Many pundits claim that the charter schools sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Is that true?
Earlier this summer, Education Next published a post by EdChoice’s Robert Enlow and Michael Q. McShane, “School Choice Should Take the Road Less Traveled.” It was not my favorite take, to say the least.
The problem wasn’t so much their argument that private-school choice should be regulated differently than charter schooling. While I would quibble (and quarrel) on some specifics, I can appreciate that the rules for private-school choice should be different from those for charter schools. Otherwise we’d “de-privatize” private schools, and what would be the point of that?
No, what really bothered me was their claim—one I’ve seen many others make—that the charter sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of those dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Here’s how Enlow and McShane put it:
Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.
They go on to write that there should be lots more kinds of charter schools, and lots more charter schools overall, but that, by choosing overregulation instead, the charter sector committed “ an own goal, kicked into the wrong net by the very reformers that passionately advocate for charters..”
Jed Wallace, in a great piece for Charter Folk, admits that there is overregulation of charter schools in some states but also argues that that wasn’t an “own goal.” Those regulations were foisted upon the charter sector by opponents bent on containing or killing the sector. In deep-blue states like Wallace’s California, opponents really did insert poison pills into laws and regulations. A major goal of charter advocacy today is rolling back the rising tide of red tape.
But what about states where we see charter schools continuing to grow and succeed—those where policymakers are trying to help, rather than hurt, charters? Are their sectors overregulated, too? And is it true, as Enlow and McShane say, that a set of “unelected functionaries” has been empowered to say no to charter applicants for arbitrary and capricious reasons?
Those are fighting words—a direct attack on charter authorizers of which Fordham is proud to be one: We oversee about a dozen schools on 20 Ohio campuses, all high poverty, mostly urban, with one in the Appalachian region. We get proposals every year for new charter schools, and we have said yes to some and no to many. We’ve also worked to close schools that weren’t performing. Were we doing all of this for arbitrary and capricious reasons? Hardly!
We say no when we make a professional determination that the people proposing a new charter don’t have the expertise or experience to run good schools. The world is full of people with good hearts who have dreams for schools that they want to create, but they don’t have the know-how to do it well. For example, they don’t have a staffer or board member who understands finances. They don’t have a solid strategy for overcoming challenges related to facilities. Maybe they want to start a wonderful elementary school yet have never heard of the science of reading. Those are huge red flags.
We try to stay open-minded. For example, a few years ago, we approved a school that was focused on attracting a socioeconomically and racially diverse population in one of Ohio’s big urban areas. We thought the proposed curriculum was a little too loosey-goosey, but we understood from the founders that they wouldn’t be able to recruit upper-middle-class and White families into their school if they offered a “no excuses” type program. We were willing to give it a try. It didn’t work. It struggled to get enough enrollment, and eventually, they just didn’t have enough students to make the finances work. The school had to close.
Taking some risks is important. And I can imagine that some authorizers have opted to be very risk averse. Maybe they started a few bad schools or faced a scandal and responded by rejecting everything but sure bets.
But is it also true, as Enlow and McShane imply, that there were scads of wonderful (potential) schools out there that authorizers rejected? That, were it not for the regulations (and regulators), the charter sector would be bigger and more innovative today? That does not line up with my experience, nor have I seen any evidence to back that claim.
And as for closing schools, maybe some libertarians think we authorizers are just looking at Excel spreadsheets and pushing a “close” button from far away. That’s not how it works. We know these schools intimately. Our teams spend time in them. We go to their board meetings. We work with their staffs. We interview their students. We know their parents. And guess what? Some schools just aren’t very good. It’s actually really hard to run an effective school. It’s difficult to run a multimillion-dollar nonprofit organization, which is what charter schools are. Some people turn out to be ineffective at managing these complicated enterprises, and some schools just turn out to be bad at teaching children what they need to learn. As an authorizer, we work hard to offer help, advice, and sometimes extra resources, but closure is occasionally the least-bad option.
To repeat: Private-school choice programs and the schools that participate in them should be regulated differently than charter schools. But differently does not mean “not at all.” Let’s embrace the potential for innovation but not be Pollyanna about the potential for waste, fraud, abuse, bad ideas, poor execution, and all the rest that comes along with human imperfection. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the very real success of the charter movement, and all of the people and institutions—authorizers included—that continue to make it possible.
One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.
Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.
Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.
These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.
Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.
When the Conservative Party came into Government in the U.K. in 2010, the newly appointed Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and I were determined to reverse this decline, and to do this we knew we had to challenge the child-centered, progressivist ideology that we believed had been its cause.
In setting about our reforms, we were greatly influenced by the writings of another University of Virginia academic, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, challenged the progressivists who said what matters was not knowledge but skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. He pointed out that these skills (important though they are) come from having deep and broad knowledge and that schools that focused on these skills at the expense of knowledge would, counter-intuitively, fail to instill these very skills in their pupils. Only a knowledge-rich curriculum, properly taught, can help develop a student’s ability to think and to be creative.
Daniel Willingham’s research into cognitive science explained that higher-order thinking skills take place in the working memory, which is small—only able to handle half a dozen new pieces of information. Try asking someone to recite ten phone numbers you’ve just read to them. But, of course, all intellectual activity requires more than six bits of information. For Willingham, education is about ensuring students have access to vast amounts of knowledge, secure and understood, in long term memory.
The work of Hirsch and Willingham informed our far-reaching education reform program in England between 2010 and 2024, which has helped drive wholesale change to the quality of the curriculum, to teaching methods, and in the reading ability and math attainment of young people emerging from our schools. I believe it played a significant role in in England rising from 27th in math in 2009 to 11th in 2022 (the U.S. is 33rd).
In reading, we required schools to teach children to read using phonics, with them learning the 44 sounds of our 26-letter alphabet and how to blend those sounds into words. The alternative method, which swept the world from the 1960s, encouraged children to intuit a new word from the context of the story or the grammar rather than by sounding out the letters. Teaching reading using phonics has helped take England to fourth in the world for the reading ability of nine- and ten-year-olds (the PIRLS study).
Phonics is gradually being re-introduced around the world. In the U.S., broadcast journalist Emily Hanford, with her exposé of the scandal of the widespread use of failed methods for teaching children to read in American schools, is having an impact in many U.S. States through the science-of-reading movement.
And this is happening not only in the U.S., but in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, too. Six Australian States have introduced England’s Phonics Screening Check—a test for six-year-olds we pioneered in 2011 to ensure schools were teaching children to decode words using phonics. New Zealand is doing the same this year, and their Education Minister, Erica Stanford, has abolished their failed skills-based curriculum and replaced it with one based on a rich content of knowledge, as has Flanders in Belgium.
The insurgency has begun. Across the world, the failed progressivist agenda is being challenged and overturned. American thinkers and educationalists—such as Doug Lemov, who wrote the best-selling guide, Teach Like a Champion, as well as Willingham and Hirsch—are at the center of this movement. Is it too much to hope that their ideas will have even more impact in the United States?
States can play a powerful role in improving student learning by improving instruction. I know this from my experience working at a state agency and from observing how the districts and schools that partner with my organization, Instruction Partners, orient to the expectations and initiatives of their state agencies.
I also know from those experiences that states can inadvertently hinder the very changes they seek to make. Ask the people who work with them most closely—district leaders—what they think of their state agency, and I bet you’ll hear things like, “too many requirements,” “lots of things to track,” and “not sure how the pieces fit together.” And if you press further into the details of the instructional moves being implemented in schools “because the state told us to,” you’ll find a myriad of disjointed approaches.
Three years ago, after noticing a pattern of our school and district partners being pulled in competing directions by the instructional requirements issued by their states, my team and I began working with state education agencies (SEAs) to take stock of and strengthen coherence across their instructional guidance, support, and accountability measures. Across five states, we reviewed hundreds of guidance documents and worked with leadership teams to (1) get clear on their core instructional strategies and (2) review how aligned the messages they sent to schools and districts were to those core strategies.
Last month, we released a report, “The State of Instructional (In)Coherence,” based on our findings.
Bottom line, we found that:
We found that SEAs can take productive steps to improve the coherence of their instructional guidance. And when they do, schools and systems (1) appreciate the flexibility and time back it gives them and (2) take better action, aligned to the state’s guidance.
We had four takeaways about how states can help create more instructional coherence.
1. Leadership has to make it a priority. Few things can make change faster than a chief who is willing to demand action and make hard calls. That said, the source of incoherence is rarely a chief—or any individual. Rather, it is the cumulative effect of unintended mixed signals from offices across the agency, which build up over time. Leadership has to be willing both to set expectations for coherent messaging and to get into the weeds to ensure the details of implementation match the vision.
2. The (productive) team fights come out when discussing money and measurement. Teams can agree on a shared vision and still have very different ideas about what the implementation of that vision will mean in practice. The conversations about what will get funded (and what will not) and what will get measured (and what will not) are the discussions that surface disagreements. For example, many states have multiple rubrics for instruction or needs assessments that school leaders have to complete. When states look to streamline those processes for school leaders, they have to engage with questions like, “if we could only look for ten things, what would we choose?” In our experience, such questions lead to disagreements between teams (and individuals), but negotiating those disagreements is a powerful mechanism to create a clear focus on what the agency is prioritizing as most important.
3. The P’s and Q’s matter. State teams are used to discussing the big ideas together but typically work out the details in silos—and that’s where incoherence comes home to roost. For example, if guidance on multi-tiered systems of support requires an assessment that meets certain criteria and the school improvement guidance requires an assessment that meets different criteria, then schools will end up purchasing and administering two assessments to address those two sets of state requirements. Negotiating the details together or creating processes that give other teams lines of sight and feedback loops on the details of rubrics, reporting requirements, or training materials is not common practice for most teams. When leaders insist that review processes for rubrics and needs assessments includes cross-team review—or even norming to a common glossary to ensure terms are being used consistently across the SEA—it typically involves significant change in how business is done.
4. Articulating what a team is not going to do is as important as articulating what it is going to do. Traditional state strategic planning processes are forward facing. They rarely involve looking back to eliminate old guidance, initiatives, and practices that aren’t aligned with new strategic goals. These forward-facing visioning and planning processes are good at surfacing everything teams want to be happening that’s not currently happening, but they don’t tend to account for what is currently happening. That is, the planning processes teams engage in almost never attend to what could be taken off leaders’ plates. Sometimes budget cuts force resource prioritization, but even then, the spirit of old guidance tends to live on because it’s rare for states to clearly articulate “this can be retired or updated.” In the teams that have done the most to help districts get really clear, we observed that they spent time and effort articulating what they don’t want to see in action or in funding requests and managing implementation of that change.
Unclear and incoherent state instructional guidance has a real cost for system leaders, teachers, and students. Every school and district leader can tell you—with conviction—how wide-ranging state requirements make an already hard job harder; how teachers grappling with ways to make it all work feel the burn, even if they don’t directly trace it back to state guidance; and how students feel it in their classrooms when they get disconnected interventions.
SEAs come by incoherence honestly. As someone who led a fair share of incoherent initiatives in my own state office, I can attest that state leaders themselves are pulled in many directions—from federal requirements to legislative mandates, from research trends to funding restrictions. But because of the unique role that states have in setting their own educational policies and practices, they are the only actors in the American education system with the power to manage and reconcile competing tensions. Because it is time-intensive and counter-culture to the way states traditionally organize efforts, most state leadership teams rarely choose to exercise that power. They may layer on initiatives, but they pass the tensions on to districts and schools. But, if they choose to step into a more active role in driving coherence, they can make an enormous difference for their systems, schools, teachers, and, ultimately, students.
Author’s note: “The State of Instructional (In)Coherence” details how SEA-issued guidance often advances incongruent, competing theories of instructional improvement, creating problems for educators and students. It also outlines steps state leadership teams can take to improve the coherence of the guidance and messages they send to schools and systems.
The four-day school week has become one of the fastest-growing trends in American K–12 education, particularly in rural communities. By 2023, roughly 850 districts across 24 states had adopted the shorter week, up from about 600 before the pandemic. While the earliest adopters often pointed to cost savings, the post-pandemic surge has been driven by staffing concerns, with many local leaders claiming that the four-day week is an attractive perk that can help them recruit and retain teachers.
A new CALDER working paper by Andrew Camp, J. Cameron Anglum, Cory Koedel, Se Woong Lee, and Tuan Nguyen casts doubt on that claim. Focusing on Missouri, where nearly a third of districts have made the switch to the shorter week, the study pairs qualitative interviews with an event study and difference-in-difference analysis, finding a mismatch between perception and reality.
The authors begin by conducting interviews with 36 Missouri educators, including 20 superintendents, four principals, and a dozen teachers. Most of these respondents liked the idea of a shorter school week. Superintendents, in particular, saw it as an important benefit that expanded applicant pools and reduced teacher turnover. One superintendent told the researchers, “We can’t compete with salary, so we had to put things in place like the four-day to encourage [teachers] to stay.” Several respondents said that, in rural areas where salaries lag behind those in nearby suburban systems, the four-day week had become an essential recruiting tool. And one worried that not adopting it could put his district at a competitive disadvantage, as other local districts had already implemented the shorter schedule. Teachers tended to echo these positive assessments, praising the additional day for improving work-life balance or allowing more time for lesson planning.
Yet when the researchers turned to the data, they did not find positive effects of shorter weeks on teacher recruitment or retention. Using fifteen years of Missouri Department of Education administrative records, from 2008 to 2024, they examined teacher turnover, new hires, and the use of “out-of-field” teachers, which is a common indicator of staffing stress. Their analysis finds that the estimated effects of adopting a four-day week are negligible and statistically insignificant. They found no evidence that shorter school weeks reduce teacher exits either overall or in hard-to-staff fields like STEM and special education. Their best estimate is less than one fewer annual exit per 100 full-time teachers. Nor did the policy meaningfully increase the share of new hires, whether from other Missouri districts or from outside the state, and any small gains in one group were offset by losses in the other. Likewise, there was no reduction in the prevalence of out-of-field teachers. These null findings held up under numerous robustness checks.
How can a policy that practitioners say works result in no measurable impact?
The authors suggest several possibilities. Teachers may value the shorter week, but not enough for it to outweigh salary, location, or other considerations when deciding whether to take or keep a job. Or district leaders may be confusing correlation with causation, attributing improvements to the calendar change when other forces are at play. They also posit that confirmation bias could be causing leaders in four-day districts to notice and remember positive anecdotes about the shorter school week while discounting contrary evidence.
The findings of this study based on Missouri data align with a small but growing body of research from other states. Studies in Colorado and Oregon have also found null or negative effects on teacher recruitment and retention, and the one state-level study to show a positive effect, Arkansas, found it to be very small.
What is even more troubling is that four-day week are not good for student learning. The researchers cite prior research indicating that the policy harms student achievement, with most estimates showing losses of 0.02 to 0.09 standard deviations in test scores per year of exposure. While these effect sizes are small, they can compound over time into sizable learning loss.
The downsides to the four-day week—along with the limited upsides—may be why state policymakers are beginning to regulate school time more aggressively. In 2024, the Missouri legislature passed Senate Bill 727, which requires voter approval before large districts can adopt the four-day week and offers a modest funding boost to districts that keep a five-day schedule. Other states are also passing new regulations, such as Oklahoma, where lawmakers have taken steps to limit the growth of shortened weeks and clamp down on virtual or “off-site” school days.
If the aim is to strengthen the teacher pipeline, the authors argue, states and districts would do better to address the underlying causes of staffing challenges, particularly in rural areas, through competitive compensation, targeted incentives, and improved working conditions, rather than reducing instructional days. The four-day school week may be popular with many educators and communities, but research continues to indicate that it doesn’t yield the recruitment and retention boost its advocates promise. And the fact that it’s bad for student achievement should be weighed very, very seriously.
SOURCE: Andrew M. Camp, J. Cameron Anglum, Cory Koedel, Se Woong Lee, and Tuan D. Nguyen, “The Effects of the Four-Day School Week on Teacher Recruitment and Retention,” CALDER (2025).
Editor’s note: Adam also covered this study on a recent episode of our podcast, The Education Gadfly Show. The discussion starts at 23:10.
Alternative certification programs can help schools to fill vacant teaching roles with eager and promising teaching candidates. Flexible and affordable, it’s no wonder both schools and potential teachers are drawn to this attractive alternative to traditional teacher prep programs. However, these programs must still equip future teachers with the skills, competencies, and knowledge essential to delivering high-quality academic instruction and managing classrooms. And too many are failing miserably.
This is the general consensus reached in a July 2025 brief released by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The brief utilizes federal Title II data and online information from over 550 alternative certification programs that include a pathway for elementary teacher certification. The data are used to examine clinical practice experiences, coursework requirements, and mentorship opportunities, which serve as foundational academic and professional experiences for pre-service teachers. The dataset includes information for programs that are both based in institutions of higher education (IHE) and those run independently.
The brief finds uneven program quality across alternative certification programs and suggests avenues for targeted improvement. For example, nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of alternative programs don’t provide clinical practice, and only about a third (34 percent) of the programs require student teaching before becoming a full-time teacher, leaving many participants placed in classrooms without prior clinical teaching experience or even exposure to classroom environments. Although 40 percent of alternative programs provide some early field experiences to candidates, these experiences alone may not be sufficient preparation for participants in programs without full-time clinical practice to follow.
The vast majority (91 percent) of alternative programs require coursework for their enrollees, with a slight majority (56 percent) requiring coursework to be completed prior to entering the classroom. The depth and quality of such courses can vary greatly between programs, and nearly 40 percent of alternative programs offer entirely online coursework, which has been associated with higher teacher turnover and lower student achievement. Clearly articulated coursework requirements and expectations for instructor-led versus self-paced instruction are essential to adequately prepare teacher candidates for their work.
Most candidates in programs offering clinical practice experiences work closely with a veteran educator. However, 45 percent of “fast-track” programs (i.e., programs that lack a clinical practice component) lack clearly outlined mentorship requirements. Structured mentorship opportunities during (and potentially beyond) clinical practice experiences with high-quality mentor teachers are crucial for novice teachers to build instructional expertise and comfort in classroom environments.
Enrollment in alternative programs has risen by 63 percent over the past decade and a half, while overall teacher prep enrollment has fallen. However, the number of alternative program completers has fallen since 2010–11, with non-IHE-based programs serving as the main catalyst for such trends. Notably, Texas is responsible for over two-thirds (67 percent) of non-IHE program enrollment in the U.S., yet program completion rates have fallen by 21 percent over the past decade and a half. State leaders in Texas aim to address this issue through increased state funding—$187 million for teacher prep programs, including alternative programs, was included as part of House Bill 2, which was signed into law in June 2025.
Two programs (Teachers of Tomorrow and iTeach) are responsible for nearly half (48 percent) of all alternative program enrollment, both of which are fast-track, non-IHE based programs. accredited by the Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation (AAQEP) and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), respectively. Teachers of Tomorrow relies primarily on self-paced online modules with no required supervised teaching experiences or formal observations. Thus, as alternative program enrollment rates rise and completion rates fall, accurate and detailed state-level data provide a crucial “quality check” on these programs.
The brief provides helpful recommendations for state policymakers, including:
Alternative certification programs have potential, but they do not inherently guarantee a well-equipped teacher workforce in the long term. Frequent clinical experiences, solid coursework, and consistent mentorship opportunities facilitate crucial learning experiences for teacher candidates seeking to make a positive impact in their classrooms. Teacher candidates need academic rigor and professional preparation to meet the growing demands of their classrooms.
SOURCE: Ron Noble and Christie Ellis, “What’s the Alternative? How some alternative certification programs are shortchanging teachers,” National Council on Teacher Quality (July 2025).
This week, Matthew Kraft, professor of education and economics at Brown University, joins The Education Gadfly Show to discuss the intersection of education policy and climate change.
Then, on the Research Minute, Adam Tyner examines whether an elite “exam school” led to better educational outcomes for its students.
Recommended content:
On education and climate change
The Research Minute
Feedback welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? Send them to Alicia Anderson at [email protected].
