The Education Gadfly Weekly: On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it
The Education Gadfly Weekly: On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it
On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it
The Texas Education Agency has spent roughly three years piloting a promising set of ELA materials, which became freely available late last month: a structured and sequenced knowledge- and vocabulary-rich K–5 curriculum. The Lone Star State seems to well and truly understand the ingredients of language proficiency.
On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it
In support of Texas’s plan to include Biblical references in its English curriculum
Poland proves that education matters
Virtual tutoring can benefit young readers, too
Is performance-based licensure a viable solution for teacher vacancies?
#924: How presidents polarize education debates, with David Houston
Cheers and Jeers: June 13, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 13, 2024
In support of Texas’s plan to include Biblical references in its English curriculum
Poland proves that education matters
Virtual tutoring can benefit young readers, too
Is performance-based licensure a viable solution for teacher vacancies?
#924: How presidents polarize education debates, with David Houston
Cheers and Jeers: June 13, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 13, 2024
On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it
A good case can be made that, to the degree K–12 education in the U.S. has embraced high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), the movement began just over a decade ago with EngageNY.
Launched in 2011 with $700 million in federal “Race to the Top” funding to support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, EngageNY provided a comprehensive suite of free, downloadable instructional materials in English language arts and math. It also demonstrated convincingly that districts, schools, and teachers across the country were starved for quality curriculum: Its resources became even more widely used outside the Empire State than by the teachers for whom it was built. A 2015 RAND survey found that one in four English teachers nationwide were using EngageNY. Uptake for math teachers was even higher. The vast majority of teachers surveyed reported their districts either required or recommended that they use it.
New York State stopped supporting EngageNY two years ago. But a new open educational resource has just debuted that has the potential to pick up where it left off. The Texas Education Agency has spent three years piloting a promising set of ELA materials, which became freely available late last month: a structured and sequenced, knowledge- and vocabulary-rich curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade, including reading materials, teacher’s guides, activity books, and supporting resources—all online, all downloadable, all free to anybody who wants to use it.
That said, if you’ve heard anything at all about this initiative, it’s probably that Texas is trying to “inject Bible stories” into its elementary school classrooms. When The 74 broke news of the project, its headline said the Texas initiative “raises questions about ‘religious and ideological agendas.’” A report in the Washington Post this week said “it is clear the materials include many religious references that center Christianity.” This framing is unfortunate and frustrating. Unfortunate because it’s distracted attention from the fact that Texas seems to well and truly understand the ingredients of language proficiency. And frustrating because, if your takeaway is that the curriculum doesn’t grant “equal time” to other religions (as one Texas state lawmaker put it), you’re not seeing language proficiency for what it is and how it works. And this understanding is particularly important for low-income students.
To state it bluntly, “equity” is not bean-counting, it’s literacy. Speakers and writers make assumptions about what listeners and readers know. Not just vocabulary, but a vast array of literary and historical allusions and idioms, including Biblical references—Pandora’s box, a pound of flesh, Prodigal Son, Good Samaritan, David and Goliath, forbidden fruit, white whale, to name but a few. These and countless other examples act as a kind of shorthand for complex ideas and concepts. They color our language and, most pertinently, they are broadly shared bits of common knowledge that literate people simply drop into their discourse without any explanation whatsoever. Those who get these references are language-haves; those who don’t are language have-nots and will always be at a verbal disadvantage. Not for nothing did E.D. Hirsch, Jr. title his first and most famous book Cultural Literacy. It refers to the ability to understand and use the information and references that are common in a culture. For decades, Hirsch has passionately and unimpeachably argued that possession of this shared body of knowledge is crucial to reading comprehension, effective communication, social inclusion, and citizenship.
Seen through this lens, designing an effective curriculum isn’t an exercise in canon-making (“learn this because I said so!”). It’s a curatorial effort: Learn this because literate speakers and writers assume you know it and you’ll be at an enormous disadvantage if you don’t. Every effort must be made to ensure that students, particularly disadvantaged students and English learners are conversant in literature, history, science, the arts, and yes, the Bible—the robust array of mental furniture that their well-off peers take for granted, and upon which mature language proficiency depends. Equity, properly understood, demands nothing less. Hirsch himself said it best: “Public education has no more right to continue to foster segregated knowledge than it has to foster segregated schools.”
This was clearly on the mind of Texas leaders, including Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, who previewed the state’s new OER curriculum for me last month. “Clearly, you have to have a very skilled principal and skilled teachers. But there’s an aspect of curriculum design that’s critical in order for reading comprehension to grow,” he explained. “You have to have explicit, systematic direct instruction in phonics. You have to have vocabulary complexity. You have to have knowledge coherence as opposed to skill coherence in the design of your units and lessons. And you have to write a lot in response to reading.” Hear, hear.
Echoing previous studies that have shown that disadvantaged students tend to get low-rigor, unchallenging schoolwork, Morath said the Texas Education Agency replicated TNTP’s well-known “Opportunity Myth” study in twenty-seven Texas school districts and found that, “in elementary school reading, only 19 percent of the assignments we sampled were on grade level.” This sets in motion a cycle of underperformance, he noted, “because teachers aren’t deliberately doing this.” Kids, too, might not realize they’re working diligently but on material that’s below grade level. “Then the state assessment comes around and says you’re not performing at grade level. And everybody’s like, ‘What gives?’”
Close observers of curriculum will recognize that the Texas “OER” (open educational resource) is an adaptation of the well-regarded Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum, which a Texas Education Agency spokesperson confirmed was “purchased as a foundational product and then overhauled based on feedback to align to Texas state standards, research-based instructional practices, and recommendations from the field.” With 9,000 campuses, 4,500 elementary schools, and 400,000 teachers, “no one should expect a miracle overnight,” Morath said. “But we’re moving in a very evidence-based direction in Texas.” Initial results from districts that have piloted the curriculum, he added, are “not universal, but promising.” The majority Hispanic and low-income Temple Independent School District in Central Texas, for example, has seen a 13 percent jump in third graders meeting standards compared to pre-Covid levels. Results were even stronger in Lubbock, which has similar demographics and saw a 21 percent rise in African American third graders meeting standards, and 19 percent of Hispanics in its first year of implementation. “It’s not just the rising tide is lifting all ships. We have some evidence base that this disproportionately lifts the ships of kids who have been the most academically at risk,” Morath observed.
As for the Bible stories controversy, Morath said via email this week, “We are actively taking feedback on the product and will make updates to address any errors that are surfaced to ensure that references to any religious tradition(s) are done accurately and reinforce the intended purposes of bolstering understanding of literature, history, and culture.” It would be lamentable, however, if that controversy derailed or neutered a project that has the potential to benefit students nationwide, further the HQIM movement, and advance the field’s sophistication on what language proficiency requires.
It’s commonly observed that a dictionary isn’t a rule book, it’s a history book. It doesn’t tell you how words must be used, only how they have been used. The same basic idea runs throughout language at large: You can’t control or impose your will on it. But you can teach it. This is the Achilles’ heel (see what I did there?) of those who think they’re striking a blow for social justice by “decolonizing” curriculum or whose view of equity is limited to mere “inclusion.” They are at grave risk of imposing a kind of illiteracy on disadvantaged children by denying them access to knowledge and vocabulary that is essential for mature language proficiency.
The bottom line: If you think Bible stories are inappropriate in a public school ELA curriculum, let Texas’s important new OER curriculum be your come-to-Jesus moment.
In support of Texas’s plan to include Biblical references in its English curriculum
Texas is back in education news. In late May, The 74 reported that the state education agency is proposing to supplement its existing English instruction with lessons that include Biblical references. Examples include explaining the Christian context underlying Leonardo DaVinci’s painting of The Last Supper and recounting the story of Queen Esther, as part of a second-grade unit about people who fought for a cause against great opposition, like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez.
Reactions to mentions of religion in the context of public education are sadly predictable. Progressives denounce efforts to “indoctrinate” impressionable youth and violate the First Amendment. Counter-reactions are equally predictable, as conservatives assert that denying the Judeo-Christian world view at America’s foundation is unpatriotic. Each side gets to motivate its base.
Lost in the political score settling is the fact that religious beliefs underlie most social and cultural developments. Music, art, literature, and philosophy all draw on and are rooted in religion. To make sense of the world and enjoy the active and engaged citizenship that our democracy requires, students must draw on this background knowledge. Using the Establishment Clause to bar religious content, even where it provides important context, harms students.
Imagine seeing DaVinci’s masterpiece and not knowing why these thirteen men had gathered to eat. Or singing “Go Down Moses” in chorus and having no idea where Moses went or why African American slaves identified with the story of the Exodus?
One element of America’s unique example to the world is our (at times fitful) acceptance of immigrants from different cultures and religions. But this openness, and our present diversity, don’t obviate the fact that the original English colonists were deeply religious dissidents who had fled England in search of the right to worship freely. Their language (think John Winthrop’s City on a Hill) and town names (Goshen, Canaan, and Hebron, to pick three from my native Connecticut) underscored their self-image as the new Israelites fleeing Pharoah and Egypt.
In Cultural Literacy, an education book that became a surprise best seller, E.D. Hirsch presciently observed that, “Although some modern secularists do not accept public religious expressions of any sort, and do not regard them as the necessary source of social bonding and civic virtue, their position has not been sustained by history.” If the founders didn’t hold some regard for a belief in God, Hirsch asked, how are we to make sense of Jefferson’s declaration that it is “self-evident” that all men are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights?”
As civic beliefs evolve, they remain rooted in a shared culture, informed by religion. As an example, Hirsch cited Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, replete with references to The Declaration, the prophet Isaiah, and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Advocating for changes allowing “all of God’s children, Black men and White men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestant and Catholics” to join hands in freedom, King made multiple religious references.
In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, taught frequently in civil rights lessons, King famously wrote:
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Try explaining that paragraph, or the myriad additional religious references in King’s letter, to students who are ignorant of the Bible, geography, or “the Greco-Roman world.”
Bible stories are a form of cross-cultural currency. When I was launching the International Charter School, a member of the nearby AME Church offered to help find space for our kids. “You should talk to Rev. Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, at Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church,” he said. “That’s your people,” he added, referring to the verse in Deuteronomy where God orders Moses to a mountain top from which he could look into the Promised Land.
Despite being filled with commandments, the Bible is not a writ. No credible politicians advocate for imposing it like a law. In my faith, digging deeper to understand the bible spawned an entire book, the Talmud, which catalogs centuries of rabbinic debates. American students who learn nothing of Moses, Egypt, Jesus, or the Galilee are bystanders in equally important civic discussions that draw on the religious beliefs of our founders and many of their fellow citizens.
Although 63 percent of Americans identify as Christian, a faith tied intimately to Judaism, our nation also includes 5 million Indians of diverse religious beliefs, and 3 million Muslims, whose beliefs are sometimes misrepresented by extremists from within and outside their community. Teaching American students, the vast majority of whom who will never have an Indian or Muslim classmate, the origin stories of these newer Americans serves to build understanding and compassion. Sikhs wear turbans; that does not make them Muslims. Factual knowledge of others’ beliefs can help heal our divisions. Ignoring them leaves students prone to propaganda.
One can question the motives of Texas’s leaders. At times their decisions appear to have been taken narrowly to ensure their continued political success. But what should we expect politicians to do but to act politically? Massachusetts Puritans disagreed with Pennsylvania Quakers—they executed three of them!—yet they eventually found common ground to forge a nation. At my diverse-by-design charter school, church-going children learned alongside classmates from avowedly secular families to the benefit of both.
Bible stories allow us to examine an inherently human phenomenon: the vexing, fascinating, ubiquitous fact of faith. Some argue that faith without factual foundation is just like today’s mulish insistence on creating one’s own political narrative. But there’s an important distinction: Religious faith exists in the absence of facts, not in contravention of them. Science has chipped away at religion, but believers still believe. There is room for subjectivity and a case for contemplation. Rather than ducking religion, we must teach it to build both cultural literacy and empathy, critical predicates for the kind of understanding so sorely missing from our national debate.
Editor's note: This article previously said that the full set of materials was not yet available. That has been corrected.
Poland proves that education matters
Poland has been the economic tiger of Europe in recent decades and one of the fastest growing economies in the world over that time. In 1990, when I taught high school in a rural Polish town located in Silesia between Poznan and Wroclaw, Poland’s GDP was less than Ukraine’s. As noted recently by the journalist Anna Gromada, at the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 “the 13:1 per capita gap between Poland and soon-to-be united Germany was twice that between the U.S. and Mexico.”
Between 1990 and 2018, however, Poland’s GDP increased almost eightfold. The Business Leader reported in late May that “the GDP per capita has already surpassed those of Portugal and is on track to beat the Italian (late-2020s) and even French levels (early-2030s).” And the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts that Poland’s Gross National Income per capita will surpass that of the United Kingdom by 2030.
Many factors lie behind Poland’s impressive economic growth and its emergence as a “global power.” These include its embrace of economic freedom and innovation, robust infrastructure investment, access to European Union markets and investments, really hard-working citizens, and education. The power of education is most interesting to me, going back to when I taught there and saw the Polish commitment to it first-hand.
Polish teacher credentials from 1990–91 for the author.
Mateusz Urban, Senior Economist at Oxford Economics, argues that Poland’s “focus on education and skills development has helped them cultivate a talented workforce, which is a crucial asset in today’s competitive global landscape and I think crucial to their rise as a European powerhouse.”
Over the last thirty-four years, I have visited many times with my Polish wife and our two daughters. In May, we spent three weeks traveling across the country and saw first-hand the ongoing power of education to improve individual lives and a nation’s overall well-being. My wife’s family is large. She has seventeen nieces and nephews, and we met almost all of them and their families. They are the beneficiaries of Poland’s economic growth and educational opportunities.
Most of the next generation speak some English, and a few are completely fluent. They work hard across a variety of professions, including teaching (English!), banking, science, engineering, and trucking. They own homes and travel across Europe. One nephew speaks multiple languages and is completing his bachelor’s degree with honors in Wales. What’s remarkable is that my wife, one of seven children, educated during the Soviet period, is the only one of her siblings that attended college and speaks English.
The story of my wife’s family is very much the modern tale of Poland. Journalist Anna Gromada captured this when she observed, “Since 1989 my family has gone from farm laborers to high achievers.” We saw this transformation when we visited Krakow, founded in 1257 and on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Cities.
Yes, Krakow swarms with tourists who spend freely. But, according to the Warsaw Business Journal, “Krakow’s primary assets are its people, namely its well-educated workforce and professionals, which is largely what attracts businesses and investors. Multinational corporations choose Krakow not because it is cheaper, but because of the value of what it offers.”
But education in Poland is not only about creating a dynamic workforce for a world-class economy. Even more important, education is about helping the next generation understand what it means to be a Polish citizen and the responsibilities that come with it. During our travels, we visited historical sites in Gdansk, Warsaw, and Krakow (as well as lesser-known towns like Hel on the Baltic Sea and Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains).
At all these places, we saw school children in their yellow hats or blue t-shirts visiting historical sites with their teachers and local historians and experts. We listened in to conversations between adults and students in places like the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Museum of Warsaw, and the Jagiellonian University (founded in 1384 and attended by the likes of Nicolaus Copernicus, Pope John Paul II, and Nobel Prize Winning poet Wislawa Szymborski).
Polish students in Krakow.
Poland has had to fight for its existence over the centuries. As it grows into a dynamic Twenty-first-century power, it lies on the free world’s outer edge. It has a 142-mile border with autocratic and hostile Russia in the north, and to the east, it borders Russia’s ally Belarus and war-torn Ukraine. Much of the Western support flowing to Ukraine flows through Poland. Not surprisingly, according to the Warsaw Business Journal, “83 percent of Poles believe that the war in Ukraine poses a threat to Poland’s security.”
The Polish education system is responding to this threat. The BBC reported on June 3 that, “In a school just outside Warsaw, children have been learning survival skills. It’s part of a new program that’s sending soldiers from the Territorial Defense to teach emergency drills in classrooms across the country.”
In 1990, as I struggled to teach English to my Polish students, we would periodically hear the Russian jets based nearby fly over our school. They’d break the sound barrier to rattle our windows and classrooms and maybe our nerves. But we all knew the Russians were in retreat. Fast forward thirty-four years and Poland is a powerful country that is a beacon for what Ukraine wants—freedom, economic opportunity, and better lives for their children. It is also what Russia despises and fears. Education matters, and Poland proves it.
Virtual tutoring can benefit young readers, too
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing body of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of tutoring interventions. To date, however, little research has examined the impact of fully virtual tutoring on very young students. Hardly a technicality, this distinction matters because younger children are less likely to have the technical and self-regulation skills upon which virtual learning depends. Now, a new study by researchers from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and UnboundED analyzes the benefits of virtual tutoring specifically for early elementary students.
The authors conducted a randomized controlled trial with 2,085 K–2 students at twelve Texas schools within the same charter network. Those in the sample were randomly assigned to participate either in 1:1 tutoring, 2:1 tutoring, or a control group; the tutoring provider, OnYourMark Education (OYM), is a partner of the unnamed charter network and a science-of-reading-based virtual tutoring program. Students in the 1:1 and 2:1 groups participated in in-school, virtual tutoring for twenty-minute periods, four days a week, from September 2022 until May 2023. For their main measure, the researchers compared students’ beginning-of-the-year performance on a widely used exam, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills (DIBELS), to their end-of-the-year performance on the same assessment. The analysis controlled for demographic factors like gender, race and ethnicity, and economic disadvantage, and the authors also broke down their findings to understand OYM’s effects on students with differing baseline performance and in different grade levels.
Overall, the results show that OYM produced statistically significant reading gains for participants. On average, the students who received the OYM treatment improved their scores by 0.05–0.08 standard deviations. Gains were slightly larger for those in the 1:1 group, a finding in line with other research on 1:1 tutoring.
The effect sizes varied by subgroup. Perhaps most notably, students with the poorest baseline scores saw the largest gains (0.11 standard deviations), and this trend was especially true for the lowest-skill students in the 1:1 group (0.15 standard deviations). Given that this finding was statistically significant, 1:1 virtual tutoring could be a worthwhile intervention for young readers struggling the most. In the results disaggregated by grade level, first graders saw the greatest reading growth, followed by kindergarteners, followed by second graders. This result probably tells us more about the tutoring program and study alignment than it does about student reading skills: OYM focuses on foundational reading skills, whereas by second grade, most assessments include a greater focus on comprehension skills.
Readers will want to interpret all these findings cautiously. First, the student sample was not entirely random (although the assignment of the groups within the sample was random). Prior to the creation of the sample, staff in the twelve schools each selected ten students who most needed tutoring support; these students then participated in OYM that year but were excluded from the study. This limitation suggests that the study findings may actually have been conservative, as the lowest-skill students tended to gain the most from tutoring, and the students hand-selected by staff for guaranteed participation were likely among the lowest-skilled.
A more serious threat to the study’s internal validity surrounds the participation of students with disabilities and multilingual learners. After students were assigned to the three study groups, numerous students from these groups withdrew from the OYM intervention due to a scheduling conflict with their federally mandated services. As a result, there was moderately high attrition, and the patterns of attrition were not random. To account for this issue, the researchers ran additional calculations for a “preferred sample,” which excluded all 731 multilingual learners and students with disabilities—a large proportion of the study’s sample of 2,085. Still, both samples are somewhat problematic, as the “full” sample suffers from disproportionate attrition, and the smaller sample cannot speak to effects on students with disabilities and multilingual learners. This is especially unfortunate, as the study’s implications would be particularly important for these subgroups, which experience substantial and enduring achievement gaps compared to their peers.
Yet the findings remain encouraging, suggesting that many young readers can benefit from virtual tutoring, a more affordable and often more logistically feasible intervention than in-person tutoring.
SOURCE: Carly D. Robinson, Cynthia Pollard, Sarah Novicoff, Sara White, and Susanna Loeb, “The Effects of Virtual Tutoring on Young Readers: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).
Is performance-based licensure a viable solution for teacher vacancies?
Forty-five percent of U.S. public schools report feeling understaffed, 70 percent report that too few candidates are applying to teaching vacancies, and 86 percent report challenges hiring teachers in the 2023–24 school year. In recent years, several states have attempted to address these problems by issuing emergency teaching licenses, expanding alternative certification programs, and pursuing other strategic staffing solutions. A new working paper by Mary E. Laski, a Harvard researcher, analyzes one such solution—a pilot program in which principals hand-select experienced staff members to fill classroom vacancies.
The study focuses on a three-year alternative performance-based licensure (PBL) pilot program implemented in eight Mississippi school districts beginning in 2019. The program allowed principals to use their professional judgment to identify experienced staff members—such as teaching assistants, instructional aides, or para-educators—to fill vacant teaching positions in their schools. Though staff members were still required to meet the bachelor’s degree requirement to be promoted, they were not required to pass the state licensing exam before taking on the lead teaching role. In order to participate in the PBL pilot, principals were required both to randomly assign students to different classrooms within each grade level, and to identify a comparison teacher at the school for each PBL candidate they promoted. Across the participating districts, 126 educators were promoted to regular teaching positions during the three-year period. These teachers were almost all Black, with a median of seven years of experience at their schools.
The researchers used detailed administrative data provided by the Mississippi Department of Education on both teacher and student performance, including demographic information, teacher observation scores and retention rates, student course schedules, assessment scores, and attendance records. A regression analysis was conducted to compare the observation scores and retention rates of PBL teachers to those of the principal-selected comparison teachers, as well as those of an additional group of teachers working on emergency or provisional licenses in similar schools (i.e., those who would otherwise have filled the vacancies, in the absence of the PBL pilot program). The analysis also compared the effects of PBL teachers on student outcomes with both groups of comparison teachers. All models controlled for previous-year test scores, previous-year absences, and student demographics.
The study found few statistically significant differences between PBL and non-PBL groups across different measures, indicating that PBL teachers performed, on average, at the same level as principal-selected comparison teachers and teachers working on emergency licenses in comparable schools. When differences were statistically significant, they favored PBL teachers. One such difference was that students of PBL teachers were absent about 12 percent less often than students of principal-selected comparison teachers. In addition, PBL teachers’ students performed about 0.2 standard deviations higher than comparable peers on annual state math assessments, and about the same as comparable peers on ELA assessments. PBL teachers also scored about 0.1 points higher than teachers with emergency licenses in comparable schools across most teacher observation standards, and were more likely to continue teaching in subsequent years than comparison teachers.
Naturally, there are some caveats. For example, the author acknowledges that some of the confidence intervals found in the analysis are large, making it difficult to rule out the possibility that PBL teachers may be less slightly effective than comparison teachers; however, the magnitude of any such difference in effectiveness would be small. In addition, though initial classroom assignments were random, principals had the ability to alter student assignments after randomization, if necessary, which suggests a possibility that the analysis may not have included truly random groups of students for comparison across PBL and non-PBL classrooms.
Nonetheless, the study’s findings suggest, overall, that PBL programs present a promising approach to filling teaching vacancies without compromising the quality of the education that students receive. The study also suggests that PBL teachers may be, on average, more diverse than comparable groups of teachers, suggesting that PBL programs may have some benefits related to diversification of the teacher workforce.
Additionally, the results have important implications related to the licensure process for individuals already working within the school system in different capacities. If PBL teachers—who did not pass licensing exams—perform at the same level as comparable teachers who did pass licensing exams, the professional judgment of school leaders may be an acceptable replacement for licensing exams that may otherwise present a barrier in promoting experienced education professionals to teaching vacancies that schools are struggling to fill with traditionally licensed candidates.
SOURCE: Mary E. Laski, Teachers in our Midst: Using Experienced School Staff to Solve Teacher Shortages, Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).
#924: How presidents polarize education debates, with David Houston
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, David Houston, an assistant professor at George Mason University, joins Mike and David to discuss how presidents polarize voters when they weigh in on education debates. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating whether performance incentives improve teacher skills and so the academic growth of their students.
Recommended content:
- “Polling data: Presidents split the public on schools” —Kevin Mahnken, The 74
- “Let’s talk about bad teachers” —Michael Petrilli, Fordham Institute
- David Houston and Alyssa Barone, “How the engagement of high-profile partisan officials affects education politics, public opinion, and polarization,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2024).
- Eric Taylor, “Employee evaluation and skill investments: Evidence from public school teachers,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: June 13, 2024
Cheers
- After years deconstructing their discipline structures, many No Excuses schools are rediscovering the need for strict behavioral codes. —RealClearInvestigations
- A school nurse meets parents in the parking lot to determine whether their kids are healthy enough to attend school—curbing absenteeism. —NPR
- Louisiana is piloting a new standardized reading test that prioritizes content knowledge and specifies which books and content it will include ahead of time. —Chad Aldeman, The 74
- More and more schools are banning phones and seeing the benefit. —Kate Cohen, Washington Post
Jeers
- Street Data, a book that is skeptical of using data to analyze schools, reflects a broader distrust of evidence-based decision making. —Steve Rees, Education Next
- Last-in, first-out policies are inequitable and bad for kids. —Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report
- Analysts continue to suggest that NCLB-era reforms failed despite clear evidence that they boosted student scores. —Jack Jennings, Education Week
- A proposed policy in Denver would prohibit the superintendent from using low enrollment or poor test scores as conditions for school closures or consolidations. —Chalkbeat
What we're reading this week: June 13, 2024
- Pandemic-era school closures explain only one-fifth of the rise in chronic absenteeism. —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times
- Education reform is challenging because it’s unclear what “better schools” or “challenge the teachers unions” even means. —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
- Young people must be told that high school does not determine their destiny, that whether they were failures or high achievers needn’t shape who they are as adults. —Megan Stack, New York Times
- The Tories’ focus on basic literacy and numeracy is paying dividends in UK elections. —Chris Bryant, Bloomberg