The Education Gadfly Weekly

A recurring question in recent years is whether the education reform movement is dead. I’ve argued that it’s not—that the “Washington Consensus” that gave rise to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top may be long gone, but that education reform itself is alive and well. Then again, as my longtime colleague and friend Checker Finn would tell you, I’m a famously (and perhaps naively) optimistic guy. If someone handed me a partial cup of poison, I would probably notice that at least the glass is half full.

So even I will admit that something about education reform changed significantly in the mid-2010s, and not for the better. Political polarization put serious strain on the bipartisan movement, and culture wars are stressing what is left.

Some on both right and left remain sanguine about these developments. Some school choice supporters view Democrats as non-essential baggage. Why compromise when Republicans have the votes in red states to enact education savings accounts on their own? Likewise, some Democrats don’t want to sully themselves by cooperating with Republican “book banners,” especially when they aren’t committed to the cause of racial equity and social justice anyway.

I strongly disagree. It wasn’t perfect, but the bipartisan era of education reform, from the 1990s until the early 2010s, accomplished a great deal of good for America’s children. If you aren’t convinced, spend some time with Dan Goldhaber’s and Michael DeArmond’s wonderful overview of the research literature in a recent report for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Looking Back to Look Forward: Quantitative and Qualitative Reviews of the Past 20 Years of K-12 Education Assessment and Accountability Policy.

(If you are convinced, you can skip the next few paragraphs!)

First, it’s clear from multiple studies and analyses that student achievement in the United States improved dramatically from the mid to late 1990s until the early 2010s—especially in math, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, and especially for the most marginalized student groups. The proportion of Black fourth-graders scoring at the “below basic” level on the NAEP reading exam, for example, dropped from over two-thirds in 1992 to less than half in 2015. Likewise, the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring “below basic” in math dropped from two-thirds in 1990 to 40 percent in 2015. Those numbers were still much too high, but the improvement was breathtaking.

Sure, helpful social trends may explain some of this progress, yet much can be attributed to reform. A seminal paper by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob compared states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the late 1990s to those that adopted it in the early 2000s after NCLB required it. Whenever states adopted these policies, Dee and Jacob found large impacts on math achievement (an effect size in the neighborhood of half a year of learning), with even greater effects for the lowest-achieving students, as well as Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. Another study by Manyee Wong and colleagues used Catholic schools as a control group, and found more evidence that accountability policies raised achievement in math in the public schools. And a brand-new study by Ozkan Eren, David Figlio, and colleagues found that accountability policies had an impact on more than just test scores: “Our findings indicate that a school's receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students’ reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early thirties.”

That’s real-world, real-life progress for millions of kids.

Or consider this week’s brand-new study of KIPP middle schools and high schools, showing that students who were selected by lottery to attend these institutions back during the heyday of reform were almost twice as likely to complete college.

Bipartisan reform is worth fighting for

Standards-based reform and high-quality charter schools made a tangible difference for hundreds of thousands of kids and for our country. And neither would have been possible without bipartisanship. The lesson to me is clear: We need to build a bridge back to bipartisan education reform if we want to keep making progress, especially in the wake of the awful Covid pandemic.

Which is why I’m thrilled with this week’s release of an important new Call to Action, A Generation at Risk, published by the Building Bridges Initiative. This Initiative is a partnership of Democrats for Education Reform and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. We launched it eighteen months ago with the hope of bringing reformers together from left, right, and center. Our top goal was essential if modest: to rebuild relationships that had been frayed by the polarization of recent years. We gathered a dozen and a half amazing leaders for six in-person sessions. We learned the obvious lesson that Zoom is no substitute for sharing meals together, chatting over coffee, looking each other in the eye, and respectfully sharing our hopes and dreams for America’s children.

A secondary goal was to see if we might come to an agreement on a new reform agenda. To be honest, it looked for a while as if that goal would not be met. This is an incredibly diverse group of people, reflecting the diversity (racial, ideological, and otherwise) of today’s reform movement. We got stuck at times, but we kept at it, and I’m proud of where we landed. I hope you will read the Call to Action (it’s short!) and, if you agree with it, sign onto it yourself.

Though “written by committee,” it proposes some very bold ideas! We desperately want America’s leaders to show a greater sense of urgency in meeting the needs of today’s students, struggling as they are with learning loss and mental health challenges in the wake of the pandemic. But we also want policymakers to start building a more responsive system for the future, meaning one that should do the following:

1. Be firmly centered around students and their needs.
2. Give parents and families true information, power, and agency to understand, support, choose, and advocate for their children’s education in a real and actionable way.
3. Aim for a broader definition of student success and enable a broader set of providers—inside and outside of schools—to play a role in meeting our students’ needs.

Taken seriously, those are some big ideas—some of which overlap with Reform 1.0, but some which push far beyond it.

And more than anything, we hope that others will share our commitment to rebuilding the bipartisan education reform movement, step by step and conversation by conversation. As we say in the conclusion of the Call to Action:

We need you, the reader, to take action on behalf of America’s children and to continue the dialogue.

Are you in?

Last month, I met a newly certified kindergarten teacher. Twenty-two years old, she was thrilled to be starting her first full-time teaching job. Passionate about her budding career, she shared detailed, insightful responses to my questions about teaching young children. She was also happily enrolled in a part-time master’s degree program in education policy.

“Why the master’s right now?” I asked her. “For the salary increase?”

“Partly,” she answered. “But also, I’d like to have kids someday, and teaching doesn’t seem compatible with a family lifestyle. So I’ll teach while I don’t have other responsibilities, and then I’ll move on to something more flexible.”

A brand-new teacher who couldn’t have been any more enthusiastic—yet she already had one foot out the door. That’s the door of a profession that claims to attract and retain employees with “perks” like pension plans that take a quarter-century to kick in.

She’s not alone. Thirty-eight percent of teachers ages twenty-five to thirty-four already plan to leave the classroom, in contrast to 30 percent of their older colleagues. And among teachers who planned to leave as of 2022, 26 percent cited a desire for greater workplace flexibility as a top reason motivating their career change. Among those who actually did leave, that number remains high, at 21 percent.

As a teacher who left the classroom in 2022, I get it.

That teaching feels inflexible—and that it’s not a family-friendly career—may surprise some. Many Americans picture the typical classroom teacher as a motherly figure, alternating between nurturing her flock of students at school and enjoying long summers off with her own children. And no doubt, the summers and other holiday breaks are fantastic (for those who don’t have to work additional jobs, that is).

But those scheduling benefits come at a cost: Teachers have non-negotiable hours and a system of disincentives to take days off. As my mentor teacher warned me: “Teaching is more work when you’re absent.” There’s making sure the lesson plans and materials are ready (and hopefully manageable) for a substitute, there’s the scramble to find a substitute (particularly burdensome these days), and then there’s the clean-up in the aftermath (because no matter how diligent the sub, there’s always confusion and missing work when the regular teacher is away). There can also be “teacher guilt”: An absence at a critical time could affect students’ test scores, and some students may struggle emotionally.

What’s more, many administrators outright discourage the use of leave time. I once had a colleague who used most of her annual leave days during her first year of teaching. At her year-end review, our principal told her, “You’re a great teacher, but your absences are a red flag. You shouldn’t actually use so many of your leave days.”

Having to plan vacations around school holidays is one thing, but consider, for example, teachers with caretaking responsibilities. Another former colleague of mine had to take her dying father to chemo treatment every week. Our department worked to cover her classes, and she was lucky she had saved up enough leave time to keep getting paid. Nearly half of teachers have school-age children living at home, a responsibility that comes with hauling them to medical appointments, picking up feverish kids, and more. Many of these appointments can’t be saved for the weekends, whether because those slots get booked early or because the offices simply aren’t open.

Teaching certainly isn’t the only job where scheduling is inflexible. Firefighters and nurses can’t exactly call in the at the drop of a hat, and many retail workers have to deal with automated, “just-in-time” scheduling that prevents them from planning around work hours.

By and large, though, teachers aren’t leaving the classroom for those jobs. They’re going into fields like ed tech, instructional design, IT services, consulting, and software development—jobs more likely to allow some scheduling flexibility. And keep in mind, too, that teaching requires white-collar credentials, which means that their college friends and broader social circles are likely to include many white-collar office workers. They’re seeing remote and hybrid work options expand around them, so why wouldn’t they want at least some of the same for themselves?

We’ve learned that remote instruction doesn’t work for most students, but that doesn’t mean policymakers can’t create a few more options for teachers. For middle and high schools with block scheduling, for instance, schools could design schedules to give teachers days (or at least half-days) to work remotely. Alternatively, campuses with sufficient staffing could take advantage of co-teaching or floater teachers to create opportunities for remote work. Other schools could consider scheduling four days for concentrated core academic instruction, with one day for activities like tutoring, the arts, physical education, internships, or community service. One D. C. middle school, for example, has dedicated Mondays to field trips, town halls, sports, and extracurricular programming. (Some schools have even moved to four-day weeks, although the research there suggests a potentially negative effect on student achievement.)

These days or hours wouldn’t be days off, but rather protected time to plan, grade, call families, or meet remotely with colleagues—all work that teachers are doing anyway, work they need more time to complete, and work that can be completed more efficiently with fewer interruptions from students and colleagues in the school building. (The only thing I loathed more than a fire drill interrupting my lesson was a fire drill interrupting my precious prep period.)

No doubt, scheduling reforms would face logistical and budgetary challenges, and different grade levels would require different structures. Districts with a strong union presence wouldn’t be the place to start, either, as their schools typically have strong emphases on fixed, contracted hours.

But, where feasible, schools and districts ought to give more flexible teacher schedules a try. Doing so could attract new teachers and combat burnout and attrition among those already in the profession. Given that teachers feel particularly disrespected in the post-pandemic era, this shift could also send the message that leadership does respect them as professionals and trusts them to get their work done. Teacher turnover continues to escalate while enrollment in teacher-prep programs declines. School as we have known it clearly isn’t working very well any more. Scheduling may not be teachers’ top reason for leaving the classroom—that honor, as ever, goes to compensation—but it’s an important factor that could be addressed at a relatively lower cost. At the very least, it’s worth rethinking our decades-old structures to meet schools’ and educators’ contemporary needs.

When Texas education commissioner Mike Morath named Mike Miles as the superintendent of Houston ISD back in June, it represented a throwback of sorts to a more muscular period of school and district accountability. From Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, the reform galaxy as it were has dimmed, but Miles’s arrival in Space City suggests that Texas’s star is again on the rise. In the short time he’s been at the helm, Miles has moved with breakneck speed to implement his “Destination 2035” plan—a complete structural overhaul that promises to uproot and upend the district’s way of doing things for years to come.

Indeed, the scale and scope of what’s happening in Houston can be dizzying to comprehend. I’ve had a close-up view, having spent this summer in the Lone Star State working closely alongside Miles and his whip-smart team to help lift these systems off the ground. Twenty-eight schools (out of approximately 270) have been completely reconstituted (i.e., replacement of teachers and principals) as “New Education System” schools. Teacher compensation in these NES schools was raised to about $85,000 per year with an additional $10,000 stipend, and is differentiated based on grade level and subject matter. An additional fifty-seven schools voluntarily opted into the same wholesale transformation model. Reading and language arts will be taught in these schools using a well-regarded curriculum aligned with the science of reading. A comprehensive, research-based teacher and principal appraisal system is being installed. HISD’s unwieldy central office has been entirely reorganized, with 2,000-plus positions eliminated. Teacher vacancies, which were close to eight hundred on June 1, were reduced to zero before classes began on August 28. And this list is only a fraction of what’s now underway!

Back in the halcyon days of ed reform, the zone was flooded with courageous leaders like Miles, who at the time had his hands on the tiller in Dallas. Houston was looking good, too, under the leadership of Terry Grier, who moved with a similar sense of impatience and urgency. The prevailing wisdom, lubricated by a healthy helping of hubris, was that reformers knew exactly what needed to be done to tame large, bureaucratic systems like HISD. Looking back, these leaders were often left out to dry, and the districts they led tended to regress soon after they left. Will Houston’s fate be any different this time around? Despite the hefty list of accomplishments thus far, it’s far too early to tell, but some familiar parallels—and stark differences—have already emerged.

What’s similar is that the forces of resistance and repeal have been kicking and screaming ever since Morath announced his intention to take action in Houston four years ago, this despite providing the then-elected district leadership an opportunity to avert a takeover. Unable to get out from under its own malfeasance and incompetence, the elected board was replaced, Miles was brought in, and a relatively small, albeit loud, opposition has ever since behaved unseriously. Never mind the district’s woeful performance. The objectors’ chosen course has been to traffic in spurious, ad hominem attacks and borrow heavily from the union’s dog-eared playbook of misinformation and misdirection.

The most egregious among these is the patently false allegation that the district converted its libraries into discipline centers—a tall tale that was irresistibly and credulously picked up by the New York Times and MSNBC and amplified by California’s insufferable governor. The truth is that libraries in the NES schools are essentially being used as study halls to help differentiate instruction and encourage students who have already mastered content to continue accelerating ahead. During the first week of school, I observed a number of these libraries in person, chock full of books—which students read once they completed their assignments—and not even one was being used for disciplinary purposes.

Different this time around are the larger political and cultural atmospherics. A decade ago, there was a bipartisan consensus on education reform that recognized the necessity of drastic intervention in the nation’s most distressed school systems. Any shenanigans that status quo apologists tried to pull were likely to be frowned upon by Democrats and Republicans alike. Randi Weingarten herself once proffered the need for changes in teacher evaluation akin to what’s being done in HISD. What’s more, anyone who has worked with Miles knows that his unapologetic focus on high-quality instruction and teacher effectiveness can be taken at face value. The man is laser-focused on academic excellence and does not abide excuses or mediocrity. For Miles, the mission of getting every Houston student well-educated and well-prepared is a labor of love.

But blinded by the fog of negative polarization, alleged “book bans,” and the funhouse mirrors of the broader culture wars, everything that Miles says or does is viewed by his adversaries as a sinister plot. For example, one popular conspiracy theory connects the reform efforts in Houston to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s enthusiastic support of school vouchers. It’s an odd line to draw, but one would be hard pressed to parse that out from the overheated rhetoric and frantic media coverage. All of which is to say that, while the policy prescriptions underway today in Houston harken back to NCLB and Race to the Top, the politics animating things underneath bear no resemblance to the Bush-Obama era of school reform.

I’ve known and admired Miles for years, but this summer was the first chance I’ve had to see him up close and to witness the way he—to the chagrin of the conflict entrepreneurs—is converting the staff, students, and community in HISD to his cause. I listened as he extemporaneously and compellingly delivered “The Man in the Arena” to a group of NES principals, encouraging them to tune out the naysayers and critics. Afterwards, I asked him about the ceaseless flak, to which he replied, “Who cares what those people say? Let’s just do what’s right for kids.” No matter what obstacles may come in the years ahead, nothing will distract Miles from his assignment. That’s because Miles’s cause is Houston’s children.

Most public policy efforts are very specific about the individuals or groups intended to benefit from their implementation, and evaluations of such policies generally stick to impacts on the target population. However, education policies aimed at helping certain K–12 students can also have wider implications for other students. A recent working paper from David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Umut Özek illustrates this very clearly by focusing on the ways a mandatory third grade retention policy impacts others through a “sibling spillover” effect.

Florida’s third grade retention policy was enacted in 2002 as part of a broad literacy push. Students who do not meet a designated target score on the state test (called “Level 2”) are, with a few exceptions, retained in third grade and—importantly—given substantial additional instructional support. This includes development of an academic improvement plan that address students’ specific learning needs, assignment of students to high-performing teachers, providing at least ninety minutes of daily reading instruction, and offering six to eight weeks of summer camp that facilitates intensive reading intervention.

The researchers focus on seven cohorts of students who entered third grade in Florida for the first time between 2002–03 and 2008–09, as well as their closest younger sibling. Sibling identification comes from administrative date from the Florida Department of Education. Students without identified siblings are excluded. The researchers limit their sample to sibling pairs where the younger sibling was already enrolled in a public school (kindergarten through second grade) at the time when the older sibling entered third grade for the first time. Treatment group students were those third-graders retained when falling just below the Level 2 cutoff, along with their siblings. A comparison group of students comprised third-graders who scored just above the cutoff, along with their siblings. All students were followed through fifth grade.

Overall, students retained in third grade showed improved test scores (approximately 0.2 standard deviations in both reading and math) and lower likelihood of grade repetition in future elementary grades than their peers who scored just above the Level 2 cutoff. This accords with other research showing similar outcomes. But the big news is that the nearest younger siblings of retained students also showed improved test scores (between 22 and 31 percent of the effects on their older siblings), as compared to students with non-retained older siblings. The effects were particularly pronounced in families where one of the children had an IEP, for boys, and in immigrant families.

What’s going on here? The analysts suggest, with abundant caution, that some combination of in-school and home-based factors are involved. For some reason, the younger siblings of retained third-graders are significantly more likely to be assigned to higher-quality teachers (using value-added scores) than their control group peers, and are also more likely to be in classrooms with higher-performing classmates. On the home side, data suggest that parents of retained third-graders are more likely to move their younger children (although not the retained child) to higher-performing and better-resourced schools, particularly in terms of reading resources.

While nothing causal can be concluded using the available data, the firm indication is that test-based retention triggers action in both educators and parents—not just for the retained student, but also for his or her younger sibling. Researchers should dig further to figure out the details and to see if the same spillover effects can be found elsewhere. But the headline finding should also stand on its own: Test-based retention policies accompanied by strong student supports can work even better than intended.

SOURCE: David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Umut Özek, “Sibling Spillovers May Enhance the Efficacy of Targeted School Policies,” Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (June 2023).

Cheers

• “Indoctrination has no place in education.” —Wall Street Journal
• A new study finds that KIPP middle and high school students have college completion rates that are almost twice as high as students who applied but didn’t make the lottery. —The 74
• Teachers are too busy dealing with changing technology, discipline issues, learning loss, and more to be loony ideologues proselytizing children. —Jim Geraghty

Jeers

• When enrollment declines force districts to close schools, they should target their low-performing, half-empty ones. Yet Denver might adopt a dubious policy to ignore these factors. —Chalkbeat

• Young men continue to benefit from affirmative action as the number of women at most colleges continues to surge. —New York Times
• Public trust in universities has plummeted in the last decade, and enrollment numbers have followed; rising costs and wokeness are to blame. —Paul Tough
• Mississippi didn’t fudge its reading gains with student retention, but achieved real, lasting academic improvements through smart policy. —Washington Post
• Many states and schools are moving away from credit hours and towards a competency-based system of graduation requirements. —The 74