The Education Gadfly Weekly: One new idea, and two old ones, for moving beyond age-based grouping of students
The Education Gadfly Weekly: One new idea, and two old ones, for moving beyond age-based grouping of students
One new idea, and two old ones, for moving beyond age-based grouping of students
A child’s age is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness, yet it’s the primary means by which we group children in school. More age variety in classrooms could allow for greater academic consistency; grade retention and grade acceleration could help us get there. So too could a new idea from Petrilli: transitional kindergarten–5.
One new idea, and two old ones, for moving beyond age-based grouping of students
Finding the sweet spot on accountability
Further adventures in teacher-evaluation reform
#923: Debating school funding inequities, with Alex Spurrier
Digging in to the 2024 Charter School Ecosystem Rankings
The impact of private schooling on students’ civic engagement
Cheers and Jeers: June 6, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 6, 2024
Finding the sweet spot on accountability
Further adventures in teacher-evaluation reform
#923: Debating school funding inequities, with Alex Spurrier
Digging in to the 2024 Charter School Ecosystem Rankings
The impact of private schooling on students’ civic engagement
Cheers and Jeers: June 6, 2024
What we're reading this week: June 6, 2024
One new idea, and two old ones, for moving beyond age-based grouping of students
Ever since the one-room schoolhouse faded from the American prairie, some reformers have argued that clumping students by age is ill-advised. After all, where a child’s birthday falls on the calendar is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness. Some students enter kindergarten with emerging literacy and robust knowledge, while others can’t count to ten. And any teacher will tell you of the difficulty trying to teach a class with multiple grades-worth of differences in academic readiness.
Yet calls to disrupt age-based grouping altogether—such as by allowing everyone to literally proceed through grade levels at their own pace, as some mastery-based schooling advocates want—sounds too radical and unfamiliar to gain widespread support. Parents recoil at the idea of seven- and ten-year-olds sitting side-by-side in the same class.
There is less resistance to this practice when kids are older. For instance, at my son’s high school in suburban Maryland, most classes are open to students in any grade. His pre-calculus class serves precocious sophomores but also (less precocious) juniors and seniors. So it is with most courses. It seems that once we are talking about teenagers, a mishmash of students of various ages is more acceptable to parents and to teachers.
Back in elementary school, imagine if we took small steps in the same direction. Picture, for example, a fourth-grade class made up of mostly nine-year-olds but also a few eight-year-olds and a few ten-year-olds—more age variety but a greater consistency in academic abilities. That doesn’t sound so crazy.
And indeed, there are already two well-known ways for schools to move closer to that model. The first, of course, is via grade retention. In the context of “third grade reading guarantees,” students who have not yet mastered the basics of reading are made to repeat third grade, and schools are required to provide intensive interventions to help them get up to speed.
On the other end of the achievement spectrum is the long-standing (if too rare) practice of letting high achievers accelerate, also known as skipping a grade. This can be done either in a single subject, such as math, or for the whole enchilada.
In many respects, grade retention and grade acceleration are two sides of the same coin.
(Then there’s the Richard Reeves idea of redshirting all boys, given that they tend to be more immature and less prepared for school at age five than girls are. Though that merely replaces one weak proxy for readiness—age—with another—gender.)
Grade retention and acceleration face fierce resistance from the status quo, however. Educators seem to hate both ideas. When it comes to retention, the worry is that we will make kids feel bad. And with acceleration, the concerns are similar: Some kids might be ready academically to learn with older peers, but they will suffer socially or emotionally if removed from their agemates. Thus we see even red states like Ohio and Tennessee backing away from mandatory grade retention and observe very few districts embracing grade acceleration for high achievers.
That’s a shame because there’s lots of research evidence about both practices, and overwhelmingly the findings indicate that retaining low achievers and accelerating high achievers is what’s usually best for their educations. It certainly helps them learn more than they otherwise would. And to the extent that the issue has been examined, there is little evidence to suggest that the concerns about social and emotional well-being are well-founded. Kids who can’t read don’t tend to feel great about themselves, and kids who are bored tend to act out, tune out, or drop out.
Yet resistance to mixing schoolkids across ages remains sturdy. I’ve suggested a few times that we could add a little more flexibility by creating a “grade 2.5” as way of making “third grade reading retention” into more of a default option and therefore carry less of a stigma. But, so far, that idea doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.
Another baby step via TK–5
So here’s another one. Let’s borrow the language of “transitional kindergarten” from California, where it refers to programs for four-year-olds within public elementary schools, but instead use it as an option for five-year-olds who enter school without the prerequisite readiness skills to succeed in kindergarten. We might call it TK–5.
Let’s say you are a typical elementary school with four kindergarten classrooms. Every summer you assess entering five-year-olds via a battery of readiness assessments, looking both at academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, and then place students into either transitional kindergarten (TK–5) or kindergarten (K) classrooms. (One might hope that communities with strong pre-K options might not need to send too many kids to transitional kindergarten.) Some advanced kids might be ready to start in first grade.
Depending on the results of those assessments, you might turn one, two, or even three of your classrooms into transitional kindergarten rooms. These classrooms would focus on kindergarten readiness skills—both academic and social-emotional—and then would start making progress through the beginning of the kindergarten curriculum.
The following year, the transitional kindergarten kids would matriculate into kindergarten, though some students might be back on track and ready to go all the way into first grade. (You might also make some adjustments mid-year.)
Now you have created grade cohorts that have a little more diversity in terms of students’ ages but a lot less diversity in terms of their academic achievement and, thus, readiness for learning new material. And that’s really what this is all about: making it more likely that every student will get the appropriate level of challenge by giving teachers a smaller target to hit in terms of the variation in students’ readiness. For example, all students in kindergarten would know their letters and numbers on day one, allowing the class to dive right into reading and math. And no kindergarten students would already have mastered all of the skills covered in the kindergarten curriculum. These would be enormous changes from what happens now.
The big question is how parents would react when told that their five-year-old is not ready for regular kindergarten. As a dad who redshirted his own son back in the day, I personally don’t think that’s going to be too big a deal, especially if schools are using good data and judgment about who is ready for today’s elementary school curriculum and who is not—and if TK–5 becomes a well-trod entry route into the education system.
Economists and budget hawks may complain that we are adding a year of school to taxpayers’ bill, given that some children will now attend public schools for fourteen years instead of thirteen. That also means less time earning money in the labor market for the kids who are held back, thus creating opportunity costs, as well as the budgetary kind. But if this change serves to boost achievement for the late bloomers, the payoff will be well worth it, both to students individually and to society. Plus, by also accelerating advanced students—letting them skip kindergarten—we will be recouping some of those same costs by shrinking some kids’ K–12 experience from thirteen years to twelve.
—
There are lots of ideas in education that make good sense but also seem to be politically impossible—for example, getting rid of elected school boards, merging districts within the same metro area, or eliminating school boundaries. If we were dreaming up an education system from scratch, we could put these notions into practice. But we’re not. We’re largely stuck with the system we inherited from our forebears.
The best we can do is find workarounds. Launching the charter school sector, for example, has allowed us to create new schools that themselves do not have elected boards or attendance boundaries. Developing alternative certification routes for aspiring teachers has loosened the ed-school monopoly.
Similarly, we’re probably stuck with grade levels, from K–12, tied to children’s ages. The best we can do is to try some workarounds. Embracing transitional kindergarten for some five-year-olds and accelerated placement into first grade for others would be steps in the right direction. We just need some schools or districts willing to try it. Any volunteers?
Finding the sweet spot on accountability
For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself. For “no excuses” charter schools in particular, this was until recently their raison d'être. Now, with the rapid spread of education savings accounts and other private choice vehicles, the salience of parents “voting with their feet” has—along with a shift in the political zeitgeist—pushed test-based accountability further and further into the background.
This tension around accountability has brewed within the reform community for years. By way of table-setting, my colleague Mike Petrilli once described this as a tribal feud among three distinct camps: (1) choice purists, (2) choice nannies, and (3) choice realists. In a nutshell, all three support parental choice, but part ways on the extent to which they can get behind test-based accountability. Robert Pondiscio characterized the internecine dynamic as a schism between “those whose preferred flavor of school choice emphasizes charter schools, strong authorizers and performance-based accountability versus those who think the ultimate control should rest with parents—[with] private schools very much part of the mix.”
In reality, this duality—test-based accountability versus accountability entrusted to the parent marketplace—is not binary; empirical proof of achievement and parent preference are distant locations on a spectrum rather than two sides of a coin. Indeed, I find much to like about the libertarian view of parent power and school autonomy and nod in agreement with many of their criticisms of test-based accountability, especially the ways it can distort and narrow the curriculum. But I also find the forceful pushback against using tests to measure and evaluate schools to be problematic if it undermines the broader goal of improving life outcomes for our most marginalized kids.
Consider what’s now happening in Houston ISD, the eighth largest district in the nation and the largest in Texas. For choice enthusiasts, the Lone Star State is the biggest prize on the map, being one of only four states controlled by Republicans that do not yet have private school choice. At the same time that choice boosters seem to be on the cusp of a big victory statewide, Houston and its embattled superintendent, Mike Miles, are taking fire from all sides as they attempt to raise the city’s abysmally low floor on academic instruction and student performance.
Just last month, Miles and his team faced hours of grueling public comment from a procession of parents protesting budget and personnel cuts—with the decision to terminate some teachers and principals based in part on student and school performance data. Their grievances were familiar (one person on X called the protesters the “Moms for Mediocre Schools”), but lost in the noise and rancor was the district’s woeful academic performance and the role that test-based accountability has played, and is playing, in starting to turn things around. If Miles were to defer completely to the will of the parents in the room (who represented only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands in the district), it’s difficult to see how that would help close Houston's yawning achievement gaps.
The episode calls to mind an apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Along the same lines, Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Miles has described Houston ISD as a tale of two districts: Its high performing schools are some of the best in the nation, while the struggling ones have languished for decades. Accountability to parents is unquestionably needed, but it’s often insufficient—especially in circumstances where parents have been denied an ambitious vision of what’s possible.
At the same time, test-based accountability has its fair share of problems. Heritage’s Jason Bedrick has written persuasively about its limitations and the double standard often applied to education savings account spending versus public school spending. While the research on the academic efficacy of programs like ESAs is to date inconclusive, there’s a lot to be said about developing delivery models beyond conventional K–12 classrooms and creating the conditions for more agency among students and families.
Simply put, whether you agree with it or not, the following assertion from my colleague Checker Finn gets to the heart of the accountability tension:
We can’t assume that every child is going to be well educated if the parents are put in charge, because not every child has parents who can responsibly take charge.
Or this one from the New York City Parents Union’s Mona Davids:
Parents don't care about politics, we just want our babies educated. And, we are capable of deciding which school will do that.
Can these two ostensibly disparate perspectives be reconciled?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Further adventures in teacher-evaluation reform
In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms. Tim recounted, accurately and candidly, why teacher evaluation reform seemed liked a slam-dunk no-brainer when a major push began circa 2008 and how, ultimately, such efforts mostly fell apart in the face of harsh political headwinds and thorny policy challenges.
Then, in May, Kevin Huffman wrote a reply emphasizing where things went right: in Tennessee, where Huffman was state commissioner and oversaw the implementation of its educator and school leader evaluation system, and in Washington, D.C., where former Chancellor Michelle Rhee led the development of a robust teacher evaluation system known as “IMPACT.” Both Tennessee and D.C. subsequently went on to become national leaders in student achievement gains.
Both are useful additions to the discourse, but both left out how the pre-service system of teacher preparation in university-based programs establishes a culture of mediocrity that makes it difficult for those seeking more accurate and differentiated educator evaluations in schools.
Simply put, when people like Tim Daly, Kevin Huffman, or I come along and say to teachers “we want to evaluate you and such ratings will be meaningful and will differentiate across a spectrum from bad to excellent,” that’s not what they signed up for. Those aren’t the rules they were told they would have to play by. It’s no wonder we all faced so much blowback on test and non-test forms of evaluation alike.
From their earliest experience, those enrolled in traditional teacher prep programs are sent the same message that we lament sending classroom teachers. No matter how they perform, the vast majority of them, and nearly all of the programs in which they are enrolled, will get high grades and glowing reviews. In other words, the same “Widget Effect” that Daly and his peers observed in K–12 schools actually starts years earlier, back when aspiring teachers are in their formative years.
Case in point: In a report titled “Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them,” the National Council on Teacher Quality has documented how teachers-in-training receive significantly higher grades in coursework and are much more likely to graduate with honors than their peers in other university majors. Noted then-NCTQ President Kate Walsh: “Teaching is one of the most difficult and demanding jobs there is. Yet for reasons that are hard to fathom, it appears to be one of the easiest majors both to get into and then to complete.”
I had my own experience with teacher prep’s aversion to differentiation and rigor during the time I served on Capitol Hill. My boss, then-second ranking Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee George Miller, put forth a set of proposals aimed improving teacher preparation. His vehicle was the 1998 reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA).
The proposal that met the most blowback would require publication, for graduates of each teacher prep program, of program-wide pass rates on state licensing and certification exams. This is standard practice in other fields such as law and medicine. Also under consideration was requiring a minimum pass rate for each program as a condition for receiving federal funds, a parallel version of which some states were then pursuing.[1]
The proposal took everyone by surprise, especially on the left. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article with the headline “Liberal Democrat Is an Unlikely Foe of Teacher-Education Programs.” Miller was quoted: “They are perpetrating a fraud on the public because they are graduating teachers who aren't prepared to teach. And they are also, in some instances, perpetrating a fraud on the people they are enrolling. Because they are suggesting that if you come here, and you graduate, you will be prepared to teach. And the evidence is that is not always true.”
Now-ranking, then-more-junior member of the Education Committee, Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), expressed a legitimate concern that the provision might disincentivize schools enrolling more lower-achieving candidates, including students of color, but as we pointed out, we were only interested in counting those who had actually been handed a diploma, not everyone enrolled. Schools of education advanced specious arguments about student privacy and faulted the quality of licensing and certification exams without producing any evidence that they were doing anything to improve or replace those same tests.
The requirement that teacher prep programs publish the pass rates of their graduates was ultimately included in the HEA reauthorization bill, minus any provision that tied those pass rates to eligibility for federal funds. The provision was in no way detrimental to the passage of the overall bill. The conference report passed unanimously in the Senate and only got four “no’s” in the House (all Republican).
We thought we were home free. But under heavy pressure, not just from schools of education but from the entire higher education lobby—which didn’t want to set a precedent for postsecondary accountability and had been accused of using teacher prep programs as cash cows that subsidize more prestigious departments on campus—the Clinton Administration completely eviscerated the pass-rate reporting requirement. And they did it in a way that can only be called shameless.
Even though the statute specified that pass rates were to be reported for graduates of teacher preparation programs, the regulations developed by the administration said that pass rates had to be reported only for “program completers,” an entirely new concept in both federal law and higher education practice. And who were these program completers? Only those graduates who had passed the licensing and certification tests. Voilà, virtually every program had a 100 percent pass rate regardless of how many students to whom they had awarded a diploma went on to fail those same exams.
Admittedly, simply looking at pass rates is a limited way of evaluating teacher preparation—hey, we were just trying to break the ice, we just didn’t bring a big enough mallet—so a decade later Congressman Miller, now House Education Committee Chair, via the next HEA reauthorization, helped put into law some more elaborate requirements. Long story short, the Obama Administration spent its entire two terms trying to develop regulations and ultimately failed, leaving it to NCTQ to collect and report—through shoe leather, legal action, and public humiliation—institutional pass rates, at least for those for which it could acquire data. Both of those are stories for another day.
The point here is that aspiring teachers are constantly shown, by those whose responsibility it is to prepare and mentor them, that any process that differentiates knowledge, skills, or performance among individuals or institutions is inherently undesirable. Everyone is doing just great. Anybody can do the job well. No one need be given a bad grade or denied a diploma.
In hindsight, I think it would have been better if we had started with trying to reform teacher preparation before embarking on teacher evaluation. Not that it would have been easy. But it might have made more systemic sense. (For some ideas, see Education Reform Now’s report “Breaking the Cycle of Mediocrity.”) The wins on the science of reading in recent years are encouraging, but there is a lot more fertile ground to be plowed if we can somehow get ourselves up for it.
[1] This also was based on a little-known provision in HEA that foreign medical schools—which are generally considered to be of lower quality than U.S.-based medical schools—meet a minimum 60 percent pass rate among their graduates on medical licensing exams to be eligible for federal funds. You can read more in a 2010 GAO report titled “Education Should Improve Monitoring of Schools That Participate in the Federal Student Loan Program.”
#923: Debating school funding inequities, with Alex Spurrier
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether, joins Mike and David to discuss whether schools in low-income neighborhoods receive less funding than their affluent counterparts. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating state finance reforms that secure lasting budget increases for districts.
Recommended content:
- Alex Spurrier, Bonnie O’Keefe, and Biko McMillan, “Leveling the landscape: An analysis of K–12 funding inequities within metro areas,” Bellwether (May 2024).
- “Low- and high-income schools now receive equal funding” —Adam Tyner, Fordham Institute
- “Doing educational equity right: School finance” —Michael Petrilli, Fordham Institute
- Shelby M. McNeill and Christopher A. Candelaria, “Paying for school finance reforms: How states raise revenues to fund increases in elementary-secondary education expenditures,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Digging in to the 2024 Charter School Ecosystem Rankings
The Education Freedom Institute (EFI) recently released the newest iteration of its charter ecosystem rankings, its third such effort to gauge the health of states’ charter-school sectors. The mission is still the same—shifting the focus of ranking schema to how a state’s schools are actually performing and serving students, rather than how conducive their laws are to charter establishment, support, and growth (which is what other national organizations’ rating systems have typically focused on). But how well have the authors achieved their goal and crafted an ideal ranking system?
The authors, Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne of Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, combine four statewide measures of charter school accessibility and academic success to craft their rankings: Accessibility comprises the percentage of a state’s students who attend charter schools and the percentage of students residing in a zip code that contains a charter school serving their grade. The former gauge is straightforward enough, but the latter tends to bias the rankings against states that limit charters to urban communities and/or low-performing districts. On the academic success front, the authors use the aggregate reading and math test score performance for all charter students as compared to how these students would have performed if they had instead attended a traditional district school.[1]
Accessibility measures come from publicly available data frome 2021–22 while achievement data are drawn from CREDO’s 2023 National Charter School Study III. The rankings include 29 states and the District of Columbia, and exclude states whose data are incomplete or too recent to be properly comparable. The components are scored individually, with the highest-performing state given 30 points and the lowest-performing one given 1 point—the others ranked in order in between. Then the point totals are added together, with the Academic Success measures comprising 60 percent and the Accessibility measures counting for 40 percent of each state’s total score.
According to EFI, the top five charter locales are Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. In line with the 60/40 split, their scores were driven by the relatively strong academic performance of those states’ charters versus their district peers. For example, Rhode Island’s accessibility rankings were average to just-above average, but charter students in the state gained a whopping 90.2 extra days of instruction in reading and 87.9 days in math compared to their district counterparts.
What does all this mean? Scafidi and Wearne emphasize the importance of considering student outcomes, which other national organizations don’t do in their rankings. “What experts consider well-written laws,” they opine, “do not always produce actual charter schools, and those schools do not always result in increased achievement by students.” They are hopeful that state and national policymakers will eventually favor their more outcomes-driven analysis, especially in this third iteration. However, they note that any statewide snapshot of the charter sector—even theirs—should only be used as a “first-pass” when considering the performance of charter schools in a given state. These aggregated data “may not reflect what is happening in a specific community” at a specific point in time, and especially may lag behind where that state’s charter school ecosystem is currently at or may be headed in the near future. If lots more charters are scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, for example, 2023 accessibility scores will be far lower than they will be during the next review. And low charter performance on a statewide measure could mask the fact that any single charter school could be the very best-performing option near a given family’s home.
Another important issue is the inclusion of online charter schools in CREDO’s data, which has a big impact on the EFI ratings. Consider Fordham’s home state of Ohio, ranked 27th, rising above only Oregon, Indiana, and South Carolina. Ohio ranks low in the accessibility categories (in part because its plentiful charters are limited to urban locales), but does especially poorly in academic outcomes, with charter students actually losing days of instruction in both reading and math to their traditional district peers, according to CREDO. Yet such analyses fail to control for the well-documented academic struggles of online schools, which make up nearly 30 percent of the Buckeye State’s charter sector, and have often distorted CREDO’s Ohio charter analyses. Indeed, a 2020 Ohio State analysis commissioned by Fordham found that brick-and-mortar charter schools boosted math and ELA test scores for grades 4–8 above their district counterparts, with impacts especially pronounced among Black students.
Despite these methodological concerns, however, EFI’s analysis continues to add food for thought around what makes for a “good” charter school sector. And for that, it deserves to be taken seriously.
SOURCE: Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne, “EFI Charter School Ecosystem Rankings 2024,” Education Economics Center, Kennesaw State University (April 2024).
[1] More on the methodology used by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford (or CREDO) and used in this analysis can be found here: https://ncss3.stanford.edu/methods-data/methodology/
The impact of private schooling on students’ civic engagement
In 2023, Sarah Stitzlein—professor of education at the University of Cincinnati—asserted that “the health of our democracy in the United States depends directly on our public schools.” Her assessment summed up decades of thought and scholarship on the subject. But what about private schools, attended by about one in every ten young Americans? Surely they are crucial to democracy as well. A new meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review aims to find out.
The research team is a stellar one, including Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham in England, and a crew from the University of Arkansas that includes professor Patrick Wolf and researchers Mattie Harris, Alison Heape Johnson, and Sarah Morris (the latter two former Fordham EEP Scholars). Together, they dig into the measurable impacts of civics instruction on students. The initial literature search identified a whopping 13,000 quantitative studies. The vast majority, however, duplicated or replicated each other, weeding out the majority and leaving just over 1,500 unique studies. The researchers screened these based on appropriateness and quality—specifically, they were looking for those that showed the impacts of civics education on public and private school students’ political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, as well as their voluntarism and social capital.
Their final meta-analysis draws from 40 different databases and includes 57 studies, yielding 531 effects studied across the four outcomes of interest. (More on this methodology later.) The majority of studies came from the United States, with a handful from other countries in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. Thirty-one studies utilized nationally representative samples. Data ranged from 1982 to 2020. The private schools studied included those with specific religious identities (Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, and other religions), several non-specific religious schools, as well as secular private schools. The analysts used robust variance estimate (RVE) regression and meta-regression to identify the average association between civics education and the four civic outcomes of interest.
On average, they report, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling, showing statistically significant positive impacts on three of the four civic outcomes, with only political participation showing null effects. Religious private schooling shows an even stronger impact.
These findings come with methodological caveats that must be considered: Only seven of the 40 databases informing the studies were generated using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The average effect observed in the studies that use those databases, the authors write, “is positive 0.019 SD, but null.” And while the meta-analysis would likely have not been possible using only those gold-standard studies, the observational nature of the majority of the source data—and the reliance on those sources to generate statistically significant effects—should encourage readers to interpret the findings cautiously. The wide chronologic and geographic spread of the data also deserve consideration—Chile and Mexico are not the U.S.—and the America of 1982 is far removed from that of 2020. The fact that effects on parents are included in the overall outcomes—and are larger than the effects on students—is another concern. Additionally, as with meta-analyses in general, we can’t investigate the mechanisms that may be at work.
Still and all, the analysts conclude that private schools appear better than public schools at building civically-engaged citizens and let the rhetorical chips fall where they may. There’s likely some truth to their assertion—and the corollary that public schools are not de facto better than private at building good citizens, despite a century of faith in that tenet, is likely true as well—but this evidence is surely not enough for anyone to declare it a settled question just yet.
SOURCE: M. Danish Shakeel, et al., “The Public Purposes of Private Education: A Civic Outcomes Meta‑Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review (April 2024).
Cheers and Jeers: June 6, 2024
Cheers
- The New Hampshire state senate passed a bill that would allow high schools to hire part-time teachers without a state license. —New Hampshire Bulletin
- Louisiana passed an Education Savings Account bill that prioritizes low-income kids, uses a sliding scale, and has a testing requirement. —Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN
- Harvard emeritus professor Harvey Mansfield: “One of the things grade inflation does is to rob students of knowledge of what they’re good at, and not so good at.” —Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
Jeers
- “Milwaukee schools superintendent resigns amid potential loss of millions in funding.” —Associated Press
What we're reading this week: June 6, 2024
- The nation’s graduation rate rebounded after a Covid-era slump. —K12 Dive
- Major reforms make for splashy headlines, but small, incremental policies win achieve lasting improvements. —Bridgespan