The Education Gadfly Weekly

I expected this to feel better.

I’ve been a Never Trumper for over a decade, and Tuesday’s overwhelming repudiation of Trump, Trumpism, and MAGA is what I’ve been craving all these years. Yet now that it finally happened, I find myself with a pit in my stomach.

To be sure, I’m happy that our country pushed back strong against Trump’s illiberalism, cronyism, and egocentric disregard for the concerns of everyday Americans. And I certainly don’t feel sorry for all those Republicans who tried to go along and get along all these years, accepting a hostile takeover of their party (and to some degree their country) so that they could stay in power. Good riddance.

But I worry, as many others do, that we are in for a rocky period. It’s a good sign that Trump is accepting the election results, but I am skeptical that he and the people around him are going to respond to this shellacking by looking for common ground with their political opponents and moderating their positions on issues like immigration or the war in Iran. I buy the argument that a lame-duck Donald Trump could be quite dangerous.

Nor am I thrilled about an ascendant hard-left progressive wing in the Democratic Party—one that has its own problems with illiberalism, especially in the form of antisemitism.

But I’m also deeply concerned about the next few years of education reform. It is simply a truism that the teachers unions remain a powerful force within the Democratic Party and are opposed to many of the promising reforms available to governors and lawmakers who want to improve their schools. That certainly includes high-quality charter schools, but also accountability, merit pay, and much else. Trifectas in states like Arizona, and blue supermajorities in states like Colorado, are going to be challenging to say the least. And expect some major budget fights in Washington over reform priorities like the federal Charter Schools Program.

And then there’s Texas. Elections have consequences, and it is quite clear that one consequence of Gina Hinojosa beating Greg Abbott in Texas is that education commissioner Mike Morath will soon be packing his bags. (Hinojosa said so in her victory speech.) That’s an enormous loss for the children of Texas and for all of us in education reform. While you may not know it based on the reporting from much of the national press, which has been obsessing over the culture war stuff in the Lone Star State, Morath has been working diligently (and frankly technocratically) for ten years now to put in place policies that are the very definition of student-centered.

My favorite example is the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, a merit pay program that is dramatically boosting salaries for great teachers in the state’s neediest schools, and one that should be a model nationwide. But also Morath’s appointment of Mike Miles in Houston and decisions to intervene in other low-performing districts around the state. Plus his recent introduction of the “Bluebonnet” curriculum, which has arguably the best reading list in the country—and even expects students to read complete novels!

As I told the Texas Tribune this summer, Morath is cut from a different cloth from most state superintendents—in a very good way. Though I acknowledge that, for all his great work, he hasn’t been able to claim a major victory in terms of boosting Texas’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Perhaps that will come a few months from now when the feds release the 2026 scores.

Here’s hoping that the incoming governor is wise enough to appoint a replacement who will continue much of Morath’s efforts, much of which sits quite comfortably within the 40-yard lines of the political and ideological spectrum.

Big battles ahead

And then there is school choice. I wrote on Tuesday that we should be skeptical of claims that a candidate’s opposition to “school vouchers”—or really his or her stand on any issue—was a decisive factor in any given contest. Overwhelmingly Democrats nationwide won because of the “blue-nami,” and that was because of Trump (and high gas prices, etc., etc.).

Still, I acknowledged that, if gubernatorial candidates significantly outperformed the national environment, and made their opposition to school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns, it would be reasonable to say the issue played a real role. And Hinojosa, along with Rob Sand in Iowa, met that high threshold. Nationally, it appears that Democrats outpaced Republicans by about 13 points on Tuesday, which would equate to a 14-point shift from 2024. Hinojosa’s 7-point margin of victory equates to a 21-point shift from 2024 (when the state went +14 for Trump); Sand’s winning margin of 11 points equates to a whopping 27-point shift. Those are big numbers! (Compare that to Amy Acton, whose 8-point win in Ohio equates to a 19-point shift—still impressive, but not quite as dramatic, and certainly explainable by Vivek Ramaswamy’s disastrous campaign.)

So get ready for some big fights over Education Savings Account initiatives in Texas and Iowa, and surely also in Arizona, where the Democrats will not only have a trifecta but probably the state superintendent’s office as well.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Democrats in those states team up with moderate Republicans to tweak their school choice programs to be more targeted towards poor and working-class families and more accountable to the public, especially in the form of transparency around student achievement results.

But I also understand that it’s hard to predict how these sorts of fights will play out, and there’s a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would be a huge loss if Democrats end up kicking low-income kids out of private schools that are serving them well and that their families continue to prefer.

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I don’t know about you, but I feel better now that I got all that off my chest. Maybe I’ll even try to enjoy this moment of (small-l) liberal victory, at least for a few days. But buckle up because it’s gonna be a wild ride in the days ahead.

It’s hard to feel sorry for the College Board, so let’s not. But let’s also try to understand an enormous dilemma that this enormous organization faces.

The Advanced Placement program is its biggest revenue generator and, along with the SAT, its showpiece. But where the SAT is little more than a measuring-and-comparison tool, the AP operation has long served as an indicator of educational quality and performance, often seen as the “gold standard” of high school achievement.

We at Fordham haven’t always gone quite that far. Our big review of AP and the much smaller International Baccalaureate (IB) program back in 2007 concluded that “AP and IB deserve most of the esteem in which they are held. Parts of the two programs are 24-karat…while others are less pure…. But they’re mostly gold and mostly worthy of emulation.”

We’ve been defenders and advocates for AP in the years since—and have sometimes declared without reservation that it is indeed a “gold standard.” One of us co-authored a well-received book that praised AP while also calling attention to the challenges it faces.

The challenges—and challengers—have, for decades now, included much debate over whether AP continues to deserve anything like a “gold standard” reputation. Or has it succumbed to “dumbing down” and “inflating up” like so much of the rest of American education, both K–12 and higher? (See this new Education Next article by John Moscatiello for the evidence of AP’s drift from excellence.)

We recognize some compelling reasons why it should succumb. Three come quickly to mind.

First and foremost, if “passing” an AP exam (traditionally a score of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale) is tantamount to passing an introductory college course in that subject—hence the long-standing expectation that one would be awarded credit upon arrival within the ivy gates—and demonstrating readiness to succeed in a more challenging college course in the same subject, then how should the College Board respond to the plain fact that it’s getting easier and easier to pass those college courses, indeed to get honors grades in them? Should the Board make it harder to pass a college-level course than the colleges do? Bear in mind that 19 of its 31 trustees have day jobs in higher ed, often engaged in “enrollment management” for individual institutions.

Second are all the equity pressures. It’s laudable that the AP program has swollen from a handful of courses taken by driven students at a couple of hundred private and suburban high schools into a massive operation—six million or so exams in 42 subjects taken by three million students at almost every high school in America. But it’s also well known that poor and minority students are far likelier to enroll in AP courses than to pass AP exams. A Georgetown University study found, for example, that “In 2019, 31.8 percent of exams taken by Black students and 44.5 percent of those taken by Latinx students received passing scores, compared with 72.4 percent of Asian students’ and 65.1 percent of White students’ exams.” Of course the College Board does not want to discriminate or be seen to. Shouldn’t it make those exams easier to get a passing score? Or at least add some exams that are easier to do well on?

Third, as the high school population shrinks; alternatives to AP, like dual enrollment, expand, usually without any quality control mechanisms; the value of a college education gets argued over; and renewed emphasis gets placed on career and technical alternatives to “college prep,” how should AP’s proprietors respond? What about expanding the share of students who take its courses and pass its exams—that’s good for equity, too—and introducing more courses in subjects that are useful in the world of work and don’t feel so academic?

So yes, the College Board has done some succumbing, most obviously by changing how student work on some of its most popular exams is evaluated, thereby boosting the shares of test-takers who pass and those who get high scores. In recent years, it has also added a number of subjects and exams—things like psychology and “human geography”—that are widely viewed as easier than the challenging disciplines it started with. And of late it has introduced subjects linked to “career readiness” (“Business with personal finance,” cybersecurity) and others in hot topics that seem more employable (computer science, art and design) than art history and “Italian language and culture.”

Yes, it’s all understandable. But returning to the “quandary” in our title, have David Coleman, Trevor Packer, and their colleagues entered into a Faustian bargain, risking the soul of Advanced Placement as they make decisions that alter its scope and rigor? If not its soul, are they risking its reputation by shifting its gold content from 24 karat to 18 or so? And, in the process, are they contributing to the dumbing down of both K–12 and higher education? If not contributing, aren’t they at least failing to resist?

Messrs. Coleman and Packer have shown courage and strategic good sense before, returning to the AP drawing board in the face of valid criticism, especially in the cases of their AP U.S. History and African American Studies courses.

But is it realistic to expect a nonprofit organization—one that depends for its existence on clients and institutions that find it useful—to continue to resist changes in the zeitgeist that surrounds it? Can the College Board in 2026 really be asked to fight back against the degradation of American education? A quandary indeed.

Here’s where we come out: We agree with some of the AP program’s critics that it’s a shame—and a problem for the country—that these widely respected tests appear to have gotten easier over time. As discussed above, we understand why that’s happened. And we understand that it’s hard to reverse, especially because it’s unclear what “standard” the AP should peg itself to, if not “a level of performance equivalent to passing an introductory college course.” A standard, we repeat, that is lower than it used to be—and lower than it ought to be!

But that doesn’t stop us from offering two suggestions.

First, in the interest of transparency, the College Board could declare that scores of 2 ought now to count as “passing” given the decline in college standards, making clear that this isn’t the Board’s preference but its acceptance of current reality, however regrettable. It follows that the Board should then urge states and nonselective universities to accept scores of 2 for credit and course placement.

Second, the Board should simultaneously work with the country’s most selective colleges and universities to determine a level of performance that would prompt them once again to give bona fide degree credit for AP scores—and set that level at 5 on the exams (then score them accordingly).

In other words, the College Board should use the AP scoring system to differentiate the performance of students more clearly than today by acknowledging that a 2 indicates readiness to pass courses in most colleges in this time of grade inflation, while saving 5s for students at the very top of the performance distribution, making the Advanced Placement program at least 22-karat-gold-worthy again.

Trump admitted last year that he “hates” his opponents. You may have missed the speech, but you haven’t missed the hatred. It spills over every container. He sticks his adversaries in the eye, calling them “the enemy within” and so on—vermin, traitors, scum. He unleashes “his” DOJ against them.

I taught civics to high school sophomores at the beginning of my teaching career, and it gave me an abiding appreciation for the foundation of political knowledge that is laid in the formative years. My favorite curriculum topic was loyal opposition.

Alongside this concept in American government are checks and balances, limited government, the rule of law, and civil rights. The five ideas are related, each is complex, and demonstrating their relationship is the deeper objective of the course. Good news: the course is required for graduation from high school in our state.

My students were sophomores, 15 years old and unsettled in that liminal zone called adolescence. Like any teens, they were “under construction” morally, emotionally, cognitively, and busy navigating the murky currents of loyalty, dissent, and individuality.

What a rich time to contemplate loyal opposition. You’re 15 and you want to be liked, not shunned. Once accepted, you’re tempted to follow the crowd. You’re likely to confuse loyalty with obedience, inclusion with groupthink, going along to get along. You’re working on trust and hungry for reassurance. You’re becoming your own person, gaining some autonomy from parents and family but perhaps over-bonding to peers.

The “opposition” half of loyal opposition was easiest for my sophomores to grasp. Teens are familiar with the idea already, of course, not so much from instruction as from experience. They’ve had opponents in games, races, and other contests all their lives. However, transferring that everyday understanding from playtime to the political realm is a bit tricky. Government and politics (“GoPo” my students called it) is a different playing field, but still it has opponents (contenders, adversaries, rivals).

Crucially in both realms, games and politics, your opponents are not enemies. Quite the opposite, they are essential. Winning against opponents is the goal. Without opponents there’s no contest.

Candidates, elected officials, and parties may be disloyal to one another’s positions and policies, they can protest the government and organize against its policies, but they are loyal to the constitutional framework—the playing field—that gives all opponents legitimacy as players.

The concept developed in England a couple hundred years before the American Revolution, so the founders of the U.S. had it in mind when they formed our system. James Madison in particular understood this was how you keep a democracy afloat in a diverse society, against all the odds. The formula is open contestation among competing interests on a rule-based playing field. Opponents are loyal to the ground rules even when they can’t stand one another. Everything depends on everyone’s fidelity to this one thing.

The “loyal” part of loyal opposition in the political realm can be hard for adolescents to grasp. Like opposition, they know loyalty experientially. They’re in the thick of it but in a family-and-friends context, not politics. Personal loyalties are at the churning heart of their psychosocial world as they make a community life that extends beyond family and kin. They value faithful friends—the warm security of it. And they recoil at duplicity—being “two faced.”

They grasp the wickedness of betrayal and wonder if it justifies revenge. They are captivated by stories of treachery, whether traitors in history or unfaithful friends in literature. Benedict Arnold, Judas, and Brutus are not just notorious examples but fascinating, too. And Hitler rose to power on a betrayal narrative (Trump too, in a way). The Godfather and The Sopranos make juicy case studies. And personally, Winston’s betrayal of his secret lover Julia in Orwell’s 1984 still gives me the shivers.

Teens will testify to the conflict between loyalty to friends and loyalty to principles—personal loyalty and principled loyalty. The question looms: Can one be a faithful friend and maintain the independence needed to weigh the friend’s actions on the scales of right and wrong?

Here’s where judgment and bravery enter hand in hand, for loyalty in both the personal and the political realms includes dissent. Here is the difference between the upstander and the bystander, virtue and cowardice.

Fifteen-year-olds have a lot to say about this. They try out the concept loyal opposition by applying it to their family and friends, and then to ball games and the political system. They aren’t certain of the latter because that system is for them a distant abstraction which, at this stage, they can barely detect. But as they live and read and learn some history, they gain additional on-the-ground examples of the concept. Gradually, their understanding ripens.

Has your understanding ripened? One’s grasp of loyal opposition is a telltale for one’s grasp of constitutional democracy—the cluster of principles and actions at the heart of our modus vivendi. It’s another convention mocked by Trump and his collaborators. Maybe they never understood the idea. Maybe they learned it but dismissed it as irrelevant to their project.

Politicians worthy of the nation’s creed should practice the concept in speech and conduct or face condemnation as turncoats. We can be grateful that there are plenty of loyal opponents in our elections, and we can thank our civics teachers who forge ahead.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Post Alley.

In states and districts throughout the country, “Grow Your Own” (GYO) teacher programs have become a popular strategy for strengthening and diversifying the teacher pipeline. By developing teacher candidates from local communities, the logic goes, GYO programs will expose more potential educators to the career, diversify the K–12 workforce, and boost retention. Indeed, initial evidence suggested that these programs can enhance teacher recruitment and retention. But their rapid rollout outpaced research on their effects on student achievement. Now, a new study by four researchers from the University of Maryland builds on the existing literature by digging into different forms of teacher “localness” and by connecting localness to student outcomes.

Using data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center, the authors link teacher and student data from 2012–13 to 2023–24. They also analyze select data going back to 2007–08 for then-students who went on to become teachers. They examine teachers’ localness based on three dimensions:

• Growing up locally, based on whether they graduated from a Maryland public high school, and whether their first teaching job is in the same district as the high school they attended. (Keep in mind that districts in Maryland are countywide.)
• Being trained locally, based on whether they completed a Maryland-approved preparation program, the high school pathway Teacher Academy of Maryland, and/or various other training and licensure categories.
• Working locally before teaching, based on whether they previously worked as aides in Maryland public schools.

Controlling for factors such as student demographics and prior test scores, teacher demographics and experience, and school characteristics, the researchers explore the impact of localness on teacher retention, and on third- through eighth-grade students’ math and English language arts (ELA) test scores. They focus on early-career teachers. In total, their data include about 12,366 unique teachers linked to about 1,581,000 student-year observations.

In line with previous research on GYO programs, the study finds positive and statistically significant relationships between teacher localness and retention. This pattern generally holds across all three categories of localness, with local upbringing and local training having the strongest relationships to retention. For example, teachers working in the same district where they attended high school are 10 percentage points more likely to stay in the same job for at least five years, compared to teachers who did not attend a Maryland public high school.

The effects of localness on student test scores, however, are much more modest. For most of the measures of localness, the association was statistically insignificant by two years into a teacher’s career. One exception was the link between local training and math scores, where the researchers found small but statistically significant increases for specific local programs. Traditional licensure through a Maryland program tied to a math improvement of 0.06 standard deviations, Teacher Academy of Maryland participation during high school to 0.09, and Maryland teacher residency participation to 0.12.

Even so, localness did not outweigh other features of teachers’ backgrounds. Those with out-of-state certifications saw a statistically significant math boost of 0.12 standard deviations within two years and by three years had the largest remaining advantage of any certification group, at 0.10 standard deviations—perhaps a reflection of a higher hiring bar for out-of-state candidates. Conditionally certified teachers over the age of 28 outperformed younger conditionally certified teachers by 0.05 to 0.10 standard deviations, even though younger conditionally certified teachers were likelier to be local. The researchers took this finding to indicate the benefits of prior work experience for teacher effectiveness.

Whatever the mechanisms, the findings around localness and student achievement are generally underwhelming. Yes, there’s a strong link between localness and teacher retention—but as the authors argue, student achievement should remain the north star. After all, keeping an ineffective faculty around for years doesn’t benefit students.

But the most common tradeoff probably isn’t between hiring a local teacher versus a slightly more effective out-of-state teacher. Given that Maryland’s recent GYO efforts seem to have contributed to the dramatic decline in teacher vacancies, the tradeoff may more often be between hiring a somewhat effective teacher and no teacher at all—and in that case, the local teacher certainly takes the cake. The authors also highlight their descriptive finding that recently conditionally certified teachers are more likely to be Black, and their effects on test scores are comparable to those of peers who enter through other routes—so certain local hiring practices may boost diversity while maintaining consistent effects on student achievement.

So, while GYO advocates undoubtedly hoped for stronger connections between localness and student achievement, these programs are certainly not without value. Still, before hitting the gas on GYO program expansion, leaders ought to consider what problem they’re really solving for—whether it’s primarily about recruitment, retention, diversity, or achievement—and consider whether the program is likely to move the needle toward that target.

SOURCE: Nicolas Dominguez-Mel, Wesley T. Morris, Sarah Montana, and David Blazar, “Teacher Localness, Early-Career Effectiveness, and Retention,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2026).

In a recent Fordham Institute survey, 76 percent of high school students and recent graduates reported at least one form of daily unsanctioned tech use during the school day. Half reported daily social media use, while 49 percent reported messaging friends during school hours. These numbers reflect student use both of school-issued devices and of personal phones. States aim to address some of these distractions with cellphone bans.

As of July 2026, more than 30 states restricted student phones during school hours. Such bans can take various forms, from restrictions limited to class time to policies that ban phones throughout the entire day. Some require students to lock their phones in secured pouches or a central office, while others rely on teacher discretion. Despite the rapid growth of phone-ban policies, there is limited research examining whether the bans improve student achievement and well-being.

In a research review of seven studies of natural experiments across six countries, NYU’s Emma Park, Carmen H.J. Lim, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt aim to assess the effects of these policies. Haidt is a leading proponent of phone bans and heads NYU’s Tech and Society Lab, which has spent years collecting evidence on “away for the day” policies. Among the studies, three^[1] evaluate full-day bans only, while three^[2] analyze both full-day and classroom bans but report the findings separately by ban type. The seventh^[3] study pools several types of phone bans in Sweden, examining ninth-grade outcomes from 1997–2017.

The findings are nuanced. All studies measuring phone use found that students used phones less in class after the bans were implemented. Three found positive effects on student test scores, while three showed no overall effect and one did not measure test scores. Preliminary findings in two of the studies suggest that phone bans may reduce bullying over time, while the studies that measured student well-being found no significant overall effect. Notably, in two of the studies, discipline incidents increased in the first year of a ban, though most of that increase faded out by the second year. Overall, the studies found mostly beneficial or neutral effects from phone bans.

The seemingly modest impact of cellphone bans described in the NYU research review may be related to varied and shifting implementation. A recent Brookings survey of teenagers by Dan Silver, Amie Rapaport, and Morgan Polikoff examined how phone bans hold up over the course of the year. In surveys near the start and end of the school year (October 2025 and May 2026), Brookings asked teens about their schools’ phone policies and whether they used their phones during core classes, with nearly all of the respondents attending schools with some form of phone ban. Overall, the percentage of teens reporting in-class phone use rose from 28 percent to 42 percent between the start and the end of the school year, with larger increases in places where phone ban policies were less strict. Consistent with this finding, 44 percent of teens said their teachers became less strict about phone use as the year progressed.

By May, most respondents reported that phone bans had no overall impact on their well-being or relationships with teachers, which the Brookings authors interpret as consistent with teens finding the phone bans less disruptive than they had feared. Still, the share of teens who said phone bans improved their learning environments rose from 28 percent to 35 percent.

While teen perceptions are far from causal evidence, the Brookings survey is consistent with Fordham’s finding that phone policies are rarely enforced. The NYU research review suggests that benefits rise when phone use declines substantially, but the policies don’t always hold, as a larger share of teens report using phones in class by the end of the year.

Enforcement matters. If leaders wish to ban phones from classrooms, they need to design policies that don’t rely solely on teacher enforcement. Future research should also track phone use along with school-issued devices, as students still find ways to access distractions without their phones. The early evidence suggests that phone bans can help students, but open questions remain about the best way for schools to carry out these policies. Taking phones out of the classroom may be the place to start.

SOURCES: Emma Park, Carmen H.J. Lim, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt, “Are school phone restriction policies working? A review of the natural experiments and advice to researchers on expanding the outcomes measured,” NYU Stern School of Business working paper (September 2026); and Dan Silver, Amie Rapaport, and Morgan Polikoff, “A year later, what teens tell us about school cellphone bans,” Brookings Institution (September 2026).

Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED), joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss teacher diversity and the challenges of building a stronger teacher pipeline. Why are so few Black and Latino men entering the profession? How can early exposure to teaching, apprenticeships, and Grow Your Own teacher programs help? And can teacher preparation programs better prepare aspiring educators for licensure exams?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a study finding that charter school openings can reduce nearby Catholic school enrollment and increase the likelihood of closure, particularly among K–8 schools.

Recommended content:

• Male Teachers Say Mentors Got Them There. For Black Men, the Need’s Even Greater — Sharif El-Mekki & Jeanie Lee, The74
• Can left and right find middle ground on teacher diversity? — Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• In defense of teacher diversity — Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
• Center for Black Educator Development — Center for Black Educator Development
• Charter School Expansion, Catholic School Enrollment, & the Implications for School Choice — Shaun M. Dougherty, Andrew Miller, and Yerin Yoon, Education Finance and Policy (2026)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]

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Transcript

This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Introduction

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This week, we're joined by Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, to discuss building a more diverse teaching workforce.

What's keeping more Black and Latino men, in particular, from entering the profession?

And can we recruit more teachers from underrepresented backgrounds without lowering cut scores on teacher licensure exams?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reports on a study of how nearby charter schools impact Catholic school enrollment.

All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.

Mike Petrilli [00:51]

Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.

Now, please welcome today's special guest, Sharif El-Mekki.

Sharif, welcome to the show.

Sharif El-Mekki

Thanks for having me.

Great to see you again.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, it's great to have you here.

Sharif is the founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development.

I got to know Sharif really well a few years ago when we did this Building Bridges project together.

Sharif is from Philadelphia.

We've already talked a little bit about football, as is appropriate.

We did mention that the Washington Commanders did beat the Philadelphia Eagles, but only because you're missing your star quarterback.

Sharif El-Mekki

That's the only way. Only way possible for them to do that.

Mike Petrilli

Exactly.

Well, also joining us, my co-host who likes the other football, David Griffith.

David Griffith

Hey, Mike.

Always a pleasure.

Don't know what you guys are talking about, but it sounds like fun.

Mike Petrilli

Yes, exactly.

Exactly. We're fans of soccer too, but it's all good.

David Griffith

Yes.

Mike Petrilli

Well, Sharif, I'm really glad that you came on the show.

We've been wanting to have you on for a while.

We are going to talk about an issue that I know is dear to your heart.

It's really the mission of your organization. It's something that I've been talking about on the show and writing about some this year as well.

That is teacher diversity.

Let's do it on Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: Building a more diverse teaching workforce

Mike Petrilli [02:22]

All right, so Sharif, I have been trying to make the case, especially to our friends on the right, that this is something they should care about and that there are ways to embrace teacher diversity that can be race neutral.

I mean, as you know, a lot of people on the right are very concerned about anything that explicitly has a racial component to it.

There's some people arguing that anything with that kind of explicitly racial component would be unconstitutional.

We don't need to get into any of that kind of stuff here.

But I've been trying to say, look, even if that's your argument, still surely we can agree that when we're talking about schools and we're talking about the experience that kids are having, it's important for them to get to have at least some teachers who have a shared life experience as they have.

So, you know, if you're teaching in a rural school, hey, that rural school should at least have some teachers who themselves grew up in a rural community, ideally that rural community, right?

If it's a Title I school, hey, having some teachers who went to Title I schools as kids would be great.

Serve a lot of kids getting free lunch? Having at least some teachers who themselves were free-lunch kids back in the day might be useful.

I don't know if I've had any success, though, convincing people about this.

So let's just start here.

You obviously work on this issue closely.

Tell us a little bit about what you do at the center.

And then also, when you try to make the case to folks, how do you pitch it?

What is your basic elevator pitch for why this is something we should care about and why it's important?

Sharif El-Mekki [03:56]

No, absolutely. And thank you.

And I think you're spot-on as far as introducing folks into the profession.

And particularly when they have some type of shared experience, understanding, deep empathy because of their lived experience, you know, with said students.

And so at the center, you know, I was a teacher and a principal for 26 years.

My principalship was 16 years in two turnaround schools here in Philadelphia.

The first one was with Edison Learning.

The second one was with Mastery Charter Schools.

And so that was my introduction to the principalship and my development over those, you know, a decade and a half.

And as we've been going, I did a fellowship at the U.S. Department of Ed and really started seeing nationally this was a challenge.

And I think it's twofold.

One is there is a teacher shortage in certain areas, particularly certain subjects, certain areas.

We see that there's a gap as far as people coming in, almost a decimation in some areas as far as people getting their teacher certification.

And then when you add diversity to it, what that means is that there are less and less people being invited into the profession.

And if we're saying, and listen, my generation, we're about to retire.

So if we already had a teacher shortage in some areas and Gen X folks are like, hey, this is year 34. I mean, this is year 35. I'm starting to lay out.

And we know that the inflow has also shrunk over the years.

Then we should at least start just having an analytical look of who hasn't been invited in the past.

Who may have had such negative experiences as students that they can't even imagine returning to teach?

And so to me, that's a group of students that have often been overlooked as far as the teaching profession.

We see the lack of diversity in teacher colleges.

And particularly when you're talking about, like, even men, you know, young Black and Latino men, it's even less.

Men, period.

You know, and so, you know, you have work of, like, the American Institute for Boys and Men who are also looking at this issue.

And what does it mean to have almost half of the population of students where these young men and young ladies never see a man in the building, never see a teacher?

Again, just being able to connect and share said experiences.

So fast-forward to, like, my work when these were things that, as a principal, listening to student voices is what led me to launch this organization.

We had a nitty-gritty of it.

We had an internship component, a graduation requirement in our school for 10th graders.

And so students were going to energy companies, law firms, the Philadelphia Zoo, newspaper, right?

Like, they had to do an internship.

They had to compete for an internship because we believed in the college and career.

They weren't, like, these two different things.

They were, like, conjoined.

Postsecondary means that you're going to have experiences.

But what we realized is students called us out on it.

If they were interested in education, we didn't have anything for them.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, interesting.

Sharif El-Mekki

Yep.

All the other careers, we had something for these students.

For education, we were basically like, oh, well, you know what?

Students would get out early on Wednesdays and go to their internship.

And for our students who were in education, we're like, well, do we send them to another school?

Well, go talk to your teacher.

And students would come back to me and say, listen, I want to be an educator.

And they didn't have the language, but what they said was, I'm being asked to help with bulletin boards or grade papers.

And mind you, I was at a highly successful school where we had some of the best teachers in the state, and I would say even in the country, in our building.

And it was still a struggle where they were trying to plan for the next week and help a student and giving them busy work.

And so we said, you know what, they actually need the actual kind of voc-ed introduction to teaching from a perspective where they can actually understand what's behind the scenes, not as a student, but as a potential career.

And that's what led us to this work.

Mike Petrilli

Like teacher apprenticeships and the sort of Grow Your Own programs.

Sharif El-Mekki

Exactly.

Mike Petrilli

Gotcha.

Sharif El-Mekki

Exactly.

And what we found is that they're not often in education.

Title I schools, diverse communities, Black and brown neighborhoods, they're typically not in those schools.

And so we said, you know what, we should make sure that they're in there.

We have a friend, Chris Emdin, who talks about, like, and we have to be very deliberate about it because, for some students, even thinking about returning to a classroom is like inviting them back to the scene of a crime, a crime committed against themselves.

Because some of them, we know absolutely, the data shows that some of them have horrific experiences in our schools across the country.

They may also be some of the best future teachers because of this struggle that they had.

I had a group of young men who said, you know what, we're going to become the teachers we wish we had and knew we needed.

Mike Petrilli

I love that.

And you wrote recently about this, I guess in the context of men, I think it was, that because we don't do a good job starting young, either in high school or even in college, when people are deciding what profession to go into, what to major in, the challenge of then getting men into the profession is one about getting mid-career people to switch careers, which is, of course, a much bigger challenge.

Sharif El-Mekki

That's a tougher challenge.

Mike Petrilli

Now, maybe it'll become easier if a bunch of college-educated people get laid off because of AI and they're suddenly saying, wow, what am I going to do with this college degree?

Maybe people will look at teaching.

But still, it makes sense to start the pipeline.

Sharif El-Mekki

And Mike, to your point, teaching is so important.

And yes, we welcome folks who have, you know, these late epiphanies or because of economic circumstances.

It is such a critical role for the future of this country.

Why wait on that as the default?

Like, oh, when the economy, you know, has a downturn, then people will start looking for them.

Like, no.

Why not inspire and invite them on the front end and ensure they're well prepared so we have better student outcomes on the back end?

Mike Petrilli

Right, right.

You know, Sharif, one place where this gets real is the debate around teacher licensure exams.

And that's because we know that these exams, they can have a disparate impact on teachers of color, potential teachers of color, that it is more likely that Black and Latino teachers are more likely, in general, to fail those exams.

And so some people say, well, you know, for the sake of diversity, what we want to do then is to lower the cut scores, make those tests easier to pass.

And I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, myself included, right, to the degree that those tests are predictive.

It's really hard to predict who's going to be a good teacher, but there's some predictive value, it seems, in some of these licensure exams.

We did a review of a study just a few weeks ago, I think Amber did, on exams that have to do with reading, Science of Reading knowledge.

And guess what?

Teachers that are stronger on the Science of Reading knowledge turn out to be better teachers in the classroom.

So how do you think about that challenge?

And to people who say, hey, this feels like, you know, there's this tradeoff, that you're saying we have to lower the bar in order to get more teachers of color into the classroom?

Sharif El-Mekki [11:37]

Yeah, you know, I mean, I would say in many ways, the way I talk about it, we actually have to raise the bar.

You know, people who are leading classrooms, that we understand, like, how critical this work is, the bar is actually higher.

What I think complicates it is I've seen many people, and research shows, that there are a lot of folks who can pass the test and can't lead a classroom.

They can't lead human beings.

You know, they can't convey complex issues and break them down for a seven-year-old or a 17-year-old to deeply understand, master the content, and be able to demonstrate their proficiency independently.

And so we know that it's not a clean line between that.

And at the same time, I have six children.

I want all of their teachers to not be two lines ahead of my kids as they're teaching.

I want them to not only, I want them to understand math, for example, deep enough where they understand where the gaps are.

They're able to do error analysis and say, here's where these students are maybe getting tripped up, and I know how to mitigate for that.

I understand the curriculum deep enough where, hey, I can move on from this because this spirals through the curriculum and it's going to be...

Or, you know what, this is a lever that we need to pause and make sure they go deep enough and understand because it is a critical building block.

Right?

So that depth of knowledge, that rigorous intellectual work necessary to be an effective teacher is paramount.

But I don't necessarily believe that the test is the only way to address this.

You know, I would say, like, we should look at the history of the test and, like, when it sprouted, when it was sprouted.

And then also, like, what does it mean?

And are there states that have better ways to measure?

But I also think a part of it is sometimes often in a conversation that's either test or no test.

And I would say, yes, we need some kind of measuring rules, but I would also, like, really push hard for the certification programs.

Like, what are they doing?

Like, how does someone have four years, at least, in a teacher college, graduate with debt, and unprepared to pass a licensure exam?

And my pushback has been on some professors.

I've had professors, this is about a decade ago when I was at the Department of Ed, speaking to some professors, and I'm asking them, why is there an issue with so many of your graduates?

They have a degree from your institution, but they're struggling on the test.

Have you linked your coursework and your syllabi to the state licensure examination?

They said no.

I'm like, why not?

We're telling teachers to backwards design.

I would think that would be the best marketing tool in the world to say, yep, we're a teacher college, and 99 percent of our graduates pass the licensure exam.

To me, that is like, I just can't even fathom why that wouldn't be part of the entire programming.

They said, well, we're teaching what I think they should know.

You think they should know it, but it doesn't correlate with their state exam, their career.

They're like, yeah, this is important.

So to me, sadly, there are a lot of people who are unserious about teachers passing the certification process.

And I also would say that as part of our high school program, we're looking at how do we have high school students take at least part one of the Praxis, which in many states they can do that because they're closer to when those coursework may have happened.

They may have just taken Algebra II.

So let's have them take the Praxis earlier.

And so that we at least understand, I meet so many college students who are taking their Praxis at the end of their college career when they may not have even taken some of those coursework.

And I would also challenge the states to look at what do you actually need to know in order to be an effective teacher?

Because I do think some of it is not necessary.

And what is the preparation?

And for us, the preparation for teachers, for us, it happens long before the graduating senior in college about to graduate.

Way before.

We're working with high school students and introducing them to it, the theories, the ideas, and even the practice.

The apprenticeship practice to help a student with their literacy, we start that far earlier than a 22-year-old about to graduate.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

David, why don't you get in here?

What's on your mind?

David Griffith [16:08]

Well, I guess I'm inclined to ask a question, Mike, which is I just want to hear from Sharif.

What do you think the single biggest barrier is to getting, let's just say, more men of color in the classroom?

Are there costs that we're not seeing?

Is it they just don't want to, like you alluded to at the start?

Is it the tests?

Where do you feel like we are losing them?

Sharif El-Mekki [16:37]

Yeah, so it's not a single one, but I can give you a group of things, right?

So a little scattershot here, but all connected.

I think a big part of it is, let's start with one, you know, and I think this is for any student, but where we're trying to attract and engage and educate is expectations.

I do think there are low expectations for, you know, young Black men.

They experience it, whether it's in their schools or in the profession.

And what I mean by that is, when we started the fellowship years ago, and these were all young Black men, highly successful, relatively good-looking, had, you know, found success in their schools.

We realized that all 17, and we were from all around the country but were all working in Philadelphia, not a single one of us had been invited into the profession until after we had graduated from college.

And we asked our colleagues, most of them were white women, you know, teachers, part of our administration.

The average response for when someone tapped them on the shoulder and said, hey, you would be a great teacher, consider teaching, it was third grade.

So third grade for one group, post-bachelor degree for another group.

And as we speak to people around the country, that's been consistent, which is crazy to me.

But I feel like part of it is, like, people don't see them as the future teachers and leading classrooms.

And it's been so much of just this assumption that, oh, it's a women's profession.

And it hasn't always been the case, but there is something about society where it tells people, like, no, you're not a nurturer of youth.

You're not a, you don't pour into humanity in the same type of way.

And I feel like, you know, listen, we should open it up for everyone to say, like, hey, if you want to pour into the next generation, lead classrooms, be a leader.

Basically what a teacher is, is a leader.

You are leading other human beings, edifying them in content and knowledge that is necessary for this country to flourish.

That's not just a women's job.

That's all of our job.

That is all of our responsibility because it affects our collective future.

I think the other piece is, it's harder, as Marian Wright Edelman used to say, it's harder to be what you can't, what you don't see.

If I never see a man leading a classroom, and if I do see him, he's a phys ed teacher or the custodian, maybe a principal, you know, then it might be harder for me to see because daily, 180 days times, you know, 13 years, I'm not seeing them.

And so it might be harder for me to even envision myself as leading the classroom.

And if I have an inkling towards it, like, why would I?

And I may be discouraged because people say, that's for you?

When have you seen a Black man teaching?

And then I would say the third part, which I think is extremely important, is what are their experiences in school?

How have they experienced school in those 13 years?

And I think, to me, as a teacher and a principal, that was the most important part of it.

Like, not only are they finding success, are they feeling smarter at the end of the class?

Do they feel seen, heard, and valued?

Those are parts that make it an inviting area or a place that I'm just trying to get through this.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, and I love that, Sharif, that last part about how do we, I wonder, for example, about, like, tapping men and/or Black men on the shoulder and say, hey, you would be a great teacher.

And that may be some of the charter schools, for example, that, you know, you came out of the charter sector, that are highly successful, that are effective, that are helping young Black and brown kids feel good about themselves as students, that maybe they have a particular responsibility.

Right?

Or we could encourage them to play that role because their young people are having better experiences in those schools.

They're getting to experience and see, again, for the high-quality ones.

Of course, we know there's plenty of low-quality charter schools.

But for the good schools out there, that's super powerful.

I hadn't thought about that before.

Sharif El-Mekki

Yeah.

Interesting enough, and as you said, the high-quality ones, I was proud that Mastery Charter, actually, they tracked that.

You know, they were looking to see, okay, how, you know, do we have diversity?

Do we have men diversity?

You know, do we have Black and Latino men diversity when we know that, you know, 90 percent of our students are, you know, Black and Latino and some Asian students?

Are we even thinking about that?

You know, there's so many districts that it's not even on their radar.

And it's not, it's also, we did surveys with our students.

And so we had the Insight Survey that TNTP used to design and kind of gear it towards what we wanted to know about.

And so we were constantly asking about our students' experiences, their experiences in classrooms, as well as in the school, and our staff.

And so all of that, I think, is a combined effort.

Just about every district in this country says something about, oh, we want to ensure our students are prepared for a global economy, a global world.

And they had no experience practicing working with, you know, diversity.

None whatsoever.

You know, and we also have people like, oh yeah, come in this profession, as you painted earlier.

And they have no connection, no understanding, no, you know, deep insight and proximity to the places that they're serving in.

It doesn't work.

We see the results of dissatisfaction.

We see dropout rates.

We see the disengagement.

And we can't say, oh yeah, students are being more disengaged, and not think about, okay, well, who's leading their classrooms and schools?

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, no, and I see what you're saying, though.

It's not like every single teacher, right, has to have grown up in the community.

I mean, The New York Times did a profile of James Talarico's time in Teach For America the other day.

You know, Jimmy Talarico.

Sharif El-Mekki

I gotta check it out.

Mike Petrilli

It's good.

I mean, and it sounds like he did okay.

You know, it was funny.

One of his peers, you know, his fellow teachers, she saw him come in, you know, TFA, white, liberal, idealistic.

She's like, oh, those kids are going to eat him alive.

And it sounds like by the end he had earned her respect, that she, you know, he did a pretty good job, right?

So, I mean, there are people out there who can do it even if they grew up, say, you know, privileged and, you know, from a different community, then they have that empathy gene or whatever and they put in the work and they can be...

But you don't want a whole school full of James Talaricos, you know, teaching a school that's, you know, with all brown or Black children.

Right?

I mean, so that's the balance.

There's, you want to have, you know, when we talk about teacher diversity today, what we're really talking about is making sure that there are some Black and Hispanic and male teachers because it is still the case that white women dominate the profession still overwhelmingly.

Sharif El-Mekki

Yeah, vastly, between 70, 80 percent over the past, what, 50 years, you know.

That's significant, especially as we have more and more diverse students.

And I love that you brought up also the economic diversity.

We also have to recognize, like, you know, one of the biggest gaps in that, you know, we see in some communities is the socioeconomic range of the people leading classrooms and schools and districts and the students that they serve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

Like, and so even that, like, having that understanding.

So we're not just like, oh yeah, well, this is, you know, because when you don't have that, when you don't have proximity, you start seeing expectations lower.

You start seeing, like, oh well, that community, they don't care about teaching and learning.

Oh, that student, they don't understand or they don't want to do...

That's actually low expectations for yourself because, like, well, what can I accomplish?

Right?

And so even the diversity, you know, some of my, the pattern that I've heard over the years of white teachers, white women, was saying, like, you know what?

A lot of professional development that I have received over the years and what I graduated from, it sucked.

It stunk.

Some of my best professional development was being in proximity to diverse educators.

Like, we wouldn't even have a KIPP if it wasn't Harriet Ball.

Mike Petrilli

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

All right, Sharif, we will have to leave it there.

Such a great conversation.

Really appreciate it.

Sharif El-Mekki, again, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development.

Really appreciate you joining us.

Sharif El-Mekki

No, thanks for having me.

Thanks for always being open for engaging in the complexities and tapestry of education.

Appreciate you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

Thanks. Likewise, Sharif.

All right.

Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

Research Minute: Do charter schools reduce Catholic school enrollment?

Mike Petrilli [25:37]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

So it's a little awkward this week because we are recording this on Monday.

The election is on Tuesday.

This will come out on Wednesday.

So, yes, no real election coverage other than...

Amber Northern

I know.

Mike Petrilli

I do feel like I've been working on a piece, I've got to finish it quickly here, about sort of preregistering my views on how to tell if education was an issue in any of the races, right?

Or maybe school choice, right?

As you always know, advocates on either side will want to make hay out of the results and say, see, if these politicians would just adopt my preferred policy, they would be more likely to get elected.

David Griffith

Mike, I do not think there is a political professional in America who genuinely believes that anything about this, this is not about education.

Mike Petrilli

Come on now.

You're really going to be digging.

I agree.

No, and I think that's super important to say.

Of course, this election is not about education, though it will have big implications for education, especially at the state level.

But, for example, you know, if Gina Hinojosa does actually win the governor's mansion in Texas, which would be amazing, you know, if she outperforms whatever the blue wave is, you know, then it's fair to say, okay, maybe on the margins, what made a difference?

And in her case, for example, she did run very much on education.

She was a school board member.

She's talked a lot about support for public education.

Maybe there's an argument there.

Right?

Versus some of these other races where, look, it's just basically if there's a blue wave, it's going to get a bunch of these Democrats across the winning line.

And we all know it's about Trump. It's about affordability, et cetera, et cetera.

But, you know, look, I think it's worth asking and saying in advance what's the right way to think this through, right?

About did, for example, the support for universal school choice hurt Republicans anywhere?

Did it help them anywhere because of new voters?

I think that's, you know, it's going to be one of those things that people are going to try to spin.

So let's get ahead of it.

Amber Northern

You get spinning, Mike. You're good.

Mike Petrilli

It's the pre-spin.

Amber Northern

Pre-spin.

The pre-spin.

Mike Petrilli

And I would say my own view is, as people know, I've been talking about forever, you know, I don't love the universal choice, but if you're going to have universal, I love what happens in Ohio where there's a sliding scale and the wealthiest parents only get a small little baby voucher.

That said, I don't know that that helps politically because it's so wonky and technocratic.

I don't know if anybody even knows, like, understands how that works.

So, you know, the fact that they only get a small voucher, the point is still the opponents can say, oh, these rich people are getting subsidies, free money from the government.

Right?

Amber Northern

Yes.

Mike Petrilli

I don't know.

Maybe it doesn't matter one way or the other.

It's a nuanced argument.

Amber Northern

Yes.

Mike Petrilli

Which is not what our elections tend to be about.

David Griffith

That was an absolutely terrible tweet, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, like, you know, you're not even on Twitter.

David Griffith

Correct.

Amber Northern

Nor am I.

David Griffith

All right.

I'm holding myself to a different standard, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

I hear you.

Well, speaking of that, we hold ourselves to very high standards when it comes to the Research Minute.

Amber Northern

We do.

Except our producer reminded me that I covered this similar study over two years ago.

I'm like, well, if I don't remember, I don't think Mike and David are going to remember.

Anyway, this is the final version of a working paper I covered, I think, in September 2024.

That gives you an idea of how long it takes, like, these peer-reviewed journals to, you know, get turned from working paper to final version.

But I digress.

Education Finance and Policy asks whether public charter schools have played a role in the decline of Catholic school enrollment.

I think we have an idea of the answer here.

But Shaun Dougherty, our longtime Fordham friend, and colleagues deliver the first national evidence on this.

We've got prior studies in state-specific contexts, such as Michigan.

They've shown mixed results.

But this time, Shaun and friends use the National Longitudinal School Database, NLSD, covers 1998 through 2020.

And they have school-level data for both public and private schools in the U.S.

And this database compiles Catholic school data from the Private School Survey.

All this is NCES data.

They split the sample into K-8 and high school, in part so that the control schools have at least one overlapping grade.

The final sample has, I think, over 8,000 Catholic K-8 schools, about 1,700 Catholic high schools.

So just a little backdrop first.

I think most of our listeners know that Catholic school enrollment has been falling over 30 percent, actually, over the past 20 years.

And it had a peak of 5 million kids in the 1960s and '70s.

We got a little, what, 1.7, barely, million today.

And then a lot of people say, well, it's the demographic shifts.

You know, there are some white Catholic families that move to the suburbs.

It's this terrible clergy sex abuse scandal stuff.

But what's less examined, and what we've got here, is the potential influence of the other free public school alternatives, namely charters, which are now up to, gosh, I know it's 6 percent.

Have we got to 7 percent yet?

I'm not sure, but at least 6 percent.

So we are looking at the number of charter schools descriptively grew rapidly from '98 to 2020.

And this was interesting. I didn't know.

They eclipsed the number of Catholic schools starting in 2013, 2014, 2015, those years.

So we've got a staggered difference-in-differences design comparing Catholic schools that got a new charter school opening nearby to those that have not been treated.

So basically, they're looking at the rollout of these charter schools and positioned to the new charter schools that opened in a vicinity.

And they're basically, they fixed some things that were wrong with earlier staggered diff-in-diff designs.

I don't need to go on all that.

But the treatment is the first charter school opening within a set radius.

They look at one, two, three, and five miles.

They find that it doesn't really matter.

They find consistent results across one, two, three, and five miles.

And they also look, they do a bunch of, you know, robustness tests and that sort of thing.

They actually, for instance, they compare Catholic schools near charters that actually open versus ones that were proposed sites because we know sometimes the sites change once the application's in.

And anyway, it basically supported that it was the charter-school opening itself and not anything that was going on locally.

All right.

Key finding one: Charter openings reduce K-8 Catholic school enrollment by about 6.8 students on average.

That's from a baseline of 286, or approximately 3 percent.

So, for example, a K-8 Catholic school exposed to a charter-school opening for eight years faces, on average, a cumulative enrollment loss of about 50 students after eight years.

And then they basically use their sample and they interpret that to mean that charter competition accounts for approximately 17 percent of the total national decline in Catholic school enrollment.

Seventeen percent.

It's a K-8 effect.

There are no impacts at the high school level.

They're null.

So key finding two: K-8 Catholic schools near a charter school are significantly more likely to close within five years.

So charter openings increase the risk of a K-8 Catholic school closure by one percentage point per year on average.

That accumulates to four percentage points higher risk of closure over five years.

And that translates to 113 additional school closures in that five-year period.

Key finding three: Charter openings change who stays.

So white enrollment shares fell, Hispanic shares rose in these affected K-8 Catholic schools.

And it's consistent with prior studies that show white families are more likely than other groups to exit toward the charter option.

And then they had finally two suggestive findings, but they say they're not significant.

They're kind of borderline significant, but not, you know, precisely.

And that was that states without caps on charter numbers actually show larger enrollment declines, which I didn't think that was surprising.

But the other thing that was surprising was that states that had the private-school voucher programs showed larger declines than those without, which is a little odd because you would think that maybe vouchers insulate the charter schools from charter competition.

But maybe these voucher states also have more permissive charter laws, and maybe those larger declines reflect sort of this broader school competition rather than vouchers themselves.

I don't know.

We can hypothesize about that.

And the takeaway, the authors finally say that this is a paradox of choice, that if expanding public charter schools closes nearby private-school options, the net choice in a community might not actually grow.

Okay, but we weren't actually able to look at the quality of the Catholic schools or the newly opened charter schools, which kind of seems like a big deal to me.

That's what I've got.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, that point at the end, Amber, which you probably didn't make two years ago, is important.

I mean, yes, if you're like, oh, you know, all we're seeing here is charter schools replacing Catholic schools.

There's no net plus.

Right?

Maybe.

But if the schools are better, right?

They are free.

That's something that's good.

We have more information about them.

They're more accountable.

I will say that taking two years to publish this article gives us a chance to say now, hey, some of these trends may be turning around.

We've seen some headlines out of Florida that Catholic schools are growing again.

We've got our friend Stephanie Siroki, who's just been appointed to lead a new group that's going to be supporting new private schools in terms of expanding and growing.

You know, the growth of private-school choice programs, especially in red states.

And now the federal scholarship tax credit, at least in New York and Colorado, you know, is giving people some hope again that Catholic schools might find.

And then there's, of course, you know, pretty soon the Supreme Court is going to take up again this question of religious charter schools.

So point being, this will not be the final say on the word because it keeps changing.

Right?

It keeps changing.

David?

David Griffith [36:47]

Yeah, and it's sort of hard to know what to make of it.

I mean, I suspect we'll still be struggling with it five years from now, right?

But it's mixing so many things together, right?

You've got a huge just, you know, financial effect.

Right?

If you're giving people an option that they have to pay drastically less for, that's going to affect almost everyone's decision-making process.

Right?

But of course, there probably was a traditional public school in many of these places.

So, you know, the implication is that maybe people weren't necessarily exiting the traditional public school, you know, for Catholicism, maybe.

Right?

So we're mixing together a bunch of things.

And yeah, I think it's sort of a test, right?

Like, if this reverses itself, then maybe this was just about kind of, like, giving people a cheaper option and they took it.

Right?

But if it doesn't, then maybe the implication was that, you know, people were just looking for a safe school when they went to Catholic schools or a school with high standards or better peers or whatever you want to call it.

But we're not going to get anything remotely approaching, you know, a real experiment for any of this.

So, you know, I think the conversation continues.

I also think that it's probably just going to divide people normatively, right, along pretty traditional private-school-choice, public-school-choice lines.

Because you can argue that, you know, it's unfair.

If you're a private-school-choice person, you're going to argue that this is sort of unfair competition.

And if you're a public-school-choice person, you're going to say this is the price of running an explicitly religious school, is that, you know, you're not subsidized in the same way.

And that's not really a question that research can answer.

So, yeah.

Mike Petrilli

Well, so it is going to be interesting that in some of these states where maybe we could study this, where there is widespread private-school choice, the dollar amounts are ample enough to support the full tuition.

Right?

That piece is a...

I don't know if there's anywhere where we can say, I mean, maybe at the K-8 grade-school level for Catholic schools.

I mean, in Arizona it's $8,000.

I still don't know if that's enough to actually, right?

I would think the church still would have to subsidize at that level.

But, you know, if you had a fair test, then maybe, yeah, you could say.

And if there were, you know, I mean, the notion for a long time, right, was that these no-excuses charter schools, they were Catholic schools without the crosses.

And they, high expectations, uniforms often, right?

High expectations for behavior, you know, a character-education component, you know, all of this stuff.

And maybe for some parents, you know, they were happy enough with the Catholic schools even if they weren't Catholic themselves.

And maybe they didn't love the theology stuff, but it was close enough.

Right?

Maybe for some of those parents now, you know, if they get to have all of that without the religion, that's a better fit for them.

Right?

But then there's this group of parents that very much want the theology, that very much want to raise their children in the Catholic setting.

And now in additional places, they have that opportunity also.

Amber Northern

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

All right, Shaun.

Well, you know, Shaun and colleagues, start working on the next paper is what we're saying.

Amber Northern

And if you're lucky, we'll cover it twice.

Mike Petrilli

Yes, that's right.

Oh, boy.

All right, everybody.

Well, that is all the time we've got for this week.

So until next week.

David Griffith

I'm David Griffith.

Mike Petrilli

And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.