The Education Gadfly Weekly

As many readers are surely aware, the number of English learners in charter schools has increased markedly in recent years. Yet, our knowledge of how well charters are serving these students hasn’t kept pace with that growth.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of Fordham’s newest report, Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State.

Currently, about one in five English learners in the United States lives in Texas, which is also home to one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing charter sectors. In the past decade, the number of English learners in the Lone Star State’s charters has quintupled to around 125,000. And, of course, the state has also served as a launching pad for some of the country’s biggest charter school networks, including KIPP, IDEA, and Harmony (to name just a few). All of which makes Texas an unusually credible and compelling test case.

Since the early days of the charter school movement, concerns have been raised about how non-English-speaking families learn about, evaluate, and access schools of choice in a country where most official business is conducted in English. And while some studies suggest a positive relationship between charter attendance and English learners’ academic progress, questions about the validity of these estimates have persisted, along with similarly fair questions about whether charters are pulling their weight when it comes to the number and types of English learners they serve.

Enter our study—or rather, the analysis conducted by Deven Carlson, our principal investigator—which is, to our knowledge, the first truly large-scale study to control for factors such as students’ baseline English proficiency when estimating EL students’ academic progress in charters, as well as the first to examine the relationship between charter school enrollment and longer-term outcomes such as postsecondary enrollment and earnings.

Briefly, the study finds:

1. Charter schools now enroll a disproportionate share of Texas’s English learners.
2. Compared to their traditional public school peers, English learners in Texas charter schools make somewhat more progress in reading but slightly less progress in math.
3. Compared to their traditional public school peers, English learners in Texas charters are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college, and they earn more money in the post-college years.
4. As Texas’s charter sector has expanded, English learners’ reading gains have remained relatively consistent, but their math gains have fluctuated.

On the strength of these findings, we are convinced that English learners (like other student groups) are benefitting from attending charter schools—and perhaps just as important, that they are doing so at scale. Accordingly, we urge policymakers in Texas and elsewhere to stay the course.

More specifically, we urge the Texas Board of Education and charter authorizers in other states to continue to set a high standard for the approval of new schools and to close those that consistently low-perform. Similarly, we urge lawmakers in Texas and elsewhere to remain committed to the goal of equitable charter school funding, which has yet to be achieved in many places.

In addition to the results of Deven’s analysis, the final report features quotes from our many conversations with practitioners in charter and traditional public schools that contain high concentrations of English learners.

If nothing else, we hope that these snippets will serve as conversation starters. For example, based on the aforementioned conversations, our sense is that charters may be more responsive to the demands of some English learners’ parents for more English instruction and/or English-focused supports. But it’s less clear how to square that hypothesis—or charters’ generally strong performance in reading—with the largely positive research on dual immersion programs, which balance English lessons with continuing instruction in the student’s home language.

As Steinbeck famously wrote after traversing the state with his poodle, “Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.” In other words, it might just be big enough, diverse enough, and indisputably American enough to tell us something important about where the rest of the country’s K–12 education system is heading.

If so, we have reason to be optimistic about the growing number of English learners who are enrolling in charter schools.

This year’s state legislative sessions, now coming to a close, have yielded a blizzard of high-profile victories on school choice, from the enactment of universal education savings accounts (ESA) programs, to the expansion of private school choice policies to serve many more families, to fairer funding for charter schools. These gains have come primarily in red states, even as choice opponents in blue states have, if anything, strengthened their hand, with resurgent teacher unions and energized progressives denouncing charter schools (never mind vouchers and ESAs) as nefarious “privatization.”

What can choice supporters take from these developments? It seems to me that there are at least four big takeaways, all of them rooted in the kind of reflection that I suggest in my new book, The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press 2023).

First, when it comes to educational choice, it turns out that huge swaths of seemingly “satisfied” parents see the value in having more options—at least when it’s offered in terms of taking care of their kid rather than bashing their public schools. The pandemic and value-laden fights fueled by political polarization have made choice appealing to many families that never thought much about it before. This is what’s driving so many of the legislative wins. As I put it in The Great School Rethink:

How do we reconcile parent support for more choices with affection for their local public schools? It’s not hard, really. Parents want options. They may wish for alternatives when it comes to scheduling, school safety, or instructional approach . . . At the same time, though, they also value schools as community anchors, like their kid’s teachers, and may live where they do precisely because they like the local schools . . . The notion that one is either for empowering parents or supporting public education is a misleading one. Real parents don’t think this way.

Now, some observers see a handful of very online choice advocates denouncing “failing public schools” or calling to “blow up school systems,” and seem to imagine that these appeals are helping to fuel choice gains. I think they have this wholly backwards. Choice enthusiasts have been issuing such screeds for many years. What’s changed is that, after the pandemic, many more parents are open to choice even though the lion’s share continue to like their local public schools. Advocates who get this are more likely both to win over red-state parents and to bolster their case with blue-state ones. Indeed, many apolitical parents who just want good options for their kids are alienated by reformers who seem like wannabe revolutionaries.

Second, it’s more useful to think of “educational choice” than “school choice.” From start to finish, schooling is a stew of choices made by students, parents, educators, system officials, and policymakers. Attendance zones, discipline policies, electives, homework policies, when to start school—schools are nothing but a series of choices about education. Given that, we need to appreciate that school choice works much better in some places (like urban areas studded with schools) than in others (like sparsely populated rural communities or those lacking in convenient transportation). Even in locales where the promise of school choice may be more limited, many families stand to benefit mightily from educational choice that allows them to address their child’s needs. This may take the form of course choice, access to apprenticeships or other terrific career and technical education options, hybrid homeschooling in which a student works from home a portion of a week, supplemental learning pods, or much else. Choice options that provide educational choice, and not just school choice, have the potential to do more good for more families.

Third, closely related to the previous point, it was long held that limiting choice programs to low-income students was a good way to serve “families in need” and minimize political opposition. Of course, one consequence was that most parents rightly judged that school choice just didn’t have much to do with their kids. And, while you’ll often hear those parents get told that their kids “are just fine,” it turns out that they don’t necessarily agree. (If you’ve never talked to an affluent parent driven to tears by frustrations with their local public school, you haven’t talked to enough parents.) School choice programs that include middle-class kids have frequently been dismissed as somehow less virtuous than those that only help low-income kids escape from awful schools. But the pandemic made clear that many of those middle-class kids aren’t “just fine.” Educational choice can be both a lifeboat for families stuck in unsafe or academically inept schools and an answer for those frustrated by mediocre math instruction, too many long-term subs, or ideology run amok.

Finally, charter proponents have long insisted that charters are “public,” as opposed to, say, publicly-funded voucher programs, this in an attempt to cultivate Obama-style Democrats who were cool with “reinventing government” but less so with “privatization.” As the political tectonic plates have shifted, however, that semantic argument looks to have largely lost its mojo. It’s time to jettison tendentious definitional games and demand a more coherent standard. After all, public school districts routinely contract with for-profit firms for books, buses, technology, and testing—and pay to place hard-to-serve students in private settings. Public school systems charge fees for various extracurricular activities and accept funds from private philanthropy. Yet these systems are casually deemed “public.” Why? Well, mostly because we take it for granted. Choice opponents like to assert that public schools are “public” because they’re funded by public tax dollars allocated by public officials. Fair enough. But that means that, when states establish charter schools, ESAs, or voucher programs, lawmakers are funding those services with public funds, so they obviously meet the “public dollars” standard, too.

Indeed, less “public” schools may, sometimes, better serve public ends. Take citizenship education. University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf has noted that the evidence suggests that private schools outperform public schools as far as promoting tolerance, democratic participation, civic knowledge, and voluntarism. The bottom line is that the boundaries of “public education” are far less precise than choice critics like to pretend. There are many ways to provide and serve the aims of public education. The choice community needs to explain this, then educate and legislate on the need for a principled (rather than a political) standard. I think transparency of outcomes and academic materials should play a major role here, and I’m game for linking eligibility for public funds to demonstrated performance, so long as such a standard is consistently applied—to district schools as well as alternatives. 

The cacophony in educational choice today is a wonderful thing. It’s America at its Tocquevillian best. A robust, fractious choice movement should be enormously healthy. As I observed in Education Next last spring, charter schooling is well-served by a “big tent” strategy that allows it “to evolve in very different ways in different locales.” But in an age of polarization, social media hijinks, and deep distrust, it can be easy for uneasy allies to turn nasty and fratricidal. We mustn’t let it.

A healthy choice movement should be a “both/and” coalition. This, for me, is perhaps the most telling takeaway from the pandemic. It turns out that Americans can like their public schools and still wants lots of other options, and opportunities to do what’s right for their child and situation. And for millions of families buffeted by closures, mediocre remote instruction, short-staffed schools, and culture clashes, that seems like an eminently reasonable stance.

Now, look, within a big tent, there’s copious room for fruitful disagreement on tactics and policy. Preferring ESAs to charters, or charters to ESAs, for instance, strikes me as wholly valid—especially with regard to the logistical challenges of standing up ESAs or the political realities of a given state. That’s hard-headed federalism at work. What’s feasible or appealing in Illinois will be different than what works in Indiana; the same can be said of Oregon and Ohio, or California and Colorado. But what we shouldn’t do is cling to old prejudices or destructive caricatures, especially when they leave us ill-equipped for the opportunities and challenges of an evolving landscape.

When it comes to K–12 education policy, the post-Covid period has become, more than almost anything else, the era of school choice. This success has opened new avenues for its growth and confronted choice supporters—particularly Catholic school supporters—with an important decision. Should we focus our energy on breaking down the lines between public (charter) and private school choice programs, or strive to put private school choice programs themselves on a more equal footing?

Before addressing that question, we need to understand why choice advocates have more momentum now than ever. It starts with the momentum in statehouses. This year, Indiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Utah, and Iowa have either created or expanded their voucher and/or “universal” education savings account (ESA) programs. In Florida alone, more than 3 million students, including those currently attending public school, are now eligible to participate in private school choice. These bills came on the heels of nineteen states that had either passed new or expanding existing choice programs in 2021 and 2022. Together, that means that the number of students who have access to school choice has expanded from roughly 500,000 to well over 3 million. In the slow-moving world of education, this is a policy equivalent of a tsunami.

Not only has the policy environment changed, but during the same period, the number of students taking advantage of private school choice programs has increased, as has the number of students enrolled in public charter schools and Catholic schools.

Some of the enrollment increases Catholic and charter schools have enjoyed over the past few years are undoubtedly tied to the dissatisfaction so many parents experienced with how their local public school handled Covid—particularly in areas where school closures lasted far longer than was prudent or necessary. In fact, if our pandemic experience taught us anything about meeting diverse student needs, particularly in times of crisis, it’s that there is no one-size-fits-all system that can serve every child or every community. Traditional public schools offer one important option in a community, but so do independent, charter, and parochial schools.

At the same time, the increase in Catholic school enrollment, as significant as it was, was no doubt slowed down by the fact that there are still many communities that do not offer publicly funded scholarships, tax credits, or ESAs for parents whose children attend private or parochial schools.

What else can we do to ensure that every family that wants a Catholic education for their child can get one?

Continuing the push to expand private school choice options is one path, but another has emerged as a result of a recent U.S. Supreme Court case. The 2022 Carson v. Makin decision affirmed that it is permissible for public funding to flow to religious schools and asserted that, if a state chooses to fund secular private schools, religious organizations cannot be excluded from the program. That is important because it suggests that it may be unconstitutional for states that fund charter schools to deny charters to religious organizations simply because of their faith.

In other words: Carson v. Makin suggests that, if states fund secular charter schools, they must fund religious charter schools, too.

That question is already being tested in Oklahoma, where the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa applied to the state for a charter to open what would become the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isodore of Seville. (The state denied the first application but has given the school thirty days to reapply—a window that ends this week.)

While this suggests that a door may soon open for Catholic schools to receive funding as charter schools, choice advocates in general, and Catholic school advocates in particular, would do well to pause and consider whether pursuing a path of state-chartered religious schools is a good idea.

To be sure, particularly in states where there appears to be little hope of passing private school choice policies, the ability to apply to the state for charter school funding would clear a path to sustainability for struggling urban Catholic schools. As a superintendent who runs urban Catholic schools serving students from under-resourced communities in a choice state (Ohio) and a non-choice state (New York), the promise of public funding in the latter could be game-changing. It would allow us to grow our network and would help support a sector that has been in free fall for decades.

At the same time, there are at least three things that give me pause before I would consider jumping on the “religious charter school” bandwagon.

The problem of bureaucracy. While Catholic schools do not have access to the same funding streams as public and charter schools, we do have true autonomy over how we run our schools—and we are freed from much of the bureaucratic reporting requirements that add time and overhead, but often little value. Charter schools were initially created with this idea in mind—on the promise of “autonomy in exchange for accountability.” Unfortunately, charter schools today are shackled with many—perhaps more—reporting requirements than traditional public schools. In a 2017 piece, then Colorado Charter League President Benjamin J. Lindquist argued that overregulation is “the biggest threat to the charter sector today because it undermines its ability to offer distinctive, high-quality options to students and families with differing needs and preferences.”

That means that, in order for religious schools to access government funding, we would be knowingly giving up autonomy in exchange for what would likely be excessive government bureaucracy and regulation.

In fact, in states with both charter laws and publicly funded scholarship programs for private schools, entrepreneurial education leaders seeking the freedom-accountability trade-off charters once enjoyed are increasingly looking to the private sector for expansion. See, for example, the recent move by Great Hearts, a network of classical charter schools, which opened their first private, faith-based school in Arizona as soon as the state’s universal ESA bill passed.

The problem of liberty. Second, once religious organizations agree to run charter schools, it remains to be seen what limits on their religious liberty they would be pressured to accept. Would they, for instance, continue to enjoy the freedom to choose their curriculum? To set policy that aligns with their faith? To give preference to Catholic students, teachers, and leaders?

This relates to the question of whether charter schools are public or private. For the past two decades, charter leaders have built their advocacy strategy on the idea that charter schools are public schools. Indeed, for many years, leading charter advocates have worked hard to get people to call them “public charter schools” to reinforce this point. A case currently making its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court—Charter Day School v. Peltier—will address this question directly, and will undoubtedly have broad implications for the viability of “religious charter schools.” If the Court declares that charter schools are public schools, the question of religious liberty will become murky.

If, on the other hand, the Court decides that charter schools are private schools, and therefore not subject to the same rules and regulations that govern traditional public schools, then the future of charter schools, particularly in blue states, may very well be threatened.

The problem of coalitions. That brings the final point: While we are currently enjoying broad and growing support for private school choice, we risk significantly fragmenting that support in pursuit of religious charter schools. Charter leaders around the country have already roundly denounced the idea. Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, for example, said “this movement was never about private education. It was about public schools and making them better by making them more responsive to the needs of families.” What kind of success can we have with a policy that pits Catholic school advocates against charter school advocates?

Worse, for those who support both charters and private school choice, the idea of religious charter schools may well threaten both. That is to say, if the Court ultimately rules that states that fund secular charters must fund religious charters, then instead of opening a path to funding for religious schools, blue states are more likely to put a moratorium on the growth of any new charters. Ultimately, that could mean that, in an effort to increase parent choice, we end up reducing it.

We should keep these problems in mind as we think about how to expand parent choice in the years ahead. With momentum on our side, we should seize this moment in time to scale up both private and public school choice programs. To be sure, that fight will always be harder in traditionally blue states that are largely hostile to choice. But as more parents across the country enjoy true educational freedom, it will become more difficult for reluctant states to resist the pull towards educational freedom.

While life is more normal now than it was two years ago, pandemic lockdowns and school building closures that once kept young people inside and online have likely altered behavior for the foreseeable future. For instance, results of a nationwide survey conducted by an “entertainment software” company in 2022 revealed that 71 percent of two- to seventeen-year-olds in the United States were identified as video game players by their parents. Many of us are at least vaguely aware of prior studies finding that playing violent video games is linked to increases in overt aggressive behavior over time. But a recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association looks at, shall we say, less hostile outcomes and finds better news.

Six scholars from the University of Vermont examine the link between video games and cognitive performance in children—specifically involving working memory and motor responses. Their theory: Video gaming shares some similarities with common cognitive tasks like tracking multiple objects, rapid changes in attention, and peripheral vision that may enhance reaction time, problem solving, and logic.

Data from over 2,200 nine- and ten-year-olds were collected from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD), a comprehensive longitudinal project that kicked off in 2018 and will track the brain development of its participants into adulthood. The study uses brain imaging from functional MRI data while students perform tasks. A randomized probability sample was recruited from the ABCD’s first release in 2019 across twenty-one sites that included district, charter, and private elementary schools that mirrored the demographic variation of the U.S. elementary population (inquiring minds can find more here).

The researchers divided the sample into two groups. First were the gamers—those young people who self-reported playing video games three hours per day or twenty-one hours per week or more, which is an amount that exceeds the American Academy of Pediatrics’s recommended maximum of one to two hours per day. The second group comprised non-gamers, who reported zero hours of gaming per week. Analysts had access to numerous control variables, demographics included, as well as behavioral and psychiatric variables such as age-corrected IQ scores; child’s body mass index (BMI); and measures of anxiety, depression, aggression, attention deficit disorder (ADD), oppositional defiance disorder, and more. The study tasks required that the young participants look at many faces in a short time span and then respond whether they had already seen that face, while researchers recorded how fast they responded “yes” or “no.” Another task resembled a “Simon Says” activity, in which children have to repeatedly press a “stop” or “go” button based on repetitive and sometimes differing directions.

Gamers and non-gamers did not differ on age, BMI, or IQ, and their mental and behavioral scores were not significantly different. However, gamers were more likely to be male and have less combined parental income.

As for the empirical results: Overall, gamers had better memory and better control over their motor skills than non-gamers. Specifically, gamers took less time to inhibit their motor response or reaction time in the tasks (nine milliseconds versus twelve milliseconds) and were less susceptible to distractions, suggesting that “gamers have greater capacity to suppress or disregard irrelevant stimuli.” Moreover, data from the MRI scans showed differences in brain activity patterns when performing the tasks. In a nutshell, gamers had more activity in the brain regions that involve attention, memory, and cue reactivity than did their non-gamer peers. Digging even more deeply, during tasks involving working memory, the scans showed that gamers exhibited less blood-oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signals, which indicates that their responses came from specific areas of the brain—and suggests that the children were actively engaged with the video game content, as opposed to passively watching it.

Still, the results need to be taken with the proverbial salt grain. The findings are not causal and are based on a snapshot of information from a brand-new dataset. Additionally, we don’t know how the non-gamers spend their time, which matters in a comparison. (They could be reading historical fiction or scrolling TikTok.) And although the results appear positive for gamers, spending three hours per day or twenty-one hours per week (or more) playing video games is a lot of time. That means less time spent on schoolwork, physical exercise, time with the family, and so on. In other words, what elicits one person’s delight may elicit another’s dismay.

SOURCE: Bader Chaarani, Ph.D., et al., “Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children,” Journal of the American Medical Association (October 2022).

The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) is a comprehensive suite of supports meant to help community college students persist in school and complete a degree in three years or less. These include obvious things, such as tuition and transportation assistance, and less-obvious—but no less necessary—things, such as work- and family-friendly class schedules, priority registration, and intensive advising from dedicated counselors. It began in the City University of New York (CUNY) system in 2007 and was imported into Ohio—at the Cincinnati State, Cuyahoga, and Lorain County community colleges—beginning in 2015. All along the way, implementation partner MDRC has also been tracking outcomes for Ohio students via a randomized controlled trial.

I have reviewed two of MDRC’s prior reports: A look at the program’s structure and first two years of data, and their further analysis based on a third year of data. They found, in short, that the treatment group outperformed the control group in all measured outcomes, which include persistence in school, persistence of full-time enrollment, credit accumulation, and college graduation. All program effects were large, significant, and increased throughout the study period. The Ohio version of the program also turned out to be more efficient in terms of staffing needs and cost requirements than the CUNY one.

Even though the program was discontinued in 2020 at two of the three Ohio sites due to withdrawal of financial support, MDRC researchers continued to follow the original treatment and control groups for a further three years. The most recent report on their progress was released last month. The new results were similar to those previously reported. After six years, 44 percent of treatment students had earned a degree of any kind, compared with 29 percent of control students. This included both associate and bachelor’s degrees. Forty-two percent of treatment students earned an associate degree over six years, compared with 26 percent of control group students, and 14 percent of treatment students earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with 9 percent of their control group peers. 

New to this report, the researchers also found that ASAP participation boosted individuals’ earnings. In the sixth year of follow-up, which occurred during the pandemic, program participants’ average earnings (across full-time and part-time workers, as well as nonworkers) were $19,573, an 11 percent increase over the control group earnings of $17,625. And because program and control group employment rates were the same, they believe that the effect on earnings is directly attributable to treatment group students securing higher-paying jobs than their peers.

They speculate that the positive impact of ASAP in regard to earnings comes via two separate but interconnected mechanisms. The first is, perhaps obviously, degree completion. Students who were better prepared for community college at the start—those who entered without the need for remedial courses—saw the highest completion rates and the largest salary boosts. But to the extent that persistence is also enhanced by the ASAP supports, those treatment students who needed remedial courses at the start were less likely to drop out and moved on to earning credits faster than their control group peers. They, too, saw their earnings outpace those of the control group, even if they didn’t reach the same levels as those ASAP students who were more prepared for college.

As with previous analyses, the primary takeaway here is that the ASAP program improves outcomes for community college students, but that the overall outcomes for the universe of community college students are still not stellar. The amount of earned credits and degree completion numbers were still pretty low overall: Less than half of students in the treatment group have earned any type of degree after six years. Ditto for the earnings data. $19,500 per year is higher than $17,600, but if that is the highest level that successful community college students can hope for after six years, there are clearly more lucrative pathways available.

The vast majority of treatment and control group students have either completed or stopped attending college after six years, likely solidifying the college-centric impacts of the ASAP program firmly as “decently positive.” A version of the program continues, self-funded, at Cincinnati State Community College, although new data is not being added to the longitudinal study. But that doesn’t mean that MDRC and their partners are done tallying the postsecondary impacts of their original student support efforts. Join us back here in two years for more!

SOURCE: Colin Hill, Colleen Sommo, Kayla Warner, “From Degrees to Dollars: Six-Year Findings from the ASAP Ohio Demonstration,” MDRC (April 2023).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Deven Carlson of Oklahoma University joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his new Fordham study on the outcomes of English learners who attend charter schools in Texas. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber discusses the prevalence of stackable credentials in Ohio and Colorado.

Recommended content:

• Fordham’s new report: “Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State” —Deven Carlson and David Griffith
• “Thousands of families opt to join Texas’ growing charter school system” —Spectrum News 1 [South Texas]
• “San Antonio charter schools lifted student achievement prior to pandemic” —Greg Toppo
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Lindsay Daugherty et al., “Stackable Credential Pipelines and Equity for Low-Income Individuals,” RAND (2023)

Feedback Welcome:

Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to our producer Nathaniel Grossman at [email protected].

Cheers

• Indiana’s new state budget allocates $1.5 billion more for charter schools. —The 74
•  “It is vital that attending to students’ reading skills be designed to complement the specific content demands of the discipline, not replace them.” —Susan Pimentel
• Over the next two years, New York City schools will roll out three new reading curricula based on evidence-supported practices including phonics instruction. —New York Times
•  “Gov. Henry McMaster signed legislation providing parents $6,000 annually for private education, creating South Carolina’s first broad private K–12 school choice program.” —Post and Courier

Jeers

• Education reformers may have overpromised, but they never claimed ed reform would wipe out the Black-White wealth gap as this columnist claims. —Washington Post
• New York state’s “compromise” on lifting its charter school cap means just 14 new schools for New York City, and only in neighborhoods with low charter market share. —Wall Street Journal
• Michigan is eliminating its A–F grading system for ranking public schools, after already cancelling its reading retention policy—signs that ed reform in the Great Lake State has collapsed. —Detroit Free Press

• High-dosage tutoring is the most effective way to combat learning loss, and schools have the ESSER funds to pay for it. —Washington Post
• “Serious research on poverty must contend with basic facts. Poverty has fallen significantly over the past 50 years. Government-assistance programs do a lot to diminish material hardship. Poverty is less likely when adults work, especially full-time, year-round; it is even less likely when adults are married.” —City Journal
• For education, artificial intelligence tools will likely succeed where other technologies failed. —John Bailey
• Another writer agrees: “A.I. could actually be a boon to education” —Peter Coy
• As schools consider eliminating advanced courses, they must grapple with fundamental questions of fairness and equity. —Scott Peters
• “A middle path of reflective patriotism can rebuild support for public schools” —Richard D. Kahlenberg