The Education Gadfly Weekly

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.

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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]

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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.