The Education Gadfly Weekly: Ten lessons from six decades in the struggle to improve schools
The Education Gadfly Weekly: Ten lessons from six decades in the struggle to improve schools
Once a hedgehog, now a fox: Ten lessons from six decades in the struggle to improve schools
The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Finn’s experience has made him more like the fox: as keen as ever to overhaul and revitalize American education, but having come to “knows many things” about that enterprise, is more a wary realist regarding its difficulty.
Once a hedgehog, now a fox: Ten lessons from six decades in the struggle to improve schools
American students underperform, but our economy overachieves
Is it time for a second look at virtual education?
Implementation of citizen science curriculum in elementary school: A case study
How are four-day school weeks impacting student attendance and teacher retention?
#943: How 20,000 parents view educational opportunity in America, with Marc Porter Magee
Cheers and Jeers: October 24, 2024
What we're reading this week: October 24, 2024
American students underperform, but our economy overachieves
Is it time for a second look at virtual education?
Implementation of citizen science curriculum in elementary school: A case study
How are four-day school weeks impacting student attendance and teacher retention?
#943: How 20,000 parents view educational opportunity in America, with Marc Porter Magee
Cheers and Jeers: October 24, 2024
What we're reading this week: October 24, 2024
Once a hedgehog, now a fox: Ten lessons from six decades in the struggle to improve schools
In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated essays, titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” He was riffing on the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In this essay, Sir Isaiah divided people—well, writers and thinkers, those sorts of people—into two categories. As summarized in Wikipedia, they are:
...hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe).
Reflecting on my own engagement with education over the past sixty years, beginning just a dozen years after Berlin wrote, I find that I started as a hedgehog but have turned into a fox. My hedgehog self, I should add, was young, optimistic, probably naïve. Becoming a fox has meant growing skeptical, wary, perhaps jaded, though still determined.
Once upon a time—college senior time, LBJ time—I pretty much agreed with President Johnson that the way to end poverty in America while achieving other worthy ends was to beef up the education system, particularly the parts that served poor kids, and that the way to do that was to ramp up its funding, such as via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty, both of which he pushed through Congress.
When he signed ESEA in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood in Johnson City, Texas, the president declared that:
By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children. We put into the hands of our youth more than 30 million new books, and into many of our schools their first libraries. We reduce the terrible time lag in bringing new teaching techniques into the Nation’s classrooms. We strengthen State and local agencies which bear the burden and the challenge of better education. And we rekindle the revolution—the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance.
This one measure, as LBJ saw it, sending federal dollars into the schools attended by “deprived” children, would transform their lives. Call it a moon shot, a silver bullet, a cure-all—it was something JFK had not been able to do and something Johnson almost certainly believed would make a big difference.
As did I. Much taken with Michael Harrington’s The Other America and thinking myself a budding social reformer, I spent much of college doing volunteer work: settlement house and tutoring efforts with poor kids who lived in public housing, and with their families. Then I helped launch one of the country’s first Upward Bound programs—another battalion in the War on Poverty. I was a true believer, so much so that it drew me into the field of education itself, right out of college. (I also wasn’t keen to return to the family law firm in Dayton.) The “one big thing” I knew was that I could and should join the fight against ignorance and disadvantage by enlisting in the poverty war. I’m sure I expected to fire only silver bullets.
Then a bunch of things happened that took some spines off the hedgehog.
Those Upward Bound kids mostly had a good experience, but it didn’t alter their lives. To my knowledge, it didn’t propel them into college. Meanwhile, early evaluations of Head Start indicated that the boost it offered little ones didn’t last once they hit school, and James Coleman reported that just adding to the inputs of schools was not a reliable way to strengthen their achievement. Johnson, it seemed, had overpromised: The simple beefing-up approach wasn’t working very well at ending poverty, transforming lives, or closing gaps. More or different ammunition had to be added to the armory.
While taking in these disappointments, I was also falling under the spell of the late Pat Moynihan, my graduate school adviser, and his colleagues—people like Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Irving Kristol, and others, soon to be dubbed neo-conservatives, who were looking at a range of Great Society programs and concluding that, while they were fine things to do in response to generous impulses, they weren’t very effective. Worse, such programs typically directed resources to middle-class professionals and their institutions while disrupting traditional neighborhoods and social and governmental structures that had been important to people—often the poor folks whom these reforms were supposed to be helping.
Kristol jibed that neo-cons were liberals who had been mugged by reality. That’s pretty much what happened to me, even more so when I went to Washington with Moynihan and was immersed in both the challenges of education and the limits of government policy to address them.
As the decades passed and I’ve learned still more, almost all my spines have fallen off (though some still think me prickly). I’ve come to resemble Berlin’s version of a fox. I’m as keen as ever to overhaul and revitalize American education and have spent a lot of years giving it my best. Today, however, I “know many things” about that enterprise and must report that they’ve made me more of a wary realist regarding its difficulty.
Lessons on school reform
Let me unpack the ten lessons that have struck me hardest.
First, nothing changes quickly in K–12 (or higher) education. This vast enterprise is sluggish and slow to move. Efforts to change it have legitimately been compared to “turning an aircraft carrier” and (by Admiral Rickover) to “moving a graveyard.” After a career that included building a giant company, rescuing hostages from Iran, and running for president, Ross Perot told Lamar Alexander that trying to reform Texas schools was the “meanest, bloodiest, and most difficult thing I’ve ever been into” (whereupon he rebuffed Alexander’s suggestion that he take on a national role in education reform).
Second, besides being big and sluggish, American K–12 education is leaderless. Nobody’s really in charge of this undertaking, which is not really a system, though it gets called that. It’s been plausibly compared to a loosely coupled train, where the engine may head down the track, but the caboose doesn’t move
Third, in a land this big and diverse, decentralization of schooling is a necessary evil—both necessary and evil. It’s necessary because “local control” is a historical fact and a sacred mantra, because a big chunk of school funding comes from local property taxes, and because educational priorities and emphases really do differ from place to place. Springfield, Massachusetts; Springfield, Ohio; Springfield, Missouri; and Springfield, Oregon, are very dissimilar communities—and people are hypersensitive to what their kids’ schools teach and what values they communicate. But decentralization is also a problem. K–12 schooling is a time to forge Americans, to toss the salads of diversity, to establish shared values, and to absorb knowledge and skills that benefit oneself, one’s immediate community, and the larger society. Greater unity in the enterprise would make that easier to do.
Fourth, besides being enormous, sluggish, decentralized, loosely coupled, and leaderless, this enterprise—like most—is populated by millions of adults who don’t like to change their ways. It’s widely noted that, when the classroom door is closed, every teacher is pretty much free to do as she thinks best, which most often means doing what she’s always done. Connect these realities and you see why U.S. education resembles a giant rubber band. Elements can be stretched when enough force is applied, but as soon as the tension is released, it snaps (or drifts) back into its previous shape. That’s why the reform efforts that have had the greatest traction in improving student outcomes are those that have endured over a significant period, not changing or ceasing when there’s a new face in the superintendent’s or governor’s office. A few, like charter schools, have lasted long enough to begin to benefit from the biases against change that permeate our political institutions. (In federal personnel lingo, we’d say they’ve “careered in.”) But that’s also why the “spinning wheels” of so many initiatives have not left much of a legacy.
The fifth reason that efforts to boost educational performance by reforming K–12 schooling have little impact is because American kids spend so little of their lives going to school—and that was true even before today’s epidemic of chronic absenteeism. Perhaps the most original piece of education research I ever did was around 1990 when it occurred to me to calculate the portion of young Americans’ lives that they’re actually in school. It’s an astonishingly small 9 percent! If you don’t believe me, calculate it yourself. Give the kids credit for full-day kindergarten and perfect attendance. In the numerator, multiply thirteen years of schooling by 180 days in the typical school year by six hours in the typical day. In the denominator, put eighteen years on Earth times 365 days per year times twenty-four hours a day. See what you come up with. As to the rejoinder that kids “also have to sleep,” change the denominator to sixteen hours a day instead of twenty-four and your quotient will still be a startlingly small number. Then ask yourself how much leverage that humble percentage has competing against all the other forces at play during the much larger portion of kids’ lives that are spent outside school.
Sixth, though we always say we do things in education to benefit those kids, most actual decisions are based on adult preferences, satisfying adult demands, avoiding adult displeasure, and navigating among rival adult interests. Kids really don’t have lobbyists, but the six million or so adult employees of K–12 education have plenty of them, and it’s grownups who vote for school boards, local levies, legislators, and more. How many times have would-be reformers—including school principals and superintendents—been flummoxed when told that, sorry, your plan is incompatible with the seniority requirements of the collective bargaining agreement? But it’s not just teachers. Extended days and weeks conflict with all manner of contracts (custodians, food service workers, bus drivers, etc.). Voters without kids in school may reject tax levies. Aggrieved parents—“Let’s hold onto traditional summer vacations. Let’s not change school attendance zone boundaries. Let’s not raise taxes to install more technology.”—can defeat candidates, referenda, levies, and more. Kids don’t vote. And—sorry—what parents want or will tolerate isn’t always what would cause their children to learn more, or it may be something that could work for their own kids but won’t enable other parents’ children to learn more.
Seventh, structural reforms are important but don’t directly bear on what is taught and learned, nor do those charged with implementing structural reforms always possess the capacity to succeed with them. Reformers (me included) have expended enormous energy over the past three or four decades trying to alter the structures and ground rules of K–12 education: put in choices, different kinds of schools, alternative certification paths, statewide standards, assessments and accountability schemes, different schedules, calendars, staffing arrangements, and more. Virtually all of these have been well intentioned, many have been carefully considered, and most (in my judgment) have been good ideas. Yet few have had much to do with where the education rubber meets the student road—what the late Richard Elmore termed the “instructional core,” i.e., the content of what’s taught and how (and how well) it’s taught. We’ve focused lots on assessing whether things have been learned but precious little on ensuring that the requisite curricula and pedagogy are in place—nor on whether teachers themselves ever learned what they’re now supposed to teach, whether their schools and those running them have the organizational, intellectual, and fiscal resources to implement changes, or whether anybody has the capacity much less the authority to supply what’s missing and remedy what’s done wrong. So many of our reforms resemble blueprints for new structures that ought to be built, but they don’t come with the necessary materials, tools, and competent foremen and construction workers.
Eighth, a huge proportion of our recent ed-reform debates has hinged on whether one views education—in economist talk—as fundamentally a private or a public good. If private, it should be done to benefit the individual receiving it, and many policy decisions follow. If public, it should be done to benefit society, whereupon very different policy choices make sense. The reality is that it’s both—but the ensuing policy decisions make that duality fraught with tension, tradeoffs, conflict, and the need to compromise. It’s also fraught with antagonism between adherents to two quite different sets of beliefs.
Ninth, in parallel to this tension is the tug-of-war between school choice on one hand and the standards-assessment-accountability trinity on the other, and the sense that we must line up behind one and push back against aficionados of the other. As it turns out, effective education reform depends on both school choice and standards-driven accountability. Properly understood, they’re codependent because neither is sufficient unto itself. Giving choices to families is essential, but that doesn’t reliably lead to putting kids into effective schools where they’ll learn all they should. For choice to work well, there must also be reliable third-party comparative information on school performance along multiple dimensions—information that mostly comes from standards and assessments plus the “school report cards” that follow under a well-designed accountability regime. Conversely, those accountability regimes are pretty good at identifying bad schools but mostly fail when it comes to turning them around or shutting them down. So families need alternatives—choices—lest their children be stuck forever in dire schools.
Tenth, and finally: Accountability does matter, but nobody likes it. I’ve come to believe that’s a generalizable truth about both institutions and individuals. Companies need auditors. Restaurants need health inspectors and reviewers. Universities need accreditors. People do their best work if someone is watching and providing feedback. If you’re racing, you need someone to time you and make sure you don’t cheat. If you want to drive a car, you need to pass a test. If you want to be a surgeon, you need to pass the surgical boards (otherwise, please don’t operate on me). Similarly, schools—and the educators and students in them—need to be held to account for whether the requisite skills and knowledge are getting acquired. We have ample evidence that schools work better and kids learn more when content standards are joined by testing and accountability. Yet the pushback against accountability is relentless—nobody really likes to be audited, evaluated, or judged by their results—and today it’s yielding ground.
Complicated problems demand multifaceted solutions
I might still prefer to be a hedgehog. Spines or not, they look cute and cuddly. They’ve been called Britain’s favorite mammal. They have few enemies. Because they need only to hold one idea in their heads, their lives are less confusing. I don’t know whether they’re as single-minded as Isaiah Berlin’s essay suggested, but I do know a lot of education reformers who tend in that direction—toward the proverbial silver bullet, the one thing we must do that will cause many good things to happen. Sixty years ago, that’s the direction I was tending. Fifty-five years ago, however, the education world—indeed the world itself—began to appear more complicated to me. Perhaps I was just growing up, grappling with reality. In any case, I was on the way to becoming a fox.
That’s not so very great. Foxes do move faster and cover a lot more ground, but they also steal stuff. People tend not to like them. And foxes have so much to think about that their lives aren’t simple. I’d rather Sir Isaiah—and Archilochus before him—had contrasted hedgehogs with pandas, koalas, or golden retrievers. It would be good to revise his terminology. (Plato versus Aristotle would be especially welcome!) But I can’t escape the larger distinction he was making. Do we view the world through the lens of one defining idea, or do we draw upon many experiences and conclude that the world that matters to us—education in my case—is indeed complex and changing and calls for more than a silver bullet?
In retrospect, the “single defining idea” that animated me—and President Johnson—back in the 1960s was naïve, as would be any single prescription for a complex malady. A good education surely helps fend off poverty in individuals, and a well-educated society is more prosperous than an ignorant one. Yet successfully combating multigenerational poverty in a disadvantaged population takes more than beefing up the schools their kids attend. It needs schools in which children actually learn. But that’s just the start. And simply adding resources to schools doesn’t get us even there, especially not when all those other factors endure.
Complicated, intractable problems call for multifaceted solutions. In American K–12 education, however, as in dealing with poverty, the cures we’ve tried so far haven’t overcome the underlying maladies.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
American students underperform, but our economy overachieves
There is a large literature linking the quality of education to economic growth, and numerous economists and development agencies, including the World Bank, have endorsed this connection. Most analysts also recognize that it’s not simply the years of schooling that matter, but rather the cognitive skills education imparts on the future workforce. Observers who want to measure these cognitive skills often look to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as a high-quality, comparative indicator of student skills.
Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that PISA itself is viewed as a key predictor of countries’ economic growth. As economist Eric Hanushek has written: “The PISA scores are a good index of the future quality of the labor force in each country, and the quality of the labor force in turn has been shown to be a decisive factor in determining the long-run growth rates of nations.”
But consider the following data. Figure 1 shows PISA math and reading scores in 2009 for the U.S. and peer nations. Since PISA scores are supposed to be a leading indicator of future growth, I use PISA data from fifteen years prior—the students who were assessed then are now around thirty and are economically active adults today.
Let’s first examine scores for math, often regarded as the best subject area to predict economic development. Figure 1 shows that American youth do not stack up particularly well against peer nations. U.S. students outperformed the OECD average, which includes low-performing countries like Turkey and Mexico, and tested at the same level as students in the United Kingdom. But we lagged France (10 points) and Germany (26 points). The gap between the U.S. and Japan (42 points) and Korea (59 points) was even larger.
American students did better in PISA reading, performing at the same level as our European competitors and beating the OECD average. However, the U.S. lagged Japan (20 points) and Korea (39 points) in reading, as well.
When PISA results are released, there is always rending of garments and gnashing of teeth surrounding America’s comparatively poor performance and how this portends economic disaster. But is this concern justified? Using GDP per capita as an indicator, the answer is a resounding “no.”
We have data for a far longer time span for GDP than for PISA (which did not begin until 2000). Figure 2 shows growth in GDP per capita across these same countries. In 1990, except for Korea, all these nations were tightly clustered—indeed, the U.S. lagged Japan. But even as our PISA scores have remained mediocre, the US has experienced a far faster increase in GDP per capita than any of these competitors, passing Japan in 2010 and widening the wealth gap since then.
Some of the United States’ apparent economic advantage is driven by the strength of the U.S. dollar. Further, differences in the cost of living across these countries may make the U.S. seem richer compared to other countries. Figure 3 looks at the same time span as Figure 2, but now using purchasing power parity, which, by adjusting for the cost of common goods across countries, generates a more consistent comparison of GDP. The adjusted numbers aren’t quite as stark as before, but they continue to illustrate the growing strength of the United States economy.
Do better test scores matter?
For highly developed OECD countries, PISA scores are not a strong indicator of GDP growth. Maybe assessments like PISA are measuring the wrong thing. PISA has been trying to pivot away from “traditional” aspects of education performance (like reading, writing, and math) to more amorphous “forward thinking” concepts such as “twenty-first-century skills” and “creative problem solving.” Conceivably, if PISA measured these skills, it might be more predictive of economic growth—but it will take years to find out.
I have spent decades advocating for better educational practices to increase student performance. But perhaps the U.S. has already achieved a sufficiently strong educational “floor” to support solid economic growth, and policymakers might do better to invest in other factors responsible for American prosperity.
Among those factors behind U.S. wealth are American workers’ higher productivity and longer hours worked, as well as Silicon Valley—which has led the high-tech sector from the dot-com boom to today’s rapid deployment of AI. This has been one of the driving forces behind the far more vigorous start-up culture in the U.S. than in the European Union. Demographically, the U.S. population is far younger than many OECD peers. The median age in the U.S. is thirty-eight versus forty-nine in Japan and forty-five in Korea. The U.S. fertility rate is also far higher than other countries on this list (except for France). And the U.S. has a strong tradition of independent courts that enforce contracts, making it a predictable venue for investment.
The list of important reasons for America’s current prosperity goes on—but high test scores do not seem to be among them.
Would I love to see the U.S. top the PISA “league tables”? Of course. But that may be a parochial lens shaped by my long involvement in education research and development. Rather than fixating on test scores, I would bet on the many other advantages the U.S. has to propel our economy into the future.
Is it time for a second look at virtual education?
I confess I approach the question of virtual education with more than a little skepticism. Kids spend enough time staring at screens, and I’ve developed a reflexive distrust bordering on cynicism for all things ed tech, which has a reliable history of overpromising and underdelivering. And, of course, student outcomes from virtual schools have been awful. But about a year ago, I was at a conference in which Ian Kingsbury of the Educational Freedom Institute and Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University presented on virtual learning. Their work challenged several of my preconceptions and left me thinking that we may have fundamentally misunderstood both the promise and the problems of virtual schooling. So I invited them to reprise their presentation last week at a webinar series that I host at the American Enterprise Institute, along with Amy Johnson, executive director of the Arkansas Virtual Academy.
For starters, virtual schooling is here to stay. As of the 2021–22 school year, well over half a million students were enrolled in 726 virtual schools across the United States, roughly six-in-ten of which are online charter schools. Much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the poor performance of those schools stems from a 2015 study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. That report, and its subsequent updates, paint a bleak picture. The study’s most damning finding was that, compared to 180 days of learning for students in brick-and-mortar traditional public schools, the average online charter student advanced only 122 days in reading; in math, it was even worse: 56 days per year. In other words, CREDO found virtual students learned only a third of what their brick-and-mortar school peers were learning.
But there are serious questions about the validity of these comparisons, which Kingsbury suggests are based on a flawed understanding of the differences between virtual and traditional students. As Scafidi put it, “When your child is born, what percent of Americans say, ‘I can't wait till they grow up and we send ‘em to a virtual school!’ Probably close to zero, right?” His research shows students in virtual schools are far more likely than their brick-and-mortar school peers to report incidents of bullying, trouble with teachers, or their academic needs not being met at their previous school. “So virtual schools are often for people who need a safety valve,” Scafidi observes.
Kingsbury agreed, “Virtual schools are often a last resort for students who have struggled in traditional settings.” This suggests that studies, which try to match similar students in both settings, are comparing apples to oranges. These differences are a stark daily challenge for Johnson, who raised concerns about the way student achievement is assessed in virtual schools, arguing that accountability systems and standardized tests don’t adequately capture the challenges virtual schools face: “There are times that it’s a win for us just to get the student to the computer to take the assessment,” she said. Kingsbury also noted that virtual school students are typically required to take state exams at designated testing centers, a practice he describes as “psychometrically problematic.” In other words, students sitting for state tests in completely different settings than where they learn adds up to artificial testing conditions and deflated scores. When students were allowed to test from home during the pandemic, he observed, their scores jumped dramatically, wiping out much of the achievement gap identified in the CREDO studies. A skeptic might immediately argue: “Well, sure. That’s because when virtual school students take tests at home, they can easily cheat, which artificially inflates scores.” While acknowledging concerns about cheating on at-home tests, all three panelists insisted that the technology was now robust enough to address those issues through rigorous proctoring and security measures.
Kingsbury and Scafidi also attacked the common notion that virtual students are more affluent than average (thus, by implication, putting low student outcomes in even sharper relief). Researchers use free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) as a proxy for income status; when those forms aren’t submitted, the assumption is that they are ineligible. But Kingsbury points out parents have no reason to submit those eligibility forms, since virtual schools don’t serve lunch. Scafidi’s research suggests virtual students are no less likely to be low-income than traditional students, further complicating researchers’ efforts to evaluate results. “They’re matching low-income virtual school students to high-income brick and mortar students because they’re not capturing the free and reduced-price lunch [eligible students],” Scafidi explained. “They're matching kids who have social and emotional problems to kids who don't.” Both comparisons disadvantage virtual schools.
Less easily addressed is the issue of screen time. The three panelists acknowledged it was a valid concern and that any honest appraisal of virtual education had to wrestle with the downsides of students spending even more time in front of computers. But Johnson noted that well-designed virtual schools don’t simply replicate a traditional school day in an online setting: “We don't have students sitting in front of a computer with a teacher on the screen from eight o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon.” Instead, virtual learning is built around structured blocks of instruction, with plenty of opportunities for students to engage in offline activities.
Some years ago, Mike Petrilli and Dara Zeehandelaar, leaning heavily on the CREDO study, expressed concern that the academic performance of students in online charter was dragging down the sector at large. Writing in Education Next, they suggested exempting virtual schools from laws that require them to accept all students, allowing them to be more selective in their admissions. For his part, Kingsbury thinks admission screens are “a bad idea” for a couple of reasons. Outside of a very small number of selective high schools, he notes public schools, including charter schools, are open access. But more pertinently, he explains, “it problematizes one of the best features of virtual schools: that they are a refuge for at-risk students.” If virtual schools accept only those most likely to succeed “they’ll deny admission to the students in greatest need of access.” It’s a persuasive point that compels me to rethink my inherent skepticism about virtual education. But it doesn’t resolve entirely the problem of public dollars continuing to support non-participating virtual students, which Mike describes, not incorrectly, as “subsidizing truancy.” The virtual sector “broadly seems to be in favor of enforceable engagement laws whereby truant or disengaged students are unenrolled,” Kingsbury responds. “That’s the appropriate solution here.”
Implementation of citizen science curriculum in elementary school: A case study
The term “citizen science” refers to research in any field conducted with participation from the general public and/or amateur researchers—a way of crowd-sourcing data in more volume through observations or experiments conducted outside of a lab. Citizen science (CS) is utilized by NASA, NOAA, and other reputable research entities and was front and center during the solar eclipse earlier this year. CS also has the potential to allow K–12 students access to a broader range of scientific education than a typical classroom can offer, including data analysis and reporting. A new report looks at how two teachers have attempted to implement CS at the elementary level. It’s a limited picture, but this qualitative report does go inside the black box of the classroom, giving us some curricular ins and outs that are illuminating.
A group of researchers led by Sarah J. Carrier of North Carolina State University are engaged in a multi-year study of CS in elementary classrooms. Specifically, the development, deployment, and evaluation of curriculum support materials to help a group of teacher volunteers integrate two CS projects—one conducted by the National Weather Service, the other by a national nonprofit organization—into their classrooms. The new report is a case study of two fifth grade teachers implementing these materials in year three of the larger study. These were chosen for analysis because the CS project content aligned with the fifth grade science standards (weather and ecosystems) in the unnamed state(s) where the schools were located. They also connect science to other subjects such as English language arts (reading and writing informational text), math (manipulating data and graphing), and social studies (mapping). The primary questions: How do teachers incorporate CS projects in their classroom and in the schoolyard and how do teachers navigate their school contexts to include CS projects in their science instruction?
Both teachers were twenty-year veterans at Title I schools (meaning they had a high percentage of their students identified as economically disadvantaged). The schools posted years of low performance ratings in math, reading, and science, the last of which fell far below their state’s average regularly. The schools were located in rural communities in unidentified state(s) in the southeastern part of the country. Both teachers received one day of professional development training on the CS projects, as well as the researchers’ curricular materials. While these data come from year three of the larger study, it is important to note it was year one for actual classroom deployment. Data come from teacher-provided documentation of their use of the materials, along with data from classroom observations, instructional logs, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. No dates of implementation are provided.
One teacher, called “Taylor,” reported both internal and external barriers to full implementation of the curricular materials. As a result, her students had very limited exposure to CS. Barriers included skepticism about students’ abilities to understand and execute the more concrete scientific and mathematical operations required and her belief that “administrative pressure to prepare students for science assessments” meant that science activities not directly related to concepts and tested vocabulary took precedence over everything else during class time. Most lessons consisted of vocabulary review and test preparation, along with video clips and lectures. Taylor’s students did not participate in data analysis or share CS data with the science community. In fact, the totality of data from the research team suggested that her students went into the schoolyard to search for ladybugs—a single aspect of just one of the CS projects—for only eight minutes on a single day when an observer from the team was present.
The other teacher, called “Morgan,” reported similar concerns about her students’ abilities related to the CS projects. However, she told the researchers that “Just because they are low in math and reading does not mean they cannot do science. It just means that I’ve got to adjust.” Observation and interview data showed Morgan devoting significant time to reviewing both the curricular materials and the two CS projects themselves. In a mid-year interview, she reported that she had adapted the materials to her students’ abilities and interests. In the end, she documented student activity with the CS projects (checking a rain gauge, entering data, or doing class activities) during thirty-one weeks of the year. She reported needing to bolster her students’ knowledge of geography and topology and re-teaching how to set up and label a graph (all of which, she states, should have been learned in fourth grade). Morgan also taught her students how to enter rainfall data into a spreadsheet and upload it to the National Weather Service website. Most students ended the year able to do this work independently. In a focus group, one of Morgan’s students confirmed that reading a rain gauge all year helped them to learn about “the decimals to where we understand how much it is.” Another student reported, “We measure the precipitation by hundredths.”
Carrier and her team conclude that the commonalities of Morgan and Taylor’s student populations, school contexts, and CS curriculum supports demonstrate the importance of teachers in science education (at least in this limited context). They also believe they can refine their curriculum support materials to help various types of teachers. Taylor’s teaching style is described as “teacher-focused” and she herself as a “selective user” of curriculum, with many external influences limiting her ability to plan, adapt, and deploy curricular materials. Morgan’s teaching style, on the other hand, is described as “student-focused” and she as a “learner/modifier” type of curriculum user. While these definitions are likely too simplistic to have much applicability beyond the walls of their two specific classrooms, the detailed descriptions of science teaching and learning within those walls are valuable evidence of how quality instruction can be provided to the highest possible level. They are not to be ignored.
SOURCE: Sarah J. Carrier et al., “Citizen science in elementary classrooms: a tale of two teachers,” Frontiers in Education (October 2024).
How are four-day school weeks impacting student attendance and teacher retention?
The four-day school week is increasingly popular, particularly in rural districts, with roughly 900 school districts having adopted such a truncated schedule as of 2023. Districts often turn to the four-day schedule in the hope of reducing costs, improving attendance, and increasing teacher recruitment and retention. While the first goal is often achieved (though savings are small), evidence regarding the latter two is mixed.
A recent working paper sheds more light on how the four-day schedule affects student attendance and teacher shortages.
Using panel data from Colorado, where many districts were early adopters of four-day school weeks, researchers Emily Morton and Emma Dewil use a synthetic control difference-in-differences design to investigate how this schedule impacts three outcomes: the percentage of teachers with shortage credentials (a temporary alternative or emergency teaching license), teacher attrition rates, and student attendance rates. The first outcome, shortage credentials, is used as an indicator of teacher shortages, as they are issued when schools face difficulty filling teacher positions and are typically valid for just one to two years. Over the fourteen-year period studied (2009–10 to 2022–23), more than 500 of the 2,000-plus public schools in the sample adopted a four-day week, increasing the share of students on this schedule from just under 3 percent to over 12 percent.
Overall, they found that four-day school weeks increased the share of teachers with a shortage credential by a small but statistically significant 0.11 percentage points. This increase was mostly driven by non-rural schools, where four-day schedules boosted the share of teachers with shortage credentials rather than a traditional licensure by 0.25 percentage points, or 0.07 teachers per school. In rural schools, the average impact of four-day school weeks on shortage credentials was negative and not significant.
Perhaps more importantly, the study found no evidence that adopting a four-day schedule significantly reduces teacher shortages over time, either overall or among recent adopters. This is especially noteworthy, as many recent adopters implemented the four-day week specifically to attract and retain teachers.
When examining teacher retention, the researchers found no evidence that the new schedule reduced attrition. Rural schools showed slightly more favorable results, but they were not significant.
The study also found no significant effects on student attendance, either. However, in large rural districts, they estimated a 0.76 percentage point decrease in average daily attendance, concentrated mainly during the pandemic years.
One key limitation of this study is the use of shortage credentials as a measure of teacher shortages. While issuing shortage credentials suggests a staffing need, it doesn’t directly capture teacher vacancies. In other words, some schools may have more teachers with shortage credentials but few actual vacancies. This means four-day school weeks could help recruit new teachers with temporary licenses, but we should still question the quality of teachers these schedules attract.
In short, the findings provide even more reasons to be skeptical of the four-day school week. Combined with tons of research showing that these shorter schedules negatively impact student achievement, it’s hard for anyone to make a case for the policy. In a time of unprecedented learning loss and widespread chronic absenteeism, it’s indefensible.
SOURCE: Emily Morton and Emma Dewil. “Impacts of Four-Day School Weeks on Teacher Recruitment and Retention and Student Attendance: Evidence from Colorado,” CALDER Working Paper (Sept 2024).
#943: How 20,000 parents view educational opportunity in America, with Marc Porter Magee
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Marc Porter Magee, CEO and Founder of 50CAN, joins Mike and David to discuss “The State of Educational Opportunity in America," 50CAN’s new report based on a survey of over 20,000 parents from all 50 states and D.C. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam shares a study examining how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and student achievement.
Recommended content:
- The State of Educational Opportunity in America, 50CAN (2024).
- “Student enrollment is dropping. The charter sector should keep growing anyway.” —Michael J. Petrilli
- State of Educational Opportunity: Ohio Survey of Ohio Parents, Thomas B. Fordham Institute and 50CAN (2024).
- Melissa Arnold Lyon, Matthew A. Kraft, and Matthew P. Steinberg, The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes, NBER (2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: October 24, 2024
Cheers
- The College Board is responding to rising student disengagement by extending the AP model to CTE courses and deploying a new tool that maps out career interests for students based on their SAT scores. —EducationWeek
- To help win over independent male voters and recenter a race increasingly divided along gender lines, Kamala Harris should bring attention to the pressing issue of boys falling dangerously behind in K–12 schools. —Richard Whitmire, The 74
Jeers
- Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to address the city school district’s debt by taking out a $284 million loan fails to solve any of the district’s actual budget problems: high salaries, overinflated staffing, declining enrollment, rising pension costs, and the end of pandemic funding. —Chad Aldeman, The 74
- Four-year college enrollment declined this year for the first time since the pandemic, possibly due to larger numbers of students choosing instead to enroll in lower-quality community colleges as a result of FAFSA delays and glitches earlier this year. —The Washington Post
What we're reading this week: October 24, 2024
- How can school systems make the best use of money? An analysis of ESSER funds points to five key areas of focus: effective leadership, equitable spending, targeted procurement, improved general education, and more responsible budgeting practices. —Marguerite Roza and Maggie Cicco, Education Next
- The newly released National Career Clusters Framework introduces fourteen updated career pathways, including fields like AI and clean energy, reflecting modern job market demands. —Education Week