The Education Gadfly Weekly

A few weeks ago, my colleague Robert Pondiscio argued convincingly that the accountability policies of the No Child Left Behind era did not work as effectively as they could have because schools did not know how to respond to the pressure they felt to improve instructional practice and deliver stronger results. I think that’s right and, as Robert argued, that’s why leading states discovered that they needed to provide help, and in some cases mandates, to get schools to adopt approaches that would actually improve student performance and narrow achievement gaps. Robert wrote:

The states and districts showing the strongest results today are not those that abandoned accountability. Nor are they those that relied on accountability alone. They are the ones that paired accountability with coherent instructional strategies, high-quality curricula, teacher support, and a clearer understanding of how children learn. Mississippi’s literacy gains did not emerge from testing by itself. Neither did the progress seen in places like Louisiana or, more recently, Houston. Accountability provided urgency and focus. It did not provide the instructional playbook.

I agree with all that, and it’s in line with some things I’ve written about the need to marry accountability with greater capacity building, as some standards-based reformers have long urged.

But it’s important to point out that directly improving instructional practice wasn’t all that NCLB in particular, and consequential accountability in general, were about. They were also trying to shift the local politics of education. That’s why many consider NCLB to have been a civil rights effort as well.

Putting students first

In the parlance of the time, the idea was to “put students first.” And, of course, to “leave no child behind,” especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This meant applying pressure at the level of policy and politics—trying to shift the decisions of local school boards and district superintendents. It was a political science proposition: Left to their own devices, most districts would let normal politics plod along, which generally meant giving organized labor and other adult interests what they wanted, including giving upscale parents what they wanted, and not giving much of anything to anyone else, most notably poor kids.

Whereas Robert’s view of standards, testing, and accountability resonates with reformers who spent time in the classroom (as he did), the accountability-as-political-game-changer view has long appealed to those of us with more of a poli sci, econ, or public policy background. Vlad Kogan, author of the 2025 book, No Adult Left Behind, is currently the most effective evangelist for the proposition that U.S. school systems have been “hijacked” by adult interests and that external accountability pressure is one way (among others) to disrupt this status quo.

But just as accountability pressure alone doesn’t give districts clear advice on what to do to improve instructional practice, neither does it provide clear advice on what to do to “put students first” or “leave no child behind.”

Sometimes we reformers claimed that districts would be shamed into doing right by the neediest kids: spending more on their high-poverty schools, giving them their fair share of the best teachers, and making sure disadvantaged students had access to rigorous curriculum and advanced courses.

But, frankly, we were terrible messengers about this. I remember giving speeches in the early 2000s as a twenty-something George W. Bush appointee, trying to make this case and seeing education leaders in the crowd look at me like I was from Mars. If NCLB was about getting school boards and district central offices to “put students first,” that was news to them.

And we’re still not clear enough about what it would really mean, in practice, to put students first. So let me take a crack. I would argue that putting students first—especially disadvantaged students—means:

• Scrutinizing collective bargaining agreements and district bureaucracies for any expenses that aren’t connected to pupil achievement or other student needs. That would include bloated central office staff (especially highly paid administrators who were “promoted” from their jobs as principals because of weak performance by the schools they led); salary supplements not connected to evidence of effectiveness, like master’s degree bumps for teachers or raises for longevity (beyond the first ten years or so, when returns to experience generally peter out); extravagant employee healthcare policies, especially for retirees and their families; and ballooning non-teaching staff without a direct role in serving students.  
• Taking any savings and driving it into initiatives to recruit and retain effective teachers in high-need schools. That means paying teachers dramatically higher salaries to take the toughest assignments while also paying more to teachers with a track record of boosting achievement and narrowing gaps, as D.C., Dallas, and now the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment have done. On top of the instructional-improvement agenda that Robert writes about, ending the teacher-retention crisis at high-poverty schools is the most promising way to help many more young Americans achieve their full potential.  
• Removing from collective bargaining agreements and district policies any provisions that impede instructional improvement. Here’s where the two branches of reform come together. High-quality instructional materials, for example, won’t make much difference without high-quality professional development, teacher planning time, and regular coaching and feedback. But some union locals force districts to the bargaining table to negotiate all of that, and more. The more includes the details around high-impact tutoring, automatic enrollment of qualified students into advanced courses, and pretty much everything else that instructional reformers dream up. This must stop.

But let’s be honest. No amount of top-down accountability—or competitive pressure from school choice either, to be clear—would be sufficient to motivate most school board members to embrace these sorts of reforms. Not so long as they depend on the teacher unions and other adult interests for campaign donations and get-out-the-vote efforts.

As with instructional reform, if we want more than a handful of districts to take these sorts of politically treacherous actions, then we probably need state policymakers to do the heavy lifting. This means, for example:

• Banning automatic pay raises for master’s degrees or experience after ten years or so;
• Mandating significantly higher pay for teachers in high-need schools;
• Prohibiting districts from offering taxpayer-subsidized retiree healthcare benefits; and/or
• Going “full Scott Walker” and limiting collective bargaining just to wages.

That sounds like a pipe dream in blue states. But in red ones, maybe it could happen?

Here’s the point: Accountability is necessary but not sufficient. That’s true with instructional reform, and it’s true with forcing political change, too.

The current issue of The Atlantic proclaims the demise of reading—the act at the heart of the humanities. While the decline in reading—and the study of the humanities in general—is nothing new,[1] the Atlantic piece sparked an avalanche of responses (for a quick sampling, just look at Reddit). The piece and the reactions raise a broader set of issues: In the age of AI, what justifies an education grounded in the humanities?

For some of us, this is déjà vu. Decades ago, as the director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), I was tasked with making the case for including the arts in public education. Two arguments stood out: Arts education improves math scores! The arts are a major sector of economic activity! I regularly received the latest studies to bolster both claims. If I were still making those arguments today, I could cite a long list of studies linking arts education to a variety of positive academic and social outcomes, and cite evidence that the arts generate $1.2 trillion in economic impact—over 4 percent of U.S. GDP.

Although I confess to having used both arguments in appropriate venues, they make me uneasy. First, we never justify studying trigonometry by arguing that it improves artistic creativity. Why do we ask the arts to do the reverse? More importantly, the studies cited are almost always correlational rather than causal. A sober review of the evidence by a team sympathetic to arts education found the hard evidence of impact to be minimal. The largest and most recent rigorous study showed a very small impact on writing skills and zero impact on math learning. No study has shown that replacing a math class period with one in the arts would lead to higher math scores. When it comes to the economy, the definition of arts education used in the literature is so broad as to border on meaningless. The study cited above reports that “the nation’s largest arts industry in 2023 was web publishing and streaming, which includes internet publishing and broadcasting, music and film archives, comic syndicates, and news photo distribution services.” The link to a school orchestra or painting class is not immediately evident.

I rehearse these arguments today to show why contemporary defenses of a humanities education leave me equally unpersuaded[2]. The form of the argument has shifted. In the age of AI, we are most likely to hear that the liberal arts are the best gateway to the so-called “durable skills” our new economy depends on. A recent piece in Forbes put it this way:

We need a better way of talking about the important skills that these [humanities] programs develop. They are the durable skills that employers overwhelmingly value, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork. And they are the skills that will help people adapt and innovate as artificial intelligence reshapes work…. Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things.

If only it were true. The problem with these kinds of statements is that they rest on a far weaker evidentiary base than the arguments for arts education’s contribution to math learning or economic impact. Claims that a liberal arts education is especially important in the age of AI often center on the idea that it cultivates critical thinking, but the empirical basis for that claim is extremely weak. Available studies more often show correlation than causation, and I am not aware of any rigorous evidence demonstrating that humanities or social science education produces stronger critical thinking than science or math training.

The explanation for this is not complex: In almost no cases do skills developed in one academic domain transfer to others. Being excellent at assessing how Shakespeare’s King Lear self-destructs doesn’t give one a transferable skill in critical thinking that will magically manifest itself ten years later while coding for Claude.

If you ask AI whether classicists make good businessmen, it will tell you they do—partly because they are said to develop strong analytical skills. But that’s a classic (sorry) case of confusing correlation with causation: those who study classics are likely to have strong analytical skills. More to the point, there is no rigorous evidence that classicists are more likely to become terrific entrepreneurs than those who studied history, science, or math. 

The second defense of a humanities education is perhaps best articulated by Martha Nussbaum. In multiple books[3], she argues that studying the humanities is crucial for developing the skills of democratic citizenship. Once again, it’s about critical thinking—with the addition of cultivating the imagination and ethical sensibilities. Once again, there is next to no evidence. As Kate Fullagar wrote last year in Inside Story, “she never deals with the unspoken question running through the book of why other disciplines don’t lead to critical thinking or imagination.” More fundamentally, Fullagar quotes Niall Lucy in his own review of Nussbaum: the humanities are “not inherently democratic, which is why fascist regimes could take root in countries (Spain, Italy, Germany) with rich literary histories.” Or as my father put it more succinctly, “Goethe’s garden is a few thousand yards from Buchenwald.”

So, what should we teach in the age of AI? Rick Hess recently offered a strong, commonsense response—just hold steady on traditional content. Hess dismisses economist Tyler Cowen’s claim that “the curriculum itself is now radically obsolete,” rejecting Cowen’s substitution of pseudo-knowledge for the real thing. We can buttress Hess’s argument—with the same note of common sense—by observing that you can’t ask AI advanced questions or work with its answers unless you know something about the field in which you are asking. One recalls William Blake’s phrase “the idiot questioner”—garbage in, trivia out. 

But even fleshed out, Hess’s common sense still offers no special argument for an education in the humanities. For that, let’s pose a question: Would you give back those elements of your own education? Put another way, who among us, privileged to have been exposed to music, art, poetry, drama, philosophy, and foreign languages, would willingly undo that education? Would we abandon the education that J.S. Mill called “the strengthening, exalting, purifying, and beautifying of our common nature”? It is often said that privileging an education in the humanities is elitist—but the argument is exactly wrong: It is the exclusion of so many students from that education that is elitist and immensely patronizing.

In a culture that champions rapid consumption and disposal, an education in the humanities appeals to the lived experience of being removed from the everyday, of undertaking encounters that bring cognitive and emotional dislocation, searching self-questioning, and often joy.

If children responded only to an education that is “relevant,” Harry Potter would have remained unread. Instead, they discover what it means to lose themselves in imaginary worlds. In a time of often overwhelming social noise, knowing passages of inexhaustible poetry by heart creates inner spaces of private treasures. The encounter with art becomes not an interruption before lunch but a site of intense interrogation. When British scholar Peter de Bolla finally learns to “see” Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis and discovers “a heightened sense of being well-composed,” he is speaking not of the painting but of himself.[4] 

De Bolla’s experience underscores the burdens and rewards of study. Perhaps the Mona Lisa is instantly “accessible,” but many of the brightest jewels of the humanities aren’t microwave-ready. As with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, so with Dante’s Inferno: the first encounters might elicit pleasure—but unpacking the structure of the canons through repeated listening in the former or tracing the analogical echoes in a canto in the latter begins to reveal the gifts that become lifelong companions. 

An education in the humanities doesn’t make us better citizens or stronger coders. The humanities furnish the mind with stories that move us, art and music that inspire us, and informed questions that probe the fundamental nature of mortality, love, sacrifice, and evil. They provide, in Ezra Pound’s words, “the light” that “sings eternal.”^[5]

That may not be enough to rescue an education in the humanities from its current demise, but it surely should be.

In December, the board of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) unanimously approved a building consolidation plan. The move is part of the district’s Building Brighter Futures initiative, which aims to take “bold action to right-size, stabilize, and secure a brighter future for CMSD scholars.” Starting this fall, the district will operate 29 fewer schools.

Closing and consolidating schools is complicated, difficult work. But that’s especially true in Cleveland, where constant change has become the norm. Since 2020, district families and staff have weathered the pandemic and remote schooling; experienced a “refresh” of the Cleveland Plan (a comprehensive improvement plan that was signed into state law in 2012); gone through the hiring process for a new CEO after longtime leader Eric Gordon stepped down; and received word that the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, a nonprofit responsible for supporting implementation of the Cleveland Plan, would dissolve.

For some families and staff, the district’s consolidation effort likely feels like yet another upheaval. Their concerns and frustrations are understandable. But the district has been on this trajectory for years. Maintaining the status quo isn’t financially sustainable or in the best interest of students.

To their credit, Cleveland leaders, including Mayor Justin Bibb, are tackling the problem head-on. They’re learning from other districts. And they’re creating a blueprint for how to handle the complexities of consolidation.

First, they’ve been clear and concise about why consolidation is necessary. More than two decades of steadily declining enrollment—just 34,000 students are enrolled today, compared to 70,000 in 2004—have left many school buildings half-full and many students without access to programs and services. The district has openly acknowledged that there are students who lack “high-quality college, career, and enrichment programs in their school.” Costs to maintain and operate buildings, many of which need upgrades and repairs, have gone up. And a budget shortfall of roughly $150 million is on the horizon.

Second, they’ve outlined how consolidation will address these issues. Once implemented, CMSD’s plan will save the district an estimated $30 million each year. Among affected students, 96 percent will move to schools with equal or higher star ratings on state report cards, 100 percent will have equal or expanded academic and extracurricular opportunities, and 95 percent will attend a school located in a building that’s in equal or better physical condition.

Third, they’ve focused on engagement and gathering feedback. Outreach efforts during phase one, which began in spring 2025 and continued through the fall, included community meetings, staff meetings at all schools, discussions with both the Student Advisory and District Parent Advisory Committees, board meetings, media briefings, online resources, virtual meeting options, and presentations to civic, service, and faith-based groups. Phase two, which began in the fall, focused on impacted schools and included in-person meetings for staff and families, as well as administrators and school-based staffing groups.

Fourth, they’ve prioritized transparency. Results from a community survey conducted in April 2025 were published online. All of the district’s presentations, including the region-specific ones, are also online. Consolidation recommendations were grounded in data (student enrollment trends, building condition, and building size and use), as well as school and neighborhood factors (student outcomes, special programming, student demographics and retention, and the number of school options nearby). Data sheets containing information for every school are—you guessed it—available online.

Last but not least, they’re working to ensure that transitions are as smooth as possible. A schedule of transition activities and culture building/welcoming activities for families, students, and staff is available online. It includes family carnivals, game nights, block parties, community art shows, and farewell celebrations for buildings closing their doors. The district hosted two School Choice Expos that allowed families to connect with school leaders and get more information about neighborhood schools, magnet programs, college-credit pathways, and specialty programs. And that’s all in addition to resources the district already annually publishes, like choice books and an interactive school finder, to help families decide which district-run school is right for their child.

There’s still a long way to go before CMSD’s consolidation effort can be labeled a success. But Cleveland leaders deserve credit for working to create a better long-term future for kids instead of kicking the can down the road. Over the next few years, demographic changes will force districts across the nation to face similar decisions. Local context and needs should be paramount. But following Cleveland’s blueprint would be a great place to start.

Editor’s note: This was first published by RealClearEducation. 

As school districts across the country struggle to recruit and retain qualified teachers, policymakers have increasingly turned to financial incentives as potential solutions. Texas launched the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) in 2019 in hopes of retaining highly effective teachers, particularly in high-need districts. A recent policy brief published by Texas Tech University researcher J. Jacob Kirksey examines the effects of the program on student achievement and retention of effective teachers.

Under TIA, the state provides funding to school districts based on the number of designated teachers they employ, with larger allotments for teachers serving rural and high-poverty schools. Designations may be awarded through locally established criteria or by becoming National Board certified. Districts must spend at least 90 percent of each allotment on compensation for their designated teachers and instructional staff, while the remaining 10 percent may support program implementation and administration. Today, more than 800 Texas school districts participate in TIA, and the state distributed more than $480 million during the 2024–25 school year alone. Eligible teachers can receive performance-based salary increases of up to $36,000 annually, guaranteed for five years after earning a designation.

Using Texas administrative records, Kirksey analyzes nearly 8,000 district-year observations from 2016 through 2024, providing four years of data before and after TIA implementation. To estimate the program's effects, the study compares outcomes in adopting districts before and after TIA with outcomes in similar districts that had not yet implemented the program. It is worth noting that Kirksey discloses consulting with several Texas districts implementing TIA, but asserts that these relationships did not influence the study’s data, analyses, or conclusions.

Student achievement increased after districts adopted TIA, and the gains grew stronger over time. On average after four years of implementation, student achievement rose by 0.09–0.10 standard deviations—equivalent to roughly one-third of a year of additional learning. By the third year after implementation, math and reading achievement gains were approximately six times as large as those observed during the first year.

TIA also reduced teacher turnover, and here again its effects grew more pronounced over time. Overall teacher turnover in participating districts declined by 1.1 percentage points, and by the fourth year, turnover was 2 percentage points lower in TIA districts than in comparable non-TIA districts. Because the gains appeared district-wide, it seems the program may improve student achievement and teacher retention more broadly, not just increase the pay of designated teachers.

The program was particularly successful at retaining highly effective teachers. Beginning in the third year after implementation, teachers in the top third of effectiveness based on their value-added scores were 1 to 2 percentage points less likely to leave the Texas teaching workforce than similarly effective teachers in non-TIA districts, a roughly 20 percent decline in annual attrition. In contrast, TIA had no measurable effect on turnover among teachers in the bottom third of effectiveness, suggesting the program specifically improved retention among the state's strongest teachers.

Although the study does not discuss the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing provides important context for interpreting the findings. Nationally, teacher turnover surged during and immediately after the shift to remote learning, making it a particularly challenging period in which to implement a retention policy. Even so, TIA's positive effects continued to grow over time despite the disruption. It seems that the program remained effective even during an unprecedented period of instability.

An open question remains whether TIA also improves the distribution of effective teachers across schools. While Kirksey’s study finds that the program helps retain high-performing teachers, it does not examine whether those teachers are more likely to transfer to high-need campuses. Other recent research suggests that although TIA increases teacher mobility, the financial incentives may not always be large enough to encourage effective teachers to move into the most disadvantaged schools.

Still, the findings also reinforce a broader lesson in education policy: reforms often require time before their full benefits emerge. More than producing immediate results, TIA's impacts on student achievement and teacher retention strengthened with each year of implementation. This suggests that policymakers should view teacher incentive programs as long-term investments rather than short-term fixes. While one-time signing or retention bonuses may temporarily attract teachers, sustained, multi-year compensation incentives appear more likely to improve retention and, ultimately, student achievement.

SOURCE: J. Jacob Kirksey, “Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment is Improving Student Achievement and Keeping Top Teachers in Classrooms,” Texas Tech University (Spring 2026).

Public school districts are microcosms of American civic life—operated by and for members of the community, with their agendas susceptible to the cultural and political winds that blow through those communities. Even in states where school choice is common, the school district and its elected board still remain part of the infrastructure of cities, towns, and counties. It’s no surprise, then, that disputes which bubble (or erupt) through the larger culture regularly land on board agendas and often land rancorously. The Brookings Institution has been digging deeply into the function of America’s elected school boards, and its first published report looks at how recent cultural conflicts were handled by board members, through the lens of that other quintessential pillar of our civic life: the media.

The research team built a dataset of media reports by web-scraping Google search results via its “News” tab for school district conflicts over a specific set of issues. The analysts chose issues which “had been prominent in education politics from 2018 through 2024 (based on [an] initial screening of articles and Google Trends data)” and which used “distinctive language” easily searchable in news reports. The final list comprises Covid-19 mask mandates, critical race theory (CRT), book restrictions, and transgender students’ rights. Not a perfect overlap with so-called “culture war” issues, but close enough.

Districts were chosen for inclusion based on a stratified sampling strategy using the National Center for Education Statistics’ 12 locale type categories (City-Large, Rural-Remote, etc.). The team randomly selected a maximum of 200 school districts of each locale type from across the country—some locale types did not have 200 exemplars—resulting in a final sample of 2,337 districts out of about 13,500 nationwide. They also applied weights so that the sample would be nationally representative and ran a second analysis including student enrollment data to give a picture of how many students attended districts with school board conflicts, not just the number of districts. Team members manually reviewed each article to confirm whether a genuine conflict within the school board had arisen, rather than a simple and non-confrontational discussion of an issue.

The first and perhaps most striking finding is that media reports on these cultural issues were not widespread. Overall, just 10 percent of districts had at least one media report of a conflict between 2018 and 2024 that was related to any of the four issues under study. However, these were often large districts, so about 30 percent of public school students attended school in places with reported conflicts. During individual years, no more than 5 percent of districts (representing 18 percent of students) had any reported school board conflict. Of the districts that did have a reported conflict, most had reports related to just one of the four issues. The most common source of conflict was book content and possible restriction, while the least common was mask mandates.

Between January 2018 and January 2020 (pre-pandemic), media reports of all four issues were scarce—conflicts were reported for less than 1 percent of districts (representing less than 1.5 percent of students)—which makes sense for Covid masking, but comes as something of a surprise for the other three issues. By 2021, reports of school board conflicts over all four issues began to rise. Media coverage of conflicts over Covid-19 masking policies and CRT peaked in 2021 and then steadily declined to near pre-pandemic levels—that is, near zero—by 2024. Media coverage of conflicts over book restrictions and issues involving transgender students peaked in 2023, and, although declining in 2024, still remained well above pre-pandemic levels.

Media reporting on these cultural issues was most common in large districts (as noted above) and urban areas, with nearly half of large districts (more than 15,000 students) having at least one reported conflict. About a third of city districts had at least one reported conflict, compared with 17.9 percent of suburban districts, 8.4 percent of town districts, and just 3.9 percent of rural districts. Reported conflicts were higher in politically liberal (“blue”) and moderate (“purple”) communities, as determined by the 2020 presidential election share won by either Joe Biden or Donald Trump in that district.

The Brookings team is quick to note that while its findings provide a useful snapshot of what was happening around boardroom tables during the period, the picture is incomplete. Local media has been in decline for years, accelerating during the 2018–2024 period. Does the low incidence of conflicts reflect actual frequency of discord, a more vigilant press overall in this period, or just the situation in those districts under watch by journalists and other public meeting documenters? Either way, the analysts say, their findings offer local district leaders a useful corrective for national narratives—especially those leaders not in large, urban, and politically competitive districts.

SOURCE: Jon Valant et al., “Media reporting on school board conflicts,” Brookings (June 2026).