In the last three years, the families of 1.8 million children switched to homeschooling, bringing the nationwide total to 4.3 million in 2022. But glib calls for parents to join those ranks gloss over some persistent challenges inherent in homeschooling. Phillips discovered these challenges firsthand when her family moved to rural upstate New York and began homeschooling their kids.
If it wasn’t the Covid closures, maybe it was the recording of a contentious school board meeting that went viral. Or a TikTok video posted by a woke teacher. Or perhaps the relentless reports of declining academic standards. Given the heated discourse around almost every aspect of public education, it’s hardly surprising that more and more families are opting out. According to the Census Experimental Household Pulse survey, in the last three years, the families of 1.8 million children made the switch, totaling 4.3 million American children homeschooled in 2022. The growth is steady and expected to continue. But glib calls to jump ship gloss over some persistent challenges inherent in homeschooling.
I discovered these challenges firsthand thirteen years ago when my family moved from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York and began homeschooling our kids, then six and eleven. We were less motivated by school board battles or declining academic standards than a general dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all classroom model. In Brooklyn, my kids had gone to a lively, sought-after public school that emphasized project-based learning within an otherwise traditional classroom. Even that school had been a poor fit for my quirky older child. I thought he was neither nurtured to his full potential nor assisted in his difficulties coping with the rhythms of the school day. My younger child was sociable, poised, and academically adept, which meant she was often ignored by teachers and partnered with difficult kids to keep them focused. The fault, I thought, lay not in the choice of teachers or curriculum, but in the very concept of assembly-line education for children, a common complaint of homeschooling enthusiasts. Coloring my opinion was the memory of my own uninspiring school years. We were ready for something different. We jumped in.
Right away we met enthusiastic homeschoolers in our new area, though they sorted into distinct groups with entirely different philosophies, methods, and cultures. The three main tribes: groovy, artsy parents who had moved up from the city and were pursuing child-led unschooling; Waldorf-inspired families with a strong homeschool culture; and Christian families who were mostly replicating traditional school at home.
Socially we fell into the first group. I wasn’t sure about “unschooling,” an approach that relies entirely on a child’s innate curiosity and natural interests to guide every aspect of the child’s education, but these were my people: artists, writers, skeptics. They were almost cultish in their love for unschooling, and they evangelized hard. I was showered with success stories. One former unschooler was studying linguistics at Oxford. Another had gone on to a prestigious technical university where he was headhunted by Google. A high school girl was working as a student-trainer on a horse farm in France, and so on. If you let kids find their own path, the credo went, they would go deep into their interests, and these kids proved it.
That sounds lovely, but does it work?
Granular data on the homeschooling experience is notoriously difficult to obtain, much less measure, and that which is touted often seems artificially rosy. My new friends didn’t mention the kids who choose to go back to school sometimes with regret about their homeschooled years or those I call “the casualties”: kids who fade away from homeschooling without finishing high school. But I would come to know kids who fit both those profiles (along with many successful homeschoolers).
Additionally, glowing reports on the test scores and college outcomes of homeschoolers often fail to provide a breakdown for the results of the widely varying methods, from traditional school that happens to be at home to radical unschooling and everything in between.
Putting it all together: Community and curriculum
Regardless, we were all in. Still unconvinced about unschooling, I was even less interested in online school, using a packaged comprehensive curriculum, or attempting to carry the entire project on my own. My goal was somewhere in the middle: to piece together an individualized curriculum using a mix of paid classes, parent-run cooperatives, and select purchased curriculum. And like every other family we would meet in the homeschool world, even those doing traditional school almost entirely at home, we would become constantly in pursuit of social opportunities. This meant groups.
The first year, we drove an hour every Wednesday to attend a cooperative group that hosted a wide mix of homeschooling types. There were unschoolers, conservative Christians, and everyone in between. Here, parents taught classes that ranged from basic astronomy to self-portraiture to medieval studies. Those who weren’t teaching sat around knitting and chatting, often in separate groups, and everyone contributed to a giant soup pot to make a shared lunch.
If I hadn’t already been smitten, the end-of-semester showcase would have sealed it: a teen girl played classical guitar, a group of girls put on a silly play they’d written, a ten-year-old boy improvised on the piano, a wildly talented teen boy sang a mashup of ‘80s songs; my daughter and her friend sang a song. Later in the spring, the group’s brilliant older kids were in an all-teen performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps the most beautiful piece of theater I’ve seen.
So far so good—but wait!
But as we said end-of-year goodbyes, I was stunned to hear from several parents that they wouldn’t be back in the fall. Their kids were going back to school or they weren’t going to make the drive or they were focusing more (or less) on academics and the group didn’t fit their plans. Plus, the incredible group of teens was graduating. This was my first taste of the hardest thing about homeschooling but a reality in our rural area: building and maintaining groups was Sisyphean labor. Groups fell apart or waxed and waned precariously and had to be rebuilt every year, even every semester.
Our difficulties were exacerbated by New York State homeschool policies, which are among the strictest in the nation. In some states, homeschooled children can participate in extracurricular activities like sports or band or even attend school two or three days per week. This kind of support would have made a huge difference, but in New York we had to create or discover everything on our own and at our own cost. For example, my daughter couldn’t do band at school, so at one point we were driving an hour and paying $60 every week for trumpet lessons.
But even supportive state policies wouldn’t have offset the biggest cost of homeschooling and the most hidden. We paid for curriculum and tutoring and materials and books and group fees, but the biggest drain on our budget was lost wages. Although my kids were no longer babies or toddlers, I continued with the part-time workweek I’d adopted when they were younger in order to meet the ongoing logistical demands of homeschooling.
Our second year, I helped create a group for elementary age kids. It dissolved within the year because a kid hit another kid, and the moms argued about whether their children had to follow rules or not. One unschooled girl wasn’t OK sitting out of classes she didn’t like; she wanted to disrupt them. Her mom thought it was cute.
Homeschooling teenagers: Lots of frustration and some bits of real joy
The older my kids got, the harder it was to curate and organize groups—and all the more necessary. Even my introverted son, who’d been largely content to hang out at home and get dragged to all-age groups, became desperate for friends his own age. This became a vicious circle. The scarcity of homeschooled teens sent many teens back to school, leaving even fewer in our homeschool world. Those who remained were then even more desperate for teenage companionship, and more likely to go back to school.
Ever the optimist, I started a new group just for teens. A local non-profit had converted the annex of a nineteenth-century factory into a maker space for children and teens. It was stocked with art supplies and woodworking tools and murals-in-progress and, at one point, the wooden ribs of a hand-crafted boat under construction. The group liked our mission and said we could meet there one day a week at no cost. Incredible!
We got to work. But the dad I started it with wanted no rules, so we argued about that and he left. An artist mom who was unschooling her four kids stepped up, and she and I ran the group for two years. Next an impressively organized and kind senior girl ran it for one year. And then, after three years total, we all were done and the group dissolved.
It was lovely while it lasted. We did discussion and debate and art and hired a biology teacher. An acting coach taught them to curse in Shakespearean dialect and made them memorize sonnets and perform parts of Macbeth for parents. I taught a literature class to a group of adolescent girls; they acted out Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, a haunting and beautiful interpretation. In the discussion group, a Christian girl and an LGBT girl debated abortion kindly and respectfully. A sullen blue-haired boy who’d left school in some disgrace blossomed with us.
Ongoing challenges
But the challenges were persistent. Homeschooling families often have no money, so classes had to be dirt cheap if we wanted turnout. Attendance was a struggle. We were always texting tensely and calling to find out who was coming that morning and hearing that a kid didn’t feel like getting out of bed today. Or their anxiety was up. Or they were skipping bio but might be in later. Or they wanted to know if the heat was working (sometimes it wasn’t). Few did homework.
My biggest frustration was the lack of common foundation. We couldn’t build on anything. We always had about eight kids, twelve to sixteen years old, but they were different kids every semester and their skills and knowledge diverged wildly. I stopped being shocked by how many kids (both lifelong homeschoolers and kids who’d left school recently) couldn’t read well. History classes fell apart as some kids were bored and others lost.
And then there were the personalities. We did a class on Serial, the podcast, but we couldn’t get a popular fifteen-year-old boy to come on board or even to sit down, so that fell apart, never mind that the younger students, all girls, were interested and prepared. That year, all the younger kids were girls and all the older kids were boys, who dominated in every way. This was not the classroom I’d imagined when I pulled my daughter out of school because the teachers were ignoring her.
My kids and I joined yet another group. In this one you had to try out and get voted in, a harsh but successful formula in a world populated by misfits and rebels. This group had no time for children who didn’t behave well, and by then we were grateful for the rules and the structure. Like the other homeschooling collectives we’d joined, this one required parental presence and was a full day of classes taught by both parents and hired teachers.
I led a class on satire for a group of smart, competent teens. The Charlie Hebdo massacre happened in Paris just days before the first class. I was shocked to learn the kids thought the artists were essentially at fault. “Not that they should have been killed,” said one senior girl, “but they crossed a line.” I also heard that the American colonists had invented slavery. Even teens who had been homeschooled since kindergarten and had smart, reasonable parents could profess a “woke” outlook.
Our years of homeschooling produced so many beautiful moments, but what I remember most was scrambling constantly. It was so. Much. Damn. Work. And I haven’t even gotten into choosing curriculum or teaching math or the tests or the quarterly reports.
The outcome? My daughter went back to school in ninth grade, behind in math but caught up by October. She is now twenty, in college, and will graduate a year early. Always pragmatic, she is sanguine about her homeschool years. “Some parts were good, some parts were bad,” she says.
And my son? I regret homeschooling him. Taking him out of school did not meaningfully alleviate his struggles or nurture his gifts. He remained isolated, unregulated, and in need of more structure. I asked him, now twenty-four, what he thought of homeschooling. “One hundred percent a mistake,” he says. “I’m still catching up.”
I can’t know what would have happened if he’d stayed in school. But homeschooling, like every education option, was a mixed bag with its own challenges and shortcomings. I still support homeschooling. But I would have been better served by more logistical support and facts than utopian idealism.
After a millennium or so in the world of ed policy, I nearly always think of education as stuff schools do that produces results on various metrics that (one hopes) enables education leaders and policymakers to make better decisions about what schools should do tomorrow. And I admit pooh-poohing “experiential education” in its various manifestations as soft stuff that doesn’t do much for those metrics.
Well, a late July weekend proved a bit of a comeuppance as it reminded me of how much one can learn by going somewhere and learning from being there, learning important and valuable things that may never show up on our usual metrics, either for me or for my college-age companion (granddaughter). I was also reminded that some of that learning may arise in unexpected ways.
Our destination was Springfield, Illinois, where we had never been and which I knew mainly as the state capital whence a bunch of governors went to prison and the place that figures in Lincoln biographies during what’s always felt like the unimportant parts before he became president.
But we went to see—the expected part—what more we could learn about Lincoln and that turned out to be quite a lot. And then it turned out there was even more to learn.
It was hot as blazes.
Springfield is a sprawled but not very big city in the flat middle of the state, within which we found a core that can fairly be described as obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.
At the core of the core, the National Park Service operates a closed-off, several-block area called the Lincoln Home National Historic Site. This starts with an information-filled (and blissfully air-conditioned) visitor center and moves on to guided tours of the house that Abe and Mary and their boys occupied for the seventeen years before they departed for the White House. (There was a partial interruption during his single term in the House of Representatives, then back to Springfield and their home there.)
The house tour is fast but fascinating, both for insights into how they lived and for evidence of Lincoln’s mounting success and prominence in that community, gradually extending to district, state, and nation. (For example, they twice could afford to expand the house and pave the muddy street out front.) And because much of the immediate vicinity is preserved or restored, one can see a bit of what pre–Civil War Springfield was like.
Scattered around town were the homes, some still standing, of Lincoln’s friends, law partners, Mary’s several sisters, and others who played roles in their lives. In the city’s heart, around the Old State Capital, site of his “house divided” speech, we encountered a trove of Lincoln lore and memorabilia—a recreation of his law office, the dry goods store (owned by a brother-in-law) in a spare room above which he drafted his first inaugural address—and a few blocks away, the railroad depot from which he departed for D.C. and delivered a memorable impromptu “farewell address,” which our local guide took pleasure in delivering for us with (one must assume) suitable Lincolnian intonation.
The depot and that long train trip to Washington of course marked the launch of his presidency, but as we know from tragic history, he would never return to Springfield alive.
Which brought us to the most solemn of Springfield’s Lincoln sites, the vast and carefully landscaped Oak Ridge Cemetery and his grand tomb—his, his wife’s, and three of his four sons—which is awesome on the outside and deeply moving within.
One especially moving bit for me and my granddaughter: embracing the actual seven-ton red marble cenotaph below which he lies are seven flags, including the “Presidential Flag,” which by custom flies only for a living president, but in this case was contributed by Ronald Reagan during a visit to the sixteenth president’s final resting place.
There’s so much more Lincoln throughout Springfield, signs everywhere explaining places that mattered to him or recounting aspects of his life, a sizable museum-cum-presidential library (operated by the state, not the National Archives). We benefited from a local guide, to be sure, but could have learned most of it on our own.
One unexpected bit of experiential learning, however, was a site that our guide steered us to and that concluded our Springfield visit: In that city, we were surprised to discover, is the largest and possibly finest “prairie-style” home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the famed architect whose work we both admire. It’s not just the house, it’s also Wright-designed furniture and fascinating objects, some of them showing his love of Japanese design.
Though we hadn’t known of its existence, we lucked into the last house tour of the day, and despite A.C. that struggled in the heat that afternoon, we learned a great deal there, as well.
None of which would have happened had we not journeyed to Springfield for the weekend.
Experiential learning it truly was. I have more respect for it now than a few weeks back. It won’t show up in any metrics, but I’m a better-informed person—and perhaps better citizen—as a result of it, and I’m pretty sure my young travel partner will be a more knowledgeable and wiser adult.
I must admit, I’d become something of an education fatalist.
I know the research about direct instruction. I know the power of a knowledge-rich, well-sequenced curriculum and the promise of school choice. I know that individual schools and even whole charter systems can achieve amazing results. But I always wonder: Is it all for naught?
Ideologically-corrupted colleges of education and their woke professors inundate American schools with terrible ideas. Unions intimidate governors, both Democratic and Republican, away from beneficial legislation. Family backgrounds and general intelligence create seemingly insurmountable achievement gaps. Do such determinative factors confound even the best laid schemes of mice, men, and technocratic education reformers?
In light of that fatalism, I needed to read Mike Schmoker’s latest release, Results Now 2.0, more than the typical education reform book. Schmoker—a former administrator and English teacher who’s written several best-sellers—convincingly provides a definitive “no” in response to my questions.
His survey of the current state of American classrooms provides a glimmer of hope—especially as it pertains to what he calls the “Crayola Curriculum.” Students spend an inordinate amount of time cutting, pasting, coloring, gluing, and glittering. There’s a dismaying lack of reading, writing, and discussion. But precisely therein lies the hope: There’s so much wasted time that minor improvements could garner significant results.
Displacing the near religious commitment to progressive education in America's teacher prep programs seems impossible. Reforming the fraying American family is a generations-long project. But replacing hours of aimless activities with little to no educational value? That’s an accomplishable undertaking.
We don’t need to convince Jo Boaler to rewrite California’s math framework. We don’t need to replace Paulo Freire with E.D. Hirsch on teacher prep reading lists. We only have to get the average classroom teacher to spend a little less time with coloring worksheets or word searches and more time reading good books together or writing extended responses.
There’s no chance I can get my old professors to take the scales from their eyes and see the errors of their ways. But when I cross paths with my colleagues at the copier printing another cut-and-paste activity, that’s an easier place for reform. To paraphrase a wise wizard, it’s not necessarily “great power” or federal reforms that can keep illiteracy in check, but rather an aggregate of “small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folks” that create the schools that students need.
Schmoker’s book has far more going for it than the fact that it shook me from my fatalistic rut. I’ve been searching for a single resource for people who are looking for an alternative to the dogmas of Piaget and Dewey, inquiry learning and project-based units.
E.D. Hirsch is an obvious first choice, but the length, theory, and tedium can make him a hard sell to busy teachers. Doug Lemov has done the thankless work of turning abstract ideas into much-needed, practical, step-by-step guides, but he won’t convince anyone still committed to progressive education. John Sweller and Paul Kirschner wrote some of the seminal, academic essays refuting unstructured learning, but they wrote just that: academic essays.
Schmoker’s book covers it all: He rebuts faulty theories and practices, covers the research behind structured practice and explicit instruction, and outlines practical policies that teachers, administrators, and policymakers can follow to bring about swift change.
Schmoker’s recommendations are basic but essential. Schools and reformers waste much energy designing gaudy projects, money investing in the latest technology, and time facilitating useless activities. In reality, there’s no occult knowledge to great teaching and learning. Effective instruction isn’t “sexy.” Rather, teachers need to just spend more time on task, clearly modeling procedures, reading books, facilitating structured practice, and requiring extended written responses. We try to “innovate” away from the basics, and our students lose out for it.
Admittedly, perhaps such reform is achievable because the bar is so low already and there’s simply so much wasted time. He gives countless examples of schools that skyrocketed their scores within a year simply by encouraging daily writing. When students spend more time with crayons than books, the return on investment of even the smallest of adjustments will be large.
If there’s any flaw in his book, it’s the lack of discussion of behavioral expectations and consequences. I worked in a school that had a great curriculum and at least espoused a belief in teacher-led instruction, but all was for naught because the school couldn’t maintain basic order. Behavioral policies are primary to curriculum and instruction. But I doubt Schmoker would deny the importance of classroom or school management, and his eschewal of this topic is simply because every author can’t address every topic in every book.
Ultimately, we overcomplicate education reform to our own peril. In his own words:
We should remind teachers that their lessons need not be particularly elaborate or complex. Teachers can build them around versatile (but underappreciated) routine academic activities such as close reading, note-taking, discussions, and writing prompts about content.... Done right, these activities never become dull. Curriculum built around this core simplifies lesson planning and powerfully promotes students’ intellectual and expressive capacities.
It’s a simple vision for our schools, but it’s powerful precisely because of its simplicity.
Computer-adaptive testing (CAT) is on the rise in K–12 schools, from Seattle to Virginia and everywhere in between. Proponents of the algorithm-driven testing model say that having variable problem sets geared toward the demonstrated capabilities of individual students allows for more accurate assessment, especially for very high and very low achievers—with less gaming and guessing—along with a focus on student growth rather than raw scores. Opponents, meanwhile, contend that those features play into the fears of test-averse students and can depress their scores. New research from Japan may offer some clues to help unravel this conundrum.
Japanese education officials have been resistant to using computer-adaptive testing for several reasons, including those noted above, but also some that are peculiar to Japan. There, large groups of students taking the same test in the same place at the same time is a longstanding cultural touchstone that would be entirely eliminated by administration of tests that must be taken on electronic devices, have different questions for each student, and likely require differing amounts of time for students to complete. Nevertheless, CAT’s expansion into international arenas like PISA and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) has made the Education Ministry take a second look. Three researchers from institutions across the country developed a computer-adaptive testing protocol designed to determine not only how students performed, but also how they perceived the testing method and whether their own attitudes toward testing were reinforced or allayed by the experience.
The researchers conducted two experiments. The first was to determine whether students who have testing anxiety performed more poorly on computer-adaptive tests than those who do not. They compiled a proxy measure of anxiety based on students’ self-reported achievement goals (whether they are focused on performance or mastery, à la Dweck) and approach to learning (deep vs. surface). A total of 870 students (474 fifth graders, 174 sixth graders, 163 seventh graders, and 58 students from an unknown grade) from the Kansai region were recruited between June and September 2020 to participate in the first experiment. (Japanese schools mostly remained open during the pandemic.) A total of 415 students were male; 383 were female. Data indicate that a student’s performance goal did not directly predict their test outcome, implying that the computer-adaptive test did not reinforce any preexisting anxiety about test taking. Additionally, students were surveyed post-test regarding their attitudes toward three types of assessments: the computer-adaptive version they just took, the traditional fixed-item version with which they were familiar, and a putative human-adaptive test which is a hybrid of the two. Despite limited familiarity with CAT, students in the first experiment expressed more positive attitudes toward it than toward traditional fixed-item and human-adaptive versions.
The second experiment, conducted in Kansai from March to July 2021, involved an additional 745 students (540 fifth graders, 90 sixth graders, 100 seventh graders, and 15 students from unknown grade levels), roughly half male and half female. The basics of the previous experiment were repeated with the same results. However, this time students were given more detailed versions of the two surveys, aimed at identifying potential mechanisms at work. Results revealed that students who felt that the value of testing was primarily to show improvement or to get them to develop study habits were least accepting of computer-adaptive testing, although the difference between them and their peers was minimal. Students who felt that the value of testing was to determine comparative achievement levels preferred a putative human-adaptive test over the other two options.
What might all this mean? The researchers believe it means that computer-adaptive testing does not make students who are prone to anxiety regarding their test performance any more or less anxious than a traditional fixed-item test would. On the contrary, most students seem unopposed to the new model regardless of their level of test anxiety. In the highly-traditional Japanese education sector, that’s saying something. More specifically, if the purpose of testing is made clear to students—that is, what their teachers and school leaders are going to do with the resulting data—nearly any type of test seems to be acceptable to them. And, as noted above, the data obtained from a computer-adaptive test are more focused on growth measures rather than raw or scaled scores, which can be compared among students. As long as teachers, administrators, and policymakers are good with that new focus, it seems that CAT could be expanded in K–12 education without concern.
SOURCE: Takayuki Goto, Kei Kano, and Takayuki Shiose, “Students’ acceptance on computer-adaptive testing for achievement assessment in Japanese elementary and secondary school,” Educational Psychology (July 2023).
Early College High Schools are designed to be rigorous programs that partner with higher-education institutions to help teens earn college credit before graduation, with the aim of improving their chance of success after graduation. There are currently more than 300 of them in thirty states. They go beyond general dual-enrollment programs by requiring students to earn at least twelve transferable credits, providing more support services, and intentionally recruiting students who are underrepresented in higher education.
A recent study by Tom Swiderski of the University of North Carolina uses ten years of student-level data to estimate the effect of Early College High Schools (ECHS) in North Carolina—where almost one hundred of them operate—on bachelor’s degree attainment. It examines those effects by area of study, with a focus on STEM degrees. The sample comprises 400,000 students who attended public high schools in the state, including 7,300 who attended ECHS.
Swiderski starts with high school outcomes, based in part on the idea that any boost to bachelor’s degree attainment may occur because ECHS better prepare students for academic success at the next level. He finds that, compared to otherwise similar students attending traditional public schools, attending an Early College High Schools increased the chance of passing at least one college-level course by the end of twelfth grade (87.8 percent versus 42.5 percent), as well as one college-level math or science course (55.5 percent versus 24.1 percent), and that ECHS students had a higher GPA in their math and science courses at any level (0.15 grade points, a 7 percent bump).
The study also finds that Early College High Schools indeed boost bachelor’s degree attainment of students, compared to similar peers attending traditional public schools, by 4.7 percentage points (from 24.8 percent to 29.5 percent). This includes increases in STEM degrees, but at a rate nearly proportional to overall bachelor’s growth. According to Swiderski, “This suggests that changes in concentrations within STEM fields are likely primarily due to students switching which field of STEM they choose to pursue rather than switching into or out of STEM.”
And there are substantial differences between different STEM and STEM-related fields. Compared to their peers in traditional high schools, for example, ECHS students were significantly more likely to earn a degree in the natural sciences (4.2 percent versus 2.9 percent), math and computer science (1.6 percent versus 1.0 percent), and psychology (3.3 percent versus 2.1 percent)—collectively much higher than the increase in overall bachelor’s degree attainment. It’s a different story in engineering and healthcare, though, where the effects are null or negative: 1.4 percent of ECHS earn a bachelor’s in engineering versus 1.5 percent of the comparison group, and in healthcare, it’s 1.8 percent versus 2.1 percent.
Encouragingly, the study found stronger effects for traditionally underrepresented groups. For example, natural science bachelor’s degree attainment nearly doubled for Black and Hispanic students (from 1.9 percent to 3.7 percent) and economically disadvantaged students (from 1.6 percent to 2.7 percent). However, the gap between economically disadvantaged and non-economically disadvantaged students also grew slightly.
As society becomes ever more dependent on technology, we will need more scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment in STEM occupations to increase by 11 percent by 2031. And compared to other groups, Black and Hispanic students remain significantly less likely to earn a STEM degree and less likely to work in STEM-related occupations. The study therefore suggests that Early College High Schools can help mitigate these problems. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, of the 23,000 traditional public and high schools in the United States, less than 400 are Early College High Schools. Lawmakers and state education leaders would do well to consider how they might increase that number.
SOURCE: Tom Swiderski, “The Effect of Early College High Schools on STEM Bachelor's degree attainment: Evidence from North Carolina,” Education Finance and Policy (June 2023).
Cheers
Jeers
