The Education Gadfly Weekly

Two depressing developments of the past couple years have given birth to a radical idea: Let’s rethink state “compulsory attendance” laws so that they’re phrased in terms of kids learning rather than years in school.

The first development is evidence that lots of students are not availing themselves of high-dose tutoring when it’s available, no matter how much they need and would benefit from it, and they’re not signing up for summer school, either.

Reasons abound. Too often, schools aren’t offering these learning boosts or aren’t offering them at times and in places that work for families, especially the low-income families whose children are most in need of additional learning. Sometimes they’re offered but parents don’t recognize how serious are their children’s learning gaps, maybe because they’re inattentive, but more likely because teacher grades and school comments mask the problem.

The upshot is that the surest cure for Covid learning loss—and other achievement woes—namely additional instruction, isn’t reaching hundreds of thousands of kids, or isn’t being taken advantage of by them, at least not with sufficient intensity to make a real difference.

The second depressing development is the growing number of districts and schools that are moving to four-day weeks, ostensibly to deal with budget woes and teacher shortages, ease burn-out, and forestall quitting. They may lengthen the remaining days to comply with state rules about instructional hours, but there are limits to how much an eight-year-old can pay attention in a day and to how much a teacher can be expected to deliver. The net effect of shorter weeks is to shrink effective learning time just when millions of U.S. students would benefit from having it extended—which, after all, is what summer school does.

Under today’s rules, however, that widening deficit won’t interfere with promotion to the next grade, with graduation from high school, or with satisfying the state’s compulsory attendance law—because all those things are framed in terms of years spent or courses completed, not skills and knowledge acquired. So the deficit will accumulate from year to year, akin to compound interest.

That U.S. students don’t spend as much of their lives learning as their peers in other lands has been known for decades, as has the fact that they need to learn more—and would if they spent more time studying. Maybe, finally, today we’ve reached an inflection point where, with the help of better assessments, lots of 24/7 technology, and much greater concern with “readiness,” we should ease off the focus on time and refocus instead on mastery.

We’ve seen much discussion of schools getting away from “Carnegie units” and instead using demonstrations of mastery to determine when a student is ready for the next lesson, the next unit, the next course, the next grade—or graduation itself. It’s a powerfully good idea that would individualize pupil progress through school (thus better serving everyone, including gifted learners and youngsters with disabilities) and result in graduates who are actually prepared for what follows.

Nor is it completely far-fetched. A few states require demonstrated mastery of core subjects in order to graduate from high school, and half the states have enacted some version of third-grade “reading guarantees,” such that kids aren’t supposed to start fourth grade until they’ve acquired basic literacy.

Yet most of American K–12 schooling is still based on age attained and time spent. State “compulsory attendance” laws are invariably framed in terms of birthdays. They start as young as age five and go as high as nineteen, requiring from as little as ten to as much as thirteen years of compulsory schooling. Save for the exceptions mentioned above, however, they’re silent about learning. They don’t require that one master the three R’s before exiting school, much less become proficient in STEM or the nation’s history or its civic arrangements. Leading one reasonably to wonder what exactly is the point of “compulsory attendance”? Is it just to keep kids off the streets so they don’t get into trouble or compete with adults for jobs or (alternatively) get exploited by adults wanting them to work instead of attend school?

Isn’t it time to consider rethinking “compulsory attendance” in terms of achievement rather than time spent? On the up side, this is how to thaw our frozen system into individualized progress whereby kids move at their own speed and move on when they’ve learned something, not when they’ve put in a certainly amount of time. It would do great things for most kids. But I can already hear the yelps, not just because of the enormous disruption that it would require of our rigid school organizations and the associated dollar costs, but also alarums about forcing young people to drop out rather than waste away in classrooms as they get older and older because they haven’t yet mastered chemistry or poetry.

So let me not suggest that kids be required to stay in school longer than age sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, but also that they not receive diplomas until they’ve reached mastery in relation to state standards for core subjects. Work backward from that and mastery becomes the key to promotion at every level—and “school days” and “school years” flex with kids’ academic needs, which is to say attending summer school—or “after school” tutoring—can be required for those who need it. At the very least, the additional instruction can be presented to parents as a precondition for promotion.

Let’s finally face the truth: Since kids move at different speeds, the amount of instruction that student Q needs in pursuit of mastery of a lesson, a unit, a “grade level,” etc. will differ from the amount that student R needs, which means that, yes, they’ll face different quantities of schooling. That’s the alternative to the batch-processing of today’s age-based attendance-and-promotion systems. It means treating kids differently.

Is America ready for that? If not, we’re stuck with a lot of learning gaps and learning losses that will never close.

Perhaps my favorite moment teaching this year came as my class finished reading Of Mice and Men. In the final moments of the story, one character executes his friend to save him from a far worse fate. It’s sudden and thus shocking. I set them to read this final scene silently. The faster readers finished first. I watched eyes widen and flit faster from word to word. A few let out little gasps. One exclaimed, “F*ck this ending, Mr. Buck. Curley’s wife had it coming.” I stifled a smile and told them to hush up. This encouraged those who hadn’t yet finished to speed up, and those who had unfocused to re-engage. Not all peer pressure is bad.

My students walked out of my room that day still discussing the book. Had the character deserved it? Was it really a mercy killing? What does it mean for one friend to kill another? C.S. Lewis quips that all friendships begin with the simple exclamation “What! You too?” The ritual of reading a great book together had given these students a “you too,” a common piece of culture, that brought them all a little closer together.

Prominent progressive education advocate Alfie Kohn writes that community is a bedrock of progressive education: “Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children—separate selves at separate desks.” And yet throughout my teaching experience, I’ve always found traditional approaches to the classroom to be far more communitarian. What’s more, there’s an inherent tension within the progressive theory of education between its desire for community and its foundation of individualism.

Romantics like Rousseau, and the progressives he influenced, view the child as inherently good. Traditions and institutions are not civilizing, but corrupting. As such, the best education is that which places the fewest constraints upon a child. Do not impose a curriculum or knowledge worth knowing. Rather, let them discover their way into whatever interests them most. Let each child guide their own education. Never mind an expectation that students master Langston Hughes, the Declaration of Independence, or any common body of knowledge to bind us closer together.

This view of the child and education more generally is exceptionally self-centered. One cannot build an education up from this first principle and expect community to result. Instead, we get children off reading their own books, designing their own projects, discovering their own knowledge, and building their own curricula. Never do they discuss together, read out loud together, practice problems together, or sit silently struggling through the same task together.

Consider the workshop model, a progressive alternative to my traditional classroom with classic novels read by the entire class. In a workshop model, students and teachers spend ideally less than ten minutes together on a lesson before spending anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five minutes working independently. A teacher might read a short excerpt from a book, perhaps model “making an inference,” then set students off to read, cloistered in their own corners of the room. According to the Units of Study website, “off you go” are the most important words of the lesson. Notice, they’re not “let’s come together.”

The criticisms of this approach and its justification are legion. I’ve detailed many here and elsewhere. But I want to focus on one right now: It’s just so atomized, individualized, lonely. No child is asked to make a small sacrifice of their own immediate interest for the good of the group. Children no longer commune around books, sharing the sorrows and joys of literature together.

This tension shows up even in behavioral expectations. It is seemingly authoritarian to ask a child to track the speaker. But even if one student is feeling down, that action of picking up one’s head to look at a speaking classmate communicates “what you’re saying matters to me, so much so that I’ll forgo my desire in this moment in order to give you my attention.” That’s a real community. We could even say that’s the basis of the social contract itself: giving up aspects of our freedom for the good of the group.

Yet the obverse shows up in so many of the fads in education right now. Children have their own learning styles, individual needs, zones of proximal development, differentiated material, individualized education plans, and so much more. Despite gestures at community, our schools foster ever less of it.

Our public schools are one of the few unifying institutions that we have left. If we allow progressive educational principles to continue to individualize and atomize the classroom, we shouldn’t be surprised if our culture and political climate follow suit. In a traditional classroom with central texts, common knowledge, and routinized behavioral norms, our children learn to let another finish speaking before interrupting, no matter how much they might disagree. How many complete strangers could spark up a conversation over their shared love—or perhaps disdain—for the Great Gatsby because so many of us have read it in high school?

Traditional literature classrooms in particular seem all the more important as technology advances. When children spend ever more time isolated in their rooms, endlessly scrolling on their phone, depressed and anxious, the act of putting a phone away, reading together, and then making eye contact to discuss the text could be the very “social and emotional” support that they need. When artificial technology can accomplish evermore tasks, enjoying a book with friends is one of the few remaining, distinctly human pleasures.

My favorite activity that I carry on with my class comes at the end of every unit. I spin the chairs into a circle and cover my chalkboard with countless thematic words like “aging” or “isolation,” so long as they relate to whatever book we just finished. As students file in, I give them only a blank piece of paper and a pencil. They choose which topics to talk about, I give them a few minutes to write about how this word showed up in the book, and then we discuss. Some conversations last a few minutes. Some spin on for almost an hour as we weave back and forth between discussing the book and our own lives, allowing the text to shape us, form us, and draw us closer together. These incredibly rich and, at times, personal discussions only happen because we first shared a book together.

This school year was supposed to mark the beginning of the comeback. Largely free from pandemic-related disruptions and with coffers flush with Uncle Sam’s Covid cash, states could finally turn their attention toward clawing back what students have lost. But early signs are, at best, mixed about how these efforts are progressing: Almost a quarter-million children across twenty-one states are missing entirely from schools, to say nothing of the half-million children in Los Angeles who missed out on classes last week. Tutoring has not been the answer thus far, and many in positions of power seem to have lost interest in school outcomes and results-based accountability.

To the extent that our education debates still turn on school improvement, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona says he wants states to keep their focus on academic achievement. In a platitude-heavy speech given earlier this year, the nation’s top education official called on policymakers and educators to challenge the current state of affairs:

Today, we raise the bar in education. The same is not good enough anymore. If we do what we’ve done, we’re going to get what we’ve gotten. We’re better than that. Our children deserve better than that. The first area where we must raise the bar is academic excellence. As much as it is about recovery, it’s also about setting higher standards for academic success in reading and mathematics...

To do this, states need valid, reliable, and rigorous assessments. Cardona went on to say that standardized tests should serve as “a flashlight on what works and what needs our attention.”

Tell that to the folks in New York State, who have decided it’s better to hide the evidence. Its education department recently announced a plan to effectively lower the bar required for students to achieve proficiency on state reading and math tests, unironically referring to the diminished threshold as the “new normal.” This in a state where kids lost enormous ground, and where things are probably worse than reported due to the large number of students who did not sit for the state exams.

To reach the baseline required to be considered proficient, a scoring committee that reports to the New York Board of Regents determines the material that students must know, and then sorts it based on the level of difficulty. The committee then uses a combination of technical considerations and expert judgment to decide the minimum scores required for a particular level of achievement. The setting of these “cut scores” happens largely out of the public eye, which is why, in part, this process can be vulnerable to mischief. Indeed, many states have historically misled the public about whether students are actually proficient.

Over the last twenty years, the federal government has been examining the discrepancy between how proficiency is defined on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as compared to each state’s definition. What they used to find is that most state standards for reading and math map to NAEP’s “basic” achievement level rather than to “proficient.” Over time, however, most states have made progress in being more honest about how they report student performance by raising their cut scores—to the point that some state tests now have standards at NAEP’s “proficient” level. New York is not one of them.

No, in fact, in the Empire State, some have reasoned that state reading and math tests should be re-normed so that students can pass them at lower levels because of their learning loss. It’s a colorable if head-scratching argument, coming at a time when Cardona and others have repeatedly said that getting back to normal is not good enough. Making matters worse, New York is no stranger to exam manipulation. This under-the-hood tinkering is happening in a state with a long anti-testing streak, and within a politically fraught environment that has become increasingly skeptical, even hostile, to standardized tests.

Part of the problem—one that is largely unacknowledged, at least publicly—is that we’re really lousy at “catching kids up” en masse if they’ve fallen significantly behind. Consequently, to solve for low proficiency rates, the path of least resistance is to make exams easier to pass—creating a false impression of success, much as already happens with high school graduation rates. If New York’s lower cut scores lead to more students being deemed proficient, the state can both mask the detrimental hardships wrought by the pandemic while claiming that it effectively deployed its federal relief dollars to raise reading and math scores back up to snuff. What’s more, it makes a mockery of the communication gap between schools and parents if the state tells them their kids are caught up when they’re really not.

This will be a dynamic worth watching: the degree to which states are being honest in how they’re succeeding (or failing) at addressing pandemic-era learning gaps. On the one hand, how states define proficiency matters less in the long run than focusing on how pupil achievement rises relative to where it presently is. But the last thing states should do is to be anything less than forthright with parents and families about how their children are doing. It’s shameful that New York is attempting to blind its citizens to the gaps and shortfalls besetting its students, but if history and experience are dependable guides, more states could soon follow this ugly example.

Clearinghouses in education are entities that review research studies, analyze the effects of the interventions studied, and provide ratings of those interventions. Such ratings are relied upon more and more by states, educators, and schools as sources of fully-vetted, high-quality curricula and educational programs—and it is assumed that they’re based on deep analysis that verifies whether the models work as intended to help students learn and achieve. But how exactly do education clearinghouses work? Upon what evidence are programs and curricula rated? And how often do various analyses of the same curriculum agree? A new review aims to answer these questions and more.

A trio of researchers from George Washington University and Northwestern University initially collected a roster of forty-three education clearinghouses in the United States and the United Kingdom. The criteria for final inclusion were entities that conducted effectiveness analyses of education programs from pre-K to college, did not borrow their rating schemes from other clearinghouses, and produced ratings that were publicly accessible via the internet. A total of twelve clearinghouses met the criteria, all based in the U.S. The researchers collected and coded data from the clearinghouses between June 2019 and August 2020, including the types of interventions evaluated, their rating processes, funding sources, and the standards of evidence used to assess both research designs and the outcomes achieved.

A bit more about the dozen clearinghouses: Four were education-focused exclusively, while the other eight included additional areas. Most focused on student-centered programs only, some on programs serving children and their families, and one on programs specifically for military families. Some better-known clearinghouses include the National Dropout Prevention Center, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), and Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE). It may be simply a matter of timing that the extremely well-known EdReports was not included in the researchers’ short or long lists—their initial search of clearinghouses stopped in 2016 just as EdReports was ramping up its work—but its prominence in the space since then should warrant its inclusion in any future research. Funding for the clearinghouses reviewed comes from combinations of government, university, and foundation sources and varies greatly across the entities. The U.S. Department of Education, for example, reported to the authors that it had spent a whopping $100 million-plus supporting WWC; many other clearinghouses indicated that they operated on a fraction of that amount.

Available resources plus choice or area of concentration serve to shape the work of the various clearinghouses—including what and how many education programs they analyze. To list just three diverse examples: WWC employs experts to proactively search for programs to review according to an extensive protocol, the Corporation for National and Community Service Evidence Exchange only reviews programs that it funds, and the Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness entity looks only at programs designed to boost school readiness. Program size, study design, and publication date also serve as criteria for inclusion in any given clearinghouse’s body of work.

Because the criteria used to evaluate programs differ greatly from clearinghouse to clearinghouse, the researchers worked hard to hammer out some useful comparisons. On the upside, all twelve clearinghouses cite randomized control trials (RCT) as their preferred research design and give greater weight to RCT studies and their outcomes than to other quasi-experimental designs. On the downside, the same type of non-RCT design that one clearinghouse readily accepts can be downgraded or even summarily rejected for analysis by others. Of the 1,359 educational curricula and interventions analyzed by these clearinghouses during the time of this study, 83 percent were assessed by just a single entity. Among those analyzed by more than one clearinghouse, similar ratings were achieved for only about 30 percent of the programs. Thus there’s not much “inter-rater reliability.” With many of those concurring ratings being low ones, perhaps the most comforting takeaway is that the duds seem easy enough for clearinghouses to spot.

The last third of the report is a set of case studies looking at all the possible combinations of outcomes for programs rated by multiple clearinghouses. Those deal with programs that earned maximal agreement in ratings across clearinghouses (both high ratings and low), modest agreement, modest disagreement, and maximal disagreement. The details of each are interesting—including the insistence of some clearinghouses on replication of findings, a state of affairs long lacking in education research—but the case of maximal disagreement is worth highlighting. Five clearinghouses reviewed research on the effectiveness of the very-well-known dropout prevention program Communities in Schools (CIS); it received one high rating, two middling ratings, and two low ratings. Among other factors, a lack of RCT studies available and some inconclusive impact findings among non-RCT studies dragged the program down for four of the clearinghouses. The one clearinghouse which gave CIS an unqualified thumbs up seemed to have its own source of RCT studies (not identified or linked) which presented enough positive outcomes to rate the program as “promising.” In short, the “evidence base” for different evaluations of the same program is wildly inconsistent for reasons unconnected to CIS itself. Spare a thought for any charter school or state education agency looking to make quality program or curricular choices in the face of these variables.

There are numerous limitations to this research, including a reliance on clearinghouses to have fully stated all of their criteria for study selection and rating on their websites. As a result, the researchers’ call for more clarity overall is sound. On the simpler side, that could mean clearinghouses add detail to their ratings—explaining, for example, that no program can earn a “recommended” rating without an RCT less than five years old, no matter what other evidence is available. Or it could mean more financial support for replication. On the more complex side, perhaps a central authority is needed to either police the varying evidence and ratings or to simply reduce the number of clearinghouses out there, which could also have the benefit of spreading resources to fewer entities, thus allowing more programs to be rated. As it stands now, clarity is clearly lacking in the clearinghouse space.

SOURCE: Mansi Wadhwa, Jingwen Zheng, and Thomas D. Cook, “How Consistent Are Meanings of ‘Evidence-Based’? A Comparative Review of 12 Clearinghouses that Rate the Effectiveness of Educational Programs,” American Educational Research Association AERA Journal (February 2023).

Much of my work as a kindergarten teacher was teaching young children how to be students. Even the routine for “circle time” on the carpet required days, if not weeks, of explicit practice. Making eye contact, waiting one’s turn to speak, and ignoring distractions are skills so basic that it’s easy to forget that they don’t come naturally to many kids. One or two of my students might know the carpet time routine on the first day of school, but just about everyone else needed to be taught.

These skills are also the prerequisite for mastering academic content because students won’t learn much from lessons they can’t attend to. Yet as they march through the K–12 grades, less and less time is devoted to study skills. Instead, content becomes the focus of the school day. A new book by a distinguished education psychologist seeks to close the learning skills gap for older students.

Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy, by Daniel T. Willingham, functions as part study guide, part self-help book. Willingham, a Harvard-trained professor of psychology who teaches at the University of Virginia, wrote it for rising college students “as a user’s guide to your brain that will allow you to fully exploit its learning potential.” A potential, it seems, that most current undergraduates are not fulfilling.

Willingham notes that, by their mid-teens, students are assumed to have become “independent learners.” While high school instructors are responsible for teaching content, the students themselves are left to manage the more mundane aspects of their learning. Few algebra instructors will use a class period to teach students how to take notes, manage their study time at home, or prepare for an exam.

But Willingham finds that many undergraduate students haven’t ever acquired the skills necessary to be independent learners, and therefore struggle to master the advanced content in college lectures and seminars. He sets out to remedy this problem by translating research on memory into practical advice. The book’s fourteen chapters include “How to Understand a Lecture,” “How to Take Tests,” and “How to Plan Your Work.” These chapters are further divided into ninety-four specific strategies, such as “Prepare a Study Guide” and “Be There and Engage.”

Some of Willingham’s tips are insightful, such as the ones pointing out the drawbacks of using a laptop or tablet to take notes. Wi-Fi-enabled devices provide too many distractions, so he favors old-fashioned pen and paper. His advice on how to properly ask questions of college professors is also helpful (briefly explain what you understand from the material, then identify what you don’t; don’t monologue just to show off what you know). His methods for using a calendar would be useful to most professional adults (“have your calendar with you at all times”; “write commitments in your calendar immediately”).

Yet many of the tips are so fundamental that one might assume students would need them to be admitted into college in the first place. How do teenagers bound for higher education graduate from high school without knowing how to take notes on a lecture (the subject of chapter two)? Or how to study for an exam (chapter six)? And, perhaps most concerning of all, did these students not read difficult books in high school (chapter five)? That college freshmen, including those at prestigious UVa, would need this kind of remedial advice speaks ill of their college preparedness.

It’s significant that Willingham did not write Outsmart Your Brain in response to the pandemic. There’s little doubt that school shutdowns, quarantines, and remote learning made students’ lack of study skills worse, but the problem predates those disruptions. An anecdote from his introduction to the book gives us insight into the true origin of the problem.

Some time ago, Willingham was invited to deliver a lecture on learning to five hundred teachers. He dreaded the engagement, convinced that he had nothing interesting to present. To his surprise, the lecture was a success. “Teachers didn’t know the content, even though it covered material you’d take in your very first course on learning,” he writes. The material in question came from an introductory course Willingham had been teaching to sophomores.

This should be a wake-up call for K–12 educators, particularly those in middle and high school. Teaching students how to be students shouldn’t stop in kindergarten. As academic content becomes more complex, so do the skills necessary to master it. And the most effective way to have students master those skills is to explicitly teach them. This will probably require abandoning pedagogies that promote “multiple intelligences” and “student centeredness” and focusing on objective, research-based practices like those in Willingham’s book. What he finds himself teaching at the collegiate level should be taught in much earlier grades.

No reasonable person expects all students to attend college, but those who do shouldn’t need most of the material in Outsmart Your Brain.

SOURCE: Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, David Griffith and Paul Bruno join Mike Petrilli to discuss David’s new Think Again brief on whether charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber discusses how academic mobility differs across student groups.

Recommended content:

• Think Again: Do charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools? —David Griffith
• “Charter school growth increases resources in district-run schools” —Patrick Wolf
• Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances —Mark Weber
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Wes Austin et al., “Academic Mobility in U.S. Public Schools: Evidence from Nearly 3 Million Students,” CALDER Working Paper (March 2023)

Feedback Welcome:

Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to our producer Nathaniel Grossman at [email protected].

Cheers

• Long-time charter school leader Geoffrey Canada sounds the alarm on learning loss: “In my career of more than forty-five years, I’ve never seen anything like this.” —CBS News
• “To retain the support of Black voters, Democrats must re-embrace charter schools.” —Markose Butler
• The portfolio management model adopted by Denver Public Schools twenty years ago led to “huge academic growth.” —The 74
• “DeSantis signs bill to expand [Florida’s] school choice program.” —RealClearFlorida

Jeers

• Masterman—Philadelphia’s most prestiguous selective high school—is being “systematically dismantled” by abandoning selective admissions based on grades and switching to a lottery system. —George F. Will
• “The percentages of nine- and thirteen-year-olds who said they read daily for fun [have] dropped by double digits since 1984.” —Atlantic

• A review of existing research suggests that “retention is more likely to succeed in earlier grades and when implemented with instructional support mechanisms tailored towards the educational needs of retained students.” —Brookings Institution
• In Washington, D.C., high school graduation rates are up, but only 8 percent of ninth graders are predicted to eventually earn a college degree. —Jill Barshay
• After multiple shootings at one of its high schools, Denver is bringing back the school resource officers that were cut in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. —Denver Gazette
• “Lawmakers across U.S. push for harsher school discipline as safety fears rise.” —Chalkbeat