The Education Gadfly Weekly

Last week brought the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trend series, and they were sobering. Just before the pandemic kicked in, U.S. thirteen-year-olds saw statistically-significant declines in both math and reading—a first in the study’s nearly fifty-year history. Black, Hispanic, and low-achieving students saw the largest declines.

The question is why, and the answer is: Nobody knows for sure. The Nation’s Report Card is great for tracking trends across time and across subgroups, but clunky for looking inside the black box of cause and effect. So we pundits are left to float hypotheses and stitch together what evidence we can to test them.

So it was that I suggested to several reporters last week, and on Twitter, that the Great Recession might be to blame. I’ve floated the idea before, given that “main” NAEP results have also lagged of late for more or less the same cohort of students. This led to some gentle teasing from some of my edu-wonk friends, making fun of my supposedly tortured logic that blames a long-ago economic downturn, and related spending cuts in schools, rather than a more proximate cause, like the Common Core. Heck, even Checker is skeptical of my theory. (He’s more apt to ascribe the score decline to the switch from NCLB accountability to ESSA’s milder form.)

And you know what? All these folks might be right! Test scores alone are akin to a Rorschach test. Just as we don’t have consensus on why America’s violent crime rate dropped precipitously in the 1990s and 2000s—or why it’s on the rise again—we struggle to make sense of gyrations in national test scores. But allow me to make my case.

Education policy is rarely the star of the show

Test scores go up, and test scores go down. It’s powerfully tempting for us wonks to believe that policies deserve the credit or the blame. Most notably, when achievement for Black students rose sharply in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially in the South, most analysts argued that it reflected the impact of desegregation and the access to greater resources that came with it. (Later studies would question these assumptions, though they remain the conventional wisdom.)

So when test scores started shooting up again—in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially for Black, Hispanic, low-income, and low-achieving kids—pundits and politicians alike wanted to credit the major policy shifts underway at the time, especially the advent of results-driven school accountability. And indeed, rigorous studies found that accountability did cause some improvements in NAEP scores. But those impacts were relatively modest and limited to math, while the national improvements were huge and seen across multiple subjects.

A few years ago, I dug into the data and concluded that most of the achievement gain was likely the result of plummeting child poverty rates in the 1990s. For example, using the “supplemental poverty measure,” which looks at income both from jobs and social programs, the Black child poverty rate dropped from close to 55 percent in the mid-1980s to 32 percent in 2000. This was a wonderful development in its own right and meant that millions more American children came to school ready to learn. And once those kids were old enough to sit for NAEP exams, we started to see those trends reflected in test scores.

The lesson is an important one: We must be careful not to put our ed-policy selves at the center of the story. As a George W. Bush Administration alumnus who still has his NCLB pin stored away somewhere, I want to believe that it was accountability policies that lifted achievement. And I believe they did—a bit. But the forces lifting families and their children out of poverty almost surely did even more.

So why should it not also be true that the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Recession put these trends into reverse? The thirteen-year-olds who took the Long Term Trend exam in January 2020 would have been babies when the economy started falling apart in 2007. Parents were thrown out of work. Many families were thrown into poverty. And the hardship was deep and long lasting. It would have been a miracle had such shocks not had a negative impact on the academic and non-cognitive development of these children.

Then this unlucky cohort of kids got hit again when they entered kindergarten during the era of deep spending cuts—roughly 2011 to 2013—after federal relief funds had been spent and districts went over a fiscal cliff. This was no typical downturn. It was the first time in recorded history that real per-pupil spending declined nationally. High-poverty districts were hit hardest. And despite much pleading by us pundits, those districts, by and large, did not make cuts strategically, but wielded a meat cleaver—laying off the most junior teachers (regardless of their effectiveness), raising class sizes across the board, eliminating reading coaches, getting rid of tutoring programs, and on and on. This happened just as this cohort was making its way through kindergarten, first, and second grades—arguably the most important period for developing literacy and numeracy skills. So it’s not surprising that Kirabo Jackson and his colleagues have found compelling evidence that these school-budget cuts did real harm to student achievement.

We can, and should, bemoan that we allowed these kids to get off to such a slow start, that we didn’t find a way to insulate them from the storm around them. And we can wish that schools had accelerated their learning over the last eight years so they might have recovered from their early life challenges. But are we really surprised that, in general, at scale, the American education system failed to do so?

Again, I can’t be sure that I’m right. Maybe it was Common Core—though the timing isn’t quite right, given that few schools were implementing the new standards in earnest until the new tests came on the scene around 2015. The cohort of kids we’re talking about would have missed the Common Core in their most formative years.

Or maybe—Checker’s theory—it was the end of consequential accountability starting early in the Obama Administration when waivers allowed most states to take the pressure off low-performing schools, or certainly by the advent of ESSA. But if accountability can’t take too much credit for test score gains, can the lack of accountability take much blame for test score declines?

What this means for the Covid Generation

The reason all of this matters is that it helps us make better decisions going forward. If we think Common Core is the culprit for these latest scores, for example, we would conclude that we should ditch the standards. But that might turn out to be a huge mistake.

And we are entering a very challenging period, given the Covid-19 crisis and its already-all-too-clear consequences for student achievement. Needless to say, it’s the impact on kids that we should worry most about. But we also need to be smart when it comes to analyzing achievement trends now and over the next decade. In particular, we need to expect that scores will be depressed through at least the early 2030s. Think of today’s first-graders, who spent last year doing “remote kindergarten.” Many of those kids likely learned next to nothing, meaning they entered first grade a year behind. For our neediest students, who tend to enter kindergarten years behind in normal times, the challenge is even greater.

And of course we’re not yet out of the woods, given the lack of an approved vaccine for young children, the aggressive quarantine policies of many states and districts, and the disruptions to districts caused by staffing shortages. So our first-grader is probably going to fall further behind this year, too.

In three years, when he takes the fourth-grade NAEP, these scars are going to show. And they will still be apparent seven years from now, when he sits for the eighth-grade NAEP, and eleven years from now, when he takes the twelfth-grade NAEP. (If he makes it to twelfth grade, that is.)

Unless.

As the Lorax famously said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Changing the course of history for this cohort of kids is the challenge at hand today. Accelerating student learning will take commitment, smarts, and the political will to invest federal relief funds strategically. A decade ago, it’s now pretty clear to me, we failed to rise to the challenge in the wake of the Great Recession. Let us not repeat the same mistakes again.

This week the Nobel committee announced that the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics would go to Joshua Angrist (MIT), David Card (UC Berkeley), and Guido Imbens (Stanford). Education researchers are rejoicing, since Angrist and Card have both made major contributions to our field (along with celebrated work on other topics, both substantive and methodological).

In recognition of their wins—and whether they jibe with your priors or not—here’s a few takeaways for the education policy world from these newly-minted Nobel laureates.

Lesson 1: Education matters

Perhaps you have never questioned it, but to cynics and economists alike (and is there a difference?), it has always been unclear whether formal education really makes us smarter or, instead, schools are just an overpriced mechanism for sorting students into groups that would have emerged through the job market anyway. (For a recent version of the argument that education is all about “signaling,” see economist Bryan Caplan’s 2018 book, The Case Against Education.)

A seminal 1991 paper by Angrist (with Alan Krueger) provided new evidence that spending more time in school had a positive impact on a person’s earnings. (Angrist published a separate paper on the methodological innovation with Imbens.) Using data from the 1930s to the 1950s, when students could drop out after a certain age (sixteen or seventeen), they used students’ birthdays to identify how many months of schooling the students received, finding that students born in months that made them go to school longer earned measurably more later in life. Another of Angrist’s papers proved that educational grants to veterans through the G.I. Bill led to more schooling and substantially improved veterans’ later earnings.

Fellow laureate Card delves into many nuances of this complicated question in an entry from the Handbook of Labor Economics, concluding that the “return to education in a given population is not much below” the raw correlations we observe between education and earnings, but that, of course, they “vary across the population with such observable factors as school quality and parental education.”

Lesson 2: School choice works

Using student lottery data, Angrist and his colleagues showed powerful effects of attending charter schools in Massachusetts. In one study, the researchers found that students who won the lottery to attend a KIPP school in the Boston area outperformed their peers substantially in math and marginally in reading. In another study, the researchers found that attending Boston charter schools had a positive effect on student test scores that were “large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

Angrist also worked with co-authors to study a school voucher program in Colombia, showing that students who won a random lottery to receive a school voucher to partially pay for a private secondary school strongly outperformed their peers who attended public schools. Voucher recipients in Colombia were 10 percentage points more likely to finish eighth grade and outperformed their peers by 20 percent of a standard deviation.

For his part, Card (with collaborators) showed how school choice can foster positive forms of competition between schools in a paper studying competition between Catholic schools and traditional public schools in Ontario. Not only do schools respond to increased competition, but the researchers also found evidence that the schools that faced the most competition had higher productivity, measured by test score gains among elementary students.

Lesson 3: Inputs matter

Some of us have been arguing that the final nail has long been in the coffin of the argument that money and other resources “don’t matter” to school performance, and Angrist and Card have both done work that has driven some of these nails. Card’s paper (with Abigail Payne) found evidence that court rulings against inequality in school funding helped narrow gaps in student outcomes, including narrowing SAT test score gaps. Card also published a study (with Alan Krueger) showing that attending better-resourced schools has an effect on students’ long-term outcomes, including earnings.

Regarding one specific costly (and controversial) input, Angrist’s paper (with Victor Lavy) on class sizes in Israel found that students in smaller classes generally learned more, at least according to test score increases.

Lesson 4: Student incentives increase effort (at least for girls)

Angrist has several papers showing that well-designed incentives can get students to work harder and learn more. His experiment (with Victor Lavy) for students in low-achieving Israeli high schools showed that a large cash incentive to succeed on the country’s series of content-based college entrance exams induced students to study longer and go to college at higher rates, although the effects were driven entirely by girls at these schools.

Another of Angrist’s papers (with Daniel Lang and Philip Oreopoulos) presents findings from a randomized controlled trial of financial incentives and academic supports (such as additional advising) for students at a Canadian university. Interestingly, the effects were again driven by female students, even though males actually struggle more in school. Women who were offered a mix of cash incentives and additional academic services earned markedly higher grades than the control group. Not only that, but women students also did better academically in the second year of the study, when the incentives and supports were removed, suggesting that these programs can alter student learning and behavior in positive and durable ways.

(Just to be clear, other studies of incentive programs have found strong effects for boys, as well.)

Lesson 5: “Gifted” education can be reformed

The newspapers are full of politicians debating whether to abolish differentiated programs for students who are higher-performing, but Card’s influential work (with Laura Giuliano) has shown that these programs can be made more equitable without sacrificing rigor. Their 2016 paper shows what’s at stake: well-designed programs for high achievers can have powerful positive effects on Black and Hispanic students. And their NBER paper from 2014 shows that students benefit most from these programs when they are conditioned on prior achievement (rather than IQ tests), with benefits again falling disproportionately on traditionally disadvantaged students.

Using achievement tests to select students isn’t their only piece of advice for designing these programs, though. Card and Giuliano’s 2015 paper showed how crucial it is for schools to screen all their students rather than relying on recommendations or “opt-in” assessments. “With no change to the standards for gifted eligibility,” universal screening resulted in an extraordinary 180 percent increase in the proportion of traditionally disadvantaged minorities selected for acceleration. These studies show that the concern that these programs promote “segregation” and stymie equity initiatives can be alleviated substantially by improving the selection criteria.

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None of these studies is the last word on its topic, but these esteemed economists have offered powerful research that has challenged us and shaped the way we think about education policy problems. And in case you think that earning a Nobel prize is all ivory tower debates and laborious coding of statistical models, I’ll let University of Chicago economist Austin Goolsbee have the last word:

Remembering when Josh Angrist moonlighted as an Uber driver to get info for a paper (he got low ratings b/c passengers said he asked them too many questions).

Rando drunk Boston ppl driven around by a Nobel laureate studying incentives and human behavior is <kiss-fingers>

— Austan Goolsbee (@Austan_Goolsbee) October 11, 2021

Every parent has the right to educate their children in way that meets their kids’ needs and accords with their values and beliefs. Don’t just take my word for it: The U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1925, “Those who nurture him [the child] and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” Congress declared in 1979 that “parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children.”

Despite these lofty statements, the ability of parents to fully exercise that cherished right and weighty responsibility has long been thwarted by government policy. Most notably, school finance policies strongly encourage parents to enroll their children in public schools, even if that isn’t their first choice. Under traditional funding arrangements, parents pay extra—on top of their taxes—to access other alternatives, whether private schools or homeschooling. Unfortunately, most families cannot bear those costs.

To their credit, Ohio lawmakers have removed some of those financial barriers. Thanks to their work, approximately half of Ohio students are now eligible for private-school scholarships, including all children from low-income households. But what about the other half? Thousands of parents still have to “double pay” for education—tuition plus taxes—should they prefer a private school. Then, there is the large and growing number of parents who are homeschooling or teaming up with others to create learning pods. Apart from a small tax credit, nothing else is done to support that form of education.

To ensure that all Ohio parents have access to their preferred educational option, State Representatives Riordan McLain and Marilyn John last week unveiled “backpack funding” legislation. Supported by the Center for Christian Virtue, the bill (HB 290) would offer state funding for every private school and homeschooling parent. Those dollars would go into “backpacks” that travel with children to their school of choice. Many school reformers have championed this concept, as it treats all educational alternatives as equals—dollars flow to any type of school, regardless of sector—and it ensures that funds dedicated to kids’ education actually reach their intended destination.

What HB 290 does

How would the McLain-John proposal work? It would do the following:

Support universal private-school choice by creating an ESA program that is open to all. As noted above, Ohio has long offered private-school scholarships (a.k.a., vouchers)—but only to students who meet certain eligibility criteria. EdChoice is restricted to low-income students and children assigned to low-performing schools, while the Cleveland scholarship is limited to those who live in that city.

HB 290 would eliminate both of these programs. In their stead, it would create an educational savings account (ESA) program that any Ohio parent—no matter their income or residence—can apply for. The funds in these accounts could be used to cover private-school tuition, and should any dollars remain, parents could use them for other educational purposes. The amount deposited into an ESA would be equal to the current value of EdChoice and Cleveland scholarships—$5,500 for grades K–8 and $7,500 for grades 9–12—so the transition from a voucher to ESA model should be seamless for current voucher recipients. Akin to current EdChoice policy, HB 290 prohibits private schools from charging tuition above the ESA amount if a family has an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Families above that threshold could be asked to cover the difference between the tuition and ESA amount.

Note that HB 290 would keep intact Ohio’s scholarship programs for students with disabilities—autism and Peterson. However, parents participating in those programs would still be eligible to apply for an ESA that further supplements their children’s learning needs.

Support homeschooling by allowing such parents to tap ESA funds. The proposal would allow homeschooling parents to apply for an ESA of the same amount that would cover curriculum and materials, as well as pay for tutoring needs and extracurricular fees. The ESA could also be used to pay tuition at nonchartered, nonpublic schools, which some consider a form of homeschooling. The upshot: The proposal would reverse longstanding policy that has denied public funding to these parents, even as they labor to educate their own children. Bear in mind that participating in the ESA would be voluntary—no parent would be compelled to apply, nor any school be required to accept these funds. That’s important, as some parents and nonpublic schools may not want to subject themselves to the rules discussed next.

Require the Treasurer of State to administer and oversee the new program. HB 290 would shift the oversight of private-school choice programs from the Ohio Department of Education to the Treasurer of State (ToS). The reasoning isn’t exactly clear, but it might make better sense for the ToS to administer what could become tens of thousands of individual ESAs. Some of the key roles ToS would play under HB 290 include: (1) accepting applications from parents and schools to participate in the program; (2) overseeing ESA expenditures to ensure they adhere to the spending purposes outlined in law; and (3) determining penalties for noncompliance or misuse of funds. The ToS would also be responsible for publishing aggregated test results of grade 1–8 private-school students who would be required to take a norm-referenced exam every two years in reading, math, and history, along with the results of high school students taking state exams or alternative tests. Finally, HB 290 would maintain current law regarding private school adherence to state operating standards and homeschooling requirements (e.g., district notification and annual assessment, though their results wouldn’t be published under HB 290).

Maintain the current funding model for Ohio’s public schools. The legislation proposes no revisions to the funding system for school districts and public charter or STEM schools. The bill also leaves local funding policies untouched. Those tax dollars would still be excluded from children’s backpacks when they attend charters, STEMs, and private schools or participate in homeschooling. Students enrolling in public schools wouldn’t be eligible for ESAs—their educations would be subsidized through the existing funding model—but their parents could of course apply for an ESA that allows for a transfer to private schools or homeschooling.

Can the bill be improved?

The overall idea behind HB 290 is right on the money. Structurally, shifting to a single ESA program could be more parent friendly than asking them to navigate multiple voucher programs, and the savings account structure could encourage private schools to keep their tuitions low. But there are a few ways that the bill could be improved to boost its chances of passing—and increase the likelihood that the program will succeed and benefit kids over the long-haul.

• Fiscal impacts. As currently written, HB 290 would make all tuition-paying private school students and homeschoolers immediately eligible for an ESA. There are roughly 150,000 such students in Ohio, so lawmakers are looking at an almost $1 billion per year price tag to fund the plan. That’s not pocket change, especially as they’re already facing challenges funding Ohio’s new public school formula. One way to ease fiscal impacts is to phase in newly eligible private-school and homeschooling students, starting with a grade level or two each year. While that would withhold dollars from some students in the short run, ramping up the program in this way would make the proposal more fiscally manageable.

• Anti-fraud measures. Like other government benefit programs, the ESA could unfortunately fall prey to abuse. HB 290 recognizes that threat but contains few specifics about how the ToS would actually oversee the program. Instead, the bill opts to give the agency broad discretion to write rules and guidelines. Lawmakers could strengthen the bill by enumerating various anti-abuse provisions—for instance, by directing the ToS to conduct random audits of accounts, creating a fraud hotline, and specifying penalties for abuse.

• Transparency around student learning. The ESA program is taxpayer funded, and the public deserves information about whether those dollars are being used to drive student achievement. To its credit, HB 290 requires assessment of private school students. But it could be stronger in a few ways. First off, instead of testing students in grades 1–8 tests biennially, private schools should be required to assess annually. Every year matters for students, and annual testing would better allow for calculations of student growth. Speaking of growth, legislators should also consider ensuring that private schools’ average learning gains (or losses) on norm-referenced tests are calculated and made public. This would give parents a better sense of private-school quality than simply publishing raw test scores that may not be comparable across different tests and reflect pupil demographics. Last, in the realm of assessment, homeschooling students’ test results should be published in the aggregate as well. Those results could help dispel critics’ worries about student learning in such an environment and ensure public transparency for those funds.

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As has been recognized for generations, parents have the primary responsibility for educating their children. But for too long, policymakers at all levels of government have pushed their needs and concerns to the side. The McLain-John proposal puts Ohio parents firmly back in control. Most families will undoubtedly continue to select public schools. Yet for those longing for something different, this bill gives them the resources to pursue innovative solutions, such as learning pods and microschools, as well as more traditional private school and homeschooling alternatives. All options should be open to parents, and this bill would deliver just that.     

Whether due to the pandemic, political opportunism, popular demand, or a combination, education savings accounts (ESAs) are enjoying much attention and growth in 2021. ESAs are funding mechanisms that allow families to receive a deposit of public funds into a government-authorized savings account from which they can pay for a variety of educational services. A recent working paper examines data from the largest ESA program in the country to describe how families have chosen to spend those funds.

The Gardiner Scholarship (now called The Florida Empowerment Scholarship) started in 2014 to provide support for students who have special needs between the ages of three and twenty-two (or in the twelfth grade, whichever comes first). The nonprofit Step-Up-for-Students administers the scholarship program, which has no income limit for eligible families and an account cap of 90 percent of charter school funding or 100 percent of school district funding, as well as a mandated standardized testing requirement. Students in the program may not attend a public school at the same time as they’re enrolled in the ESA, although they can receive contracted services from a public district or school (more below).

This descriptive study uses student, parent, household, and school level data from 2014–15 through 2018–19 to determine how the funds were spent, whether that changed over time, and whether it varied by certain demographic factors. For context, the program enrolled over 17,500 students in fall 2020 from nearly 1,900 schools and the Florida legislature appropriated nearly $190 million to support it for the 2020–21 school year. Families with children with special needs are not required to spend all of the funds each year; any unused amount may be rolled over and used in future years. Families can spend the funds on twenty-four different types of goods and services, but the study aggregates them into eight larger expenditure categories: private school tuition, instructional materials, curriculum (which are mostly approved online courses), standardized testing fees, tutoring, public services (from districts), higher education (like contributions to a 529 college savings plan), and specialized services (like music and art therapy).

Analysts found that the average award across the time period is $10,097 per year, of which families used an average of $8,373. They used their ESAs to make an average of twenty-one transactions to purchase four different kinds of goods and services. They spent the most (57 percent) on private school tuition—typically at a non-denominational school—followed by instructional materials (21 percent), specialized services (11 percent), and tutoring (5 percent). Families spent no more than 2 percent of their ESA funds, on average, on curriculum, public services, higher education, and testing fees.

In terms of demographics, 54 percent of ESA students are White, 30 percent Hispanic, 9 percent Black. Most Gardiner ESA students—61 percent—are diagnosed with autism, 18 percent with an intellectual disability, and 4–6 percent with multiple or other disabilities. About 85 percent of each cohort in a given year continued the program in the following year. The percentage of ESA funds spent increased each year from 60 percent in 2015 to 73 percent in 2016 to a high of 88 percent in 2019. Over all the study years, 83 percent of funds on average were used. Expenditures on private school tuition increased by 11 percent between 2015 and 2019, but the greatest change was for instructional materials, which saw a four-fold increase over the study period, amounting to $1,375 in additional spending.

Moreover, the longer students were in the program, the less the share of funds devoted to private school tuition, while the amount spent on the other categories (curriculum, instructional materials, tutoring, and specialized services) increased. However, Black and Hispanic families used both a greater percentage of their ESA funds and a greater share on tuition compared to White students (specifically, 7 to 9 percentage points greater). Whether students of color were choosing higher-tuition schools, or whether their higher tuition spending was a result of greater income constraints, or both, are unfortunately not questions the researchers could answer. That said, students with divorced or single parents also used a greater portion of their ESA funds. Finally, families over time increased their number of purchases, purchase types, and number of categories used. For instance, in 2015 they used their accounts an average of nine times, but in 2019 they used their accounts thirty times. The authors suggest that perhaps families are learning how to better maximize and spend the funds.

Eight states now offer ESAs, most of which are limited to special needs students. Arizona’s was the first program to launch in 2011, and West Virginia’s is the latest (to be launched next year). West Virginia also has the largest ESA program in terms of overall statewide eligibility (93 percent of students), while Florida’s special needs version—at least for now—has the largest in terms of participation (13,884 enrollees in fall 2020).

This study’s descriptive data are a good snapshot of what policymakers can expect to happen as new families who have children with special needs take advantage of these funds. Aside from student need, ample political will and parental appetite for options will drive the future of ESAs. Barely a decade old, they are relative newcomers on the educational landscape, so it will be key that we evaluate them in the future on any number of available outcomes.

SOURCE: Michelle L. Lofton and Martin F. Lueken, “Distribution of Education Savings Accounts Usage Among Families: Evidence from the Florida Gardiner Program,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (June 2021).

On this week’s podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss last week’s worrisome NAEP results. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether stricter high school math requirements in the Nation at Risk era boosted college STEM attainment.

Amber's Research Minute

Ning Jia, "Do stricter high school math requirements raise college STEM attainment?," Economics of Education Review (August 2021). 

Cheers

• Eighteen states and D.C. are focusing Covid relief funds on training teachers in research-based early literacy practices. —Education Week
• “D.C.’s teacher hiring process is drawing a larger pool of high-quality candidates and diversifying the teaching corps.” —The 74
• Eric Adams, who is all but certain to be New York City’s next mayor, says he will reject current Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to dismantle gifted education in the city. —New York Times

• “What research tells us about gifted education.” —Hechinger Report
• A celebration of the late Mike Rose and his contribution to writing instruction. —New Yorker
• “School board elections will be an early test of what issues motivate voters.” —NPR
• Parents are clamoring for education reform, and conservatives should respond with a clear agenda for it. —Washington Free Beacon
• “Moms for Liberty” is mobilizing conservative parents nationwide to advocate for their interests at school boards, sometimes disruptively. —Washington Post
• Enrollment in Christian schools is booming. Is it a pandemic-related blip? Or something more permanent? —New York Times