The Education Gadfly Weekly

I haven’t seen the data myself, but let me predict that the forthcoming results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—due out on January 29—will be bad, bad, bad. The term we may hear a lot is that “the bottom is falling out,” if the scores for low-performing students in particular continue to plummet.

While deeply disappointing, it wouldn’t be surprising, given that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results.

It’s also predictable. Indeed, in October 2021 I forecast that NAEP scores “will be depressed through at least the early 2030s.” As I wrote back then:

Think of today’s first graders, who spent last year doing “remote kindergarten.” Many of those kids likely learned next to nothing, meaning they entered first grade a year behind. For our neediest students, who tend to enter kindergarten years behind in normal times, the challenge is even greater....

So our first grader is probably going to fall further behind this year, too. [And] in three years, when he takes the fourth-grade NAEP, these scars are going to show. And they will still be apparent seven years from now, when he sits for the eighth-grade NAEP, and eleven years from now, when he takes the twelfth-grade NAEP. (If he makes it to twelfth grade, that is.)

Gulp. I won’t be happy if I’m right about this. But allow me to explain my thinking.

Here’s the first key point: When we say that test scores like those from NAEP are declining, we mean that the most recent cohort of fourth and eighth graders are posting lower achievement than their older peers—their older brothers and sisters, so to speak—did at the same age. We’re not saying that Johnny is doing worse than he did two years ago, but that he scored lower than his older brother Jimmy did back then. Keep that thought: It’s about cohorts.

Second, we have to remember that test scores don’t just reflect what has happened to a student in the most recent school year, but everything that’s happened in the child’s life to date. All the health and nutrition and stimulation they did or did not get as babies and toddlers, their early childhood experiences, their school experiences from kindergarten into the fourth (or eighth) grade. It all matters.

We might ask ourselves: How would we expect different cohorts of kids to be impacted by the pandemic and lengthy school closures?

I would posit that the cohort that might be harmed the most—at least in terms of academics—would be the one that was in kindergarten when the Covid pandemic struck. Especially students in that cohort who didn’t return to in-person learning for much or any of first grade because they attended schools in deep-blue cities and suburbs that were shuttered the longest.

And guess what: That’s the cohort of kids who were fourth graders in 2024. I won’t be surprised, therefore, if those fourth-grade scores look especially bad.

I hope that 2024’s eighth graders fared at least a little bit better, given that they were in the fourth and fifth grades during the pandemic shutdowns, which is not great, but at least most already knew how to read before their education world was upended. Again, I haven’t seen the results, so we’ll see.

Now, if this comes to pass, we shouldn’t let schools off the hook for the terrible trends. As Laura LoGerfo reminded us last month, scores, especially for low-performing students, were already trending downward before Covid, perhaps reflecting the backing away from accountability and other reforms in the 2010s. And of course, after the pandemic struck, systems received $190 billion in federal funding to get their schools open and to address learning loss; studies indicate that those funds helped but had a very modest impact. Some districts squandered the money. Others tried worthwhile tactics, like high-dosage tutoring, but struggled with implementation. Whatever they did (or didn’t do), it wasn’t enough.

One thing nobody tried, to my knowledge, was to admit that Zoom school was next to worthless and have everyone repeat the grade they missed while home for a year. If the kids who were fourth graders in 2024 had been given the chance for a do-over of first grade, with a real live teacher in a real live classroom, mastering their early reading and math skills, I suspect we would be in a much better place today. (It’s not too late for schools to embrace something like this! Especially since we know, from i-Ready and MAP data, that kids are still entering kindergarten further behind academically than their pre-pandemic peers.)

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In many respects, the United States has made a remarkable recovery from the Covid pandemic. Unemployment is down. Economic growth is up. Wages are rising, especially at the low end. Crime has fallen. Even the obesity epidemic has appeared to plateau.

But all that positive news can’t mask the reality of what the pandemic did to our children. A generation of Americans is growing up with academic scars that will last a lifetime. And we’re all just letting it happen.

President-elect Donald Trump is about to return to Washington with a ragtag coalition, united in their rejection of the status quo. Yet this shared opposition has also led to a rash of infighting over a range of policy issues. From the recent dustup on H-1B visas to Steve Bannon attacking Elon Musk, these faults lines reflect, for want of a better term, a “populist” and “libertarian” faction within its ranks. It may not be as obvious yet on education policy, but it’s only a matter of time before this MAGA-vs.-MAGA strife reaches schooling.

Indeed, the fundamental tension on education policy within Trump’s coalition is whether to devolve power from Washington or weaponize the U.S. Department of Education as part of the culture war. As my colleague Checker Finn recently observed, this disagreement can be seen as a tug-of-war between “centralizers” and “decentralizers”:

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 counter-intuitive—in the form of mandating school choice and parental rights.

That’s right on point. Opposition to “woke” ideology drives much of the ascendant “parental rights” movement, with proponents arguing that progressive ideas about race and gender have come to dominate public schools. They see parental rights as a means to challenge and, where possible, to remove such content. Conflict arises over how far these rights should extend. Some support a more assertive federal role in reviewing and prohibiting controversial materials, while others argue for local decision-making, even if it leads to progressive policies in some districts.

This tension applies doubly to school choice. Few issues unify conservatives as much as expanding alternatives to traditional public schools. Yet even here, the coalition reveals its cracks. Should we have a federal program so that blue states like New York and California have choice—as AFC, EdChoice, and others believe? Or would that be overstepping Uncle Sam’s role, and risking that future administrations will load up such a program with poison pills—like the Cato Institute has repeatedly voiced concerns about?

These questions coexist uneasily. Red-hued rural communities across the country have long resisted vouchers, for example, because many lack viable alternatives to public schools. For decades, Texas has been at the heart of this internecine feud (though things could actually change this year). Similarly, debates arise over the extent to which public funds should subsidize religious education, with some warning that public funding for private schools might compromise religious freedom or incentivize government overreach. This is why, for instance, homeschoolers are reflexively wary of anything that even smells of government encroachment. It also partially explains how last fall’s school-choice ballot initiative in my home state of Colorado went down in flames.

And, of course, there are the divergent rationales in Trumpworld behind the push to abolish the Department of Education. For some, it represents bureaucratic inefficiency—a bloated federal entity that wields outsized influence for a relatively modest outlay. For others, the department is a symbol of federal overreach, and an enemy of state sovereignty, local control, and parental freedom. Then there’s a third faction, one that views the agency through a cultural lens. For this group, the department isn’t just an inefficient bureaucracy—it’s a sinister vehicle for promoting progressive, “woke” policies that undermine traditional American values.

These motivations may align under the vague slogan “abolish the Department,” but they quickly fall apart when specifics come into play. For example, should the feds be the ones to put a stop to “transgender insanity” or would this be best left to the purview of states? Should the Department of Education condition the receipt of federal grants on the adoption of certain curricula in reading, history, civics, or what have you? What about withholding or recapturing dollars when states or localities venture into what MAGA diehards see as dangerous territory?

As a thought experiment, imagine Trump reversing course—much like his shift on TikTok—and, instead of eliminating the agency, advocated for expanding its reach, augmenting its powers, and unapologetically weaponizing it as a political cudgel. I’d bet dollars to donuts that his followers would quickly fall in line behind him. This is what happens when you define a party by loyalty to a personality rather than to a set of principled ideas.

This raises a larger question: What happens when Trump is history, whether via term limits or actuarial tables? With inauguration day around the corner, the outlook is murky. What is clear, however, is that the combination of internal discord and today’s culture-war driven version of school reform may eventually test the limits of the coalition’s unity and its ability to support a coherent education agenda.

It’s not with pleasure that I tackle the too-frequent topic of school shootings. The latest in Madison, Wisconsin, claimed the lives of two and left six others injured, just a stone’s throw away from my own school. Friends of mine were on the scene. In my building, teachers, students, and parents all felt less secure after—noticing thin windows, feeling exposed during recess, wondering about every passerby. But being American education’s most horrifying yet intractable problem, discuss it we must.

Any examination of these tragedies must begin with an honest assessment of the problem. Remedy requires diagnosis. Unfortunately, misinformation abounds. Depending on the source, you’ll read that there have been anywhere from 83 to 323 to 971 school shootings in 2024 alone.

Why the discrepancy? In a word, definitions.

Does it count if a gun discharges near a school building on a Saturday and a bullet happens to graze the wall, as some databases define it? What if the victim is an adult gang member who happens to be fleeing across school grounds? What about a construction worker who accidentally shot himself while working on a school roof when students weren’t in session? What about suicides? Use an expansive definition of “school shooting” and these all quality.

But they also differ from what comes to mind when anyone uses the phrase “school shooting”—namely, someone entering a school that contains children and teachers and does so with significant firepower and the intent to harm as many individuals as possible. Trying to narrow down the incidents to these situations, Education Week counts thirty-nine, but even this number muddles reality. In a 2023 paper in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers analyzed 253 school shootings and found that the majority arose from “interpersonal disputes” and involved the use of handguns. In other words, most “school shootings” involve individuals caught up in community violence such as gang activity or personal grudges, not mass killings akin to Columbine.

I myself have encountered threats of such violence. I’ve locked down with students in my room after a gang threatened to shoot up my school. Another day, I had to rush students into the building from recess because a gang member came onto our property to start a brawl. Students later told me that he brandished a weapon, though this was never confirmed. These were horrible events, but they’re separate from the lone wolf archetype who shows up with a semi-automatic weapon and a manifesto.

Active shooters remain rare occurrences and receive headline media attention. Other kinds of “school shootings,” much more common (though surely regrettable), we take as a matter of course.

Approaching this analysis from another statistic—violent deaths on school grounds, be they from shootings or otherwise—sheds additional light on the safety or lack thereof in American schools. In the 1990s, there averaged forty-three deaths a year, dropping to thirty-one per year in the 2010s. While there’s evidence that violence in schools has increased post-pandemic, schools are still safer than during the mid-‘90s peak.

To put those numbers in context, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for children for decades. Starting in 2019, however, firearm related injuries topped the list. That change occurred because cars became markedly safer, cutting the rate of death by car crash in half. Even so, since most firearm related deaths occur away from schools, it becomes clear that driving a student to school remains a riskier activity than sending them through the doors.

And the U.S. isn’t an outlier. According to researchers John Lott and Carlisle Moody, as far as the number of mass shootings in the world goes—be they lone-wolf shooters, terrorist attacks, mob violence, or otherwise—the U.S. has more Columbine-style mass shootings, yet is typical of gun violence at schools, broadly defined.

I lay out these statistics not to downplay any school shooting. Every single one is a horrible tragedy. But the blanket assertion without clarification from USA Today that schools suffered 971 shootings muddles reality and so our ability to respond judiciously: The majority of school shootings stem from community violence (not disturbed individuals), schools are safe places for children, and Columbine-style shooters are more rare than media panic might have you believe.

When it comes to remedies, I think there’s an uncomfortable truth here: There’s likely little that we can do to prevent active shooter scenarios. There are policies to follow that could reduce their frequency and empower schools to react more swiftly, either during an active situation or to a suspected threat. Even so, school loners are plentiful, but very few ever shoot up a school. It’s worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s more akin to seeking a slightly grayer shell on a vast beach of gray shells.

Gun regulations? Household gun-ownership rates were in decline for decades before the pandemic, and gun regulations were scant until the 1960s, yet mass shootings at U.S. schools are a comparatively recent phenomenon. And with 500 million firearms currently in circulation in this country, no regulation will prevent these events except for a universal confiscation, which is a political nonstarter.

Campus hardening? TSA-style entry points might stop a few, but school security isn’t perfect. Place a lone gunman near a door during school dismissal and, when students flood out of the single point of entry, we have another tragedy. Many school safety experts disagree about whether lockdown drills increase safety or, since most shooters are themselves students, simply broadcast to shooters a play-by-play of where the most potential victims will be and when. And according to one review of the research, “none of the currently employed school firearm violence prevention methods have empirical evidence to show that they actually diminish firearm violence in schools.”

Early warning reporting and threat assessments? In many of the active shooter scenarios of recent memory, there were signs that these students were disturbed and so a threat. But equally common were schools overlooking or ignoring these signs. Again, teasing out the difference between a typical loner and a potential school shooter is no easy task.

The Federal Commission on School Safety published a report with hundreds of recommendations for local, state, and federal-level policymakers. The three most important are the implementation of threat assessment teams, a free flow of information between schools and law enforcement, and a hands-on role of law enforcement in the evaluation of school safety procedures.

That being said, any student intent on violence will find a way. Any system will have a loophole to exploit. If the White House, one of the most secure buildings in the world, is regularly breached, there’s only so much that schools can do to prevent these (still rare) acts of violence.

If I have any recommendation, it’s that schools and localities focus on the more prosaic violence that they actually can control. Implement policies that mitigate crime in the surrounding area and so curtail the number of common, low-fatality school shootings. At the school level, strong behavioral systems would achieve three goals: They will give schools and administrators the tools to actually respond to students exhibiting threatening behavior, instead of shuffling it under the rug; they will reduce the non-fatal violence that too many students face every single day, ranging from hallway brawls to cruel verbal harassment; and they will create the welcoming, orderly school environments that would leave fewer students feeling either isolated or resentful. Not to mention that such policies will have far reaching benefits to far more students than will ever suffer the horrors of a school shooting.

Unfortunately, with students more isolated, spending less time with friends, wasting more time on their phones, and growing less connected to formative institutions such as churches or sports leagues, I doubt the trend of isolated school shooters will improve. That’s not a call to do nothing, but a difficult reality to face as we attempt to mitigate this horrifying trend.

The Advanced Placement (AP) program, celebrating its seventieth anniversary this year, has largely lived up to the promise of encouraging and rewarding ambitious high school students looking to prepare themselves for college rigor. Students who participate in AP courses generally have better chances to attend and succeed in college compared with students who do not. But questions persist about a lack of access for various underrepresented groups, leading to measurable gaps in participation and achievement over the years. The College Board, which runs the program, has urged policymakers across the country to take action to increase resources, access, and opportunity. A new report looks at one state’s efforts to do just that.

Arkansas mandated universal AP access starting in 2003, and strengthened that effort in 2005 by covering AP exam costs for all students. The mandate requires that every school provide at least one AP course in each of the core areas of math, science, English, and social studies. Theoretically, the mandate removed the most commonly-reported barriers to participation among students nationwide: availability and affordability. A group of researchers led by Andy Parra-Martinez from Mississippi State University dug into the data to examine the impacts of these policies on participation and, to a lesser extent, on student outcomes.

The research team utilized data from the Arkansas Department of Education covering the period 2016 to 2021, expanding on previous research that ended in 2015. The anonymized data include student demographic characteristics such as gender, race, gifted and talented status, English language learner status, special education status, and family income (as determined by participation in the subsidized lunch program). Additionally, they have access to students’ achievement in English language arts, math, and science subtests prior to high school. They use multilevel modeling to investigate the relationship between student- and school-based factors that influence AP enrollment and course success.

Approximately 31 percent of Arkansas high school students enrolled in at least one AP course over the time period studied here. This is an increase over both the pre-mandate (just 4 percent) and the 2015 (19 percent) figures, and approaches the national average of 33 percent. A majority of AP enrollees in Arkansas took one or two courses over their high school career. Female students were 1.6 times more likely to participate than males; Asian students and Hispanic students were more likely to participate than White students (1.8 times and 1.4 times, respectively); and students identified as gifted were 1.4 times more likely more likely to participate than their non-identified peers. AP participants also had higher academic achievement prior to high school than non-participants. Low-income students, English language learners, and special education students were least likely to enroll in an AP class.

More than 90 percent of AP enrollees ultimately earned course credit, with no significant differences in attainment based on any demographic characteristic. This is consistent with AP course outcomes previously in Arkansas and nationally. Importantly, though, Parra-Martinez and his team did not have access to data on which students took official AP exams over the study period, nor how the test takers did on the College Board’s score scale from 1 to 5. As a result, the researchers suggest that the use of school/teacher assessments, rather than official AP examinations, might be inflating grades and awarding course credits erroneously. Separate data from College Board, cited in the report, show that 22 percent of Arkansas students in grades 10–12 took at least one AP exam in 2022, an increase of 2 percent from 2012. Mean scores for Asian American students in the state grew from 2.6 to 3.0 and for White students from 2.2 to 2.5 over that same period. Gains for Hispanic students (from 2.0 to 2.2) and Black students (from 1.5 to 1.7) were more modest.

Ultimately, universal access to AP courses boosted student participation overall and among many typically-underrepresented groups in Arkansas. However, low-income students and students with special needs were still less likely to participate than their peers. In fact, school-level analyses indicated that having higher proportions of these students in a building tended to depress AP participation among other student subgroups, as well. Additionally, outside data indicate that making the exams free for students did not significantly increase AP test taking or scores in Arkansas. The researchers suggest that true universality must consist of more than just widely offered courses. For example, they propose active recruiting of students by teachers or counselors and allocating school staff to specifically support students from groups who typically don’t participate or underperform. These efforts would surely result in higher participation numbers. But until we have a study that takes into account AP exam results, we can’t be sure that expansion efforts are leading to better outcomes for students.

SOURCE: Andy Parra-Martinez et al., “Does Policy Translate into Equity? The Association between Universal Advanced Placement Access, Student Enrollment, and Outcomes,” Journal of Advanced Academics (December 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Barbara Biasi, assistant professor at the Yale School of Management, joins Mike and David to discuss Wisconsin’s Act 10 and its impact on teacher compensation. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber highlights a study on the underrepresentation of certain racial and socioeconomic groups in gifted education.

Recommended reading:

• Barbara Biasi, “Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets,” Education Next (April 25, 2023).
• Shawn Johnson, “Wisconsin’s Act 10 is back in court. Here’s what to know about the controversial law.,” Wisconsin Public Radio (December 4, 2024).
• Dante D. Dixson, Scott J. Peters, Jonathan A. Plucker, Carolyn M. Callahan, The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in Gifted and Talented Education, Annenberg Institute at Brown University (2025)

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

Cheers

• The Detroit school district has implemented new financial incentives and grade promotion policies to fight chronic absenteeism. —Chalkbeat Detroit
• In October, The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) reported a 5 percent drop in freshman enrollment—but now, NSCRC has issued a correction indicating rates of enrollment actually increased in 2024. —Forbes

Jeers

• Paid work experiences can be extremely valuable for high school students, but only a small percentage have access to internships or apprenticeships. —The 74
• A recent survey reveals that 48 percent of educators report significantly more student misbehavior this fall compared to pre-pandemic levels, contributing to lower teacher morale and raising concerns about the effectiveness of current disciplinary strategies. —Caitlynn Perez, Education Week

• Professor Douglas Fuchs is challenging the prevailing belief that inclusion is best for students with disabilities, arguing that the evidence supporting it is weak and that many students may benefit more from specialized instruction in separate settings. —Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report
• In recent years, critics of meritocracy have focused on correcting its moral faults through the lens of social justice; however, a truly healthy meritocracy requires balancing rigorous competition with a respect for individualism. —Ross Douthat, The New York Times
• Private school choice is rapidly expanding in the U.S., but the debate continues over its impact on state budgets and student outcomes, as proponents argue for increased access while critics raise concerns about funding, equity, and accountability. —Education Week