’s always appropriate to prioritize high-quality learning opportunities for children, it’s a short step from “let’s help kids accelerate their learning” to “if we do enough now, we can — yet again — banish the pandemic’s impacts from kids’ lives” (particularly if we just buy the right new ed tech product). 

The reality is much harsher. Researchers have known for years that it’s much tougher to shift students’ academic trajectories later in their careers. That’s why children who miss early literacy benchmarks so rarely catch up in later grades. It’s also why investments in high-quality early learning — like universal pre-K programs — are such a good policy idea. Now, we have a country of children who, again, inevitably, faced years of disrupted learning. Evidence suggests that closures contributed to lost learning, but only as one of many, interrelated variables, and — as noted above — students’ academic achievement in the U.S. appears to have suffered less than it did for students in peer countries that reopened on different timelines and with different COVID mitigation strategies.

Furthermore, the educational story of the past few years is far more complicated and painful than we’d like to admit and its aftereffects won’t vanish because we invest in some limited tutoring programs. Nor could they have been averted if only schools had found some magic mitigations formula to maintain normalcy for kids even as a whole lot of us repeatedly exempted ourselves from responsibility for flattening the curve. 

Why are we so resistant to facing this fact of the pandemic, even now that it’s mostly receded from daily life? It’s flatly impossible to look back at these four years without seeing how national leaders’ rhetoric drove this attitude: real and massive suffering coupled with willful self-deception and disinformation. The Trump administration flailed through COVID’s early stages, insisting it would be over in a few days or weeks, then dabbling in pseudoscience — remember hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and light and/or disinfectant “injected” into people’s lungs? 

That deadly unseriousness was contagious and collectively punishing. We’ll never know how the country would have behaved under less erratic leadership, but this band of feckless incompetents convinced masses of Americans that the pandemic could be largely ignored if we just wanted it badly enough. Their glib irresponsibility built the narrative that still plagues U.S. public education today — this notion that schools could somehow persist as normal when absolutely nothing around them was. It seems obvious that the ungainly federal response damaged Americans’ trust in public institutions and the social strains it caused ripped deeper holes in our shared social fabric. 

American pandemic flounderings were also personally crushing for many of us. Looking back, I feel a flat, dull, full-body weight settle back into my spine, that familiar 2020-vintage exhaustion. And that’s why, I know this for certain: whatever we all think now about the precise sequence of school closures, reopenings, mitigations, learning loss, and so forth, the past four years ripped a chunk out of the well-being of U.S. parents, caregivers, and teachers. 

That’s probably the clearest reason that the country’s still so determined to shift the pandemic out of mind and/or erase its impacts. No one wants to accept how far it knocked us — and our children — off the trajectories we hoped we were following. I remember reaching a point in the endless work-life-kids-panic pandemic juggle where I developed this yearning to just sit quietly on a rocky beach somewhere and watch the waves roll in. To just meditate and let my mind unspool from the tension of masks and ambulances. 

I kept telling my wife, “I bet I could sit there and stare for days before my head finally got back to something like normal.”

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/these-fed-up-parents-fought-californias-pandemic-schooling-and-won-now-what/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 19:01:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=723033 This article was originally published in CalMatters.

At the height of the pandemic, in spring 2020, Maria O. her husband and four children were quarantined in their one-bedroom apartment in South Los Angeles, each vying for privacy, quiet and adequate technology to work and attend school remotely.

There weren’t enough tablets or laptops, and Wi-Fi was glitchy. Her children ended up logging into online classes using their parents’ phones. While the children once loved school, they started falling behind academically. Everyone grew frustrated. 

“People on the outside don’t know the impact that remote learning had on families like us,” said Maria O.  “It was hard and it was stressful. We stayed afloat, but it wasn’t easy.”

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Maria O.’s family is among a dozen Californians who joined a lawsuit against the state, claiming that in many schools, remote learning was so inconsistent and ineffective that thousands of students — especially low-income, Black and Latino students — were denied their right to an education. She and other plaintiffs in the case were not identified by their full names in court documents and asked to remain anonymous when interviewed in order to protect their children’s privacy.

The case was settled this month in Alameda County Superior Court, which issued an order that the state introduce legislation requiring schools to spend the remaining $2 billion in COVID relief funds to help students who were most impacted by remote learning recover academically and emotionally from the pandemic. That could include tutoring, counseling, after-school activities and other steps.

The impact of school shutdowns

But beyond the settlement details, the case has drawn attention to the magnitude of learning loss during the pandemic. Despite herculean efforts by school staff to keep students engaged during remote classes, learning loss — especially among students who were struggling before the pandemic — is a crisis that could harm a generation of students, researchers said.

“We can measure the impact of lost quality instruction, but the implications of a traumatic few academic years are much bigger for student health, mental health and well-being,” said Joe Bishop, co-founder of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. “In the same way we rush to support families after a wildfire or school shooting, we have to deploy assistance to help students, especially youth of color, with the same sense of urgency.”

Bishop and his team at UCLA published a pair of reports on learning loss on behalf of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They interviewed teachers, administrators, counselors and school staff at all levels. They found that remote learning exacerbated pre-existing inequities and that most educators believe the state offered insufficient guidance on how to navigate the pandemic.

But with California’s decentralized education system, the state’s authority was limited, said Elizabeth Sanders, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education. Still, the department provided ample assistance for schools under difficult circumstances, she said.

“Certainly, there were clear needs for support that students and families had during the pandemic. (The Department of Education) and Superintendent (Tony) Thurmond acted immediately to try to meet those needs,” Sanders said. “And when new needs arose, we stepped in to provide help every step of the way.”

For example, when some districts struggled to get laptops or tablets for every student, the state leveraged its connections to manufacturers to deliver enough devices to districts, even amid a global shortage, she said. In addition, the state provided a host of online resources for schools, addressing health, distance learning, reopening campuses, parents’ concerns and other topics. 

Nonetheless, too many districts were “flying in dangerous conditions without a control tower, or central place of support,” Bishop said. “They were largely left alone to weather the COVID storm.” 

While some districts fared relatively well during remote learning, others struggled to meet students’ basic needs. That included everything from providing enough devices and Wi-Fi hotspots, to addressing students’ mental health needs, to offering adequate academic instruction.

“Schools and districts felt isolated and on their own dealing with this extraordinary moment in our history,” Bishop said. “They had to be public health experts, help parents find jobs and housing, provide IT support.”

The UCLA researchers also looked at solutions to a problem they say stretches far beyond the realm of schools. They said the Department of Education needs support from the Legislature and other agencies to create a long-term roadmap for recovery. It should include a comprehensive plan to address staffing shortages, expand mental health services and target services to students who need them the most, among other steps.

“Right now there’s not a clear compass for where we’re headed and what we’re doing about it,” Bishop said. “Learning has been stagnant, but as a state, what are we doing about it? This is a question we need to answer.”

Parents’ frustrations

Kelly R., another plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she’s hopeful the settlement funds will help students across California regain lost ground. 

During remote learning, her three daughters, who were enrolled in Los Angeles Unified, experienced shortened school days and large amounts of independent work they struggled to complete. Kelly R., a case manager, was working from home, and because the family lived in an airplane path, Wi-Fi was unreliable.  

Her children were falling behind academically, lost their self confidence and started disliking school, she said. This was especially frustrating, she said, because just a few miles away in more affluent neighborhoods, students were attending in-person learning pods paid for by their parents, and staying on top of their academics.

“It was stressful, discouraging. I had a sense of helplessness. I kept asking myself, what could I have done better?” she said. “Maybe if we had been in a different tax bracket, things would have gone differently.”

Compton Unified rebounds

Compton Unified, in Los Angeles County, has rebounded almost entirely from the pandemic, according to the most recent California Schools Dashboard data. Last year, English language arts scores actually surpassed the 2019 results, while math scores jumped 5.8% to nearly meet the pre-pandemic score. The graduation rate was 89% last year, two percentage points higher than in 2019. Chronic absenteeism was still high last year, but it was lower than the state average of 24%.

Superintendent Darin Brawley credits a heavy investment in tutoring and mental health services, some of which pre-date the pandemic. The district used its COVID relief funds to contract with four tutoring agencies and expand mental health curriculum at all schools, for families as well as students. It also operates 30 on-campus wellness centers that offer services such as mental health counseling, yoga and mindfulness and crisis intervention.

Brawley also credits an early reopening plan. Some students, including English learners and those in special education, began returning to in-person school in October 2020, months before most other schools reopened.

“Because of that, our students have done a little better. The drops were not as significant,” Brawley said. “Although we’re not where I want us to be.”

Brawley said he’s heartened by the settlement, but its success will depend on whether the money actually benefits students who were most affected by remote learning. Accountability and follow-up will be key, he said.

“This case is extremely important. You cannot deny that Black and brown and low-income students were significantly impacted by the pandemic,” Brawley said. “But the devil will be in the details.”

California’s education landscape, in context

California’s learning loss was not the worst in the country, by a long shot. California is actually in the middle of the pack nationwide, according to a report from the Stanford Graduate School of Education released last month. California schools have seen less dramatic recovery than other states, but the initial loss wasn’t as great.

Nationwide, the recovery for some districts has been remarkable, said Sean Reardon, co-author of the study and a Stanford University education professor. While some districts, especially those in low-income areas, are still behind, some have made significant strides to catch up. Overall, students have rebounded by 25% in reading and 33% in math, far exceeding students’ typical progress in a year, according to the report. 

He said teachers deserve credit for those improvements, helping students stay on track academically while addressing a host of other demands.

“The question is, will the recovery be sustained as (COVID relief) funds run out this year,” Reardon said. “We also need to look at the strategy going forward.”

For Maria O., who works as a case manager, the effects from the pandemic still linger. Her children managed to stay afloat, thanks in part to tutoring and other support from Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles nonprofit that focuses on social justice. But they’re not as enthusiastic about school as they once were.

Her son, who’s in high school, is especially disengaged, she said. Although he’s doing OK  academically, he often wants to skip class, she said, and she worries about him.

“I didn’t take part in this lawsuit for my kids, though. I did it for the kids who don’t have the support that my kids do,” she said. “I want to give them a voice.” 

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/lost-learning-lost-earning-an-equation-that-could-cost-the-u-s-31-trillion/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=723022 American students are lagging behind their international peers in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to a new analysis unveiled by Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek. The ultimate costs of the last few years of incomplete learning will total $31 trillion over the course of the 21st century, the scholar finds — greater than the country’s Gross Domestic Product over an entire year.

Released this morning through Stanford’s right-leaning Hoover Institution, the report echoes prior warnings by its author, one of the nation’s most cited experts on education finance. Hanushek has cautioned since the emergence of COVID that the prolonged experience of virtual instruction would meaningfully harm the skills and earning potential of today’s students.

His newest release builds on those predictions by examining the math performance of U.S. students on two standardized tests. One, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is a worldwide exam comparing American 15-year-olds against adolescents in dozens of other countries; the other, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders around the United States.

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The PISA results, revealed in December, showed U.S. math scores falling significantly between 2018 and 2022, offering more evidence of what federal officials have called a COVID-era “crisis” in that subject. But because other countries saw even larger declines, America’s international ranking actually moved upward slightly, leading Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to issue a statement extolling the Biden administration’s emergency assistance to schools during the pandemic.

In an interview with The 74, Hanushek was much less sanguine, pointing to K–12 students’ persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the NAEP math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA’s international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries. The lowest-performing American jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, placed below developing nations like Kosovo, El Salvador and Cambodia.

If our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, that doesn't seem good to me.

Erick Hanushek, Stanford University

“People in the past have said, ‘Massachusetts is doing pretty well, maybe we could get New Mexico going like that too,’” Hanushek said. “But if our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, compared to the average kids in other countries, that doesn’t seem good to me.”

In general, the analysis shows, the top-line U.S. math ranking on PISA rose primarily because the pandemic’s disruptions to schooling were much more acutely felt in countries like Slovenia and Norway, which had been among the top performers on earlier iterations of the test.

Overall, students in relatively higher-scoring countries on the 2018 PISA exam sustained larger losses during COVID than those in countries that hadn’t done as well previously. Hanushek called the trend a “straightforward” validation of the importance of high-quality schools: Canadian students stood to lose more from weeks or months of online classes than those in less-effective Philippine schools.

“If you weren’t learning very much in school before the pandemic, you didn’t lose as much,” he said. “If you were learning a lot in school before the pandemic, you tended to lose more.”

The United States, long mired in the middle of the international pack, saw somewhat smaller math declines between 2018 and 2022 than the PISA average. Meanwhile, in spite of the clear trend, high-achieving East Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea actually improved in the subject during the pandemic. 

The learning loss exhibited in both NAEP and PISA strongly suggests that the long-term prospects of affected students will be substantially worse than they would have been otherwise. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is largely due to the very nature of the American economy, in which skills and educational attainment are more highly prized than almost anywhere else in the world.

“The U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success,” West said. “What that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden.”

Wide state variation

Hanushek’s total calculation for the cost of learning loss, a staggering $31 trillion through the year 2100, is a figure that would dwarf the economic damage wrought by the business closures and layoffs necessitated by COVID’s spread, or even the years of stalled dynamism following the Great Recession. 

The projection is based on prior economic research into the connection between students’ test scores and future earnings. Hanushek further posits that the aggregate slowdown in innovation and human capital development will tend to slow the U.S. economy’s growth over the long haul, burdening even those who didn’t experience learning loss themselves.

The analysis estimates a far greater toll than that of another prominent prediction. In 2022, economists Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth used eighth-grade math results on the NAEP exam to reach a $900 billion future cost following the pandemic. While that estimate pointed to a 1.6 percent decline in students’ future earnings, Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss believe that slump will fall between 5 and 6 percent.

Staiger said his paper with Kane represented a “lowball estimate” while Hanushek’s offers an upper-bound projection, adding that most of the discrepancy between their findings likely stemmed from Hanushek’s broader lens on overall growth in addition to direct earnings. Whatever their differences, however, he noted that even marginal losses in productivity could eventually amount to considerable squandered potential.

Even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.

Douglas O. Staiger, Dartmouth College

“There are some other papers that find smaller effects of test scores on economic growth, particularly for high-income countries like the U.S.,” Staiger wrote in an email. “However, as Hanushek and Strauss make clear, even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.” 

If Hanushek’s analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each. 

Individual income losses are also projected to differ considerably depending on location. By the paper’s calculations, students affected by the pandemic will lose less than 2 percent of their lifetime earnings in Utah, where math scores fell the least between 2019 and 2022. In West Virginia, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where they fell the most, former students could forgo an average of 9 percent of their career income.

Sarah Cohodes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said that the inequity of learning loss was a cause for particular concern. While the math performance of all students suffered between 2020 and the present, the losses were especially large for those who were already struggling or navigating critical life changes when COVID emerged. She referred to her own daughter, who wasn’t yet enrolled in a K–12 school when the pandemic began, as an example.

“She lost a year of preschool, but she’s going to be fine — she hung out with me and went to all the parks in New York City,” Cohodes said. “The people I worry about are the ones who were transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on some of the final preparations for what comes next.”

The people I worry about are the ones transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on final preparations for what comes next.

Sarah Cohodes, University of Michigan

Hanushek, whose preferred strategy for learning recovery is to provide financial incentives to top teachers in exchange for taking on more students, observed that the worst-off students were likely the high schoolers who graduated or dropped out over the last few years. The unsuccessful efforts to mitigate their academic reversals, whether led by state or federal officials, were evidence that education authorities “have not really taken seriously the magnitude of this event,” he argued.

“My calculation is that 17 million kids [affected by the pandemic] have already left school,” Hanushek said. “Once they’ve left school, we have little hope of ever fixing their problems. Universities or firms are not going to make up for the lack of learning that these kids suffered, and each year that goes by, we lose four or five million more kids that will never recover.”

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to The 74.

]]> https://www.the74million.org/article/interactive-see-how-student-achievement-gaps-are-growing-in-your-state/ Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:30:00 +0000 https://www.the74million.org/?post_type=article&p=716482

Achievement scores fell in the wake of COVID-19. That story has been well told …

But what’s less well-known is that achievement scores had already suffered a lost decade before the pandemic hit.

Across grade levels, average scores peaked around 2013 and have been falling since then.

Worse, the averages are masking a growing achievement gap between the highest and lowest performers.

That gap was growing pre-pandemic and has only widened.

On Feb. 9, 2012, then-President Barack Obama invited chief state school officers, governors, superintendents and members of Congress to the East Room of the White House. 

Before the assembled crowd, Obama announced that he was granting states waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind Act (full disclosure: I worked on this project at the U.S. Department of Education and was in the audience that day). In exchange for a suite of reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations, states would be freed from NCLB’s most onerous accountability provisions. 

With the stroke of the pen, Obama waved away the notion that all schools needed to make “adequate yearly progress” for all students and for individual student groups. Instead of interventions for all children in low-performing schools, states could choose how many schools to identify for improvement and what happened there.

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NCLB’s accountability pressures had been instrumental in a decade-plus of small but significant gains. That progress was perhaps smaller than policymakers and educators might have preferred, but it was broadly shared. In eighth-grade math, for example, the lowest and highest performers both improved about 8 points  — close to a year’s worth of progress — on NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, from 2003 to 2013.

Obama’s relaxing of school and district accountability pressures helped set off a decline in student performance across the country. By the time Congress passed, and Obama signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, achievement scores had already begun to fall. 

Not only that, but the declines were uneven. From 2013 to 2019, scores for the lowest-performing 10% of students fell 7 points, versus a gain of 3 points for students at the higher end. The response to COVID-19 would eventually widen the gap even further, but it had been growing well before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus.

Today, achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. Overall, 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade. To help visualize how these disparities are changing within individual states and cities, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to create the interactive tool below. Click to find the results for your state or city. 

NAEP Math Scores

Select a state or city below for detailed information

National AverageAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCalifornia-Los Angeles, CA-San Diego, CADistrict of ColumbiaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaDoDEAFloridaGeorgia-Atlanta, GAHawaiiIdahoIllinois-Chicago, ILIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusetts-Boston, MAMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew York-New York City, NYNorth Carolina-Charlotte, NCNorth DakotaOhio-Cleveland, OHOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexas-Houston, TXUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Change in 8th grade math scores 2003 - 2013 2013 - 2022 2013 - 2022

• All Students
• Higher Performing Students
• Lower Performing Students

We chose to focus on eighth-grade math for this exercise because early math skills are linked to long-term life outcomes. However, similar achievement trends are evident in other grades and subjects as well. For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has documented the same growing achievement gaps in reading, history and civics.  

What’s behind the decline? 

A primary factor is the softening of NCLB. The law may not have been especially popular, but at least part of the gains from that era were attributable to its school and district accountability systems. When researchers evaluated the effects of NCLB, they found the law led to noticeable gains in math, especially for the lowest-performing students. When schools felt pressure from state accountability systems, they increased their academic standards and boosted achievement in ways that had long-term benefits for students. 

New York City provides an illustrative example of what happens when accountability pressure goes away. Under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city instituted an A-F school rating system in 2007. Research found that the system significantly boosted student achievement, particularly in F-rated schools. But in 2014, the city abandoned that grading system and the previous gains went away. 

New York City’s NAEP scores show similar trends. All students made large gains from 2003 to 2013, but the lines diverge after that. While the city’s higher-performing students continued to improve, the scores of lower performers fell 10 points over the last decade. 

There are plenty of other potential theories explaining these trends beyond accountability, but they don’t fully align with the timing, scope or magnitude of the declines. In 2019, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli looked into the “lost decade” and suggested it could be due to economic factors, screens and other technology or a shift away from basic skills. Others, including Diane Ravitch and the Pioneer Institute’s Theodor Rebarber, blamed the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. 

Economic factors could certainly play a role. Petrilli is right to note that recessions and periods of rising unemployment are bad for kids, especially the most disadvantaged ones. Plus, the Great Recession of 2007-09 did set off a wave of austerity in some states. Given what we know about how education spending boosts student performance, particularly among low-income students, this feels plausible. 

However, the timing isn’t right. The economic recovery throughout the 2010s and rise in education spending should have augured well for student performance. Yet, the opposite was happening as achievement fell and gaps grew.

The economic argument also doesn’t explain the scope of the declines. While achievement was falling, 47 of 50 states were increasing their inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending. Washington state, for example, increased its spending by 38% over this time period, but its achievement scores fell more than the national average and its achievement gap widened. It’s possible the losses would have been worse if not for the new money, but something else had to be driving the decline. 

The same flaws apply to arguments around the Common Core. If disruptions associated with the shift to the Common Core were the cause, the scores should have rebounded over time. But they didn’t. 

It’s also possible that the Common Core pushed schools to cover different topics in a different order, but that doesn’t explain why achievement gaps grew even in non-Common Core states such as Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, or why the same patterns appear in civics and history, which the Common Core did not address. 

What about technology? Screens have become more pervasive at home and in schools, and kids are reading for fun less often than they used to. Psychologist Jean Twenge has pinpointed 2012 — the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone — as the beginning of a noticeable decrease in teen mental health. 

That timing lines up with the achievement declines, but it’s not quite clear why the technology problem would hit children in the U.S. harder than in other places. And yet, achievement gaps in math and science for both fourth and eighth graders widened faster here in America than in any other country (and they were already quite wide here). We have a unique achievement gap problem.

These trends are sobering, but there is one hopeful lesson here: Holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working — until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it. It may be time once again to ask schools to focus on the academic achievement of their lowest-performing students. 

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