The Education Gadfly Weekly

At a recent event, I made what I thought was an obvious and uncontroversial statement: Red and blue states continue to go in different directions on education reform, with red ones embracing it and blue ones running away from it. A Democrat friend protested that I was being unfair, so I decided to look at the evidence.

To be clear, I’m not happy that the GOP has emerged as the party of education reform—or, more specifically, the only party of education reform. Things were much better in the days when both teams fought for that mantle, which was the case across much of the land (and in Washington) from the late 1980s through the mid-2010s. Take any issue you want (international trade, gay marriage, whatever) and any advocate will tell you that the dream scenario is for both parties to agree with your position.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case in education for over a decade.

Before I go farther, let me define education reform as I see it. (Matt Yglesias’s definition is pretty good, too.)

What is education reform?

Start with basic values and principles, beginning with the conviction that all children should be given the opportunity to achieve their full academic potential. Second is the belief that schools are essential to achieving this first goal. Third is that, in general, U.S. schools aren’t doing nearly enough to accomplish it (even as we acknowledge that a lot of what it would take to help all kids achieve their full potential is outside of schools’ control). Finally, bona-fide reformers understand that our 150-year-old school systems, with their central offices, bureaucracies, top-down management, union contracts, and bizarre political incentives, are unlikely to be able to reform themselves. Improvement is going to take outside pressure.

Reform as I see it, then, is largely about applying that external pressure in constructive ways. It comes via two primary strategies: standards-based reform and school choice. The former means setting clear expectations for what students should know and be able to do, measuring whether they are learning those things, and then holding schools (and, often, educators and students themselves) to account for the results. And the second involves introducing competition, so as to create incentives for school systems to improve their performance and better serve their customers—the families who entrust their children to them.

No smart reformer thinks that either testing and accountability or school choice alone will automatically lead to great schools. Tons of additional activities are necessary, many of them placed in the “capacity building” bucket. That starts with ample and fair funding, but also high-quality curricula, including those based on the science of reading; great professional learning; and deregulation so that school leaders can create a positive culture and get their teams moving in the same direction.

In my view, urban charter schools are the beau ideal of the education reform movement, given that they combine school choice, accountability for results, and real autonomy for educators. The type we used to call “no excuses” are also extraordinarily high performing and prove how much human potential our traditional system fails to fully develop.

Democrats for education stasis versus Republicans for education reform

With education reform duly defined, let’s turn to the question at hand.

Is the conventional wisdom right that both parties have abandoned education reform? That D’s have forsaken it out of fealty to their teachers union base plus the influence of what Nate Silver recently called the “social justice left.” And the R’s have turned away from it because of their obsession with “privatization”—currently in the form of universal education savings accounts, with accountability to parents the only form of accountability they now favor.

Well, the evidence indicates that this conventional wisdom is mostly fair when it comes to Democrats, but not all that fair when it comes to the GOP—at least if we look beyond Washington to the states.

Let’s examine three key policy areas: accountability, charter schools, and the science of reading, and how they are playing out in red versus blue states.

Start with standards-based reform, the primary domain of center-left education reformers going back to the Clinton days. When Congress enacted, and President Obama signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, it allowed states to decide whether to issue annual judgements about their schools. All states have to report reams of data, but whether to turn those data into user-friendly ratings is up to each jurisdiction.

Well guess what? Some states embraced clear ratings, such as A–F or 1 to 5 stars, while others opted to issue no ratings at all, or to use mealy-mouthed, descriptive labels. A clear partisan pattern emerged. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. States that use A–F or 5-star ratings for their school accountability systems

Kudos go to blue state standouts Maryland and Rhode Island, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Granted, labeling schools isn’t the only form of accountability. Federal law requires all states to do something to address chronically low performance in their least-effective 5 percent of schools. Unfortunately, I can’t find any fifty-state evaluation of how that’s going—probably because not much is happening to hold bad schools accountable anywhere.

Maybe the blue team does better when it comes to public charter schools, especially given that the GOP is focused on education savings accounts? Here’s a look at changes in charter school enrollment for the most recent period for which data are available, according to this analysis from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Figure 2: Charter school enrollment growth, 2019–2023

Indeed, the D’s do a bit better, with a particularly impressive showing from New York, and the R’s do a bit worse. Still, the pattern again favors the red team.

How about promoting the science of reading? This has been sweeping the country and is often pointed to as a rare example of common ground across the ideological spectrum. Here we can rely on this excellent resource from ExcelinEd, and look particularly at whether states fund training for teachers in the SoR (a capacity-building strategy that Democrats should love).

Figure 3: States that provide funding for science of reading training

What we see is that virtually all red states provide this sort of training—but only some of the blue states do. Notable laggards include the biggest blue states—California, New York, and Illinois.

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Republicans could definitely be doing more on the education reform front. As I wrote last year, it’s crazy that teacher tenure is still enshrined in law even in deep-red states, and that Republicans haven’t shifted teacher pay to focus more on performance instead of traditional measures like master’s degrees.

But the much greater shame is that the Democrats have moved away from education reform almost entirely. And there’s some reason to believe that it’s hurting them electorally. That at least is the argument that Rahm Emanuel is making, including in his podcast appearance last month with Ezra Klein.

Pre-Covid, Democrats historically run somewhere between a 15-to-22-point advantage on education. From Covid forward, the only two things you hear from Democrats on education is: We’re going to shut the school down. We’re going to close the front door of the school, and after Covid, we’re going to blow open the bathroom school door.

That’s it. Not what you’re going to do on math, not what you’re going to do on reading, what you’re going to do to drive graduation. And now what is the net result? Not only are parents pulling kids out of public schools; we’re barely breaking even on the issue of education.

Democrats are increasingly the party of college-educated professionals, while Republicans gain the mantle of the party of an increasingly multiracial working class. So perhaps it’s inevitable that the D’s will tie themselves ever closer to the people who work in our schools—especially college-educated teachers and administrators—and R’s will orient themselves to the consumers of the system, the working-class parents who now make up a majority of public-school customers.

But I sure hope that the Democrats instead listen to Emanuel and fight to win back some of those working-class parents by embracing education reform. The country—and our kids—would be better off with two ed-reform parties instead of one.

I’m no “tech bro,” nor a fan of Ramaswamy (or Musk), but Vivek was right this time:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken [sic] from slumber before & we can do it again…but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

As everyone knows, this (excerpted) tweet helped trigger the dust-up over H-1B visas, the kind that the U.S. bestows on specialized and highly skilled workers from other lands so they can take jobs here that employers otherwise find hard (or impossible) to fill. They’re a very big deal in Silicon Valley and through the tech world, as is obvious when you see how many key figures in that realm—Musk included, as are Ramaswamy’s parents—came from elsewhere.

As everyone also knows, this comment (accompanied by Musk’s feisty defense of these visas) triggered an avalanche of criticism from anti-immigrant Trumpsters, Steve Bannon included.

After much shouting and puzzlement as to whether Trump would side with his DOGE team or his traditional base, the President-elect weighed in on the pro-visa side, declaring to interviewers that “I've always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people, we need smart people coming in to our country.”

Almost all the attention being ladled onto this issue involves politics and whether it was smart of high-profile Trump advisors (and funders) to say things that would alienate many of his actual voters. But that’s not the part that caught my eye

What grabbed me was the accuracy of Ramaswamy’s diagnosis of why America’s own education system—enmeshed as it is in the broader culture—isn’t producing enough highly educated, hard-working, smart people to fill the jobs that our own ingenuity and entrepreneurialism are creating.

Everyone knows—or should know by now—that it’s not, and you don’t need Ramaswamy (or Musk or Trump) to supply the evidence. Look at the recent TIMSS data for eighth graders in math and science. Look at decades of PISA data. Look at the new OECD report on adult skills. Over and over we see not just that the United States trails many other countries in average achievement, but also that much smaller percentages of Americans make it into the ranks of high achievers on these international comparisons.

Yes, yes, we have most of the world’s top universities. Yes, our very strongest graduates of our schools and colleges are solid, as good as anybody’s. But there aren’t nearly enough of them, not nearly enough for our own domestic manpower needs. The achievement pyramid is way too steep and narrow at the top.

The formal education system is not entirely culpable here, for Ramaswamy’s right when he states that the culture bear much responsibility for what it does and doesn’t value and prioritize. But the implications for K–12 and higher education are profound, and many educators have come to share the anti-achievement bias of the broader culture. Thus the neglect-verging-on-hostility to acceleration and advanced learning (a.k.a. “gifted and talented” education, exam schools, etc.), despite mounting evidence—including an important new study—that such opportunities propel many more students, including disadvantaged youngsters, into the ranks of high achievers.

We tend to explain that resistance by saying equity comes first, advanced programs are discriminatory, and we must concentrate our energy on low achievers. But that’s not the whole story.

See, for example, an astute New York Times column (published on Boxing Day) by Wharton psychologist Adam Grant, titled “No, you don’t get an A for effort.” He wrote of U.S. education that:

...we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person). And that does students a disservice.

I somehow doubt that Professor Grant and Vivek Ramaswamy have much in common. But combine the former’s observation that schools honor work over achievement with the latter’s observation that our culture “celebrates the jock over the valedictorian,” and you will have plenty to ponder as we enter the New Year. Maybe even the makings of an important resolution—one we might even hope is shared by the incoming administration.

I’m going to give you a reading test. Ready? Say these words out loud:

Chip

Hill

Jars

Bep

Fod

Glork

If you’re an adult seeing this, with years and years of reading experience, your brain probably processed the list pretty quickly. You could even pronounce the last few entries, even though they aren’t real words.

Beginning readers need to be taught how to do this. Reading doesn’t come naturally, and kids need to be explicitly taught how letters correspond to sounds. If kids don’t master this foundational decoding skill, they will likely struggle to read more challenging texts.

Clearly, decoding is an important and fundamental reading skill. So why don’t we test for it in the United States? England does. Starting in 2012, the Brits started giving a phonics check to all six-year-olds. At the end of their first year of school (equivalent to kindergarten), kids are given a list of forty words to read out loud. Half of them are real words, like “chip,” and half are nonsense words, like “bep.” Teachers listen to each student read the words and then score them on how many they decode correctly. Children have to get at least 80 percent correct to pass.

Not that much happens with the results. For example, England doesn’t require that kids who fail the phonics check have to repeat a grade. But parents get to see their child’s result, and kids who fail the test have to retake it the next year. The results are also shared with officials who use them to evaluate each school’s performance.

In this light, England’s phonics check is a light-touch intervention with relatively low stakes. But it has driven dramatic increases in student performance. The percentage of kids passing the phonics check on their first try soared from 58 percent in 2012 to 82 percent in 2019. (The check was paused in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and the pass rate fell to 75 percent in 2022, but it was back up to 80 percent this year.)

Moreover, England’s scores on international assessments have also risen. On the PIRLS test of fourth grade reading, England’s scores rose 6 points from 2011 to 2021, a time when most countries were seeing declines. Scores in France, Finland, and Germany, for example, fell 6, 19, and 17 points, respectively. More recently, England’s fourth grade math scores rose 11 points from 2011 to 2023, while performance in the U.S. was falling 24 points. The phonics check isn’t responsible for all these gains—England has also emphasized a knowledge-rich curriculum and tests specifically aligned to that content—but it is a fundamental building block.

Could the U.S. benefit from an England-style phonics check? Sure, we already have plenty of reading tests, some of which give educators a good sense of a student’s early literacy skills. But there are key differences in how American students are assessed, and we could learn some lessons from the Brits.

First is the question of timing and focus. America’s federally mandated English Language Arts tests don’t start until third grade and gauge a host of reading skills that are interwoven with the students’ background knowledge. The national NAEP reading assessment, first delivered in fourth grade, suffers from the same issue. In contrast, England’s phonics check is specifically concerned with one key reading skill—decoding—and measures it at age six. That’s earlier and more focused than what we’re doing here in the States.

Second, England makes clear that all students are expected to master decoding, and it communicates to parents whether their child has done so. In the U.S., that benchmark is far from universal, and parents are not always informed. According to ExcelinEd, sixteen states have adopted “universal screener” tests that identify students in grades K–2 who are at risk of having difficulty reading. Nine of those states also require parents to be notified when their child has been flagged with a reading deficiency. But that means forty-one states and the District of Columbia are leaving that up to chance and hoping schools are teaching kids to decode.

Any school or district could decide to adopt its own version of a phonics check. It’s a simple protocol, and because the stakes are low, there’s not much to worry about with respect to test security.

But state and national policymakers could think even bigger. If a state were to adopt a phonics check and report the results, it would send a strong signal to teachers and school leaders about the importance of making sure all students are taught to decode. At the national level, congressional leaders could consider requiring every state to deliver a phonics check. Or, at the very least, they could include something similar on NAEP.

Simply put, America’s third grade reading tests are administered too late to spot and rectify emerging problems. Too many school systems simply pass kids along in the hopes that they will naturally pick up reading skills over time, rather than catching and fixing gaps early. An early phonics check would make sure that all kids are learning to decode letters into sounds.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

Allowing families to express their preferences for various schools—whether inside or beyond their geographically-zoned building or district—sounds good in theory. Indeed, we’ve been hearing for decades that a zip code should never determine the quality of a child’s education. But does allowing parents to provide their preferences for schools mean that they actually get them? A recent report examines how New York City’s centralized enrollment and school matching system—arguably the largest and most complex in the nation—works in practice, with a focus on which families get their preference in the school system and which don’t.

New York City allows families at all grade levels to apply to any public school in the city, regardless of where they live. Kindergarten parents, for example, can choose from over 700 traditional public schools, not including charter and private school options. The district’s school allocation process—which must accommodate tens of thousands of students in each grade each year—encompasses a complicated set of enrollment deadlines, application priorities, parental preferences, and seat availabilities. The analysts for this study had access to restricted-use data on kindergarten enrollment applications—the only grade they focus on—used to make admission decisions for the 2015–16 through 2018–19 school years. The study excludes youngsters who applied to gifted programs, charter schools, special education schools, and the like. Their sample ultimately includes over 233,000 kindergarteners attending 743 district-run schools across the four years of the study.

The report starts with background on the process. Parents submit their preferred schools in rank order, with no limit to the number of schools that may be requested. Applicants are then assigned a priority rating of 1 through 8 per school requested, with 1 being the highest. That top rating is bestowed upon students who both live in the requested school’s zone and have a sibling enrolled there. That is followed by priority 2 students, who live in the zone but don’t have an enrolled sibling; priority 3 is for kids who live outside the school zone but in the larger assigned district and have a sibling in the requested school; and priority 4 is reserved for students in the assigned district with no sibling. The lower priority ratings (5–7) include students who attend a public pre-K program at the school to which they are applying, and on down to the least priority (8): those living outside the district and with no “prior claim” on the school to which they are applying. They, for all intents and purposes, get the schools that have seats remaining. Additionally, families that apply before the posted deadline get a little bump over families who didn’t meet the deadline.

Analysts examined which students did and did not receive their first-choice school. Given the priority system in place, it is not at all surprising that over-subscribed and high-quality schools enroll smaller proportions of students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. Specifically, Black students were 14 percentage points less likely to match with their first-choice school than White students. In fact, the priority ranking system essentially explains the demographic differences observed: A model that controlled for the priority rankings of students reduced the Black/White difference in the probability of a first-choice match from 14 percentage points to less than 1 percentage point. The pattern was similar for Hispanic students.

The analysts primarily fault the prominence of residential location in the priority rankings as disadvantaging Black, Hispanic, and low-income students—just as it happens in traditional address-only assignment with its long history of residential redlining. Not only are these families unlikely to get seats in the most-sought-after schools, many don’t even try since transportation to non-zoned schools poses real challenges. In fact, 87 percent of on-time applicants who chose their neighborhood school as their first choice got it, compared to only 6 percent who ranked a non-neighborhood school first.

The authors acknowledge that getting rid of zoned school, sibling, and/or pre-K priorities would be “politically and logistically fraught.” But they suggest that the city use a “diversity code” for each 4–8 block neighborhood which reflects neighborhood racial composition, income level, and adult education level, and then reserve a portion of the seats in highly-sought-after schools for students from neighborhoods that rank high on the diversity code. Another idea is to expand the number and capacity of high-performing schools!

The findings are disappointing—showing that New York’s school choice efforts are more illusion than reality for most families of young learners—but they’re also important. Any system that is serious about giving parents a choice of schools needs to reckon with the scarcity of good ones and the inability of families to break through barriers of entry, especially when, apropos of the study title, they have “constrained agency.”

SOURCE: Rebecca J. Shmoys, Sierra G. McCormick, and Douglas D. Ready, “Constrained Agency and the Architecture of Educational Choice: Evidence from New York City,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2024).

De facto segregation persists in schools across the United States, leading many Black and Hispanic students to attend lower quality schools with fewer resources and opportunities. Public school attendance is typically determined by a student’s residence, but inter-district open enrollment gives families the option to select a school outside their local area. In theory, choice within the public school system has the potential to break down racial segregation and provide underserved students with better opportunities; however, decisions made by families can unintentionally perpetuate existing achievement gaps and segregation. To better understand these choices, a new mixed-methods study explores how peer diversity influences parental school choice decisions.

The researchers conducted a survey of 3,000 parents and guardians who completed high school inter-district open enrollment applications in the 2022–23 cycle in New York City’s public school system, and combined it with a decade of administrative data, which they used to measure student-body composition as well as school quality using value-added models for student achievement. Then, using an original conceptual framework and vignette experiment within the survey, the researchers explored a variety of factors that might impact a family’s choice in school, such as the awareness of available school options, perceptions of the school’s quality and discrimination, beliefs about the probability of admission, among several other topics. Unlike many studies that infer the reasons behind parental choices, this approach directly connects survey responses to corresponding administrative data and thus offers a new perspective on family’s educational decision-making.

The analysis yielded two key findings. First, middle school diversity plays an important role in shaping high school enrollment choices for students and their families. When a Black or Hispanic student attends a majority White and Asian middle school, this leads to them being more likely to apply to and enroll in higher-quality, more selective schools with more White and Asian students. While White and Asian families’ high school choices are less influenced by the racial composition of middle schools, attending a majority Black and Hispanic middle school increased the proportion of Black or Hispanic students in White and Asian applicants’ top three choices by about three percentage points.

Second, the researchers found that racial disparities in parent’s choice of school are driven by two main factors: (1) information gaps about the schools that are available and (2) a parent’s preference to enroll their kid in a school with peers who share similar racial demographics to their own. Although families of all racial backgrounds valued similar characteristics in schools, Black and Hispanic families were less likely than their White and Asian counterparts in the same neighborhood to be aware of majority white and Asian schools or high-value-add schools. For instance, Black and Hispanic families were 8 percent less likely to have heard of schools with high White and Asian enrollment or high college enrollment rates, and 7 percent less likely to know schools with high value-added.

Furthermore, although most families did not explicitly indicate that a school’s racial composition was a factor in their decision-making, the differences in the demographics of schools chosen by students of different races does suggest that it impacts a family’s choice. For example, White and Asian respondents consistently favor schools with more white and Asian students, while Black and Hispanic respondents are less likely to choose majority white or Asian schools when their information on academic performance is limited.

In short, all survey respondents wanted their students to attend a safe school with high achievement levels, but the remaining racial differences in school choices appear to be driven by the preference of parents to keep their kids enrolled with students of the same race.

These results lead to two main takeaways. First, the study demonstrates the important role that peer diversity has on a family’s educational choices. While school choice is meant to give disadvantaged students access to greater social capital, the study reveals that making the best choice for a student is also greatly impacted by who and what information families have access to, prior to any choice being made. For instance, over three-fourths of parents surveyed reported discussing high-school applications with other parents at their middle school. Therefore, creating opportunities for families to connect with a more diverse network of parents and peers could help close information gaps.

Second, because attending a middle school with more diverse peers decreased the preference for high schools with higher enrollment of students from one’s own race, promoting diversity in earlier grades—especially middle school—could be a key strategy for advancing high school desegregation. By finding ways to foster diversity in earlier grades and promote more equitable choice, we can lay the groundwork for a more integrated school system that benefits all students.

SOURCE: Clemence M. Idoux and Viola Corrandini, “Overcoming Racial Gaps in School Preferences: The Effect of Peer Diversity on School Choice,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series (November 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Alyson Klein, assistant editor at Education Week, joins Mike and David to discuss how President Trump could weaken the U.S. Department of Education without dismantling it entirely. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares a study examining the impact of early math intervention on student outcomes in Kentucky.

Recommended content:

• Alyson Klein, “How Trump Can Hobble the Education Department Without Abolishing It,” Education Week (December 12, 2024).
• Chester E. Finn, Jr., “Will Trump eliminate the federal role in education or weaponize it?,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (December 12, 2024).
• Michael J. Petrilli, “How much blame does the federal government deserve for America’s mediocre schools?,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (November 21, 2024).
• Zeyu Xu, Umut Özek, Jesse Levin and Dong Hoon Lee, Effects of Large-Scale Early Math Interventions on Student Outcomes: Evidence From Kentucky’s Math Achievement Fund, SAGE Journals (2024)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected].

Cheers

• In an effort to fill vacant trade jobs and attract a younger, more diverse workforce, Maryland is expanding apprenticeship programs through the inclusion of a wider range of industries and increased investment in the development of a cybersecurity talent pipeline. —The Baltimore Banner
• Praising effort can foster resilience—but it becomes an issue when students expect high grades for hard work alone, rather than quality of work or mastery of material. —Adam Grant, The New York Times
• In recent years, the charter school movement has shied away from political fights. Now, it’s time for renewed commitment to the core mission of the movement: providing diverse, free, and public education options that serve all students. —Derrell Bradford, CharterFolk

Jeers

• Under Mayor Brandon Johnson’s management, Chicago’s battle over school funding has led to the resignation of an entire school board, a chaotic school board election that descended into name-calling, and now the ousting of the city’s schools chief. —The Wall Street Journal
• A 2006 Minnesota law mandating algebra for all eighth graders aimed to boost math achievement and prepare students for calculus—but it has not led to improved outcomes, as many eighth graders are unprepared for the abstract concepts of algebra. —The Hechinger Report

• Girls’ math, reading, and science test scores have declined sharply since the pandemic, possibly driven by a greater focus on boys’ educational outcomes in recent years or the increased household responsibilities many girls took on during the pandemic. We also wonder about the impact of social media. —Matt Barnum, The Wall Street Journal
• Participants at the 2024 National Summit on Civic Education discuss various aspects of that subject,  including the roles classical education, discussion-based learning, and experiential learning can play in developing students into responsible citizens. —The Jack Miller Center
• Private school choice advocates are optimistic that additional red states will adopt universal school choice in 2025, but expanding the movement into blue states is more difficult due to opposition from teachers’ unions and concerns about funding. —Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigations
• Despite its growing popularity, Wisconsin’s open enrollment program has had no clear impact on overall academic performance, and has led to greater resource losses for districts serving larger low-income and minority populations. —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel