Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of
Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of 100 percent reading proficiency by 2014—maybe we went a little overboard, folks. (Though I’m sympathetic to Mike Petrilli’s Ahab-like insistence that standards-based reform, for all its flaws, really was a net positive.)
After the bipartisan consensus splintered in the late Obama and early Trump years, and with some space to assess the era’s wins and losses, the charter sector remains one of the few reforms of that period that (just about) everyone agrees was a success. They’re popular, they boast real academic advantages over traditional public schools, especially for poor kids, and, through competitive effects, they even improve the outcomes of students in those nearby traditional public schools.
Given their popularity and success, one might be curious how—given the ever-changing landscape of school choice and the recent adoption of education savings accounts (ESAs) across several states—the charter sector is adapting. There are currently 21 ESA programs across 18 states. The expansion of such programs coincides with a recent uptick in homeschooling and microschooling—a trend enhanced by the COVID pandemic.
Typically, reformers have worried that union and Democratic pressure would stifle charters in blue states. Now we have to ask: Can charter schools keep pace with more widely available private alternatives in red states with robust ESA programs?
A new report from AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network offers a preview of the answer. Ian Kingsbury and David T. Marshall surveyed 285 charter leaders across three states—Arizona, Florida, and Utah—with mature ESA programs to get a better sense of enrollment impacts on charter schools associated with the competing private school options in those states.
Their data indicate that the spread of ESAs and popularity of alternative options may indeed be placing strain on traditional charter schools in jurisdictions such as these that have both. In particular, charter schools are now “forced to compete against nimble, less-regulated ESA-funded providers while operating under heavier compliance and resource constraints than traditional districts are.”
Their survey, though narrow in scope, reveals that charter schools are in fact experiencing student withdrawals in Arizona, Florida, and Utah. For example, in Arizona, where the universal ESA has been in place the longest, “nearly half of leaders indicated that students had already left their schools to use ESA funds,” with reported withdrawals ranging from a single student to dozens or even hundreds in larger schools. On surveys, 58 percent of Arizona respondents anticipated that ESAs would decrease their enrollment. Whether their predictions and worries prove true is yet to be seen, but insiders and practitioners are feeling competitive pressure.
When asked about funding for their schools, charter leaders indicated frustration with high compliance costs. While ESA programs typically provide lower per-pupil funds, charter monies are eaten up to accommodate oversight from authorizers, maintenance and overhead costs, and detailed reporting.
The leaders surveyed argued that, particularly due to ESAs altering the competitive landscape of schooling options, there is a heightened need for reforms targeted at reducing bureaucracy within the public sector. While charters already enjoy greater operational autonomy than traditional public schools, the sector still faces regulations that make it difficult to compete with comparatively flexible private options. To help them compete with ESAs, the surveyed leaders noted the need for funding equity, getting rid of duplicative reporting requirements, facilities and transportation support, and streamlining special education paperwork.
Most of them emphasized that they’re more interested in reforming charter schools to allow them to better compete with ESAs than to abandon the market altogether, noting that charter schools maintain strong reputations and that they provide “appropriate governance, accountability, and oversight.” When asked whether their respective state’s ESA program impacted their likelihood of starting a private alternative, the majority of respondents reported “no effect,” implying that charter leaders still prefer the public option.
ESA-induced competition appears only likely to increase. Coupled with the anticipated demographic cliff and new Education Freedom Tax Credit, traditional public and charter schools seem positioned for continuing enrollment declines unless changes are made to retain children in these classrooms.
Lurking behind this report is a more fundamental question: Should charter schools even continue to exist? Or should reformers let creative destruction work and replace an antiquated model with the new era of ESAs?
As those in the survey identified, there are comparative advantages to charter schools: They serve students with special needs; accountability regimes and public oversight guarantee at least a floor of quality; they’re replicable and scalable; and without tuition, they seem more accessible to families. A strong education marketplace requires many options—public, private, and charter. Moreover, if the sector dies with a whimper, those within it suggest that it will come through overregulation, not its own failures.
To let charter schools wither away would be a mistake. To preserve the distinctive strengths of charters, conservatives can work to trim needless regulation, streamline authorization processes, and lift enrollment caps. To do otherwise is to risk letting one of the primary successes of the bipartisan education reform movement become just another failure.
There’s an old adage that it’s better to build a sturdy fence at the top of a cliff than station an ambulance at the bottom. This wisdom has been conveyed through a variety of metaphors, but the underlying lesson is the same: preventing problems before they occur is almost always more effective than responding after the damage has been done. Yet K–12 education too often embraces the opposite instinct. For instance, schools aren’t held accountable for reading and math outcomes until the end of third grade, even though many of the conditions that shape student success take hold well before then. The result is a cascading series of downstream consequences, from the overrepresentation of Black boys in special education to the shunting of less effective teachers to the early grades.
My colleague Mike Petrilli recently argued that high school foreign language requirements are another example of education’s too-little, too-late tendency. He’s right. If the goal is for students to become proficient in another language, beginning in middle or high school is an awfully inefficient way to get there. If schools were serious about teaching students a second language, the more sensible approach would be to start earlier, when students have far more time to build fluency, and sustain instruction over many years. This points to a broader truth: timing shapes what schools can reasonably accomplish.
Foundational reading skills and automaticity with basic math facts are also worth prioritizing while students are young. Both are harder, sometimes impossible, to pick up later if they’re missed early. Students who fail to master the basics can struggle to keep up in class, require progressively intensive remediation, disengage from school, and eventually drop out. The fact that many middle schoolers still have not fully recovered from the pandemic underscores the point. The longer gaps are allowed to fester, the more difficult—and costly—it becomes to get students back on track.
School discipline further illustrates this dynamic. Much of the debate focuses on the higher rates at which Black students are suspended compared with White students. But by the time a student has misbehaved himself into suspension, expulsion, or involvement with law enforcement, the school is often dealing with behavior that has escalated over months or even years. As researchED’s Tom Bennett has written, schools need to establish clear routines, expectations, and boundaries before problems arise. “It’s all about building that fence.”Waiting until behavior has deteriorated before responding consumes more energy and effort than consistently enforcing clear expectations from the start.
So why do schools end up reacting to problems rather than heading them off? Part of the answer is that prevention is less tangible. A student who is failing or repeatedly disrupting class creates an immediate problem that demands attention. One who learns to read well in the early grades may never need tutoring, but there is no obvious crisis to point to as evidence that the early instruction worked. Similarly, schools that establish and enforce clear routines and expectations may never have to suspend a student, but there’s no way of knowing which disciplinary problems never materialized. The way education data is gathered reinforces this bias. Students who fail or misbehave show up in the numbers; students who never reach that point do not. As Mitch Daniels often says, “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.” Prevention is therefore inherently counterfactual. It’s easier to point to an ambulance that saved someone than to a fence that kept someone from falling.
There’s a broader institutional challenge here too. Education has a powerful bias toward preserving the status quo. “We’ve always done it this way” is a familiar refrain in struggling schools and districts. My former boss, Tony Bennett, often talked about how the traditional system is organized around adult comfort rather than what’s best for children. As frustrating as this inertia can be, it is also understandable, even rational. A school can see the disruption caused by changing how it teaches reading or enforces its student code of conduct. The benefits of change, on the other hand, are longer-term and far harder to grasp. And so the ambulance light spins on and on.
The point isn’t that every problem can be headed off. Sometimes the ambulance is exactly what’s needed. Tier II and Tier III supports matter. And high school foreign language courses can still give students valuable exposure to another language and culture, even if they are unlikely to produce fluency on their own.
For policymakers, the question is not only what schools should achieve, but when they need to act to make that outcome possible. What needs to happen early? What can wait? Where is the cost of waiting likely to be especially high? And what do schools need to be able to do before a problem becomes harder to address? The alternative is to keep asking schools to solve problems after they’ve become intractable.
Approximately half of American adults read at a sixth-grade level or below, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation. The consequences of poor literacy skills are profound: higher unemployment rates, lower-paying work, and struggles with routine tasks such as reading prescriptions or bills. From a societal perspective, widespread illiteracy means slower economic growth, a less vibrant democracy, and greater taxpayer burdens.
Adult illiteracy rates of course include many who attended school decades ago. But the outlook is—somewhat surprisingly—just as grim for today’s students. In Ohio, 38 percent of fourth graders and 31 percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” (the lowest mark) on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. These failure rates have crept upward over the past decade—accelerating during the pandemic—and in 2024 they reached the highest levels since the turn of the century.
To address this literacy crisis, Ohio lawmakers have enacted two landmark policy reforms: the third grade reading guarantee (2012) and science of reading initiatives (2023).
The third grade reading guarantee requires elementary schools to identify struggling readers in grades K–3 and create an improvement plan outlining the additional supports they will provide. The guarantee initially required schools to retain third graders (with narrow exceptions) who fell short of a state reading target and provide them with more intensive interventions.
The science-of-reading initiative requires schools to align their curriculum and instruction with the five pillars of evidence-based reading practices (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). It also requires colleges of education to align their teacher preparation with the science of reading, and included more than $170 million to support implementation in K–12 schools and higher education.
Fordham’s latest report, The Next Chapter: Ohio’s implementation of the science of reading—and where to next, reviews Ohio’s efforts to implement key provisions of these literacy reforms, focusing primarily on state- and district-level activities.[1] Important—but mixed—developments pertaining to the third grade reading guarantee include the following:
As for science-of-reading implementation, the report documents the following:
With one glaring exception (retention), Ohio has a solid early literacy policy framework.[2] When it comes to implementation—how laws are translated into practice—the state has moved aggressively in various areas such as curriculum and teacher PD. But it will take more to sustain this momentum. The following summarizes key ways that state leaders can keep the pedal to the floor.
Steady leadership. Due to term limits, Governor DeWine’s tenure is drawing to a close. The next governor should also embrace literacy reform, making it a top priority and taking actions that challenge schools to rigorously implement the science of reading. As exemplified by Massachusetts and Mississippi, strong and sustained leadership has been critical to keeping education reforms on track and working to produce results. Ohio will need that same type of resolve to ensure that literacy reforms yield long-term benefits for its students.
Strong accountability. State policymakers must hold schools and educators accountable for implementation and improved reading achievement. They can do this in the following ways (further discussion of each recommendation appears at the link noted).
a. Require schools to meet with parents of struggling readers more than once per year.
b. Restore the third grade retention requirement.
c. Support inspections of low-performing schools’ alignment to the science of reading.
d. Strengthen the teacher preparation program audits.
Knowledge-building focus. Discussion around the science of reading tends to revolve around phonics—i.e., teaching children to “decode” by sounding out words. While phonics is absolutely essential, it’s not the only ingredient to reading success. Students also need a rich vocabulary and strong background knowledge to make sense of what they are reading. The good news is that the content-rich Core Knowledge Language Arts has become the most-selected literacy curriculum in Ohio, with roughly one in four districts choosing this program for third grade instruction; another one in five uses another core reading program that is nationally recognized as knowledge-rich. This means, however, that just over half of Ohio districts are using third-grade reading programs of more questionable depth when it comes to foundational knowledge and vocabulary. Policymakers should continue to seek ways to promote vocabulary and background knowledge, whether by focusing future PD efforts on those reading pillars or providing grants for districts seeking to implement content-rich programs.
Rigorous evaluation. While Ohio schools are starting to row in the same direction on literacy, there remains wide variety in the specific programs schools use and quality of instruction. Rigorous research should be undertaken to shine light on which core curricula, intervention programs, and professional supports provide the strongest benefits for students. This can help state and local officials pinpoint programs and initiatives worth promoting through targeted investments (and which should be discontinued).
—
Literacy has the power to change lives. It can unlock further education and rewarding careers. It opens minds to new ideas and ways of thinking. The ability to read is necessary for responsible citizenship and independent adulthood. Thanks to the work of state policymakers, Ohio has moved in the right direction on literacy policy. With continued bold leadership and rigorous implementation in the years ahead, Ohio can make good on its promise of higher reading achievement.
[1] Classroom-level implementation is beyond the scope of this report, but a survey of Ohio teachers offers insight into how they view and implement the science of reading: Alanna Bjorklund-Young and Andrea Ochoa, Ohio’s Path to Early Literacy, Johns Hopkins University/Thomas B. Fordham Institute (March 2025).
[2] Though beyond the scope of the present report, a comprehensive policy framework for reading achievement across all grades also includes a rigorous school report card and academically driven graduation requirements. For discussion of these topics and how Ohio can improve those areas, see Aaron Churchill, Ohio’s High School Diploma: Gateway to success or door to nowhere? Fordham Institute (October 2025), and ibid., “Getting Ohio’s early literacy measure right,” Fordham Institute, blog (January 28, 2026).
New York City Schools piloted an external qualitative review (QR) in a subset of its schools for the first time in 2005, intended to expand the definition of school quality via a school inspection-type model and to broaden the scope of educational accountability. Along with traditionally examined outcomes like test scores, disciplinary actions, attendance, and graduation rates, outside analysts aimed to capture schools’ quality across three additional dimensions: their instructional core, school culture, and structures in place for continuous improvement. New research looks at whether such an expansion of accountability improved schools.
Due to concerns over cost and potential disruption to school operations (external reviewers were on site for two or three days), the New York City Department of Education both delayed and staggered the rollout of QR across the district, beginning in the 2009–10 school year. The first year prioritized schools that were low-performing or in danger of becoming low-performing based on the most recent district-issued Progress Reports. Higher-performing schools were entered into a lottery system to receive their first qualitative review as soon as possible after 2009–10. The low performers received annual reviews; higher performers were on a three- or four-year schedule depending on how highly they were initially rated.
American University researcher Robert Shand exploits all of these implementation quirks in his analysis, covering 2009–10 through 2013–14. His main goal: determining how more frequent exposure to external qualitative evaluation impacted school practice and learning outcomes, including test scores, graduation rates, attendance, and the various QR measures. For just a taste of these new quality measures: Instructional core indicators included measures of a rigorous, engaging curriculum aligned with learning standards; school culture measures captured a positive learning environment (or not) and a climate of high expectations (or not); and structures for improvement concerned processes like institutional goal-setting and teacher support systems.
The publicly available data Shand uses came from the New York City Department of Education, including whether and when a school was subject to QR, scores for all QRs conducted, and measures of teacher practice from the annual Learning Environment Survey/School Survey. Student outcomes included scores on third through eighth grade math and English language arts state tests, four-year and six-year high school graduation rates, and student attendance, all compiled by NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools. Shand employs a regression discontinuity design to examine the effects of additional evaluation and feedback provided via QR on student outcomes and the new quality measures.
First, the bad news: No statistically significant impacts from a quality review were seen in any school receiving a review, and even the small nonsignificant positive improvements on test scores observed were driven by a handful of schools, appeared two to three years after QR, and faded by the following year. Whether reviews were annual or intermittent made no difference.
On the more positive side, some additional dimensions of school quality examined via QR did show improvement following a review. These include the number of teachers reporting that they use data to guide decision-making and those working in collaboration with their peers, as well as measures of overall learning environment quality. Even better: Higher overall QR scores predicted modest test score gains in a given school—albeit not for a year or two after the review—with Shand suggesting that QR’s primary value is as a leading indicator rather than a diagnostic tool.
“Taken together,” Shand concludes, “the findings support a cautiously optimistic but qualified view of qualitative accountability as one component of a broader school improvement strategy…but insufficient on its own to drive sustained gains in student learning.” In other words, even a rigorous on-site review doesn’t negate the need to keep a sharp eye on more traditional measures of quality and for schools to change course when, say, test scores fall or absenteeism rises.
SOURCE: Robert Shand, “The Effects of Qualitative Accountability on School Improvement Efforts: Evidence from New York City,” Leadership and Policy in Schools (June 2026).
Third-grade proficiency is one of the most consequential milestones in a child’s academic career. Around this time, students transition from learning foundational skills to using those skills to engage with more complex content. This period has become the gateway to state testing, and test scores at that age are highly predictive of later outcomes, including success in high school and graduation.
The question remains whether third grade is uniquely significant or simply the point at which formal measurement first identifies students falling behind. Either way, could testing earlier help improve opportunities to support their academic growth? In recent years, policymakers have increasingly embraced early screening and intervention, particularly around reading, with similar efforts now emerging in early math. Several states use third grade proficiency as a key benchmark, codified through retention policies. But waiting this long to identify struggling students is a questionable choice, as many students have already spent years on trajectories that put them at risk.
NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld, Karyn Lewis, and Emily Morton set out to understand whether we can reliably identify students who are unlikely to reach proficiency by third grade, and whether those odds change the longer identification is delayed. Using MAP Growth, their organization’s widely used K–12 assessment tool, they tracked over 400,000 students from kindergarten entry in 2021–22 through the spring of third grade, separating the sample into quintiles. That included tracking those who scored in the bottom quintile at each point from fall kindergarten through spring of first grade and comparing their likelihood of eventually reaching third-grade proficiency.[1]
They find that early achievement is a powerful signal but not a determinant. Among students in the bottom quintile at kindergarten entry, 10.3 percent reached math proficiency by third grade. Among students who were still scoring in the lowest group by spring of first grade, only 2.1 percent reached math proficiency by third grade. The implication is that students who remain in the bottom quintile through first grade have a much narrower path to proficiency, which means the opportunity for support is closing well before most school systems intervene today.
Notably, students who started behind were generally more likely to reach proficiency in reading than in math, perhaps because many states have spent the last decade investing in universal reading screening, early literacy interventions, and read-by-grade-three initiatives. Similar policies for early numeracy are far less widespread.
The MAP Growth data may be able to tell us that students who remain in the bottom quintile through first grade rarely reach proficiency by third grade, but it cannot tell us why. Still, the findings suggest the need for more robust assessment and accountability infrastructure beginning in kindergarten. As states are designing their early identification policies around reading, investments in intervention may make a measurable difference. The same logic applies for math and potentially for other core subjects.
The core takeaway is that achievement gaps are visible and significant at kindergarten entry, long before any summative state assessment is administered. While 27 states have kindergarten readiness tools, they vary widely in design and consistency, and screening doesn’t always translate into action. Designing policies that tie interventions to identification helps students and gives parents information to understand their child’s trajectory long before a high-stakes decision arises.
Screening at younger ages gives schools and families valuable information to drive decisions, but that doesn’t do much good unless systems are built to act on it. Policymakers serious about third-grade proficiency would be wise to incorporate kindergarten screening and intervention as the starting point for a coordinated, multi-year response. Waiting even a single school year may narrow the odds that lower-scoring students ever catch up.
SOURCE: Megan Kuhfeld, Karyn Lewis, and Emily Morton, “Behind at the Starting Line: What Kindergarten Test Scores Tell Us About Reaching Proficiency in Third Grade,” NWEA Research (June 2026).
[1] Proficiency represents a higher bar than average achievement. In the MAP Growth data, just over one in three third-graders are considered proficient in reading and math, and students near the middle of the achievement distribution will not reach proficiency without above-average growth.
Mike Petrilli is solo once again to revisit the college-for-all debate and consider whether the backlash has become an overcorrection. He considers the risks of steering academically underprepared students toward four-year degrees, the growing enthusiasm for career pathways, and whether today’s push away from college could discourage some students who might actually succeed there.
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study examining more than two decades of state pre-K expansion and what it reveals about balancing access, spending, and program design.
Recommended content:
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Transcript
Introduction
Mike Petrilli [00:00]
Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.
I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
This week, I’m taking the mic again to revisit the college-for-all debate and ask whether the pendulum has now swung too far toward career training and away from college.
Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study on more than two decades of state pre-K expansion and what it tells us about access, spending, and program design.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
Well, it is my monthly solo edition. We have been doing this for about a year, and so far so good, as far as I can tell. I’m going to keep doing this until you all tell me to stop.
Today, let’s talk about college for all and whether we education reformers went too far in our enthusiasm for college as the lever for opportunity and upward mobility. And now, whether we’ve let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction, away from college and toward career training.
Let’s unpack all of that on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: Did the college-for-all backlash go too far?
Mike Petrilli [01:30]
All right, folks. Well, I do have college on my mind right now.
You know, people at Fordham always joke that when my kids were little and they were in elementary school, I was very focused on elementary school, then middle, then high school. And guess what? I’m now going to be very focused on college.
That’s because our firstborn, my eldest son, Nico, is heading off to college. In fact, as I am recording this, he is packing furiously. And by the time you listen to this, we will have dropped him off.
He is going to Cornell. He’s got an ROTC scholarship. Super proud of him. He’ll be joining the Army. And all that is just amazing. But man, I have a lot of feelings. I’m going to miss him tremendously.
Those of you who have been through this as parents know what it’s like to have an emptier nest. Not empty. We still have my younger son, Leandro, at home, thank goodness. But if you’ve got any advice for how to go through this transition, please do share.
But look, college is also on my mind because of some recent news. One thing that I’ll talk about is Alabama. That is something we have been following this year, especially over at my Schooled Substack.
They have been talking about using WorkKeys in addition to the ACT as part of their high school graduation and accountability systems, and that’s got a lot of my fellow reformers quite alarmed.
Now, the notion is, and I’ve made this case myself, it seems a little crazy, if we’re not into college for all, to make all high school students take the ACT or the SAT. That certainly sends the message that we think they should be thinking about college. And so balancing that with WorkKeys, which supposedly measures work skills, has a certain amount of appeal.
The other big news recently was that Matt Barnum over at Chalkbeat, with his newsletter Chalkbeat Ideas, wrote a really thoughtful piece that was in part a rebuttal to an argument I made recently in Schooled, my Substack, arguing that we really should be discouraging students who have either very low grades or very low test scores from giving college a try because the chances of them completing are low.
And if they don’t complete a degree, they most likely will not benefit from the college wage premium, because that college wage premium is a college completion premium. But Matt pushes back on that with some rigorous studies. So we will talk about all of that.
And again, this question about, did we swing too far in one direction back in, say, the Bush-Obama years, when we really did talk a lot about college for all? And now are we swinging too far in the other direction? Everybody loves career and technical education, it seems. Certainly the politicians love it.
Makes sense, maybe, at a time when we’ve had this populist backlash that politicians in particular want to send the message that, hey, we respect people who are in the working class, who do not go to college or graduate from college. And so that has a lot of appeal.
And there’s also just a strong argument, as I’ve been saying, that there are routes to upward mobility that don’t include college. But there is also a risk of going too far in the other direction and then discouraging kids who could do well in college and benefit from the college wage premium not to do it.
All right. Now, let me start with this.
I will say that many of you out there may say, look, who was ever saying college for all, right? That’s a straw man. Nobody out there was saying that literally every kid should go to college. And that’s probably true.
However, I think if you go back and you look at the rhetoric that a bunch of us, and I’m part of this, used back in the late 90s and early 2000s, in the heyday of education reform, the Bush-Obama era, the rhetoric came awfully close to talking about college for all.
It certainly sounded like the message we were sending to young people was that college is the path to opportunity. We certainly would say that education was a path to opportunity and that you should seize it. You should take that opportunity.
In the ed reform movement, we had charter schools like KIPP and other high-performing charter schools that started having their teachers decorate their classrooms with their college paraphernalia, naming the rooms after their alma mater. You know, this is the University of Virginia room. This is the University of Michigan room.
With an indication of trying to send the message to kids, especially kids coming from low-income neighborhoods, kids who would be first-generation college students, that they were college material. That they, starting out in kindergarten, should think of themselves as somebody who’s going to college someday.
We had a bunch of school reform organizations who had it in their strategic plans and their goals about how we’re going to dramatically increase the number of students who make it to and through four-year degrees.
The Common Core standards, the rhetoric was around, and again, this was us, including those of us here at Fordham with the American Diploma Project, the precursor to the Common Core that we produced with EdTrust and Achieve, it said, hey, it looks like the same skills you need to take credit-bearing courses in college in terms of reading and math are the same skills you need to get a high-paying job.
So it’s the same basic college-prep core: English, math, writing. And so maybe was it college for all? Maybe not, but it sure came close.
And finally, one last point. Where I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, we had a superintendent, Jerry Weast, very well respected here and nationally. And one of his big initiatives was that he talked about the seven keys to college. He had big posters up on all the schools talking about these different benchmarks that we wanted to see students hitting so that they were ready for college.
This kind of thing was everywhere. So I just think we have to be honest about that, that that was a big part of the zeitgeist.
At the same time, we certainly did let that old vo-tech system atrophy. And it was for good reason.
I mean, look, that old system was in many respects racist and classist. It often led to dead-end jobs, if it led to any jobs at all. And look, we know clearly from tons of evidence that the school system would look at kids based on their race, based on where they live, and they would say, okay, you’re going to work with your hands and we’re going to push you in this direction. And there’s no doubt that there were lots of young people who could have performed at high levels academically and were never given the chance.
But the mistake we made, and I came to believe this now about twelve or thirteen years ago, was we should have focused on mending rather than ending vocational education.
Now, there were people out there who were doing that. But I still think in the major ed reform groups, that was not our focus.
But around 2014, I was working on a book that became a book I edited called Education for Upward Mobility, one of my favorite projects ever. And I was interviewing a bunch of different people and reading tons of stuff. And I kept running into social scientists, especially people that weren’t necessarily education specialists. And I would ask them, what do we know about what helps young people coming from poverty achieve upward mobility?
And they kept pointing to the same thing: career academies. Have you looked at career academies? The evidence on career academies is so, so strong.
It turned out these career academies, which often were these academies either within comprehensive high schools or standalone schools that had a strong focus in a given industry area, that had kids doing basically what we would now say is high-quality career and technical education, very much focused on getting particular jobs, had incredible evidence that they boosted students’ earnings long term, especially for boys.
You could even see impact. They were able to follow the kids long term and see impacts on marriage rates, on incarceration rates. I mean, all kinds of great evidence. In some cases, those kids went straight into work. In other cases, they still encouraged them to go to college.
But these career academies were clearly doing something really well.
This was one of the big arguments made by a report that came out around that same time, again, I think this was 2011 in this case, by William Symonds, Robert Schwartz, and Ronald Ferguson called Pathways to Prosperity, which basically was this clarion call saying that people were focused too much on college. That’s great for a chunk of kids, but there’s this other chunk of kids that need other pathways.
And I remember talking to Bob Schwartz about this up at Harvard, at his office. This was an event I did, and he would make this compelling case. He was like, look, the career tech stuff is not for the lowest-performing kids. It’s not for probably the most disadvantaged kids, because you need to have reasonably good reading and writing and math skills. I mean, that part was true from the American Diploma Project.
So this might be more for the kids, let’s say, sort of in the middle. The top kids, yeah, they’ve got the academic skills and drive to get through a four-year degree in college. And the kids at the very bottom, they don’t have what it takes, for example, to be able to succeed in an electrician training program because they don’t have the reading and writing and math skills. Maybe there’s also a bunch of other stuff going on for them.
But those vast kids in the middle, a lot of them could benefit from at least having this as an option.
So I started writing about this way back then. I wrote a Slate article that had a terrible, cringeworthy title that was about something like, hey, we should start telling kids that you’re not college material. Probably a little too trollish, and I would tone it down if I wrote it again.
But look, I still basically make the same argument, which is that college is a great path to upward mobility for students who are academically ready.
And look, we should still be very much focused in our K-12 system, in our charter schools, and everything that we’re trying to do, on getting many more kids, especially poor kids and kids of color, academically prepared so that when they graduate high school, they can choose to go to college and succeed if that’s what they want.
But if you’ve got eighteen-year-olds who are far from academically ready, it is a waste of time and money for them to give college a try because their chances of graduating are just so, so low.
I wrote about this a few weeks ago. You can look at this ACT and SAT. They both published these charts that can show you what your chance of completing a four-year degree is, depending on your SAT score or your ACT score and your GPA. And you will be shocked at how high those scores have to be to have even a 50 percent chance of completing a degree.
You have got to be ready to do academic-level work. And many, many of our young people are not there.
Now, look, I understand that this whole line of thinking creates some significant risk. If we start to decide that some kids are unlikely to succeed in college, the worry is we’re going to lower our expectations, right? And especially if we decide that too early, if we decide early that someone’s not college material.
Of course, we do not want to do that when a kid is in kindergarten or fifth grade or eighth grade. And we definitely don’t want to do that based on race or zip code or other group characteristics.
So I agree 100 percent with those kinds of concerns. We have to be just as worried about the students who could have succeeded in college.
The trick is we’ve got to be able to tell different kids different messages and that their academic readiness matters.
So I think it’s a balancing act. I like, as I’ve said before on the show and in my writing, where Maryland landed a few years ago when it wrote its new blueprint for its education system. It’s still working on implementing it. But the notion is that they want all students to master this high level of knowledge and skills by the end of the 10th grade, based on end-of-course exams.
And then once kids have kind of passed through that gate, you can let them go either college prep, a lot of AP classes, IB, dual enrollment, or more of a career-oriented track, including work-based learning, and make sure there’s time in their schedule to do that.
For the kids that don’t pass the end-of-course exams, have them keep working on getting those basic skills where they need to be.
I like that a lot. I think that makes sense.
And to me, that’s way better than having everybody just sort of sleepwalk through the so-called college-prep curriculum. And they’re still in senior year doing English and math and history and all the rest, not necessarily well, not necessarily in a rigorous way. Maybe they’re taking a career and technical education course as an elective.
But one course at a time, that’s nothing like what a lot of other countries overseas, especially in Central Europe, do in terms of intensive career training that can start when kids are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
So that’s still where I’m at, but I will admit that there are some complications.
The Alabama thing, for example, it’s a little confusing, but they’ve put forward an Ed-Flex request to the federal government that would in part allow them to use this WorkKeys assessment. Basically, kids that aren’t quite proficient according to the ACT, if they do well enough on WorkKeys, that can get them over the line.
A lot of my friends worry that that amounts to lowering standards. And it sends this message that, oh, those kids that are going to go into CTE, they don’t have to hit the same high standards as other kids do.
On the other hand, look, do we really want to make every kid just take the ACT or the SAT? It sends that message that college is what we care about.
The other real complication is the stuff that Matt Barnum wrote about and some of these studies that he pointed to. And here’s where I’ve got to say it really is confusing for me. He found these studies that showed that there were some students with shockingly low test scores, like an 800 on the SAT, which is very low, who nonetheless went to college and, according to some of these studies that were able to track the kids long term, benefited from going to college in terms of higher earnings.
Some of these studies were discontinuity studies where you’re able to look at kids right above and below a cutoff. So these kids that just barely met a minimum GPA in order to get into a selective four-year college versus those that did not.
It’s a little unclear from some of the studies whether those benefits were because the kids beat the odds and actually completed a degree and therefore, as you would expect, did benefit from the college wage premium, or there may have been even some cases where these, frankly, underprepared kids did not complete a degree, but they still earned some credits. They took some courses. They were in college for some time. And that did seem to boost their earnings for whatever reason.
Employers maybe looked at them and said, well, hey, you made it at least through some college. You already got into college. Who knows? We don’t know for real. But it does complicate things.
It does indicate, where in my head I think, okay, let’s say if you’re at the top 10, 20, 30, even 40 percent in terms of achievement of your high school graduating class nationally, meaning you’re reading and doing math at the 60th or 70th or 80th or 90th percentile, yeah, college is most likely a very good bet for you if you’ve also got good grades. And if you’re interested, if you’re driven, if you like school, if this is what you want to do.
And then there’s this next tier of kids in the middle where it’s maybe a little bit questionable. You’re more marginal. But the kids at the bottom of the achievement spectrum, reading at the 10th percentile, the 20th percentile, even the 30th percentile, to me, it just seems like there’s no way you’re going to be able to do college-level work.
You’re going to get there. You’re going to be in remedial courses. Even with a lot of support, even with some of the reforms that the colleges are trying, their chances of success seem very, very low.
We should at least tell kids that.
And yet here are some of these studies showing that some of those very marginal students were able to do well anyway.
Now, I look at all of that, and I still think my read on the evidence, when I look at things like the great AEFP Live that’s out there, we’ll put that in the show notes, is that those kinds of reviews indicate it’s still the case that there’s a big risk of students not completing college.
And if you don’t complete college, there’s a big risk that therefore it won’t pay for itself, because, of course, there are costs in terms of your time and in terms of tuition and all the other expenses. And one of the big reasons for non-completion is a lack of academic readiness.
So maybe it’s the case that some kids beat the odds, but we shouldn’t pretend that those odds don’t exist. And we should certainly make sure that young people know the odds.
We should tell them, look, somebody with your test scores, with your grades, with your background, kids like you in this situation, only 10 percent of them go to college and end up completing a degree. Now, maybe you’ll be one of those 10 percent, but you should know those aren’t great odds.
And you might be better off, for example, doing a short-term certificate program, especially now that there are Workforce Pell dollars available to pay for those short-term Pell programs, than trying to go and get a degree the traditional way.
That’s where I’m at.
I understand that some of you see it differently, that you are so concerned about the risk of discouraging kids from going to college who could otherwise benefit, especially if it’s based on race and class, of course, that we should be willing to continue to nudge kids to give college a try.
Okay, I get it.
Now, look, I think the fact that we have 40 percent of kids going to college who do not complete college, that is a huge number. So to me, I would balance it in the other direction.
But this is what I want to know from you: Do you think we’re finding that appropriate balance? Are we in a better place than we were twelve years ago, when all we ever talked about was college? Are we now doing a better job supporting multiple pathways to success and not just college for all? Or have we overcorrected too far in the other direction, and we’re now discouraging some kids from going to college who could really benefit?
I’d love to know what you think. Do hit me up and let me know.
Okay, gang, that’s it for now. So now it’s time for everyone’s favorite, Amber’s Research Minute.
Research Minute: What state pre-K expansion reveals about access and spending
Mike Petrilli [22:11]
Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
So I was just talking about college. And of course, it’s on my mind as Nico is, as I speak, packing up all of his earthly belongings.
Amber Northern
Oh, my God. You’re taking a U-Haul, or you really think you’re going to get it in one carload?
Mike Petrilli
Well, it’s funny you mention that. No, no U-Haul. And he really doesn’t have that much stuff. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, but he’s like, there’s no decorating. There are no mood boards about how his room is going to look. He couldn’t care less about it.
But the school did say on a Zoom that they did for getting ready for move-in, they made it very clear that moving trucks would not be allowed on campus.
Amber Northern
Oh, wow. Okay.
Mike Petrilli
Which tells me that people have tried this before.
Amber Northern
Sounds like it. I don’t know. Obviously, you’re not seeing on Instagram all the dorm makeovers that are coming up on my feed this time of year. These young girls turn it into a Pinterest board.
Mike Petrilli
Yes, exactly. There’s been none of that. He doesn’t care. You know, he took random selection of roommates. He’s like, I don’t care. They seem fine.
Oh, but speaking of the rooms, I did see a friend sent around on Facebook, it was so funny. These parents were like, well, we were trying to think of a gift for our daughter so that she could really feel our love as she goes off to college.
They got a picture of the two parents blown up onto a bedspread for her college dorm, so that her college dorm bedspread would have a life-size picture of mom and dad.
Amber Northern
That is hilarious. Do we think it’s going to get stuck in the closet?
Mike Petrilli
I don’t know. I’ve seen pajamas with boyfriends and moms and dads, but never a bedspread. I thought that was pretty smart, pretty funny.
Amber Northern
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s going to last long, but yeah.
Mike Petrilli
Well, I’m glad we can laugh because I’ve got to say on the inside, I am crying with this.
Amber Northern
I know, Mike. This is a tough one. This is the first one out too for you. So I understand that it’s going to be a big gulp for you when you go back home and have one fewer kid in the nest.
Mike Petrilli
That is right. Thank goodness for Leandro. He’ll still be here, giving us a half-empty nest or a half-full nest.
Amber Northern
Yes, that’s right. Still a blessing.
Mike Petrilli
It’s a blessing.
All right. Well, enough on that. Let’s talk about research. What you got for us this week?
Amber Northern [25:06]
We are going to talk state-funded pre-K. I think you’re going to like this one. It kind of ties into some stuff you’ve been saying in the past.
Really very important descriptive study looking at pre-K expansion across all fifty states over the past twenty-three years. They’re looking at National Institute for Early Education Research data. They collect annual pre-K spending and enrollment from state agencies, and they’ve done it since 2002.
They’ve got a team of analysts here, and they’re building a new state-by-year dataset that’s the most comprehensive picture, really, that we’ve ever had of pre-K investment out there.
Importantly, they only include state funding. So we know how complicated school funding can get and state funding, but they just include that. No local, no federal.
All right. Still, the numbers are pretty striking.
The inflation-adjusted state spending on pre-K grew from $4.8 billion in 2008 to $13.6 billion in 2024. That is a 208 percent increase.
Over the same period, the share of four-year-olds, because they didn’t look at three-year-olds, they isolated to four-year-olds, enrolled in state-funded pre-K increased from roughly 10 percent to 30 percent, so a tripling.
But then, as always, when you dig into the state-level results, you see big variation. So then the authors decide, okay, we’re going to bucket these states into spending groups.
And they had eighteen high-growth states, and that’s the ones that really kind of drove these increases. They had sharp upward investment curves. California, New Mexico, Colorado are in that group.
Then they had eleven what they call low-growth, higher-spending states that started out at a relatively elevated level, and then they stayed there. So that’s Oklahoma, Tennessee, and North Carolina in that group for starters.
And then they had thirteen low-growth, low-spending states, and they averaged under $1,000 per four-year-old across the whole period that they examined.
And their last bucket of the four were eight states that never or only briefly had a state-funded program.
So this big 208 percent increase I just mentioned is being driven by a relatively concentrated group of states that are kind of making big bets.
And then some other interesting stuff, I just think they did some neat analyses here. They look at observational state characteristics to kind of see, okay, what might be predicting which bucket a state falls into.
They look at political party of the governor. They look at state wealth. They look at racial demographics. They look at child poverty, a bunch of stuff.
None of those things were drivers.
They found that having a Democratic governor was linked to being in a high-growth group, but it was a very modest relationship. It wasn’t that big of a deal.
And then the authors say, you know what, pre-K expansion seems to be driven more by distinct state-level politics, other dynamics, advocacy organizations, maybe some key lawmakers that really want to see this happen or not, the history of the program. They just feel like other things are driving it other than the demographics and the economic factors.
And then another important question: They look into whether there’s a quality-quantity tradeoff. So as states enroll more kids, do those per pupil expenditures decline?
And basically, no.
They looked at spending per enrolled child, and it increased by 21 percent over that twenty-three-year panel. So it reached about $6,300 in 2024.
And then they did some regression analyses, and they showed that a one-percentage-point increase in that enrollment rate predicted just a $19 increase in spending per slot. And that was not significant.
So states expanded access, the ones who did that the most. They didn’t cut what they spent on each enrolled child, is basically what I’ve just said.
And then some of those high-growth states, like California, actually grew per pupil spending a lot as they expanded enrollment. So again, being driven by a fairly small number of states.
And then finally, and this is what I think is also super interesting, they’re looking at whether universal eligibility that had no income requirements versus means-tested programs had different enrollment patterns.
And so among those states with consistent program criteria, because they couldn’t look at all the states, but the ones that did have those data, universal states do enroll more kids in state-funded pre-K than means-tested states. It’s about 49 percent versus 26 percent.
But when you look at overall enrollment across any type of program, so public or private, the difference disappears.
So that’s basically saying that enrollment in any kind of formal preschool hasn’t changed really over time. And so both those universal and targeted states enroll about 57 to 60 percent of four-year-olds in any type of program.
So they make the point that these low-income kids aren’t being crowded out, per se, because the enrollment of low-income kids is similar across both types of programs, at around 45 percent.
So the universal programs aren’t dramatically improving access for the low-income kids.
And the authors basically say that universal programs appear to be shifting families from private to public preschool because we don’t have a lot of net new enrollees, which is what I just said: enrollment’s stable.
So they think that we’re seeing this shift here. And the question really is: Has the pre-K supply and demand reached equilibrium? And are we just going to see additional investment kind of shifting to families that would have chosen care regardless of this public investment?
So interesting stuff. That’s what I’ve got.
Mike Petrilli [31:25]
Yeah, no, it’s good.
Of course, you know, I think Checker has made the case at times that this group is an advocacy group, right? I mean, and you could quibble with some of their stuff. But, you know, these trends are the trends.
Of course, I have all these questions, right? I’m like, oh, I wonder if they looked at, you know, when I think about the states that have gone big, Oklahoma has always been the strange one, right? It’s the most conservative state in the country by many measures. And yet it’s got universal pre-K.
And I think, is that oil and gas money? Right? I mean, literally, look at that. I mean, New Mexico has been able, even though it’s very poor, it’s had this windfall because of oil and gas money. And I think that’s how they’re affording their pre-K. So, you know, maybe Colorado to some degree as well. So it makes me wonder if that’s what’s going on.
Amber Northern
If that’s one of those unique state characteristics I mentioned.
Mike Petrilli
Exactly. Exactly. That you’ve got that kind of source of money.
The universal stuff is fascinating. I mean, it sounds an awful lot like the debate we’re having within the school choice world. What are the benefits of doing universal versus not?
And I’ve taken the position that I don’t think there are many benefits to doing it universal. In other words, including the wealthiest families, giving them this subsidy because it’s just a windfall for the families and it costs a lot of money for the taxpayers. And I’m not sure what you get from it.
The argument has always been that it helps politically build support for the programs. But it looks like, and I think in both cases, you’re just saying, well, yeah, now the public is giving these wealthier families money and it’s not increasing the number of kids enrolled.
It’s not decreasing them, but it’s just replacing, putting more money in the pockets of some of these wealthier families. Is that a good use? I’m not convinced it is.
I mean, we can quibble. If you’re talking about middle-class families, a lot of people are out there struggling to make ends meet. That’s one thing. But we do have a big deficit right now, and we do worry about those things.
Final thing, Amber, I wonder going forward is just this question about declining enrollment overall. There are fewer of these four-year-olds to serve. So that’s going to be a factor.
However, there are also fewer elementary school kids, and there’s a lot of interest in the education world in trying to keep those schools open, trying to keep teachers employed. And so is that going to be another big driver to say, hey, let’s fill up these elementary schools with new pre-K kids?
Amber Northern
Yeah. And we know that some charter schools do have their pre-K programs. And they’re able to sometimes give preference to those kids in pre-K if they are oversubscribed and that sort of thing.
Mike Petrilli
Well, and districts, of course, do this too. I mean, this is where some of these state-funded pre-K programs, I think, are in traditional public schools in many cases.
Amber Northern
That’s right.
Mike Petrilli
I mean, what’s going on? Is it just the same old issue with communications with low-income families, that we don’t have more of a take-up here? It just seems like, you know, we thought, we’ll create it, they will come.
I don’t know. What’s happening here? Why are we not seeing even more of a take-up?
Amber Northern
I thought, isn’t the issue that they’re just looking at state-funded? And so a lot of those lowest-income families are doing Head Start instead, I think.
Mike Petrilli
Okay. Okay.
Amber Northern
Yeah, I think that’s part of the issue.
Mike Petrilli
We’re going to get over our skis here on the pre-K stuff, which we don’t follow too much. But yeah, I mean, it does make me wonder how many low-income four-year-olds are actually not enrolled anywhere. I’m not sure what that number is.
Amber Northern
Right. That’s right.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. But you’re right.
Amber Northern
All federal.
Mike Petrilli
All federal. Yeah. It’s one of those very strange federal programs that goes straight to providers. It doesn’t go through the states. Of course, it doesn’t go through school districts. They just have individual contracts with local providers.
Amber Northern
Yeah.
Mike Petrilli
Okay. Yeah. And of course, the Trump administration is announcing a big effort to try to massively deregulate Head Start. Some people think in order to destroy it. So that’s happening at the same time.
Amber Northern
Right. It’s a busy space.
Mike Petrilli
A busy space.
Yeah, look, if I had to bet, I would say bet on there being more and more pre-K, in part to stem elementary school closures.
It costs money. I mean, they’re going to have to decide that on the K-12 side, the pre-K side, where does that money come from? But I think that the political pressure for that, and look, the truth is, with the same amount of tax dollars, but now fewer kids coming into the system, both pre-K and K-12, we have more money per kid to spend, even without raising taxes.
So we should debate whether that’s a good use of tax dollars versus other things you can spend that money on, or giving the money back to taxpayers, or paying down the deficit. But if I had to bet, I think you’re going to see these trends continue.
Amber Northern
And I would think, I mean, I don’t know, you’re a parent, Mike. Would you think parents would like that? Like that’s one less transition your child has to make that might be just kind of tough on them at a young age? Or what do you think about that transition?
Mike Petrilli
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the lesson, like in a place like D.C., where we know we have friends and colleagues that participate in that, for sure. It’s super, I mean, first of all, it’s incredible savings that you’re going to give three- or four-year-olds even full-day pre-K. That’s amazing.
And yeah, one less drop off, one less transition.
Now, look, there are people out there, again, who want choice. And so I think it’s important we have a mixed model in pre-K, and that includes religious preschools and, you know, in church basements and things like that. I don’t think you want to move away from that.
But maybe that means you just have more Catholic schools that start pre-K instead of kindergarten as well.
Amber Northern
Yeah. Declining enrollment. It’s just got its tentacles everywhere.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, it does. It impacts everything.
Yes, indeed. Indeed.
All right. Well, we should leave it there because that is all the time we’ve got for this week. So until next week.
Amber Northern
I’m Amber Northern.
Mike Petrilli
And I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.
The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, located in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit us online at FordhamInstitute.org.
