The Education Gadfly Weekly

On Monday, World Teachers’ Day, friends and relatives of the late Rod Paige released the trailer for a forthcoming film about his remarkable life and career. Titled Paragraphs of a Paige, the appetite-whetting trailer can be viewed here. We at Fordham are proud to be playing a modest role in the evolution of this project, spearheaded by Rod’s family and ace filmmaker Isaac Yowman, as Rod Paige was our friend, longtime board member, colleague in the ed-reform struggle in which he played such a key role, and (for some of us) boss during exciting times at the Education Department during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The film, in fact, opens with a (re-enacted) scene in Sarasota’s Emma E. Booker Elementary School on 9/11/2001, as President Bush was paying a long-awaited visit to a second-grade class. He had just begun to read to the enraptured students when Andy Card whispered into his ear that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and that “America is under attack.” Whereupon the president excused himself from the classroom and invited Secretary Paige to take his place.

Rod was, of course, Bush’s first secretary of education, as well as the former Houston superintendent, college dean, football coach, and lifelong civil rights pioneer.

To be released in full later this year, Paragraphs of a Paige is a hybrid scripted and documentary film chronicling his life and legacy. Through cinematic reenactments, archival material, and documentary storytelling, it traces his journey from segregated Mississippi through decades in education and ultimately to Washington, D.C.

I’ve written before about Rod, his remarkable track record in Houston, his longtime service on the Fordham board, and more. But not until we entered into this film project did I really begin to know the important earlier chapters in his life, such as the day in 1967 when the Jackson State football team, of which he was head coach, played a historic game against Grambling that caused the first-ever integration of Jackson’s Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. (Rod’s team won, Grambling’s only loss that season.) Yes, this was 1967. I was barely into graduate school.

The film trailer hints at some of these chapters. The film itself will do more. Check it out. And as you do, try to remember a time when ed-reform was high on the agenda, even in Washington, and mostly what we meant by it was that all kids needed to learn more and those yawning gaps needed to narrow.

Rod believed and worked for that—and much progress got made.

We continue to miss him.

I recently wrote an essay for The Dispatch about the wave of regret washing over America’s political left…and the wave of regret building offshore of the political right.

But today I want to focus on regret and the “education reform” movement.

The sudden change

As some readers know, I spent much of my early career focused on K–12 education. I shifted away from that in part because, 10–15 years ago, the leading figures and organizations in the ed reform community moved far left and seemed devoted to excising people like me from that world.[1]

It’s not just me. Find any right-of-center person who had happily worked in ed reform when that change took place. They will probably have stories of suddenly being required to attend training sessions that taught that “the American Dream,” “boot-strapping,” and “melting pot” were now considered offensive and unacceptable terms. Of being told to read articles arguing that oppression was baked into all American institutions. Of being told that the slogan “work hard, be nice” perpetuated structural inequality. Of attending meetings and conferences suddenly devoted to a new dogma without any debate. Of being told that immigration laws were xenophobic. That the police had to be defunded. That individual success had to be understood through the lens of unearned privilege.

There’s little value in lingering on these particulars. I’m sure most people reading this are well aware of what happened.

But for the purposes of this column, I do want to emphasize three aspects of this shift.

Consequences of the change

First, the desire—sometimes it felt like a demand—for ideological purity was remarkable. I had been a right-of-center person working in the left-leaning education world for a while, so I had grown accustomed to being a bit of an outsider. But people knew that I’d committed myself to improving America’s schools, especially schools serving disadvantaged kids. I helped start a charter school for low-income students. I advocated policies that were designed to help the underserved. I wrote constantly about the unfairness of assigning students to failing schools. This work was meaningful to me. It was a reflection of my faith and my commitment to expanded opportunity.

But none of this mattered as ed reform took a hard-left turn. If you didn’t agree to the laundry list of new requirements, you were made to feel like part of the problem.

Second, so many of these new requirements had little to nothing to do with actually improving student learning. The new orthodoxy was built on an ideology about power and oppression that led to mandatory policy positions on the police, prisons, student discipline, tax policy, the demographics of newsrooms and boardrooms, housing, marriage, bathrooms, sports participation, immigration, the confirmation of judges, and on and on.

I wanted to help form kids into better people and help them learn more so they could succeed as adults. As a conservative in a mostly progressive field, I knew that I would disagree with other ed reformers on non-education issues. I was fine with that. That’s the nature of a coalition. But I thought that we would, when working together on education issues, focus on education issues. Not so. The new agenda had lots of non-education issues.

Third, dissent became verboten. The new priorities were not subject to debate, much less criticism. Critique an article advocating modern progressive social justice? No. Point out that critical theories assumed too much and demanded extreme action? No. Suggest that organizations’ hyper-progressive policies and public statements had gone overboard? No. Say you preferred a Republican candidate? NO.

So what was the result of all of this?

In just a matter of years, most right-of-center individuals had been exited from leadership positions in ed reform organizations, whether foundations, advocacy groups, service providers, or school operators. The only even-somewhat conservative figures remaining were those who understood that they had to accept the new orthodoxy or not fight against it. It was lost on most of these organizations that while they were advocating diversity and inclusion, they were simultaneously mandating ideological conformity and excluding those who dissented.

Regret

There seems to be some building recognition that the ed reform movement went off the rails. Maybe this is the downstream effect of AOC’s recently admitting that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” Or the other instances of the left conceding its errors.

But on the education front, the big story is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral essay admitting that her ideology caused her to do wrong by her own child. The essay even implies that she understands that her advocacy encouraged others to make the same wrong decisions.

But that’s not all. An education journalist just wrote an essay admitting that he regrets his “misguided six-year foray into ‘social justice journalism’.”

Some of the regret is coming from the outside. Dale Chu, a reform-minded Teach For America (TFA) alum, recently explained how his former organization—arguably the most influential ed reform organization—became a progressive political-ideological enterprise.

Doug Lemov, one of the most respected researchers and practitioners of high-quality teaching, reached a similarly damning conclusion, writing, “Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years.” Regarding their shift from focusing on education to focusing on ideological commitments, he wrote: “they traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve.”

Frustration

I’m glad for this shift. Sincerely.

But I have to admit that I’m also frustrated.

I (and others) raised objections to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s positions years ago. We were ignored or worse. I had repeated conversations with leaders in Teach For America over years trying to get the organization to stop veering hard to the left. I got nowhere. I repeatedly asked journalists to stop acting like political advocates. Again, nothing. I probably talked to a dozen foundations and nonprofits asking—begging—them to hire some right-of-center people to arrest the leftward trajectory, to stop taking political positions on non-education issues, to encourage or just tolerate ideological disagreements. No success.

To be clear, I was not the only one dissenting. With these particulars, I’m only speaking about my personal experiences. There are many ed reform expats.

My larger point is that those who dissented while things were going sideways were often ignored, scolded, shunned, shamed, dismissed, and/or disinvited. If ed reform is going to recover, this should be rectified. They should be brought back into the fold.

Maybe the New York Times and other outlets could hire a slate of right-of-center education journalists to more fairly cover future events. Maybe reform organizations and foundations could hire and offer board seats to those who dissented over the last decade.

In short, meaningful regret includes changing your ways.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.

If you’ve paid even general attention to Texas education news over the past few years, you’ve likely heard some version of the phrase “local school districts being taken over by the state.” Maybe it registered as a Houston story, since that made statewide headlines. If you missed that, you hopefully didn’t miss that the same thing happened 35 miles west of Dallas on Interstate 30.

Fort Worth ISD lost its elected school board this spring. A state-appointed superintendent and a nine-member board named by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath now run the district, because one campus, Leadership Academy at Forest Oak, failed the state’s academic standards for five straight years. Most North Texans never heard the countdown happening. Worth noting: as state action became imminent, Fort Worth’s own elected leadership responded by adopting a bold campus transformation strategy. It was the right move, but it came too late to stop what was already in motion.

That countdown to a state intervention in a school district is rooted in a 2015 Texas law requiring the education commissioner to act whenever a single public school campus receives a failing grade from the state for five consecutive years. The commissioner has two choices, and only two: close that campus, or replace the district’s entire elected school board with local residents the state appoints. There is no third option once the fifth year hits. The only thing a district controls is what it does with the four years before that.

Most people call this a “takeover,” but that word describes only one of the two things the law can temporarily do, and it flattens a distinction that matters. The more accurate term, and the one I’ll use, is intervention. A takeover implies a grab for power. An intervention implies a response to need, the same word we use when a family finally confronts a loved one who can no longer help themselves. That is closer to what this law actually is: a last-resort response to schools that have been failing children for five straight years, with no end in sight.

Right now, Austin ISD is living the moment Fort Worth already lived. Two of its middle schools, Burnet and Webb, just posted their fifth consecutive preliminary failing grade, though those ratings are not yet final. About a dozen other Texas districts are watching Austin closely, because they are on the same clock, closer to home than most of us realize. The state publishes annual A–F ratings for every campus in Texas at TXschools.gov. But keep in mind: it only takes one failing campus to trigger intervention for an entire district. In a large district, the campus putting a school board at risk may not be your own child’s school. Look at all of them.

I have watched this happen from the inside, serving seven years on the Dallas ISD board when our district faced this same law and the possibility of state intervention. What I learned is that this law is neither what its strongest defenders nor its strongest critics sometimes make it out to be.

The national research on state intervention does not support the simple proposition that replacing elected governance, by itself, improves student achievement. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath argues that intervention has improved learning in Texas, and Houston’s recent results provide evidence for that case. But the broader research is far more mixed. The more important lesson may be something different: A credible deadline can change behavior if local leaders act while there is still time on the clock.

The law’s author understood this. State Rep. Harold Dutton, the Houston Democrat who wrote the underlying provision, has described it as a hammer: Don’t let a campus fail five consecutive years, and the state never has to use it. The law grew out of his frustration over chronically struggling schools in Houston, including schools serving generations of Black students, that remained low-performing year after year despite repeated promises of improvement.

Dallas once faced a similar reckoning. In 2012, 34 Dallas ISD campuses were on the state’s failing list, some for multiple years. We hired Superintendent Mike Miles, now Houston’s superintendent, who moved aggressively to change how the district recruited, evaluated, and compensated educators and how it staffed its lowest-performing schools. The politics were brutal. There were public board fights, efforts to remove the superintendent, and even a separate campaign to replace the school district with a home-rule charter. None of that is a footnote. It is the actual texture of change, and all of it happened before the state ever sent us a warning.

Then, in October 2016, the state’s warning became explicit. Commissioner Morath told Dallas and ten other districts, including Houston and Fort Worth, to demonstrate meaningful improvement or risk state sanctions. Dallas ISD chose to accelerate. We expanded reforms that rewarded teacher effectiveness and placed highly rated educators in our lowest-performing schools. Within a year, six of our seven original turnaround campuses came off the failing list. Within two years, the district was down to three failing campuses. We never crossed the five-year line, not because the threat was meaningless, but because we acted with bold urgency before time ran out.

That work did not stop when Miles left. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa’s tenure built durable systems on those early reforms, and current Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde has boldly led that commitment forward. The results Dallas shows today belong to all three eras, not any one of them.

Dallas residents backed that choice with their own money. Less than two years after the state’s warning, nearly 60 percent of voters approved a tax increase dedicated to sustaining those reforms. Voters subsequently supported major bond investments in 2020 and 2026. Not every reform worked perfectly. Some proved too expensive and had to be redesigned. That is the nature of difficult institutional change. But Dallas retained control of its schools because its leaders and community chose to act while they still could.

That is why the debate over intervention too often misses the most important question. Yes, temporarily removing authority from an elected school board should make anyone who values local democracy uncomfortable. But persistent academic failure should make us even more uncomfortable, when we know the children forever impacted by an inadequate education have no vote and will never get those years back.

Houston is further down this road than Fort Worth or Austin, and the most damning account of why comes not from critics, but from inside Houston’s own boardroom. Sue Deigaard, a Houston ISD trustee whose seat was stripped when the intervention began, did not blame the Legislature for what happened to her district. She blamed her own board’s inaction, five years of it, in her own words: “We stole five years from kids.” Her board sat on nine figures in reserves while resisting both real structural cuts and full use of the money it was holding, right up until the state acted.

Texas’s intervention model has real defenders, and the numbers give them ground to stand on: Since intervention, Houston has closed the gap to the state average in reading, math, and end-of-course exams, and nearly eight out of ten of its schools now earn an A or B rating, up from three out of ten when intervention began. None of that is easy to square with another number: Houston lost roughly a third of its teachers in a single year, a rate nearly double the state average. But Texas Tech researcher Jacob Kirksey, who tracked every Houston teacher over a decade, offers a clarifying reframe: The question was never how many teachers left. It was which ones. In 2024, Houston’s least effective teachers left at a rate nearly ten points higher than its most effective, and the district’s best teachers ended up concentrated at the campuses that needed them most. Kirksey’s separate research finds that districts using the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a state program that mirrors Dallas’s pay-for-performance work, reduce turnover among their highest-performing teachers by roughly 20 percent.

That’s the outcome of good legislation already on the books. House Bill 3, passed in 2019, and its most recent iteration, House Bill 2, represent the most significant investment in teacher workforce strategy Texas has made in a generation. Baked within them are tools any district can reach for right now: the Teacher Incentive Allotment; resource campus designations that direct dollars to the highest-need schools; expanded pre-kindergarten funding; and outcomes bonus funding tied to college, career, and military readiness. The dollars are in Austin. The question is whether district leaders are willing to do what it takes to unlock them.

None of this erases real, uneven costs. Houston has posted genuine gains at the district level even as the campus that triggered the state intervention, Wheatley High School, shows that its students who are still learning English are losing ground in core subjects. It is also true that this law addresses real neglect of Black and Latino students, and that research shows majority-Black and majority-Latino districts experience intervention at disproportionate rates nationally. I do not think those two facts cancel each other out. I think we owe our children the discomfort of recognizing that doing nothing to address persistent underperformance has the worst effect on those who the system has historically left behind. That is precisely why no district should wait for a warning letter to act.

The debate over intervention has become Manichean: You are either for it or against it, state power versus local democracy, disruption versus the status quo. But that binary misses the most important question entirely. The real question is not whether intervention is inherently good or bad. The better one is why it should ever become necessary. The tools to avoid it already exist, and any district in Texas can reach for them today.

Five years is a long time in the life of a school system. It is an eternity in the life of a child. Austin’s leaders will likely face state intervention because of ongoing struggles at Burnet and Webb. Fort Worth and Houston are already there, with Houston experiencing some important improvements. Other Texas districts still have time. They should use it to act before action is taken.

The greatest threat is not ultimately that the state might intervene. It is that a child can spend year after year in a school everyone knows is failing them while the adults debate what to do. The clock belongs to the adults. But the five years? They belong to the child sitting in that classroom, hoping someone will finally decide she is worth the fight. And once those years are gone, no court ruling, no board vote, no state appointment will ever give them back to her.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the Dallas Morning News.

While four-year college degrees are largely viewed as a direct path into career-ladder jobs (AI fears notwithstanding), two-year degrees and shorter-term certificates are seen as less of a sure thing. A new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce provides a better picture of the jobs that associate degree and certificate earners can access and what their career trajectories look like—essential information to help improve our understanding of non-bachelor’s pathways.

First up, some definitions: Jobs requiring a postsecondary certificate or an associate degree are here termed “middle-skills occupations.” Categories include installation and maintenance of equipment, office and administrative support, computer science, transportation and logistics, and so on. There are hundreds of such occupations across the categories. The Georgetown researchers use a combination of national and metro-area-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau from 2018 through 2023 to estimate wages for workers across the 55 largest metro areas in the country. They identify what they term “springboard occupations”: 159 middle-skills jobs in 22 occupational categories that offer workers above-median earnings at the start of their careers (based on local data) and strong wage growth over time—ensuring that inflation won’t erode their economic security. They use those springboard occupations—some of which provide earnings comparable to some bachelor’s degree-specific jobs—as the basis for their analysis.

The researchers find that just 15 percent of early-to-mid-career middle-skills workers in the largest metro areas are employed in a springboard occupation. The rest are in lower-paid and low-salary-growth fields. Why so few springboarders? Largely because no metro area has jobs in even a majority of the springboard fields available. The highest percentage of springboard occupations in any area is 47 percent; the lowest is just 28 percent. The most common such jobs are electrician, firefighter, general and operations manager, and police officer, but each metro area has a unique combination of springboard jobs. Los Angeles, for example, has the largest number of discrete springboard occupations, while St. Louis has the largest share of middle-skills workers currently employed in springboard occupations. Overall, early-career workers in middle-skills springboard occupations (ages 20–24) have median annualized earnings of $42,500, an amount that increases by 59 percent to $67,500 by mid-career (ages 35–44). By contrast, median annualized earnings for workers in non-springboard middle-skills occupations are $35,600 in early career and just $47,000 in mid-career.

Adding to the low percentage of springboarders is a mismatch between credentials earned and jobs available. The researchers compute a ratio of each metro area’s annual number of middle-skills credential earners (those that align with springboard occupations) to the projected annual number of job openings available in all occupations (both springboard and non-springboard occupations). Their findings indicate a shortage of properly credentialed workers for springboard occupations in each of the 55 metro areas through at least 2034, although the exact nature of the shortages varies from place to place. Indianapolis, for example, overproduces associate degree and credential earners overall, but still faces shortages of properly credentialed workers in six different occupational categories, including architecture, computer science, and business operations. Nashville’s production of properly credentialed workers, on the other hand, is expected to meet a mere 9 percent of the projected annual springboard job openings. The biggest shortages are projected to occur in the construction and extraction; installation, maintenance, and repair; and production occupational groups. Similar shortages can be found in nearly all 55 metro areas.

Taken together, these findings indicate millions of good-paying, high-wage-growth jobs becoming available all across the country for workers with less than a four-year degree. But without changes, knowledge of those jobs and individuals’ access to them will continue to lag availability. The report’s recommendations start in middle school, with an expansion of career and technical education (CTE) programs that introduce students to career pathways requiring less than a four-year college degree. They also recommend partnerships among employers, high schools, and postsecondary institutions to better define—and publicize—the steps needed to earn credentials and to move directly from high school graduation to postsecondary certification to employment. Better alignment between workforce needs and credential programs being offered in a given metro area will also help direct students to credentials in high demand in their area. There’s nothing wrong with earning a credential that is in demand in some other city, but students should be aware of that before they start on a pathway. Data such as those collected in this report will be vital to students, educational institutions, and employers going forward.

Source: Emma Nyhof McLeod, Catherine Morris, and Jeff Strohl, “Springboards to Opportunity: The Middle-Skills Occupational Landscape in 55 US Metro Areas,” Georgetown University, Center on Education and the Workforce (August 2026).

Kevin Shafer, president of City Fund, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss efforts to expand access to high-quality public schools across the country. Speaking on his experience with school reform in Camden, New Jersey, Shafer discusses what it takes to improve school systems and the role charter schools can play in that work. Is it better to work with districts to build a portfolio of schools, or focus on growing high-quality charters outside the system?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study finding that districts losing students gain more funding per pupil, but much of that additional money goes toward reserves and facilities rather than higher teacher pay.

Recommended content:

• A flexible “third way” option: Partnership schools on the rise —Andy Smarick, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Three ways charters reform and improve our schools —Chester E. Finn, Jr., Bruno V. Manno, and Brandon L. Wright, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Denver doesn’t spell doom for portfolio-style reform —Paul T. Hill, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• The Baby Bust Goes to School —Michael J. Petrilli, Education Next
• Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances —Mark Weber, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Moving Target: The Success and Failure of Missouri’s Charter School Funding Surge—Andrew M. Camp, Collin Hitt, and David Griffith, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (2026)
• The “Would You Rather?” Test —Marguerite Roza, American Enterprise Institute and Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Enrollment, Fiscal, and Resource Changes in American Public School Districts, 1998 to 2019 —Matthew H. Lee and Benjamin Scafidi, Education Finance and Policy(2026)

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

---

Transcript

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

Introduction

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

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

This week, Kevin Shafer of City Fund joins us to discuss the promise and challenges of district-charter partnerships and his experience with school reform in Camden, New Jersey.

Should we try portfolio-style reform with districts, or just focus on growing high-quality charters outside the system?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study finding that districts losing students have more funding per pupil. But much of that money goes toward reserves, facilities, and more staff rather than higher teacher salaries.

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

Mike Petrilli [00:56]

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

Now, please welcome today's special guest, Kevin Shafer.

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Shafer

Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Excited to chat.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, I understand. Longtime listener, first-time caller kind of situation here.

Kevin Shafer

Sports talk radio and ed reform podcasts.

Mike Petrilli

Good. I love it.

Kevin is the president of City Fund. We will talk more about that and Kevin's background in a moment.

But first, let me welcome my co-host, David Griffith.

David Griffith

Hey, Mike. Always a pleasure.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, you know, before joining City Fund, which supports the expansion of high-quality schools, including charter schools, in big cities around the country, Kevin was chief innovation officer for Camden City School District, where he worked on transformation efforts and led to the development of Renaissance Schools, which is a partnership between the district and high-performing charter schools.

Which is really the perfect place to start, because we're going to talk about the pros and cons of reformers focusing on districts, or districts doing charter-like things, doing charter things, versus just, hey, let's just try to expand charter schools and forget about those districts altogether.

So let's talk about all that in Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: District reform or charter growth?

Mike Petrilli [02:26]

So, Kevin, tell us about your experience in Camden, which, as I recall, was a very exciting success story in ed reform.

For those folks out there that may not know, tell us about that and the role that charter schools and the district played together in that.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. Excited to talk about it.

So I started my career, you know, middle school teacher, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and found myself in 2012 working for Paul Vallas in Bridgeport.

And we tried to do a bunch of things to make schools better and got a lot of the politics wrong, got a lot of the engagement wrong, the community side wrong, and found essentially that our school board flipped on us.

Paul went to go run for lieutenant governor, and I was sort of like, what do I do next?

The state then took over Camden City School District.

It was a rare state takeover where the mayor asked for it and local electeds were saying, come do this.

Hired my boss at the time, an amazing leader named Paymon Rouhanifard. I spent thirty minutes with him and was like, sign me up.

I want to be a part of this because there was just such unbelievable need and unbelievable opportunity to actually make a difference.

So, 2013 Camden.

In a pretty small district, 15,000 students, but 23 of the 26 schools in Camden were in the bottom 5 percent in the state of New Jersey.

There were three students, not 3 percent, three total, that met the College Board's college-ready benchmark.

Something like 70 percent of our buildings were constructed before 1928.

And so it was just an absolute system in total crisis.

And I think I'm going to get this wrong. If Paymon ever listens, he'll call me out on it.

But there was something like ten superintendents in thirteen years before he got there.

And, you know, amazing people in that system working hard for kids every single day.

And the system wasn't working.

It didn't work for kids. It didn't work for families. It didn't work for the community.

And so we saw our job as, really, let's do two things.

Let's do everything we can to help improve the schools that are underneath us.

And also, let's recognize that turning this sort of Titanic around is going to be really hard. It's going to take a really long time.

And, you know, superintendents don't last.

We lasted for five years, and I think that was the longest one in thirty years.

But superintendents don't last very long.

And so what can we actually do that will both make an immediate change and will last?

And so there was this really novel piece of legislation called the Urban Hope Act, which created something called Renaissance Schools, which in Camden's case meant essentially it was the governance of a traditional charter.

So all the autonomy, a charter held by the state, performance standards they need to meet, sort of all those things.

But it was also a partnership with a local district, which meant a defined neighborhood.

So everyone in North Camden got to go to that Renaissance School, had a guaranteed seat, which in a city like Camden was hugely important.

You know, if a family didn't have the means to drive their kid across town or if city transportation wasn't reliable.

So that sort of safe neighborhood component was really important.

So it's basically the benefits of a charter with a neighborhood school.

And this piece gets sort of underreported, but it was really, really important: a facilities requirement.

And so it was actually a requirement that every school either was a brand-new construction or significantly renovated.

And so because of that, we were able to leverage the bill and these partnerships to get hundreds of millions of dollars in new school renovation, which was critical to actually getting the infrastructure met.

Which, you know, great schools, I've seen great schools in church basements and in $50 million high-rises. You know, great school anywhere.

And the signal it sent to kids in Camden about how much we value them and their education was real.

Mike Petrilli

Interesting.

So the district role then was what in the facility piece, basically?

Kevin Shafer

Yeah.

So the district, but even this gets to your sort of district-first, charter question.

We had a choice.

You could sort of say, we'll partner and we'll open some Renaissance Schools across the street from a district school, right? Or down the street, right?

If you're sort of, we're going to grow charters next to the traditional system, we could have done that.

The downside to doing that was you're bleeding enrollment from the traditional district school.

It's slower to actually get as many kids into a higher-quality school.

It just takes ten more years, right, if a school starts with kindergarten and grows its way up.

Or can we actually do the work to figure out, can these Renaissance Schools take over an existing building and transform it wholesale?

And so we were lucky enough in New Jersey that we had some amazing school partners.

This was KIPP from Newark, Uncommon from Newark, and Mastery Charter Schools from across the river in Philadelphia.

And all of them were willing and had the ability to sort of do whole-school turnarounds.

And so we actually took a bunch of traditional district schools that were most under-enrolled, had been most chronically struggling to perform academically, and where there was real community demand and parents saying, we would want something different.

And said, we're going to give you, Uncommon, this facility. You're going to take every student in that building. You're going to transform outcomes.

So it was really the district-initiated sort of whole-school turnarounds.

And then we were basically the authorizer, and they ran great schools and have done great things for kids.

Mike Petrilli

So that's interesting.

So you are the authorizer. Okay, so it's not that, you mentioned the contract being held at the state level.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. I mean, this is the risk of being, like, really wonky and nerdy.

It's both.

So it actually has to get initiated by the district.

The district holds a contract with the operator, but then that contract goes to the state.

And so neither party can amend it or change it without the state signing off.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, interesting.

Your point about sustainability questions, you know, someone comes in and says, I think this is a bad idea.

You have to go convince the state, and both sides have to agree.

So the story goes on.

Some fantastic results at these schools and the district as a whole. Tremendously better results.

Right?

But you guys leave.

And so the concern has always been sustainability, right?

The next guys or ladies come in and just kill it, turn it back into a traditional public school.

The union demands, you know, get rid of these providers.

Is that what has happened? Or has this rule about getting state approval helped to keep it in place?

Kevin Shafer

It has not happened.

The schools have kept growing. They've added high schools. They're now fully K through 12.

Definitely been challenges along the way, as any systems face over the last ten years.

And I think it's sort of two reasons.

One is the policy structure, for sure.

State holds it. That is all true and a big part of it.

I think the other part of it is how it happened.

I think if you do these things to, not with, there's just always going to be some backlash.

I think credit to Paymon and Mayor Dana Redd and local parents and local council leaders.

But this really was done with folks so that these schools were seen as community schools, and there was big public engagement and buy-in and support.

Not everybody was happy all the time, sure. These are hard changes.

But I think that actually people were bought into doing this.

And then, two, the schools delivered.

And I think if these schools were not actually doing better for kids, if they weren't serving all students, if they weren't getting great results, then I think it's a really different conversation we're having today.

Which I think, these strategies, who's running the schools matters way more, just as much, I think, as which policy construct you use.

Mike Petrilli

Well, this is interesting.

And this is good for me to hear, Kevin, because it is challenging some of my priors.

You know, because I have been in this debate forever, somewhat skeptical of what people have called the portfolio strategy, right?

Saying that, you know, people should come in and they should try to devolve power to these charter schools or charter-like schools as district officials.

It just always seemed like, you know, the politics of that would be unsustainable.

You know, maybe that's what you have to do as a compromise organization.

Okay, but why not just instead put all of your focus on starting high-quality charter schools completely outside of the district?

You know, so basically like in D.C., right?

In the District of Columbia, you've got this separate authorizer, separate mechanism.

They've solved the various problems over the years with facilities and enrollment and all the rest.

And so they've built this great system of charter schools that sits right next to the system of traditional public schools.

Versus what we see in, say, Denver, where there was this focus on, you know, having the district partner with these kinds of schools, charters and charter-like schools.

You know, and then the policy shifts, the unions vote in an anti-reform board, and then a lot of it is fragile. It's at risk.

Right?

But you're making a case that says, hey, you know, at least in this New Jersey example, you have, partly because of good state policy that brought in this investment in the facilities, that gave you some leverage, you know, maybe to make sure this came out right, that there were some real benefits.

And this idea that these are takeovers, transformations, they're neighborhood public schools.

I don't know. This all sounds pretty good.

David, what are you thinking about this?

David Griffith [11:18]

Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree.

I think I've made the point a couple times that I at least feel like, in some circles, what we'll call the Denver model, maybe it's the Camden model, is underrated, right?

I think there are these sort of unfortunate transition costs that are associated with the route that the big Missouri districts that we studied are taking, that Indianapolis is sort of finally turning the corner on, right?

Like this sort of rocky road to destroying the district to save it.

And so I don't, you know, as much fun as that looks like, you know, I think we should consider these alternative routes, right?

And one reason, I think, it's sort of been touched on, right, is like if you have enough political support to take a few steps down this road, chances are it doesn't just evaporate completely if there's some, you know, if there's turnover at the school board level, right?

I mean, you can have dramatic changes in school boards. I don't mean to sort of discount that.

But I mean, I don't think that parents woke up in Denver or Camden and felt completely different about charter schools overnight because of something that happened with the school board.

And so, you know, I think there's sort of more latent support, even in these places where reform is struggling right now, than maybe it seems.

So, you know, if you can go this route, like, why not?

I guess the flip side of that, I would also say, is like, you know, the completely external route has its own challenges, right?

And not just sort of educational challenges.

Like, I don't know, you have a serious facilities challenge, like we've been talking about, if you're not going to partner with the districts, right?

Like, my understanding is that in North Carolina, for example, it's just like a queue to try to find buildings that look like schools, right?

I don't know.

I don't want to undersell this choice.

I think it's a significant strategic choice on the part of the charter sector.

But I do think there are pros and cons to each side.

And I don't think you can judge it over three years or five years.

I think you have to judge it over twenty-five to thirty years because these are long political cycles.

Mike Petrilli

All right. So that's well said, David.

So, Kevin, all right.

So you've got this experience. You now are in this role at City Fund.

You all raise money from some of those pro-ed reform billionaires that are still out there, Reed Hastings and others, and invest them in trying to grow high-quality seats, what, a couple dozen cities around the country.

Excited that you're working in Ohio and Cleveland.

Woo!

Glad to see that.

So how do you think about these issues now?

I mean, is it a, you're trying to do both-and in a lot of these cities? Or do you kind of pick one or the other?

How's this go?

Kevin Shafer [13:59]

I think both-and.

But I wouldn't want to understate sort of, the nuance really matters here.

And so on the one hand, I look at Camden, I look at Indianapolis as two cities that have come the closest to New Orleans on creating a system that really is about outcomes for kids.

Lots of high-quality choices, performance bar, cycles of accountability.

You know, 70 percent of students or so in both places that are actually going to a charter or charter-like school.

And both Indianapolis and Camden called them something different, and they leveraged some version of this, right?

The innovation law in Indianapolis converted good schools to great and had sort of this turnaround component. Lots of similarities to Camden.

Camden had the Renaissance School piece.

But in both places, they also were protected from the political swings.

Like the state charter in Camden, being like the charter ultimately being held by the state.

In Indianapolis, at an innovation school, if the district decided to tear up that contract, every innovation school has a charter contract.

And so I think there is just a protection in that that, frankly, Denver doesn't have.

And in Denver, an innovation zone, it's at the whim of that board.

And so the families in Denver and leaders of those schools every year have to go fight to defend those schools that have done amazing things because it's not protected in law.

In Texas, the 1882s, it really varies by what the contract looks like.

So there's ones that are really protected and there's ones that aren't.

And so I actually think the nuance of this actually matters more to me than, is it...

Because I think there's no doubt that if you have the operators who can do right by kids, you have the community willing to do it, it is a more efficient, faster route to get more kids into better schools faster.

Can it sustain?

And that actually becomes a policy, it really is a policy question.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, that is, so no, it's really interesting.

And so the question, yeah, right.

So for policy people, us policy wonks who think about, hey, maybe, you know, how do we change state policy to be supportive?

Right?

Indianapolis route is one way. Hard politically.

I mean, you know, maybe there's some more red states out there willing to do what Indianapolis, what Indiana has done in terms of taking basically the facilities and the transportation and the money out of Indianapolis Public Schools, giving it to this new independent board run by the mayor.

I mean, that is, I'm still super excited about that, but that's hard.

So this other option then would be to create basically what? This Renaissance Schools policy like you have in New Jersey.

Who knew that New Jersey should be such a great model of state policymaking?

Kevin Shafer

Well, in true New Jersey fashion, this law was available to, like, the five biggest urban districts, and only one was willing to do it.

And it's worth noting, only one was willing to do it that was under state intervention.

And so while there was local support and cover, I think the reality is, if we wait to find the conditions where you get the right law, the right willing district partner to do it this way, we're going to be waiting a long, long time when hundreds of thousands of kids are stuck in systems where they're not getting access to great schools.

So the question of, like, which route to go, maybe it is a both-and.

And, you know, the majority of our cities are every day figuring out, how do I grow a great charter school for the students and families in that neighborhood that's most underserved?

Right?

How do I then grow another one and another one?

And hopefully there's a moment where you can partner with the district or you can figure out a plan for the whole city.

But that's the thing we can control.

They can do right by kids every day.

And then try to create more moments where you have opportunities to work with and go faster.

But those moments are hard, and they've been a lot fewer in the last five years than they were in the ten years prior.

Mike Petrilli [17:31]

All right.

One last question, Kevin.

You know, back to this portfolio model.

You know, the alternative for what districts should do, right, is to do what D.C. Public Schools has done and a few other big-city districts and just try to get really good at running traditional public schools.

Right?

Forget this devolution thing.

It's basically a top-down playbook.

Lean into high-quality instructional materials, a very clear vision around what high-quality instruction is, you know, a lot of support, a lot of training.

Accountability up and down the system.

You know, and it has been proven in DCPS and maybe a few other places that you can do this and you can do it at scale.

And the benefit, by the way, is that in a place where there's a lot of kids in poverty, they move around a lot.

Wherever they land, the curriculum is the same, high quality.

The teachers are using the same kind of language. They're getting the same training.

It's maybe not so different.

And it's a nice complement to this choice-based system that the charter schools have.

Right?

I mean, you can tell I'm a huge fan of what D.C. does, right?

And I still think it's the best of both worlds.

But I mean, to me, that, though, is not what you guys do.

That you are not supporting district reform strategies unless they embrace the portfolio model.

And the question is why?

Like, what's your take on that?

Kevin Shafer

I think it really, I think the progress and results in D.C. have been incredible.

And I think part of the reason the district has been able to sustain this is also because they've done it alongside growing an incredible charter sector.

And I wonder, I don't know, it's a thought exercise, but I wonder whether it would be as sustained if charters were 10 percent of D.C.'s share versus 50, right?

And so it's hard to separate those two things.

And we want to see every city we support have a world where every kid gets access to a great public school.

And if that is 40 percent charter or 50 or 70 or 20, don't really care.

It's ultimately, do kids get access to the school they need and can it last and sustain?

I think what we've seen in places outside D.C. is that playbook works.

It's really hard to execute it well.

Mike Miles in Houston is doing an absolutely phenomenal job of executing that playbook.

Lots of other challenges, but, like, the results are unbelievable.

But it's really hard to actually execute it well, and it's really hard to sustain it.

And what often happens is the average superintendent comes in, spends three years building this up, have their new curriculum, have their new teacher-support program, have their new principal, their new academic team.

Just when they start to see gains, time for a new school board, time for a new superintendent, and a version of the same thing, but a little bit different, happens.

And you're in this sort of constant flywheel.

The miracle of D.C. is that they've been able to sustain this progress for fifteen, twenty years.

And I wonder if that's possible without charters keeping the bar high for progress and accountability.

We haven't seen that anywhere else over a big city over that lifetime.

So I think if you can actually guarantee districts could keep doing that and get a better governance model, it's way easier.

It'd be way easier than trying to grow charters and make it work.

I think unfortunately, we just have thirty, forty years where D.C. is one outlier, and that outlier came when you grew the charter sector to 50 percent.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's fair.

And look, this reminds me of my good friend Rick Hess's classic Spinning Wheels, right?

This is what we know from urban districts.

I mean, we maybe can point to some others.

Houston is a very good example.

You know, Chicago there for a long time got a lot of credit, especially from Sean Reardon's analyses, for really boosting achievement.

And, you know, there too, it helped that there was a strong charter sector.

But it seemed like the district was doing good things as well on the teaching and learning front.

Maybe, you know, depending on how we define big districts, we could find a few others, maybe a few of the big suburban districts.

But you're right.

Spinning wheels seems to be much more common than the success stories that we are pointing to.

I guess the basic takeaway is no matter what you try, it's hard.

And so we have to stay humble and be willing to be flexible.

But this is great.

Kevin, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Appreciate what you did in Camden and now what you're doing at City Fund.

And we'll have to have you on again sometime soon.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. Love talking about this stuff and, you know, grateful to be able to be in the seat and learn from a lot of amazing leaders doing hard things for kids everywhere.

So appreciate you all having me on and would love to come back anytime.

Mike Petrilli

All right. Great.

Again, Kevin Shafer, president at City Fund.

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

Research Minute: What happens to district finances when enrollment falls?

Mike Petrilli [22:04]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

So, yeah, as you can tell, if you're watching, you know, behind me, the weather has changed here in Washington.

It suddenly feels cooler. It's a little rainy, a little fall-like.

An autumn breeze is in the air.

Is it the same down there in the South where you live?

Amber Northern

It is. Definitely is.

I'm just waiting to go get the pumpkins, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, are you big into pumpkins now?

Amber Northern

I do a lot of pumpkins on the front porch.

I don't know, kind of a pumpkin aficionado.

I get the different colors and different shapes.

Mike Petrilli

Mums also?

Are you into the mums?

Amber Northern

Yeah, do the mums.

Mike Petrilli

Okay.

All of that. Excellent.

Whereas David has to save all his money for the hordes of children that go to his Capitol Hill house on Halloween, right?

Thousands and thousands. Isn't that the case?

David Griffith

That is the case on East Capitol Street, about four or five blocks north from me, Mike.

It is not the case on Seward Square.

We have a big semi-historic square that nobody really comes to.

But D.C. Halloween is amazing.

It's one of my favorite things about D.C.

Also, it doesn't rain out here like it does in Portland.

So it's a genuinely magical time.

Mike Petrilli

Lovely.

Okay, wow.

And we are, of course, way ahead of time here because, you know, we can keep talking and looking forward to Halloween for a whole other month.

I love it.

Amber Northern

Yes, we can.

David Griffith

And I'm sure you will, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

I will.

I do like Halloween.

I do like dressing up for Halloween.

I was just thinking the other day about my...

[Unclear costume name in the source transcript.]

...costume that I won a little bit of a New York Times newsletter contest in at one point.

And I was always very proud of that.

I thought, you know, but I do have my number two pencil costume. It's always a classic.

Can't come up with anything else that is a classic.

Amber Northern

It is. It is.

David Griffith

Yep.

Fascinating, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Yes.

All right.

Hey, I digress.

Amber, what's on the research?

Amber Northern [24:11]

We've got a really cool descriptive study.

I think it's sort of like, I feel like we've talked about this before on the podcast, but we've never had, like, a study that actually kind of shows this descriptively.

It's tracking how revenues, expenditures, and per-pupil resources changed across nearly all U.S. school districts as their enrollments grew or shrank over two decades.

It is in the AEFP journal.

It isn't even out yet. It's on, like, just accepted.

So anyway, it literally is, like, not even off the press yet.

But anyway, interesting stuff coming in AEFP.

Data come from NCES Common Core of Data, so we know this sort of bread-and-butter data set.

1999 through 2019.

It covers 12,000 traditional public school districts across 47 states and D.C.

As you can tell, it predates COVID and ESSER, those influxes of dollars.

So we don't know whether these patterns persist into the 2020s.

But regardless, it tracks each district against its own history.

And the study design basically allows the shrinking and growing districts to follow different patterns rather than assuming that the pattern works the same way in both of those growing and declining districts.

Okay, so I'm not going to get into all of the specifics around that, but it's an appropriate methodology.

The authors look at one-year, four-year, and twenty-year enrollment changes to capture both short-run adjustments and long-term trends.

So key finding number one: Declining districts saw significantly larger increases in per-pupil revenues than the growing districts did.

And this held across all three time periods.

So the main driver was local revenue.

I think we know this.

The property taxes and other local sources, they don't fall proportionately when students leave.

Property values don't drop because, you know, fewer kids are enrolled, so the tax base largely stays in place.

Federal dollars also enhance this effect because federal aid is tied to school-age child counts from the Census, not district enrollment.

So when kids move to homeschools or private schools, for instance, the federal dollars largely stay behind as well.

And then the state revenues showed an advantage as well for the declining districts too, partly because states have these hold-harmless provisions which protect districts.

And the advantage there was smaller because those provisions do tend to be temporary, like one to three years.

Number two: On the resource side, declining districts saw much larger increases in staff and teachers per 100 students.

Over twenty years, districts with long-run enrollment declines spent roughly $1,700 more per pupil than the growing districts did.

And they employ 2.55 more staff per 100 students than the growing districts.

So basically, the declining districts were accumulating per-pupil funds even as their headcounts fell.

And on the other hand, these growing districts were absorbing students faster than they could add staff or funds.

Number three: Salary and benefits per employee show no meaningful difference between declining and growing districts.

So those gains in per-pupil funds I was just telling you about weren't going to higher compensation.

So where did the money show up?

It showed up in stronger fiscal reserves and capital projects like facilities.

So basically, because these declining districts had higher per-pupil revenues and healthier balances, or bank accounts, the bond markets said, hey, they have more credit.

So that means they got cheaper borrowing for their capital projects.

So they were doing some building.

And then the last finding I'll highlight is on grade-level differences.

They looked at that as well, and they found that this fiscal advantage I've been talking about was biggest for districts losing elementary kids.

It was smaller for middle grades, and the advantage was smallest for high schools.

And they discussed that and basically say that there's more of a fixed-cost problem at the secondary-school level because you can't, you know, just cut a chemistry teacher when your enrollment drops because you still have to offer chemistry.

Whereas at the elementary level, it's a little easier to consolidate positions and that sort of thing.

So bottom line, the conventional thinking, which holds that enrollment decline leads to, like, fiscal crises or disaster, isn't really how it works out, at least in the aggregate, which this study analyzed.

Again, individual districts may look different because, you know, some factory leaves or big employer leaves.

But in the aggregate, these are the patterns, and basically shows that, if anything, the growing districts are the ones who look more squeezed.

And those state formulas have a lag.

The property taxes, which I've already talked about, take time to adjust to new development.

So in those places, the growing districts, the revenues can't catch up to the students coming in.

So anyway, I thought it was a great study.

Just kind of writing some sort of common notions that some of us hold.

And I love that it's descriptive and still landed in a prestigious journal.

Mike Petrilli

That's great, because this is super helpful information to have.

And you look at, you know, you say, oh, this is bad news that these growing districts can't keep up.

On the other hand, we don't have growing districts anymore, so that's fine.

That's not a problem.

Amber Northern

Not many.

Mike Petrilli

We have very few.

We have very few.

Look, I will say that I am proud that way back in something like 2018 or '19, I wrote an article for Education Next about the baby bust and what that was going to mean for schools.

And, you know, I remember just looking at state-by-state spending, and you could see that the states that had already had enrollment declines, even at the state level, their per-pupil financing went up also.

And here I think the phenomenon is that, you know, the state legislatures, they don't think about this in terms of per-pupil funding, right?

They think about, okay, last year we gave $20 billion to the public schools, and so this year we're going to give them $21 billion, maybe without, you know, contemplating that there's fewer kids.

Right?

And so that is exactly what we see happening.

So for all these reasons, yeah, this is not, at least in the short term, a financial catastrophe.

Right?

And the other thing is that this is helping to explain, but also show, that the staffing surge, right?

We just keep choosing more staff over higher salaries.

It drives me so crazy.

How do we fix this?

David, your thoughts?

David Griffith [31:22]

I do not know the answer to that last question, Mike.

It is remarkably consistent, right, across contexts.

It just makes you wonder if there's some, like, political law, right?

Unwritten political law that if, I don't know, class sizes get bigger than a certain amount or teachers make a certain amount and they stop, you know, asking for raises or something.

I'm honestly not sure exactly what it is.

You would think that teachers would want, you know, raises, right, and lobby for that.

I don't know, at least in some of the contexts.

But it seems like it doesn't matter.

I honestly think if someone could figure that out, like one of our brilliant researcher friends out there, I actually think this is a question that needs an answer at the level of politics and causality.

What actually leads to higher salaries for teachers?

Because it needs to happen, right?

Mike Petrilli

I think there's some evidence that unionization helps a little.

Right?

But, and then, the other thing is just what can states do?

It's like, well, something like the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, right?

I mean, like, if you give school districts and schools a choice, it seems like they will just keep hiring more staff instead of paying teachers more.

Right?

But so then you've got to, like, force them to raise salaries instead.

Amber Northern

I mean, this tradeoff survey we did not too long ago with Marguerite Roza, and she helped us develop it.

And we actually asked teachers that tradeoff, like, would you rather have more money or would you rather have a teacher's aide?

And if I recall, it was fairly split, you know, where some teachers actually were preferring an aide to help them.

And, of course, you know, it had to, I can't remember how much of a stipend the question posed.

Obviously, that makes a difference, whether it was $10,000 or $40,000.

But I think teachers are also split on whether they'd like another set of hands in a classroom, especially if it's a high, you know, whether they're dealing with discipline problems or something.

David Griffith

I can't help but point out, right, we also did a study, Mike, I know you wrote about this, but we also did a study in 2021 called Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances.

And I have to say, all of this sounded really familiar.

Mike Petrilli

Familiar.

David Griffith

Because when we dug in, the study turned out to be about, you know, there were a couple of states that had, you know, special carve-outs for districts that had lost kids to charter schools, right?

New York, Massachusetts.

But honestly, the list is pretty short of states that actually do that.

The dominant story in, you know, thirty-plus states was exactly what Amber just said.

You know, districts lost money to charters, but not local money necessarily.

Right?

And, you know, they lost students, but, like, there were these declining-enrollment provisions.

And so, you know, it took a few years for it to trickle through.

And then it turns out even the federal government, right, there are essentially time-limited hold-harmless provisions written into federal law.

And so at every level of governance, you're actually pretty cushioned from this kind of blow, whether it comes from charters or whether it comes from some other reason.

And I think, honestly, up to a point, that's right, so long as it isn't permanent.

So, you know, I don't know that there's necessarily a problem that needs solving here except the one that you articulated, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

And that, look, you never know.

Like, there could be a real property-tax revolt coming in some of these places where, you know, people notice that their property taxes, you know, the property values have gone up and the property taxes are really high.

And what am I getting for it?

And anyway, I mean, that hasn't happened in very many places yet, but you could imagine it happening.

There was a wave of it back in the '70s, famously in California especially.

But you could imagine that happening, right?

Because it does feel politically unsustainable.

You know, we look at this in the Missouri study you did recently, where we're going to get to the point where St. Louis and Kansas City are going to be spending $50,000 per kid, you know, with their local funding as they keep losing kids.

I mean, at some point, taxpayers are going to notice.

David Griffith

Let's hope.

Mike Petrilli

Let's hope.

David Griffith

No. My property tax bill was way up this year.

Mike Petrilli

No, no, no. Come on now, my conservative friends.

This is great.

All right. We will have to leave it there.

Thank you, Amber. That was a good one.

Amber Northern

Yes, it was.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

But until next time.

David Griffith

I'm David Griffith.

Mike Petrilli

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

Whatever you think of AI’s potential upsides—and I believe they are significant—the most urgent questions around artificial intelligence in education have to do with minimizing harm. How do we keep students from using it to cheat on essays and assignments, even on in-class quizzes and tests, as a quarter of high schoolers copped to in a recent Fordham Institute survey? And how do we keep kids safe when they’re likely to be tempted to chat with bots about all kinds of personal issues?

But the most important questions related to AI and education have to do with the future of work. It’s never been particularly easy to predict the jobs of the future, but it’s arguably an order of magnitude harder now, given the uncertainty about which occupations may shrink or disappear amid the accelerating tech cognitive revolution. Especially for older students, we want schools to prepare them to make a living. Hence any reasonable guesses at future careers are super valuable.

So I was happy to learn about the new book Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach, by Luis Garicano, Jin Li, and Yanhui Wu, which was highly recommended by Tyler Cowen, the information omnivore, libertarian, and AI enthusiast, and has received positive reviews in The Atlantic, City Journal, and elsewhere.

It’s a winner that you should put atop your reading list. The first half, in particular, supplies a persuasive explanation of what AI is likely to do to the labor market. The three authors, all economists, expect neither a utopian future where sky-high growth rates leave us all enjoying a life of leisure on the beach, nor a dystopian world where nobody can get a job or earn an income. That’s because plenty of human work will remain, some of it (including in education) not directly boosting economic output.

It’s not just the obvious jobs that will be hard to automate, such as the skilled trades and the caring professions. It’s also much of knowledge work. We shouldn’t fear a white-collar job apocalypse, say this trio of economists.

They suggest that the folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who predict mass unemployment may have a good understanding of the technology they are building but don’t have a grip on what office workers actually do. Frankly, few of us really do. How many times have you thought about the jobs your college buddies work in and wondered, “What the heck do they do all day?” As a think-tank president, I’m sure my college buddies have these questions about me!

But labor economics includes scholars who study exactly these questions, including the “production function” of white-collar work. Which turns out to be a lot more complicated than we might assume.

The authors argue that the jobs that will not go away are “messy.” As they explain:

All knowledge work varies along one dimension: messiness. At one end of the spectrum, there is a single defined task to execute, such as helping clients file their taxes. You get the pay slips and expenses via email, use rules to fill out a form, and get a result. At the other end of the spectrum, there is an enormous bundle of complex tasks. Running a factory, or a family, involves many different tasks. They are very hard to specify in advance, and they are difficult to split from each other so that some can be automated autonomously. Many involve a lot of conflict.

Jobs that amount to a single routine task, or even a bundle of routine tasks, can and will be automated. Note that many such jobs have already been outsourced, such as call-center roles that have moved to India or the Philippines.

But many jobs are “tight bundles” that are hard to break apart and difficult to automate. And mostly what those jobs have in common is lots of dealing with humans, with all our messiness and neuroses, and with the complicated internal politics of large organizations.

If, therefore, you spend a lot of time sitting in meetings, working toward decisions with colleagues and clients, selling to customers, or solving problems, then good news: Your job will be hard to automate!

What does that mean for schools? Should we make kids do lots of group work and endure endless “meetings”? Some maybe, but that’s only part of what’s involved. The authors expect that the trends identified years ago by Harvard professor (and now dean) David Deming will still apply. They write that “a consistent pattern runs through decades of data: The labor market increasingly rewards people who combine analytical thinking with the ability to work well with other people.” Demming tracked American jobs in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s and found that careers that scored high on both “cognitive skill” and “social skill demands”:

…grew by roughly 12 percentage points over three decades. Jobs that were cognitively demanding but low on social interaction (number crunching) shrank by about 3 percentage points. The demand increase was not for “soft skills” but for people who could both think and coordinate.

That might sound like common sense, but it’s regularly overlooked. Too often, I hear “durable skills” advocates make it sound like people skills are all that matter, as if AI will replace everything else. But to use AI effectively—especially to spot errors or misjudgments—we need people who possess deep domain expertise. That means fully developing students’ cognitive capacities and helping them become experts in something. (It’s akin to the necessity of knowing stuff in order to learn more stuff.)

Importantly, bear in mind that both cognitive capacity and people skills are also super important when it comes to participating in democracy, i.e., to competent citizenship.

The early career pipeline

The good news from Messy Jobs, then, is that it’s unlikely that all the office jobs will disappear. But there’s bad news, too: Concerns about early career pipelines are real, legitimate, and hard to solve. The authors explain that many white-collar professions have used an apprenticeship model, whereby consulting firms, law firms, or hospitals charge much more for the labor of their junior workers than they pay them. In return for reaping much of that financial value, they train those junior workers to become senior workers.

But if AI can do many of the junior-level tasks as well or better than junior workers, this model breaks down. It’s hard for firms to charge dearly for the labor of their junior employees. Which means they can’t afford to invest in their training and development.

The authors don’t offer much in terms of solutions other than to point out that AIs still need a lot of spot-checking and oversight, and that’s something junior employees could learn to do reasonably well. But this is a real problem!

The future of teaching

I close on a positive note. Even if you disagree with Garicano and colleagues about office jobs, other careers are clearly going to survive the AI challenge: those in the caring professions. And guess what? America’s K–12 education system is one of the largest employers in that field. Unless you think AIs are set to become very effective at teaching most students (which I do not, in no small part due to the motivation problem), we will still need humans to help students learn, grow, and develop.

If college graduates face fewer options for early-career jobs, our schools should be well positioned to recruit stronger candidates, akin to what can happen during a recession when the overall quality of teaching applicants increases markedly. With less competition from consulting shops and law firms, Teach For America seems well-positioned for a resurgence, as do other means of drawing talent into classrooms.

And if AI does boost economic growth, that should yield the revenue to pay teachers and other education professionals reasonably well, especially if we choose to prioritize quality over quantity. As the authors of the book write, Baumol’s “cost disease” (whereby labor-intensive parts of the economy struggle to keep up with rising productivity overall) can become Baumol’s blessing, as well-paid human-facing jobs survive the challenge from AI.

—

None of this argues for complacency. Artificial intelligence is already shaking up the world of work, and educators need to attend closely to the shifts to prepare today’s students for the world they will inhabit. A clear-eyed view of the world, however, can help us make better decisions, and Messy Jobs is as clear a crystal ball as we’re likely to find today.

Public charter schools are one of the most enduring—and successful—educational innovations over the past three decades. Freed from suffocating union contracts and distracting school board politics, charter schools can create distinctive programs, assemble teams of mission-aligned educators, and maintain a clear focus on student needs. Today, approximately 4 million U.S. students attend the nation’s 8,000-plus charter schools; in Ohio, roughly 120,000 students attend the state’s 340 charters.

In exchange for these freedoms, charters are expected to deliver stronger academic outcomes. When they fall short, accountability mechanisms come into play, measures rarely found in the traditional district sector. These include corrective actions required by state officials or their sponsor (a.k.a. “authorizer,” the entity that allows a charter school to operate), immediate funding reductions when dissatisfied parents disenroll their children, and permanent closure by their sponsor or directly by state action if they chronically underperform.

The autonomy-in-return-for-accountability model has effectively served millions of American youngsters. According to the most recent national study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, the average charter student makes greater academic progress each year than a similar student attending a district school. In Boston, researchers estimate that its finest charters close the yawning Black-White achievement gap by one-fifth to one-third each year. New York City’s famed Success Academy charter schools consistently register near-perfect proficiency rates on state exams. Ohio also has success stories, including well-regarded charters such as Dayton Early College Academy, KIPP Columbus, and the United Schools (all proudly sponsored by our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation).

Other charter schools, however, have struggled and many have closed due to accountability pressures and often-related fiscal challenges. In the early days of Ohio’s charter movement, too many schools were hastily launched, and others suffered from weak accountability and severe underfunding. Urged by choice-friendly and quality-centered advocates, including the Fordham Institute, Ohio has undertaken a decade-long turnaround effort via two main policy levers—both aimed at driving higher student achievement, an outcome the present report evaluates.

• Stronger state oversight of charter sponsors. Ohio has long permitted various entities—e.g., local districts, educational service centers, and qualified nonprofits—to sponsor charter schools. A multi-sponsor system promotes competition and innovation, but without rigorous state oversight, it also allowed the growth of weak sponsors and lax accountability in Ohio’s charter sector. Enacted in 2015, House Bill 2 strengthened the state’s fledgling effort to hold sponsors more accountable for the performance of their schools. The legislation established consequences—including revocation—when sponsors turn a blind eye to quality. This tougher oversight had an immediate impact, with the number of sponsors falling from 66 in 2013 to just 19 by 2022 (18 are active today). The system also encouraged sponsors to shutter low-performing schools. Between 2016 and 2022, just over 100 Ohio charter schools closed (out of nearly 400 at baseline), with most closures occurring through sponsor action
• More equitable funding for high-performing charter schools. Charter schools in Ohio, as in most states, have long operated with far less funding per student than their district counterparts, making it far harder to maintain high-performing schools. With the accountability framework solidified, state leaders tackled this major challenge confronting the charter sector. First enacted through the biennial budget for fiscal 2020 and 2021, the Quality Community School Support Fund has provided much-needed supplemental aid to qualifying schools, ranging from approximately $1,000 to $3,000 per pupil, depending on year. (In Ohio legalese, charter schools are known as “community schools.” See here for program details.) The extra dollars have been a gamechanger, narrowing the per-pupil funding gap between these high performers and their local district from an approximately 30 percent shortfall to 10 percent. In 2025–26, 116 of Ohio’s 348 charters qualified for the program.

As noted above, the goal of these reforms is to deliver better learning outcomes for students. Fordham’s latest study supplies hard evidence that they have indeed moved the achievement needle. Titled Ohio Charter Schools’ Turnaround, 2007–2025: The Role of Funding and Accountability in their Performance Trajectory and conducted by Dr. Stéphane Lavertu, an Ohio State University professor and Fordham Institute research fellow, it has two findings that stand out.

First, the overall performance of Ohio charter schools—the brick-and-mortar variety—has markedly improved. In 2007, the average charter student was losing ground in math and reading compared to a similar student attending a district school. The reverse is true today. In 2025, the average brick-and-mortar charter student gained the equivalent of 25 to 35 additional days of learning in both math and reading versus her district-attending counterpart. While the quality of individual charter schools still varies, the average Ohio charter today provides a better education than students’ typical district alternative.

Second, providing more equitable funding has bolstered achievement in the state’s high-quality charters. Consistent with an earlier report examining the program’s first four years, our new study continues to uncover positive impacts of the additional funds into fiscal 2024 and 2025. To better isolate the impact of the program funds, the analysis compares narrowly qualifying with nonqualifying charters, rather than charter students with district students. When doing this, we find that the extra dollars received by charter schools are associated with student gains worth about 50 to 60 days of additional learning.

Thanks to a decade of reform led by policymakers keen to ensure that charter schools serve students well, Ohio’s charter pupils are reaping the benefits of a more responsible, more accountable, better-funded, and higher-performing charter sector. Although charter students make more progress than they would attending district schools, most charter students (largely from low-income families) still score below the statewide average: For instance, 45 percent of third-grade charter students achieved reading proficiency in 2024–25 versus 61 percent statewide. Given this still-wide achievement gap, the work of helping every charter student reach their full potential remains unfinished.

What to do? On the policy side, state lawmakers must continue to insist on strong accountability measures even in the face of demands—sometimes, unfortunately, from the charter sector itself—to water them down. Lawmakers still have their work cut out to ensure that all charter students receive the benefits of fair and equitable funding—not just those fortunate enough to attend schools qualifying for the extra dollars. As we at the Fordham Institute have long contended, charter school students shouldn’t get shortchanged simply because of their choice of public school. Lastly, state leaders should continue to protect the autonomy of charter schools, while balancing such independence with expectations to implement high-quality curricula, achieve student attendance targets, and hire top-notch teachers knowledgeable in their content areas.

State lawmakers, including the next governor, should build on Ohio’s legacy of school choice and local autonomy as well as its more recent moves toward charter accountability and equitable funding. A renewed push for excellent charter schools will further empower families and put a next generation of charter students on pathways to success.

Schools cannot fix themselves unless society fixes segregation first. That’s one way to read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s conclusion at the end of a troubling account of choosing a low-performing Brooklyn elementary school for her daughter—and of the many ways that school subsequently failed to educate her. Weak instruction, a dysfunctional culture, absentee teachers, and low expectations left Najya with glaring academic gaps that years of good grades had obscured. Yet Hannah-Jones emerged from the experience more circumspect about her own family’s decision than about the ideas that informed it. She says she is more sympathetic to parents who choose to leave struggling schools, even as she continues to oppose policies that would make it easier for more parents to do the same. Despite all that went wrong for her daughter, Hannah-Jones has suggested that she would make the same choice again, and hopes that Najya will eventually understand why.

Segregation and concentrated disadvantage surely make a school’s job more difficult. Hannah-Jones is right that more integrated schools can have a positive effect on minority students. However, evidence that integration can help improve academic outcomes is not evidence that schools must become integrated before they can do so. Segregation didn’t require teachers to be chronically absent, instruction to be weak, classrooms to be chaotic, expectations to be low, or grades to conceal the fact that students weren’t learning. Educators can begin addressing these issues without residential integration or wealth redistribution. Segregation may help explain why the school’s work was harder, but it cannot explain away its failure to do that work.

Gallons of digital ink have already been spilled about Hannah-Jones’s incuriosity about the reform implications of her own story. But readers needn’t wait for her to draw them. Najya earned good grades in math without mastering long division or fractions. That should raise questions about external assessments. Teachers were frequently absent or ineffective. That should raise questions about accountability, competence, and employment protections. The principal was often inattentive and unresponsive. That should raise questions about district leadership and supervision. Hannah-Jones’s essay supplied unusually vivid evidence for asking questions that her analysis left largely unanswered.

To her credit, Hannah-Jones has begun asking some of those questions herself. In a New York Magazine interview, she acknowledged that some of the failures she witnessed demanded remedies other than integration—and ventured into fraught territory:

What we know is the best qualified teachers do not tend to be placed in the neediest schools… And so what often happens—and I’ve seen this not just in New York, in every school district that I’ve covered this—is the teachers who can’t get jobs anywhere else often end up in schools like that… So this is where we need some real soul searching, right? Like, what is the union willing to do to ensure that teachers can be placed where they’re most needed? That’s something you can’t even talk about. But the fact is that is an obstacle.

She went further, conceding that “there are things that could be done without integrating a single school.”

That admission points toward a key distinction: Schools cannot solve every societal problem, but that does not absolve them of their unique responsibilities. In her early work, Diane Ravitch chronicled the history of schools being used, often unsuccessfully, to achieve social rather than academic ends. Her concern wasn’t that problems like segregation were unimportant, but that efforts to solve them through schooling would distract schools from their distinctive intellectual mission of educating children:

[There was a harmful] idea that the school can be expected to solve all of society’s problems. The social-efficiency experts, who called themselves progressives, claimed that what was good for society was good for children… And the best way to serve society is to prepare workers. And who should they be? The children of immigrants and the poor and people who are not articulate enough to make demands.

The danger now as then, in Ravitch’s telling, was that children who most needed a rigorous education could instead receive one subordinated to broader ambitions for social change. P.S. 307 could not eliminate poverty or residential segregation. It should have been able to teach fractions, ensure that teachers showed up for work, maintain order, and give parents an honest accounting of whether their children were learning.

To be sure, there’s irony in invoking Ravitch. Once a prominent education reformer who served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, she later repudiated much of what she had believed. Her subsequent emphasis on concentrated poverty and racial segregation makes the comparison with Hannah-Jones all the more interesting. But Ravitch’s reversal was not simply a matter of following the evidence wherever it led. She at least demonstrated a willingness to reconsider convictions that had defined her professional identity.

Robert Pondiscio has a useful maxim: Successful movements seek converts; unsuccessful movements hunt heretics. Ravitch became a convert to one movement and a heretic to another. When Hannah-Jones says that questioning union practices is “something you can’t even talk about,” she identifies a barrier worth confronting. A commitment to integration shouldn’t foreclose serious consideration of what schools can do without it.

Even accepting Hannah-Jones’s argument that parental choices can reinforce segregation, making school improvement contingent on enough parents choosing high-poverty schools gets the problem exactly backward. Individual schools can do only so much—not much, actually—to influence demographics and poverty. But schools are responsible for effective instruction and high academic expectations, as well as identifying and addressing learning gaps—all things they can take concrete steps to improve.

Free community college programs are often promoted as a way to expand access to higher education and to reduce student debt for those who attend. But the programs may have unintended consequences, such as diverting capable students from pursuing four-year degrees or wasting the time of unprepared students in school when they could otherwise be gainfully employed—not to mention that someone has to pay. A recent working paper examines one such program in Chicago and offers some concrete lessons.

The Star Scholarship was established in 2014 and allows all Chicago Public Schools (CPS) graduates with a high school GPA of 3.0 or higher to attend any campus of the City Colleges of Chicago tuition-free. CCC campuses offer two-year degree programs. The only other requirement is to fill out a FAFSA application. Scholarships are renewable annually for three years after graduation. To remain eligible, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA and continue to fill out a FAFSA app each year. Star Scholarships provide last-dollar funds, covering all remaining tuition after federal and state aid is applied.

A quartet of researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, primarily analyzes all CPS students who graduated between 2015 and 2020. But they also examine changes in student outcomes before and after the policy was implemented, with data from all students who graduated from CPS between 2011 and 2014. They employ a regression discontinuity design, comparing students who were just above and just below the scholarship’s GPA eligibility threshold within the same high school and graduation year. Presumably the only real difference between the groups is whether they received the scholarship. They access data from CPS, the National Student Clearinghouse, community colleges and universities, and IPEDS, which incorporates data about student aid and can be used to analyze postsecondary outcomes.

The topline finding: Eligibility for the Star Scholarship does not affect overall college enrollment for students near the eligibility cutoff, but it does shift where students enroll. This makes sense because the GPA requirement is high enough that most of these students are deciding between a two-year or a four-year college, rather than deciding whether to enroll in college at all. Specifically, eligible students are 4.2 percentage points more likely to first enroll in one of Chicago’s community colleges and 2.9 percentage points less likely to begin at a four-year university. They estimate that approximately 20 percent of eligible Star Scholars would have attended a four-year university had they not been eligible for the scholarship. Still, although they see a 2.1 percentage point increase in associate degree attainment three years after high school, they find no evidence that eligibility for the scholarship decreases the chances that students earn a bachelor’s degree—that is, students are not substituting an associate degree for a bachelor’s. Double good news.

But are students choosing lower-quality institutions? The researchers look into the difference in quality between colleges and find that, although the scholarship slightly decreases the instructional spending of the first college a student attends, it doesn’t reduce other college “quality” indicators, such as completion rates or median earnings. Access to tuition-free community college also does not decrease the probability of students earning a STEM degree (i.e., majors with higher-paying jobs), but it does increase the number of students obtaining four-year degrees in health and human services.

Finally, they find no statistical differences in college enrollment and degree completion between students by household income or immigrant background. However, both lower-income students and students in English-as-second-language households are less likely to first enroll in a four-year university as a result of scholarship eligibility.

The authors say that the encouraging results of the Star Scholarship may stem from it boosting the college-going culture within eligible high schools and increasing the academic confidence of students at the GPA margin. But the fairly high GPA requirement is likely the biggest driver. Lower expectations would surely result in more negative impacts and unintended consequences, as other such programs have shown.

And with grade inflation off the charts, one has to wonder whether guaranteeing free college tuition to the top 10 percent of each graduating class would be a better merit-based policy than relying on GPA.

SOURCE: Emileigh Harrison et al., “The Effect of Merit-Based Free Community College,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2026).

They say everything’s bigger in Texas, but does that include teachers’ paychecks? Mary Lynn Pruneda, director of education and workforce policy at Texas 2036, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), a performance-based teacher pay program that rewards great teachers with higher pay, especially in high-need schools. Is Texas’s approach to merit pay helping attract and retain teachers in the classrooms that need them most?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study looking at whether accelerating students in middle school math leads to better outcomes in high school and college.

Recommended content:

• What Is TIA? —Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, Texas Education Agency
• House Bill 2: Improving Texas Student Outcomes With Targeted Funding Increases —Mary Lynn Pruneda, Texas 2036 (2025)
• Three things Ohio should learn from Texas on teacher merit pay —Jessica Poiner, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Big State, Bigger Idea: How Texas’ Teacher Incentive Allotment Is Changing Teacher Pay —National Council on Teacher Quality (2026)
• From Incentive to Impact: The Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment’s Path to Improved Retention and Achievement—J. Jacob Kirksey, Teresa Lansford, Angela Crevar, and Kristin Mansell, Texas Tech University (2024)
• Frequently Asked Questions About the Teacher Incentive Allotment —Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, Texas Education Agency
• Targeted Acceleration in Middle School Math: Impacts on College Entry, Degree Completion, and STEM —David Card and Laura Giuliano, NBER (2026)

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

---

Transcript

Introduction

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

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

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

They say everything's bigger in Texas, and that includes teacher paychecks.

This week, Mary Lynn Pruneda of Texas 2036 joins us to discuss the state's Teacher Incentive Allotment, an initiative that rewards effective teachers with higher pay.

Is the program helping Texas attract and retain great teachers, especially in high-need schools?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study looking at whether accelerating students in middle school math leads to better outcomes in high school and college.

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

Mike Petrilli [00:54]

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

Now, please welcome our special guest for today, Mary Lynn Pruneda.

Mary Lynn, welcome to the show.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

Hey, y'all. Good to see you.

Mike Petrilli

Yes. Mary Lynn is Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Texas 2036.

Also joining us, as always, my co-host, David Griffith.

David Griffith

Hey, Mike.

Seems like you ate your Wheaties this morning.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, I'm coming at it with some energy.

David Griffith

Good.

Mike Petrilli

Yes.

David Griffith

Your usual self.

Mike Petrilli

I've been fighting a cold, but I'm starting to feel better.

So maybe that's where it is.

Or maybe it's the cold medicine. I don't know.

David Griffith

Maybe it's the subject matter for today. Mike just loves the Teacher Incentive Allotment.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, there you go.

Speaking of when teachers eat their Wheaties, that's exactly right.

Hey, Mary Lynn, for people that don't know, Texas 2036, this was a group that at one point Margaret Spellings was the leader of, so people probably know that name.

So what's Texas 2036?

Tell us real quick.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

Yeah.

So 2036 is Texas's bicentennial.

And so it's our 200 years of existence.

And, you know, being Texans, we like to make a big deal about things and a big show of things.

So we were founded about a decade ago.

Our organization is a nonpartisan nonprofit that works at the legislature, works with state agencies and communities to do one thing, and that's to make Texas the best place to live, work, and raise a family.

And kind of our unique value proposition, if you will, is that we use data.

And so everything that we do, everything that we advocate for, it has to have a track record of being data-informed and then actually leading to some kind of better outcome for Texans.

Mike Petrilli

Love it.

And I got to say, Mary Lynn is one of my favorite butt-kicking education reformers out there doing amazing work in Texas.

People who listen to the show know that I am a big fan of a lot of things happening in Texas.

I certainly have a man crush on your state commissioner, Mike Morath, as well as the Houston superintendent, Mike Miles, appointed by Mike Morath.

Love a lot of things that are going on there in Texas, but especially the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment.

That is what we're going to talk about today.

Let's do that on Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: Texas's Teacher Incentive Allotment

Mike Petrilli [03:20]

Okay, so Mary Lynn, we have talked about this on the show from time to time, including some of the studies that have come out.

But look, you know, this is at a time when it felt like the attempt to try to evaluate which teachers were effective and maybe do something with those data, you mentioned data, right?

Whether that is pay the effective teachers more, maybe even remove the ineffective teachers from the classroom.

That was a big deal back in the Obama days, and it crashed and burned.

Right?

And it just seemed like, okay, we have this one shining example in Washington, D.C., where Michelle Rhee had come in and created this incredible system, IMPACT, that's still there.

We have a Democratic Socialist mayor coming in, so we'll see.

But still there after all these years, but did not spread anywhere except arguably Dallas and now the state of Texas.

And it's a remarkable story to me that this is even possible.

So let's start here.

What is the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment?

How does it work?

Give us kind of the nuts and bolts.

Mary Lynn Pruneda [04:24]

So the Teacher Incentive Allotment, or what we call in Texas just TIA, is a way that we pay teachers in Texas aligned to effectiveness.

And the core of this program, if you take away nothing about this program as a listener other than this, is that it is not optional in Texas.

It is not like a rider that we put on the budget that we have to come back every two years and fund.

It is required.

It is an entitlement program that Texas has for its teachers.

And so I really think that's what's led to a lot of its success, because districts can trust it.

Mike Petrilli

And it's in the funding formula.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

It is.

And it's also in our pension system.

And so if you're one of our highly compensated teachers, it's reflected in your total pension payout.

Mike Petrilli

Okay, so this program says it's in the funding formula, in the pension system.

But then how does it work?

Basically, districts have to come up with a mechanism to determine which of the teachers are going to get these bonuses, incentive pay, stipends, salary boost.

What is it?

Go, go. Keep going.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

So districts, they say, hey, I want to be a part of the program.

And they work for a year to come up with their merit-pay system.

And in that merit-pay system, there are going to be four tiers.

So there's an Acknowledged tier, which is the bottom.

Then there's Recognized, Exemplary, and then Master.

And each one of those tiers has different pay scales that attach to it.

And the districts come in and they say, okay, across these grades and this subject, this is how I'm going to rate each one of these levels of teacher.

And then they send that off to Texas Tech University.

And Texas Tech does the work of making sure that, you know, in Poteet, Texas, when they do a merit-pay system, a Master teacher in Poteet could also be a Master teacher in the Perryton pay system or the Beaumont pay system.

And so the state makes sure that there's some level of equating that goes on, or equating is probably not the exact word, but basically similarity that goes on so that, because TIA is portable, if you're a teacher that moves from Perryton to Beaumont, you're going to be a Master teacher in Perryton and then a Master teacher in Beaumont, and we're going to keep funding you.

And so after Texas Tech approves your program, then you just enter into the school finance formulas and the state begins to pay out the obligation that we owe you in accordance to your teachers, how many you have at each level, and what their designations are.

Mike Petrilli

And we're talking about, in some cases, a lot of money, right?

Tell us more about that.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

So the least amount of money that you can get in the TIA at the bottom tier is $3,000.

The most amount of money that you can get is $36,000.

And so we're just tiering across that.

And then the amount of money that districts have available within each of these tiers.

And this is a reflection of two things.

And this is, I think, one of the most probably equitable, like, focused on making sure that we put the best teachers in the hardest-to-staff classrooms, really one of the most of that type of reform in the country, because in Texas, you get more...

[Brief gap in the source transcript.]

And I think it's been incredible, particularly in our rural communities, because over half of the districts in this program are rural.

And that to us was one of the just key things we had to have.

Mike Petrilli

Now, what is a little confusing is that when you hear, for example, $36,000, right?

So that is for a teacher, the highest tier, in a high-poverty school that's also rural.

Is that right?

That doesn't necessarily mean that that teacher herself is going to get paid an extra $36,000.

Right?

There's some wiggle room about how that money is spent at the district level or school level.

Mary Lynn Pruneda [08:09]

Yeah, so each district can come up with kind of the way that they want to do it.

So we're trying to preserve local control while we put in place the statewide program.

But what basically it is, is that the district has to spend 90 percent of their TIA allotment at the campus.

And I'll tell you, sometimes people are always like, well, you know, 90 percent has to just go to the campus. That doesn't actually have to go to the teacher.

In practice, most of that money goes to the teacher.

But when we were constructing TIA back in 2019, we had a lot of teachers come to us and say, well, we would actually prefer some level of spending flexibility at the campus because I want five or 10 percent of my TIA payment to go towards more school counselors or to go towards some specific program that my campus has.

So we tried to get flexibility, and I've yet to hear anyone say that it's too much flexibility and we need to target it more towards teachers.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, no, really fascinating.

And look, it's up to what, over a billion dollars, I think, at this point that has been spent in the program?

Mary Lynn Pruneda

Not quite.

It's at $750 million.

It will probably be a billion within a couple more years.

But something else I want to point out.

So when other states come and they see the price tag currently on TIA, I think there's two things to remember.

Number one, Texas is huge.

Right?

And so our K-12, our K-to-workforce system, every single year, we spend $100 billion on it.

And so there's context.

That's 1 percent.

And then within that, when TIA started, it was only $40 million the first year of implementation because we had only a handful of districts doing it.

And that's about 1 percent of our K-12 budget.

So it's a fraction of the total spending, but I think the evidence is there that it's improving outcomes.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

I want to talk about the politics in a moment.

But first, let's keep walking out here.

David, do you have any wonky questions for Mary Lynn about the program design or some of the studies we've talked about that have come out on the program?

David Griffith [10:10]

Yeah.

I mean, so I think there have been a couple of studies, right?

And I think, broadly speaking, I agree that, you know, the sort of early returns are positive.

But, you know, there was one study, right?

And I'm guessing you know which one I'm talking about, that found basically that, you know, the program was succeeding in identifying good teachers.

But then I'm going to do violence to the nuance of the study.

But basically, the teachers were using this identification in poor schools to then go get jobs in other schools.

I guess I'm just curious to know if that rings true to you at the ground level, if you think that's something that might change over time.

I don't know. Maybe as teachers are earning, you know, more teachers are reaching the sort of higher performance levels.

Kind of what your reaction to that was.

Mary Lynn Pruneda [10:57]

Yes, I'm familiar with that research.

Here's what I'll say.

I think that point, maybe it doesn't hold if only certain districts are in TIA.

But once every district's in TIA, and if we're still doing the work of making sure that a Master teacher means Master and that we have an incentive within each individual school district to kind of bump up their points as much as possible, I think that point isn't as powerful against the system.

I think one of the things that I think I've heard Mike say before, certainly in other spaces, is, you know, ultimately the teacher's classroom experience matters to them and what kind of their environment is outside of their pay.

And I think we've all kind of heard that talking point from teachers over the past few years.

And I think that's true.

And I think that doesn't tell me anything new about the system.

It doesn't tell me that TIA isn't actually working for that individual teacher.

It just tells me that we have a lot more work to do to support those low-income campuses and make sure that if you are a low-income campus in a district, that your district is doing TIA and that we can make sure that you're getting the best and brightest.

I'll also say, you know, one of the reasons that we passed it, I think sometimes I get these questions of, a little bit, sometimes I feel maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder because I'm from Texas.

I get, you know, the part in the Bible when someone goes, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

Sometimes I feel that way about Texas when we go to these nationals.

Can anything good come out of Texas?

And my response is always, well, just because we're a bunch of cowboys doesn't mean we haven't read Eric Hanushek.

Like, I mean, we called Dr. Hanushek when we were crafting TIA, and I worked for the governor's office, and we said, will you please just make sure that this does what your research does?

Because one of our goals was to get those teachers that are maybe not performing every day for their students to have them choose just a different career path, some other place that they could be successful, and that we were maximizing our ability to keep successful teachers.

And I think that's happened.

And the other thing I'll say, just a point, and it's totally anecdotal, and I can send this to you because you can show it to your readers.

Do you want to know where Sherman, Texas, is?

Mike Petrilli

Probably not.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

Why would you know?

It's a small East Texas district.

It actually faced interventions and sanctions a few years ago in our state because of low performance.

The other day, Sherman had a billboard up, and I kid you not, it said, "Come teach. You could be one of our $100,000 teachers."

One of the poorest-performing districts in the state, now poor-performing, rural, in an area that doesn't have a significant amount of population, and they're advertising $100,000 paychecks for their best and brightest.

And I just think that that's exactly what the program was designed to do.

And that's what it's doing.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

No, I love that anecdote.

And look, I think, as I recall that study, it was some of these teachers at the somewhat lower tiers who were getting, I don't know, $5,000, maybe $10,000 extra.

It wasn't the $20,000, $30,000.

[Brief gap in the source transcript.]

It may be that we need to keep working on getting those incentives right so that those high-poverty schools can really pay extra.

When you think about that, Mary Lynn, this is a huge progressive funding plan as well.

Right?

I mean, that over time you're going to be driving way more money into the neediest schools in Texas.

So let's talk about the politics.

I mean, that sounds like something that Republicans maybe wouldn't always support because typically maybe those aren't their constituents.

Is it the rural thing that's maybe making it more doable for Republicans?

And then on the flip side, I don't know.

There's these crazy polls saying that the Democratic candidate for governor has a chance this year.

I'm not going to make you go on the record about that.

But, you know, is this something that could be at risk if Democrats gain more power in Texas?

I mean, what are the politics of this thing right now?

Mary Lynn Pruneda [15:05]

Well, I can tell you what the politics were like in 2019 when we were writing the legislation.

And then I still think a lot of it's true today.

But in maybe perhaps defense of Republicans at the time, and now today too, there was an enormous focus on improving outcomes for low-income children.

I mean, I think every single member in their district knows kind of where the hardest-to-teach-at schools are, and they have candidates.

They wanted to do something, but they didn't just want to do it by just flooding money into the system and not knowing how it was being spent.

They wanted to do it in a way that was actually going to get to largely women that were doing the hard work of actually improving students' lives.

And so I feel like what TIA offered to those members was an ability to do kind of the hard work and the head work at the same time.

And I think that, to me, is one of the kind of motivating forces behind all of Texas's different types of ed reform over the past ten years, is that it's hard work and it's head work.

It's, hey, we're going to do things for, let's say we put in $250 million into our formulas for special education last session.

But we didn't just put it in there.

We also did a complete revamping of how we're placing students.

And we're looking at how we're funding students and making sure that they're going to the right placement with as much funding as they need for the least restrictive environment.

And so it's hard work and it's head work.

And I feel like, to me, ultimately, that's something that everyone can agree on.

And regardless of who wins the governorship, it's still going to be an entitlement in our system.

There are teachers that are still going to be expecting it.

They're still going to be owed it.

And that's going to continue, Lord willing, ad infinitum for the next hundred years until we're at our state's tricentennial instead of coming up on our bicentennial.

So maybe I'm an optimist.

Maybe you guys think it could all suddenly come crumbling down, but I just don't think it's going to.

Mike Petrilli

Well, but let's talk about it.

I mean, from what we know, this is popular, right?

I mean, I know you don't have teacher unions in Texas, but you have teacher associations, and they still can, you know, find ways to find political power and to have their voices known.

This doesn't have a, there's no trying-to-fire-bad-teacher part of this thing.

So that probably helps.

It's all upside.

I mean, I don't know.

Are the teacher associations okay with this, basically?

Mary Lynn Pruneda

There were some questions at the time, but I generally find that people understood the assignment and they understood what it was trying to do.

And again, because we had so much data from Dallas ISD and the reforms that Mike Miles put in place in Dallas ISD, that it was working.

I mean, it was just incredible.

At the time, we had a low-income Dallas elementary school that we were looking at, and it was outperforming one of the most affluent elementary schools that we have in the state of Texas, in Dallas.

And it was like this school, it was just...

[Unclear phrase in the source transcript.]

And I think going back to my point about hard work and head work at the same time, that's what members were latching on to.

This idea that we could provide this opportunity to every single kid in every single district, regardless of their income, and see outcomes within three years.

And this is, I think, one of the things that I hope comes out in the research and I hope people begin to study more, is not just what the impact is of a first-year TIA teacher.

So that first year that you're in a TIA classroom, but what happens when it compounds over time?

And so one of the things that I know from this first batch of research is that I think it's like seven months of learning in three years in math is gained just by being in the presence of a TIA teacher.

And the impact of reading is about eight months.

That's almost a year of learning made up in three years just by virtue of who's teaching you.

So I hope that growth curve just keeps going on.

Mike Petrilli [18:41]

All right.

I love it.

Mary Lynn, thank you so much for being on the show.

We will have to have you come back another time, maybe after the election, and we'll find out what's happening there in Texas.

We will be watching.

Again, Mary Lynn Pruneda at Texas 2036.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Mary Lynn Pruneda

Thanks for having me, guys.

Mike Petrilli

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

Research Minute: Does accelerating students in middle school math pay off?

Mike Petrilli [19:07]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

It was nice seeing you.

I guess now it's been a few weeks, in Chicago for the PIE Network Summit.

We saw our former colleague, Adam Tyner, who sometimes had come on the show to pitch in with the Research Minute.

He's now working at an Oklahoma ed reform group.

And he noted, David, that it seemed like we brought most of the Fordham team except for you.

And he wondered if there was a reason.

David Griffith

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Is there a reason?

Mike Petrilli

We thought the reason was you, not us.

We weren't sure.

It's you, not us.

David Griffith

What are you talking about?

We were unhappy to have you there.

You decided.

I was busy parenting and being sick, but it sounds like it was a good time.

Mike Petrilli

Well, I was busy, yes, having a good time and getting sick.

So we had that in common.

But it was always fun to see the...

[Brief unclear passage in the source transcript.]

And I was just having a good time.

I hadn't been in years.

It was a little bit higher quality than it was last time, I've got to admit.

Amber Northern

Okay.

It's a great group.

Mike Petrilli

We were in Chicago.

First couple of days were beautiful.

So yeah, you got to love that.

Ed reformers unite.

David Griffith

That's right.

Mike Petrilli

That's right.

All right.

What you got for us this week, Amber?

Amber Northern [20:24]

We have a new NBER working paper, David Card and Laura Giuliano.

We like this pair.

We've heard from them in the past.

They're looking this time, they're staying in the advanced education space, and they're asking whether accelerated students, when you accelerate them through middle school math, whether that pays off in the long term.

And they really do have long-term data.

They follow students in a large urban Florida district, Miami-Dade, for more than a decade to see whether being placed in an advanced math track in middle school changes their college and career trajectories.

They're studying a program called Great Explorations in Mathematics.

This was kind of a new one for me, but our GEM program.

It compresses the standard sixth-grade math curriculum into a single year.

Then it moves students into Algebra I in seventh grade and Geometry in eighth grade.

So it's essentially putting them two years ahead of their peers.

So students who enter that track have to also maintain at least a B to stay in that track.

And then the authors follow 23,000 students using district-level data linked to National Student Clearinghouse data.

So they have postsecondary outcomes up to six years after high school graduation.

All right, we've got a regression discontinuity design.

So they're exploiting the fact that eligibility is determined by whether a student scores above a specific threshold on the fifth-grade FCAT, which is this Florida state test.

In this case, their cutoff is the 80th percentile.

So students just above that cut are much more likely to enter the GEM program or track, and students just below it are not.

So they're comparing, I've said this so many times on the show, but when we're looking at these types of studies, we're looking at a narrow band around the cutoff.

Yes, it's causal, but we can only really talk about students who are near that 80th percentile, not what acceleration could do for kids who are way above or way below that cutoff.

All right.

So the authors also want to know whether a student's nonacademic traits, so things like work ethic, and are they conscientious, and do they persist, all those things, influence who benefits from this advanced program.

So they use a proxy for students, all that noncognitive stuff that we like and don't know how to measure.

They use students' average GPA in non-math high school subjects as a proxy.

So they're controlling for students' fifth-grade test scores, but they're looking at their GPA in all those non-math subjects.

And they're calling that a noncognitive skill index.

Okay?

Hopefully you're tracking me on all that.

Finding one: That noncognitive skill thing I just told you about, not math ability, is the strongest predictor of who actually completes this GEM math sequence.

So let me slow down.

So among students at the lowest end of the noncognitive distribution, so I think it was like the bottom tercile, among the kids who made it in, almost nobody finished that sequence.

But those at the top, the completion rates were, I think, 60 percent or more.

And so I think what's important to remember is that the program is this sort of sustained commitment from kids, like over multiple years, right?

They've got to move through this advanced track, and they have to maintain a B or apparently they get kicked out.

So success clearly is about more than their math ability anyway.

And then number two, when they looked at the overall sample, they found that this program raised advanced math course-taking in high school.

Of course, that's kind of what it was supposed to be doing.

It increased the probability of completing calculus, but also what it's intended to do.

But I think that was 10 to 13 percentage points higher.

And it also increased PSAT math scores.

But what I want to kind of dig in on is that it didn't actually impact whether students enroll in college or finish a degree.

And so I'm like, huh.

And then obviously, you know, when you get to thinking the sample again, the sample is limited to these high-achieving kids who are probably going to head to college anyway, whether they took algebra in seventh grade or ninth grade.

But that said, it did increase the likelihood of them earning a STEM or business degree.

They put those together.

I'm not quite sure.

I guess they are assuming that business, sure, you use math in a business degree, but not, whatever.

They're together.

And they have kids that are likelier to get a STEM or business degree, 6 percent higher.

So that's about a 25 percent increase.

Last big finding: The effects vary a lot by gender and by noncognitive skill.

So, for example, those boys that have the highest noncognitive index ratings see the biggest calculus gains.

They're about 33 percentage points more likely to take calc by 11th grade in high school.

And there was a big jump for majoring in STEM among those same boys, about 12, I think, percentage points higher for majoring in math, the likelihood of that.

And then the puzzling thing, at least a little bit, was that the girls who had low noncognitive scores, so they're strong in math, right?

But supposedly they have weaker work habits or persistence or whatever this noncognitive thing is measuring.

They had lower grades, right?

They see the largest college-level gains of any group.

The girls with the lowest noncognitive skills.

And I'm like, okay, what's going on there?

And it was across the board.

They had higher rates of getting into selective colleges.

They had higher rates of bachelor's completion.

They had higher rates of going into STEM.

Thirteen to fourteen percentage points.

So the authors kind of, you know, discuss what...

And maybe one thing, and I thought this was the more plausible reason, was that maybe being placed in this track may have changed what girls expected of themselves and what was expected of them, given that sometimes, you know, they get the message that, you know, we're not good in math or whatnot.

I really don't know.

There's a lot of hypothesizing about what's happening with that finding.

But that's what we've got.

Mike Petrilli

Okay.

Okay.

Very good.

And then all those kids who ended up taking calculus have now gone into the crypto industry in South Florida.

Amber Northern

Okay.

We don't know that part.

Mike Petrilli

Maybe they're going to go work for Citadel now that Ken Griffin has moved it down there.

Yeah, so...

You know, I'm so glad, Amber, that you really set it up talking about the regression discontinuity and that we're talking about this narrow band of kids.

You know, so it's not surprising that the differences in math achievement didn't matter much because there probably weren't that many differences.

Right?

I mean, they're just looking at kids that must have been...

And I think the cutoff, didn't I read it was like the 80th percentile?

Amber Northern

Mm-hmm.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

So maybe these are kids at the 75th to the 85th percentile.

Right?

Who are, you know, like you said, probably going to four-year schools anyways, probably not going to the tippity-tippity-top four-year schools anyways, in general.

You know, so something like looking at their grades, which, I don't know, you call that noncognitive.

Just call it their GPA.

Come on, people.

You know, it's not surprising that that, of course, is going to vary more because they controlled for the other things.

So it couldn't vary.

Amber Northern

Yes.

Mike Petrilli

And, but this is interesting.

And like you say, what we don't know is all these kids who were even higher achieving, who otherwise would have been sitting bored in their class, like in what, in some alternative universe, you know, how do they do?

Maybe they end up doing fine, but they sit there bored and they could learn a lot more.

And now they got a chance to.

Amber Northern

That's right.

I mean, we wanted to be prepared, so...

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

I don't know what to make of the gender stuff.

I don't know, David, what else?

David Griffith [29:11]

Yeah, well, I was going to speculate a little bit about the gender.

I mean, I don't know, obviously.

But I mean, I just wonder if, you know, this equating noncognitive skills with grades, there's a lot of truth to that, right?

But I just wonder if basically we're picking up different things with that, with boys and girls.

Not to generalize too much, but my sense is that a lot of boys are flunking their courses because they're flaky in high school.

I don't know.

Maybe what you're picking up with grades with girls is more cognitive.

I don't know.

That doesn't really explain the reverse causation.

If girls are getting bad grades, maybe because, you know, relative to other girls, because they're just not as good at English or something.

And with boys, it's just really...

[Unclear phrase in the source transcript.]

I don't know.

I am speculating.

But it's interesting.

And it's interesting, I mean, that the noncognitive, we'll just call it grades, whatever is getting you through grades, you know, it's interacting with your academic ability, right?

It's not just sitting there.

And so it's actually, you know, it's sort of like a latent potential, I guess is the right word for it, that you have that you can activate in certain academic settings.

So anyway, it's nice to have a policy that I can be unambiguously for, right?

Even if it doesn't solve all the world's problems.

I feel like we don't get that very often.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Amber Northern

Yeah.

Mike Petrilli

I think that's right.

And I think we can admit what's going on with this gender thing.

Amber Northern

Yes, yes.

But it's good.

I will say it doesn't feel as clean as some of their other findings from some other studies where you can say, okay, you know, these kids, when they get an opportunity to do high-achieving classes, their achievement goes up by X percent or, you know, this one feels a little bit more nuanced.

And I don't know.

I do wonder what the noncognitive thing, I'm like, was that the grades?

I don't know.

Is that just complicating all of this?

I mean, maybe it's interesting.

Mike Petrilli

Right, right.

But still, I mean, even for the overall sample, right?

I mean, even when you're not looking at gender and looking at these things by, you know, noncognitive grading, whatever.

I mean, the fact that the program did largely what it's intended to do, we sometimes assume that, but hey, we shouldn't.

It did raise the number of math courses kids took in high school.

It did increase the probability of them taking calculus, you know, about 13 percentage points.

And it raised their PSATs.

So these are all...

Amber Northern

Yeah, good things.

Mike Petrilli

Right.

And more and more girls going into STEM is huge.

I mean, that's definitely been a big goal for many people, industry and otherwise.

And so that does matter.

And there it's like, yeah, I mean, I buy that piece about how they think of themselves.

Of course, there's peer effects.

I mean, this is classic peer-effect kind of intervention.

You're giving kids a chance to be with peers who are also high achieving.

Right?

And that's got to be helpful.

And look, the worry is always about the kids who don't get to be a part of this.

Well, when the cutoff is that high, you know, still most of the kids are on the other side of that divide.

So it's not like you've got a concentration of super-low-performing kids.

Anyway, we're all happy about this.

All right.

All right.

Thank you, Amber.

Good one.

Amber Northern

And rigorous designs in advanced education.

Like, you know, there's tradeoffs, right, to what we can say.

But still, it's an important piece of the puzzle in terms of this rigorous research in this area.

Mike Petrilli

Love it.

All right.

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

And so until next week.

David Griffith

I'm David Griffith.

Mike Petrilli

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