The Education Gadfly Weekly

At first blush, President Joe Biden’s proposals related to postsecondary education and job creation are a total mishmash, a bowl of spaghetti thrown against the wall. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that he and his team are not the only ones whose thoughts on students’ post-high school plans are tangled. Now’s a good time for some straight talk and clear thinking about what it means to help all of our young people succeed in early adulthood and beyond.

For many years, education reform dogma insisted that college, or at least some sort of postsecondary education, is necessary for young people to have a shot at the middle class and the American dream. Indeed, Biden echoed that view last week, when he called for free community college because “twelve years [of school] is no longer enough today to compete with the rest of the world in the twenty-first century.”

There’s been some movement in ed reform circles to make sure career and technical programs are also valued, not just traditional college prep ones. Still, so far it’s more talk than action. As Marc Tucker explains, “fewer than 5 percent of high school students in most states leave with a qualification that is honored by employers”—a number that could and should be five or ten times higher, at least if we think that other prosperous, advanced countries have something to teach us.

But where we continue to be most confused and dishonest is around what constitutes success for students who leave high school and go straight into the workforce.

I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that many reformers view such an outcome as a failure, especially for poor kids and kids of color. Indeed, many states’ accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act include some sort of “college and career ready” index that marks high schools down for sending graduates straight into the labor market. That’s because of overwhelming evidence that it’s really hard to make a decent wage with nothing but a high school diploma.

But what if that were no longer the case? Most of us assume that the 1950s-era economy is never coming back, that there’s no longer such a thing as a “good-paying low-skill job.” Thanks to globalization, automation, and the shift to a service-sector economy, those are just the facts of life.

But here comes Biden saying, “not so fast.” Maybe it is possible to bring back good-paying blue collar (and pink collar) jobs that don’t require much postsecondary education. He made that claim as well last week, saying, “nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. Seventy-five percent don’t require an associate degree.”

So which of his statements is true? Is it the case that twelve years of education are no longer enough, and that everyone should obtain another two years of college on top? Or is it the case that, with enough federal leadership and determination, we can bring back or create millions of jobs that pay well and require only a high school diploma? 

It’s not just new infrastructure jobs that Biden is talking about. He is also pushing to raise the minimum wage, if not for everyone, then at least for child care workers. He also promises to support low-wage workers by expanding the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, not to mention free preschool, more generous supports for child care, and the rest of the blizzard of safety-net and welfare-state benefits he is proposing.

Biden wants to make it possible to live a decent life in America without much, if any, higher education. And perhaps we should welcome such a call. It’s not like today’s K–12 system is getting anywhere close to preparing all students to succeed in postsecondary education. It’s not even getting half of students to that mark. In fact, that’s the most problematic part, among many, of Biden’s call to make community college free: It misdiagnoses the reason why so few young Americans complete programs at those institutions. Sure, more would enter and remain and probably graduate if there were no tuition. But the major reason by far that so many teenagers don’t matriculate at community college, or enroll but then drop out, is that they lack the reading, writing, and mathematics skills to succeed. College, community or otherwise, just isn’t a good option for young people whose academic skills are at a middle school level.

As a committed education reformer, I wish Biden would focus more on K–12 reboots, especially in reimagining how high schools might get many more students to college readiness levels by the end of twelfth grade, as well as giving many more students a chance to get started on serious career tech and apprenticeship programs before they graduate. Boosting the percentage of students who leave high school with the skills to succeed in some sort of postsecondary program should remain a key priority for education policy and practice in the years ahead.

But we should also take some cues from Biden and stop denigrating the straight-into-the-workforce pathway. As we were reminded over the past year, so-called “low-skill” jobs are critical to our society. And they can be their own form of postsecondary education, as young people gain on-the-job skills that will lead to better wages and more opportunities going forward. Such opportunities might even include college—down the road, when some people might be more prepared to make the most of it. So let’s start showing more respect for low-wage work, and celebrate moves to supplement those wages to help people live better lives, too.

Can parent choice survive the cancel culture that is becoming ever more prevalent on both the political left and political right? What happens when the principles of diversity and choice in schools conflict with either the left’s or the right’s firm view of truth and falsehoods? How much leeway should states provide schools of choice in how they teach the sensitive subjects of history, civics, and citizenship? Such questions are playing out in real time in states and communities across the country. How these are resolved will have a profound effect on the future of school choice in America.

Fordham’s Robert Pondiscio captured the arguments aimed at educators on the left in his piece “I believe “antiracism” is misguided. Can I still teach Black Children.” Pondiscio concludes it with the question, “What beliefs are disqualifying?” Demands from the left for obeisance to certain beliefs are not new, but they are more vicious and more easily transmitted through social media. For years, school choice supporters have faced criticism that providing more choice for parents would trigger the emergence of “witchcraft schools,” “Klan schools,” or other extremist forms of education though of course none of that has come to pass. 

Where I sit and work in Idaho, the extreme right is now using these same tactics to cancel schools and educators they perceive as pushing “political indoctrination” based on concepts espoused in “critical race theory”—even as it means disqualifying schools of choice and the decisions made by parents for their children. 

An Idaho group called the Freedom Foundation took inspiration from a Newsweek article that called for banning critical race theory. Building on model legislation advocated by Stanley Kurtz that at least seven other states introduced around the same time in April, Idaho House members introduced HB377. As originally drafted and submitted to the House, it called for those teachers and schools challenged by a “successful claimant” for teaching “social concepts such as critical race theory” to be fined up to $5,000 and risk losing state funding for their school. The bill that ultimately passed the House and Senate, and was signed into law last week by Governor Brad Little, was significantly modified and tempered with the most punitive remedies removed.

But even so, Governor Little saw the need to state the following in his transmittal letter on HB377 to the Idaho Speaker of the House:

I agree that Idaho public schools and higher education institutions should adhere to the principles of equality, freedom of expression, and respect for all. However, the claim that there is widespread, systemic indoctrination occurring in Idaho classrooms is a serious allegation. Most worryingly, it undermines popular support for public education in Idaho.

Yet, the passage of the law hasn’t stopped the Freedom Foundation from calling out a Boise-based public charter school whose students are mostly needy and non-white and tagging it as a proponent of “critical race theory”—and thus a potential violator of students’ “ideological freedoms.” (See offending second grade art here.) The school was singled out because the Freedom Foundation needed an example to show supporters and critics alike that there are in fact public schools in Idaho seeking to “indoctrinate” young children into the beliefs promoted by critical race theory. 

In a touch of irony—or bad luck, depending on one’s perspective—a Freedom Foundation staffer had a child who attended the “offending school” for eighteen months before Covid-19 shut it down to in-person learning. The staffer had never raised problems with how the school taught its students, nor had anyone else connected to the school for that matter, until the debate around HB377 exploded in April. In fact, just a year ago, the Freedom Foundation staffer was arguing publicly that a weighted student lottery bill being debated by the legislature would result in his child losing his spot in the school at which he and his wife “were elated” to have their child enrolled. A year later, this same charter school has become the focus of the Freedom Foundation’s well-constructed social media machine, and is now the target of “Fighting Woke Classrooms in Idaho.”

I’m a long-time advocate for parent choice in education, and a supporter of the public charter school that’s come under the Freedom Foundation’s scrutiny. So I have found the reaction of the school’s parents to fight back and rally around its 333 students, its leaders, and its teachers most encouraging. Parents love the school. They enroll their children in the school because they believe the school is working for them. What’s more, the school delivers academically for its students, and has a student waitlist.

Nationally, Neal McCluskey at Cato has written smartly about the need to allow schools of choice to be different even when those differences might offend one side or the other of a contentious issue. “Freedom and equality require school choice,” he says. “Quite simply, no single school can treat all, diverse people equally. One school cannot have, say, both uniforms and full student freedom of expression, or teach comprehensive sex ed and abstinence-only.”

So can parent and school choice survive “cancel culture”? All I know for sure is that there are a lot of parents hoping that their schools of choice, and the teachers working in them, can weather the latest versions of America’s culture wars. Needy families and children in both red and blue states are depending on it.

Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which has asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?” Click here to learn more, including how to participate yourself.

This fall, most students will be returning to full-time, in-person instruction after one of the most disrupted years of their lives. All students will be coming back with varying degrees of adverse experiences. Some may have lost loved ones, had a parent lose their job, seen a parent go through illness, or even been sick themselves. And all students will have experienced a disruption to what their “norm” was prior to Covid-19.

Though the data are still being gathered on the exact mental health toll the pandemic has taken on children and adolescents, both the initial numbers and anecdotal experience suggest a significant impact. A recent CDC report found that pediatric emergency department visits for mental health from March 2020 to October 2020 increased over their 2019 comparisons by 24 percent for children ages five to eleven and 31 percent for adolescents ages twelve to seventeen. This comes at the same time that overall emergency visits for this same population during the same time period were down by 43 percent.

Schools, school leaders, and teachers are going to return to an environment they have never seen before. A significant emphasis has been placed on trying to figure out how to mitigate learning loss, but schools must remember that they can’t begin to mitigate that loss until they help students stabilize their mental health.

Mental health options for schools to consider

A strong mental health program should offer a diverse array of services and be tied into every aspect of the school day. As schools prepare for students to return, they should consider mental health services outside the traditional one-on-one counseling most of us think of when discussing mental health. A few specific considerations are listed below.

Safety planning for suicide prevention. Evidence on youth suicide rates during the pandemic is still mostly anecdotal, but suicide was the second-leading cause of death among adolescents before the virus hit. Schools can address this need by ensuring that they have a strong process in place for identifying and evaluating students for suicide or self-harm risk and for working with them and their families to create and implement a safety plan when a risk is found.

To correctly identify students who are at-risk for suicide, schools must do comprehensive training for all staff members—not just teachers—on how to look for risk signs and what to do if they find them. This training should take place during summer professional development, but it should also be an ongoing topic throughout the year.

Once a staff member has identified a student who they believe may be at risk, they must know exactly what to do and where to take them for an evaluation. Schools should have a set process to evaluate student risk and a clear plan of what to do if the student is an immediate risk to themself or others, such as going to the hospital immediately, or is not a current active risk but may be at some point, like creating a safety plan.

A good safety plan should help students and the people around them identify potential triggers for self-harming behavior and have places to go, people to speak to, and emergency numbers to call if a student feels unsafe. Every school should have a template for a safety plan. Even if schools don’t have mental health professionals on staff, they should still have a concrete safety planning process in place, and all staff should be able to confidently discuss it with a student.

In preparation for a return in the fall, all schools should take time this summer to review their plans and update them to reflect the change coming—for example, how to provide support to students who may need to remain virtual because of health concerns.

Group therapy. Well-done groups are one of the most effective therapeutic techniques for schools. They not only help students address common mental health concerns, but also facilitate interpersonal social-emotional growth. From an organizational perspective, groups allow one mental health professional to serve multiple students in a shorter amount of time. As schools get ready to transition back to more traditional classroom learning, they should consider where and how to integrate groups into the school day.

After having experienced similar levels of life disruption caused by virtual or hybrid learning, many students will return with shared mental health concerns. Potential Covid-related group topics include grief for students who have lost family and friends to the pandemic, germaphobia and compulsive tendencies for students who have internalized hand washing and mask wearing to the extreme, and sensory issues for students who are struggling to return to large and busy classrooms after potentially more than a year of learning individually in their rooms.

One way schools can consider adding groups into the school day is by integrating them as a class during traditional elective time. This can be an opt-in choice for families who already know their students need this support or a recommendation from the school after an initial evaluation. Another option for schools with flexibility in the schedule before or after school would be to add optional groups on site during those times for families who opt in. They should also be mindful of the quality of the provider. This is important to all mental health services, but is particularly essential in groups. While a well-run group is extremely effective, a poorly run one can be ineffective or harmful.

Schools with highly qualified mental health staff can wrap this into their normal work. But those without these faculty in place should consider using federal pandemic aid dollars to hire strong mental health professionals to run these groups. As they can serve multiple students at one time, this can be both a strong therapeutic option, and a cost-effective one.

Coping skills for overstimulated students. When students return in the fall, some will not have been in a regular classroom for more than a year. Their daily routine went from one that was surrounded by people, activity, and sensory overload to one that was predominantly just their families. Going back will be over-stimulating for many.

Schools should consider having mental health professionals in place to support these students, as well as having the tangible tools to help them cope on campus. Some examples are headphones, music options, and systems in place that allow students to take a break from excessively stimulating environments, such as quiet rooms.

For students who display more severe symptoms, individual plans should be created to help them ease back into the school environment. These services are best provided by a qualified mental health professional, for which schools can use stimulus funds.

Universal screening tool. We can’t know students’ current ability or what they need without assessing them. Mental health is no different. All schools should have a universal screening tool in place that can evaluate all students before or immediately after the beginning of the year for whether they require these services.

Keep in mind, however, that these screening tools can do more harm than good if schools do not follow up with services. If a screening shows that a student needs support for depression or anxiety, for example, but the school does not then provide that service, the student learns that being vulnerable and asking for mental health support does not mean that that support will come.

Many states have a universal screener recommended by their department of education, but if your state does not, some examples include The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire or The BASC-3. Each school should customize the screener to their particular needs and have a plan and the resources in place to address any needs that are discovered. Federal aid dollars can be used both for the development of this tool and for the mental health professionals required to provide the services needed.

Students of Concern team. Although a universal screening tool is helpful in identifying issues upfront, ongoing observation and assessment are needed to both ensure strong treatment is occurring and to identify students whose needs did not appear on the initial screening. A weekly Students of Concern (SOC) team meeting can be an effective way to address these concerns. These are holistic groups made up of experts in students’ academic, physical health, mental health, behavioral, special education, and any other unique school needs. They should meet weekly, with a plan for which students to discuss and evaluate. Each team member should leave these meetings with concrete follow-up assignments designed to meet each student’s unique needs. And any staff member, student, or parent should be able to refer a student to the team for consideration.

This approach can help ensure that the students with the highest needs are consistently being supported and that their support plan evolves as their needs do. Schools can consider using federal stimulus funds for support staff members to ensure teams’ goals are met.

Mental health support for staff. Just as students have experienced a drastic change in the school environment, so too have school staff members. One of the greatest determinants of a student’s classroom success is the strength of the teacher. As such, schools should consider what supports they can put in for educators. Weekly or biweekly mental health check-ins for staff can provide a huge benefit. For schools that already have mental health professionally, if these individuals have set strong boundaries with their colleagues, they can be used to support the staff. For schools without this resource, consider using federal relief dollars to hire contract mental health professionals for this purpose.

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As with all mental health, it is important to remember that the quality of the provider is critical to the well-being of students. When hiring, schools should be sure to find licensed professionals and check with state accreditation boards to ensure candidates are in good standing. Possible provider types include licensed psychologists, licensed clinical social workers (LCSW), licensed master social workers (LMSW), and licensed professional counselors (LPC). Keep in mind, too, that school mental health is its own subset of mental health, and not all individuals are prepared for what it requires.

Schools should also be clear about the expectations for student services and any limitations they would put in place—for example, that students not be pulled from core classes. For schools considering partnering with outside providers, particularly companies as opposed to individuals, clarify who will be providing services to students. Many behavioral health companies have a licensed professional to do the initial assessments, but then use unlicensed individuals to implement the actual therapeutic plans. There are certainly times where this could be effective, but mental health can be complex, and the vast majority of services should be provided by licensed professionals.

Why these programs are so important, and how to fund them

Schools have long needed comprehensive mental health supports for students and staff. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, one in five children and adolescents experience a mental health problem during their school years.

At the most basic level, the best teacher in the world cannot effectively reach a student who is having a mental health crisis. For a long time, we have expected teachers to handle the mental health issues of students in their class in addition to teaching. We need to recognize that mental health is no different than physical health in that they are both real needs that require specially trained professionals to address—and that when left untreated, they can significantly inhibit the ability of a student to learn. Classroom teachers can provide some basic mental health support like comforting a student who is upset. However, asking teachers to run a classroom with students who have untreated mental health issues or asking them to figure out how to treat them is different. The fact that mental health issues are often more difficult to see, combined with years of mental health stigmatism, has led to these issues being largely ignored in education. However, recent efforts to advance the cause of mental health access for students have caused many schools to rethink their approach.

While some schools have found ways to add the required resources through complicated funding and staffing structures, others have struggled to get even one mental health professional on campus. With the sudden influx of federal Covid-19 relief funds, the financial barriers to providing these services in schools are disappearing, at least temporarily. As schools head into summer planning, they should be considering how and where to add these services—and even more importantly, how to ensure the long-term sustainability of funding that will let them remain in place after the federal relief dollars expire.

Funding for the long-term

The simplest and most effective way to provide comprehensive mental health services on campus is for schools to hire mental health professionals on staff. Many schools employ counselors—but they are often tasked with duties such as scheduling and college admissions. The best practice for schools is to have mental health professionals that are completely and singularly focused on providing mental health services to students. These individuals should be specially licensed. Some examples include licensed social workers (master’s or clinical), licensed professional counselor, or licensed psychologists. The current recommended ratio is one mental health professional for every 250 students. But with the increased needs in the wake of COVID-19, that may not be enough. While some schools already employ mental health professionals, others have not been able to make that possible due to budgetary constraints. Now, at least in the short term, thanks to three separate rounds of federal Covid relief funds, schools have an opportunity to hire these professionals.

While the best solution would be to simply add these individuals to staff, some schools and districts may run into concerns about the number of allowable full-time employees (FTEs) or concerns over what to do when the funding ends. For these schools, a good solution would be to contract with individual mental health professionals. Contractors allow schools the benefit of mental health support while not requiring the same resources as FTEs. In addition, many states may experience a talent pipeline issue because of a shortage of school-specialized mental health professionals combined with the increased demand for their services. Using contactors allows one individual to service multiple schools, slightly mitigating the talent pipeline concern. Contractors can also be useful if the school wants to provide a specialized type of mental health support, such as addiction, LGBT-related issues, family therapy, or a specialization in complex trauma. For these specializations, there may not be a large enough student population in need to justify employing a full-time specialist, but it may make sense for a school to contract for a limited number of hours.

While the federal Covid-19 relief funds can provide immediate resources to add these services, many schools may rightly be concerned about how to maintain this level of mental health access in the long term. The good news is that Obama-era changes to federal Medicaid guidelines opened up a potential pathway for long-term funding of these services. In 2014, Medicaid released updated guidelines known as the Free Care Reversal Policy that clarified that states can allow schools to bill Medicaid for mental health services for all students—not just those with IEPs, which is how Medicaid had previously functioned. This pathway has the potential to provide long-term sustainable funding for schools to provide these mental health services.

However, each state must go through a process to authorize this change, and to date, only thirteen have. If your school is in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, or South Carolina, your state has taken steps to adopt this policy; Georgia and Oregon have begun the process and are waiting on approval. If you are in one of these states and have a Medicaid-eligible population, this funding method is open to you. Each of these states has its own unique rules and requirements, so if you have not as yet begun billing Medicaid this way, you should reach out to your state department of education for support. If you are in one of these states and are not yet set-up for this, your federal Covid-19 relief dollars could be used to help you do this long-term by purchasing billing software or hiring staff that can be paid for by these federal funds until the Medicaid reimbursement can be received.

In states that have not made this policy shift, schools should consider lobbying their departments of education (in conjunction with the entity that oversees Medicaid in their state) to work to implement the Free Care Reversal Policy and use federal Covid-19 relief dollars to support that work. Helpful resources for this can be found at the Healthy Students, Promising Futures Learning Collaborative. Fully implementing this policy will allow schools to continue providing these services long after the federal Covid-19 funds run out.

Access to mental health services is critical to student success in school. With students returning after a year of disruption, these services are going to be more important than ever. Fortunately, the federal Covid-19 relief dollars can provide the funding for those resources in the short term. And if used correctly, they also have the potential to provide sustainable funding through the Medicaid Free Care Reversal Policy. If this moment is leveraged well, it can be a profound turning point for mental health access in schools.

Since 1997, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has tested students around the globe every three years to determine the educational status of fifteen-year-old students in dozens of countries and economic regions that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). PISA assesses not only the core subjects of reading, math, and science, but also areas such as creative problem solving and “global competence.” In that time, PISA has become an international reference for comparing quality, equity, and efficiency in learning outcomes within and across countries. It has also provided policymakers with invaluable statistical evidence on a wide range of education issues.

For the 2018 administration of the test, PISA included a “growth mindset” instrument. Students who have this mindset believe that intelligence is malleable based on things like effort and the willingness to explore new ways to learn, as opposed to being fixed. PISA researchers have long sought to debunk this fixed mindset, but this was the first systematic attempt to study it at scale. And the scale was pretty huge—surveying some 600,000 students in seventy-eight countries and economies across the world.

The study found that almost two out of three students who participated in PISA demonstrated a growth mindset. And that after controlling for students’ and schools’ socioeconomic differences, students with a strong growth mindset scored significantly higher on all subjects—31.5 points higher in reading on a 100 point scale, 27 points in science, and 23 points in math—compared with students who believed their intelligence was fixed. Across thirty-nine countries and economies, more girls had a growth mindset than boys, and girls got a larger boost in academic performance from having it.

However, the cultural differences between some countries were stark. In Estonia, Denmark, and Germany, for example, at least three-quarters of students reported having a growth mindset. And Estonia topped OECD countries on PISA overall in 2018. The performance gaps in reading were also the widest in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, where 70 percent of students demonstrated a growth mindset. Students with a growth mindset in these countries scored around 60 points higher in reading than their counterparts. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of students in the Philippines, Panama, Indonesia, Kosovo, and the Republic of North Macedonia agreed with the fixed mindset statement “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.”

But that pattern was not universal. In a number of East Asian countries—such as Japan, Korea, and the Macao economic region of China—growth mindsets were positively associated with academic performance, but far more weakly than in the average OECD country. By contrast, growth mindsets and reading performance were entirely unrelated in Hong Kong, and even negatively associated in the so-called B-S-J-Z economic region of China.

The study also discussed three instructional practices related to students’ growth mindsets. Those who perceived that their teachers adapted lessons to the class’s needs and knowledge were 3.5 percentage points more likely to have a growth mindset than their peers. Teachers who reported giving feedback to students—specifically regarding their strengths and areas of possible improvement—exhibited a modest positive effect on moderately good readers in terms of instilling a growth mindset in them. But they had no effect on top readers, and their lowest-tier readers were actually more likely to have a fixed and negative mindset about their reading ability.

Teacher support proved the most closely connected to both students’ mindsets and their performance. Students with supportive teachers—that is, those who show interest in every student learning and a willingness to provide extra help and explanation until a student understands—were 4 percentage points more likely to have a growth mindset than those without a supportive instructor. In the United States, for example, students with a growth mindset outperformed those with a fixed mindset by 48 points in reading when they had low teacher support, but by 72 points when they had supportive teachers.

The picture drawn by these data is important and intriguing, but much more is required. Could systematic efforts to help build growth mindsets in students—especially via specific teaching practices—help increase student achievement? It’s an important question, with most OECD countries having seen virtually no improvement in the performance of their students since PISA was first conducted in 2000. PISA has big plans for subsequent research on the topic—as soon as Covid-delayed testing resumes in 2022.

SOURCE: “Sky’s the limit: Growth mindset, students, and schools in PISA,” OECD (April 2021).

A recent study uses data from math and reading tests conducted between 1954 and 2007 to explore long-term trends in American students’ achievement. More specifically, it analyzes data from four sources—the Long-Term Trend (LTT), the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PERLS), and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Overall, the results suggest that achievement has increased in both reading and math. But one of the big stories is how much the story depends on the test. For example, both NAEP and TIMMS suggest that achievement in math has increased by roughly a quarter of a standard deviation per decade. Yet LTT finds an increase of just 0.15 standard deviations per decade, and PISA finds that math achievement declined by roughly a tenth of a standard deviation. Similarly, NAEP and PERLS suggest increases in reading achievement of nearly a tenth of a standard deviation per decade, LTT shows an increase of just 0.03 standard deviations per decade, and PISA again suggests a decline of -0.02 standard deviations per decade. (Keep in mind that a single standard deviation amounts to about 15 IQ points or three grade levels, meaning we’ve boosted math achievement by about three grade levels in the past half century according to the most optimistic estimates.)

Still, some patterns do seem to be relatively consistent across tests. For example, relative to White students, Black, Hispanic, and Asian students seem to have gained about a tenth of a standard deviation per decade (or about one quarter of a grade level). And low-income students seem to be catching up in elementary school. Yet for every subgroup except Asians, these gains are actually reversed by the end of high school. In other words, the gap between rich and poor students who are entering the workforce or moving on to college seems to be increasing.

Finally, progress in math may have slowed for students born after 1990 while progress in reading has accelerated, but the larger story seems to be that the overall rate of change has remained fairly steady over the past half century “undisturbed by the many apparent perturbations that might have disrupted the learning process.”

So what’s going on?

According to the authors, the results are broadly consistent with the long-term rise in average IQ scores, which have increased by roughly 3 points per decade over the last 100 years, both worldwide and within the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, that increase is driven by “fluid reasoning” (or the ability to analyze abstract relationships) rather than “crystallized knowledge” of the empirical world. In other words, we really do seem to be getting better at subjects like math—or at least, abstract math—but we aren’t learning that much more history, geography, and science facts.

Nor are we improving at the kind of skills assessed by PISA, which somewhat uniquely focuses on “an individual’s capacity to identify and understand the role that mathematics plays in the world,” as opposed to the kind of math that’s typically taught in school.

According to the authors, the long-term divergence between fluid reasoning and crystalized knowledge—and thus, between abstract math and reading—is most likely due to “broad changes in nutrition, reduction in contagious diseases, and greater protection against environmental risks”—all of which “may enhance the brain’s analytical capacities during prenatal and infant stages of the life cycle,” according to prior research.

In contrast, they argue that the relative gains made by minority students are more likely due to changes in education and family structure. For example, Black and Hispanic students are from families that are “increasingly well educated, earn higher incomes, and have fewer children, all of which correlate with higher achievement levels,” while “the increasingly large investments that Asian American families make in their children’s education very likely account for the group’s more rapid rate of growth.”

As the authors note, many education programs that seek to equalize opportunity have focused on preschool and elementary education, so it makes sense that poor kids are seeing gains in elementary school. It follows that the reformers behind those programs should think harder and more often about how to help poor kids in middle school and high school.

SOURCE: M. Danish Shakeel and Paul E. Peterson, “A Half Century of Progress in U. S. Student Achievement: Ethnic and SES Differences; Agency and Flynn Effects,” The Annenberg Institute at Brown University (April 2021).

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn, and David Griffith discuss President Biden’s proposal for universal preschool. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how school board size affects charter schooling and teacher salaries.

Amber's Research Minute

Ying Shi and John D. Singleton, "School Boards and Education Production: Evidence from Randomized Ballot Order," retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (April 2021).

If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a rating and review - we'd love to hear what you think! The Education Gadfly Show is available on all major podcast platforms.

Cheers

• Iowa’s governor will soon sign a bill that will make charter school expansion easier. —Des Moines Register
• Instead of expanding pre-K, Biden’s administration should give parents more power over their children’s education by giving them more money. —David Brooks
• Philadelphia’s Mastery Charter network is returning to in-person learning while most of the high schoolers in the district stay remote. —WHYY
• “McConnell, GOP urge education department to resist ‘activist indoctrination’ in curriculum.” —US News
• The late Eli Broad had a remarkable impact on education in San Diego and across California, from supporting charter schools to funding scholarships. —Times of San Diego
• One of the greatest contributions of the late Robert Slavin was his commitment to scientific evidence to figure out what works in education. —Hechinger Report

Jeers

• “Extend the school year? Teachers say no, parents say meh. LAUSD retreats from its plan.” —Los Angeles Times
• A guest essayist in the New York Times is worried about a tiny percentage of upper-middle-class kids who are struggling because of “too much pressure to succeed in school,” even though this is not a problem for the vast majority of children. —New York Times
• “Educators at High Tech High’s schools formed a union affiliated with the California Teachers Association.” —San Diego News
• "Mom says Rochester school board called her work after remote learning comments on social media.” —Fox 2 Detroit
• The lack of normal schooling is negatively affecting the workforce participation of mothers. —New York Times

• The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a First Amendment case about whether schools can police student’s off-campus speech. —EdNext
• Howard Husock’s paper argues for breaking up urban school districts to improve management and loosen the hold teachers unions have on school boards. —AEI
• Virginia seemed to backtrack on revisions to math education that may have eliminate advanced classes after it was accused of lowering the ceiling in the name of equity. —Washington Post
• Despite Biden’s promises, unions influenced federal policies and blocked many students from returning to normal, in-person schooling. —WSJ
• The surge of wokeness in the Democratic Party and its opposition to gifted and talented education in the name of equity is weakening its appeal to voters. —Ross Douthat
• “Mall owners find charter schools make good tenants in many spaces left empty by departing big-box retailers.” —WSJ
• Conservatives are fighting to prevent critical race theory from being taught in classrooms, believing it’s divisiveness disguised as equity. —Washington Post