It’s a bleak time in education policy.
Student achievement started falling about a decade ago, slowly at first, and then all at once. Then Covid led to dramatic drops in enrollment and attendance and a decline in trust in public schools. This year, with the expiration of federal relief funds, schools will have a lot less money to spend on staff or new programs.
With all this in mind, with education floundering and in need of direction, I sketched out a list of twelve guiding principles. Some may seem like obvious truisms, but they haven’t always been reflected in policy or classroom practices in recent years. Others may be more controversial and fly in the face of prevailing trends. But America is overdue for a big national reckoning about the current and future state of its public schools, so here’s my attempt to start that conversation:
1. Education is good, but knowledge is better. More schooling leads to more learning, and people who know more stuff tend to lead more successful, productive lives. That’s good for individuals and good for society. But time in school is merely an input measure, and the outcome—achievement—is what will ultimately matter in a child’s life. That lesson can be multiplied over the broader society. As economist Rick Hanushek put it to me back in 2015, “In the long run, the economic well-being of countries depends upon the quality of their workers.”
2. Teachers are incredibly important. Educators are still the most important in-school factor for student learning, and the best teachers also improve students’ attitudes and behaviors. As a policy matter, schools should hold teachers to high standards and pay them like professionals.
3. Incentives matter. Students and educators are rational actors and will respond to incentives. When states and school districts—especially those in Democratic-controlled areas—retreat from school and student accountability, that will have consequences in the form of reduced academic effort and lower achievement. Teachers as a group are well-intentioned and mission-oriented, but they naturally tend to flock toward easier jobs with less challenging students. Deliberate policy nudges in the form of extra pay for working in high-need schools and hard-to-staff roles can help reverse these normal human tendencies.
4. Testing and high expectations are good. They give people targets to shoot for, hold them accountable for results, and provide a tool for diagnosing what needs to improve.
5. Parents deserve honest, timely information about their child’s performance. The nonprofit group Learning Heroes has found that 90 percent of parents believe their child is on grade level, while the reality is about half that. This has fed into an urgency gap, where educators warn the public that kids are behind even as they struggle to enroll students in tutoring or summer school or convince students to take those programs seriously.
States have been mostly indifferent to this disconnect. They take months to process and distribute the results of their annual spring tests. Those exams are meant to present parents with the objective reality of their child’s performance, but that check on the system can’t happen given the current delays. In response, Ohio now requires school districts to share results with parents no later than June 30 of each year, and Virginia will soon give parents their child’s results no more forty-five days after the testing window closes. More states should follow Ohio and Virginia’s lead.
6. All children should get a fair opportunity to be educated to the best of their ability. A noble pursuit for “equity” has sometimes meant that schools hold higher-achieving students back. That’s a mistake, and schools would be better off with a clear focus on developing all kids’ talent. Automatic enrollment, in which students qualify for accelerated courses based on their demonstrated performance, is one simple policy that’s starting to spread across the country. Similarly, more places could adopt individual learning plans, as Mississippi did in reading, or what some states do for gifted students.
7. Public education can take many forms. The current system of delivering public K–12 education through residential school districts is a weird artifact of history. It’s not how pre-K or higher ed work, it leads to economic segregation, and it distorts the housing market. Plus, as Johns Hopkins researcher Ashley Rogers-Berner has pointed out, it makes the U.S. an outlier internationally.
8. Choice is good, but it doesn’t guarantee better results. Within education, choice makes people happier with their schools and helps students (and teachers) find the right fit. Charter schools, within-district choice programs, voluntary desegregation programs, and open enrollment can all boost outcomes for kids. There should be fewer wait lists and more options.
Still, choice is no guarantee of quality, and a well-functioning market requires oversight. As economist Doug Harris and others have noted, the logic of the free market doesn’t apply neatly in the K–12 context, given the lack of information parents have about their choices and the limited options they may have available depending on where they live. In other words, policymakers can’t just assume parents voting with their feet will automatically lead to systemwide improvements.
9. Beginners need to be explicitly taught to master the basics. In basically every human endeavor, beginners need to follow carefully sequenced steps to learn the fundamentals and make progress. For example, kids won’t learn to read well unless they can decode letters into words. That requires teachers to patiently break down the forty-four distinct phonemes used in the English language, and that can feel boring or unimportant to adults who don’t remember how they learned to read. Too many education fads suffer from this “expert’s curse” and assume that kids will just figure things out on their own.
10. Knowledge is specific to particular domains. We all want kids to be creative and to be able to read with comprehension. But these are not generic skills. Instead, they are tied up with what someone already knows and can do. For example, the most creative people in any field are those who have mastered the basics and can apply those in new ways. Similarly, people’s ability to read and understand something new depends on what they already know. People don’t retain knowledge they don’t continue to refresh, and there is very little transferability across skills and subjects. Learning chess won’t make you smarter, and most adults have forgotten much of what they learned in school. As such, schools should seek to help students develop deep knowledge in specific content areas, rather than taking a skills-based approach.
11. Practice is good. Educators sometimes speak derogatorily about “rote” memorization or “drill and kill.” No one talks like that in sports or the arts, even though, in those fields, it’s obvious that deliberate practice leads to improvement. Within education, kids need to master their times tables before they can handle more advanced math, and they need to spend plenty of time immersed in books to build up their vocabulary and reading stamina. It doesn’t all need to happen during the school day, but kids need lots of time to practice academic skills.
12. Individual policies matter, but they are not a guaranteed recipe. Researchers have documented a number of variables associated with improvements in student outcomes. For example, it’s true that more money generally helps schools produce better results and that smaller classes are easier to work with than bigger ones. But sometimes, advocates take these lessons too far. They assume there are no trade-offs to these policies or lose sight of the ultimate goal of education. For example, states like California and Florida spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes to little effect, perhaps in part because it led to a decline in teacher quality. Maine spends about twice as much per pupil as Mississippi does, yet students in Mississippi outperform those in Maine, once you factor in demographics.
Education is complicated, and policymakers need to focus on the end goal—or they can get lost chasing the wrong things. By remembering the principles I’ve outlined here, they have a better chance of getting American education back on track and helping all students reach their full potential.
Editor's note: This was first published by The 74.
