The Education Gadfly Weekly

With the midterms days away, all signs point toward Democrats carrying one, if not both, houses of Congress, an outcome that would be good for civic health and hygiene but could complicate education reform at the federal level. The stakes may be even greater in states, where the lion’s share of education policy is made and most education dollars are spent. Governors wield outsized influence, appointing key leaders, shaping policy agendas, and coaxing reluctant legislatures to act. Of the 36 governors’ races on tap, three will be particularly consequential for ed reform: Texas, Ohio, and Oregon. Each state has experienced extended periods of one-party control. The elections could send their education systems in sharply different directions.

Texas

Nowhere is the divide over education policy starker than in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott is seeking a fourth four-year term and Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in more than 30 years. Abbott is locked in a surprisingly tight race with State Representative Gina Hinojosa, a former Austin ISD school board president. A skeptic of standardized testing, school choice, and state takeovers, Hinojosa has pledged to fire Texas’s long-serving and effective education commissioner, Mike Morath, on “day one.” Her proposals for what would replace the current approach are less developed, but Hinojosa’s stated priorities point toward a sharp break with Abbott and Morath: a retreat from the current testing and accountability regime, an end to the state’s nascent education savings account (ESA) program, and more deference to local districts. She would, however, face stiff headwinds from a Republican-controlled legislature.

During his decade at the helm, Morath has profoundly reshaped Texas education. The state’s leading-edge Teacher Incentive Allotment delivers Texas-sized paychecks for great teachers, with a statewide study finding substantial gains in teacher retention and student achievement. The Lone Star State’s social studies standards, Bluebonnet curriculum, and reading list are admirably explicit about the importance of knowledge-building and curricular coherence. And the state’s takeover of Houston ISD has produced striking results. The number of D- and F-rated campuses plummeted from 120 in 2023 to 13 in 2026, while the number of A-rated campuses skyrocketed from 36 to 92. Morath is now extending the state’s intervention strategy to other districts, making the future of ed reform a central stake in the Texas governor’s race.

Ohio

Ohio is another state where the GOP has been sitting in the catbird seat; the state hasn’t voted in a Democratic governor in 20 years, and Republicans have maintained veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers for much of that time. Vivek Ramaswamy finds himself trailing former state health director Amy Acton as the campaign has taken an increasingly personal turn. Lost amid the mudslinging is a more interesting contrast between the Ramaswamy who built a national profile as a Trump-aligned firebrand and the Ramaswamy now pitching Ohio voters on a relatively conventional conservative education platform. Consider what he’s said on the stump:

I’ll lead Ohio to be the top state in the country where our kids get a world-class education in math, reading, writing, critical thinking, and physical education...where we give our kids the toolkit to think of themselves not as victims but as victors...

And in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, he advocated paying effective teachers more, citing, among other examples, the model that inspired Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment.

Acton’s vision runs in the opposite direction, emphasizing public school funding and reform of the state’s expansive voucher program. Endorsed by both state teachers unions, the physician wants across-the-board pay raises and to “fully fund” public schools, a far cry from Ramaswamy’s emphasis on performance-based compensation. The contrast is substantive, although school funding has been a contested topic in the Buckeye State for years. School choice may pose the more immediate test. Earlier this month, an Ohio appeals court unanimously ruled the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, finding that it funds a competing private school system that lacks the obligations constitutionally imposed on public schools. The program remains in place pending appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. Whatever the court ultimately decides (most observers expect the high court to uphold the program), school choice will remain a major policy test for the next governor.

Oregon

If Texas and Ohio are ruby red, Oregon is indigo blue. The last time a Republican was elected governor was in 1982. Yet Governor Tina Kotek is in a competitive reelection rematch with State Senator Christine Drazan, with education among the issues putting Kotek’s record under scrutiny. Adjusted for student demographics, Oregon is 47th in eighth grade reading, 49th in eighth grade math, and dead last in both fourth grade reading and math. Drazan’s plan calls for, among other sensible moves, reinstating graduation requirements that were abandoned following the pandemic—a debacle that made the Beaver State a cryingstock among national observers.

Oregon is the only state in the country in which the governor is also the chief state school officer. Kotek appoints every member of the state board of education along with the leader of the state education agency. Drazan has pledged to replace the agency’s director along with the entire board. That structure gives the governor substantial authority over education policy, but Oregon’s challenges run deep. Student achievement has deteriorated since 2013. State accountability is a paper tiger. Students can easily opt out of standardized tests. And chronic absenteeism is the second highest in the country. Oregon also ranks 47th in the nation in time spent in school, with some districts providing as few as 137 instructional days in an academic year. The prevailing culture is one of complacency and compliance. Should Drazan win, she may need to recruit reinforcements from outside the state to lead the education agency and reshape the state board. Oregon’s education establishment is deeply entrenched, and turning this listing ship around won’t be easy.

—

These three races pose distinct tests for education reform. Texas could test whether reforms built over a decade can survive a change in leadership. In Ohio, the test is whether a new governor can effectively navigate competing demands over school funding and school choice. And Oregon, at the opposite political pole, could test whether a new administration can reverse course after a generation of one-party rule. A Democratic victory in Texas and Ohio, coupled with a Republican victory in Oregon, would amount to a seismic shift in the politics of education reform across three very different states.

I support school choice. I ended my career as a teacher and administrator working in private choice and charter schools. School choice will almost certainly yield net benefits to American education.

At the same time, I’ve always been skeptical of those school choice proponents who sell the policy as a wonder drug. Lagging academic scores? School choice. Crime, poverty, and teen pregnancy? School choice. Civic tolerance and racial comity? School choice. Paternity suits? Apparently school choice!

Despite my reservations about these sweeping claims, however, I’m starting to think that school choice can dramatically improve the sorry state of special education in America.

There’s no one answer about what exactly ails special education. Indeed, there seem to be two contrasting narratives. On one side, there’s the argument that ordinary district schools insufficiently provide required services, so aggrieved parents lawyer up to get their children the free and appropriate education to which they are entitled. On the other side, a competing narrative holds that ballooning special education rosters (caused by too many questionable diagnoses and upper-middle-class parents seeking advantage for their kids) garner even more ethically questionable accommodations.

Last spring, I made the case that special education as we know it in today’s America is becoming unworkable: “Liberalizing eligibility requirements have swelled enrollment, creating ever-expanding accommodations that are unfair to general education students—and, counterintuitively, harmful to special education students themselves.” At the time, I thought the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law governing the delivery of special ed, needed an overhaul with more stringent guardrails on who could receive an individualized education program (IEP) and what qualified as an accommodation.

Six months later, I think I might have been wrong. Not directionally so. In The Wall Street Journal, Emma Camp said it best: “When a third of a high school’s students count as ‘disabled,’ the definition of disability has grown so broad as to become nonsensical.” We still need to rethink special education, but regulation got us into this mess, and I don’t think Washington can regulate itself out.

Instead, let the sorting mechanism of school choice better allocate funds and services.

A new report at the American Enterprise Institute from the University of Arkansas’s Patrick Wolf and researchers from EdChoice makes the compelling case that families whose children have special needs are better served in a choice-based system. The current public infrastructure, they argue, is one where “proceduralism and compliance rule.” Committees convene to create a child’s IEP, and public schools are compelled to meet those obligations.

Conversely, in a choice-based system, parents can build a system that actually meets the unique needs of their child, securing a suite of individualized services and schooling options. In fact, according to the report, students with disabilities are overrepresented in school choice programs. In choice schools, they represent 17.2 percent of enrolled students but only 15 percent of students within traditional public schools. Not only do choice schools serve more students, but—importantly—surveys have found high parental satisfaction with the services received via those programs.

The choice programs in question include both those targeted at special needs students specifically and programs for all students. For the general programs, participation rates ranged from 7.4 percent in Indiana’s voucher program to 36 percent of students in Arkansas’s education savings account (ESA) program. An outstanding but important question is who precisely these students are: Do they have mild-to-moderate disabilities such as a speech delay, or are these programs also serving students with more labor-intensive disabilities, such as severe autism?

As it stands, this report undercuts one of the strongest arguments leveled against school choice programs: that they don’t serve all students. It’s long been asserted by critics that those with means will flock to private schools, while public schools will be left with the most challenged students. Yet the opposite seems to be the case. Families of students with special needs are drawn into the customizability of choice programs.

Importantly, choice as a potential solution also has far greater political viability than head-on reform. Amending IDEA to introduce real accountability into the sector is a political nonstarter. No elected official would ever be caught even suggesting such an act. As Dan Lips has argued, however, it’s quite possible to see how policymakers left and right could come together around a law that provides some additional funding in return for the expansion of choice programs directed at students with disabilities.

Of course, any policy comes with tradeoffs. I worry about the perverse incentives that a choice-based system would create, where students with special needs would receive larger vouchers or deposits in their ESA. As the old adage goes, you get more of what you subsidize.

But there’s evidence that affluent parents already pay psychologists to secure an IEP for their children, thus getting them extra time on high-stakes tests such as the SAT. Moreover, current programs (e.g., Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities) already require that students have either a pre-existing IEP from a public school or a validated qualifying diagnosis from an eligible licensed medical professional. These guardrails won’t militate against all abuse but will prevent it from being any worse than public schools.

While it still leaves open questions about who exactly is served and how an ideal policy might function, Wolf’s report unearths important data that proportionally more students are being served in choice programs. This isn’t to say that we should throw out the legal entitlement tomorrow and enter a new era of unbridled choice-based utopia. We need more evidence and time to say conclusively that choice programs really do make a difference for students with disabilities, but if parental satisfaction and current enrollment trends forecast any answer, it’s an experiment worth pushing further.

This summer, Sarah Cone wrote a provocative essay asking why today’s billionaire philanthropists don’t build institutions the way their predecessors did.

As examples, Cone cited Andrew Carnegie helping to build more than 2,500 libraries around the world and Julius Rosenwald (of Sears fame) partnering with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for Black children across the South.

Cone argued that these philanthropists identified “structural absences” in American civic life and then set out to fill the gaps, but that their modern counterparts, instead of starting their own institutions, have mostly been content to write large checks to universities, museums, and other nonprofits that already exist.

I think Cone is on to something. If a modern-day Carnegie or Rosenwald wanted to spend millions of dollars on a genuinely ambitious education project, what should he or she build? My answer starts with how much has changed since the turn of the 20th century.

Carnegie decided to fund libraries at a time when books were expensive and hard to access. Rosenwald put his resources toward building adequate school facilities for children who had none.

And those investments paid off. A recent study found that individuals who lived in or near cities with Carnegie libraries filed 10 percent to 12 percent more patents than people who lived in similar communities without one. Research on the Rosenwald schools found even broader effects, including gains in school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, and cognitive skills.

But access to libraries and schools is no longer the main barrier to learning. Today, there are schools and libraries all over the country, and the internet has made information cheap and easy to access.

The same is increasingly true of instruction itself. Math programs like Khan Academy will teach students everything from counting to calculus for free. In addition to traditional textbooks, YouTube is full of instructional videos, and there are countless other websites and apps. Artificial intelligence is making individualized instruction more accessible by the day.

Today, a motivated seventh grader with a laptop could theoretically start working through all of her course content tonight. When she finished, she could start eighth-grade math, then move on to algebra. There’s nothing to stop her except her own motivation—and the fact that her school may or may not recognize everything she’s learned on her own.

Schools aren’t designed to accommodate this abundance of information. They still put children of roughly the same age in a room and have a teacher deliver roughly the same material to all of them for the same 180 days. Some students struggle to keep up, while others master the material quickly and spend a lot of time waiting. At the end of the year, pretty much all students advance regardless of how they did on the state test.

But math is well-suited to a different model of schooling. Arithmetic provides a foundation for algebra, and algebra opens the door to more advanced mathematics. The sequence isn’t perfectly linear, and students need to loop back on old skills to make sure those don’t wither away. But what students know today strongly affects what they are ready to learn tomorrow.

Math also benefits from being relatively easy to assess. The question, “Does this child know Algebra I?” is easier to answer than “Has this child mastered ninth-grade English?”

There is also evidence that students benefit from moving ahead when they’re ready. A 2016 review synthesizing roughly a century of research found that academic acceleration had positive effects on student achievement. The same review found positive effects from grouping students across grade levels for particular subjects, which is especially relevant here. Instead of assuming all seventh graders should take seventh-grade math together, schools could group students according to the math they’re ready to learn.

Mastery-based learning is not a new concept, but historically, implementation has been difficult. Making it work in the real world would require at least two significant changes.

First, create a common yardstick.

Suppose our motivated seventh grader goes home every afternoon and eventually teaches herself Algebra I. What happens next? In most schools, nothing at all. Even if this student has mastered algebra, her school won’t necessarily recognize it. A parent can insist that her child already knows the material, but the school has no independent reason to believe it.

A philanthropist could solve that problem by building a series of rigorous, independent math mastery assessments.

Think of something like Advanced Placement exams, but corresponding roughly to today’s end-of-year state assessments. Students could take the exams whenever they were ready, rather than waiting for April or May. In addition to being available on demand, the exams would be rigorous, secure, independently validated, and available for free to all.

A new, external assessment organization also wouldn’t care where a child learned the content: at school, from a parent, or with a tutor. The point is to certify that students have mastered the material, regardless of how they got there.

Of course, the children most likely to take advantage of such an assessment system would probably have families who already seek out extra opportunities for their kids: buying workbooks, paying for tutors, and advocating for advancement opportunities.

So, while a high-quality, external assessment system could make math acceleration more common, it would not do much to make it universal. That’s where today’s philanthropists would need to pair it with a second investment:

Build Math Labs in disadvantaged schools.

Imagine if a wealthy philanthropist went to high-poverty middle and high schools and made them an offer. In exchange for shifting away from their time-based teaching method in math and letting students advance when they demonstrated mastery on the yardstick outlined above, the philanthropy would pay for the creation of Math Labs.

The labs would be staffed by the school’s credentialed math teachers, but their jobs would change. Rather than delivering, say, five lessons per day on seventh-grade math, they would work as a team to serve as math guides for students learning independently. They would monitor progress and be able to step in to shore up any weak areas. Paraprofessionals and other recent college graduates could serve one- or two-year Math Lab fellowships.

Computers could handle a large share of the day-to-day instruction. Students could watch explanations, work through examples, solve problems, and receive immediate feedback digitally. The software would track what each student had mastered and what he or she was ready to tackle next.

Teachers could then concentrate their time where it was most useful. They might pull together students who are all struggling with the same type of problem or work individually with one who is stuck. Meanwhile, students moving quickly wouldn’t have to wait for the rest of the class.

There’s some encouraging evidence for combining technology and human tutoring in this way, from both higher education and K–12. For example, a 2024 study followed roughly 4,000 ninth graders as they alternated between working directly with a tutor and using computer-assisted math instruction. The researchers estimated that participating students made substantial gains in math, at a cost of about $2,200 apiece.

A Math Lab would push that idea further by replacing the school’s regular math class. Every student would participate, and advancement would depend on demonstrated mastery rather than age or the school calendar.

Would it work?

There are plenty of reasons it might not. Middle and high schoolers might require more human assistance than I’m assuming. Schools might struggle to motivate students who aren’t eager to advance in math. A philanthropist could fund a rigorous evaluation to test those assumptions, including whether students who passed the external assessments succeeded in subsequent courses and what kinds of adult support students need.

But it’s worth seeing how fast children will go when schools stop making them wait. Maybe most seventh graders really do need about a year to learn seventh-grade math. But I suspect some students would prove to be capable of considerably more than the current system asks of them.

A century ago, philanthropists created libraries and schools to overcome scarcity. Today there are plenty of schools, computers, and good instructional resources. What’s missing is a system that takes advantage of that abundance. Students deserve math instruction at the level that’s right for them, an independent way to prove what they know, and permission to keep going once they’ve earned it. That’s a future worth building.

Editor’s note: This post by Chad Aldeman originally appeared at The 74.

The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) at the City University of New York (CUNY) is a much-studied intervention designed to help low-income community college students overcome barriers to degree completion. Fordham has looked at several previous analyses, both in New York City and its Ohio counterpart. But the New York program is back under the microscope again. The latest study examines ASAP’s impact on participants’ education and labor market outcomes 14 years after they first enrolled.

ASAP was launched at City University of New York (CUNY) campuses in 2007, aiming to help new students persist to graduation with a full suite of supports, including intensive advising, tutoring, and career development services; tuition gap coverage; free textbooks; and transportation assistance in the form of gasoline gift cards. MDRC began its investigation of ASAP in 2009, with a group of 900 students randomized into and out of the program. And while the final cohort entered the trial back in 2012, researchers have continued to follow and evaluate their educational and career paths ever since.

Among the previous findings: After three years, 40 percent of the ASAP students had earned a degree, compared to 22 percent in the control group. Meanwhile, 18 percent of ASAP students had transferred to four-year institutions to continue with their education, compared to 12 percent of the control group. After six years, ASAP students had a 10 percentage point advantage over their non-ASAP peers in degree attainment, still statistically significant. And after ten years, researchers found that students earning a terminal associate degree at a CUNY campus earned approximately $2,400 more per quarter (roughly $9,700 annually) than non-completers.

The latest analysis looks at 14 years of data for each cohort—a total of 896 individuals. Just over 57 percent of those offered ASAP earned a degree in that time, compared with 50 percent of those who were not offered ASAP, a large and statistically significant impact, while obviously a smaller difference than ever. However, ASAP actually produced a small—though not statistically significant—negative impact on annual earnings. Those offered ASAP earned approximately $36,000 per year, compared with approximately $38,000 per year for their control group peers. These results differ from findings from the ASAP replication in Ohio, where strong positive effects on earnings were observed for many years after treatment.

As part of their explanation for these puzzling data, the researchers note that their findings are limited to New York State only. Any participant who worked in another state registered earnings of $0. In the report, they also discuss a previously unexplained quirk of the original analytic model. Students entering several traditionally high-earning CUNY majors (Allied Health Sciences, Pre-Clinical Nursing, Forensic Science, and Engineering Science) were ineligible for ASAP because course requirements made graduating within three years difficult—because “on time graduation” was a primary impetus of the program. And while neither treatment nor control group students could be enrolled in these majors at the start of the program/analysis, students were free to switch to them later. However, doing so would remove ASAP supports, a fact that likely encouraged treatment group students to stay in traditionally lower-earning majors so as to remain in the program. Fascinating. “Most of ASAP’s impact on degree completion,” the analysts write, “came from students completing degrees in fields where employed CUNY graduates historically tend to have relatively low earnings (for example, an associate’s degree in liberal arts) among CUNY graduates.”

Beyond these analytical concerns, the researchers also believe their findings reflect the fact that earning power in the Empire State depends strongly on education level attained. ASAP, they conclude, increased the likelihood that students completed a degree, but degrees that mostly had low earning potential and low likelihood of transferring to bachelor’s degree programs. “Much of this gain [in degree earning via ASAP] came from moving students from the ‘no degree completed’ category into completing degrees that typically yield relatively low earnings among CUNY graduates.” Degree-completing ASAP students at the lowest income level outearned their non-completing ASAP peers by about $9,000 per year.

In a Hechinger Report article accompanying the report’s release, it is clear that the ASAP support program will continue at CUNY and beyond, no matter what this or future research findings reveals. The program has exploded since its inception, now serving more than 22,000 students. New York City’s budget for it at CUNY campuses alone is more than $76 million a year. We also learn that it has become more efficient, with the cost per student now $3,400 per year, compared to $6,000 back in 2010. Let’s hope the schools have also learned a few things from these important analyses about how to improve student outcomes.

SOURCE: Michael J. Weiss et al., “The 14-Year Effects of CUNY ASAP on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes,” MDRC (August 2026).

It’s another Mike Petrilli solo episode of The Education Gadfly Show, and this week he’s tackling some big questions about state education mandates and local control. From recess requirements to curriculum and Science of Reading policies, when should states step in, and when does intervention go too far? Mike looks at how Mississippi and other Southern states have taken a more hands-on approach to improving student achievement and what the rest of the country can learn from their success.

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study from Texas finding that Science of Reading certification exams can help identify more effective reading teachers, but may also be shrinking the teacher pipeline.

Recommended content:

• Now states are mandating recess. Really? —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• Recess Is Disappearing. Parents Are Pushing to Bring It Back. —Chao Deng, The Wall Street Journal
• School Is Back in Session, and Recess Is Having a Moment —Emily Tate Sullivan, The 74
• Is state leadership at odds with local control? —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• Pondiscio v. Ryan on state-led curriculum reform —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• Mississippi’s School Transformation —Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times
• Why Tennessee Should Be the National Model for Literacy —Scott Langford, Curriculum Matters
• Louisiana Threads the Needle: Launching a Coherent Curriculum in a Local-Control State —Robert Pondiscio, Education Next
• Texas Has a Theory of Education —Robert Pondiscio, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Screen or Barrier? Science of Reading Certification Exams and Teacher Supply in Texas —Andrew Avitabile, EdWorkingPapers (2026)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]

---

Transcript

This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Ed Reform Update: State mandates and local control

Mike Petrilli

Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.

It’s my monthly solo edition. And today we’re going to talk about state mandates.

When is it appropriate for states to take muscular action on education, and when does it amount to counterproductive micromanagement?

Let’s do it on Ed Reform Update.

A recurring question here on the Gadfly Show, in my SCHOOLED Substack, and in education policy writ large, comes down not to the what but to the who.

In other words, for any policy decision related to education, when is it appropriate for the feds, state government, local school districts, individual schools, or individual teachers to make the call?

We’ve surfaced that debate over the past year when it comes to cellphone bans, screen time limits, AI policy, school start times, state takeovers, grade inflation, and teacher compensation.

The latest entrant is recess.

Yes, recess.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Chao Deng reported over the summer:

“Mothers and fathers nationwide are alarmed by dwindling recess time and calling upon school administrators to restore it. In New Hampshire and Michigan, parents have had success increasing recess in some schools and are pushing for state laws mandating it. In New York, some parents say a bill backed by the statewide teachers union requiring up to 30 minutes of daily, unstructured recess time in elementary school doesn’t go far enough.”

Emily Tate Sullivan at The 74 added last month that:

“The momentum around recess has been building for years, with experts raising awareness about the importance of preserving time for daily play as well as grassroots efforts from parents across the country.

“Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics added to the chorus by publishing an updated policy statement about the ‘crucial role’ of recess.

“‘Our recommendation is whatever time you have allocated in the day for recess occurs rain or shine, snow or no snow, heatwave or not,’ said Cathy Ramstetter, co-author of the AAP policy statement and author of the book Why Recess Matters: The Importance of Unstructured Play and How to Fight for It, which came out in August.

“‘This is time that should not be taken away for academics or for behavioral problems,’ she added, and occurs ‘preferably more than once per day.’

“And many states are taking notice. Tennessee, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington are among the states that have set higher minimum requirements for recess in the last few years. Advocates in a slew of other states are working toward joining them soon.”

Personally, I am sympathetic to these arguments, especially given the likelihood that little boys in particular could benefit from blowing off steam during what is otherwise a quite structured elementary school experience.

But is this really something states should be wading into?

My colleague Chad Aldis, who leads the Fordham Institute’s Ohio policy work, explains:

“Recess is good. So is math. So is reading. So is science. So is social studies. Etc.

“If states are going to set minimum times for everything, please give lawmakers a calculator and a basic understanding of how long the day is. The reading blocks in many states are crazy long. Intervention in many states requires an additional 30 to 60 minutes if a student is below grade level.

“Changing state law is of course an option, but it creates a one-size-fits-all approach. For Ohio, that means 600-plus districts must allocate time the same way. You better be sure that you’re right.”

Precisely.

Which brings us to a key question: What’s the limiting principle?

Not just for recess, but for all these other policy debates, can we come up with some kind of reasonable rules for when states should intervene versus when they should leave matters to local school boards or even school principals?

I see a couple of possible commandments we could follow.

Last week in SCHOOLED, I wrote that dictates are appropriate:

1. If the evidence is overwhelming that a particular course of action is correct. Akin to what Chad argues.

2. If a state mandate can be easily implemented and enforced.

3. If there is an intractable barrier to local action, especially political dynamics that make it unlikely that school boards will do the right thing without a mandate from above.

Tim Daly wrote in to say:

“I like your list of commandments, Mike. If hindsight is 20/20, are there any mandates since 2010 that would have satisfied all three but were not widely adopted by states? Is there any place we under-mandated?”

Which was a good question!

My response:

“In some states at least, I think there’s a case for a minimum starting teacher salary mandate, given how districts continue to fail to prioritize that versus endless increases in staffing. And the evidence that teacher quality matters, which is hard to achieve when we’re still paying $30K.

“I feel the same about differential pay for high-need schools. Won’t happen without state policy, and the evidence is strong.

“I’m comfortable with the Science of Reading bills too, which were overdue. And muscular state action around teaching and learning, and curriculum and instruction, writ large.”

That perhaps is the most controversial one.

Back to my commandments:

Are we sure about the correct course of action on curriculum and instruction?

Can states implement and enforce change on this front?

Is it true that districts won’t act without state leadership?

Maybe?

But maybe not?

That’s why, for decades, many of us in education policy, and education reform, thought these topics were taboo for state lawmakers and state ed-department bureaucrats.

After all, this is the land of local control.

Then a few, mostly Southern, states decided otherwise.

They decided they could just do things.

That’s the story of the Mississippi Marathon in a nutshell.

And it worked!

Carey Wright didn’t respect the timid traditional role of states versus districts, for example, just providing small grants to a few local education agencies to pilot stronger approaches to teaching reading, or using her bully pulpit to encourage local educators to do the right thing.

No, she acted like she ran the schools and used every lever she could find to push a coherent vision of teaching and learning, especially around early reading, from the state capital to the classroom.

That included directly hiring reading coaches and placing them where she thought they needed to go, designing professional learning experiences at the state level, forcing ed schools to change their ways, and leaning hard on local curricular decisions.

Other states in the South, especially Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and more recently Texas, have also used parts of this playbook.

It’s similar to what our cousins across the pond in England are up to as well.

And long, long ago, Massachusetts used it to “miraculous” effect, too.

So why aren’t more states doing it?

So far, in America at least, we’re not seeing this approach spread far and wide, or north, east, and west.

To be sure, lots of states have adopted “Science of Reading” laws, and a growing number are enacting bills related to math.

But most are half measures.

Maybe they require the state to publish a list of high-quality instructional materials, but they don’t make local districts follow it.

Or the lists have dozens of entries, meaning almost anything goes.

Or investments in professional learning are too limited to reach all, or even most, schools in the state.

Or teacher preparation is ignored.

In blue states, pushback often comes from, who else, the teachers unions, under the banner of “professional autonomy.”

But there’s resistance in red states, too, as I’ve seen firsthand in Fordham’s home state of Ohio and in conversations with center-right policy wonks nationwide.

Many are still wedded to the “tight-loose” frame first popularized by my colleague Checker Finn.

That’s the notion that states should be “tight” about the results to be achieved, articulated by state academic standards, but “loose” as to how schools and districts get there.

It’s akin to the autonomy-in-return-for-accountability bargain at the heart of charter schooling.

States should evaluate the finished meal, so to speak, not dictate the recipe or cooking methods.

I get it, and spent much of my career arguing for it, but I can’t help but wonder if the Southern Surge states have found a better way.

Just do things.

Just try to improve teaching and learning.

Rather than rely on what can feel like “bank-shot” strategies, using various carrots and sticks to cajole and prod and nudge, why not just go straight to the heart of the matter and give educators clear guidance and direction?

Well, again, back to my commandments, there are several “why nots.”

First, states might get it wrong.

In the long history of American education, countless fads and fashions have whipped through our field, and state education agencies and their leaders have hardly been immune.

What if we empower states to tell schools what to do, and they give marching orders that are misguided or worse?

Second, people don’t like being bossed around, especially those who call themselves professionals and those engaged in knowledge work.

Stripping frontline staff of decision-making authority can demoralize and alienate them.

We don’t want teachers acting like automatons.

They aren’t robots, at least not yet!

So if states are going to follow Mississippi’s lead, they had better get it right, focus on the areas where the evidence is strongest, and embrace some degree of local input and variation so as to keep educators doing their best work and allow for some experimentation and innovation.

States would also be smart to allow for real escape hatches, waiver policies that let schools or districts opt out, and carve-outs for schools of choice.

Back to the question of recess, I don’t think it makes sense to mandate it.

The evidence is strong, but so are the politics.

What teachers and parents don’t want more recess for little kids?

So I think state policy is unnecessary.

Curriculum reform, though, is a place where, despite the challenges, state leadership makes sense.

If for no other reason than that we hear many districts, especially the smaller ones, say they welcome the guidance.

That’s my take, but tell me if you think I’m drawing lines in the wrong places!

And with that, now it’s time for everyone’s favorite, Amber’s Research Minute!

Research Minute: Science of Reading certification exams

Mike Petrilli

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

And you too, David, since I just went solo.

Welcome, welcome.

David Griffith

Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Amber Northern

Have any arguments with yourself?

Mike Petrilli

I actually, that’s funny that you ask that.

I have arguments with myself.

I think listeners will agree that the answer is yes.

I mean, I was trying to talk through, like, when are state mandates a good idea?

When are they not a good idea?

Yeah.

I have these rules, but then I probably broke them in trying to make the case that curriculum reform is a good thing for states to lead on.

Even though it’s pretty complicated.

And there’s danger in states, as we’ve talked about here before, choosing the wrong stuff, right?

And look, we see that.

I mean, just worry about leaving good curriculum off a list or putting a bad curriculum on the list.

You know, this stuff happens.

And guess what?

These textbook companies, you know, once states start meddling in stuff like curriculum, they’re like, oh, well, we should send our lobbyists to go lobby the State Department of Ed to make sure that our book is on there.

David Griffith

Yeah.

Or we should sue them.

Mike Petrilli

Or we should sue them.

That’s right. That’s right.

One last thing, though, I got to say is David did not get the memo.

It is sweater weather, people.

Amber knows.

Amber Northern

I know. I do.

Mike Petrilli

Come on, the weather has turned.

Still wearing a T-shirt, David?

David Griffith

It has turned.

It is nice and brisk outside, I will admit.

I, as you can see, am inside.

So I’m doing all right.

Mike Petrilli

Yes, but you’re also now a dad.

So I would hope that you’ve got it, you know, quite frigid in there.

You know, heating a home these days is expensive.

David Griffith

Oh, my gosh.

Hence why I’ve decided I’m not turning my heat up, but I’m putting a heating pad in my lap.

Mike Petrilli

Nice.

See, there you go.

There you go.

Hey, I can remember, David’s too young, but I remember Jimmy Carter telling us, hey, put on a sweater.

And, you know, if we’re going to have artificial intelligence, all these data centers, maybe we need to wear more sweaters so that we can make sure that all the energy goes to our AI friends.

David Griffith

That’s right.

Mike Petrilli

Okay.

So, Amber, what you got for us on the education research?

Amber Northern

Oh, my gosh, we’re talking Science of Reading again.

This time we got a UVA professor.

Oh, man, he’s digging into these Science of Reading certification exams that apparently 18, no, 20 states now have on the books, require these teacher candidates to take these things.

Apparently the stakes are pretty high if you got to pass them, but there’s basically very little evidence to show that these things actually matter.

So this study actually is pretty important, in my view.

Texas’s SOR exam, certification exam, was required in January 2021.

All new candidates, elementary and middle-grade teachers, have to take this test.

And then grade three through grade six ELA and core-subject teachers also have to take it, which is nice.

So they aren’t just, you know, restricting it to the early grades.

You know, you gotta know your stuff.

Ninety minutes, multiple choice.

They have a cut score, so you know where this is going.

A cut score of 240.

They cover phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, like all the SOR stuff.

And then they’re able to link these certification exams to employment data and student achievement records.

All right.

So yes, they’re using a regression discontinuity design.

They’re comparing candidates whose score fell just below the passing cutoff with those who fell just above it.

Again, with the idea that, you know, you’re actually estimating the immediate effects of passing versus failing the exam.

And they also use a difference-in-differences design.

And that basically means they can look at how newly certified teachers changed after the SOR requirement took effect.

And that they can look at those same comparisons within the same educator programs compared to the unaffected fields.

Because again, this only affected certain fields.

So they’re looking within ed prep programs too, which strengthens the design.

They’re trying to isolate the change just around this SOR mandate.

And then they look at, I should say, the characteristics of the teachers, not individual teachers themselves, how they changed.

Right.

And looking within the education programs as well.

And then they’re looking at whether these certification scores predict effectiveness.

So, again, that’s pretty important.

And also looking at these Texas Reading Academies, which are apparently some modules that certain programs are using to make sure that they can prepare teachers to take the exam before they sit for it.

Twelve modules, again, covering all the SOR stuff.

So first finding: The exam is actually, quote, a barrier.

I don’t know if that’s the word they use, but I would say it’s operating as intended because, yes, it actually does show you that narrowly failing reduces the probability of earning a teaching certification within six months by eight percentage points, and the probability of teaching the following October is about seven percentage points.

And then when you look at the alternative-certification folks, it’s even higher.

They’re pretty much driving the effect.

And I tried to dig into, like, what’s going on there.

And if you’re an alternative-certified teacher in Texas, you actually have to pass this exam before you can be placed in a school where then you do your on-the-job training and your courses and everything while you’re placed.

But if you’re a traditionally certified teacher, you can, you know, take the test at the very beginning while you’re still doing your coursework, while you’re doing your student teaching, and you can retake it and retake it.

So it’s a little bit more, you know, pressure, so to speak, for these alt-cert folks because they’ve got to take it first to even start their training on the job.

All right.

They can’t run causal estimates by race, so we don’t know.

But we do know, relative to what I just said, that there’s a more racially diverse set of candidates in the alt-cert pool.

And then in terms of the pipeline writ large, they basically said that these new certifications, they spiked right before the requirement took place because the candidates were trying to rush to certify under the old rules.

And then it fell sharply after the new rules, and it still hasn’t recovered five years later.

So that’s just on the pipeline side.

Then on the actual, like, screening side, they found that the SOR exam scores predicted student reading achievement more strongly than other scores on other certification exams.

And I’m like, okay, what does that mean?

Apparently teachers don’t just take the SOR certification.

They take general pedagogy certification.

And then the teachers who are going to teach English specifically, they take ELA content exams.

So it’s associated with slightly better reading performance, twice as strongly, in fact, than these other two that I just mentioned.

And then kids who were taught by teachers who passed this SOR exam on their first attempt performed modestly better.

Wasn’t a huge effect there in reading than the students taught by the candidates who initially failed it.

And then the last thing, then they look into, okay, can better preparation help this, you know, this phenomenon we’re seeing?

Because we don’t want to reduce the standards.

And they found that first-attempt pass rates rose by four percentage points at the programs that offered this Texas Reading Academy thing, which is this coursework in twelve modules, so on and so forth.

But it said it’s preliminary because they only have one cohort that they can look at.

So they’re hoping to continue to follow this.

And I’m sitting here going, okay, why aren’t they all getting that in their regular program?

Why do they have to, you know, get this Texas Reading Academy thing on top of what they’re already doing?

But whatever.

It looks promising.

And I think the thing I was thinking about was, and you guys will remember, our Science of Reading survey for teachers, we actually found a little signal where teachers in states with these reading-aligned licensure tests knew more about the Science of Reading.

So it feels to me like we’re starting to build, you know, a little baby research base here around the Science of Reading certification exams, which seems like we should be doing this already.

It’s kind of common sense, but hey.

Mike Petrilli

It’s good stuff.

David Griffith

It is good stuff.

Mike Petrilli

Thank you, Amber.

Exciting.

This is a form of a state mandate, going back to what I was just talking about, right?

I mean, there is an argument that says, oh, you know, states should just hold schools accountable for results and let them hire whomever they like.

And, you know, look, I think there’s some argument for that, especially when kids get older, let’s say, or you’re talking about career technical education.

You’re getting to certain places where you might want there to be more flexibility.

But in a case of people teaching reading in elementary school, and I guess middle school, the argument is, well, this is an appropriate state role, right?

Especially if there’s evidence that this stuff matters.

What I wonder, you know, with these things, and maybe it’s unknowable, is to what degree is it the knowledge about the Science of Reading versus just teachers who have stronger verbal ability?

Let’s say teachers who are smarter are more likely to pass this test.

And, you know, like, is it the content?

Are you saying that, like, a different kind of teacher certification exam wouldn’t get the same, have these same benefits?

What if we try this with the, quote, science of math, you know?

Amber Northern

Yeah, I don’t think the science, I mean, personally, I don’t think the science of math is near established.

I still don’t know how to define it myself.

I think SOR is unique in that way, given the science that we do have.

And yeah, I mean, like I pointed out, it was at least more predictive than these other certification exams that they’re taking on pedagogy.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

David Griffith

Yeah, I mean, I feel pretty strongly about this one, right?

Like, you try to imagine a conversation in the medical field, right?

And it’s like, I don’t know, you know, like, should we let doctors who don’t know where the heart is or, you know, where the stomach is, should we let them, like, operate on patients?

I mean, I get it.

We’re kind of desperate, right?

Like, teachers aren’t compensated as well as doctors are, but this is so basic, right?

It’s really, it’s basic and it’s universal, and it’s just sort of laughable, honestly, that we would let people into the classroom if they don’t know how to teach kids to read.

Like, that just seems, I would rather have larger class sizes, honestly.

And I don’t know.

I also guess I would also say we’re just observing really, like, the short-run effects here, right?

I mean, in the long run, the hope is that ed schools will actually teach their teachers how to teach kids to read, right?

I mean, this should be something that they should pass.

Everyone who’s been to ed school should be passing this with their eyes shut.

Frankly, people who haven’t been to ed school should be able to work it out, to Mike’s point, right?

But it’s just, it’s an incredibly low bar to expect college, you know, kindergarten teachers to understand phonics.

And I think it’s really hard to construct a counterargument, right?

I mean, you talk about the other forms of accountability, Mike, right?

It is so hard to fire a well-meaning teacher once they’re hired.

It is so hard to close down a bad school once it exists.

It is comparatively unbelievably easy to keep bad teachers out of the classrooms, or folks who just don’t have what it takes, right?

And I also think that there’s, I mean, I think I can make a similar point about kind of the knowledge that the profession is building, right?

Like, I mean, I think anecdotally, certainly it really seems like it’s hard to get through to teachers who’ve been teaching it the wrong way for fifteen years, right?

So if you force them to learn it the right way when they enter the classroom, right, and they come in hopefully knowing it, like, that should have downstream effects on the culture of reading instruction.

Anyway, I feel very strongly that this is something states should do.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, it is interesting, this question, how do ed schools respond?

Right?

And maybe it’s different in Texas than in other places, given that it’s more of a red state.

But I don’t know.

I mean, initially, they’ll say, well, this is racist.

This is classist.

It’s the kids, you know, it’s going to be teachers of color who are more likely to fail this test.

And therefore, you’re hurting efforts to diversify the classroom, if that’s true.

And then they’ll complain that, oh, you know, the evidence is more complicated than these tests and these curriculum let on.

And I don’t know.

Maybe we should say, okay, the ed school professors and their deans, they all have to pass this test also.

Or else we take their tenure away from them.

Right?

David Griffith

I mean, look, that’s the problem, right?

We have this traditional academic model that just doesn’t work for ed schools, right?

I mean, there was a time when it was understood that these were somewhat vocationally related schools.

They were pre-professional schools.

And you wouldn’t necessarily have the same, you know, expectations around publishing and around tenure and around these other, you know, those teacher prep programs were there to prepare teachers, right?

And that’s what they’re held accountable for.

We need to, in some way, get back to that.

At least, like David said, on the place where we have very good evidence, right?

Maybe that’s a small number of topics, right?

But on early reading, come on.

Amber Northern

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

David Griffith

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

We’re all saying the same thing this time.

All right.

Well, that’s boring.

So we might as well wrap it up then.

Ah, no, this is good, though.

And I am glad that we have more evidence that these kinds of things work.

And I do wonder, I mean, you know, you’ve got to ask, like, well, these elementary teachers are also teaching math.

So then there is this question of what should they be tested on when it comes to math?

And maybe it’s a smaller set of things.

We should be more humble about what we know and don’t know on math.

But I can’t believe that it’s nothing.

That there’s, like, right?

We would want to know, for example, that they are decent at math and that they have some knowledge of, for example...

Amber Northern

Sure.

Mike Petrilli

Little kids need to learn their math facts automatically.

I think we know that quite well, for example.

Amber Northern

Yes.

Mike, you do realize we are at Fordham doing a survey of math teachers trying to get at this very thing.

Mike Petrilli

Don’t scoop ourselves.

Come on.

Amber Northern

I’m not saying what we’re finding.

We don’t know yet.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

It’s definitely worth finding out.

Amber Northern

And hello, did anybody pick up on our survey?

I looked at all these policies, and it was the only one that popped.

So I was like, wow, that’s something that was, like, very descriptive survey.

Anyway, it’s nice when you kind of see some things that are found in descriptive studies pop up in more rigorous studies.

Mike Petrilli

I agree.

Very exciting.

All right, Amber, thank you.

That was a great one.

But that is all the time we’ve got for this week.

So until next week.

David Griffith

I’m David Griffith.

Mike Petrilli

And I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.