The Education Gadfly Weekly: How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education
The Education Gadfly Weekly: How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education
How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education
It may be true that Kamala Harris is, at heart, your typical progressive Democrat from California. But she has an unusual opportunity to shed some of that political baggage. Indicating that she will be open to education reform is one of the best ways to do so.
How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education
How to implement a cellphone ban in schools
California schools are failing to teach kids how to read
Is “credit recovery” as bad as they say?
Digging into the 2024 survey of American public school teachers
#930: What Vance and Harris mean for federal education policy, with Dale Chu
Cheers and Jeers: July 25, 2024
What we're reading this week: July 25, 2024
How to implement a cellphone ban in schools
California schools are failing to teach kids how to read
Is “credit recovery” as bad as they say?
Digging into the 2024 survey of American public school teachers
#930: What Vance and Harris mean for federal education policy, with Dale Chu
Cheers and Jeers: July 25, 2024
What we're reading this week: July 25, 2024
How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education
Josh Barro wrote earlier this week that Vice President Kamala Harris has the remarkable fortune to run in a general election without having staked out any unpopular positions in a Democratic primary—at least not since she ran for president five long years ago. That means she enjoys the ability to claim some positions in the political center that can address her weaknesses and boost her chances of victory. “Harris’s biggest political liability,” Barro argued, “is that she may be seen as too politically extreme, and she can reposition herself toward the center without penalty, if she is willing to do that.”
That doesn’t mean she has a completely free hand. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, groups on the political left have been less willing to give a pass to their Democratic presidential candidates than those on the Trumpy right have:
[Trump’s] “be allowed to do that” score is off the charts. If it’s convenient for him to start saying nicer things about electric cars in exchange for Elon Musk’s money, he does that. If it’s convenient for him to pretend the Republican Party isn’t deeply committed to banning abortion, he does that.
Every progressive I know recognizes that these Trumpian stabs at moderation are good for Trump, and that it’s good for the left to try to expose them as lies. The progressives who recognize that need to see the symmetry here.
One issue that offers opportunities for moderation is education. Iglesias suggests that Harris might say something like “my parents moved to this country because it’s the greatest place on Earth, and I think my party and our school system need to get back to teaching kids patriotism.” That would be a good start, but there are plenty of possibilities. She might use this week’s speech to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to show she’s willing to buck progressive orthodoxy.
One obvious way is to talk about the current challenges facing teachers when it comes to classroom discipline. In the wake of the pandemic, but also some reforms embraced in the Black Lives Matter era, many American classrooms have gotten out of control.
Harris can lean into her prosecutor instincts and call for greater order and discipline in classrooms, and especially greater respect for teachers. She might say that it’s crazy that some states and school districts have adopted formal positions that children and teenagers can cuss out their teachers with little to no repercussions.
Relatedly, she might embrace the call to get cellphones out of the classroom, and also express support for tough love when it comes to chronically absent students. Back in California, she even prosecuted some parents for their children’s truancy, a position she later retreated from. But it wouldn’t be hard for her to say that kids need to be in school and parents need to be held accountable for making that happen. She doesn’t have to embrace draconian discipline rules; she just needs to create some distance between herself and the most unreasonable social justice warriors, who have been arguing that any form of traditional discipline is furthering the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Discipline is an issue where she can get on the side of her teachers union base, whose leaders are hearing from their members about chaos in the classroom and watching veteran teachers quit because of school violence and disrespect. But if she really wants to be seen as a different kind of Democrat than her current boss, she’s going to need to disagree with the unions on a couple of other issues. President Biden has never been willing to do so, given his self-image as the most pro-union president in history. Not to mention that Jill Biden was herself a member of the National Education Association, which she and the president pointed out at every opportunity.
So how can Harris demonstrate that she’s not beholden to the unions, especially since one of them—the AFT—already endorsed her?
One possibility is for her to return to a proposal from her 2020 campaign, which was to boost teacher salaries nationwide. This time around, however, there should be a catch, mainly that teachers need to be held accountable for improving student learning. She could, for example, say that states and school districts need to make the attainment of tenure something that teachers earn through merit and a demonstration of effectiveness rather than just surviving for a few years.
Finally, Kamala Harris could indicate support for public charter schools. It’s quite clear from public opinion polls that school choice in all its varieties is very popular with parents, especially Blacks and Hispanics. Republicans have been smart to lean into that issue in recent years, and this might be one reason that they are starting to peel off voters of color.
But Republicans have created their own political vulnerabilities by embracing private school choice for wealthy parents, which is an obvious giveaway to the rich. They also support publicly-funded vouchers for religious schools, which even supporters read as code for “Christian schools”—making lots of normie voters nervous.
This is why Democratic presidents from Clinton through Obama embraced public charter schools as a way to support school choice without the unpopular aspects of private school choice. So did a host of Democratic governors, mayors, members of Congress, and senators. Not to mention that public charter schools continue to prove their mettle in boosting student learning. A brand-new study even shows their effectiveness at dramatically raising college graduation rates.
Harris need not say much, just that she will support public schools of all varieties, including public charter schools, especially at a time when we need to make progress again on narrowing achievement gaps and helping kids recover from pandemic-era learning loss. That’s a pretty low bar—though one that President Biden failed to clear.
It may be true that Vice President Harris, in her heart, is your typical progressive Democrat from California. But she has an unusual opportunity to shed some of that political baggage. Indicating that she will be open to education reform is one of the best ways to do so.
How to implement a cellphone ban in schools
About seven in ten (72 percent) high school teachers say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom. Parents feel less strongly, as the majority (56 percent) say that students should sometimes be allowed to use their cellphones in school.
This difference of opinion was one reason that I recently attended a packed session at the National Charter Schools Conference in Boston. Called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Restricting Cellphone Use: Lessons from School Leaders, it gave an unvarnished account of precisely what the title promised. Presenters included the founder of a charter management organization, Dana Teasley, President of GEO Academies (Indianapolis, IN), and two principals, Dawn Cobb-Fossnes of Ocean Academy Charter School (Bridgeton, NJ) and Othiniel Mahone of GEO Academies 21st Century School (Gary, IN).
Plenty of schools say they don’t allow students to have their phones out during class. But many teachers will tell you that’s lip service. This particular panel talked about policies with teeth, meaning all phones are stored away in a separate location for the entire day, sometimes called “away for the day.”
Here are three things that I learned from this battle-tested trio about how to implement a phone ban in middle and high schools.
1. Overcommunicate before you take action.
Over and over, the trio told us that you’ve got to set the stage for the policy long before it’s implemented or “the parents will be livid!” (Recent articles echo this recommendation.)
So leaders formed voluntary committees at their schools to discuss potential cellphone policy changes, with representation from administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Every household also received multiple phone calls letting them know about this ongoing dialogue. Newsletters and social media helped to get the word out, too. In the interim, students had to conduct research about why banning cellphones in class was a good idea (no alternate thesis was allowed!). As part of that assignment, they had to interview a fellow student, a parent or guardian, and another adult about the potential drawbacks to phones in schools and how to address any concerns the interviewees had.
In addition to the committees, school leaders held multiple meetings to solicit parental input. At those meetings, they summarized the research on cellphone use and the negative repercussions for kids. They distributed handouts with the draft cellphone policy and told parents bluntly that they were part of the problem: “We’ve got to stop you from texting your kids during class!” Parents chuckled, but the message was received.
In the three weeks leading up to the policy’s implementation, administrators sent email reminders to parents every other day about the upcoming ban and how it would be carried out. Some might say that’s overkill. But the panelists were adamant that students and parents needed ample notice and time to prepare for the culture change. Students continued to push back, but given the incessant communication and multiple opportunities to weigh in, parents were fully aware of the policy (even if they weren’t 100 percent on board) and no longer squabbled with their kids about it.
Once the scheduled “banning” day actually arrived, the school was blanketed with signs at entrances, classroom doors, and hallways reminding everyone that phones were off limits.
2. Nail down the process by which phones will be collected and returned—and consequences for noncompliance.
Presenters shared how their prior efforts had failed and why. They’d tried “green and red zones” for phone use—think green for cafeteria and red for the classroom—but it was far too hard to monitor. They’d tried pricey lockable pouches that stored students’ phones for the day and could be reopened only at an “unlocking base” at the final bell. But some kids still managed to open them by damaging them. Or they brought in burner phones (no kidding) to put in the pouch while their real phone stayed with them. Or they forgot to unlock their phone at school, took the pouch home, and had their parents calling the school at 7 p.m.
The winning storage solution ending up being a wood box in each homeroom that costs about 40 bucks on Amazon (also known as a cellphone locker). No, it didn’t solve the burner phone issue, but it did address some of the other headaches. The panel’s advice: Keep it simple.
Students had to check in and turn over their phones first thing in the morning during homeroom. The homeroom teacher was responsible for collecting and locking them in the box. Devices had to be picked up at the end of the day in the same homeroom class.
Panelists told us that enforcement was key for both teachers and students. If the homeroom teacher failed to collect the phones, the principal was quick to pay her a visit. If that teacher was absent, an administrator would collect the phones instead, as opposed to asking a wavering substitute to do it. Enforcement at the kid level meant swift and clear consequences for any phone use at any time during the school day and any place in the school—and purposely included inconveniencing their parents.
To wit, the cellphone policy at GEO Academies 21st Century reads as follows:
The school is not responsible for personal devices or cellphones, so while we do make an effort to keep them secure, it is still the responsibility of the student to follow policies responsibly. Again, we strongly recommend the device not be brought to school at all.
This policy has been developed with the input of students, teachers, and parents, and there will be NO exceptions to it:
First warning: Parent must pick up phone and Saturday school detention.
Second warning: Parent must pick up phone and an out-of-school suspension.
Third warning: Parent must pick up phone and an out-of-school suspension and possible expulsion.
Administrators already had in place Saturday school detention. Besides punishment for behavioral infractions, it was used as mandatory make-up time for those students who had missed too many days. So it made sense to use it for cellphone infractions, as well. Classroom teachers were paid extra to monitor Saturday school.
Not long after, the policy was expanded to include other outside electronic devices. Without their phones, students had started using their watches, tablets, and other personal computers for their preferred distractions. But because the schools had one-to-one computing programs (where each student was provided with a laptop to access the internet and digital course materials), there was no need for outside electronics.
3. Don’t exempt teachers’ phones.
For the ban to be successful, they told us that it had to be an adult policy, too. So teachers also locked up their phones so that everyone was in it together. It was important for them to be models for their students. And the kids rather enjoyed keeping the teachers accountable if they caught them with their phones!
Make no mistake: It was a difficult adjustment for the educators, as well. After all, we adults are no strangers to cellphone obsession. But if teachers didn’t buy into the ban and have to abide by it, they’d be accused of hypocrisy and risk losing credibility with the students.
Some will say that teachers need their phones in case of classroom emergencies. But there’s nothing stopping them from using two-way radios, landline phones in classrooms, computer-based alert systems, or old-fashioned panic buttons. Intercom systems are also a mainstay in schools, and some even have digital displays throughout the building that can be used to broadcast emergency messages.
Others might say there’s no need to treat the adults like the children. But this seems like one of those issues where it’s important to lead by example.
—
It’s been just seven months since these schools started banning cellphones. That’s not terribly long, but panelists shared that they are already seeing benefits. There’s been a decrease in fighting, bullying, and cheating. Kids are more engaged and productive in their classes, and some appear less distressed.
In the end, we can’t turn back time and put the genie back in the bottle. But we can lock her out of schools and put her in a box.
California schools are failing to teach kids how to read
Everyone benefits from exemplars. We all need models to mimic and follow. In the policy realm that means states, legislatures and governors who pass policies and reforms that materially improve the lives of their residents.
We also need cautionary tales, clear examples of mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. On education, California has stepped into that role. Any aspiring policymaker looking for guidance on sensible education reform should take a glance at Sacramento over the past half-decade and do exactly the opposite.
Most recently, under pressure from teachers unions, the Legislature killed a bill introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio that would have mandated the teaching of phonics. The bill had the support of both the state-level parent-teacher association and the NAACP—and rightly so. A mountain of research going back to the 1950s vindicates phonics as the best way to teach young children to read.
The nation’s schools have had something of a reckoning in the past few years: Millions of children struggled to read because schools followed pseudoscientific theories about early literacy. Now at least a generation more will suffer the same fate in California.
In an open letter to Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, the California teachers union bristled at the “top down, statewide mandate” approach of this bill. But the teachers unions are happy to see California impose curricular, instructional and ideological mandates in other realms.
The state’s top-down sex education framework clocks in at 746 pages of material, curricula, assessments, grading recommendations and instructional requirements. The state compels teachers to tell kindergartners that children in “kindergarten and even younger have identified as transgender” and that biological sex is completely divorced from “gender identity.”
In 2021 the state ignited a brawl over its mandated ethnic-studies curriculum. Its content and instructional practices have roots in 1960s activism against American hegemony; the goal is to “liberate” students from the oppressive forces of capitalism, patriarchy and settler colonialism.
In 2023 California implemented a new mathematics framework, the first edition of which included “whiteness” and “social justice” as topics for instruction. The goal was to raise the “sociopolitical consciousness” of students—in math class. A revised framework was notably less political but required teachers to use a quantifiably ineffective approach to teaching called “discovery” learning, where students must be left to “discover” their way into long division or algebraic equations.
Taken together, the California Legislature is happy to impose top-down mandates about curricular content and instructional “practices” in other content areas as long as they align with progressive pieties. Lawmakers will mandate that teachers educate children about the latest obsessions of critical race theory or gender ideology, but letter sounds or math facts are a bridge too far.
Fundamentally, California demonstrates what happens when a radical theory of education is put in practice. There are a handful of competing philosophies of education, and the most popular in schools of education is “critical pedagogy.” Its fundamental principle maps the Marxist oppressor-oppressed dichotomy on to the student-teacher relationship, concluding from there that the imposition of any content, any behavioral norms, any expectations is inherently oppressive. The teacher’s only role is to develop a child’s “critical consciousness,” to foster discontent with the current power structure and spur students into left-wing activism.
In most American schools, vestiges of a liberal-arts education remain: Kids practice academic skills, learn history and might even read excerpts of Shakespeare. With its rejection of phonics, California has fully committed itself to a rejection of a liberal-arts tradition and fully embraced a radical agenda in its schools.
Editor’s note. This was first published by The Wall Street Journal.
Is “credit recovery” as bad as they say?
For several years now, critics have been blaring klaxons about the questionable quality and increasing prevalence of “credit recovery” courses in America’s high schools. Credit recovery programs (or “online credit recovery”), unlike repeating a class or taking traditional “summer school,” allow students to navigate through computer modules, taking quizzes and assessments within these digital programs to earn the high school credits they initially failed to obtain. Now, a working paper by Carolyn Heinrich and colleagues shines a spotlight on the troubling realities of these programs, particularly through their analysis of an online Algebra 1 credit recovery course.
They approach credit recovery by focusing on the assessments, in particular the assessments for an Algebra I course offered by one of the nation’s largest credit recovery vendors. The team analyzed 1,408 assessment questions, classifying them by their form and also using Bloom’s taxonomy to measure their quality and rigor. Such classifications are not direct measures of question quality, which might be debated by educators and psychometricians, but certainly speak to the value of the assessments. The results are both unsurprising and disheartening: Not only were 83 percent of the questions multiple choice, but over 90 percent did not demand any higher-order thinking such as analysis or evaluation. Only a handful of word problems required students to engage in more complex cognitive tasks.
Since in-person proctoring of these exams is rare, what’s even worse is that 91 percent of the assessment questions could be easily answered with a simple Google search. Many of these questions have been floating around the internet since 2015, with answers readily available on numerous websites. The process for retaking tests previously failed is also alarmingly lenient. Students retaking unit exams, known as “post-tests,” can review all their previous answers along with the correct ones before attempting the exam again, often with the questions in the exact same order. This method maximizes the student’s likelihood of passing the exam without actually understanding the material, further diminishing the credibility of these assessments.
The study points to lax state policies on credit recovery as another area of concern. Only a few states have any form of regulation for these programs. New York stands out as the sole state with comprehensive regulations, including rules for ongoing interaction between students and teachers, ensuring that the process isn’t entirely virtual. Still, requiring significant student-teacher interaction is an exceedingly low bar for quality, especially considering the potential for misuse—and the incentives to raise graduation rates. When the American Enterprise Institute surveyed districts about credit recovery policies in 2019, they found little regulation at the district level, either.
What can be done to address these issues? Heinrich and her colleagues recommend several measures. First, they advocate for better assessments that truly measure student understanding and learning. Second, they suggest mandating in-person proctoring to curb the rampant cheating facilitated by the current online formats.
There’s also a pressing need for state-level auditing of these programs. Randomly selecting students for additional testing could provide insights into the extent of superficial learning and cheating. Since districts are what ultimately hand out the credits, districts themselves ought to implement separate, rigorous assessments that students must pass, ensuring that the credits students receive reflect genuine learning and comprehension.
The story of Jeremy Noonan, one of Heinrich’s coauthors for this study and a whistleblower in the Paulding County School District in Georgia, underscores the systemic nature of these issues. Noonan exposed how his district provided test bank questions with easily searchable answers and tried to raise awareness of the problem with authorities ranging from his own principal and other local administrators to state officials in Georgia and even his district’s accreditor, Cognia, which declined to investigate Noonan’s claims. Eventually, he resigned and went public with these problems, which extend far beyond his suburban Atlanta district.
Although credit recovery programs are sold to districts as a more effective and efficient method of catching students up than traditional course-retakes and summer school, evidence continues to accumulate that the way they are implemented in high schools is rife with misuse, prioritizing increasing graduation rates over increasing student learning. As this new study reveals, these programs need a comprehensive overhaul, with rigorous assessments, in-person proctoring, and robust state regulations to ensure they fulfill their promise of helping students succeed. Without dramatic changes, students would almost certainly be better off recovering credit the old-fashioned way, through normal course-retakes and summer school.
SOURCE: Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Carolyn J. Heinrich, Jeremy Noonan, Jialing Wu, and Kathryn Enriquez, “Failing to Learn from Failure: The Facade of Online Credit Recovery Assessments,” Working Paper (June 2024).
Digging into the 2024 survey of American public school teachers
Teacher voice is often missing from education policy discussions, leading to what can feel like an adversarial relationship between pundits and practitioners. Educators for Excellence (E4E) strives to reframe that relationship by amplifying the interests and concerns of teachers across the land. They have recently released the results of their wide-ranging teacher survey, conducted annually since 2018, and this year’s findings are well worth the attention of education leaders.
Developed by a cadre of eighteen teachers dubbed the National Teacher Leader Council, the eighty-five-item questionnaire was administered online during the first two months of 2024. A nationally representative sample of 1,000 full-time, pre-K–12, public-school teachers working in both district and charter schools responded. Following the overall demographics of the profession, respondents were overwhelmingly female and white. Nearly 60 percent were between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, and a similar percentage reported having earned tenure in their job. Eighty-five percent taught in traditional districts. Forty-five percent of respondents worked in suburban schools, 29 percent in urban settings, and the remainder in rural locales. Approximately one-third of the sample taught in large schools (more than 1,000 students), and another third taught in small schools (less than 500 students). A plurality of respondents taught grades pre-K–5.
The topline findings are organized into seven themes, spanning topics like student outcomes, curriculum and instruction, feelings about union representation, testing, technology, etc. Here is a selection of the big picture takeaways: Teachers believe that students are still struggling in the wake of the pandemic, with 70 percent reporting that their students are behind academically and 64 percent reporting that their students’ mental well-being is worse compared to pre-pandemic. Teachers are pessimistic regarding their profession, with just 16 percent indicating they would recommend the job to others—an all-time low among E4E polling results. Interestingly, teachers of color report that their morale and outlook have significantly improved over the past few years after also hitting all-time lows.
Generally, a majority of teachers are positively disposed toward their unions’ efforts to address traditional issues, such as salaries and working conditions, but those positive numbers are down from previous years. Overall satisfaction with efforts to transform the profession from within is below 50 percent, and is even lower for certain specific union functions like improving professional development (42 percent) and expanding career ladders (38 percent). To improve working conditions, teachers are calling for more collaborative and dynamic work environments. More specifically, they expressed interest in strategic staffing approaches that would break from traditional school models and focus on team teaching and other collaborative structures.
A section of questions related to curriculum highlighted concerns over what many teachers view as a quick switch to science-of-reading-based literacy instruction. More than 60 percent of teachers say their district has implemented new curricular materials aligned to the science of reading in the last year, but only a quarter of those teachers say their instructional practices have shifted “very much” as a result of the changes. For elementary school teachers specifically, a slightly higher 31 percent say their instructional practices have shifted. A majority of respondents across the board indicate that better support and training are needed to fully implement the shift to science of reading.
There’s far more detail to be had from the raw question and response charts at the back of the report, covering issues both mundane and hot button, including standardized testing, college readiness, and some “culture war” issues. Questions and answers regarding teachers’ adoption and use of artificial intelligence are new and will be of interest to many on the policy front. There is, literally, something for everyone in this report. Here’s hoping policymakers pay close attention to the results.
SOURCE: Educators for Excellence, “Voices from the Classroom 2024: A Survey of America’s Educators” (May 2024).
#930: What Vance and Harris mean for federal education policy, with Dale Chu
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute, joins Mike and David to discuss how Biden passing the torch and Trump picking J.D. Vance could affect U.S. school policy. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study that compares the academic impacts of urban versus suburban charter schools.
Recommended content:
- “Vance vs. Pence: How Trump’s VP picks compare on education” —Dale Chu, Fordham Institute
- “The Democratic replacement candidates on education” —Daniel Buck, Fordham Institute
- Sarah Cohodes and Astrid Pineda, “Diverse paths to college success: The impact of Massachusetts’ urban and nonurban charter schools on college trajectories,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: July 25, 2024
Cheers
- A bipartisan coalition has called for schools and districts to cut chronic absenteeism by 50 percent in five years. —K–12 Dive
- An advocacy organization calls on schools to ban phones entirely, not just during instructional time. —Education Week
- One gifted student tells of the benefits and drawbacks of her own experience skipping grades. — Ilana Walder-Biesanz, Chalkbeat
Jeers
- After approving ten new charter schools, New York City has once again hit its cap and can approve no more. —Chalkbeat
- A new paper from NWEA finds that students are faring even worse than before the pandemic, not catching up. —Washington Post
- State leaders are ignoring the crisis in urban education at their peril. —Robin Lake, Hechinger Report
What we're reading this week: July 25, 2024
- The media coverage of Project 2025, which on education is little more than a wish list of standard conservative policy, has trafficked many falsehoods. —Rick Hess, Education Week
- Instead of a school voucher bill, Pennsylvania lawmakers reached a budget deal that includes expanding existing tax credit program. —The Philadelphia Inquirer
- The College Board plans to recalibrate their AP exams to allow more students to pass, and it seems to be the latest example of “defining deviancy down.” (The College Board released a document this week explaining these changes.) —Checker Finn, Education Next