The Education Gadfly Weekly

Does any field have a weaker grasp of its own history than education?

Last week, I hosted a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on “Bringing High Expectations Back to Education.” The event, which can be viewed on YouTube, was kicked off by a presentation by Steven Wilson, an ed reform fixture who has a book coming out on the subject. Listening to his talk, I found myself feeling frustrated, even infuriated: Efforts to raise rigor and expectations in education have consistently faced strident opposition.

Wilson cited a litany of disheartening examples stretching back more than a century of education experts making a virtue of holding children to low expectations for their putative benefit: When the “Committee of Ten” appointed by the National Education Association in 1892 proposed a liberal arts education for all American high school students, for example, G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist and educator rejected the idea, claiming most students were part of a “great army of incapables.” Half a century later, the “life adjustment” education movement of the 1940s, asserted that the majority of high school students were not college-bound and should therefore focus on practical skills like health and hygiene, homemaking, or vocational training, rather than rigorous academics.

The occasion for Wilson’s talk and subsequent panel discussion, which was co-hosted by Fordham and the Progressive Policy Institute, was the latest turn of this depressing wheel. In the early years of our own century, a bracing movement arose among a generation of charter school founders and leaders who insisted low student achievement, particularly for minority children, must not be abided, and placed the onus on themselves and others to do whatever it takes to help all children succeed academically. The schools they founded and led were informally dubbed “No Excuses“ schools, and it meant exactly that: External factors like poverty, family background, or community challenges were no excuse for poor student achievement. Children do not fail. Adults fail children.

Because we have failed to learn the lessons of education’s history, there has been a fierce and counterproductive backlash to no excuses schools, stemming from the idea that student discipline and orderly classrooms are culturally insensitive, particularly when imposed on students of color; they perpetuate a “school-to-prison pipeline” rather than a path to college and lives of upward mobility. This critique drove the rise of social justice education, with its focus on reducing racial harm while functionally neglecting academic instruction and enshrining low expectations. Its proponents may insist there is no conflict between student achievement and “antiracist” pedagogy, but Wilson’s presentation, based on his forthcoming book, The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, tells a different and devastating story. It’s worth watching in full and with sober reflection.

Wilson is a walking symbol of the backlash. He was dismissed in 2020 from the Ascend charter school network, which he founded and led to remarkable success, after writing a blog post that dared to critique the rise of social justice and antiracist education and its anti-intellectual notions, including how “reverence for the written word” (to cite but one example) is somehow indicative of “white supremacy culture.” His firing, and the silencing of similar dissenting voices in the education sector, underscores the fear of challenging these ideas that has marked the last several years, even when it became clear that we are demonstrably failing the very children we purport to champion.

As Wilson’s fellow panelists at the AEI event noted, the insidiousness of this ideology lies in its control of language and its ability to co-opt terms like “no excuses.” This phrase, coined as a cri de couer to hold educators accountable for student success, has been twisted to connote a misappropriation of authority on the part of adults. Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion and our foremost advocate for effective teaching practices, observed, “To care about someone is to have high expectations for them.” Yet, this fundamental truth has been lost in the fog of therapeutic interventions and misplaced racial guilt. Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, cofounder of Seton Education Partners, which operates charter and Catholic schools in low-income communities in three states, emphasized that parents in her network’s schools overwhelmingly support rigorous academic instruction over “antiracist” education. She cited a colleague who immigrated from Panama and raised her children in the Bronx, who frequently states, “Literacy is justice. Numeracy is justice.” Just so.

One hopes that Wilson’s forthcoming book will serve as a much-needed wake-up call. As he powerfully argued, social justice education “is not the long-awaited correction to America’s procession of exclusionary, anti-intellectual school reforms. It is its apotheosis. It will leave the students it aims to help less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable.” There should be, by now, recognition, even among those who have embraced the social justice agenda, that it’s not working. The post-pandemic reality of declining test scores and escalating behavioral problems in once high-flying schools underscores the urgency of returning to what works.

I was not alone in my frustration. Lemov described a high-performing school that he has visited many times over the years—the kind of school “that parents could send their kids and know they would be safe, their learning time respected, and where their education would be taken very seriously.” Sitting three feet from Doug onstage, I could see his eyes filling with tears as he described the “utter chaos” he witnessed on his most recent visit last month. The head of the school told Lemov they weren’t sure adults should be telling young people what to do. “Have we gotten to a place where we no longer believe that it is an adult’s role to shape a student’s experience in life?” he asked. His hosts insisted they were “busy dismantling systems of oppression” in the school.

“My take was, ‘Whatever systems of oppression you think you’re dismantling, they’re a lot less oppressive than the chaos that’s going on in the school right now,” Lemov concluded. “And you should reassemble them as quickly as you can.’”

Perhaps you’ve been wondering why many recent articles, predictions, and speculations about Trump’s plans for the U.S. Department of Education focus on its abolition, while others predict that it will be forcefully deployed to reshape what schools teach.

Consider the Washington Post’s excellent education reporter Laura Meckler, writing on November 12:

President-elect Donald Trump has promised sweeping changes to federal agencies, but there’s one he wants to do away with altogether: the Department of Education.

And here’s Forbes on November 20, announcing the choice of Linda McMahon to be education secretary:

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Linda McMahon—one of his top donors, a former cabinet member and wife of billionaire former WWE chair Vince McMahon—to lead the federal Department of Education, an agency he has repeatedly vowed to shutter in favor of relegating all educational responsibility to individual states in his second term.

But here’s Meckler again, just five days later on November 17:

…while his promise to shut down the Department of Education has drawn enormous attention, experts in both parties say this is not likely to have sufficient support. A more likely outcome is Trump using the department to press a conservative worldview.

And here’s PBS on November 15:

Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports....

What’s going on here? Is the federal role in education slated for elimination or expansion? Is McMahon’s mandate getting rid of her agency or empowering it?

There’s no way to be sure today—and I’m not the first to ponder this seeming paradox. But there’s ample reason to be unsure, and that’s because the Trump world has long sent exceedingly mixed messages when it comes to K–12 education and the federal role therein.

One clear message is that education belongs to the states, localities, and parents—and Washington should get out of the way. There’s certainly no need for an Education Department if the federal role is minimal or even nonexistent.

But another view—and faction—holds that Uncle Sam should require schools to do the right thing and prevent them from doing wrong things, with those things being decided by Trump’s acolytes.

You’ll find both views—and the resulting mixed messaging—in both the Republican platform and Project 2025.

The 2024 platform, for instance, says this:

We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.

But it also says this:

Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.

Project 2025’s education chapter, written by the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, says this:

Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated... The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.

But it also says this:

No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate.

A sage veteran of earlier Republican administrations terms this a tug-of-war between the “decentralizers” and the “centralizers.”

It’s not limited to education, of course. The libertarian (or decentralizing) strand within conservatism has always wanted as little government as possible, along with minimal regulation and low taxes. What one might call the “traditionalist” strand has long sought to deploy government power to ensure people behave properly and be prevented from doing things regarded as immoral, sacrilegious, or unpatriotic. They can’t help but be centralizers!

Decentralizers have pushed in the past to scrap the department, to “voucherize” Title I, and to “block grant” just about everything else, as well as to rescind a slew of regulations and rein in the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Centralizers are often found in Democratic administrations—consider the strings President Barack Obama attached to Race to the Top, as well as sundry Biden-era regulations involving gender and school discipline. But the centralizing impulse also runs deeper than you might think among conservatives, sometimes—this may be counterintuitive—in the form of mandating school choice and parental rights.

The Project 2025 chapter on education, for instance, recommends a host of legislative and regulatory moves that would ensure parental rights and role in their children’s education and provide school choice within existing federal programs. Such recommendations parallel bills that GOP members of Congress have introduced to expand federal tax credits for education, extend “education savings account” options, and enact a “parents’ bill of rights.”

Trump’s choice of Linda McMahon as Education Secretary—Mike Petrilli has called this her “consolation prize” for not being given the Commerce Department—may simply signal that education, for now, will be a policy backwater.

While she’s a long-time supporter of charters and choice, it’s a little difficult to picture her doing battle over bathrooms. She’ll likely go through the motions of trying to get her department abolished—as Terrel Bell did, with no success, back in the early Reagan years—but neither she nor anyone else is likely to get Congressional assent to repealing the agency’s innumerable spending programs nor its protections for kids with disabilities.

Does that mean in the end, that little will change?

Perhaps. But remember, too, the very last act of the previous Trump administration in the realm of education: releasing the report of the “1776 Commission ,” which sought to refute the then-inflammatory “1619 Project” and combat “identity politics” by proffering its own view of U.S. history. It contained this passage regarding the duty of school and educators:

States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.

I agree with that statement myself, as do many Americans, and I note that it doesn’t call for the federal government to get involved with curricular disputes. But I wouldn’t count on the team that will take over the White House on January 20 to be equally restrained.

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

An increasing number of districts across America are rightly procuring so-called high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) for use in their schools. These English language arts and math materials meet grade-level state standards for skills and knowledge and are thus rated “green” (fully meets expectations) by EdReports. While these materials vary greatly in the quality of included texts or support of conceptual mathematical reasoning, these materials are unquestionably an improvement on the plethora of home-grown curricula. They are vastly preferable to teachers acting as instructional DJs, spending hours a week concocting idiosyncratic playlists of instructional materials. When teachers use HQIM effectively and continuously—as they did back in 2016 in Duval County, Florida, or recently in Caesar Rodney, Delaware—students show major learning gains.

But overall, results have been modest. In math, researchers have found no overall gains when districts adopted HQIM materials. Evidence of major outcomes in ELA are also lacking: Louisiana and Tennessee, which lead the nation in the adoption of HQIM, show mixed NAEP results. Why aren’t there stronger positive outcomes? Because most teachers simply don’t use the new materials for most instructional purposes. They might pull a quiz or a homework assignment from the curriculum, but when it comes to daily instruction, they water it down, mix it with stuff from the internet, or skim over material by giving students few opportunities to grapple with the rigorous content.

Telling teachers to just do it—teach the darn curriculum—isn’t working. To address the situation, school districts are spending some $18,000 per teacher per year on professional learning, an increasing portion of which goes to curriculum-related instruction. The plausible idea is that if teachers are given adequate support to understand the new materials and present them effectively, resistance to using them will diminish.

There isn’t much strong research on the impact of this type of professional learning. One rigorous study shows a very modest effect, while a review that analyzed previous research found “small to moderate positive impacts.” This is because at the core of resistance is a mindset: Teachers don’t believe their students can manage the rigor of grade-level HQIM instruction—thus, the avoidance and watering down. The general response (especially from the publishers of these materials) has been frustration. Perhaps teachers don’t trust themselves to handle the material, or perhaps they don’t like the curriculum because they haven’t tried it (to paraphrase a British beer commercial from my youth)—or they just need more curriculum-integrated professional learning.

While there is surely some truth to these responses, I think they miss a key point—teachers are often behaving rationally. In 2022, 26 percent of eighth-graders performed at or above proficient on the NAEP in math, and 31 percent in ELA. While NAEP standards are more demanding than those in most states, what this means (conservatively) is that more than half of the students in an average American public school classroom lack grade-level skills and content knowledge. In the inner cities and many rural communities, that proportion is much higher: In the economically troubled city of Baltimore, where I live, the proficiency rate for eighth graders on the math NAEP in 2022 was 8 percent.

If you were a teacher faced with twenty-five thirteen-year-olds whose knowledge of math and ELA ranged from one to three years below grade level, would you readily teach materials that assumed grade-level competence?

School districts in Baltimore and across the country aren’t blind to this reality. For many years, they have tried to help underperforming students through remedial education that attempts to teach what wasn’t mastered in previous years. This effort has had various labels—for example, MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) or RTI (Response to Intervention). It usually involves grouping students into what is called Tier 2 or Tier 3 and then giving them various doses of remediation. There is no rigorous research that suggests this effort has succeeded at scale.

More recently, this approach has been adopted for the use of HQIM in the classroom (also called Tier 1 instruction). The idea, reasonable on its face, is that weaker students should be given extra time, usually through pulling them out of arts or even social studies courses, to master the materials.

Here is a quick sketch of how the approach works—in theory. Students take diagnostic assessments a week or two before the start of a new HQIM unit. In math, these test students’ mastery of the prerequisite skills that will make effective learning in the forthcoming unit possible. In ELA, the assessment will test for key vocabulary and background knowledge without which the forthcoming text(s) will be inaccessible. Then, the results are given to the Tier 2 teacher, who focuses on preparing the students with “just in time knowledge”—what students must know to successfully understand their upcoming Tier 1 HQIM unit.

But in practice, these efforts underdeliver. And that’s not simply due to the challenges of organizing the student groupings and the instructional differentiation; it’s because there simply aren’t effective assessments to do the job. A state test administered the previous year is largely useless (and most teachers are ignorant of how their students performed). Nationally normed tests such as i-Ready and MAP aren’t designed for educators to be able to translate results into curriculum content. A previous end-of-unit assessment (if the teacher even gave it) might work if the new skills and knowledge in each new curriculum build directly on what students had successfully learned in the previous unit. However, ELA units often introduce completely new subjects, and math curricula are full of skills that aren’t used in subsequent units and grades. The Tier 2 teacher is left trying to guess what to teach—and too often uses materials that aren’t even from the same curriculum as the Tier 1 instructor is using.

In short, there is too little connection between what students are being taught in Tier 2 instruction and what they need to know to be ready for Tier 1 HQIM material. Teachers and schools are rightly trying their best in adverse circumstances: In Houston, students are tested during their Tier 1 classes and then given appropriate Tier 2 teaching for the second part of the ninety minutes, an approach requiring extremely tight planning and many hours pre-analyzing every unit to design the tests and instruction. Superbly led districts and schools (regular and charter) create time for such analyses. But in most districts, Tier 1 instructors are given some exposure to a curriculum’s content and then told to differentiate their teaching on the fly, remediating while simultaneously teaching the grade-level material.

What teachers and students need is urgent action from the curriculum publishers (and AI-based providers such as Coursemojo and Brisk Teaching). They should be providing short, focused pre-unit diagnostics that are integrated with the most-used curriculum. These short quizzes will pinpoint the material Tier 2 instructors need to highlight. The bottom line: If Tier 2 classes across the United States were focused on teaching what students most need to know to access their forthcoming Tier 1 curriculum unit, Tier 1 teachers would rightly have more confidence that their students could manage Tier 1 HQIM. Instead of watering down that material, they could teach it, thus fulfilling the considerable promise of the new high-quality curriculum.

This won’t be a panacea. There’s no way to ensure that a child who is two years behind will be ready for next week’s grade-level instruction—a problem that goes back to the nation’s pre-K universe, with its uneven access and lack of quality control. But it is possible to give that child a chance. Currently, Tier 2 teachers are flying blind—wasting hundreds of instructional hours, unable to provide students with any chance of benefiting from HQIM. And Tier 1 instructors? Many will go on watering down those materials, knowing how few students are ready to learn rigorous, grade-level content.

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

Millions of American high school students annually participate in preparatory coursework intended to build and document their readiness for college, including Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and dual enrollment. Research generally shows a correlation between successful completion of this coursework and postsecondary success, but there are gaps in outcomes for certain students that have so far gone unexplained. A new study theorizes that student perceptions of readiness might play a role in boosting or decreasing the effects of college preparation work.

A group of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan recruited 339 first-year college students from across the country between September and November of 2022 via an online data collection platform. They focused specifically on students with an interest in STEM fields—such as healthcare, biomed, medicine, or physical, chemical, and biological sciences—due to recent increases in college-preparatory activities in these fields. The majority of students in the sample (56 percent) were first-generation college students. Thirty-nine percent were White, 33 percent were Black, and 29 percent were Hispanic. Fifty-four percent were female. The vast majority (71 percent) reported a household income lower than $75,000 per year. Individuals hailed from forty states and the District of Columbia. Although participants were accepted for the study regardless of their educational experiences prior to college, as part of the demographic data gathered students were asked about participation in AP and IB programs, as well as any dual-enrollment courses taken while in high school. Treated as a unit (as this report does), 58 percent of students in the sample reported either AP or IB participation, and 60 percent reported dual-enrollment participation. These are not mutually exclusive groups, but it is not noted how many students reported participation in both types of programs.

The survey administered by the researchers also asked about students’ experiences with several specific types of extracurricular STEM programs (science fairs, Math Olympics, Science Olympics, robotic clubs or competitions, and afterschool or summer-break STEM or health-related camps), as well as more general exposure to what are termed outreach and pathway programs (OPP). These include recruiting activities designed to introduce secondary students to the STEM and/or medical fields. Open-ended survey questions included details on programs experienced, the amount of time spent pursuing them, and particulars about the activities. Most importantly, all students were asked if they felt prepared for college—a simple yes/no question.

Approximately 84 percent of students in the sample responded that they felt prepared for college. The researchers found that, while neither race, ethnicity, income, nor first-generation status correlated with those perceptions, exposure to STEM while in high school did. Specifically, student participation in OPPs and dual enrollment were predictive of higher perceptions of college readiness, as opposed to AP/IB participation or no participation at all. Their predictive validity was almost exclusively driven by students who lived in low-income zip codes.

Digging deeper into OPP participation, a far less studied area of college preparation than the others due to its generally ad hoc and extracurricular nature, 279 students reported having had at least one OPP experience during high school, with 217 (78 percent) stating that they obtained at least one skill as a result of the experience. From the detailed responses, the researchers identified 206 “skills” and mapped them to researcher David Conley’s principles of college readiness (or “other” if they did not fit the predefined categories). Content knowledge (28 percent), learning skills/techniques (23 percent), and cognitive strategies (20 percent) were the most-common skills cited by OPP participants. (If you want detail, the report includes examples of student responses.)

The bottom line is that most first-year college students felt prepared for the labor ahead, but formal programs seemed to give students less (or little) of a boost of confidence than would be expected. Mechanisms are murky, given the limits of the data, and researchers spend more time speculating why AP/IB participation isn’t predictive of feelings of preparedness (suppositions include too few courses taken and/or courses completed without taking the final test) than why dual enrollment and OPPs are predictive. Dual enrollment is generally well-studied elsewhere in this regard, but OPP participation could be a relatively-unheralded gateway to helping high schoolers feel prepared for college. This would be good news indeed because OPPs offer a wider variety of activities with less formal structures than any of the other college-preparatory coursework noted. Sororities, governmental agencies, unions, employers, community organizations, and, of course, colleges themselves have all been active in bringing STEM (especially) outreach programming to students, generally after school or in the summer and often free of charge. This research would indicate that such efforts are having a surprisingly positive impact.

Of course, there’s no way to tell from this research whether the first-year college students were actually prepared to do well in higher education, regardless of their own perceptions thereto. Only by following them through college to observe class grades, test scores, GPA, persistence, and completion can we truly map the pathway from preparation to success.

SOURCE: Akshata R. Naik et al., “A preliminary study of educational experiences that promote perceptions of college readiness in individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds interested in pursuing a career in science, technology, engineering, math, or medicine (STEMM),” Frontiers in Education (September 2024).

California has a long history of attempting to reform Algebra I in the name of equity. From the misguided “Algebra for all” push in the ‘90s to San Francisco’s disastrous “Algebra for none” initiative, the Golden State has repeatedly embraced well-meaning but ill-conceived math policies. Both of these particular initiatives failed for the same reason: They treated all students the same, ignoring the reality that students come to the classroom with different levels of preparation.

Another Bay Area district, however, has tried a slightly different approach with its Algebra I (A1) Initiative accelerating below-grade-level ninth graders into Algebra I to learn alongside their on-grade-level peers. This effort by the Sequoia Union High School district excluded high-achieving students who had already completed Algebra in middle school, allowing them to continue on advanced tracks. At the same time, it offered extensive teacher support to foster differentiation for the students who remained in the program. A recent random-assignment study, made possible through a partnership between the district and Stanford University, examined how this approach is playing out.

Sequoia Union is a diverse community just north of Palo Alto, where 40 percent of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, 14 percent are English learners, and 43 percent identify as Hispanic. Before the A1 Initiative, students were placed into ninth grade math courses using placement charts based on transcripts and test scores. The new program shifted students entering ninth grade at or below grade level into an accelerated Algebra I course and equipped teachers with a comprehensive set of supports, including extra planning time, additional instructional training (including “math language routines”), and professional learning communities.

The study followed a cohort of over 1,000 students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2019, who were randomly assigned to either the treatment group (A1 Initiative classrooms) or the control group (business-as-usual classrooms were divided into three tracks based on the district’s traditional placement charts).

The researchers evaluated the A1 Initiative by examining a range of outcomes, including attendance rates, chronic absenteeism, student retention within the district, course progression, and standardized math test scores.

The non-academic outcomes were promising for students below grade level at baseline. Their absence rates were between 2 and 7 percent lower than the control group throughout each year of high school, with chronic absenteeism dropping even more significantly, by 5 to 9 percent. Meanwhile, attendance patterns for on-grade-level students remained largely unaffected.

The initiative also appeared to improve student retention, particularly for those at the highest and lowest ends of prior achievement. Below-grade-level students’ retention was 13 percentage points higher than their peers’ in the control group, while on-grade-level student retention was about 6 percentage points higher. Researchers speculated that these gains could reflect stronger feelings of belonging and satisfaction.

Academic outcomes, however, paint a more complex picture. Below-grade-level students assigned to the initiative faced higher course failure rates in ninth grade than those placed in remedial classes, likely due to the increased rigor of Algebra I compared to Algebra Readiness. Roughly half of these students needed to retake Algebra I or enroll in a pre-geometry summer course. Still, the long-term benefits were notable. By their senior year, these students were more than twice as likely to have passed Algebra II compared to their remedial-track peers. They also earned over 25 percent more math credits, on average, though they were no more likely to complete a post-Algebra II course.

Test scores followed a similar pattern. Below-grade-level students did not show significant improvement on the tenth-grade standardized math test, but by junior year, their scores were 0.19 standard deviations higher—about 7 percentile points—than their control group counterparts. Researchers attributed these gains to improved attendance and persistence.

For other baseline achievement groups, the results were less compelling. Students who were at grade level entering ninth grade math showed similar performance in both the treatment and control groups. Meanwhile, “nearly-at-grade-level” A1 students were less likely to complete two semesters of geometry by the end of tenth grade. This may have been because their control group peers benefited from “double dose” math under the traditional placement system. Additionally, standardized test score improvements for these students were not statistically significant.

While the study’s use of random assignment lends itself to strong internal validity, several factors warrant caution. The pandemic disrupted the cohort’s freshman year, introducing potential confounders like changes in motivation and parental involvement during remote learning. The relatively small sample size further limits generalizability, and the fact that teachers volunteered to participate in the initiative adds another layer of complexity, as teacher assignment was not random.

Even when taken at face value, the A1 Initiative raises important questions about both feasibility and scalability. The district made thoughtful adjustments compared to previous Algebra reforms, such as exempting high achievers and focusing on robust teacher supports, but these efforts required significant resources and partnerships. For below-grade-level students, the A1 Initiative clearly delivered benefits, both academically and non-academically, while leaving on-grade-level students unaffected. However, the approach’s resource-intensive nature—relying on extensive professional development and a partnership with Stanford University—may not be realistic for most districts.

Ultimately, the A1 Initiative represents a well-intentioned and innovative effort to address math achievement gaps, but its broader applicability is limited. Sure, for districts with the budget and partnerships to provide the necessary teacher training and support, this model could be worth considering. For the rest, it’s back to the drawing board.

SOURCE: Thomas Dee and Elizabeth Huffaker, “Accelerating Opportunity: The Effects of Instructionally Supported Detracking,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Philip K. Howard, chair of Common Good and a bestselling author, joins Mike and David to discuss what it takes to create positive school environments, as outlined in his recent Hoover Institution essay, “The human authority needed for good schools.” Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares an Urban Institute report analyzing states’ demographically adjusted 2022 NAEP performance.

Recommended content:

• Philip K. Howard, “The human authority needed for good schools,” Hoover Institution (November 19, 2024).
• Ashley Berner, “3 ways to increase choice and decrease polarization in U.S. schools,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (September 23, 2024).
• Jeff Murray, “Digging into the 2024 survey of American public school teachers,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (July 25, 2024).
• Matthew Chingos, States’ Demographically Adjusted Performance on the 2022 Nation’s Report Card, Urban Institute (2024).

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

Cheers

• A group of parents is suing the publishers and creators of popular reading curricula, claiming their methods, which emphasize “cueing” over systematic phonics instruction, misled schools and harmed students’ literacy development. It’s a path others have advocated taking. —Chalkbeat
• What makes Ignite Reading, a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, work? A new study in Massachusetts reveals that consistent attendance, well-trained tutors, and strong school support are all keys to the program’s success. —Education Week
• Samuel Everett School of Innovation’s hybrid learning model blends homeschooling with public schooling, providing students and families with increased flexibility while fostering greater teacher satisfaction and family involvement. —Eric Wearne and Tom Loud, The 74

Jeers

• Montgomery County’s no-zeros grading rule, which guarantees students at least 50 percent on every assignment, has garnered significant backlash from educators, parents, and students for failing to prepare students for the academic expectations they will face in college. —Source of the Spring
• In an effort to address teacher shortages, Missouri’s State Board of Education voted to lower its standards for teacher certification, reducing the GPA requirement for prospective teachers from 3.0 to 2.5. —The 74
• A recent international assessment reveals that U.S. adults are falling behind their peers in other industrialized countries in critical skills like problem-solving, numeracy, and literacy, with the gap widening since the pandemic. —The Wall Street Journal

• Nearly five years after the pandemic forced school closures across the country, many Ohio students continue to struggle with chronic absenteeism and academic gaps, despite efforts to address these issues at the state level. —The Columbus Dispatch
• “Understanding disruptive behavior in the classroom.” —AFT
• Affluent white men are enrolling in college at declining rates, a surprising trend that may be driven by increasing skepticism about the value of a college degree. —Lee Gardner, The Chronicle