In his new book, “The Parent Revolution,” school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis explains the notable plummet in the public’s trust of public education, especially in the past five years. By his telling, school choice is the answer to all that ails us. But he’s likely overselling its healing powers.
Listen to the media, and you’ll be told that the parents’ movement is a manufactured culture war designed to dismantle public education, score cheap political points, or rake in easy money for provocateurs. Read National School Boards Association memoranda or listen to Attorney General Merrick Garland, and you’ll be told that parents’ actions at school board meetings verge on terroristic.
Quite the contrary. Many schools have fallen into disrepute because they engaged in policies and practices that tarnished their reputations. And the public has grown dissatisfied with American education because the results of the system are unsatisfactory. If a restaurant served rotten food, would we blame the customer for their anger and revulsion?
Any time parental or public dissatisfaction gets brought up, rebuttals point to an oft-cited statistic drawn from annual Kappan/Gallup surveys: Trust in public education may be low, but parents still rank their own local school highly. I myself used to read these data optimistically, but it’s unclear how much these surveys really tell us. School districts are great propaganda machines, after all. Regular emailers and press releases boast about all the good things happening, school events create warm and fuzzy feelings, and inflated grades foster a false sense of security (“It’s not my kid!”).
What’s more, there’s potential for motivated reasoning. Parents want to believe that a kid’s school is pretty good because, if not, they’d have to do something painful about it—move across town or fork out private school tuition, for example. There’d be too much cognitive dissonance to both admit public school failures and keep children there, and it’s easier to tell yourself a white lie.
Ultimately, any education reform advocate must reckon with the fact that satisfaction with public education generally is the lowest it’s been since Gallup started polling on it.
In his new book, The Parent Revolution, school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis unrolls a saga that he believes explains the notable plummet in trust of public education that’s worsened in the past five years.
As you might assume, it began with pandemic-era school closures. It’s easy to forget the excesses and corruptions exposed during debates over school openings. A teachers union official defended closures while vacating in the tropics. The Chicago Teachers Union released a cringe-inducing interpretive dance video in protest of school openings and later blamed the push for reopening on “sexism, racism, and misogyny.” A school attempted to expel a young boy who had a BB gun in the background during a video call. United Teachers Los Angeles demanded socialized healthcare, defunded police departments, and pressed for a moratorium on charter schools before it would consider teaching in-person again. And countless ludicrous exhibitionist protests cropped up in cities across the country with teachers carting around open caskets.
Amidst such silliness, there was ample evidence that schools were in fact safe to open. Months into the pandemic, it was clear that they weren’t Covid super-spreaders. European countries read the evidence early on and reopened while American school children faced shuttered school doors and continued online learning. Meanwhile, closures enacted an academic and mental health crisis among teenagers.
But such goofy examples overlook an even deeper and more important corruption. The CDC drew guidance from the American Federation of Teachers that went into its school opening guidelines, mixing politics and lobbyists with the so-called “science.” Studies found that union power correlated to the length and severity of school closures, not viral spread. Throughout the pandemic, bureaucrats and advocates actively conspired against the interests of families and students.
As one bright spot throughout all this, parents discovered a few levers through which they could exert power over and control of schools. In January 2021, instead of developing plans to open schools, San Francisco’s school board wasted meeting time on renaming schools, replacing controversial titles like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Parents mounted a campaign to recall board members, and elsewhere, parents sued districts to reopen. These were first spurts and starts of a parent’s revolt.
But there was much more to follow. After schools reopened, story after story about politicized curricula hit the headlines: mock political rallies with fifth graders, lessons that deny basic biology for kindergarteners, and policies that keep life-altering decisions from parental oversight. Soon parent organizations formed with the intent of mounting public pressure and political campaigns to counter union influence. In small-turnout elections, unions can flood the polls, but a parent constituency could shift the balance—at least in theory.
Ultimately, as a history of the parent’s movement, The Parent Revolution is a welcome and constructive contribution. Where the media exonerates school officials and slanders parents, DeAngelis tells the truth of pandemic closures and culture battles over schools. It’s an honest telling that’s doubly welcome in the face of counter media revisionism.
In the second half of his book, DeAngelis turns to potential solutions and corrections. And while I remain a proponent of school choice, he oversells that prescription. A few Tylenol might help the headache, but that doesn’t justify swallowing a bottle-full.
DeAngelis deftly surveys much of the relevant research: “Out of seventeen random-assignments studies, eleven find statistically significant positive effects and three find negative impacts.” What’s more, of the twenty-nine studies that investigate the effect of choice on traditional public schools, twenty-six find that school choice improves them. In other words, competition is better for everyone, even students not in the choice program. And school choice benefits non-academic outcomes as well: civic knowledge and engagement, crime rates, and political tolerance, for example. What’s not to love?
But most of this research investigated voucher programs targeted at low-income families. That the benefits of such policies would translate to universal ESAs isn’t clear. Perhaps research will vindicate universal private choice—and I’ll be the first to make a mea culpa if it does—but as we’ve learned from decades of testing and accountability, it’s possible to oversell a worthy policy remedy and then watch as political backlash dismantles it.
When it comes to combating “woke-ism” and progressive capture of American schools, I’m quite skeptical of school choice. If charter school networks, educators’ professional organizations, curriculum companies, teacher prep programs, credentialing and accrediting institutions, leading publications, and all of the other mediating institutions in American education share the same progressive worldview, as appears to me to be the case, I can’t see how allowing families choice will combat such institutional capture. School choice may be necessary, but it’s far from sufficient.
Amid all of DeAngelis’s data, the most moving argument for school choice comes in its opening pages, where he recounts a story from his own life: walking up blood-spattered steps in his public middle school, where violence and fights were the norm. His life trajectory changed when he got accepted into a magnet high school and encountered for the first time a rigorous education surrounded by academically-minded peers. School choice saved him from chaos and propelled him to success. This was and still is the most convincing case for school choice, each individual child who deserves something better.
In his book, DeAngelis shows that the lion’s share of American students deserves something better—something better than political interests holding them back, something better than political indoctrination, something better than academic mediocrity. The parent’s movement could, should, and very well may help to establish the institutions, staff the school boards, and win the elections necessary to achieve that “something better.”
As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools. Charter enrollment has increased by almost 14 percent since 2019, the last full school year before pandemic school closures. Meanwhile, district public schools have lost around 1.2 million students since the pandemic, with thirty-seven states and two-thirds of districts suffering declines. Families are choosing charters because of their educational successes and because they are sources of community renewal.
Charter school facts
As regular Flypaper readers are aware, charter schools are taxpayer-funded, independent public schools of choice for both families and educators that are accountable for the results of student learning. The movement to create them began in 1991 when Minnesota passed the first charter law. Today, forty-six such laws have enabled the creation of 8,000 schools and campuses enrolling 3.7 million students, around 7.5 percent of all public school students, according to the Data Dashboard of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. They employ around 251,000 teachers. Almost three-fifths of charters are urban, with a quarter in the suburbs and 17 percent in rural and small-town America.
According to the Data Dashboard, charter schools have consistently enrolled proportionately more students of color and children from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven of ten (70.7 percent) charter pupils are children of color compared to slightly more than half (53.8 percent) of district students, with six of ten charter students receiving free and reduced-price lunch compared to half (50.3 percent) in district schools. Hispanic students are the fastest-growing charter student group.
As educational institutions, the focus is on teaching and learning and accountability for results. Much ink has been spilled on their academic successes and failures. A report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that spans the school years from 2014–15 to 2018–19 provides a useful summary of these findings:
Building communities and social capital
Along with being educational institutions, charter schools function as mediating institutions in their communities that build social capital.
Charter schools are wellsprings of civic renewal and community rebirth. If Alexis de Tocqueville were to revisit America today, he would surely say that charter schools are vibrant illustrations of Americans’ enduring appetite to create new voluntary organizations to meet human needs and build communities. They serve as mediating institutions, a middle path between the impersonal agencies of government and the private affairs of individuals and families. They reinvigorate the local civic community since they interact with the people, places, and institutions where they operate.
Charter schools are also opportunities for educators to create voluntary professional communities based on shared values, goals, and instructional approaches. Teachers and principals who choose to work in the charter sector have the autonomy to choose who else works in their school, rather than having a school district bureaucracy assign an educator to the school.
Charter schools also build what sociologist James Coleman called social capital, which he saw “…as a resource for action [that includes] obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms.” A charter school’s social capital arises out of the relationships that exist among people: the children who attend it and the adults involved with it, including parents, the educators who staff it, and the community members who support it. A school lacking social capital is not likely to be a productive learning environment nor much of a community asset.
Charters create new forms of association. While some charters are neighborhood schools in the old-fashioned sense, others transcend particular neighborhoods or geographic places. They may be organized by curricular philosophies like Montessori or classical education or by place-based geographic approaches like charters located in parent workplaces. There are also networks of charter schools or charter management organizations that cross district and state boundaries and are organized around a common mission and instructional design, like Achievement First Charter Schools, Basis Charter Schools, or High Tech High Charter Schools.
Charter schools display elements that sociologist Robert Nisbet thought essential to community association, including a high degree of personal intimacy, social cohesion, and moral commitment. As he wrote in The Quest for Community, “Community is the product of people working together on problems, of autonomous and collective fulfillment or internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in large degrees by the persons involved.” That’s what happens in charter schools.
Stubborn particulars that unite
Charter schools are sometimes faulted for dividing communities rather than uniting them. And lately there’s been more political division around charters, though for years their support was a bipartisan political effort. Still, that hasn’t entirely disappeared. Witness the recent effort in Colorado by a bipartisan political coalition that included Democratic Governor Jared Polis to defeat a measure to make major changes that would restrict some of the freedoms that that state’s charter schools possess.
The charter model presents a vision of public education that sees K–12 schools differently than the centralized, bureaucratic view inherent in the district arrangement. The charter model emphasizes a decentralized array of self-governing, results-oriented schools run by all sorts of different providers, like educators, parents, and nonprofit community organizations.
Charter schools are “not the collectivism of organized government action from above…[but] the collectivism of voluntary groups action from below,” to borrow from the well-known management consultant Peter Drucker in his book The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition. They are at the intersection of civil society and public education.
“Charter schooling has been arguably the most influential school reform efforts of the past several decades,” conclude the authors of a 2023 report published in the Journal of Public Economics. While this is true, it’s also true that not every charter has lived up to its promise or been a source of civic renewal in communities. Many have been closed for not serving their students, families, or communities. As we observe National Charter School Week, all this is worth recalling and recommitting ourselves to creating more high-quality independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.
I’ve made no secret of my fervent belief that curriculum is the overlooked lever in education reform. Replacing the slapdash, incoherent, and under-nourishing mélange of materials to which the typical U.S. student is exposed with a more rigorous and thoughtfully sequenced student experience holds promise unmatched by the “structural” reforms favored by policymakers. Over the years, I’ve also crossed swords occasionally with fellow curriculum advocates who labor under the misconception (or allow others to do so) that simply adopting high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) is a magic bullet, or who obsess over minor points of orthodoxy between programs. The larger battle to be fought and won is making curriculum—virtually any decent curriculum—central to school improvement efforts.
In fact, I’ve lately struck from my vocabulary the phrase “curriculum adoption” in favor of curriculum purchases. The word “adoption” implies a much higher bar than just forking out taxpayer dollars for a new program and calling it a day. It’s a serious and sustained effort shared within and between grades to implement curriculum rigorously and with fidelity. Such efforts remain the exception, not the rule. Thus, I’m pleased to recommend a new case study published by Rivet Education, a curriculum-focused consulting group, which lays out the steps needed to turn a curriculum purchase into an adoption process worthy of its name, and that moves the needle on student outcomes.
In 2018, teachers and leaders in Wisconsin’s Mount Horeb Area School District made the decision to adopt a new math curriculum called “Bridges in Mathematics” and produced by The Math Learning Center. Students in this small town in southern Wisconsin were doing reasonably well on state math tests, but teachers had noticed that they “struggled when given more challenging math work” including problems that required them to conceptualize, explain their thinking, or apply math to real-world situations. Mount Horeb embarked on a multi-year “journey” to fully implement Bridges. This involved multiple phases, which Rivet categorizes as “exploration; program installation; initial implementation; consistent implementation; and innovation and sustainability.”
In the “exploration” phase, district officials and (mostly math) teachers “established a vision for effective and equitable instruction, reviewing and evaluating curriculum.” They reviewed high-quality math curricula, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a number of programs, each ultimately selecting the curriculum that best aligned with the district’s priorities. Next, professional learning providers were recruited (presumably with Rivet’s input and guidance) to educate teachers on mathematical practices, assessing student work, and the role HQIM plays in student learning.
It’s the “program installation” phase that warrants the most attention and contrasts most vividly with what I suspect is the standard experience with curriculum “adoption,” wherein teachers unbox the materials, do a “walk-through” of the new program, and sit for a day or two of professional development led by a district staffer who attended a “train the trainer” workshop at a budget hotel conference room the previous spring. If they get any ongoing professional development after that, it’s minimal. I could have pulled a muscle in my neck nodding at a quote in the case study from Latricia Johnson, a math coach who worked on Mount Horeb’s implementation. “One-and-done, workshop-based professional learning doesn’t work,” she said. “Teachers need a mix of observations, lesson studies, modeling, and [professional learning communities] for a successful professional learning plan.” Hear, hear.
Yet even that elides what is almost certainly the main impediment to successful, sustained curriculum implementation: internal resistance. As my AEI colleague Rick Hess never tires of pointing out, it’s easy to get people do something, but it’s hard to get them to do it well. It’s even harder when teachers are comfortable with what they’ve been doing for years and reluctant to change practice. I wanted to know more about how Mount Horeb built teacher buy-in—not just compliance—without which even excellent curriculum tends to underperform.
Rivet’s case study pairs nicely (or contrasts vividly) with a recent article by Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay, which paints a concerning picture of the field’s relationship with curriculum. At the recent annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, William Zahner, a math professor at San Diego State, presented a survey of more than 1,000 math teachers. “A surprising number of math teachers,” he reported, “particularly at the high school level simply said we don’t use the district of school-provided materials, or they claimed they didn’t have any.”
Only it’s not surprising. We’ve known for a long time that nearly every teacher creates, customizes, or “curates” their own lesson plans and materials (hello, Teachers Pay Teachers!). A little of this is appropriate and beneficial but too much results in lost coherence. There’s also good evidence to suggest that teachers simply aren’t very good judges of rigor when they venture into the “curriculum bazaar.” The main screen they employ is more often than not “student engagement.”
Truth be told, the Mount Horeb “case study” is also a marketing exercise. Rivet is a consulting outfit founded by veterans of the Louisiana Department of Education who helped engineer that state’s ground-breaking curriculum and instructional reforms under then–state chief John White. They work with state and school district leaders to scale the adoption and implementation of HQIM. Nevertheless, the effort they highlight in Wisconsin is a good model for districts that seek to take curriculum seriously or wonder why their “adoptions” disappoint or fail to stick. It’s required reading for state officials, school board members, and district and building leaders who are convinced that HQIM is an essential component of student success. It paints a compelling picture of what it would look like if we took curriculum seriously as a school improvement strategy.
In an effort to avoid prescriptive top-down mandates, the school accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allow states flexibility in determining what measures they’ll use to assess school quality, how much “weight” they carry, and over what time periods they’re calculated. A recent descriptive study uses data from North Carolina to demonstrate how policymakers’ decisions can influence school ratings and, ultimately, the list of schools identified for improvement under ESSA. (States must identify their most troubled schools but have considerable flexibility in what to do about them.).
Analysts Erica Harbatkin (Florida State University) and Betsy Wolf (U.S. Department of Education) draw on eight years of administrative data from the Tar Heel State—including roughly 1,900 public schools. They develop three ESSA-compliant school quality metrics, all of which include proficiency rates, student growth, high-school graduation rates, English learner proficiency, and chronic absenteeism rates. The first four elements are required by ESSA, and the last is the most popular of the flexible “fifth indicators” that states select for themselves. The metrics vary based on weighting and the number of data points included (one to three years). For each of the three metrics, analysts simulate school ratings overall, as well as which schools would end up in the bottom 5 percent that require “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI) as required by ESSA.
In Goldilocks lingo, the analysts undertook to identify the too-hot and too-cold tradeoffs arising from the various simulations. Their key “temperature” gauges are stability and equity. “Stability” addresses consistency, meaning whether there is volatility (unpredictable changes) at different points in the distribution. “Equity” examines whether school ratings are systematically and disproportionately lower for schools serving disadvantaged student groups—the idea being that metrics that weigh proficiency too heavily could “further marginalize” schools with students in need. Thus, analysts calculate whether the share of schools within three equal groups—defined as the 25 percent of schools with the largest share of low-income and Black students, the middle 50 percent, and the 25 percent with the smallest share of these student subgroups—would total 5 percent in each because “a perfectly equitable accountability system would identify exactly 5 percent of CSI schools in each of the quantiles.” The extent to which a given group deviates from that 5 percent threshold represents their measure of inequity (arguable as it is).
The three simulations are as follows:
They also change the number of years of data to see how that affects their measures of interest. They toggle between a single year of data (which is what most states do, although they don’t have to under ESSA), a three-year weighted mean where the current year is weighted most heavily, and two other scenarios where they use one year of data for each of three years but alter how they classify the lowest performing schools (meaning the schools appear in three consecutive years or appear in two of three consecutive years).
Looking at stability first, they find that weighting proficiency more heavily than growth produces more stable year-to-year ratings. This is because proficiency rates are strongly correlated with student characteristics. Not surprisingly, ratings based on three years of data are three to four times more stable than those based on a single year. They also find that the “three of three rule”—meaning classifying schools for intervention that fall in the lowest performing group for three consecutive years—produces the most stable list. However, and this is important, using three years of data versus one more than offsets the loss of stability one gets when shifting from a high proficiency to a high growth index model. In other words, there’s a lot of volatility in scores when a state that once weighed proficiency heavily in its accountability system decides to weight growth heavily instead, but this volatility is taken care of (and then some) if a state uses three years of rolling data.
As for their measure of equity, the higher-proficiency index was the most inequitable and the higher-growth index the least inequitable. Specifically, under the higher-proficiency index, 75 percent of students in the lowest-rated 20 percent of schools were low-income, compared with just 39 percent in the top-rated 20 percent of schools. Under the higher-growth index, the comparable figures were 65 percent of students compared with 47 percent. Likewise, when they aggregate data into the three quantiles above, none of the simulations identify exactly 5 percent as needing CSI services, but the proficiency measure disproportionately identifies schools in the bottom that are the most disadvantaged.
Still, the bottom line for Harbatkin and Wolf is that using three years of data is imperative for consistency no matter which you weight more heavily—proficiency or growth—given that each has tradeoffs.
We endlessly debate those tradeoffs here at Fordham, underscoring the importance of a state identifying its goals before it decides how to balance proficiency and growth. If the goal is to identify schools that aren’t meeting the bar in order to target scarce resources to them, then it’s preferable to weight proficiency more heavily. But if the goal is to identify schools that are (or aren’t!) making a palpable difference in their students’ academic lives, then it’s preferable to weight growth more heavily. Another option: Follow Texas’s example and give schools two helpings of grades—and hope that bowl is just right.
SOURCE: Erica Harbatkin and Betsy Wolf, “State accountability decisions under the Every Student Succeeds Act and the validity, stability, and equity of school ratings,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2023).
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