CHEERS
Cheers to Louisa Moats for her decades of work helping children learn how to read. “For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-forth over the best way to teach kids to read,” writes Time magazine’s Belinda Luscombe in an extended profile. Today, states are leaning into the science of reading, with many relying on Louisa’s LETRS teacher-training program to help get evidence-based practices into classrooms.
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Economist Noah Smith weighs in on last week’s viral Nikole Hannah-Jones essay (like, yes, everyone else), in his case pointing out that spending more money on smaller classes won’t fix bad schools.
We should be spending more money on educating our poorest and most disadvantaged students. But that money should be spent less on flooding those schools with ever more teachers of questionable quality, and more on raising pay to attract highly competent people capable of making a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives. If we did that, then stories like Nikole Hannah-Jones’ might be more of a rarity in America.
JEERS
Yet policymakers appear to be moving in the opposite direction from the one Noah Smith—and research evidence!—indicates they should. A new NCTQ study shows a declining number of states providing (or requiring) incentive pay for hard-to-staff subjects and schools. Sarah Sparks has the details, noting that teacher shortages are especially acute in special education. So why aren’t more states offering differentiated pay when bonuses are associated with lower turnover?
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.
