The Education Gadfly Weekly

Few organizations have shaped education reform as profoundly as Teach For America. This year, TFA marks its 35th anniversary, an improbable milestone for a program conceived in Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis at Princeton. It produced not only achievement gains among students taught by TFA corps members, but also an elite talent pipeline, as alumni went on to leadership roles across business, medicine, law, and other fields, while many remained in education. For K–12 in particular, TFA developed a deep bench of superintendents, policymakers, elected officials, and other influential figures.

Yet Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and hardly a TFA hater, recently offered a stinging assessment of its trajectory:

Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years… For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve… It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to “teach young people to interrogate systems of power.”

That’s quite an indictment of an organization that was once a bipartisan darling, earning plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike. In its heyday, TFA was a movement with remarkable reach and influence. So what happened?

Modeled loosely on the Peace Corps, TFA’s founding coincided with heightened public attention to the glaring disparities in American education. Jonathan Kozol’s best-selling Savage Inequalities, published the following year, became a cultural touchstone for that concern even as it drew ire on the right. But the original idea behind TFA was fundamentally about human capital. Compete directly with Wall Street investment firms and management consultancies for high-achieving undergraduates, then place them in inner-city schools that struggled to attract teachers. It also dovetailed with an emerging push for alternative certification, challenging the assumption that prospective teachers needed to pass through traditional routes before entering the classroom. As TFA matured—and faced questions about whether inexperienced college graduates were actually helping children—student achievement moved to the center of the organization’s identity.

When I joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America was hardly a conservative outfit. Most of my fellow corps members leaned left. But importantly, TFA seemed determined not to make politics a condition of belonging. We were there because children growing up in poverty weren’t getting the education they deserved. We could disagree about why that was happening, or what policies might fix it, without disagreeing about the mission itself. The focus on kids and equity, properly understood (more on that below), was paramount, and politics largely stayed in the background. TFA’s instinct calls to mind Michael Jordan’s famous quip that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Teacher recruitment was an appealing form of civic service that carried little ideological baggage, allowing people with different politics to rally around the same goal. Its message was essentially, “Come teach poor kids who deserve a great education.” That proved to be a potent formula.

In the late nineties and through the early aughts, many ed reformers understood “equity” largely in terms of outcomes. Hold all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities. That conviction was central to what attracted people like me to TFA. Since then, however, the term has accumulated more ideological and political freight.

The culture evolved, too. I joined Teach For America before smartphones and social media, before Amazon became an everything store. The generations that followed came of age in a radically different technological and information environment, one that reshaped and continues to reorder everything from social interaction and political engagement to the culture on college campuses. The labor market changed as well. An organization that had once beaten Goldman Sachs and McKinsey at their own recruiting game found itself competing for talent in a very different marketplace. The numbers tell the story. At its peak in 2013, TFA drew 57,000 applicants and nearly 6,000 new corps members. By 2022, the incoming corps had dwindled to roughly 1,600.

At the same time, TFA’s politics moved from the background to the brand. Its public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity. As mission creep set in, its pitch morphed into something like, “Come join a broader struggle against systemic injustice.” That newer framing asked for agreement on more contested questions about why injustice existed and what kind of social change was required to remedy it.

To be fair, the metamorphosis that Lemov describes occurred in the face of real political and cultural headwinds. But those forces alone don’t explain every choice Teach For America made. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The more TFA asked people to agree on issues beyond student achievement, the harder it became to sustain the big tent that had once made it so powerful.

Teach For America’s great advantage at the outset was that politics wasn’t especially relevant to joining the enterprise in the first place. I never thought much about it when I applied, while I served, or even after my two-year commitment was over. TFA recruited ambitious young people, put them through an intense, shared experience (Moody Towers, anyone?), connected them to one another, and seeded them throughout the education ecosystem. That was it. The clarity of the proposition gave TFA an unusually large constituency, and that network became movement infrastructure for transformational change in cities and states across the country.

TFA still has that network, which has grown to more than 70,000 alumni/ae. The question is whether it can regain the focus that once made it a tour de force. That challenge now falls to Aneesh Sohoni, who took the reins last year and whom I’ve previously had the chance to work with. Under his leadership, recruitment seems to be on the rebound. More importantly, Sohoni is publicly emphasizing areas of agreement like reading, math, and college and career readiness.

The timing might even be right. The cultural currents that pulled institutions like Teach For America toward more ideological terrain appear to be receding, while disappointing student achievement results have returned much-needed attention to the basic work of schools and teachers. That creates an opening for TFA to rediscover what once made it so effective. Doing so will require resisting the pull of new battles that aren’t essential to its educational mission. The test will be whether Teach For America can once again make its core proposition broad and compelling enough that people with different politics and worldviews can be a part of it.

Public school funding is at record levels, but not enough money is making its way to teacher paychecks.

Between 2002 and 2023, the average inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell despite a 36 percent real increase in per-student funding. Public schools are increasingly spending more outside the classroom, with non-teaching staff—such as instructional aides, counselors, and social workers—increasing by 23 percent.

Many factors have contributed to this staffing surge, including special education, technology, wraparound services, and administration. But it’s a real problem, given that research shows teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student outcomes, underscoring the significant opportunity costs of this spending. There are no quick fixes, and state lawmakers face real constraints on what they can do. But they still have an important role to play in stemming the staffing surge and encouraging more strategic use of scarce resources for teacher pay. The following analysis offers ideas for how they can tackle these challenges.

Decentralize spending decisions

Requiring school districts to spend a minimum portion of their funding on teacher compensation, as Indiana does, might be tempting. But money is fungible, and no single way to allocate resources is optimal for every school district. Instead, state lawmakers should slow the staffing surge by decentralizing spending authority, giving districts—and ultimately schools—flexibility to align resources with local needs.

A good place to start is to eliminate state categorical grants that direct funding toward non-teaching staff. For example, Arizona’s $82 million school safety program funds social workers, school counselors, and school resource officers; Michigan allocates $428 million for mental health and school safety; and Minnesota spends $45 million on student support personnel to improve students’ “academic, physical, social, and emotional outcomes.” These dollars could be redirected into the state funding formulas instead.

Funding for community schools, which now make up an estimated 6 percent to 8 percent of all public schools, deserves similar scrutiny. Community schools often provide health care, adult education, counseling, and other services that require costly investments in non-teaching staff. Lawmakers in Maryland appropriated $572 million for community schools for FY 27—more than they spend on school construction and about 50 times more than the cost of the state’s program for math and literacy coaches.

Improving mental health, school safety, and other student supports are worthwhile goals. But one-size-fits-all grants prevent local leaders from making tradeoffs between higher compensation, additional staffing, and other uses of scarce resources. And while community schools address real needs, policymakers should ensure that academics, not social services, are public schools’ priority.

Next, lawmakers should audit state laws for provisions that dictate staffing inputs. For instance, Virginia mandates one school counselor for every 325 students, one librarian for every 300 students, and one assistant principal for every 600 students in high school. Arkansas has similar requirements for counselors and librarians, while New Hampshire regulates school counseling loads. Other states go even further: Idaho, West Virginia, and North Carolina have funding systems that allocate resources based largely on staffing positions and programs.

A public school deregulation agenda, while not a cure-all, would push the ball in the right direction.

Finally, states should encourage school districts to give principals more authority over budget decisions. As it stands, most school budgets revolve around staffing positions, incentivizing school leaders to advocate for additional full-time equivalents (FTEs) rather than higher teacher salaries. Expanding principals’ role in financial decision-making, including providing a mechanism to convert staffing positions into flexible compensation dollars, can make these tradeoffs clear (more on this below).

Getting the fiscal incentives right is crucial, but policymakers also need to rethink how teachers are paid.

Modernize teacher compensation

State policymakers should avoid costly, across-the-board pay bumps that do little to attract and retain the best teachers. Instead, they should reform flawed policies and try approaches that reward high performers and differentiate pay for shortage areas such as math, science, and special education.

Most public school teachers are paid on a step-and-lane salary schedule in which pay increases with years of experience and educational attainment. While research indicates that teachers tend to improve with experience (with diminishing returns after the first ten years or so), studies show that teachers with advanced degrees are generally no more effective than teachers with bachelor’s degrees.

Paying more for teachers with advanced degrees is inefficient, but data published by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) suggest that this practice is widespread. NCTQ examined the nation’s 148 largest districts and found that 135 pay teachers with master’s degrees more than those holding just bachelor’s degrees, with novice teachers receiving $3,581 more on average and experienced teachers receiving $9,315 more.

For many states, the first step in modernizing teacher pay is a no-brainer: stop mandating master’s degree premiums. Nearly one-third of states—including Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—have such a requirement in state law, according to NCTQ. Or they could go even further and incentivize districts to phase out the practice.

Removing collective bargaining constraints, as Wisconsin did in 2011, can also help encourage innovation in teacher pay. Research suggests that giving districts flexibility in determining their compensation structure, while politically difficult, can help improve teacher quality and student achievement.

But lawmakers might also need to try more direct approaches to rewarding the best teachers. For example, Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), adopted in 2019, provides performance pay that’s awarded based on locally designed designation systems using student growth, classroom observations, and other criteria. Initial research on TIA is encouraging, with researchers finding improvements in teacher retention and student achievement.

States could go even further by piloting a bottom-up model that minimizes red tape and leverages local knowledge: Send dollars directly to principals and empower them to reward their best teachers or those in hard-to-staff positions.

This might sound radical, but principals in private schools and charters routinely have more discretion over teacher pay than their public school counterparts. Great Hearts Academies’ Teacher Excellence Fund, which gives headmasters a pot of dollars to use at their discretion for teacher bonuses, offers a glimpse of what this could look like. In an era defined by school choice policies that fund students directly, Principal Empowerment Accounts might have a fighter’s chance in state capitals.

Conclusion

Public school funding has risen drastically in the last couple of decades, but dollars are increasingly going toward non-teaching staff rather than teacher salaries. If state policymakers want to slow staffing growth—and redirect dollars toward teacher paychecks—they can start by decentralizing spending decisions and reforming how teachers are paid.

The latest PISA results were mostly grim. The Program for International Student Assessment—the leading international test of fifteen-year-olds’ academic performance, given in dozens of countries around the world—showed average scores falling to their lowest levels ever in reading, math, and science. The U.S. results were better, but not by much: Reading fell again and math and science were basically flat.

But one of our focuses here at Fordham is advanced education, so what about results at the high end of the achievement spectrum? The best way to determine this on PISA is to look at students scoring at Levels 5 and 6. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—a group of 38 mostly-affluent countries that designs and administers PISA—views such test-takers as advanced performers able to go beyond routine, age-level tasks and apply what they know to complex and unfamiliar problems. It’s somewhat analogous to NAEP’s Advanced level.

Viewed through that lens, the current American picture is brighter than most.[1] About 13 percent of U.S. students reach those levels in reading and science, compared with roughly 6 and 7 percent across the OECD, respectively. In math, the U.S. is right around the OECD average at 8 percent. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Percent of students at PISA Levels 5 or 6 in reading, math, and science, U.S. and OECD average, 2025

Source: OECD, PISA 2025 U.S. country note.

If that snapshot is encouraging, the trends are even better, as shown in Figure 2 below. Recent NAEP results have given us some hints of this pattern. Start with reading. A decade ago, the U.S. advantage over the OECD average at the high end was just 2 percentage points. Since then, the American share of top performers has risen by more than 3 percentage points, while the OECD average has fallen by about 2. There was a small U.S. decline from 2022 to 2025, but it wasn’t statistically significant. In fact, among 89 participating countries and jurisdictions, the United States ranked 4th in students reaching those levels in the subject.

Science is relatively bright, too. In 2015, 9 percent of American test-takers reached Levels 5 or 6, statistically indistinguishable from the OECD average of 8 percent. Today, the U.S. is at 12.9 percent, compared with roughly 7 percent—and ranks 8th out of the 90 countries that took the assessment.

Then there’s math, which has long been America’s biggest weakness compared with other countries. Yet the trend here is also encouraging. In 2015, just 6 percent of U.S. students were top performers in math, versus about 10 percent across the OECD. In 2025, America’s share was 2 percentage points higher (even if, surprisingly, this jump isn’t statistically significant), while the OECD average was 2 points lower (which, conversely, is significant).

Figure 2. Percent of students at Pisa Levels 5 or 6 in reading, math, and science, U.S. and OECD average, 2015 and 2025

Note: The OECD data in this figure are based on 35 OECD countries with comparable data in both 2015 and 2025. Source: OECD, PISA 2015 and 2025 results.

This is all good news, full stop. But it shouldn’t be oversold, and nobody should over-indulge in champagne. In each of the three subjects, countries perform better than the United States, especially in math. In 2025, for example, 37 percent of students in Singapore reached Levels 5 or 6 in math, compared to America’s 8 percent; in Korea, it was 23 percent; and in Japan, 22 percent. In other words, the U.S. still produces advanced math students at nowhere near the rate of the world leaders, even if our comparatively large population still produces a substantial absolute number of top performers.

Nor should any of this distract from the country’s shortcomings at other achievement levels. In 2025, more than one in three American test takers scored below PISA’s Level 2, its baseline proficiency bar, in math, as did about one in four in reading and more than one in five in science. Those numbers are especially sobering considering the strong U.S. performance at the high end. In fact, the United States has the largest gap between its 90th- and 10th-percentile students in reading and the second largest in science.

Still, the good news at the top suggests that the country is capable of producing a lot of very advanced students. It also suggests that America, again with its large population, has a substantial reservoir of academic talent, periodic cries of disastrous brain drain notwithstanding. In reading and science, the shares of top performers have risen and are now among the highest in the world. And although the U.S. still lags far behind the strongest nations in our rate of advanced math achievement, we did improve over the last decade while the OECD average dropped.

That leaves us with a more complicated—and more positive—picture than many PISA headlines painted. Yes, America has serious achievement problems. But there’s also a lot of good news at the high end. That surprised me, and I’m guessing it will surprise readers, too.

A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes. Contract renewal time is when those determinations matter most. Has a school earned the right to continue operating and for how long? While the typical charter renewal term is five years, most states give authorizers the discretion to offer longer or shorter terms if circumstances warrant. A new report looks at renewal term length decisions in four of those states, aiming to see how authorizers use that discretion and what impacts they associate with different term lengths.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) surveyed 39 authorizers across Colorado, Florida, Indiana, and Michigan, all of whom had at least five charter schools in their portfolios. The survey asked respondents about all the renewal term lengths they grant and the reasons for granting different lengths. Twenty-six of those authorizers also agreed to participate in focus groups which delved into more depth on their survey responses and added an additional dimension: What effects—intended and unobserved—do authorizers associate with different term lengths.

Across all four states, five years was the most common renewal length. Respondents said that a five-year term provides them with enough data to make sound decisions and provides schools sufficient time to achieve any needed operational stability required by authorizers.

Longer-term renewals (anything more than five years) were rare, respondents said—typically reserved for schools with sustained strong performance across academics, finances, and governance. But they do have their upsides when granted, including reduced administrative burden for both authorizers and school staff, as well as incentivizing more favorable facility financing opportunities for schools with longer-term charters. On the downside, however, respondents reported that some schools declined in performance after receiving long-term renewals, with fewer intervention tools then available to authorizers.

Shorter-term renewals (anything less than five years) were most commonly reported in response to academic underperformance, financial distress, or governance problems. Authorizers intend them as leverage—a way to force change with new contract/accountability requirements or to signal that a school’s continued operation is conditional upon specific improvements. However, respondents provided little evidence that short-term renewals actually improved school performance. Repeated short-term renewals, respondents said, could also accelerate staff turnover, hasten enrollment declines, and do reputational harm to schools.

Interestingly, while five-year terms continue to function as the sector default and are deemed appropriate for most schools that are meeting expectations, they still generated concerns from some respondents. Having all or even most schools in a portfolio on similar terms creates clusters of renewals every year, resulting in a significant and ongoing administrative burden for authorizers that staggered/non-standard terms could alleviate. Additionally, any states that don’t allow shorter renewal terms lump both adequate and problematic charter schools into the same category; and any states that don’t allow longer renewal terms lump both adequate and exceptional schools together. Both situations, authorizers say, remove the quality signals that varying term lengths are meant to convey.

While these findings come from a limited, nonrepresentative sample of authorizers—those willing to speak on the subject—NACSA’s recommendations on renewal term length nonetheless reflect much of the insight they provide. To wit: The length of charter renewal terms should be determined through a deliberate, performance-based process, and not by default or tradition.

Long-term renewals should be reserved for schools demonstrating sustained excellence across all performance areas, and their contracts should include robust monitoring systems to detect declines in performance as well as actionable accountability structures if a decline occurs mid-cycle. Short-term renewals should be used sparingly—with “clear conditions and consequences”—and never as cover to kick painful closure decisions down the road a year or two. Finally, the report encourages charter supporters to band together to support state policies (or support implementation of new policies if they don’t already exist) that minimize “authorizer shopping,” the process whereby schools can easily switch authorizers if they don’t like, for example, the term length being offered.

SOURCE: National Association of Charter School Authorizers, “Charter Renewal Term Length Project” (August 2026).

Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent reflections on her decision to send her daughter to a predominantly Black, low-income public school. They discuss school choice, parental involvement and family stability, and that family structure deserves more attention in conversations about student achievement. Should family structure become a more common measure in education data?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern shares a new study of team-based teaching in Arizona. The researchers find no overall improvement in student achievement, but positive results in middle school math and much lower teacher turnover. 

Recommended content:

• In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? —Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
• Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City —Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
• Why I Send My Kid to Low-Income Urban Public Schools —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
• Family Structure, a Key Factor Hidden in Plain Sight: The Case for Federal Reporting in Education —Ian V. Rowe, Brad Wilcox, and Grant Bailey, American Enterprise
• Evidence on Team-Based Teaching Models in Arizona —Mary Laski, Calen Clifton, and Dan Goldhaber, CALDER (August 2026)

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

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Transcript

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

Introduction

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This week, Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, joins us to discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones' recent reflections on her daughter's education and what her experience says about school choice, parental agency, and family structure.

Plus, why is family structure so often missing from conversations about student achievement, and should education data do more to account for it?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study of team-based teaching in Arizona. The model showed promising results in middle school math and significantly lower teacher turnover, but little or no benefit at the elementary school level.

All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.

Guest introductions

Mike Petrilli [01:01]

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

Now, please welcome our special guest for today, Ian Rowe. Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian Rowe

Hello, Michael. So great to see you.

Mike Petrilli

Well, it's great to have you on, Ian.

Ian is the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, which is right now a single charter school in New York City, but soon to be more. We can maybe talk a little bit about that.

Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and, most importantly, a trustee at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, meaning he is one of my bosses. So I am especially delighted to have him on.

If you're like, wow, it seems like Mike's asking all kinds of softball questions today, well, now you know why.

Just teasing. He and I are not afraid to debate vigorously on many issues, regardless of our roles.

Similarly, just how David doesn't care, you know, about the Fordham organizational chart when it comes to sharing his opinions.

David Griffith, my co-host, welcome to you as well.

David Griffith

We all stand for true democratic discourse.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

David Griffith

Competition of ideas. This is a nice change of pace, though, I have to say. I like having Mike's boss on the show for a change.

Mike Petrilli

Yes. Okay, good.

Well, I've got to say, Checker, I think, really set that tone at Fordham long ago, that we would be fine disagreeing with each other out in the open. It would be so boring.

So, you know, look, for no other reason than it's interesting, we entertain ourselves by getting to have...

[Unclear passage in the original transcription.]

Honestly, we are trying to figure out what works. We're trying to figure out what policymakers should do, what practitioners should do.

In this search for truth and search for what works, it helps to have a diverse range of views. It helps to also be willing to change your mind.

Today, we're going to talk about somebody out there in pop culture this week who does not appear to be changing her mind, even though maybe she should.

Yes, we're going to start by talking about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her long article for The New York Times. Let's do that on Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: School choice and parental agency

Mike Petrilli [03:18]

All right. So, Ian, we really invited you on weeks ago to have you here to talk about some of the work you've been doing on family structure, on making sure, or asking our statistical agencies to do a better job reporting data by this. Make sure that's part of the conversation.

We will get there.

But, you know, we woke up Monday morning, I guess maybe it broke over the weekend, to this big article, Nikole Hannah-Jones going back to kind of give us the updated story about her own daughter.

She wrote about her when she was in kindergarten, about the choice she was making to send her Black daughter to a mostly Black, high-poverty community, basically segregated public school in New York City. It attracted a ton of attention at the time, and it was part of what made Nikole Hannah-Jones a star.

And now she's back. Her daughter's sixteen, and her daughter is pissed.

Ian Rowe

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

That her mom and dad made some bad decisions and did not put her first.

So much to talk about in this article. I feel like it can be, what drove us craziest about this article? You first, Ian, but it's more than that, right?

But you start. I mean, by the way, Ian, you're a graduate of the New York City public schools. You have run a whole bunch, not just this most recent one, but a bunch of charter schools in New York City for mostly Black and brown kids.

I mean, you know a lot about this world she's talking about. So tell us your thoughts.

Ian Rowe [04:50]

Yeah. And first of all, guys, thanks for having me on, as always.

So Nikole Hannah-Jones, I think she's done, you know, let's give her props before we criticize her, which I'm ready to. But let's give her props for doing a huge mea culpa.

She's saying the decision she made ten years ago, and she framed this ten years ago, and by the way, many of us wrote about this ten years ago, that she was willing to sacrifice her daughter for the greater good.

There's the principle that there are all these Black and brown kids languishing in schools, and it was up to people like her, Nikole Hannah-Jones, to be their savior.

And by being their savior, that meant she had to subject her own kid to go to a school that otherwise, given her means, the fact that she was married, has resources, has a platform, she could get her kid into any school. But no, she was going to get her kid into, quote, a low-income Black school.

And at the time, I think many of us said, maybe you should be making decisions for your daughter about what's best for your daughter, not necessarily some social justice agenda around race.

And so over the weekend, she then wrote an article ten years later saying that the elementary and middle schools that she had put her daughter in were by far subpar.

And ultimately, she decided when her daughter needed to go to high school, she said, you know what? I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to put the power of choice in your hands, saying to her daughter.

And the irony that I don't think Nikole Hannah-Jones gets is that the same trust and confidence that she ultimately built in her daughter to make the choice of where she would like to go to school, perhaps she should start advocating for policies that give the same trust and confidence to those same families that she says she's trying to save, the ones that are languishing.

She says there's no absolution. These families don't want absolution from Nikole Hannah-Jones. They want the same privilege of choice that she exercised in her own daughter's life.

And the fact that she regrets her decision to send her kid to schools that she now deems weren't worthy, that's something she has to confront, but it doesn't negate the power of choice.

Making bad decisions doesn't mean that you should restrict other people from making their own decisions.

Mike Petrilli

No, that's right.

And look, I said at the top that this is somebody that hasn't changed her point of view. She did decide that she made a mistake. She should have put her daughter first. She should not have chosen those subpar schools.

But when you read the piece, it hasn't changed anything, she thinks, about education policy and practice. And that's what I found so maddening.

And look, Ian, you've pointed this out. You, again, have run charter schools. She doesn't at all mention the fact that there are these schools in the same city, often the same neighborhoods, serving a very similar population of kids who are getting much better results, right?

Called charter schools.

I mean, she described some of the things happening in these traditional public schools that were just terrible. The lunch monitors not doing their jobs, teachers not showing up to teach, administrators in over their heads, in schools where they're spending something like $40,000 or $50,000 per child, right?

And her hope was that she and her husband, by being in these schools, being on the PTA, being squeaky wheels, being able to complain, would help the other kids in that school.

And look, I think there's some truth to that.

The problem is it's a drop in the bucket. Right? The problem in New York City and in most big urban districts is systemic.

Why is it that they're spending all of that money? Which, look, it's a huge success in that we're spending more money on these poor kids and Black and brown kids, but they still can't get the workers in the system to do basic things like show up and do their jobs, right?

It's not necessarily just because of segregation. She uses that word probably dozens of times, right? It's because the system's broken.

And so then you've got to ask yourself, okay, well, what can we do to fix it? Or can we create an alternative system?

I mean, and before you know it, you turn into an education reformer, right? But she doesn't do that at all. She doesn't go that far.

Ian Rowe

I think for someone as deeply entrenched in her ideology as Nikole Hannah-Jones, it would literally be a brain explosion. She wouldn't know how to process it.

I do think it's worth noting, in the original article that she wrote ten years ago when she was explaining why she was doing this, you know, we have to make decisions about the collective good, not only my individual advantage.

But she said something very important ten years ago. She said, despite all of this, I knew that we, she and her husband, would be able to make up for Najya, her daughter, anything the school was lacking.

It's a very powerful statement because basically what she was saying is, I'm going to make this decision to send my daughter to a school that I think is subpar. But I know that because I'm married, stable parent household, resources, we will make up for anything the school is lacking.

And essentially, that's what she did for ten years.

You're right. She talks about lunchtime. Kids are chasing and hitting each other. She comes into the school. She's breaking up fights. She's demanding the principal resolve these unsafe conditions. She's trying to make it happen.

And I think one point that many people aren't appreciating is that it sounds like her daughter turned out okay.

Even despite going to these bad schools, it's a function of the fact that they were able to provide the resources to be a buffer for her daughter, who now evidently got into one of the top public high schools in New York City.

So it is interesting that she never actually acknowledges the role that her strong family played in getting these better outcomes for kids.

But to your point, she never deeply realizes, okay, you may not have liked your decision, but what about you not supporting policies?

Which, by the way, she's very actively opposed to charter schools.

I don't know where she stands on this education freedom tax credit that the governor is leaning into positively in New York, even though the unions are bashing it.

But why not, Nikole Hannah-Jones, take a lesson from your own experience?

And I think that's what's frustrating many of us, that she had the courage to share this story. And I give her props for that. She didn't have to write the story.

But what's the lesson for all of us?

The lesson isn't that privileged kids or privileged parents don't need to send their kids into subpar schools to sacrifice their own children's education.

It's really to level the playing field of choice so that every parent can do what she did and have the opportunity to fail.

The thing is, our parents don't have ten years to course-correct. She wrote this article ten years ago, and that is now her mea culpa. Well, our parents need opportunities today.

And her mindset is one that diminishes this idea of agency. She seems to continue this idea that it's all these Black and brown kids that are languishing, and it's up to her to save them.

And that is just an insulting position.

Mike Petrilli

Or, you know, that the problem is concentrated poverty, right? And that the solution, therefore, is some kind of, she doesn't really get into it in this piece, but some kind of desegregation system, which we've tried and failed various forms of that forever.

But by not talking about, for example, the charter schools that also have concentrated poverty, and look, they're not perfect and they're not working miracles necessarily, or the ones that are, maybe you look at the data and you wonder, right?

But their lunch monitors are monitoring lunch, and their teachers are showing up to teach, and they're facing some of these challenges like, okay, what do you do in a classroom of kids who are way below grade level?

That's a real challenge, but they figure out ways to address it head-on. They have instructional strategies to deal with that.

David, this drove you crazy, too. Why don't you get in here and share your thoughts?

David Griffith [13:50]

Yeah, well, Ian has said a lot of what I would say, and I think more powerfully than I can say it.

I'll just say, I mean, I think the piece spends a lot of time on this notion of sort of like racism in the system, right? And I think we all understand that it's not as though race is irrelevant in the system. That's certainly not something that anyone would claim.

But I think when I read her, it seems like she views herself as kind of continuing this tradition of fighting for racial justice.

And that's powerful and noble in some ways, but it also misses some really important things that are going on, I think, in today's society.

And it kind of misses the way that the problem, if it is a problem, has evolved.

This isn't kind of like forcing kids to break the color line and go ... de jure segregation.

The problem is subtler than that. Its in many ways a collective action problem It's hard to be the first white parent to send you child to an all Black school.

It's hard to be the first Black parent to send your kid to an all-white school, right? There are some really frustrating collective action problems at the heart of what frustrates her.

I don't know. The whole thing strikes me as a little tragic because she's trying to dive in and do something about it. And the logic of these problems means that it is very hard for you as an individual to overcome them.

And I just want to tell her, instead of judging everyone harshly, including yourself, maybe cut everyone a little bit more slack and recognize that parents are trying to do what's right for their kid and be open to alternative theories of action, I guess is how I would put it.

Ian Rowe [16:00]

Well, you know, her closing paragraph is her flourish at the end, because I think it's worth reciting verbatim.

She says:

"For all of our justifications, including mine, to take my daughter out of this school, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we, the privileged, continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people's children to languish, simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here."

So think about what she's saying.

She said, as long as we, the privileged, including mine. Meanwhile, I've just sent my daughter to a selective high school in New York.

So she's never, wait, don't these people that are languishing, don't they have agency? Don't they deserve the ability to make the same choice that you are now regretting, but still?

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Ian Rowe

She just doesn't make that connection.

For her, it's about the privileged. It's a zero-sum game. They just have to give up what they have in order for the languishing to be successful.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah. Yeah, no. And you're right that the poor families don't have any agency.

And look, in a lot of these systems, they have less agency than they should because we don't give them the opportunity to make choices, including outside the system, or we put a cap on.

I mean, she goes through and puts school choice in scare quotes throughout the piece. I'm like, come on, editor, what are you doing here? This is ridiculous.

Look, and to David's point, I get the collective action challenge when it comes to school integration.

But my frustration is about the collective action challenge of how do you deal with the systemic problems.

Why is it that you walk into these schools, again, that we have fixed the funding problem? It used to be the issue was you couldn't get good people because you couldn't pay them well enough because there wasn't enough money.

We've solved the money problem, and yet you still can't seem to get good people or hold them accountable for doing their jobs, right? What is that about?

Well, then that makes you start thinking about the unions. That starts making you think about the politics.

Ian, you though are, I mean, this whole discussion then, she would like it to continue to be about race and segregation. And your hope with some of the things you've been pushing on family structure is to try to make it so that we also have a conversation about the importance of family structure.

So tell us about that. How are we going to do that, and is it doable?

I don't know if it's doable. There's a tiny corner of people on the right who are happy to have that conversation. Nikole Hannah-Jones is never going to be willing to have that conversation, but maybe people in the middle. I don't know.

Family structure and student achievement

Ian Rowe [18:54]

Well, I guess I'm trying to embark upon an effort to make it impossible to ignore the importance of family structure.

So as you said, I've been running public charter schools since 2010 in the South Bronx, elementary and middle schools for a decade and now running high schools.

And being a school leader, look, you get a bird's-eye view of what's working and what's not working in schools.

The importance of strong leadership, great principals, a school with an actual ethos that it has fidelity toward, rigorous curriculum, content-rich curriculum. These things really matter.

But if one doesn't acknowledge, particularly in the communities we serve, the role that a kid coming from a stable family household, and that can be a single-parent household for sure, but oftentimes a kid coming from a married two-parent household, just based on my lived experience, as a phrase that people love to use, it's obvious that that makes a huge difference in kids' outcomes.

And when I first started talking about this issue, probably back in 2016, folks said, Ian, don't go down there. Don't talk about this, because if you start talking about family structure and the relationship with kids' outcomes, you're going to be embarrassing kids because a lot of their parents weren't raised in married two-parent households.

And more importantly, you're going to take the attention away from what really matters, and that's the structural racism and discrimination in the system.

And I said, okay.

But then as I looked at the National Assessment for Educational Progress and almost every report that came out, you almost always saw disparity information reported by race, reported by economic class, reported by gender.

And those things are important to track. So this is not an argument for eliminating other prisms through which we look at student performance.

But family structure doesn't appear anywhere.

And that's when it became clear to me that we are deliberately ignoring a very important dimension. In fact, a dimension that might be what I call transcendent, meaning that there are Black kids being raised in stable, married two-parent households that are doing great.

They're heading to college. They're reading on grade level. They're well-adjusted.

And there are a lot of white kids being raised in unstable family structures whose education is suffering.

And of course, you have to say the caveat, just because a kid is raised in a married two-parent household is not a guarantee that they will be successful, in the same way a kid raised in a single-parent household, their life is not a disaster.

There are many, many exceptions.

But the data, when it becomes available, disaggregated by family structure, really makes a difference.

So my colleague and I, Brad Wilcox, embarked upon an effort to do a report to say, does it make a difference?

And we learned that the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and actually it was Checker Finn who was the first person to alert me to this fact, collects data on the student questionnaire every two years on NAEP, the National Assessment for Educational Progress, the Nation's Report Card.

And what's interesting is they don't ask kids, what's your family structure? It's a simple question. It says, who do you live with?

And it's a dropdown. You can say father, mother, stepfather, a couple of other options. But basically, a kid in fourth grade and eighth grade and twelfth grade can answer that question.

And so you're able to reconstruct family structure of a given kid.

And when you do that analysis, there is enough data to indicate that this is a factor that matters, and it's worth reporting on.

And so we produced a report, Hidden in Plain Sight.

We actually looked at the National Survey of Children's Health, and we found that kids raised in what are called intact families, which are kids raised with biological or adoptive parents that are together and married, they do far better on a number of dimensions, both in school and also in depression and mental health.

And so we're arguing very strongly that family structure should become a reporting category, just in the same way we currently do what I call the usual suspects: race, class, gender. Let's add family structure.

I do believe it's possible, Mike, because I think it's a dimension that we're just ignoring, and it actually could become one of the most important factors as we talk to young people about their decisions moving forward.

It's not about shaming current families, but it's helping young people understand the factors that matter most to their ultimate success, with them knowing family formation is one of the biggest decisions that they will make for their own lives.

Mike Petrilli [24:07]

Yeah, no. And look, I think it's an interesting hypothesis to say, can that be part of shifting this conversation, making it constructive?

I mean, look, we can all, well, I don't know, maybe David can't remember. He was too young. But Ian, you and I can remember when teenage pregnancy was through the roof.

You know, 1990, just sky-high. And then we made tremendous progress as a country in reducing that teenage pregnancy rate.

And no doubt that helped. And it was one reason why the childhood poverty rate came down. Much better outcomes for lots of kids because that message got out.

And look, there were huge debates on left and right. What's the right way to do that? What's the role of birth control or not? What messages do you send?

But simply saying, hey, we can change the behavior of young people. And if we have a consistent message that says, look, getting pregnant when you're a teen is not good for you and is not good for your baby, we were able to say that, and that made a difference.

And now to say, hey, look, the message is it's better if you can finish your education, get started in a career before you find a partner and then have children.

If you follow that, which is what almost all upper-middle-class people do, people who overwhelmingly now vote Democratic, if you follow that success sequence, you're much less likely to be poor.

That maybe can start to shift the culture as well.

And look, maybe we're already seeing it. We certainly know that the teenage pregnancy rate continues to go down. There's been some stabilizing on some of these other trends. So maybe it's getting out there.

Ian Rowe

It's getting out there.

And it is important to say that the teen pregnancy, as you say, I cite this in my book, too, probably one of the greatest public health achievements of all time, the reduction of that.

What has happened is that the nonmarital birth rate, or the nonmarital births, the problem shifted. It just moved up the age scale a little bit.

So while there are a lot fewer teenagers having nonmarital births, it has shifted to young women aged twenty to twenty-four.

And so we still need that messaging for this particular age group to recognize that many of the issues that we felt plagued teen moms, those issues are now plaguing women twenty to twenty-four who are having unplanned or nonmarital births.

And the consequence, again, always have to make the exception statements, but the data is overwhelming that the likelihood of poverty, domestic violence for both the mother and the kid, is dramatically higher.

And if we can have that be part of the conversation to open the door that maybe things like race, class, gender, they matter, but they may not matter as much as something called family structure.

Mike Petrilli

All right. We will leave it there.

Ian Rowe, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's always great to see you, and we appreciate it.

Founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. We didn't get to talk about your great high school. People should check that out.

Ian Rowe

Yes. And our new high school, Westchester Aerospace and Virtues Academy. We'll have a separate conversation about how we can marry classical education with pre-professional training in aviation.

Mike Petrilli

Love it. Love it.

All right. Thanks, Ian.

Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

Research Minute: Team-based teaching in Arizona

Mike Petrilli [27:24]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

We had a great conversation with Ian about what everybody's buzzing about, of course, Nikole Hannah-Jones' long article.

I heard that you were a big, big fan of that piece.

Amber Northern

Oh, Mike. So frustrating.

I said over an email, I was expecting a big Diane Ravitch conversion toward our side of the fence, and it just didn't happen.

I'm like, how could it not have happened after she wrote all that?

Mike Petrilli

Right, right.

It was interesting when you said that about Diane Ravitch because I think about how sometimes I felt like Diane's argument over the years after she had her conversion was, hey, the schools are doing the best they can.

It's that argument. It's all poverty. It's all racism, inequality, American society. You're beating up on these public schools, and they're doing the best they can.

But Nikole's reporting showed they're clearly not doing the best they can. They weren't doing the basics well at all.

All right. Well, I've been thinking, Amber, of renaming Amber's Research Minute to Dan Goldhaber's Research Minute.

Is that fair? Tell us what you got this week.

Amber Northern [28:34]

He's got some good stuff, but he's going to have to call me out because I swear this was a complicated report.

I tried to get it right. Don't know if I got it right, but I trust he'll let us know.

So we are looking at a new CALDER paper. They're looking at a workforce policy question, which is, does team-based teaching actually move the needle for students?

So we'll get into what that really means.

They're looking at this model called the New Education Workforce Model, or NEW. I'm just going to call it the new model.

It's where groups of educators are sharing responsibility for a cohort of kids, like a large roster of kids. I think it was between fifty and one hundred kids.

And in theory, this would enable them to differentiate their roles, specialize instruction, and so on.

So we obviously want to know, is it boosting achievement? Is it improving teacher retention and quality and things like that? And that's what the study looks into.

All right. I had to dig into the model because I know you're going to be like, what was the model?

They bring together two to six educators. It's supposedly a mix of teachers, paraeducators, special education teachers. Again, they collectively share this large roster of kids.

Then I had to look into what ASU, like what the model on paper is supposed to do versus what the CALDER paper, or rather the ASU AIR paper, said it does.

According to the model, it does include subject-specific specialization because I know we've talked about that before on this show.

So one teacher on the team is supposed to handle math, another science, another ELA, and so on. And then each is that teacher of record for that subject across the shared cohort.

And within that cohort, the idea is these students get regrouped flexibly based on their needs.

So one group might be getting targeted instruction in literacy. Another might be working on advanced content.

So they get this targeted differentiation rather than a single teacher trying to do the same thing, managing twenty-five kids and differentiating, which we know doesn't happen.

So then supposedly this new model introduces a specialization that a lot of the middle schools in the study already had by default.

But the paper can't confirm whether elementary schools in the district are actually doing that because principals have significant leeway in configuring the teams.

They are explicitly told they can adapt the framework to their local context, meaning we don't really know exactly what this team experience entails.

So they can't tell you in the data, okay, this elementary team reorganized their instruction. They have subject-specific specialization versus this team just spent a lot of time talking and planning together, but they still teach their own group of kids.

So that's kind of a big deal.

That said, the authors define treatment at the grade level. So if any teacher in a grade participates in NEW, all the students in that grade are counted as exposed, even if their own teacher wasn't teamed.

That's because, number one, the data were messy, but also it avoids bias from sorting within the grades.

So the whole sort of estimate here could actually understate the effects for the students who were actually directly exposed to the model.

All right. I think that's enough explanation, caveats, blah, blah, blah.

They have eight years of data, 2017 through 2025. They skipped Covid-2020.

They're using one large Arizona district. It has eighty schools, 60,000 kids, 3,000 teachers, and they have the staggered rollout of the new model starting in 2021 across these different schools and grades.

So they're using a difference-in-differences design. They're comparing changes over time in the places that adopted the new model with changes in similar places that hadn't yet adopted the new model.

For those who are methodology geeks, they also addressed some recent concerns about this model in particular.

All right, I'm not talking about that.

Key finding one: The new model produced null effects on student achievement in both math and ELA when pooling across grades, but that hides important grade-band differences.

So this was the headline finding, I think.

In middle school math specifically, the authors find consistent positive effects of about 0.08 standard deviations. So that's equivalent to moving from a median teacher to one at the 70th percentile of effectiveness. Pretty good.

By contrast, elementary school effects were negative or null, and ELA effects were inconsistent.

And then on teacher outcomes, they find that teamed educators had lower turnover, so about seven to eight percentage points lower, which was a 27 percent reduction from typical teacher departure rates.

And they had higher evaluation ratings.

But interestingly, the positive outcomes didn't align with where they saw the achievement gains.

So they kind of hypothesized that schools with better retention and ratings didn't necessarily show stronger math outcomes, which maybe suggests that those benefits were less about workforce stability and more that maybe folks were actually changing their instruction.

And then I guess the takeaway is that you can look at team-based teaching in middle school math, and we know that's where departmentalization already exists.

So they seem to be saying, okay, this model deepens the specialization where the conditions already exist for it. Maybe that's why we're seeing some positive results there.

And then elementary schools traditionally have self-contained classrooms.

So it looks like they appear to struggle with the model, but you've got this elephant in the room that we don't know whether these NEW model teams at the elementary level were doing the lighter touch, maybe just planning and coordinating and not doing the specialization piece around subject matter.

So if that's the case, then you wouldn't expect the achievement gains, which we didn't see.

And that could explain why we saw the null and negative effects there.

Did you get me on all that?

Mike Petrilli [35:09]

You know, I learned a lot, Amber, and I'm glad to hear it because I've been confused about this model, I will admit.

I sort of kind of knew about it, but then people put it in the same bucket. It's like teacher reforms and this one and then also the one that Bryan Hassel and his team at Public Impact have been promoting, Opportunity Culture, right, which is more about trying to get the best teachers in front of lots more kids in various ways.

But I'm still trying to figure out, wait, is this really a teacher reform thing or is this departmentalization, which we've talked about here before, we always feel like should work but often doesn't work for some reason in elementary school.

You would think it would work. I would think it would work. I would think if you didn't have to train as many math teachers or as many reading teachers, that would be better.

But that doesn't seem to work.

Or is this just an elaborate way to do tracking and ability grouping and not say it out loud?

I mean, right, David? We talk about this all the time. Is this a silent track? Is this just we don't want to admit that we're grouping kids by ability, so we've come up with an elaborate way to sort of do that without saying we're doing that?

David Griffith

Well, I don't know, Mike.

I mean, that's part of it, isn't it, Amber? Or that could be part of it?

They're saying they're regrouping, right, based on student need. So that could be an implication.

What I didn't really get was, okay, if you need more math, do you then take your kid and the kid gets more time in math?

It wasn't exactly clear to me if you've got differentiation of teachers and you've got fifty, I mean, seventy-five kids covered by four teachers, then what is that?

Because you still have a teacher of record for your subject.

So it's not entirely clear to me how having the team really helps them unless they're letting their kids sit in a math class when they should be in ELA.

Mike Petrilli

Right, right. They double up on the math time or something like that.

David Griffith

I'm just struggling to make sense of the elementary and the middle school results because, I don't know, if the theory is that differentiation is good, then it should be good in elementary school, right?

Mike Petrilli

You mean departmentalization?

David Griffith

Either one. Yeah, either one of them.

It's just very hard for me to believe that either one of them is good in sixth grade and bad in fifth grade.

I don't have a fifth or sixth grader yet, but I don't think they're that different.

And if anything, I would expect, if that's the direction that the team teaching pushes, I would expect bigger effects in elementary school where there's less of this happening at the school level.

Or I'm misunderstanding.

Mike Petrilli

Right.

But a lot of people that have always been worried about departmentalizing in elementary school, they say, oh no, well, that's where the relationships really matter.

For these younger kids, it's really important to have one teacher that they really get to know. And when you start messing with that, then it's a problem.

Which, again, I can buy for kindergartners. I don't know, fourth and fifth graders as much.

David Griffith

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something to that. I don't want to dismiss that.

I just know that in any given week, right now, James goes to a different teacher for science almost every day.

And he goes to atelier, which is a fancy word for playing with lights and colors and Play-Doh and blocks and getting your first grade out.

And I mean, it's not like he's locked in a room with one teacher.

It would not be that big a leap for him to be doing math in one of these alternative settings. They have library every week.

It's a caricature of the first-grade experience, I think, in many schools to say that they just never leave their homeroom.

That's the part I struggle with. It seems like there's plenty of scope for that sort of thing.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, they do enrichment stuff already, and they do music and they do art.

David Griffith

Yeah. And they do aftercare.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah. I don't know.

And Amber, this thing from a research perspective, like we don't really know what's going on in these classrooms.

I hate to say it, and Dan will correct me if I'm wrong, but it really did seem like they just didn't have the data that they needed to pinpoint what the heck was going on at the elementary level.

And they, again, to take care of the selection problem, they had to look at these grade levels because, in many ways, they couldn't link the teacher to the student in ways they would have liked to.

So I don't know. I think it was a measurement problem, or at least it was a big measurement problem relative to the elementary level.

And I kind of buy the theory that the specialization is already occurring at the middle school. So maybe this model just deepened it and kind of put it on steroids because they already knew how to do it there.

That doesn't strike me as unusual.

Amber Northern

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

You know, if they really wanted to know what was going on in those classrooms, they could have put cameras in the classrooms and collected that data.

This is not hard, people. Good Lord.

Amber Northern

How do all my Research Minutes reach the same capstone comment from you?

Mike Petrilli

This is not hard to do. There are cameras everywhere in our world today, except classrooms. Can't put them in a classroom.

David Griffith

Six degrees of Enemy of the State here with Mike Petrilli.

Mike Petrilli

I know, that's where everybody goes. Come on.

I was joking about them being Flock cameras. You don't have to do that.

And look, guard the data. They only go to the researchers, right? Or a principal. I'm not saying put it online.

David Griffith

Right, right.

Mike Petrilli

Not like where you can see your panda when the panda's eating at the zoo. You're not looking at your kid all day.

David Griffith

Yeah, all right.

Mike Petrilli

Exactly. Whenever I talk about this, I get these emails or people on social media. Ben Reilly most recently. "Oh, when are we going to put a camera in your office, Mike?"

Which, look, if that's what it takes, I'll do it. I tell you, it will not be very interesting. But, you know.

David Griffith

How do you know there isn't one, Mike?

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, good point. Good point.

All right, we'll leave it there.

Good, good, good. It's good stuff, Amber. Look, it's getting a lot of attention. I'm glad we're learning more about it.

Amber Northern

Yeah, yeah, we'll keep at it.

Mike Petrilli [41:46]

All right. Well, hey, gang, that is all the time we've got for you 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.

The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, located in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit us online at FordhamInstitute.org.

I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were Black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere. The report cards and grades she received that concealed her elementary-level deficiencies were not caused by insufficient funding. These failures—all of them—were evidence of incompetence.

The injustice in Najya’s story is not that her school enrolled mostly poor minority children. It is that a school serving these children—an astonishingly well-funded school—was permitted to function this poorly.

A competently managed school puts a qualified teacher in front of children every day. When that teacher is absent, it has a plan for maintaining instruction. Teachers are expected to assign work, examine it, and provide feedback to students. They assess what children know and can do. Grades and report cards convey meaningful information to students and parents. When a child falls behind, someone notices and intervenes. Principals are responsible for making sure those things happen.

All of this should be obvious, yet has gone almost entirely unremarked upon in the voluminous response to Hannah-Jones’s recent essay about her daughter’s education. The piece has renewed arguments about integration, school choice, hypocrisy, parenting, and whether Hannah-Jones deserves credit for admitting that the decision she defended so passionately and aggressively harmed her daughter. But we should make sure not to lose sight of two more important lessons. The first concerns the stunning degree to which debates about education take institutional competence for granted. The second concerns a generation of education reformers who, whatever their overconfident mistakes, would have recognized instantly the failures Hannah-Jones describes and refused to excuse them.

The response to Hannah-Jones’s essay has been remarkably generous. She has been praised effusively for the candor and courage required to admit that the choice she made for her daughter was a mistake. The praise is undeserved. Bravery requires more than confessing error after its consequences become impossible to ignore. Hannah-Jones did not merely make a private decision about her own child. She used her considerable influence to turn that decision into a moral argument. For years, she mocked, condescended to, or condemned parents and education reformers who believed disadvantaged children should not have to wait for some larger social transformation before receiving a decent education. She treated parents who sought out better schools for their own children as not merely making a different choice, but perpetuating inequities.

She was explicit about her moral stance. “I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids,” Hannah-Jones said of Najya in a 2017 NPR interview. “I think that we can’t say ‘This school is not good enough for my child’ and then sustain that system. I think that that’s just morally wrong.”

To be very clear: The revised story she now tells is not a mea culpa or an act of bravery. It seeks to be exculpatory yet is devastating to her theory of change. But avoid at all costs the temptation to take a victory lap lest you repeat her mistake.

Let me ask an awkward, impertinent question: Do you earnestly believe that America’s teachers want three-fourths of students to read and do math below proficiency? Is it your assumption that principals, superintendents, school boards, education professors, and even teachers union leaders welcome these mediocre results? This is the first lesson Hannah-Jones’s experience should force upon both her critics and admirers. We argue ad nauseam about what schools believe, what incentives they face, how much money they receive, who attends them, who governs them, and what curriculum they adopt. But all of these arguments elide a question we refuse to ask: Do the people and institutions responsible for educating children actually know how to do the work well?

Hannah-Jones had a theory of change. She believed that segregated schools suffered because well-off families took their influence, expectations, resources, and social capital elsewhere. In her original account of enrolling Najya at P.S. 307, she wrote that she had seen how “the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected.” She believed her family would help integrate the school economically and that “we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.”

Hannah-Jones understood even then that there was a risk to her daughter. “I had moments when I couldn’t ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter,” she wrote. She worried whether she had made the right decision for Najya, but she concluded, “I knew I made the just one.”

That sentence deserves attention. Hannah-Jones consciously weighed what might be best for the child in front of her against what she believed justice required. Her theory of change resolved the conflict: Families like hers could make the school less neglectful, while her own family could compensate for whatever deficiencies remained.

She put that theory to an unusually favorable test. Her family is educated, affluent, politically sophisticated, and deeply engaged with considerable professional and social capital. They advocated, organized, complained, and supplemented. They did virtually everything the theory asked of them. And still the school failed their daughter.

Where did you get that idea?

This should be a cautionary tale, not a victory lap. Every education movement becomes enamored of a theory of change and assumes that if we get the structures, incentives, resources, or policies right, results will follow. For years, at education-reform meetings and conferences, I’ve challenged this assumption with an impolite question: “You have this idea that schools and teachers know what to do and all you need to do is hold them accountable. Where’d you get that idea?”

This was the great unexamined assumption of the education-reform era. Standards would tell schools what children should know. Tests would reveal whether they had learned it. Accountability would create incentives for adults to improve. School closures would impose consequences for persistent failure.

All of these ideas had merit. Testing and accountability in particular performed an essential function: They made it harder for schools to tell parents their children were doing fine when they weren’t. Najya’s story is a vivid reminder of why that mattered. She received reassuring grades while accumulating academic deficits that became painfully obvious when she finally entered a more demanding school.

There is a bitter irony here. Hannah-Jones once characterized No Child Left Behind as an abandonment of integration. Instead of integrating schools, she said, the Bush administration had effectively decided, “We’re going to make these poor Black and Latino schools equal to White schools by testing and accountability.”

Najya’s experience does not prove that testing and accountability can make a bad school good. It demonstrates something more modest but essential: Parents need honest information about whether their children are learning. Najya did not suffer because adults tested her too much. She suffered because report cards and grades told her family she was succeeding when she wasn’t. But accountability could tell us that a school was failing without telling the people inside it how to improve. It could create urgency; it could not create expertise.

More recently, I have revised this lesson in speaking to rooms full of my fellow school-choice advocates. “You have this idea that there’s all this talent and dynamism just waiting to be set free from bureaucrats and union domination. Where’d you get that idea?”

Choice changes incentives. It changes governance. It allows families to escape schools that fail them and entrepreneurs to create alternatives. These are considerable virtues. But none of it fixes the competence problem. Responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay in The Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer described this problem clearly. “Choice advocates make the opposite mistake by assuming choice is enough,” he writes. “Choice can provide an exit from a bad school; it isn’t a production function for creating a good one.”

Precisely. Will an ineffective teacher suddenly become competent merely because we change the person who signs her paycheck? Structural reforms can create conditions for improvement, but they do not guarantee it.

The assumption hiding inside our theories of change

Once you notice the assumption of competence, you see it everywhere.

Social justice theory says that concentrating disadvantaged children in the same schools concentrates disadvantage. Change the mix of students and families, and resources, expectations, peer effects, and social capital should improve. Maybe so. But someone still has to teach fractions.

School-finance theory says money can purchase smaller classes, better materials, tutoring, specialists, higher salaries, longer school days, and any number of potentially useful things. But someone has to know what to purchase, whom to hire, how to organize the work, and whether it’s improving instruction and student outcomes.

Accountability theory says adults and institutions respond to incentives. Measure outcomes, make results transparent, reward success, and impose consequences for persistent failure. But someone still has to know what to do differently on Monday morning.

Even when it comes to the reforms I strongly support, the competency problem does not disappear. Take curriculum. A district can purchase an excellent knowledge-rich curriculum, deliver materials to classrooms, train teachers, align assessments, and require implementation. None of that ensures that the teacher understands the material well enough to explain it, recognize misconceptions, ask productive questions, or determine whether children have learned it. They may adapt it or even decide not to implement it at all.

Or take the science of reading. States can ban three-cueing, mandate phonics, adopt screening assessments, and require teacher training. But legislators cannot look over a child’s shoulder, hear the particular error she is making, diagnose its source, and decide what to do next. We change everything around the classroom and assume that what happens inside it will change too. Where did we get that idea?

The black box

What if schools don’t know how to improve? This is a less satisfying political problem or culture-war issue because it implicates nearly everyone: schools of education, districts, state agencies, curriculum providers, professional-development organizations, unions, reformers, philanthropists, and policymakers. But it has one great virtue as an explanation: It takes seriously the enormous variation we see among schools serving similar children.

Fryer observed that “resources alone can’t explain disparate outcomes among schools serving similar children with similar budgets.” Right again, but that ought to make us curious. If two schools serving broadly similar children with comparable resources produce dramatically different results, we have a duty to understand what is happening inside them.

What are the teachers doing? What curriculum are they using? How much instructional time is protected? What happens when children don’t understand something? What does the principal do all day? What happens when a teacher chronically fails to perform? What information do parents receive? Does an A on a report card mean a child has mastered the material, or merely that she completed her assignments?

These questions lack the grandeur of debates about segregation, markets, democracy, and social justice. But they are where the work of education actually happens.

What the reformers got right

There is a second lesson in Hannah-Jones’s story that deserves to be stated just as clearly.

For all its mistakes and excesses, the education-reform movement that arose roughly a quarter-century ago began with a proposition that now seems almost radical in its simplicity: Black and Hispanic children are capable of much higher achievement than the public education system was producing. Adults and institutions had to accept responsibility for the results.

Of course, poverty mattered. Segregation mattered. Racism mattered. Family circumstances mattered. But none of that was an excuse for giving a child a poor education.

It is difficult to read Hannah-Jones’s account of her daughter’s education without being struck by how completely the failures she describes violated that ethos. A Black child from Brooklyn could not do fractions? Her teachers owned that failure. An honors student got an A in algebra without possessing elementary mathematical knowledge? The school owned it. A third-grade teacher repeatedly failed to show up and children were farmed out to other classrooms? The principal owned it. Parents were repeatedly reassured while their children accumulated enormous academic deficits? The system owned it.

To be clear, ed reformers of the bygone era did not have all the answers. They were too confident that standards, tests, accountability, choice, new governance structures, or closing bad schools and opening new ones would cause better practice to emerge. But we should not allow criticism of the movement’s solutions to obscure the moral authority of the problem it set out to solve. Education reform put student achievement—particularly the achievement of poor Black and Hispanic children—at the center of the national conversation. It demanded honest information about whether children were learning. It rejected the idea that miserable academic outcomes should be accepted, contextualized, or explained away because children were poor, Black, Hispanic, or disadvantaged.

The best charter schools served overwhelmingly poor Black and Hispanic populations and sometimes achieved results dramatically different from neighboring institutions serving similar children. That did not prove poverty was irrelevant, segregation didn’t matter, or every charter school was good. It proved that schools matter. What adults do matters.

Hannah-Jones’s story should occasion some reconsideration of the reform era’s reputation. The failures she describes are a functional catalog of what those reformers warned against: low expectations disguised as compassion, grades that concealed rather than communicated, adults explaining failure instead of correcting it, and disadvantaged children who paid the price.

These, then, are the two lessons I take from Hannah-Jones’s story. The first is competence. Changing a school’s demographics, increasing its funding, holding it accountable, changing its governance, giving parents choice, adopting a better curriculum, or mandating better instructional practices can all create conditions for improvement. None of it eliminates the need to ensure adults know how to teach, lead, assess, diagnose, intervene, and improve.

The second is about responsibility. In correcting the excesses and shortcomings of the education-reform era, we should not discard its most important insight: Schools have an obligation to educate the children in front of them, and poor outcomes for disadvantaged children are not inevitable facts of nature to be shrugged at or waved away. Children should not have to wait for America to solve poverty, racism, segregation, inequality, or any other social problems before receiving a decent education.

Those two lessons belong together. Responsibility without competence produces frustration, churn, and disillusionment. Competence without responsibility permits institutions to become complacent and excuses to proliferate. Good schools require both.

The next task for education reform is therefore not merely helping parents identify good schools. It is understanding what makes schools good—and figuring out how to make effective practice routine rather than exceptional. The next generation of reform should begin with two questions: Are we willing to hold schools responsible for whether children learn? And do the adults responsible for educating them know how?

The reform generation understood the first question better than its critics sometimes acknowledge. Its mistake was underestimating the second.

A theory of change needs to answer both.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Next 30 Years. And a shorter version of this argument appeared previously in The Wall Street Journal.

I have heard a number of leaders start discussions about AI with the question, “Are you for or against AI?”

I suspect there are many points in history where similar questions have been posed: In 1889, “Are you for or against electricity?” In 1953, “Are you for or against atomic energy?” In 1995 (this one I remember), “Are you for or against the World Wide Web?” I wonder how long it took for the question to change from “Are you for or against?” to “What are the risks and benefits we need to manage at the same time?”

I am in a small club of people who have seen a number of AI-powered products in classrooms and talked to hundreds of users. What I have learned prevents me from choosing one camp or the other—AI is both a huge opportunity for learning and a huge risk to learning at the same time. AI in schools is not one thing; it is a source of power to do many things—some great, some horrible. My speculations about what will be good or bad are often wrong; I have learned that we have to observe real use to see what adds value and what undermines learning.

The biggest risk to learning I saw on the tour came from a tool that few people would call “AI”: Google Search. I didn’t see students turning to ChatGPT or Gemini in school often (though I heard a lot about students using these tools at home). But I did regularly see students open their search browser, ask a question, and copy the “AI Overview” summary without questioning it or—as far as I could tell—usually even reading it. I have seen screenshots of computers in New York and L.A. (where most AI is banned in K–12 schools) that show the AI summary in Google Search still alive and active. The bans do not seem to have ruled out the biggest risk to learning I saw on the tour.

But the bans do seem to have ruled out some remarkably helpful uses of AI that I saw. Based on test scores and reports from educators, we are not preparing kids to be great writers. To become a great writer, a student needs a lot of practice and a lot of feedback, which is constrained by the time and effort it takes teachers to grade. I saw targeted instructional tools use AI to give students massively more practice and feedback on their writing than the most industrious human teacher could deliver in a week. It didn’t eliminate the need for teachers to also read and provide feedback on student work, but it did give teachers a huge assist in a laborious instructional job.

Foundational reading skills are essential for student opportunity. I saw targeted tools use speech recognition and AI analysis to pinpoint the letter sounds that students were struggling with and give them immediate instruction on those learning needs. These tools did not eliminate the need for teachers to hear students read, but they did give teachers a much better way to increase foundational-skills practice during station rotations than relying on static worksheets.

As I see policy efforts to try to regulate AI in schools emerge, I worry we are headed toward a quagmire. It is hard to come to a consensus definition about what AI even is. Even if you could get large groups of people to agree on definitions, the technology is changing so rapidly that they’d need near-constant revision. Different types of AI are increasingly being integrated into everything (e.g., the new iPads have AI-powered features in the keyboard). It is becoming (or maybe has already become) virtually impossible to isolate and completely expel AI from all the different types of technology that most kids interact with.

Rather than focusing on whether or not AI is present as the approach to regulation, we’ll do better for students if we look at the types of interactions we want technology involved in and the types we don’t. As a parent, I want the tech my kids use to be safe and their data to be secure, but I’m less interested in the particular technology in the tool (e.g., is this predictive AI or generative AI?) than the job the tool is trying to do—and how effectively it does it. I want the very best technology available to help my kids get practice and get feedback on writing, but I don’t want any technology giving them spiritual counsel. I want my civic and educational leaders to focus less on whether AI is good or bad or whether or not AI should be allowed. I want them to wade into the specific kinds of interactions and uses we want to encourage and discourage.

Like our forebears had to do with electricity, finding the right guardrails will require all of us to be learners and to watch for both access and safeguards at the same time. By 1930, nearly nine in ten urban homes had electricity, but only one in ten farms did because private utilities saw little profit in running lines to rural families. It took the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935 to begin closing a gap the market had left open for half a century. Private markets did not manage for equal access to a major enabler of quality of life. Safety lagged in ways that were harmful: New York strung live wires overcrowded streets for years before a series of electrocutions in 1889 forced the city to bury them. The rules that made a difference came from watching real use: the National Electrical Code, first published in 1897—many years after cities began introducing electricity—grew out of close study of the fires and failures that actually happened in homes and factories.

Policymakers should act quickly on what we know about safety and data privacy, but when it comes to instruction, we have a lot more to learn before we know how to regulate. What policymakers can do is set up a framework that will support that learning. They can make sure that school leaders and product leaders are in classrooms actively watching how product use is going and use those observations to drive improvements. They can make sure that state leaders and district leaders are carefully studying innovations and sharing what they are learning.

I have been in about 1,000 classrooms over the last decade. Those observations have shown me just how hard it is to teach. Kids have a lot of learning needs right now, and we need every tool in our toolkit to deliver great learning to them. What I saw on the tour convinced me that AI-powered products can offer a lot of value alongside the risks and that we have a lot more to learn to know how to navigate it.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Instruction Partners.

Education systems often fail to challenge our very brightest students. The unfortunate result is that too many high achievers lose their edge and fall short of their potential. The problem is especially acute for high-achieving, low-income students who are commonly overlooked for advancement throughout their K–12 education. The lack of equitable access to more challenging coursework and instruction robs them of downstream opportunities to compete for selective colleges.

To their credit, state lawmakers recently took an important step forward to support Ohio’s high achievers. Enacted earlier this summer, Senate Bill 19 includes “automatic enrollment” provisions that require schools to provide high-achieving math students with advanced learning opportunities the following year. The requirements begin in elementary school and are designed to enable all high-achieving students to complete algebra I by the end of eighth grade. Successful completion of this gateway course in middle school opens doors to advanced math and science courses during high school—the very type of coursework that many four-year colleges expect.

With implementation starting soon—spring 2027 math scores will inform 2027–28 advancements—it’s worth reviewing the policy details. This piece first covers how students qualify for advanced math. It then turns to what advancement looks like in elementary and middle schools.

Student eligibility for advanced math

Students qualify for advanced math based on their state test scores. Those who score “advanced” in math—the highest achievement level on state exams—are automatically enrolled in advanced math the following year. Students who score one notch below—“accomplished”—qualify as well but must also receive an A or B in their math course or earn a satisfactory score on a diagnostic math test.[1] The link to state assessment results is critical: The tests are taken universally, so high-achievers from all backgrounds can be identified. It also means that math advancement decisions are based on objective standards (accomplished and advanced indicate being on-track for college) rather than subjective judgments alone. Because the eligibility criteria are tied to state tests, these provisions cover only fourth through eighth graders.[2]  

How many students are likely to qualify based on these criteria? As shown in Table 1, approximately half of third and fourth graders would likely score high enough to qualify for automatic advancement if current numbers hold. The number of high achievers in math starts to decline in fifth grade and by sixth grade—a pivotal year for algebra I placement (as discussed below)—just one in three students may qualify for automatic enrollment. This, however, would still represent a substantial increase in the number of students taking algebra I in eighth grade, as only 20 percent of Ohio students completed the course in eighth grade or earlier in 2024.

Table 1. Percent of Ohio students scoring accomplished or advanced on state math exams, 2025–26

Advanced learning opportunities—fourth through sixth grade

If students qualify in fourth through sixth grade, schools must provide “advanced learning opportunities.” These may be either:

• An above-grade-level math course. Schools selecting this option could, for instance, place qualifying fourth-grade students in math classrooms with mainly fifth graders. Another possibility is a self-contained, fifth-grade-level math class that serves all qualifying fourth graders (rather than mixing students of different ages).

• “Services or curricula modifications” that provide “additional rigor or challenge.” This more open-ended option allows schools to enhance a conventional, grade-level math program through enrichment or differentiated instruction to serve qualifying students.  

Ohio rightly calls for early action, with advancement starting in fourth grade based on third-grade scores. Although the two service options outlined above provide districts with flexibility, they could also result in uneven advancement opportunities for students. Placement in an above-grade-level math course is more likely to ensure that students are challenged daily because the rigor is built into the coursework. The “services or curricula modifications” option, on the other hand, is just vague enough to open the door for lower-quality programs (e.g., sporadic “enrichment” or lackluster online modules). Moving forward, state officials should monitor how elementary schools implement “advanced learning opportunities,” which should include collecting data to help identify gaps in the types of opportunities elementary students receive.

Building to algebra I—seventh and eighth grade

As noted above, sixth grade is pivotal in Ohio’s advanced math framework. Sixth graders who score advanced or accomplished (and also earn an A/B or pass a diagnostic test) are automatically enrolled in a compacted math course that includes both seventh- and eighth-grade content.[3] Seventh graders who complete this accelerated course take the eighth grade state math exam at the end of the year and are automatically enrolled in algebra I if they achieve a score of “proficient” or above.[4] Compacted courses are common in schools that have traditionally offered algebra I in eighth grade. In those schools, only minor programmatic adjustments may be needed. Schools that have not offered compacted math courses, on the other hand, will need to overhaul their middle school programs. To its credit, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) has already developed some resources on advanced middle school math pathways. They’re a good first step, but more will surely be needed to effectively assist middle schools that must revamp their offerings.

* * *

Following in the footsteps of North Carolina and Texas, Ohio is now among the states that have adopted automatic-enrollment math policies. The change is a good one, as it promises to help ensure that all high achievers are challenged to reach their potential. But as with all policy reforms, implementation will be key to delivering on the promise of both expanded opportunities and stronger student outcomes. Ohio lawmakers have established an admirable advanced math framework. Now it’s time to start the work of implementing these policies well.

Dual enrollment (DE) programs allow students to take college courses for credit—usually at no cost—while still in high school. Students must pass the course in order to earn credit. Efforts to increase DE access mean more high schoolers than ever are taking college courses. This has many upsides, but also increases the likelihood that unprepared students will enroll in them and fail. A recent report tries to uncover what happens to students who don’t pass. Could participating in DE still hold value for them?

A group of researchers from WestEd looked at data on more than 1.7 million California public high school students[1] who entered ninth grade between 2015–16 and 2018–19. The current DE framework in the state dates to 2016 and was meant to expand access to college-level coursework—particularly for low-income students, students of color, and first-generation college-goers—by reducing previously identified barriers to DE participation. Features include removing a number of academic prerequisites, focusing on community college coursework, and bringing instruction directly to high schools rather than requiring teenagers to travel to campuses. The majority of the full sample (55 percent) was Hispanic, and 73 percent were from low-income families, reflecting California’s overall student demographics. The researchers broke sample students into one of three groups: those who never enrolled (Never DE), those who enrolled and never failed a course (Passed DE), and those who took and failed at least one course (Ever Failed DE).

Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of California high schoolers (1.6 million, or 94 percent) never took a single DE course in that time.[2] Of the remainder, just over 93,000 took and passed their DE courses, while approximately 18,700 (17.1 percent) failed at least one such course. Students in the Passed DE group were demographically similar to the full sample, but students in the Ever Failed DE group were disproportionately Hispanic (65 percent) and from low-income families (83 percent). Students in the Ever Failed DE group were also lower achieving on average than their peers (46th vs 61st percentile in math). While low-income status was a strong predictor of DE course failure, the researchers note that the better prepared a low-income student was before attempting DE—i.e., higher performance on the state’s eighth grade math assessment—the weaker the influence of family income.

Because DE enrollment is not random, the researchers used inverse probability weighting to approximate the impact of failing one or more DE courses on a student’s likelihood of enrolling in college after graduation. They found that students in the Ever Failed DE group are 10–12 percentage points less likely to enroll in college within 18 months of high school graduation compared to their peers in the Passed DE group. The more courses failed, the higher the college enrollment “penalty.” There was no difference in these outcomes between students in different socioeconomic groups. However, the average student in the Ever Failed group was still 6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than the average student who never attempted DE at all.

All of this is consistent with similar findings around students who take and fail AP tests, with a spokesperson saying that “studying hard, preparing for the exam, following through — can change the way students see themselves and raise their ambitions for college.” The WestEd researchers (and other analysts) conclude from their findings that efforts to remove barriers to DE participation for lower-income students and students of color provide value for those students, regardless of whether they pass their college courses. This appears to be modestly true when college enrollment is the only outcome under scrutiny, but that should not be the end point of the discussion. The more academically prepared DE students are, the likelier they are to pass their courses and accrue credits that will be valuable in persistence and completion and, perhaps, in reducing college costs along the way. In other words, high schools should give more of their students access to DE, but they should also make sure that they are academically ready for the work before they start.

SOURCE: Jenna Howard Terrell, et al., “Course Failure in Dual Enrollment and the Impact on College-Going,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (July 2026).

The push for no-zero grading policies, which prohibit assigning zeros for class assignments or tests, began during a broader “equitable grading” movement arising from the view that traditional grading is rooted in bias and discourages students. Critics counter that such policies inflate grades in ways that demotivate students and that higher standards produce better long-term outcomes.

This debate extends beyond policy circles. Multiple Fordham Institute studies show that teachers and students share concerns about no-zero grading policies. Eighty-one percent of teachers say giving partial credit for assignments that are never turned in harms academic engagement. Similarly, high school students report that weak grading standards, along with widespread AI-driven cheating, diminish their learning experience. Yet despite such findings—and a dearth of empirical evidence supporting the practice—no-zero grading continues to spread. About 27 percent of teachers nationally report working in a school with some form of no-zero policy.

In a working paper, Dan Goldhaber, Maia Goodman Young, and Luke Caldwell at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) aim to map out the no-zero grading policy landscape in one state. They examined 295 traditional school districts in Washington State, covering 2015–16 through 2024–25, and collected documents ranging from board policies to school-level student handbooks.

Using AI^[1], the team created a system^[2] to determine what counts as a no-zero policy and identified 68 districts with such policies. To better understand what types of districts are more likely to adopt no-zero policies, the CALDER team estimated the probability of adoption in a given year, controlling for district size, location, test proficiency rates, as well as student demographics. They also looked at variation across schools within the same district.

The study finds that no-zero grading policies increased by 110 percent over ten years across the school districts examined. These policies are most common at the elementary level, but high schools had the fastest growth rate: 350 percent since 2016. Many of these no-zero policies predate the Covid-19 pandemic, with nearly half of the elementary-level policies’ adoption dates predating the 2015–16 school year.

The results also reveal enormous variation in how districts write and implement no-zero policies. Sixteen percent of those with such policies have contradictions between board policy and school handbooks. For example, one source established a no-zero policy while another permitted zeros. There is a particularly wide range when it comes to enforcement. Some districts require students to redo their assignment with mandatory structured support sessions, while others exclude the assignment from the gradebook. Some districts assign a partial score, while some policies vary by assignment type.

Perhaps the most striking finding is an equity paradox. While these reforms are typically framed as equity tools, Washington districts with more low-income students were less likely^[3] to have a no-zero policy. At the elementary level, districts serving more special education students were also less likely to have no-zero policies. Among high schools, suburban districts were more likely to adopt such policies than city districts of similar size and student population.

The study is limited, of course—to a single state and to published policy documents. It cannot capture how teachers implement these rules in the classroom. Yet it exposes the unevenness of no-zero grading policies, which are hard to find and often inconsistent even within the same district. This may favor privileged students in multiple ways. Families with more education and institutional savvy may, for example, be better positioned to advocate for their children when rules are unevenly applied. And because high-poverty districts have fewer no-zero policies to begin with, this gap could give wealthier students a GPA advantage in college admissions. No-zero policies are framed as equity tools, yet their distribution doesn't match their intent. The landscape seems most uneven for the students these policies were designed to benefit.

SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Maia Goodman Young, and Luke Caldwell, "Where Have All the Zeros Gone? The Landscape of No Zeros Grading Policies," CALDER Working Paper No. 345-0826 (August 2026).

Kimberly Richey, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about the latest federal guidance on school discipline and Title VI. What does the Department’s new approach to racial disparities in discipline mean for schools? Can the new guidance stick, or will the rules continue to change every time a new administration takes control of the White House?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new NWEA study examining whether schools are getting Algebra I placement right, and why students should be allowed to take algebra as soon as they are ready.

Recommended content:

• Dear Colleague Letter: Guidance on Pupil Discipline and Compliance with Title VI —U.S. Department of Education
• Toward a durable compromise on discipline disparities? —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• Doing educational equity right: School discipline —Michael J. Petrilli, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Groundhog Day for school discipline —David Griffith, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Getting Algebra Placement Right: Expanding Opportunity and Strengthening Preparation —Megan Kuhfeld, Daniel Long, and Scott J. Peters, NWEA (August 2026)

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

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Transcript

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

Introduction

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This week, Kimberly Richey, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, joins us to discuss new federal guidance on school discipline and Title VI.

What does the Department's new approach to racial discipline disparities mean for schools?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new NWEA study examining whether schools are getting Algebra I placement right and why students should be allowed to take Algebra as soon as they're ready for it.

All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.

Mike Petrilli [00:59]

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

And now please welcome today's special guest, Kimberly Richey.

Kim, welcome to the show.

Kimberly Richey

Hey, Mike. So good to be with you all today. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah. Well, Kim is a special guest.

She is the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

Boy, we had a congressman on a few weeks ago. Now you're just raising the bar, I tell you.

Kimberly Richey

Super, super excited to be here with you today. It really is an honor, and to talk about something that's so important is exciting.

Mike Petrilli

Yes.

Well, let me welcome in my co-host as well, David Griffith.

David, welcome to the show.

David Griffith

Hey, always a pleasure, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, Kim, we did invite you here to talk about one of my, I wouldn't say favorite topics because it's a tough topic, but I think one of the most important topics, something I've certainly written a lot about and care a lot about, which is the topic of school discipline and, in particular, racial discipline disparities.

This has been a big controversy for multiple administrations now.

You recently put out new federal guidance on school discipline, and we would love to talk about it.

So let's do that on Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: School discipline and Title VI

Mike Petrilli [02:25]

All right, so Kim, oh, and I should say, how can I not say this?

First of all, it's Kim's birthday as we're recording today.

So happy birthday, Kim.

Kimberly Richey

Thank you so much. What a great day to be here. Thank you.

Mike Petrilli

And people watching on YouTube can see in the background, there are some birthday flowers and a birthday crown.

Amazing.

So I'm glad to see there is celebrating going on.

Kimberly Richey

And for those who can't see, I am not wearing the crown right now. It is here in spirit.

Mike Petrilli

Yes, exactly.

I do remember my time as an appointee over there at the Department of Education, and people would take birthdays very seriously.

Kimberly Richey

Very seriously.

Mike Petrilli

Any excuse, actually, to have a party, to have cake, but there were strict rules. You know, people had to pitch in. Could not put that on the taxpayer dime.

Kimberly Richey

That's right. And the entire team has confirmed for me this morning that we are in full compliance with all of those rules.

But we did, in full disclosure, we did have birthday cake at about 10 o'clock this morning, so I'm feeling the sugar rush.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Hey, there's no regulation against that.

But speaking of regulations, all right.

So let's start here, Kim, especially for folks who have not been following every twist and turn of this debate around discipline disparities, especially with respect to federal civil rights enforcement.

Let's start by just, like, the basics, because I just want to be clear.

It is certainly the case that it is still the law of the land that schools cannot discriminate against students on the basis of race, including when it comes to discipline.

Right?

This idea that, you know, if a white kid breaks a rule, they only get a slap on the wrist. A Black kid breaks the same rule but gets suspended. That would be discrimination.

That's illegal.

That's the kind of thing that your office would investigate and, if possible, hold folks accountable for, right?

So what is this debate about when we're talking about discipline disparities?

Kimberly Richey [04:19]

Thank you for starting there, Mike.

I want to say at the outset that there's nothing about the July regulation that OCR published. There is nothing contained in the August guidance that changes the legal requirements for race discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VI, for those who may not know, is the federal law that prohibits schools from discriminating against students, against employees, on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

And so those provisions remain unchanged.

Schools cannot treat students differently on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and OCR will continue to vigorously enforce Title VI to ensure that schools are not doing that.

I think that's a really important place to start.

I think for those who are coming to this new or who may not be familiar with this either as a legal issue or as a policy issue, as you all know, and I'm preaching to the choir, but really we've been dealing with this issue of race and discipline since 2010.

I would say it's been a prevalent policy and political and, frankly, legal issue. All three.

This started in about 2010 when the Obama administration made the decision to prioritize this as an enforcement matter.

I think it was back in 2010 when they opened really five very large, comprehensive compliance reviews to look at school districts across the country and how they were disciplining students to see if schools were treating students differently and disproportionately impacting students on the basis of race at any point through the discipline process.

Shortly thereafter, in 2014, the Obama administration issued a Dear Colleague letter that really, I would say, changed the way that OCR enforced Title VI in school discipline cases.

OCR has always had provisions within its regulations that allowed for the examination of disparate impact.

And what the Obama administration said in 2014 is, we're going to look at these cases. We're going to look for different treatment. We're going to look to see if you are treating students differently, but we're also going to look to see if your policies might be having a disparate impact on certain students.

And for those that may not know what disparate impact is, we try to talk about that without sounding too attorney-like or too legalistic.

But essentially, what OCR began doing is they began investigating cases and going into school districts and starting with data analysis and looking at nothing but a school district's discipline data.

And what began happening is that OCR would look at a case, they would look at a school, and they would look at the policies.

They would say, okay, there's no evidence that you had intent to discriminate. You are fairly enforcing your policies. That means you're not treating students differently.

You're applying your policies evenhandedly. Your policies are not discriminatory. You're applying them across the board the way that you should.

But they would nonetheless hold schools in violation of Title VI for no other reason than the data did not look right.

And what I mean by that is they were disciplining certain groups of students at higher rates than they were compared to other students.

[Brief gap in the source transcript.]

Mike Petrilli [08:56]

And can I just say, Kim, that, you know, and when we say data, I mean, my understanding is they were just looking at it by, say, race, right?

And we do know that...

[Brief gap in the source transcript.]

It is the case that we know that that matters a lot.

Poverty matters a lot.

And tragically, Black students in America today are still way more likely to be poor than white students.

They're way more likely to be consistently poor, to be extremely poor. I mean, they are much more likely to face disadvantage in lots and lots of areas.

And there are reasons in the discipline case to expect that a kid growing up in poverty and growing up in maybe a dangerous neighborhood, maybe going to a school that's not as safe as we would like, for a lot of reasons, that child may be more likely to act out, may be more likely to get into a fight.

There are surveys. The federal government has asked teenagers, you know, have you gotten into a fight? And Black students are more likely to say yes.

Right?

So I remember once at a conference, I tried to explain all this.

I said, look, it's not because of race. It's because of class that we see these disparities.

And yes, I think there's reasons to believe that Black students misbehave at higher rates than white students, not because they are Black, but because they are so much more likely to face all these disadvantages.

You know, the audience kind of gasped. I mean, like, how can you say this out loud?

Which, again, I get. These are not happy conversations to have.

But if that's the underlying issue, right, the students, there's a disparity.

All we see with the discipline data is how schools responded. We don't see the underlying misbehavior.

And, you know, we can imply it. There's some studies that are trying to get closer to it.

And look, it still could be the case that some of these disparities are being driven by discrimination.

Right?

But we can't assume that all of it is being driven by discrimination.

And then we've got to worry about, as you have, Kim, what are the unintended consequences?

Kimberly Richey

That's right.

Mike Petrilli

Do schools start to discriminate against white students in order to make the discipline data look right?

Do they start lying about their discipline data and being on the forms?

Right?

Kimberly Richey

I think that's right.

Yeah. And I think you really are hitting the nail on the head, Mike, because discipline is one of the most complex areas of civil rights law that we deal with in OCR.

And it's because, exactly what you said, there are so many factors that can go into why a particular student is disciplined.

And so to reduce it to data, or to reduce it to race, to take such a complex issue and to try to apply such a singularly focused solution to it has just ended up, you know, with catastrophic results.

And I think that that's what we've seen over the last twenty years.

These policies have not been effective.

They are reducing everything to race. They're reducing everything to the color of a student's skin.

And, you know, I hear from teachers all the time: I was told that I could not discipline African American students at all. I was told that I could only refer white or Asian students.

And, you know, in 2026, those are just not acceptable answers.

And even more importantly, they are completely inconsistent with what the Constitution requires and with what Title VI allows.

And so I think that, just to recap, I gave you a lot of background. I'm sorry.

But so what the Trump administration has done, what we've done, is earlier this summer in July, we first started with the regulations, which is what I was referring to.

We amended the Department's regulations to remove disparate impact provisions from the regulations.

That's obviously more broad than discipline, but the Constitution requires it.

We believe the Supreme Court has been clear that Title VI prohibits intentional discrimination, not unintentional discrimination, not disparate impact.

So we've taken the very significant step of aligning our regulations with both the Constitution and the statutory requirements of Title VI.

And we followed up with that about a month later with what we're here to talk about today, some very important guidance that provides clear direction to schools on what the law requires throughout the discipline process.

And the bottom line is that Title VI prohibits any type of discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

Schools cannot take race into account at any part during the discipline process, at any part of the discipline process.

And this idea of racial balancing, which is what these policies have resulted in, is not allowed under Title VI.

It's certainly not required, and I would argue that it's not permissible.

And so what we're doing within OCR right now is we are enforcing Title VI, and we have launched two directed investigations.

I think that schools, you know, dating all the way back to the Obama administration, schools that have adopted these social justice policies, these restorative discipline policies, we have reviewed so many of those where it is clear that schools are taking race into account.

Those are extremely problematic under Title VI.

And so we are going to pursue those investigations.

We are really trying to reorient and reset on Title VI.

I think, you know, you've written extensively on how difficult this has been for schools, and I've written on that as well.

But what has essentially happened is with every change in administration, the pendulum swings back and forth.

Mike Petrilli

And I want to talk about whether we can fix that.

But let me push a little bit, Kim.

I'm thinking, okay, there's been forever debate. Let's say I remember famous debates about Shaker Heights, Ohio, a diverse suburb outside Cleveland, right, where there was a lot of time this question of, hey, you know, it was a diverse suburb, a lot of professors and the like.

And it seemed like both upper-middle-class, or at least middle-class, Black students and white students, and yet the white students were outperforming the Black students in terms of achievement.

And so there were studies and task forces to try to understand that.

What's going on? Can we do something about it?

It seems like on the discipline front, you could have a similar circumstance.

Let's say there's a district. Let's say they do like I've been calling for and they have controls for socioeconomic status, and they still find there's a gap, that Black students are getting in trouble at higher rates than white students.

And they want to try to understand why. They start digging into it.

And maybe they start having some initiatives that focus on providing support to Black students to help them steer clear of violence or whatever's causing them to get in trouble.

I mean, if they consider race at all, are you saying that's starting to cross legal lines?

They can't do that kind of analysis? They can't have those kinds of initiatives?

Kimberly Richey [16:46]

Yeah.

So I think that, you know, this is where, this is the area where OCR will focus over the next several months on providing additional guidance to schools.

I think that there is a difference, Mike, between telling a school district, you cannot take race into account throughout the discipline process. You cannot have the end goal of racial balancing in your discipline data.

There's a difference between saying that and saying it's okay to track your data. It's okay to know what your discipline data looks like.

I think my position and the position of the Department is that, and this is the difference between how Title VI has been enforced before and how it's being enforced now, the data is the starting point.

So if I'm looking at discipline data and I'm seeing discrepancies, I 100 percent agree with you that schools have an obligation to dig at that point.

They have an obligation to look at their policies. They have an obligation to look at their practices.

They still have to ensure that they are not violating Title VI. They still have to make sure that they're not treating students differently at any point throughout the discipline process.

And so I think that there's nothing in this letter that tells schools that they can't look at data, that they can't ensure compliance.

If I were in charge of a school, or if I were representing a school, or if I were on a school board and I saw discrepancies in data numbers, it would be my sign to do some additional digging.

It would be my sign to dig into the policies, to dig into the practices, to figure out what was going on in the classroom.

The difference is that under the 2014 discipline letter, everything stopped at an analysis at the data.

Nobody went any further than that.

So they looked at the data. They said there's a discrepancy. Boom, you're in violation of Title VI.

There was no additional digging. There was no inquiry as to why or what may be contributing to that.

And data alone does not cause a Title VI violation.

It should be a sign to schools to dig more.

Mike Petrilli

Right. Right.

You know, so much of this has been about the legal rules, and it has to be, right? This is a civil rights law.

But like you say, it's complicated.

And at the end of the day, this is an educational issue, too.

David, why don't you get in here, as I bring you out every once in a while as our former high school teacher at a challenging charter school.

I mean, how do we make sure that we intersect all the legal requirements with, like, the classroom reality and the goal?

The goal is to help students meet high expectations when it comes to their behavior.

Right?

The goal is for kids to misbehave less. The goal is to have safe and orderly classrooms.

So how do we do it?

I mean, what's on your mind, David?

David Griffith [19:39]

Yeah, well, I will attempt to distill what I've been trying to say for the last ten years, which is that I would encourage everyone, regardless of how you feel about what has been said here, to try to keep the two issues separate.

One issue is: What are the sources of these disparities that we've been talking about, harping on?

That's a really important question.

Another really important question is, basically, what is the best approach to discipline?

Right?

I think that discipline reformers, certain kinds of discipline reformers, sometimes I even count myself as one, make very valid points about the risks associated with, you know, at-risk kids essentially being on the street.

Right? Like, that's not particularly satisfactory.

Mike Petrilli

Because we suspend them or expel them.

David Griffith

Yeah, because they're... right.

Right.

I mean, nobody should really want an at-risk fifth grader or eighth grader, pick your age, it doesn't matter, right, we shouldn't really walk them out of school onto the street.

That is an entirely legitimate end of public policy to ask, can we reduce that?

Are we sure we're getting the tradeoffs right?

We have this need to maintain order in schools and classrooms, and we have this concern that if we put kids out of the classroom, we don't really know what's happening to them.

There are really difficult tradeoffs there.

It is entirely appropriate to talk about that.

I think we should try to keep that conversation as separate from race as we can, because they are two separate questions.

And I mean, frankly, I just think that it is not helpful to the conversation to mix these two questions, because this question of what is the best discipline policy or the best approach to discipline is really slippery, even if you don't inject race into it.

It's actually quite a slippery question on its own.

You can find schools and districts that seem to have successfully reduced out-of-school suspension, replaced it with in-school suspension.

You can find places where it doesn't seem to have gone well.

I think that will keep us pretty busy, honestly.

And I would encourage people, maybe who don't agree with Kimberly on this one, right, to focus their efforts on making that case sort of on the merits and on getting that balance right.

Because that is actually what I think we should be talking about.

Mike Petrilli

No, and I like that.

And, you know, Kimberly, you mentioned the pendulum swinging.

I mean, I raised this a few weeks ago in my SCHOOLED Substack.

You know, this is really hard on district officials and educators.

Cory Turner, NPR, did a great story on this when your guidance came out.

I mean, it's the ping-pong game. It's going pretty extreme.

You know, the Obama and the Biden administrations say you must look at your data and you must act on it.

And as you explained, you know, even if you're not doing anything unfair to treat kids unfairly, you still have to keep going, right?

And then you're saying, well, basically that, no, if you do anything that's racial balancing, then we're going to hold you accountable.

I mean, sometimes I feel like, is there some way to just, like, maybe discipline is too complicated to be in this whole civil rights frame at all?

Or can we just maybe have a rule that says, look, all we're going to do at OCR is we're going to pick up the phone if somebody calls us and says, hey, I think my child was treated unfairly when it came to discipline because of their race.

And we will respond to those individual complaints.

Or what else?

I mean, how do we stop the ping-pong match from happening?

Kimberly Richey [23:14]

Yeah, you know, honestly, Mike, I think that when we published our final rule in July and we removed the disparate impact provisions from our Title VI regulations, I believe that that is going to help a lot with what you're referring to as far as the continuous, every time a new administration comes in, the policy changes and schools don't know what might violate Title VI from one school year to the next.

And more importantly, families and kids don't know either. Teachers don't know, right?

But I think that with OCR's removal of the disparate impact provisions from our regulations, that was the legal basis for these decisions.

That was the legal basis for OCR to go in and to focus exclusively on data.

And so I think, from my perspective, removing those provisions from OCR's regulations will finally start to add some continuity.

And we actually talked a lot about that in the publication of the final rule, and it was one of our justifications for the regulatory action, to provide more clarity to schools, to provide more clarity to parents, so that everyone would know, once and for all, when it comes to enforcement of Title VI, what actually violates the law and what does not.

Mike Petrilli

And are you hopeful then that if, let's say, the Democrats win the White House in 2028, that the next administration isn't going to just go back to what we had before?

Kimberly Richey

Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm not a bettor or a tea-leaf reader.

I don't know what's going to happen, you know, as far as what any future administration might do from a regulatory perspective.

But I think that we made a persuasive legal argument.

You know, the Supreme Court has spoken on what type of discrimination Title VI prohibits, that it's intentional discrimination.

It does not cover situations where there might be some type of unintentional discrimination or where there might be some type of disparate impact on a particular group.

And so I think that it would be difficult to roll back this initiative in the future.

But I will say, I've worked with schools all across the country.

I've worked at three different state departments of education. So I've worked with schools a lot in Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida.

I can tell you that when you tell a school any discrepancy in your data means that you violated Title VI, they are going to make the data look right.

They're going to do whatever they have to do to make the data satisfy OCR's inquiry, whether that means disciplining on the basis of race, whether that means racial bias...

[Brief gap in the source transcript.]

Data looks good.

That's not good for anybody.

That's not good for teachers. That's not good for school safety. That's not good for classroom behavior.

And it's certainly not good for kids.

And what this has really done is tied the hands of local leaders to the point where they cannot respond to misbehavior. They cannot respond to school violence.

And so I think that there are broader, serious implications here about what this policy has done.

We are not better off than we were in 2014.

Outcomes have not increased. Schools have not gotten safer. Behavior has not improved.

And I'm really proud of the work that we're doing to rethink these policies.

Mike Petrilli [26:55]

All right.

We will leave it there.

Kimberly Richey, the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

We appreciate it. And again, happy birthday.

Kimberly Richey

Thank you so much. Great to be with you all today.

We'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

Mike Petrilli

All right. Thank you, Kim.

Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

Research Minute: Are schools getting Algebra I placement right?

Mike Petrilli [27:16]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

We just had a really good, interesting talk with Kim Richey.

I understand you worked together in Virginia.

Amber Northern

Oh, we did a little bit. Had a little bit of overlap. Not much.

But yes, knew her from Virginia, other folks that we met, and yeah, had a little bit of overlap when I got to the Department.

So she's great.

Mike Petrilli

I mean, David, like I was saying there, I just wish sometimes we could just take the whole discipline thing out of the civil rights frame because it doesn't fit well.

I mean, look, I get it that we need to worry about kids getting discriminated against, and you should be able to file a complaint if you think your kid was discriminated against.

But, you know, looking at data, I mean, it's like imagine if we said, okay, the Office for Civil Rights is going to take it upon themselves to investigate any time there's a racial achievement gap in a school or school district.

They would be investigating all the time, everybody, everywhere.

Right?

I mean, we don't do that.

David Griffith

Yeah, that's right.

And as I keep trying to say, I just, you know, I guess we're going to have to keep having this conversation because we can't avoid the topic.

Right?

But I think the more we can talk about the other question, which is, what is the right approach to discipline, the more constructive the conversation is.

Right?

Because, you know, if you're concerned about kids being out of school, you don't need to motivate your policy...

You don't need to go there. You don't need to talk about racial disparity.

You can just say, look, I'm concerned that we're suspending kids too much, right?

I'm concerned, you know, and you're not going to have a bulletproof case there either because it's really complicated when you dig into the data.

But you can at least have a, I don't know, a constructive conversation about when can we replace OSS with ISS and how do we know, right?

And kind of how good are our ISSs and how good are our other alternative schools, and what can we do about this?

Right?

Is it possible to do better?

And it's just, it's a completely different conversation than the one we've just been having.

I don't know.

It's also important.

Mike Petrilli

No, it's the difference between, you know, the educators talking and the lawyers talking.

And look, everybody plays an important role.

David Griffith

They do. They do.

Mike Petrilli

We're being nice here. We won't throw the lawyers under the bus.

All right.

Well, Amber. So, yeah, that was a good one. You should go back and listen to it.

Amber Northern

I will. I will.

It sounds like a good one.

But, you know, what I really thought you were going to ask me about was Bruno Mars, which is why I had to miss a podcast.

Mike Petrilli

Yes.

Amber got to go see Bruno Mars, who, by the way, did one of the best Super Bowl shows ever, I remember.

Amber Northern

Best Super Bowl ever.

Sold-out crowds everywhere.

He stayed onstage for three hours without a break, sweated his behind off, and just totally delivered.

So anyway.

Mike Petrilli

Love it.

All right.

Well, are we going to talk about research today?

Amber Northern [30:14]

Well, we should.

We have a new research brief from our friends at NWEA, just always using their MAP data to answer interesting questions.

So this time they are looking at math education policy via the lens of this study that asks, one, are students who are ready for eighth-grade algebra actually enrolled in it?

And two, does taking algebra in eighth grade rather than waiting until ninth grade actually improve student outcomes?

Which seems like questions we need answers to.

So they are looking specifically at whether there's a disadvantage to delaying algebra until ninth grade for students who are already ready by the end of seventh grade.

And for students who are not ready by the end of seventh grade, does waiting until ninth grade actually help them?

Okay, so they're using nationwide MAP Growth data for 55,000 middle schoolers.

Just love how they get these N sizes with their data.

They have seventh-grade MAP Growth scores and eighth- or ninth-grade MAP Growth and algebra.

Those are the two data sets they're looking at.

They're defining readiness using a seventh-grade spring RIT benchmark of 237.

What does that mean?

It means that RIT is a score from NWEA's MAP Growth test, and it shows where a student is performing academically regardless of grade level.

That's my layman's way of explaining that.

So in this case, they're saying a score of 237 is the point at which students are considered likely to be ready for Algebra I based on these prior studies that they've done that connect MAP Growth scores to students' odds of reaching proficiency on state Algebra I end-of-course exams.

Okay, couple quick caveats.

First, that benchmark I just mentioned is derived from linking studies they've done to EOC algebra tests in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina.

So that means they're looking at median cut scores across those states.

So it might not generalize to every state accountability condition or context.

And then second, the researchers are comparing algebra outcomes for students who were ready by spring of seventh grade but waited until ninth grade to take it.

And then they are looking at those who were ready to take it and took it, okay?

So those two groups.

And we know that there may be unobservable reasons why kids end up in eighth-grade versus ninth-grade algebra beyond what these MAP scores are capturing.

So there is some selection here, okay?

All right, with that in mind, key finding one: About one-quarter of seventh graders are ready for early algebra.

According to this benchmark I just told you about, unfortunately, 42 percent of schools don't offer eighth-grade Algebra I.

So that's an access problem.

But then beyond the access problem, they say even among the ready students attending schools that do offer eighth-grade algebra, still about one-quarter of those kids wait to enroll until ninth grade, even though they're ready.

Key finding number two: For higher-achieving kids, taking algebra in eighth grade generally produces better outcomes than waiting.

This advantage, they looked at across the upper half of the achievement distribution. They saw it throughout that upper half of the distribution, but it was largest among seventh graders in the top decile.

So specifically, students in that top decile who took algebra in eighth grade scored five points higher than those who took it in ninth grade.

Again, these are all the kids who got that magic readiness score.

And that's roughly equivalent, I'm like, okay, what's five points? It's roughly equivalent, they say, to two-thirds of a year of growth for the average student in algebra.

And then for lower-achieving students who weren't yet ready by the end of seventh grade, the timing didn't seem to matter.

So they remain below proficiency, below the proficiency benchmark, regardless of when they took the course.

So simply delaying the course until ninth grade wasn't enough to improve outcomes for those kids.

And they say, you know, the takeaway for me anyway was we shouldn't use one group who's not ready as a reason to hold up another group that is ready.

And I think we've got to do more to get all kids ready and do more to get the ready kids in the more advanced math course.

So that's what I've got.

Mike Petrilli

And maybe one more takeaway would be that some of these automatic enrollment policies that states are adopting, that these are good ideas, right?

Because you say basically, okay, if you score well on the state test, how it usually works, could be on NWEA or i-Ready, you know, then we're going to automatically place you into the advanced math course.

And therefore, we don't worry about teacher bias or making parents request that you get in or other kinds of things like that.

The default is if they show they've got the potential on this test to do well, they go in there.

Of course, the parent can always opt them out, but that seems unlikely to happen.

And what we've seen is, I believe in North Carolina and Texas especially, is that that has a big impact on getting lots more kids, especially disadvantaged kids, into these classes that they can do quite well in and they were not in previously.

Amber Northern

Yeah.

But I guess that only works if their school has the class.

And I couldn't believe it, that you've got middle schools out here across America still in 2026 that do not have eighth-grade algebra.

It said 42 percent, which seemed a little high to me, too.

David Griffith

I also picked up on that.

That's unbelievable.

I mean, I don't know that there's a middle school in America, I mean, I'm sure there are, but the number of middle schools that do not have at least one student, and probably more than one student, who is ready for eighth-grade algebra is extremely small.

I mean, even in poor areas, there are kids who are ready for algebra in eighth grade.

What are we doing?

I don't get it.

Also, what are we doing?

I mean, is it just six years of pre-algebra?

I mean, somebody with older kids explain to me, like, what is happening in all these years if they're not getting to algebra?

I know we do fractions in, like, third grade and fourth grade and then just more fractions and...

I don't quite understand what it is that we think we're doing for all of middle school if it's not algebra.

I mean, calculus is hard. Algebra is doable if you can benefit from the tracks, in my opinion.

Mike Petrilli

We do introduce algebraic concepts in elementary school under the college standards, but yeah.

Look, no, that's shocking.

I mean, it used to be the case that you'd find a lot of high schools that didn't have a single AP class, but I thought we've largely fixed that, right?

I mean, still plenty of progress to be made, but I think you'd have to work hard at finding an American high school, traditional comprehensive high school, that does not have at least a few AP courses.

But you can still find 42 percent of middle schools without algebra in the eighth grade.

No wonder the kids aren't working all their way into AP Calculus.

No wonder that the College Board came out with AP Precalculus.

Goodness gracious.

David Griffith

I'm really struggling to formulate a counterargument here.

I mean, honestly, right?

If there's any, if there's any...

Mike Petrilli

Oh, you got one?

Oh, it's that tracking. It's terrible.

Tracking.

It's racist. It's classist. It's terrible. It's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's the counterargument.

David Griffith

Yeah, that's pretty crazy, honestly.

If we're just talking about, I mean, no, I mean, it is.

Like if we're talking about letting kids go further ahead, particularly when kids in other schools and districts are probably doing that, right?

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's pretty crazy. I'm sorry.

Is there an actual counterargument that I'm missing other than, you know, we should let kids move on to the next math class when they're ready?

That seems like a pretty intuitive concept to me.

I don't know.

I'm struggling to come up with a version of equity that I believe in that, I don't know, in any way challenges that idea.

I guess I would hope that we can rally around that and make it happen, right?

It's sort of shocking, honestly, that it isn't already happening, right?

It's such a common-sense policy that it's hard to understand why we can't make it happen.

Amber Northern

Well, you guys may recall I covered the Washington State study that Dan Goldhaber and friends did, and they found large numbers of parents opting out, right?

Even when we did automatic enrollment.

So to me, it's partly some parental education is another piece of this when they do have the policy, right?

Because it didn't fix it either. They didn't see the numbers that they wanted to see.

David Griffith

Yeah, somebody said that to me. I'd forgotten that.

I don't get it.

I mean, nobody's asking parents to do anything, right?

Other than let their kid move ahead.

I really am struggling to understand that intuition on the part of parents.

What do they think is going to happen?

Mike Petrilli

Maybe their kids don't want to take a harder math class.

I think it might be that simple.

Let's not ever complicate it.

David Griffith

Yeah.

I mean, that's demoralizing, but it has the ring of truth, right?

I don't know.

Mike Petrilli

Yes, that could be our tagline.

Demoralizing, but has the ring of truth.

I like that.

Let's try that.

That sounds good.

All right, everybody, that is where we've got to leave it.

That is all the time we've got for today.

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.