Rather than wait until kids are leaving high school to try to even the playing field, we must start in kindergarten to identify the most academically talented students of all races and backgrounds and give them the support they need to excel.
Immediately following the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the use of race in college admissions, the Biden administration released a U.S. Department of Education plan to “promote educational opportunity and diversity in colleges and universities.” It includes forthcoming guidance to higher education institutions on how to use still-lawful practices to promote diversity, particularly new “measures of adversity” that consider what applicants may have had to overcome. The department also will consider expanding data collections and transparency around admissions factors and convene an “educational opportunity” summit to bring colleges and universities together with students, advocates, and researchers to discuss a way forward.
That’s all well and good, but it’s worth noting what was left off the department’s laundry list: anything having to do with K–12 education. That’s a huge missed opportunity and one that the administration should urgently work to address. One of the most effective ways to boost college diversity is by building broader, more inclusive paths to educational excellence. And that work starts in kindergarten.
Imagine if, instead of or in addition to looking at adversity and other proxies for race, our nation dedicated itself to creating a more diverse pipeline of high school graduates with the ability to do advanced-level work. Imagine a world where college admissions offices didn’t rely on loopholes and complicated backdoor policies to create diverse student populations. Imagine that the top high school students in the United States were already racially and socioeconomically representative of our great nation—without the need for affirmative action of any kind.
A stubborn gap in “excellence”
Sadly, we are a long way from that today. On virtually any measure, there’s an “excellence gap” among students coming out of twelfth grade. Students reaching the highest levels of performance—whether measured by test scores, grade-point average, or the number of Advanced Placement courses—are more likely to be Asian or White than Latino or Black. This excellence gap means that White and Asian teenagers are disproportionately represented among the top 10 percent of U.S. students, while Latino and Black students are significantly underrepresented.
Closing this gap will not be easy. It is related to a complex mix of social and historical conditions, including the impact of centuries of systemic racism, sharp socioeconomic divides between racial groups, and big differences in school experiences, family structures, and parenting practices. But frankly, as a nation, we’ve never really given it the “old college try.” If we focused on what schools can do to recognize and nurture excellence in all students, instead of just trying to work around the gaps at the end of their high-school careers, we could make significant progress toward the inclusive college campuses we all want to see.
That’s the message from an important new report from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, an ideologically and racially diverse set of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners convened by Fordham. Its most important message: Rather than wait until kids are leaving high school to try to even the playing field, we must start in kindergarten to identify the most academically talented students of all races and backgrounds and give them the support they need to excel.
The working group makes three dozen recommendations for states, schools, districts, and charter networks, with specific opportunity-building actions that start in the earliest grades and continue through high school. It is a clear roadmap for building this wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced students.
The first step is called “frontloading,” a type of enrichment provided to young children before they are old enough to be assessed for advanced learning opportunities like gifted and talented programs. Because poor children tend to come to school with limited vocabulary and less knowledge about the world compared to their more affluent peers, they typically earn lower scores on most traditional academic assessments—even if they have the intellectual horsepower to take on rigorous academic work. High-quality enrichment programs can help young students build knowledge and vocabulary to improve their reading skills and get them on the path to success.
The next step is to use “universal screening” to find every single child who could benefit from enrichment, acceleration, and other advanced learning opportunities. Schools and districts can use valid and reliable assessments—such as IQ tests, diagnostic exams, or state achievement tests—to identify all kids with the potential to do advanced-level work. That’s a big change from how many school districts do things today, which is to ask parents or teachers to nominate children for their gifted programs (or later, Advanced Placement courses). It’s not hard to see how that approach can bring with it racial and socioeconomic biases. Affluent, college-educated parents tend to be more aware of these programs and know how to advocate for their kids. And classroom teachers, however fair-minded, might overlook some talented students because they don’t fit a stereotype of a high achiever.
Opportunity starts in elementary school
Once students are identified as highly capable, they need the programs and opportunities that can help them realize their potential. School-based programs that do this can take many forms, but most share several key features. They allow students to study and engage with academic materials more broadly and deeply than the typical class, including doing above-grade-level work. They allow students to skip an entire grade if that’s what a child needs and can handle. And once students get to middle and high school, they automatically are enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes. In other words, no more gatekeeping that tends to dissuade kids on the bubble from giving these tougher classes a shot.
Doing this work and doing it well will take leadership and commitment from district and charter network leaders. Educators will have to view greater equity in education as crucial—and not just for their lowest-achieving students, but also for their highest-achieving ones. They will have to reexamine how a student’s potential is measured, and when. And they will have to focus on supporting more students to excel, including by looking closely at how students are identified to participate in advanced coursework and enrichment programs. The absolute worst thing schools could do is to eliminate advanced learning opportunities, like gifted and talented programs or honors classes, which have disproportionate White and Asian enrollments that mirror the “excellence gap.” True equity demands that we mend, rather than end, such programs—and extend these opportunities to many more kids.
Universities might object that there’s not much they can do about K–12 educational practices. But that’s simply not true. Institutions of higher education can make sure that their schools of education prepare future teachers and school leaders to recognize and serve every student who can do advanced-level work, especially students from low-income families. And universities can lend their expertise and money to local school districts and charter networks that need assistance in putting these kinds of initiatives in place.
The Biden administration should widen its action plan to include the K–12 system. Starting in kindergarten isn’t the fastest way to college diversity, but it is probably the sturdiest.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
In the latest issue of Education Next, James Peyser argues that “overpromising” undercut the ed reform movement, in which he played a prominent role for three decades in a series of roles—from education advisor to two governors to chairman of the State Board of Education and, most recently, Massachusetts secretary of education, from which he stepped down earlier this year. Peyser is currently an academic visitor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a senior advisor for America Achieves and Bellwether Education Partners.
In your Education Next piece, you list four basic components of the education reform playbook of the last few decades: standards, assessment, and accountability; innovative schools, instructional tools, and systems, including ed tech; robust teacher recruitment and training; and autonomous schools and parent choice. With the benefits of hindsight, were those the right levers?
I would say yes. I think they were and still are the right elements, but doing them well isn’t so easy, and sustaining them over time isn’t so easy, either. I still think these are all worthy projects for policymakers to be involved in, but at the end of the day, they’re necessary but not sufficient to achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves about raising the overall level of learning and closing disparities among various communities and student subgroups.
Surely, some of those have borne more fruit than others. Which are you most sanguine about going forward?
Unfortunately, I think all of them are at risk, either because they are still under direct assault from long-standing opponents or because policymakers and ed reformers have lost interest or shifted their focus to other things. Underlying this trend, I think, is a public narrative that this package of policies hasn’t really produced much, in terms of better or more equitable student outcomes. I think the data suggest that in fact these reforms have been very successful, at least pre-Covid, but not as successful as had been promised or expected. From my perspective, we need to defend and sustain the basic reform infrastructure of the past twenty–thirty years, while paying far more attention to the scalable evidence-based programs and practices that are delivering positive results in the classroom.
Can I push back a little on the efficacy of standards? It feels to me like the challenge was never setting standards, but meeting them.
I was fairly skeptical about standards-based reform at first because it felt like we were trying to tell teachers how they should do their business. Instead, we ought to be getting out of their way, while breaking up the monopoly structure of public education by giving parents more power and opportunity to make choices if they aren’t satisfied with the education their children are getting. But over time, it became increasingly clear to me that in too many schools and districts across the entire system, but especially in low-income communities, there was a complacent attitude towards student achievement and outcomes or a belief that schools cannot overcome the challenges of poverty. Getting the state involved was the only way to lean in against other forces that were pushing the system away from higher expectations for all students, whether it’s schools of education, the teachers unions, or education bureaucracies. There needed to be some other intervention to break up the inertia. And state governments were the only ones that had enough heft to actually move the system, or at least influence it in a positive direction. Obviously, that’s fraught with risk because you can go in the wrong direction and make things worse. But it seemed like parent choice or, if you will, a more open educational marketplace alone was not a sufficiently strong counterweight to make a difference in terms of broader or system-wide outcomes.
School choice seems to be the dominant driver now, at least on the right. You don’t sound optimistic that it will yield better results than the last thirty years of reform.
When I think about how I originally got into this work, it was much more around charter schools and choice, and through the lens of letting educators teach and getting the monopolistic district bureaucracy out of the way. I still think that’s a good thing, but also in the “necessary not sufficient” category. Just letting schools or individual teachers do whatever they want and having parents vote with their feet unfortunately doesn’t produce the kind of results that we’d like—at least not at scale. The tricky part is that there certainly are educators who know what they’re doing, who get great results—actually, a lot of them. The problem is that when you try to standardize across a one-best way or a very narrow set of practices or tools, systems, and curricula, you inevitably run into trouble—in part because you can’t force people to do something they don’t believe in and in part because one size really doesn’t fit all. It’s also possible, in fact it’s pretty certain, that mistakes or bad decisions will be made, which will negatively affect everyone, instead of just one school or classroom.
The idea of predicating reform on attracting the cognitive elite into our classrooms feels to me like something that, in retrospect, we would do differently.
Directionally, it still makes sense to try to try to get the best people we can into the field. I mean, why would you do otherwise? But even if you love the work, it may not always be a rewarding career. It seems to me that one of the problems is the sense that many teachers have when they enter a school, especially teachers with other career options, that they don’t have enough control over their destiny in their own classroom, that they’re not succeeding with their students, or the work environment is just sort of oppressively bureaucratic. You can only stand that for so long. If you’re someone who’s got options, you’re going to move on to something else. If you see yourself as a cog in a great wheel, you can very quickly lose your enthusiasm, even if you love the children. But there’s no enterprise that will succeed for very long without a strong human capital pipeline. We need to constantly be working on that. So, yes, we can’t say that we’ll fail unless we get only the brightest, smartest people in the world, but I think we should probably be setting our sights higher than we are, while at the same time providing better support for the educators we have.
Is it my imagination or did ed reform just give a pass to ed schools?
There was a lot of emphasis on alternative certification pathways that generated a fair amount of traction, and TFA is an example of this, but we seemed to just run out of gas. Part of it may be the collective bargaining agreements that still compensated people for graduate degrees, as well as district hiring practices that didn’t change all that much. But the other part is that, as hard as K–12 education reform is, higher ed is worse. Taking on the ed schools or trying to reform colleges and universities is just such a daunting and prolonged challenge that maybe people just gave up.
I’ve heard David Steiner, who was state ed commissioner in New York, say, “We’ve got the power of accreditation. We’ve got the power of certification. Why are we afraid to use it?”
That’s true. Part of my role as secretary in Massachusetts was to oversee public higher education and serve on the Board of Higher Education. On the one hand, the board had a great deal of power because of its authority to approve degree programs. But, typically, once the board confers degree-granting authority to a college, you’re set for the rest of eternity. The board has authority to revisit those programs, evaluate their quality, and make judgments, but as far as I know, it’s never been done. Separately, our Board of Elementary and Secondary Education oversees teacher prep programs at colleges and universities, as part of the educator certification system. And similarly, that authority is underutilized—although, just over the last year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued a rubric and a set of standards specific to education programs that clarify that the department and the board have the authority to decertify an individual program within a school of education, without de-certifying the entire school or department. So, for example, if your elementary reading program is teaching balanced literacy or whole language and doing nothing about phonics, based on criteria they have now established, the department could say, “You’re no longer authorized to certify elementary school teachers.” We’ll see if that goes anywhere, but at a minimum it’s now put the ed schools on notice.
There was a line in your Education Next piece that frankly struck me as a bit depressing, about the “breakdown in the shared understanding of what educational excellence means” and the purpose of our schools in the first place. If we can’t agree on what we’re doing, then how can we shape policy to do it?
I think it’s hugely problematic. The glimmer of hope is that I do think the average American parent, and I would like to think the average educator, actually has a pretty traditional understanding of what schools and schooling are supposed to be about, namely preparing young people for college, career, and citizenship. And the large majority of parents still believe their own children are going to good schools. Unfortunately, activists and advocates are filling the air time and creating a public narrative that schools are not just failing to live up to expectations in terms of student learning, but are actually a big part of the problems we’re having as a society. From the left, you hear that schools are drivers of the school-to-prison pipeline and from the right that they’re indoctrinating our kids to become social justice warriors. And, of course, you still hear the argument, most regularly from the teachers unions, that until you end poverty and racism, schools won’t really matter and it’s giving false hope to students to believe that if they just get straight A’s, everything’s going to be fine. My hypothesis is that the center still holds, but it’s a fragile silent majority that’s being drowned out by these other voices, and it needs some organized support, which at the moment seems to be absent.
It’s not lost upon me that the movement that once insisted poverty isn’t determinative now insists race is. My hunch is that’s how ed reform explains its failures to itself.
I think there’s something to that, at least among some people and organizations that have been part of the reform movement since the beginning. Look, poverty and race really do matter, and they need to be taken into account as part of any strategy for educational improvement. But there’s no question that poor children and children of color can and do learn at the highest levels, and that by doing so, they unlock life-changing opportunities for themselves and their families. Saying or implying that, no matter how hard you work or how much you learn, your life chances will ultimately be determined by factors beyond your control—it’s not only incredibly demoralizing, it’s also wrong, and it can become a convenient excuse for the adults and a self-fulfilling prophecy for the students that perpetuates inequality.
So it seems there’s a lot to be discouraged about, but what gives you hope?
As I said earlier, I think the majority of parents and educators are still focused on the right things and still think the basic architecture of education reform is sound. That’s a good place to start. I also think there are a number of programs and practices that are not only working well for students, but are getting increasing traction in the field and with policymakers. Things like the science of reading, early college, career pathways, and expanded vocational-technical education. The focus on evaluating curriculum and professional development based on student outcomes continues to gain acceptance. I’m encouraged by the growing interest in high-dosage tutoring and the renewed focus on civics education, although I’m concerned about prioritizing activism over knowledge and informed civil discourse.
Nearly two years after federal data indicated that 99 percent of students had returned to in-person learning full-time, as many as one out of three students still haven’t really returned full-time—because 33 percent of American students remain chronically absent. That means that they’re missing at least 10 percent of school days, or more than three weeks a year. And the consequences can be devastating: Chronic absenteeism predicts worse academic performance and long-term health outcomes, as well as higher risks of dropping out, poverty in adulthood, and involvement in the criminal justice system.
What’s more, that 33 percent is an average. In many schools, especially those enrolling many students from historically underserved populations, the rates are even worse. This creates an equity concern, too, as disproportionate rates of absenteeism can exacerbate already-disproportionate academic, economic, health, and other outcomes.
A recent wave of public attention to student absenteeism has suggested several contributing factors, including escalating mental health crises, spotty transportation access, recent changes to grading policies, and pandemic-induced disruptions to routine. All of these are surely at issue. Having taught before, during, and after the remote learning era, I’d like to add one more probable cause to the list: the shift of so many class materials online.
In the 2010s, when I started teaching high school, the internet was already part of regular school life. I managed all grades online, students enjoyed the occasional online activity (all my fellow teachers know Kahoot!), and I assigned end-of-unit papers via Google Classroom. Most other activities, though, were offline, whether students were doing turn and talks, fishbowl discussions, quick writes, gallery walks, whole-class read-alouds, or even plain, old-fashioned note-taking. There just wasn’t a reason to post all materials online, and like other teachers, I adopted various strategies for absent students to make up missed work as best as they could.
But in March 2020, when schools shut down, every element of class had to move online. Students couldn’t jot down answers to a reading quiz on a half-sheet of notebook paper, so they responded through Google Forms. They couldn’t annotate a poem together on chart paper, so they collaborated on Google Slides. In many school districts, including my own at the time (New York City), policymakers rightly recognized disparities in internet access and prohibited making attendance at synchronous class sessions mandatory. As a result, though, if we wanted to have any type of “discussion,” it would have to occur on a virtual discussion board (or Padlet, or any similar ed tech tool of the moment). If teachers wanted to give notes, we had to record ourselves and post that recording for student reference. Suddenly, school existed entirely online, available at any time, at least for students with decent internet access.
In Fall 2020, when I started teaching in Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools, I found that the learning platforms of choice were different, but the underlying policies were much the same, even when we shifted to “hybrid” learning later in the year. Attendance became mandatory, but so was posting every assignment and every synchronous session.
Finally, in Fall 2021, we returned to school fully in-person, five days a week. And yet, after a long eighteen months, we had all grown accustomed to school existing primarily online. Many parents and other caregivers had had to help their children navigate online learning; now, they had come to expect to be able to examine all readings and assignments with just a few clicks. There was an appeal for educators, too. Learning management systems shrank their messy paper piles, and if a student missed class, a teacher could point to the virtual discussion thread for making up participation points.
Students, most of all, had adapted and adjusted their expectations accordingly. They had received the message that school was school, whether in-person or not, and they were getting “the work” done, whether they were raising their hands in the physical classroom or clicking through checklists on learning management systems. If they could earn the credit either way, and everything that happened in class was going to be posted anyway, then suddenly there was much less incentive to be in class.
Exacerbating the situation were concurrent grading reforms like the 50 percent rule, under which students could not earn less than 50 percent credit for any assignment. Such reforms made any individual assignment—and therefore any particular class day—seem optional, as students could pass without attempting every task.
No, this doesn’t amount to a scientific study of online learning and absenteeism. But these were my experiences in two of the country’s largest school systems, and ed tech’s recent growth spurt would indicate that, for millions of others, school not only moved online in 2020, but stayed there. Instructure, the maker of popular learning management system Canvas, grew in revenue by 21 percent just in the first quarter of 2022, and literacy-focused site Newsela nearly quadrupled from 11 million student accounts in 2020 to 40 million in 2023. As a whole, the education app sector grew by 7 percent in 2022 compared to the year before, and it’s projected to experience nearly 9 percent compound growth each year until 2030.
I anticipate some traditionalists saying, “So then, teachers shouldn’t put everything online, and they ought to make in-person class experiences more meaningful!” Easier said than done on both counts. There is huge pressure from many administrators and families—not to mention state and federal legislators—to maintain most or all class materials online. I sure wasn’t willing to risk my job over a Schoology debate, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect any teacher to do so.
And yes, it would be fantastic if classroom culture and the promise of an exciting class discussion could always motivate students to attend regularly in person, but in reality, that’s not always enough. And not because students are acting out of malice or laziness: If a teenager is struggling with anxiety or exhausted from having to work a late-night shift, and she can make up the work online, then the benefits of days off might seem to outweigh the benefits of days in the classroom. Especially if everyone in class will be typing away on Google Docs, there might not feel like a meaningful difference between writing at home or at school. After all, adults are asking similar questions about in-person work, and many resist returning to the office.
What should come next is complicated. There’s been a culture shift, and schools can’t unring this bell. Kids aren’t going to come pouring back into classrooms simply because a few assignments aren’t online anymore. Caregivers’ greater involvement is probably here to stay. Tools that can make teachers’ jobs easier are generally a good thing. And maintaining materials online continues to reduce some inequities, including among students with disabilities, for example, and for students facing personal crises that cause extended absences.
Realistically, individual district and school contexts will dictate varying policy solutions. Some communities must reduce barriers to attendance, whether by offering essential services like laundry or combating the ongoing bus driver shortage. Closely monitoring attendance data and reaching out early to families can also reduce absenteeism, especially for many of the most vulnerable students. More radically, some policymakers may want to rethink what the school day should look like, seeking opportunities to boost attendance through more robust afterschool programs, work-based learning experiences, or entirely revised school schedules. Google Classroom and its ilk aren’t signing out anytime soon, but this new normal doesn’t mean that we should accept skyrocketing chronic absenteeism as the new normal, too.
For folks who question the value of a traditional four-year college degree—whether they have done so for ages or have only recently lost faith—apprenticeships seem like a promising alternative for young people leaving high school. They provide immediate pay, in-demand job skills training, mentorship from an experienced professional, and conclude with a nationally-portable credential. Why, then, has the United States lagged behind its international peers in creating, promoting, and filling apprenticeship slots? And can those barriers be overcome to finally supercharge the model here? A recent brief from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) tries to find out.
Author Taylor Maag focuses on formal, federally-registered apprenticeship efforts, which allows for comparison to other countries like the United Kingdom and Germany. Unfortunately, it also leads immediately to roadblock number one: Historically, the United States has favored college matriculation over career education for high school graduates (and for non-graduates seeking to return to complete their education, too), and federal expenditures reflect this favoritism. Pre-pandemic, Maag reports, the federal government spent roughly $149 billion per year on higher education versus $58 billion for workforce-related education and training. And even that latter category included Pell Grants and education programs for veterans, most of which also went to traditional higher education institutions. Maag estimates that the U.S. only spent about $16 billion, spread across seventeen separate federal programs, to provide workforce-focused education, employment, and training assistance. Apprenticeships comprised just a fraction of that.
Roadblock number two: lack of employer buy-in. Apprenticeships are costly to start up, onerous to maintain at a high level, and require a lot of time and oversight. All of this for what could be minimal yield from the pool of potential apprentices, or apprentices who may not stick around once their program is finished.
Roadblock number three, meanwhile, is political. Specifically, Maag states that an effort by President Trump to make apprenticeships simpler to set up and run (via executive order) was opposed so broadly and vehemently that previous bipartisan agreement on the issue was ripped asunder. While that sounds like a very specific and recent point of contention, quickly rescinded upon the change of leadership, historic levels of buy-in on both sides of the aisle will surely be necessary to make an impact.
Currently, just 0.3 percent of all workers in America are apprentices. PPI is looking to boost those numbers significantly to more closely match the percentages of apprentices in the workforce of other countries (2.7 percent in the U.K. and 3.7 percent in Germany, to name two examples), and that means adding 1 million U.S. apprentices annually until the goal of 4 million is reached and maintained. PPI’s recommendations to achieve this lofty goal lead off with federal expenditures of approximately $4 billion a year (based upon a 2015 analysis that showed a single registered apprenticeship cost $4,000 per year to create, oversee, and maintain). The additional money would be carved off from current higher education funding, which makes sense, given that most potential apprentices would be young people diverted from attending college.
But even with that logic, and the fact that the total would represent a tiny reduction in the higher ed line, Maag does not explain why PPI believes the federal government should be footing the entire bill. If employers will receive significant benefit (for every dollar spent on apprenticeship, she writes, “employers get an average of $1.47 back in increased productivity, reduced waste of time and cost, and greater front-line innovation”), surely they should be ponying up some fraction of the seed money as other exemplar countries do.
PPI also recommends an expansion of recipients of federal support, including what are termed “intermediaries” (public organizations, nonprofit groups, labor unions, and for-profit service providers), who would help employers set up and maintain their apprenticeship programs. Additionally, the brief calls for “encourag[ing] alignment and partnership” across government programs to ensure this new apprenticeship paradigm doesn’t become siloed at the federal level, and to make sure that K–12, higher education, and workforce systems are all on the same page at the state and local levels, too.
The policy brief concludes that this proposal is a “smart way to grow a high-quality, evidence-based career path” with the aim of “leveling the playing field between degree and nondegree workers while also ensuring strong returns on investment through outcomes-based funding and industry-driven partnerships.” If the college degree premium is waning, then PPI is probably right. Nevertheless, it stills feels like a huge swing for the fences either way.
SOURCE: Taylor Maag, “Strengthening America’s Workforce: The path to 4 million apprenticeships,” Progressive Policy Institute (May 2023).
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