Dear governor,
Do you want to be remembered for your leadership on education? Your state may be spending nearly half its budget on schools, and yet test scores continue to fall, especially for the students who need the most help.
That gap between investment and results creates both a problem and an opportunity. Here are seven simple, low-cost ways governors could help get education back on track:
1. Signal interest in opting in to the federal tax credit program
As of the last count, 17 states have already signaled their intention to opt in. I personally think it’s too early to formally opt in, given that we don’t know how exactly the program will work. Still, governors could say something bland like, “we’re going to give it a hard look once the regulations are finalized. While we would like to put our own stamp on it, we won’t say no if the federal government wants to invest in our state’s young people.”
2. Adopt a “phonics check” and share the results with families
In 2012, England started requiring all of its six-year-olds to take a simple “phonics check.” Each kid was given 40 words to read. If they could decode at least 32 of them correctly, they passed. The first year, only 58 percent could pass on their first try. Now, about 80 percent do. England passed a lot of other reforms, as well, but the phonics check has been a big part of their rise up the international rankings.
States should adopt their own versions of a phonics check. These are not fancy or costly, and they require only about five minutes per child to administer. But they accomplish several things. One, they help ensure that all kids are being taught to decode words. That’s the most important thing. But two, adopting a phonics check would also give policymakers a more useful metric to evaluate how their “science of reading” investments are going, rather than waiting until generic reading comprehension tests begin in third grade.
3. Ask for an independent review of the state’s accountability plan
It’s been a decade since Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act and states drafted their plans. Meanwhile, achievement scores have plummeted, especially for the lowest-performing kids.
So how are those accountability systems working? Are they providing clear goals for schools? Are they providing sufficient incentives for schools to focus on their lowest-performing students? Given the objective data, my hunch is that most states have work to do here.
Virginia could be a model. The Youngkin administration devoted significant resources to understanding how their old accountability system was working and creating a new one. (I played a role in that process.) But they didn’t stop there. The state’s version of the GAO conducted a thorough review of the new system, spoke with stakeholders across the state, and provided recommendations for tweaks and improvements. Every state should be doing something like this.
4. Direct the state department of education to share test results with parents and educators within 30 days of administration
State test results are too d*** slow. Despite much of the testing infrastructure shifting online, states are taking longer than ever to share the results. This is ridiculous and undermines the utility of having common, standardized benchmarks in the first place.
States like Florida, Tennessee, and Texas have been consistently fast. States like Ohio and Virginia have recently adopted policies to speed up their processes. It can be done, especially when we’re talking about the low-stakes sharing of results with parents and educators. Governors should make this a priority.
5. Adopt an automatic enrollment policy
This should be an easy win. As I wrote last year, automatic enrollment policies shift from an opt-in to an opt-out mindset. Instead of making students nominate themselves, schools use the objective data at their disposal to find students who are ready to be successful in more advanced courses.
States have options here about how aggressive they want to go. Do they want to focus on middle school math or extend the idea to other grades or subjects? Regardless, this is low-hanging fruit, and more states should consider their own versions.
6. Create a campaign around celebrating school success stories
Governors could be creative here. Could they create a prize for schools with the highest percentage of students making their annual growth targets? Or the schools with the strongest early reading or math scores? Could they partner with private businesses to reward kids who read or did math at home for 20 minutes a day?
In my opinion, we’re not talking enough about academic successes, so the goal here is to get governors out of the state capital and talking to those kids, teachers, and schools who are achieving great things.
7. Ask the state legislature to invest in great teachers
There are very few things on my list that cost money, but this is one of them. We’ve spent so much time over the last few years talking about the quantity of teachers in schools that we’ve lost sight of the fact that great teaching matters enormously.
Policymakers have been burned on teacher evaluation reforms in the not-too-distant past, so what’s the play here? I would look to the North Carolina Advanced Teacher Roles program, which invests in a small number of districts that are interested in reconfiguring the teacher role in the classroom. Instead of one teacher being in charge of one isolated classroom, these schools have teachers work in small teams that are responsible for a larger group of kids. These sorts of models have strong results both for teacher satisfaction and for delivering positive outcomes for kids.
If a state wants to go even bigger, they should look at the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment program. Districts that submit their teacher evaluation systems to a state review can then receive extra money for their “Master” and “Exemplary” teachers. It’s a clever program design in that it ensures that districts are using rigorous and robust evaluation systems, and it provides extra money to teachers who work in high-need and rural schools.
Other ideas…
Across the country, more high school students are taking more advanced courses. There’s been a steady increase over time in the number and percentage of kids who complete Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate, and dual-enrollment classes. But I suspect states could drive those numbers up even faster by looking carefully at their course sequences and funding mechanisms.
Similarly, a lot of states are seeing more kids complete career pathways and earning industry-recognized credentials. That all seems good, in theory, but there are a lot of them, and many are not adding value to kids’ lives. State leaders should be taking a hard look at their incentive structures to make sure their policies are encouraging kids to pursue pathways that will actually lead to meaningful careers.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it offers governors a menu of practical, affordable ways to drive real improvement. At a moment when education policy lacks strong national leadership, governors need to step up if they want to leave behind a legacy of meaningful progress for students and families.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Aldeman on Education.
