The Education Gadfly Weekly

In announcing his nomination of wrestling magnate and former Small Business Administration director Linda McMahon as the next secretary of education, President Trump promised yet again to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. One big question is whether this dynamic duo could actually make it happen, and about that I remain extremely skeptical, given the need for congressional approval and the idea’s deep unpopularity, though perhaps Elon Musk will mutter abracadabra and find a way to get it done.

A more important question, though, is whether abolishing the agency—and its programs, policies, and regulations [1]—would actually make things better for America’s students. Or to put it differently: How much blame does the federal government deserve for the general mediocrity of America’s public schools?

It’s not crazy to think that Uncle Sam is at least somewhat to blame. We have a sprawling, continental system governed by fifty states and 14,000 districts, yet the on-the-ground reality in schools and classrooms is remarkably similar, and similarly lackluster, throughout the nation.[2][3] Is that because of some homogenizing force? And is that force the federal government?

My answer is: Yes, in part. But there are other forces that are much more powerful and harmful.

But let’s stay with the feds for a moment and consider how Uncle Sam is making it harder than it should be to run excellent schools. I can think of four big ways.

1. Federal programs encourage a compliance mindset that is anathema to excellence, experimentation, and improving student outcomes. Because of a history of financial shenanigans with federal money, big programs including Title I and IDEA come with strict spending requirements, rules around clear audit trails, limited “allowable uses,” and dictates about “supplementing, not supplanting” state and local spending. Bureaucrats at the federal, state, and local level know that they will get in much more trouble for running afoul of these rules (and their enforcer, the Office of the Inspector General) than for failing to improve academic results. They also learn to be risk averse.

2. Well-meaning but naïve policies meant to promote educational equity force schools to make compromises that aren’t always good for kids. I’m thinking especially about the long-standing special education law requiring students with disabilities to be placed in the least restrictive environment, regardless of the impact on their peers.

There’s a lot to love about this. As a public-school parent, I’m glad my kids get to go to school with children with disabilities, including kids with significant developmental delays. I sure don’t want to go back to a time when such children were systematically excluded. But in the real world of classrooms, this stuff can get complicated quickly. It’s especially problematic when we define most students who are violent or consistently disruptive as having a disability called “emotional disturbance” and then create protections for such kids that make it hard to keep their peers safe or to protect the learning environment.

3. A similar dynamic is in play when we analyze discipline disparities through a disparate-impact lens, as the Obama administration did, and tell schools they must reduce the rate of suspensions and expulsions of Black and Brown students, regardless of any disparities in underlying student misbehavior. Guess what: That can make schools more violent and less orderly.

4. Some of the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds act—holdovers from No Child Left Behind—pervert the way states evaluate the effectiveness of schools, which has negative consequences on classrooms. I’m especially thinking of the rule that states assess all kids on “grade-level content”—which sounds good but means that states can’t use fully computer-adaptive assessments because some students would answer questions well above or below grade level. This means that we end up getting less accurate measures of the skills of high- and low-achieving kids, which in turn makes our measures of student growth less accurate than they otherwise could or should be. It also discourages teachers from pinpointing instruction to kids at the high and low end of the achievement spectrum.

Fixing these four problems should be at the center of an effort to reform federal education policy. But note a couple things. First, there’s really not that much stuff I could come up with that’s making a real negative impact in our schools.[4] Most of what the federal government does in K–12 education is simply a waste of money (like myriad “competitive” grant programs that amount to pork for congressional districts) or is mildly helpful (like supporting research and collecting statistics, providing extra money for high poverty schools, or enforcing anti-discrimination laws).

Second, fixing these problems would take enormous political capital that President Trump seems unlikely to invest. Would a Secretary McMahon—and Congressional Republicans—really go after special-education law? Stand up to the equity advocates on discipline and “grade-level standards”? This stuff is hard!

If Uncle Sam isn’t the primary impediment to excellence, what is?

Even if Trump and McMahon crossed off some items on my federal-reform wish list, or abolished the department entirely, most of our education system’s problems would remain. And that’s because the forces that are doing the most damage would still be with us. And they are:

• Elected school boards that are easily captured by the teachers unions and other adult interests.
• The teachers unions themselves.
• The education schools that train our teachers, principals, and other administrators.

That’s what all public schools have in common. And that’s why we see such homogenization—and mediocrity—across the land.

Perhaps it’s not quite so bad in red America because the unions are weaker there. But even where there are teacher “associations” instead of “unions,” we see human capital policies that no organization in its right mind would embrace voluntarily. These include barriers to entry that are weakly related to on-the-job performance; ineffective supports for new teachers and principals; lifelong tenure after just a few years in the profession; pay systems that pretend that every school and subject area demands the same salary; and compensation systems heavily weighted toward health care and retiree benefits instead of starting salaries—in other words, what veteran and retired teachers value, instead of what potential rookie teachers might want.

And we see bad ideas flowing through our schools, like recent efforts to “reform grading” by never giving kids a zero, to “reform discipline” by, well, not disciplining students, to teach reading by not explicitly teaching reading, to teach American history as a story of the oppressors versus the oppressed, and on and on ad nauseam. Thank you ed schools for your contributions!

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Dismantle the Department of Education if you’d like. But don’t expect our schools to change much. If you want real transformation, fight the elected school boards, defang the unions, and create alternatives to the ed schools. If all of that is too hard (and it probably is), then put your money on the best work-around we’ve got: America’s charter schools sector, which is showing what public education can be with a different set of governance arrangements. A charter sector that, by the way, has benefited hugely from targeted federal grants!

Social media lit up Tuesday evening with the news that President-elect Trump has tapped professional wrestling magnate and former Small Business Administration (SBA) administrator Linda McMahon to lead the U.S. Department of Education. McMahon currently chairs the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank founded to advance policies like parental rights along with more divisive education proposals. A former member of Connecticut’s state board of education, her installation would mark the department’s second consecutive leader with roots in the Nutmeg State, and the second billionaire GOP secretary in a row. While McMahon’s primary charge is to usher this forty-five-year-old agency out of existence, it’s unclear whether her boss is willing to expend any political capital to get Congress to go along. Instead, McMahon would do well to focus on academic achievement—something that was given remarkably short shrift by her predecessor.

Returning Uncle Sam’s focus to improving academics ought not be too much of a stretch, given what we know about the education secretary-designate. In the coming weeks, more will be learned about McMahon’s views on education, but school choice is unquestionably near or at the top of the list. Consider an op-ed she penned for the Huffington Post nearly a decade ago titled, “Today’s kids, tomorrow’s leaders.” In it, McMahon underscored the importance of high-quality charter schools in ensuring that all students are academically well-prepared:

I support charter schools because I have seen the great work they do, especially in disadvantaged urban areas where kids often have challenges far beyond a weekly spelling test. Charter schools have high standards. Students often outscore their peers in standardized tests. The secret: Teachers, kids, and parents are all involved, and ALL are held accountable. Charters are community-based public/private schools that receive part of their funding from the private sector. I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather, I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices.

A few things to note on McMahon’s calling out of urban charter schools: (1) the research base behind them is almost universally positive and has grown considerably since she wrote that piece; (2) despite charter schools’ success in improving the lives of needy urban families, Democrats have largely turned their backs on them; (3) the big city swing to Trump may have occurred in part because of this betrayal by Democrats (Biden and Harris included) of low-income and minority children. Doubling down on charters and charter growth would be a shrewd policy play, as well as a politically astute one that could further cement the loyalty of the GOP’s newly won poor and working-class constituents.

But no matter what policy prescriptions come down from McMahon, her success will depend in large part on who she surrounds herself with at the department. Assuming the agency stays around, anyone heading it needs strong deputy secretaries, deputies to the deputy secretaries, associate deputy secretaries, and every other permutation that runs up and down the ladder. She shouldn’t hesitate—nor should the White House—in choosing some who didn’t necessarily support the GOP ticket. Andy Rotherham is right that “we’re all in this together” and that we need good people to step up to ensure the next four years are the best they can be for our children:

We face real challenges as a country, and specifically in education, and we need the best possible people in government to address them regardless of who is in charge. This doesn’t mean acquiescing to things you don’t agree with, but it does mean coming to the table.

The argument, “I want Trump to fail because I don’t like him,” doesn’t align with rhetoric like, “I care about improving education in this country” or “I put kids first.” If you disagree with Trump, then persuade and pivot to governmental politics from electoral politics. Don’t hope or root for the worst just to make a point. One makes you an advocate; the other makes you an asshole.

To be sure, the President-elect’s treatment of the Department of Education as a consolation prize for Secretary-designate McMahon (who wanted Commerce) doesn’t inspire confidence. But given the present state of affairs, this selection could have a silver lining. From FAFSA to fundamentals, the abject failure of the outgoing administration on education suggests that McMahon could be exactly what’s needed now in Washington. Not a veteran school administrator, but an outsider with managerial prowess and a knack for getting things done. As the former head of SBA, McMahon has more executive experience than the past two education secretaries combined. And she knows wrestling, too, which is definitely a plus when tangling with Congressmen, bureaucrats, even the White House staff. Let’s hope she can use that know-how to whip Uncle Sam into shape and help more of our nation’s students get back on track.

Ah, David Brooks. Ordinarily, I’d start a piece in which I plan to (partially) disagree with him by stating that he’s a very smart guy—but what I’m going to push back at this time is his much-disseminated contention that America needs to rethink what “smart” means. Even though his own qualities would likely still qualify under his new formulation, I ought not take chances. Nowadays, he might not even want to be termed smart.

So let me instead begin by observing that David’s voluminous writings and frequent commentaries, whether in print or on PBS on Friday evenings or in myriad panels, conferences, speeches and symposia, are nearly always well-informed, well thought through, articulate, wise—and set forth clearly, with decency, some humor, a dash of humility, and a friendly smile.

What’s more, I usually agree with him.

But when he sets out to reinvent the American meritocracy and the education system that feeds into it, I can only accompany him partway, at which point I find his analysis and especially his proposed remedies off-base, slightly archaic, unrealistic, and potentially harmful.

You should definitely read his long piece in The Atlantic titled “How the Ivy League Broke America” and perhaps some of the various spinoffs—podcasts, interviews, news shows—it has already spawned. You may well find yourself, like me, agreeing with part of his analysis, especially the parts—echoing the recent election, as well as Charles Murray’s thesis in Coming Apart—about the deepening bifurcation of America into a college-educated population that hangs out with, and shares the values of, others like itself, and may look askance at the other population, which is less educated, often poorer, similarly inclined to clump together, and perhaps resentful of that first group.

America, like every country, has always had better educated and more prosperous elites, on the one hand, inclined to marry one another and produce children with good odds of remaining in that elite, and on the other hand, a large population with less schooling, less money, less status, and less chance of altering that situation for themselves or their progeny. No advanced society that I’m aware of has eradicated that situation, though some small, homogeneous Nordic lands have reduced the discrepancies.

What’s long distinguished the United States, however, the prototypical “land of opportunity,” is how many ways it has offered determined individuals and families by which to propel themselves into the “better educated and more prosperous” parts of its society. And its educational offerings—schools of all sorts, colleges of all sorts, apprenticeships, vocational programs and workplace training opportunities, including the military—have played a key role, surely the largest role, in enabling such mobility. Never, though, has there been much mobility without aspiration, determination, and quite a lot of effort on the part of individuals and those who love them.

The mobility arrangements are numerous but complicated, imperfect and sometimes just half-visible. All sorts of barriers have also gotten in the way, from discrimination and poverty to inadequate schools to limits imposed by guilds, unions, and professions.

So those arrangement have long needed a tune-up, and Brooks recounts, at considerable length, what he views as an education revolution—far more than a tune-up—that began in the 1950’s and was intended to improve those arrangements. He centers the tale on Harvard’s James B. Conant, who, with a few others, set out to overhaul entry into the country’s most elite universities, changing the focus from what Brooks terms “bloodlines and breeding” into “criteria centered on brainpower.” Conant, writes Brooks, hoped, by “shifting admissions criteria in this way...to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society” and fostering “more social mobility and less class conflict.”

Thus arose, for example, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, an earnest effort by Ivy colleges and psychometricians to level the playing field, such that a talented kid from public school in Cairo, Illinois, would have as good a shot at Yale as a Groton graduate whose parents lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

It actually worked pretty well. Combined with civil rights breakthroughs, the rise of feminism, and a bunch of changing social attitudes, plus all manner of financial aid, the entering classes of selective, elite colleges and universities came a lot closer to “looking like America” than ever before, and a lot more of their duly credentialed graduates ended up diversifying—while also boosting the brain power of—myriad C suites, big-time finance, major-league science, the traditional professions, and the academy itself.

Much else changed, too. “The effect,” Brooks writes, “was transformational, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet,” a talent-gauged-by-smartness magnet.

But, he goes on to contend—at this point we’re just five pages into the thirty-seven that came out of my printer—that big problems also followed. Brooks judges that the “highly competitive status race” that overcame K–12 education and parents in the wake of this transformation, especially parents bent on securing their own kids’ entry into the high-status colleges via the new criteria, caused widespread collateral damage. He sees the emphasis on testing, evaluating, and sorting kids—and holding schools and teachers to account for the academic performance of those kids—as taking pretty much all the joy out of childhood, the arts out of schools, the professionalism out of teaching, and the pleasure out of learning.

Here’s where we start to part company. Much of what Brooks is focused on pertains almost exclusively to the tiny top of the social pyramid, the part that’s competing hard to get its kids into the twenty or so colleges whose diplomas it cherishes even as the vast majority of college-going Americans matriculate at non-selective state schools within fifty miles of home. Does he really think the obsessions of a few percent have transformed a K–12 complex serving 55 million kids?

Far more leverage on that vast enterprise has been exerted by state and federal policies—most famously No Child Left Behind—that have sought for almost four decades to boost achievement across the board while reducing achievement gaps between student groups, all this prompted not by an obsession to get into Princeton, but by ample evidence from PISA exams, from A Nation at Risk, and from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that America’s national prosperity, national security, and domestic equity (and tranquility) hinge on doing this better.

It’s true that such policies have emphasized testing to go along with higher academic standards, and it’s often said by teachers that those tests and prepping pupils for them serve to cramp their style and narrow the curriculum. While there’s no doubt that U.S schools focus much more on reading, math, and science than on history, art, and poetry, it’s no bad thing for states to push for higher achievement across the board and to start that heavy lift with literacy and numeracy.

As for classroom joy, it would be swell to have more of it, but can David Brooks really point to some golden era when American kids viewed the best part of school as anything other than the 3 p.m. closing bell?

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What would he have us do differently? His proposals begin with identifying what he terms the “six deadly sins of the meritocracy,” namely: “the system overrates intelligence; success in school is not the same as success in life; the game is rigged; the meritocracy has created an American caste system; the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite; and the meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.”

Wow! Whew! At this point—about halfway through Brooks’s essay—one might expect him to erect a guillotine, summon up a firing squad, quote Karl Marx, or at least urge lottery-based entry to everything from CalTech to McKinsey & Company, from neurosurgery to the ranks of general and admiral, to Rhodes Scholars and poets laureate. Surely we should demolish (or use random admission to) Stuyvesant High School, as well as David’s alma mater, the Ivy-adjacent University of Chicago.

But no, he doesn’t recommend anything crazy. What he does instead—which I view as well-intentioned, partly right, but also a bit naïve and out of touch—is to “redefine merit around four crucial qualities” that he dubs “curiosity,” “a sense of drive and mission,” “social intelligence,” and “agility,” all of which are indeed valuable because all are important elements of highly successful human beings in pretty much every field of study and line of work. Fostering them, all four of them, is an important part of what effective schools and great teachers have always done. But—I’m getting to some big buts, at least as regards the K–12 enterprise—focusing bigtime on those qualities rather than what we’ve been focused on, we education reformers, for the past few decades, will lead to new and different problems while producing more collateral damage. Here goes:

• Formal education can indeed help foster those qualities, but it’s far beyond the capacity of teachers and schools to instill them in kids or even do a great deal to develop them. Some are probably innate, qualities we’re born with in varying quantity. And schools occupy a surprisingly small slice of children’s lives, while most of the forces that foster (or squelch) these qualities operate outside school: at home, in the neighborhood, in the culture, on the Little League field, and so on. What’s more—I’ve had this argument with the “social-emotional learning” crowd for ages—too much time and attention by schools to fostering these qualities within their limited time with kids will squeeze and shrink the attention given to grammar, multiplication, phonics, chemical reactions, key historical events, poetry, the solar system, and the causes of the Civil War. You may contend that those things aren’t important, but I contend that solidly imparting them to kids is the foremost job of schooling—and practically impossible to acquire anywhere else.


• The quartet of qualities that Brooks prizes is exceptionally hard to measure, meaning that it’s all but impossible to know in any useful way how effective is a teacher or school at fostering them or to report to parents (or colleges, employers, etc.) how well a given child is faring at developing them. They can only be gauged subjectively—the polite term is holistically—and that’s time consuming, expensive, deeply vulnerable to uneven criteria, and subject to manipulation and corruption. Test scores, for all their shortcomings, come closer to objectivity, fairness, and integrity. While efforts are underway to devise workable metrics for what ETS and Carnegie term “skills for the future,” they don’t exist today.


• Further tamping down on competition for better grades and higher scores, as Brooks would do, in pursuit of those worthy qualities and skills, will worsen grade inflation while eroding the strongest motivators that kids have to strive—to win the race, to get elected, to get a part in the play, to make it onto the team, to secure a prize, to make the honor roll, to be selected valedictorian—at a time when today’s K–12 system is already dangerously far down that route. It will make it even harder for our modest and beleaguered “gifted and talented” programs to enroll more kids and for those trying to get more—and more different—kids into Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classrooms to get school systems to take the steps needed to ensure that more kids are well-prepared for the demands of such coursework. I’m sure David Brooks doesn’t intend this, but the only ways schools know how to implement the kinds of recommendations he’s making are to reduce rigor, lower standards, and serve up more of what Rick Hess has recently termed “sugar-coated” education.


• Perhaps this needn’t be said, but every previous era of “kinder, gentler” education in America has led to a post-Sputnik-type panic over the country’s loss of expertise or a “Nation at Risk” alarm about dumbed down high school graduates. Even fewer kids will be academically prepared to succeed in college. More will drop out. And, in point of fact, when one asks educators and policy leaders from other countries what they admire about American education, it’s nearly always the creativity and independent thinking that our system already fosters—or at least doesn’t squelch! And when you ask American educators what they admire about, say, Asian education, it’s nearly always the other countries’ prowess in ensuring that their students are literate and numerate.

Finally, why did I say that Brooks’s argument is a little dated? He right that our push for everyone to go to college—the best possible college—has ill-served a great many young Americans and we need a revival of attention to high-class career education and other alternative pathways for young people, as well as far stronger preparation for college for those who really want to go there. But that revival is underway, even thriving in some places, if not as newsworthy as how many applicants Stanford is now rejecting. Almost every day brings news of another employer that’s quit requiring college degrees or stopped putting a premium on credentials from elite institutions—many of which are also struggling with internal governance, free-speech, hyper-woke, and student safety issues. And you’d do well to check out such high-quality alternatives to college-prep as the regional technical schools of Massachusetts. See what Sinclair Community College is up to in Dayton. Have a look at WorkTexas in Houston. There are many more. This movement needs nurturing, for sure. But it’s underway.

I have immense admiration for David Brooks, and as I said up top, I nearly always agree with him. But his prescription for American education needs to go back to school.

A new working paper by an accomplished team of researchers uses a new dataset to dive deep into the dynamics and impacts of teacher strikes. This paper provides a fresh perspective on why these strikes happen, how they influence school districts, and their broader implications on education policy and student achievement.

Teachers play an outsized role in American organized labor, especially as overall union participation has declined by 60 percent since 1970. Today, K–12 public school teachers make up 18 percent of all unionized workers, and in 2018, when the “Red for Ed” teacher movement swept the country, nearly four in five workers who participated in large work stoppages were K–12 teachers.

To analyze the role of strikes in American public education, the researchers reviewed 90,000 news articles and other public records, creating a database of 772 teacher strikes across the U.S. from 2007 to 2023. These data provide a unique view of teacher strikes, shedding light on both the reasons behind them and the changes that occur in their wakes.

They find that teacher strikes are relatively rare in the U.S. The median year in their dataset saw just 12.5 strikes, and most strikes lasted two days or less. Still, some years saw many more strikes, and the researchers estimate that the strikes included in their study disrupted the education of approximately 12 million students, resulting in 48 million days of idle student time over sixteen years. There is extreme variation in the number of strikes across states, however, with Pennsylvania leading the nation in teacher strikes, while other states, such as Texas, seeing none at all.

Analyzing strike motivations, the researchers find that teacher pay and benefits are the most common concerns, cited in 89 percent of strikes. Over half of the strikes also demanded improved working conditions—such as smaller class sizes, increased funding, more support staff, or better facilities. Interestingly, about 10 percent of strikes raised issues only loosely connected to schools, such as housing and immigration policy.

Certain types of districts are more likely to experience strikes, particularly larger, urban, or suburban districts and those with lower education spending, more racial diversity, or higher poverty levels. Strikes coordinated across districts and often aimed at influencing state policy were more common in conservative states during the study period.

To assess the effects of teacher strikes on district policies and student outcomes, the researchers employed a difference-in-difference analysis. The results show that strikes often result in some tangible improvements for teachers: By the fifth year after a strike, annual teacher compensation increased by an average of 8 percent, or around $10,000, and non-instructional staff salaries rose by about 7 percent, as well. These benefits, however, were unevenly distributed, as a quarter of districts saw no significant change in teacher pay post-strike.

Funding for these compensation increases primarily came from state budgets, not from reallocations of district funds or local tax hikes. The researchers say that this suggests that teacher strikes serve as strong public signals to state leaders about teachers’ concerns related to increased education funding.

Given that most strikes were short, researchers found little evidence of significant academic impact from these brief disruptions. However, longer strikes lasting two weeks or more did have a small negative effect on students’ math achievement, effects that lasted about two years. Over the longer term, they estimate slight positive effects in math scores, which they argue may be due to the increased resources obtained through the strikes. Yet because these positive effects in math coincided with small declines in reading performance, the net academic impact of strikes is minimal.

SOURCE: Melissa Arnold Lyon, Matthew A. Kraft, and Matthew P. Steinberg, “The Causes and Consequences of US Teacher Strikes,” EdWorkingPaper No. 24-1032, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University (2024).

In 2001, Congress enacted No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the much-discussed statute that, among other things, required states to identify their lowest-performing schools and help them improve. In 2015, in an effort to address perceived problems with NCLB, lawmakers revised the law into its current form, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Although ESSA introduced new requirements for how states must evaluate school performance and identify low performers, it allowed states far more flexibility than NCLB. Among the changes was a shift in terminology, with schools most in need of intensive support now labeled Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools.

In a new report, researchers at the federal Institute of Education Sciences examine whether ESSA played out as policymakers expected. They consider the number, types, and composition of schools that states identified as low-performing just before (2016–17) and just after (2018–19) ESSA’s full implementation. At the most basic level, ESSA reduced the overall number of schools identified as low-performing, from 6,917 during the last year of NCLB to 5,838 in the first year of ESSA—a 16 percent drop. This reduction, they find, was driven mainly by seven states that, before the ESSA switchover, were still operating under the full accountability and school-identification rules of NCLB. In those states alone, the number of identified schools dropped 77 percent, from 4,033 to 930 schools. Most other states had previously sought and been granted waivers from various aspects of NCLB, which allowed them flexibilities akin to those included in ESSA. Waiver states saw a 70 percent increase in the number of schools identified as low-performing when they switched to ESSA rules.

The types of schools identified as low-performing broadened across the board, resulting in more small schools and charter schools appearing on state lists, along with more schools that employ “alternative learning models.” The authors believe this shows ESSA’s school evaluation methodology was applied similarly to all public schools regardless of differences in model, size, or governance structure, but also represents an unintended consequence of the law. Schools that checked all three of those boxes (such as dropout recovery charter schools) were identified under the new law largely because of their high dropout rates, even though they were designed specifically to deal with that population.

Finally, the analysts found that, despite ESSA’s expanded list of accountability measures and increased flexibility, states still tended to identify schools with the lowest test scores. The only real difference was that fewer schools were identified overall, and those that ended up in CSI status were less likely to have high concentrations of historically underserved students. This is likely due to greater use of performance measures instead of (or in addition to) proficiency, like student growth rates, which are less correlated with poverty.

The report warns of too many supports potentially going to small alternative schools that don’t need them as badly as others, potentially diluting the available resources. Overall, though, it seems that the ESSA changes worked out as intended, correcting the perceived shortcomings of NCLB identification rules. However, none of this has anything relation to how either NCLB or ESSA have impacted schools and students on the ground. Luckily, some other analysts have begun to dig into that question, mindful that the identification of schools is only the first step in a much more detailed—and important—process of school improvement.

SOURCE: Institute of Education Sciences, “Identifying the Nation’s Lowest Performing Schools: Shifts Following the Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA),” U.S. Department of Education (October 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jim Peyser, former Massachusetts Secretary of Education, joins Mike and David to discuss voters’ recent decision to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement and what it means for the future of high school. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares reports exploring the changing landscape of homeschooling in America.

Recommended content:

• James A. Peyser, “Don’t Abandon Common High School Graduation Exams” Education Next (2024).
• Frederick M. Hess, “Why Did Massachusetts Just Pull the Plug on 30 Years of K–12 Success?” AEI (November 6, 2024).
• Angela R. Watson, Homeschool Participation: Post-Pandemic Persistence and Growth Trends, Journal of School Choice (2024)
• Alanna Bjorklund-Young and Angela R. Watson, The Changing Face of American Homeschool: A 25-Year Comparison of Race and Ethnicity, Journal of School Choice (2024)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected].

Cheers

• Local nonprofit Tennessee SCORE has launched a new initiative to connect universities that train teachers with school districts to ensure that they are aligned on evidence-based reading instruction. —Education Week
• A new tool launching next year will use AI to process young children’s voices in order to evaluate how well they understand the words that they read. —The 74

Jeers

• California schools are failing to meet the unique needs of advanced students. —Karin Klein, Los Angeles Times
• Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters is requiring public schools to show students a video in which he calls for more “religious freedom" in schools and leads a prayer for President-elect Donald Trump. —CNN
• Florida teachers say that students are pushing boundaries, acting disrespectfully, and misusing their cellphones more than ever before. —WEAR News

• A partial defense of Lucy Calkins and her role in America’s reading crisis. —Helen Lewis, The Atlantic
• Despite efforts to diversify, Harvard still admits a disproportionate number of students from a small number of affluent and/or highly-selective high. —The Harvard Crimson
• A short documentary filmed in a Tokyo public school highlights a unique aspect of the Japanese education system: its focus on building traits like teamwork and responsibility to a larger community in young students. —Ema Ryan Yamazaki, The New York Times
• A new report reveals that high school graduation rates declined in twenty-six states following the pandemic—but the full impact may not be seen for years, as long-term impacts on younger students continue to unfold. —The 74