As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, civics education and American citizenship are receiving much attention. Yet recent surveys reveal widening generational and partisan divides over patriotism, the nation’s founding, and what schools should teach about American history. The findings are troubling even as the growing effort to strengthen civic knowledge and commitment offers some grounds for hope.
With July 4 around the corner and amid mounting anxiety that its observance in the nation’s capital may consist of little more than parades, flyovers, and whoop-de-dos, mounting numbers of people who are serious about civics, citizenship, democracy, and history are doing their best to ensure that we commemorate the audacious events of July 1776 in ways that those events and their aftermath deserve.
This includes a boatload of revealing (and mostly worrying) opinion-and-attitude surveys, including a terrific new release from AEI (see below), as well as an Ipsos poll conducted in April and a fascinating change-over-time analysis sponsored by More Perfect and conducted by Hart Research Associates for NBC.
People are also absorbed by Ken Burns’s spectacular documentary on the American Revolution, the timing of which is hardly a coincidence, and which has deepened my own understanding of that complex, perilous, and momentous period.
In the scholarly world, Harvard’s Danielle Allen has just published a major book on antecedents to the Declaration and the Revolution that, wrote the Wall Street Journal reviewer:
…is a major work of interpretation. The Age of Revolutions is usually narrated around America and France, but Ms. Allen argues that its initial chapter unfolded in England during the 1760s, the turbulent first decade of George III’s reign. The ideas of “the rights of man, the theory of revolution, and calls for popular sovereignty—all of these developed earlier in London than in the colonies,” she writes. Revolution spread from the imperial center to the colonial periphery, rather than the reverse.
I’m pleased also to report widening attention to the Hoover Institution’s new Civic Profile, an online self-assessment of one’s own citizenship, and its widening use by educators and organization leaders to stimulate thoughtful discussion among their students and members. (Anyone can take it and learn more about themselves. Check out CivicProfile.org.)
In the education sphere, iCivics’s Louise Dube reports that “we are witnessing the rise of civic seals, formal credentials that recognize student excellence in civic readiness upon high school graduation. Seventeen states, spanning the political spectrum, have now adopted civic seal programs, reaching nearly half of all K–12 students in the United States. In just the last few months, seven states have taken action on civic seals.”
In higher education, the new Alliance for Civics in the Academy has grown to some 300 members on 85 campuses, attesting to the revival of civics education as an important college subject.
The new release from the American Enterprise Institute that I flagged above incorporates a perceptive analysis by Karlyn Bowman, AEI Distinguished Senior Fellow Emeritus, and Nicole Penn, assistant director of AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department. Titled America at 250: Surveying Change and Continuity on Civic Values, most of it consists of data from a February survey of more than 5,000 Americans, which asked 30 wide-ranging questions about values, attitudes, historical knowledge, rights, immigration, American exceptionalism, the qualities of good and bad citizens, and more. The analysis is particularly telling in its age-difference comparisons, especially Gen Z versus “baby boomers,” as well as comparisons by political affiliation, race, education, and more.
Substantial differences emerged. For example, “Barely half of the Gen Z cohort (52 percent) described the United States as unique, compared with 80 percent of baby boomers.” As to whether “schools should make a special effort to teach new immigrants about American values and beliefs,” the answer was yes from 63 percent of Gen Z versus 84 percent from my generation. Often-wide partisan divergences include a “roughly 40-point difference between Democrats and Republicans on whether the Founding Fathers deserve respect for what they created, and, separately, whether we have made substantial progress in addressing past wrongs.”
Especially interesting to me, the authors unearthed a 1998 survey of parents, conducted by Public Agenda, sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (!), which for once was teamed up with the two national teacher unions, and authored by my friend, the late Steve Farkas. This enabled them to replicate a number of the same questions on parental attitudes toward civics education, and these, too, led to some fascinating comparisons over nearly three decades. Probably the most significant change is somewhat diminished enthusiasm among parents for schools and teachers emphasizing the positive side of American history:
Eighty-four percent of these parents in 1998 felt America was a unique country that stands for something special in the world; 62 percent gave that response in the new survey. Sixty-seven percent in 1998 and 42 percent in 2026 said it was absolutely essential for schools to teach that America is a fundamentally good country.... Eighty-five percent of parents in 1998 said it was absolutely essential for public schools to teach that we are all one nation regardless of background, compared with 70 percent of parents in 2026.
Seventy percent is still a huge share—but not as huge as 85! What’s more problematic for civics educators is that today’s parents aren’t quite as sure that civics education itself is essential:
Although parents in both surveys agreed that civic education requirements in schools are necessary, parents in 2026 feel less strongly about this. Eighty-six percent in 1998 supported making it a graduation requirement for students to show they understand the common history and ideas that tie all Americans together. A lower but still solid majority (66 percent) gave that response in the new survey.
There’s plenty more to be examined, both in the over-time comparisons of parents and in the new data assembled by Bowman and Penn, who have also written separate commentaries that bear attention, as have others, including Matthew Continetti, cautioning that the decline in patriotism among Gen Zers is a major problem.
I agree. What’s somewhat reassuring, however, in this semiquincentennial year is the attention being paid to these challenges, to civic education, and to the requisites of good American citizenship at a time when we’re not seeing nearly enough examples of it and when we must resolve to alter that situation both in the run-up to July 4 and long thereafter.
As Americans are discovering during this summer’s World Cup, soccer often produces an outcome that is unsatisfying to our domestic sports sensibilities: a tie. One team controls possession while the other creates better scoring chances. Both leave the pitch claiming vindication, but neither gets to declare victory. That was my reaction in a nutshell to this week’s education policy match pitting reform veterans Ross Wiener and Mike Petrilli, both of whom I esteem greatly, against each other over the legacy of No Child Left Behind.
Writing in The New York Times, Wiener, the former policy director at the Education Trust who later played a leading role at the Aspen Institute, lamented his past support for ed reform’s accountability movement and questioned whether the high-stakes testing regime ushered in by NCLB ultimately helped schools. It was a mistake “to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers,” Wiener wrote, adding that “test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.”
On Substack, Petrilli responded by defending accountability as one of the most successful education reforms of the last quarter century. Wiener “is simply wrong about the lack of progress in the consequential-accountability era, especially in reading,” he insisted. “Ross thinks we reformers are too enamored with testing. I fear that Ross may have given up on academic achievement.”
After reading both pieces, I’m inclined to call it a 1-1 draw. Here’s my game summary:
Wiener scores
The accountability era promised more than it could deliver. The theory behind No Child Left Behind seemed straightforward enough: establish standards, measure performance, identify and target failure, and attach consequences. Schools would respond to incentives by improving instruction, and achievement would rise. The first half worked. The second half proved far more complicated.
Accountability systems became very good at identifying struggling schools. They were far less successful at helping schools improve, or even understand how to improve. And nowhere was this more evident than in reading. For years, schools responded to accountability pressures by doubling down on mindless test-prep and instruction in “reading strategies.” Ad nauseam, students practiced finding main ideas, making inferences, identifying author’s purpose, and answering multiple-choice questions. Testing pressure functionally encouraged teachers to treat reading as a set of transferable skills that could be directly taught and practiced.
The problem, then and still, is that reading simply doesn’t work that way. Decoding (phonics) is a necessary skill, but reading comprehension leans heavily on vocabulary, background knowledge, and familiarity with language structures and conventions. It is not a transferable “skill” in the way that your ability to ride one bike transfers to nearly every other bike. The student who knows more about history, science, literature, and the world generally understands more of what he reads; the student who doesn’t struggles. Yet state reading tests, the coin of the accountability realm, enshrined an impoverished view of reading achievement and functionally demanded poor practice, thereby encouraging schools to focus on skills-and-strategies lessons rather than the systematic accumulation of knowledge. There’s an undeniable mismatch between what schools believed (or were encouraged to believe) would raise student scores and what actually leads to stronger readers. While this may have been an unintended consequence, it’s one that accountability advocates must nonetheless own.
The central flaw of the accountability era was mistaking measurement for a theory of improvement. Wiener scores with his clear-eyed diagnosis that accountability gave “unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling.”
1-nil, Ross Wiener.
Petrilli equalizes
But then Wiener fails to get back on defense. It is one thing to recognize that test scores do not capture everything that matters. It is another to conclude that schools should focus primarily on goals such as helping students find “meaning and purpose” in their education, goals that are difficult to define, influence, or measure. “Do we really believe it’s impossible to do that in schools that are also trying to help students make year-to-year progress in reading, writing, and math?” Petrilli asks.
I share Mike’s concern. The history of American education is littered with high-minded aspirations: self-esteem, creativity, critical thinking, social-emotional growth, student agency, and now “belonging.” Many of these goals are worthwhile, well-intentioned, even noble. But they’ve often functioned as substitutes for academic achievement rather than complements to it. Reading, writing, and mathematics are among the few outcomes that schools can—and must—be expected to shape at scale. The danger, which Wiener omits or elides, is not that schools will stop caring about reading and math. It’s that they will convince themselves that success can be defined without them.
It’s worth remembering why the appetite for accountability emerged in the first place. It wasn’t because policymakers suddenly fell in love with standardized tests. It was because indisputable quantitative evidence revealed that vast numbers of students—especially poor children and children of color—were not mastering basic academic skills. Those uncomfortable facts supplied the moral oxygen and bipartisan political force behind the education reform movement. Without these facts, it becomes easier to mistake good intentions for good outcomes.
The growing tendency to treat No Child Left Behind as a cautionary tale—or worse, a policy failure—is its own form of revisionist history. Before accountability, achievement gaps were easier to ignore. States routinely reported averages that concealed enormous disparities between affluent students and their less advantaged peers. Before mandatory state-level NAEP reporting, states could set standards so low that they—and their schools—could proclaim success while large numbers of children could not actually read (or cipher). For all its shortcomings, No Child Left Behind changed that.
For the first time, schools were required to pay attention to the performance of all students, including low-income children, English language learners, and minority students whose outcomes had often been buried inside aggregated data. Mike is right: The achievement gains of the early 2000s were real. Achievement gaps did not disappear, but they narrowed. Progress was uneven and incomplete, but it was progress nonetheless. Petrilli notes, for example, that “Hispanic and Black fourth graders respectively gained 20 and 21 points on NAEP reading from 1994 to 2015.” Of equal, even paramount importance, accountability established a principle that should remain non-negotiable: Schools should be expected to produce academic results.
That may sound obvious, but it wasn’t always. It’s increasingly common today to hear schools judged by their climate, culture, student engagement, social-emotional supports, or any number of worthy goals. Those things matter. But measuring whether students can read, write, and do mathematics is not a distraction from that holistic mission, it’s central to it. On this point, Petrilli scores.
The final score is 1-1
Let me offer some post-game analysis. The deeper lesson of this debate, to my mind, is that both Ross and Mike are arguing about the last match rather than applying its lessons to the next one. The real story of the past 25 years is not accountability vs. anti-accountability. It is—or ought to be—understanding that accountability alone cannot produce excellence.
The reform era focused primarily on incentives, as if schools knew what to do and rewards or punishments would make them do it. If schools were made to care enough about results, policymakers assumed (at least tacitly), improvement would follow organically. What we underestimated or overlooked was the difficulty of the work itself.
How should reading be taught? What knowledge should students acquire? What curriculum should schools use? How should teachers be trained, coached, and supported? What organizational structures make effective instruction possible? Those questions turned out to matter at least as much—and frankly more—than the accountability systems designed to measure outcomes.
The states and districts showing the strongest results today are not those that abandoned accountability. Nor are they those that relied on accountability alone. They are the ones that paired accountability with coherent instructional strategies, high-quality curricula, teacher support, and a clearer understanding of how children learn. Mississippi’s literacy gains did not emerge from testing by itself. Neither did the progress seen in places like Louisiana or, more recently, Houston. Accountability provided urgency and focus. It did not provide the instructional playbook. That distinction matters. In sports, the scoreboard can only tell you whether you’re winning. It does not tell you how to score. For too long, education reformers conflated the two.
Game summary: Ross Wiener is right that accountability could not deliver everything its advocates promised. Mike Petrilli is right that abandoning accountability would solve nothing. Twenty-five years after No Child Left Behind, the final score is 1-1.
But the next match isn’t just about accountability. It’s also—even more—about the quality of instruction.
When the Supreme Court bases a decision on policy considerations, the downstream consequences can be significant. A compelling example is 1982’s Plyler v. Doe, when the court struck down a 1975 Texas law allowing public school districts to exclude children of foreign-born parents who were not “legally admitted” to the United States. The court’s concerns were obvious. Denying access to education would harm these children, who often had no choice in the decision to come to America, which could in turn harm society.
The only problem is those concerns were not grounded in the Constitution’s text or the court’s own doctrine. Thus, regardless of the decision’s merits as a matter of policy, it has always been difficult to defend as a matter of law. Now Plyler is being targeted by state legislatures, making it likely the court will have to confront the legal weaknesses of its decision four decades ago and the practical effects of overturning it.
The problems with Plyler begin with the court’s own precedents. Nine years earlier, it had ruled in San Antonio v. Rodriguez that education is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. And in Plyler, the court for obvious reasons refused to consider those illegally present in the United States a suspect class, a status that would require it to subject the Texas law to its most demanding level of review. With that foundation, the decision should have been straightforward. Texas’s law should only have received the most lenient level of review—rational-basis review—which it could easily satisfy.
The majority in the 5–4 decision, however, refused to let constitutional text or precedent get in its way. The opinion, written by Justice William Brennan, focused on the innocence of the children in question and the burden that Texas’s law would impose on them and society: “without an education, these undocumented children, ‘already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of English-speaking ability, and undeniable racial prejudices . . . will become permanently locked into the lowest socio-economic class.’” Texas, the court said, was not justified in saying “that exclusion of undocumented children is likely to improve the overall quality of education in the State.”
But the prudence of Texas’s judgment should not matter. The Constitution does not prevent states from doing unwise things; it only prevents them from doing unconstitutional things. As critics, including the four dissenting justices, immediately noticed, the court had created a bespoke and textually unmoored variant of rational-basis review just to reach its desired policy outcome.
Despite the legal infirmities of the court’s ruling, the policy concerns that motivated it were, and are, real. The children would be punished for the sins of the parents who decided to enter the country illegally. These children would be isolated from the rest of society and turned into permanent truants. One need not consult the oracles of social science to know that unoccupied children are a source of social disorder. And absent a coherent and enforced immigration policy, those children were likely to stay in the United States into adulthood, creating a class of uneducated and unassimilated persons.
But, despite what Plyler’s defenders say, the policy considerations do not run only in one direction. The financial and administrative burden of educating the children of the unlawfully present are not distributed equally. Some districts—often those that are most financially and socially challenged—have disproportionate numbers of these children, who are also more likely to need English-language instruction, among other costly services. State and local governments operate under significant financial constraints. Unlike the federal government, they cannot just print money to finance programs. A dollar spent on one program means it cannot be spent on another. States, in other words, have to consider opportunity cost, which is normally considered a hallmark of rationality. Individuals who don’t consider opportunity cost end up in bankruptcy.
When the federal government, including the Supreme Court, imposes mandates on state and local governments, it pretends that tough trade-offs don’t exist. Absent a clear constitutional violation, decisions about spending scarce public dollars should belong to politically accountable institutions.
States, and even members of Congress, are now exploring challenges to Plyler. In its most recent session, the Tennessee legislature considered two such laws. One would have allowed school districts to deny enrollment or charge tuition based on immigration status, and another would have required K–12 schools and public universities to collect and report the immigration status of students to law enforcement. Neither bill passed, but they will undoubtedly resurface elsewhere if not in Tennessee. Additionally, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this spring on the “The Adverse Effects of Plyler v. Doe.”
Clearly there is a growing appetite to bring a challenge to Plyler, and it would be foolish to believe that the court won’t have to reconsider its precedent. Given the Supreme Court’s current composition, it is difficult to count five votes that would find Plyler’s reasoning convincing, or that think policy consequences should outweigh what they see as the meaning of the Constitution. After all, they take an oath to uphold the Constitution, not precedents that they think were wrongly decided in the first instance.
But that does not mean overturning Plyler would lead to mass exclusion of these children from public schools. It would instead return the question to the states and potentially Congress. Some states would likely limit enrollment or charge families tuition. Many others, perhaps even most, would not do so on both policy and moral grounds. Advocates for these children would face a more difficult political landscape, since they would need to make their case in each state rather than relying on a single federal court decision.
Congress could conceivably enter the fray, but a potential federal law would face both political and constitutional hurdles. Any such action would likely not take the form of a mandate, as a majority willing to compel states to educate the children of unauthorized parents is unlikely to emerge. What’s more, a mandate would have to be justified under the Commerce Clause, an argument that would also face skepticism from the Supreme Court.
Instead, Congress would need to condition a requirement to educate undocumented children on the receipt of related federal funding. One can at least imagine such a policy passing and being signed by a future president, but it would still have to be carefully drawn. The Supreme Court has said that Congress cannot make the receipt of federal funds unconstitutionally coercive. No one knows exactly where that line exists, but conditioning all federal education funding would almost certainly cross it. The funding in question would likely need to be both new and relatively small.
This returns us to the original problem with Plyler. Whether Texas’s policy was wise or morally compelling was not a constitutional question, but the court tried to make it one. Decisions based on that kind of judicial alchemy are always at risk of being overturned. The costs that come from undoing a bad decision should be blamed not on the court that corrects it but on the court that first chose to bypass the political process.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
School leaders regularly make decisions on how to deploy their finite resources—staff, money, time—in ways they believe will best serve their students. While distribution is likely intended to be both efficient (providing the maximum benefit possible) and egalitarian (not benefiting one group of students over another), reality dictates that tradeoffs between these two goals must regularly be made, per the “leaky bucket” theory propounded by Arthur Okun in 1975.[1] Can such tradeoffs be measured? A new study from the American Educational Research Journal gives it a try.
Researchers Paul Yoo of Stanford and Paul Hanselman of the University of California, Irvine, use data on elementary school students from one unnamed western state—specifically, 375,000 unique students who entered fourth and fifth grades between 2005–06 and 2013–14 at 700 unique public schools. This represents almost 95 percent of the state’s fourth and fifth graders during those school years. According to the researchers, per-pupil spending was within 10 percent of the national average, and funding policy was less progressive than the median state in providing compensatory support for high-poverty districts. Average third-grade achievement in math and reading ranked below the national median on a nationally normed metric, and the achievement gaps between lower- and higher-income students were wider than the median state. Student data include demographic characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity, special education status, gifted status, and economic disadvantage status), attendance, and academic outcomes for each year in reading and math. They standardize test scores within each year, grade, and subject to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.
Yoo and Hanselman create value-added models of student achievement to generate annual estimates of schools’ (a) overall effectiveness in promoting learning and (b) differential effectiveness in promoting more learning for low-income students relative to higher-income peers.
What they find is that the schools in their study are, overall, minimally effective at promoting learning compared to the average expected value-add of schools in the state, with sample schools adding approximately 1 month of learning in math and reading for students in grades four and five, as compared to 2 to 3 months for the average school serving those grades. They also find that the most effective schools achieve that result by adding more learning to their higher-income students than to their lower-income students. The difference is small but significant, with higher-income students coming closer to the average (2–3 months of learning), while lower-income students fall just short of a month of learning. This doesn’t mean that the schools are ineffective for low-income students, just that there is a difference between high- and low-income kids, which they say is proof of a tradeoff made between equity and efficiency in provision of education.
Or, more accurately, a set of tradeoffs. The researchers tested a number of variables that impacted the outcomes of students, including prior academic achievement levels, racial/ethnic diversity in schools, and concentrations of low- and high-income students, among others. Most of them had small and modestly-significant impacts on student learning. Some were positive and some were negative, but no obvious patterns were discernable among schools. They conclude that “many important aspects of tradeoffs are rooted in organizational practices” from building to building, but do not have enough evidence at the school level to speculate about mechanisms. Even in districts where financial allocations are made centrally, school- and even classroom-level use of funds will have a differential impact on students.
Yoo and Hanselman are convinced from their findings that their resource buckets are leaking (per Arthur Okun) in these schools, but cannot generalize beyond them—or, likely, even beyond the specific grade levels they study. However, they seem equally convinced that the mechanisms are knowable and would be useful to know, especially for school leaders charged with allocating resources. They suggest several avenues of deeper research that could get closer to isolating specific allocation decisions, and their effects on students, including case studies comparing similar schools with differing outcomes.
SOURCE: Paul Y. Yoo and Paul Hanselman, “Efficiency-Equity Tradeoffs in Schools: Evidence from Elementary School Learning,” American Educational Research Journal (May 2026).
[1] The researchers offer this example of such a tradeoff: “Consider a school administrator deciding how to allocate limited staff. Assigning all staff as classroom teachers would minimize average class sizes, potentially providing the richest learning environments overall, but this allocation would preclude targeted, compensatory use of resources, such as for tutoring, that could support more equitable outcomes.”
Charles Barone of the National Parents Union joins Mike Petrilli to debate the Senate’s bipartisan READ Act. Would additional federal funding help states strengthen teacher preparation and expand evidence-based reading instruction, or could a larger federal role politicize the science-of-reading movement and repeat the mistakes of Reading First?
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study examining why tutoring’s impact on student achievement tends to shrink when programs scale up.
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Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Introduction
Mike Petrilli [00:01]
Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This week, Charlie Barone of the National Parents Union joins us to debate the Senate's READ Act and whether a larger federal role would advance reading reform or repeat past mistakes. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study examining why tutoring's impact tends to shrink when programs scale up. All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
[Show opening and theme music]
Mike Petrilli [00:40]
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org. Now, please join me in welcoming our special guest for today, Charlie Barone. Charlie, welcome back to the show.
Charlie Barone [00:55]
Hey, good morning, everybody.
Mike Petrilli [00:57]
Hey, Charlie is the senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union. I was going to say still a newish role, but I guess you've been at NPU now for a little while, haven't you?
Charlie Barone [01:11]
I've been at NPU for about a year and a half.
Mike Petrilli [01:14]
Okay. All right, not so new. Well, good. Welcome back, Charlie. It's great to have you. I hope you've got fun summer plans coming up. But before we let you disappear and enjoy any vacation, we're going to make you talk about the Senate's READ Act. Let's do that on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: The Senate's READ Act
Mike Petrilli [01:38]
All right, Charlie. My understanding is that the National Parents Union is one of the driving forces behind this bill in the Senate. It has bipartisan support, which is itself kind of miraculous these days, as well as support from a whole slew of education reformers.
I will admit that I'm a little nervous about it. The bill focuses on the science of reading, and the science-of-reading movement seems to be going pretty well, at least policy-wise. We have states all over the country taking action. I'm always nervous that once the federal government gets involved, that could change.
First, tell us what's in the bill. Then tell us why it will be okay if Uncle Sam gets involved this time around. Why won't this become another Reading First, Common Core, or Race to the Top situation? Put our minds at ease, Charlie.
Charlie Barone [02:44]
So, you know, I think some of your concerns are legitimate. I think you might have a little PTSD from your experience with Reading First, which came out of NCLB. Maybe, if we have time, we can explain to your audience a little bit about what happened there.
But look, what's key for NPU is that this bill came out of parents mobilizing on Capitol Hill and telling lawmakers about the lack of attention they've seen paid to their children's reading instruction, including in states that have already passed laws. One outgrowth of this is progress before a law even gets passed: Legislators have heard parents' concerns, and that has moved them to support a bill.
For Republicans, it's significant that they're willing to get onto a bill where there's a federal role, which is something they've increasingly opposed since the George W. Bush administration. That hasn't been a Republican position. For Democrats, it's significant because they're not always willing to talk about achievement. It's a topic that the powers that be push them away from talking about. There were efforts to get the Biden administration to be robust on reading reform, and they mostly chickened out because of pressure from the status quo.
So the fact that we're seeing Democrats on the Hill talk about reading achievement and reading gaps is progress. These are all leaders who are going to be around for a while, either in their current positions or because of future ambitions for higher office. All of that, even before a bill is passed, has the potential to benefit students and policy.
Mike Petrilli [04:48]
Although I should say on the Republican side, of course, the lead sponsor is the chair, Bill Cassidy, who is on his way out because he lost his primary right after Trump went after him for various sins, including voting to impeach him.
Charlie Barone [05:02]
Right. You could say he's liberated because he no longer has to worry about his primary and, as a lame duck, Trump can't do anything to him. But engagement on the bill started well before his primary, so he did not know the outcome when he was working on this bill with us.
Mike Petrilli [05:32]
Yeah. All right. Well, tell us again, what's in the bill? This is my understanding. It's basically tweaking an existing program that is in the Every Student Succeeds Act and has been operating now for over a decade. So what would this particular thing do?
What the READ Act would change
Charlie Barone [05:47]
It does some key things. One is that, under the law as it was passed in ESSA, states have to send 95 percent of the funding they receive down to LEAs. At the time ESSA passed, there weren't success stories like Mississippi and Louisiana, so pushing 95 percent of the funds down to LEAs made sense.
Since then, we've learned that states can set robust reading policies and affect changes in student achievement. The READ Act would increase the state set-aside from 5 percent to 25 percent. State aid would basically quintuple from what it is now, and hopefully that might motivate states that want to play a more robust role. We're hoping that would be one incentive aligned with what we've learned about policy over the past ten years.
Mike Petrilli [06:54]
Yeah. We've been talking a lot on the show about how this is a big shift, and it's interesting that it's happening more in red states than blue states. This idea of muscular state efforts around reading, and around teaching and learning in general, includes identifying high-quality instructional materials or reading programs aligned to the evidence, hiring coaches at the state level and sending them into individual schools, reforming teacher education, and similar work. This law would allow states to spend their money on those efforts while districts would still receive funding at the local level.
There is a slightly strange provision, in my opinion, that gives preference to states with chronically low NAEP performance. It sounds like a race to the bottom: Let's reward our lackluster states. But I get it. These are also arguably the states with the greatest need.
Charlie Barone [07:48]
I mean, look, you want to balance not rewarding failure with being able to deliver resources and policy leverage to the states that need to improve. For example, when Tennessee applied for Race to the Top in 2009 and 2010, it was near the bottom in terms of student achievement. It received a Race to the Top grant because it had started to become self-motivated.
Tennessee went through the whole honesty-gap debate and raised the cut scores on its state tests because people pointed out that it had the widest gap between its state proficiency scores and NAEP. It has since become one of the highest-achieving states and put together many different policies to get there. Race to the Top enabled that. So I think this could help motivate a state that needs to improve.
Federal incentives and teacher preparation
Mike Petrilli [08:50]
And so maybe that's it. From your perspective, Charlie, is this basically a way to give blue states in particular some political cover and incentives to do the right thing? It seems to me that red states are, by and large, already doing this. Maybe not always perfectly, of course. Implementation and execution are where it's at. But they're more likely to have comprehensive science-of-reading laws on the books and to have put some money behind them. Do we need federal action in order to get blue states in particular to move?
Charlie Barone [09:28]
I think it can help. One thing we've seen successful states do, and states that have adopted science-of-reading laws but not shown student progress fail to do, is address teacher preparation. You brought that up when you were running through some of the policies states have used to change things. Maybe half of the states that have adopted science-of-reading laws have addressed teacher preparation, but half haven't.
If you're a recipient of the grant under this bill, it isn't a mandate because participation is voluntary, but you would be required to overhaul your teacher-preparation programs. That's something not all states have done. I live in New Jersey. We supposedly passed a science-of-reading law, but we didn't really address teacher preparation. I don't know whether it's going to work. There aren't many signs that the law we passed here is going to do much.
When I was at DFER, we had a Connecticut state chapter, and they passed what is a very good law, except they could not get teacher-preparation reform across the finish line. That's a glaring omission, and it makes me wonder whether they'll have the kind of success they might have had if they'd addressed it.
You're seeing in Ohio, since you all pay attention there, what audits of teacher-preparation programs have done in terms of shaking things up. My understanding is that Ohio State did not come out very well in the analysis, so that's pressuring the university to change. That might be an incentive for a state to opt into this program and, as you said, give it political cover.
Addressing teacher preparation is not easy. The resistance among teacher-preparation programs to reform in general, and especially to reform that targets them, is underrecognized in this business.
Lessons from Reading First
Mike Petrilli [11:26]
So I like that, and I certainly agree that fixing teacher preparation and ed schools has been a huge mountain to climb for years. We haven't gotten anywhere near the top. But here's the worry, Charlie. Let's take New Jersey. It has a law that doesn't seem to be doing much good.
I can imagine that part of the problem is the state not being muscular and aggressive enough in identifying evidence-based reading programs and doing something about districts that are still using the bad stuff. This was the Reading First dilemma. Reading First was a formula program, but states had to apply. The Bush administration famously kept turning states down, in many cases two or three times, before finally approving their plans. It wouldn't approve them until states promised to use what we then called scientifically based reading instruction.
The concern was that states and districts were trying to slap a new label on whole language and claim they were doing scientifically based reading instruction, or what we'd now call the science of reading, when they were really doing whole language or so-called balanced literacy and trying to get federal funding for it.
I wasn't directly involved, but I had good friends who were. They held the line and took a lot of grief for it. Eventually, the department faced lawsuits and intense political pressure for, in the opinion of some, going too far with federal control by saying no to states and districts that wanted to use programs that weren't scientifically based. It became a political disaster, and eventually the program collapsed.
I worry about that dynamic here. It's one thing to pass a law. If you actually want it to work, you've got to say, 'No, we're not going to fund your program that has three-cueing in it. No, we're not going to fund something you call scientifically based reading instruction, or now the science of reading, when it isn't.' Why isn't that the future we're heading toward here?
Why this time could be different
Charlie Barone [13:31]
I think things are different than they were twenty years ago. It's been almost exactly twenty years since the whole Reading First effort imploded. I admire the Bush administration, which is one reason I enjoyed working with it to craft NCLB. It wanted to be tough. Its goal wasn't to please everybody inside the Beltway. Its goal was to affect change for children.
The problems were nuanced. The administration was trying to do the right thing by the science, but there was a very negative inspector general's report that accused the department of ignoring conflicts of interest. I think you pointed out at the time that it wasn't surprising there were conflicts because these were people who supported good programs. Still, the report gave people on the Hill enough to work with to go after the Bush administration over cronyism, insider dealing, and conflicts of interest. It was 2006, the issue was highly politicized, and Democrats were trying to take back the House. There were real concerns about objectivity.
That aside, there is now a much broader national consensus about what has been missing from reading policy and how most policy in the United States failed to address the science of reading until recent years. When Reading First was passed, policy experts, scientists, and cognitive psychologists knew that. But there wasn't a broad political consensus. The Bush administration was trying to go from zero to one hundred to implement something pretty radical, and people just weren't ready for it, even though the science was sound. Even groups that weren't especially reform-oriented, such as the Center on Education Policy, said at the time that it was working.
I think there's a much bigger consensus now. It has played out in different places, and people are far more aware of it. That's partly due to the advocacy of parents, especially parents of children with dyslexia, who have raised awareness and been warriors in taking the issue to their representatives. Emily Hanford also had a great deal to do with changing the conversation. She was willing to call people out publicly in a way they couldn't ignore. Then you have the Southern Surge states, which have made it harder to ignore the good that can come from passing sound reading policy.
All of that makes this a very different political landscape from the one we had back then. And this program is not quite as heavy-handed. I hate to use that word because I think Reading First was the right policy, but this bill is less heavy-handed. In 2005 and 2006, the department was more or less trying to dictate curriculum and assessment. This bill sets parameters around the science of reading, but states still choose their own assessments and curricula. It retains many of the state protections Lamar Alexander built into ESSA around federal mandates and control.
Between the different political landscape and the differences between this bill and Reading First, I don't anticipate the same kinds of problems.
Mike Petrilli [17:38]
All right. Well said, Charlie. We shall see. Of course, first they've got to get it passed. We'll see whether that happens. There's plenty of reason to be cynical these days about anything passing Congress, but it could happen in the coming years.
Charlie Barone [17:53]
Let me say one thing quickly. I was back at the ESSA anniversary earlier this year, and I looked at the insider polling on ESSA in 2015. About 65 percent of the supposed insiders said the law wasn't going to pass as late as July of that year. So you never know. That's why President Obama called it a Christmas miracle.
Mike Petrilli [18:17]
And it was. Thank you so much. Charles Barone is senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union. The organization has fact sheets, one-pagers, and other information about the READ Act on its website. Charlie, thanks so much for coming on the show. Good to see you.
Amber's Research Minute
Mike Petrilli [18:32]
Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern [18:42]
Thank you, Mike. It was nice to see you and the rest of the Fordham team and Fordham board last week. We had a big Fordham board retreat and then a staff retreat. It's always nice to see people in person rather than through a screen.
Mike Petrilli [18:55]
I know. That was nice.
Amber Northern [18:57]
I agree. We need to do that every now and then to keep the morale and the Fordham culture going.
Mike Petrilli [19:05]
And we even took in a baseball game and then I totally abandoned you.
Amber Northern [19:13]
Hey, you gave the word, and I thought, yeah, I don't think I'll make it through all nine innings.
Mike Petrilli [19:18]
I mean, I was ready to go. I was going to take a Lyft back and offered you a ride, but it turned out you had to go get your purse. Oh my God. Don't you know you can't bring a big purse into a stadium?
Amber Northern [19:30]
I know, I know. See, to me, that was not big. That's the problem, right? That was my small purse, Mike.
A couple of our colleagues cruised right in with their purses, but mine apparently went over the line. So I had to put it in a locker, and then I couldn't find the locker. I was thinking, 'Where in the world did this locker go?' This is kind of a big place. But anyhow, you were right to abandon me. Thank goodness Victoria was with me, although I felt bad for her.
Mike Petrilli [20:03]
I thought about being nice and waiting, but when you said, 'Where was the locker? I know it's down by the street, by the exit,' I thought, okay, there are about fourteen of those around the stadium. I knew I was in trouble. I'm terrible with directions and whereabouts, too. I thought, oh no, there are two of us. It truly was the blonde leading the blonde.
All right. Anyway, good stuff. It is time for our Research Minute. What do you have for us this week?
Why tutoring effects shrink at scale
Amber Northern [20:41]
We have a new meta-analysis from Matt Kraft and his colleagues. They're going back to the well and looking at tutoring, but this time with a more refined question, which I really like: What should districts expect when tutoring is taken to scale?
Earlier studies showed that tutoring produces large achievement gains, but those studies often operated under different assumptions than district policymakers have in mind. The researchers wanted to see how applying tutoring to larger samples affected the results. They examined 263 randomized controlled trials. That's a lot. They included only wealthier OECD countries, giving them a sample roughly three times the size of their prior meta-analysis.
Then they narrowed the sample to resemble the kinds of tutoring programs districts actually operate. That means large-scale programs serving hundreds or thousands of children rather than a few dozen, which is what some earlier studies examined. They also used standardized tests as outcome measures because the prior meta-analysis included researcher-created tests aligned to the tutoring curriculum. You can see how that might influence the results. So this is a newer and, in my opinion, more realistic study.
First, they calculated the effect sizes for all 263 programs and replicated their old finding: very large effects of about 0.40 standard deviations. But, again, that finding was driven by small studies, often at the elementary level and focused on literacy tutoring. When they restricted the sample, the effects shrank.
Programs serving fewer than 100 students averaged effects of about 0.51 standard deviations. The effect fell to 0.30 for programs serving 100 to nearly 400 students, 0.23 for programs serving roughly 400 to 500 students, and about 0.16 for programs serving 1,000 or more students. The more students you add, the more the effects diminish. The effects are still meaningful, but they aren't the kind of blow-your-head-off results that appeared in the original research once you narrow the analysis to more relevant programs.
The researchers then asked why effects diminish as programs grow. Larger programs had higher student-to-tutor ratios, offered fewer tutoring sessions, and struggled to identify or reach the students most likely to benefit. They also appeared to have weaker implementation fidelity.
Next, the researchers looked at the ingredients that might buffer large-scale programs against diminishing returns. The key was maintaining a low tutor-to-student ratio. You need more tutors if you're going to serve more students. Tutoring should happen during the school day rather than after school, staffing should be consistent, and programs need an adequate dosage. If you do those things, you can resist some of the decline in effectiveness that comes with scale.
I also wanted to dig into virtual tutoring. The researchers found that more recent studies of virtual tutoring are producing results increasingly similar to those of in-person tutoring. They included studies going back to around 1999 or 2000, but the more recent virtual programs appear to have effects on par with in-person programs.
Then I asked, what does adequate dosage mean? Based on their estimates, high-impact programs appeared to provide about 30 to 50 hours of tutoring, while the strongest programs provided more like 50 to 100 hours per year. Tutoring also appeared to need to occur two to five times per week.
The bottom line is that tutoring remains a strong intervention. It isn't as impactful as earlier studies suggested once we account for real-world constraints. When programs scale to hundreds or thousands of students, districts have to pay much closer attention to the design elements.
Cost, dosage, and virtual tutoring
Mike Petrilli [25:43]
Yes, good stuff. I think this dose of reality is important because, in the real world, it's hard to hit these ideal conditions. Did they get into return on investment at all, Amber?
Amber Northern [25:57]
I did not see that, no.
Mike Petrilli [25:59]
Okay, because that's a big one. Fifty to 100 hours, three to five times a week. That gets expensive.
Amber Northern [26:10]
Right. We've talked before about how there are always trade-offs. If you're trying to do this during the school day, you're hiring a lot of tutors, and that's money you can't use for other things.
Maybe a moderate impact is okay. I still think the moderate effects are sizable. An effect of 0.40 standard deviations is high impact. To me, 20 to 30 hours of tutoring could still be worthwhile for a moderate effect, versus 30 to 50 hours for the highest impact. An ROI analysis would be helpful, but districts don't necessarily have to swing for the fences.
Still, serving that many students while keeping the groups small requires a lot of tutors. That's the problem: hiring enough tutors, getting them to stay, and avoiding turnover.
Mike Petrilli [27:13]
Yeah, and then you layer on top of that the hope many people have that the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will open up new opportunities for tutoring. You could have tutoring scholarships for public school students, but it's hard for me to see how those could be used during the school day if tutoring during the school day is supposed to be free. If it's after school, you're back to the challenge of getting students to stick around and show up.
Amber Northern [27:43]
Yep, and then it isn't as effective.
Mike Petrilli [27:45]
Right, because they don't show up. If they do show up, how do you get a student to attend enough sessions to receive 50 to 100 hours of tutoring?
Amber Northern [27:55]
Yeah.
Mike Petrilli [27:56]
Especially when they probably want to go home. But maybe somebody can figure this out. Could we make it legal, for example, to have a student receive tutoring during lunch and say that it is an extra service, so the scholarship can be used for it? I don't know. It feels a little like a square peg in a round hole.
Amber Northern [28:20]
Yes, that's right. But if more recent studies continue to show that virtual tutors can be as successful as in-person tutors, that gives us some cause for optimism. It could be less expensive, and you wouldn't need as many people physically present. We need to keep an eye on that finding and see whether it continues to bear fruit.
Mike Petrilli [28:44]
Yep. Well said, Amber. Thank you for that. And good work by Matt Kraft and his colleagues. Looking at the big picture across multiple studies is super helpful for policymakers and practitioners. Keep doing it.
Amber Northern [28:59]
Yes. Yes. Yes. It helps.
Closing
Mike Petrilli [29:02]
All right. That's all the time we've got for this week. Until next week.
Amber Northern [29:07]
I'm Amber Northern.
Mike Petrilli [29:08]
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.
