The Education Gadfly Weekly

Earlier this year, a coalition of traditional public school districts filed a lawsuit that they hope will spell the end of EdChoice, Ohio’s largest voucher program. The majority of their claims are focused on Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio constitution, which calls for a “thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State.” The plaintiffs argue that the term “common” refers to “non-sectarian, publicly-funded schools” and not private schools that require applications and tuition payments. As part of their argument, they claim that “the common school accepts all comers.”

But that’s not true in many places in Ohio, most notably the state’s wealthier suburbs. Traditional public schools in those areas aren’t open to everyone. They’re open to the students who live within their district boundaries, boundaries that are rooted in real estate redlining that’s had a lasting effect on American society. While they don’t require an application, they do require proof of residency. And instead of tuition, they require payment in the form of a hefty mortgage and property taxes, or sky-high rent, a price tag that’s often far out of the reach of low- and middle-income families.

Consider how this works in the Columbus metro area. Columbus City Schools (CCS), the largest district in the state and one of the named plaintiff districts filing suit, served over 45,000 students during the 2020–21 school year. On the 2018–19 state report card—the last full school year before Covid took over our lives—the district posted an overall grade of D. That was an improvement from the previous year, when the district earned an F, but the results for individual measures weren’t much better. In 2018–19, the district had an F in both achievement and progress, and a four-year graduation rate of 82 percent that earned them a D. The district also earned Ds and Fs on these measures in 2015–16 and 2016–17. Approximately 80 percent of the classes of 2019 and 2020 took the ACT, but only 8.3 percent earned remediation-free scores. Nearly 24 percent of students participated in AP in 2018–19, but less than 5 percent earned a score of three or better on their exams. And while a whopping 99 percent of third graders were promoted to fourth grade that year, only 23 percent proved they could read proficiently on the state ELA exam.

Now, imagine you’re a parent living in Columbus. You want to make sure your child has the best education possible, and the data above—likely combined with your own experience—have convinced you that CCS isn’t the best option. You still want your child to attend a public school, though, so you start looking around. Ohio’s school district map shows that there are over a dozen districts that share borders with CCS, and because you have reliable transportation, they’re all viable options. A close look at 2018–19 report cards reveals that eight of the identified districts had overall grades of C or higher and no Ds or Fs on individual measures: Bexley, Gahanna-Jefferson, South-Western, Grandview Heights, Upper Arlington, Dublin, Worthington, and Westerville.

You decide to focus your efforts on these eight districts. Your first move is to look into open enrollment, because even though your assigned district is academically low-performing, you like your neighborhood and you’d rather not move. Unfortunately, though, open enrollment isn’t an option. None of these eight districts allow students who live outside their borders to enroll in their schools.

If you want to enroll your child at one of these higher-performing districts, you’ll have to move. But that’s easier said than done. Thanks in large part to the impacts of Covid, the housing market is insanely competitive. And even if it wasn’t, purchasing a home in the districts that surround Columbus is financially out of reach for many city residents. The table below lists the median household income between 2015 and 2019 along with the typical home value in each district as of this writing. Every single one has a significantly higher median income than Columbus. The smallest difference—between Columbus and South-Western—is more than $20,000. The same is true for typical home values. The closest difference, also between Columbus and South-Western, is over $52,000.

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It’s also important to keep in mind that this table shows median incomes—there are thousands of Columbus households that make far less than $53,745 a year. The same is true for typical home values. Wealthier enclaves within Columbus—neighborhoods like Clintonville and Victorian Village—are driving up the average home value for the rest of the city. And don’t forget, thousands of Columbus residents are renters, not homeowners. That means they don’t have any home equity to help with a down payment on a new house. It’s possible that these families could rent, rather than buy, their way into the suburbs. But the current rental market is just as competitive as the housing market. And as the table below shows, average rents at the time of this writing are higher in the suburbs, too.

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As a last resort, you look for family and friends who are living in the districts you prefer but can’t afford. Your loved ones are residents, and they pay taxes, so maybe your children can list those addresses as their proof of residency. But a quick Google search reveals that that’s a really bad idea. Apparently several of the districts on your list hire private investigators to tail parents and make sure they’re actually residents. In other parts of the state, parents have been sent to jail for enrolling their students in districts where they don’t reside. As much as you want your kids to have a better education, doing jail time is a steep price to pay.

The upshot? You’re stuck. The districts that claim they’re open to all aren’t actually open because you don’t make enough money to live there. You can’t send your children to temporarily live with family or friends because districts have teams of lawyers and private investigators to hunt you down. And although Ohio has a statewide open-enrollment policy that approximately 80 percent of districts participate in, the affluent, high-performing districts that surround cities like Columbus are almost exclusively closed.

And that’s what makes the establishment’s “we’re open to all” argument particularly galling. They know not all districts are open. They know that only certain kids are fortunate enough to attend the high-performing districts that they hold up as exemplars of public education. But it’s not enough for them to just close their borders and be hypocrites. They also want to intervene in family decisions and prevent kids from attending any and every school that’s not under the control of a district. That’s why they cherry-pick data to criticize charter schools. That’s why they’ve filed a lawsuit to eliminate the EdChoice program. And that’s why, when parents dared to express concern over a lawsuit that could upend their lives and their kids’ futures, the establishment’s callous response was that families “do not have sufficient knowledge about either the Ohio Constitution or the EdChoice Voucher Program to be of any use to the Court in deciding this case.” (It’s unclear why these particular parents don’t know enough to be heard but the parents named in their lawsuit do. Perhaps there’s a test of some sort?)

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing school district, you get to choose where to send your kid to school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into a high-performing district, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you. You can either resign yourself to the assigned district that, for myriad reasons, doesn’t work for your child, or you can take advantage of school choice programs. But beware—if you exercise your right to choose how to educate your own child, the establishment will brand you as a traitor. Because after all, these are their kids.

A common charge against classical education—education that is rooted in the classical texts of the Western ancient world and that seeks to develop the moral and intellectual character of its students—is that it is inextricably racist, sexist, and quite generally offensive or alienating to members of historically marginalized communities. The #disrupttexts movement, to take one example, seeks to get rid of the traditional canon in school curriculum because it supposedly centers White, male perspectives, excludes minority voices, and has nothing to offer non-European students.

No one has argued more passionately against this caricature of classical education than Dr. Anika Prather, Ph.D., who teaches classics at Howard University and runs her own classical school, The Living Water School. I recently sat down with Dr. Prather (who serves with me on the academic board of advisors of The Classical Learning Test) to discuss how she became interested in classical education, and why she sees classical education, Black history, and Black identity as essentially intertwined.

Dr. Prather told me that she came to a love of classics through her understanding of the Black intellectual tradition in the United States. She had an epiphany while reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, which enabled her to see how classics could be essential to the Black American experience. Du Bois, a Black intellectual and early civil rights leader, argued that a proper education is the training of a person for life. Unlike Booker T. Washington, however, Du Bois thought that Blacks should have the freedom to pursue higher learning in order to be able to have full equality with Whites.

For Du Bois, a proper education is a liberatory endeavor, and that the vocational training offered to Blacks in the industrial schools favored by Washington was inadequate because it did not meet the higher aspirations of the human heart. Du Bois argued passionately that Black Americans also needed to be educated in the “liberal arts”—those studies which are aimed not at specialized work or earning wages, but the cultivation of a person’s mind and inner life, thereby allowing a person to be free to think and speak for himself and to make himself properly understood by others. A true education, he argued, will evince a “respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world”; it will match the longings of the human heart, which is to cultivate the inner life so that man may both bring forth new knowledge and also be able to communicate the deepest parts of themselves to others. Du Bois explicitly connected liberal learning with the study of the sources of American culture—the classical texts of the ancient world. 

Dr. Prather was struck by the fact that Du Bois was steeped in the texts that she had assumed had nothing to say to her. She was especially moved by Du Bois’s own account of his classical education. At the end of “The Training of Black Men,” he wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension.” It was his training in the liberal arts, Du Bois argued, that enabled him to “dwell above the Veil,” which was his metaphor for the condition Black Americans were forced to endure, by prejudice and ignorance, to live during his own life. Behind the Veil of ignorance and poverty, Black Americans were outsiders looking in on a free world around them—exiles in their own country.

Dr. Prather’s encounter with Du Bois started her on a journey that led her to earn her masters at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where she studied great books, and then to writing her dissertation on the Black classical tradition at the University of Maryland. It was during her doctoral research that she learned how classical education was foundational for many esteemed Black Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley, Anna Julia Cooper, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, and Malcolm X. Dr. Prather came to see that serious study of the ancient canon and the struggle for Black liberation were inextricably intertwined.

Although she started off as a skeptic of classical education as “too White,” these days Dr. Prather is completely invested in carrying forward the Black classical tradition. At The Living Water School, she teaches her students to participate in “the great conversation” with classical texts and ideas that played such a formative role in her own life.

When I asked her what positive character traits classical education inculcates in her students, she spoke about their deep capacity for empathy, careful reflection, thoughtful deliberation, and problem solving; their civility and ability to get along with those who disagree with them; and their strong sense of self-transcendence, or ability to recognize goods that are greater than their own selves. 

Dr. Prather is currently writing a book, titled The Black Intellectual Tradition and the Great Conversation, which she hopes will help to dispel the prevailing myth that classical education is too White. As far as Dr. Prather is concerned, this myth neither fits with the facts of Black history in America, nor does it serve the cause of Black struggles for freedom and human flourishing.

As Michael Petrilli wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the education reform movement has come to the realization that its belief in “college for all,” while well-intended, was misguided. Though the population of undergraduates is substantially more diverse, both racially and socioeconomically, than it was twenty-five years ago, it’s an open question whether many of them are better off. Most of the increase has come at less selective or for-profit colleges, which have much lower retention rates. Nationally, only 16 percent of urban community college students graduate in three years.

An unintended consequence of the laser-like focus on college was that it pushed the most at-risk kids to the schools least equipped to support them. A culture that messages “college above all else” necessarily labels all other options as inferior. Many kids who struggled to graduate from high school and don’t have a real interest in college nevertheless pursue higher education because it’s what they’ve been told, implicitly and explicitly, they should do. Those that drop out—and in New York City, where I’m a high school principal, almost 80 percent of community college attendees will—feel a sense of shame and failure. They’ve also lost valuable time and, in many cases, taken on debt.

There are, however, ways to fix this.

At the school level, the conversation around career readiness is fraught because of the historical way in which tracking was used. We are justifiably wary of recreating a system in which race and socioeconomic status often served as a pretext for assigning kids to either a “college” track or a “vocational” track when they entered high school.

We must empower families to make choices for their child—a core belief of the reform movement. This requires schools do the granular work of speaking with families early and often about their child’s interests, circumstances, and goals. If a family expects their child to start contributing to household expenses after high school graduation, that means it’s more important for that young person to be able to enter the workforce quickly. For others, immediate finances may be less of a concern. In all cases, it’s crucial for families to be able to make a well-informed decision that works for them.

In other words, everyone in high school is on a career path. Some paths go through college, others go through a trade school or training program. Paths evolve over time, as you learn more. Most important is that all students be on the road to a career that is financially sustainable and personally satisfying.

It’s also worth highlighting that there are many careers that don’t require a college degree that can be quite lucrative. Several alumni of MESA Charter High School, which I cofounded, are Fellows at the Marcy Lab School—a free, year-long tech training program for low-income students. Graduates earn, on average, six figures, and many qualify for bonuses and stock options. Others are entering into Construction Skills Inc. and Non-Traditional Employment for Women, which will train them and help them secure union work in building trades.

These are decidedly not consolation prizes. For many, the ability to enter the workforce sooner, debt-free, and earn a high wage is an extremely enticing prospect.

Providing families with agency also means exposing students to a variety of different career pathways as early as possible. Schools could allow students to leave early for internships and provide instructional credit for this work. At MESA, we’re partnering with a program called CareerWise that helps students secure paid apprenticeships in a variety of fields. They attend school during the mornings of their junior and senior year, heading to work in the afternoons where they earn money, gain valuable work experience, and develop the real-world problem-solving skills they’ll need to navigate life once they leave high school.

A recent report from the New York Mayor’s office indicated that a quarter of people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four—comprising more than 300,000 city residents—were at risk of being “out of school and out of work” (also referred to as “disconnected” youth), with one in eight already meeting that classification. This is devastating to these young people and costly for the city. The financial burden of a youth becoming disconnected averages just over $16,000 per year between lost tax revenue and expensive social services. Soberingly, 75 percent of disconnected youth are high school graduates.

Schools can be a leverage point to change this. School personnel build close relationships with families during their four years. Families that are confused or hesitant navigating college or a training program will be more open to counsel from a trusted source. Not only can schools expand the array of post-secondary options they connect kids to, but they can provide continued support after graduation, a “warm handoff” to college or a training program.

Relationships between schools and families are an asset, but systematically, we throw that asset away. In New York City, high schools are evaluated primarily on their graduation rate, as well as their pre-Covid performance on certain standardized tests. Schools are incentivized to care deeply about how to get students a diploma on June 26; come June 27, you’re someone else’s problem. Similarly, we draw a bright line between P–12 funding and post-secondary funding. Schools that wish to provide post-graduation support must either seek philanthropic help or cannibalize their operating funds.

If the purpose of high school is to prepare students for a financially sustainable career, let’s be explicit about it. Why not fund Title I schools at 10 percent of the per-pupil cost to continue supporting their graduates for two years, and in turn, hold them accountable for what percentage of those graduates are enrolled in college, in a training program, or in a financially sustainable job—defined, perhaps, as earning a geographically appropriate multiple of the federal poverty guideline? If this investment keeps a young person from becoming disconnected, it’s a savings of over $14,000 per year, per person. Factor in the social and emotional benefit to that person, his/her family, and community, and the return on the investment is incalculable.

Those of us in education can feel the paradigm shift taking place. For the first time in recent memory, policymakers and thought leaders are embracing non-college options. Let’s seize the moment to create some truly innovative policy.

In 2017, a team of researchers from Finland and Michigan State University who were eager to improve science instruction for secondary students launched a field trial for Crafting Engaging Science Environments (CESE), a project-based curriculum they created and aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). During the 2018–19 school year, the team conducted a controlled efficacy trial in a number of high schools across the United States. Its new report looks at the academic outcomes of the students who participated in that trial.

CESE is focused specifically on chemistry and physics and consists of six units (three for each discipline) ranging from the periodic table to conservation of matter to maglev technology. On average, teaching the full curriculum takes twelve to sixteen weeks. In each unit, students are required to construct models and connect them with evidence-based explanations of phenomena, incorporating on-the-job practices of scientists and engineers. Students are supported in learning about identifying system components and the relationships among them, and modeling can take many forms, including mathematical formulae, diagrams, and computer simulations. Each unit concludes with a comprehensive assessment, although the results of these were not incorporated into the research design. Two detailed curricular examples are provided in the report.

Before implementation, treatment group teachers spent three in-person days learning about the NGSS and project-based learning goals and walking through the first two units in chemistry and physics, acting as students while the CESE team taught them. Facilitators returned before the start of each of the remaining units for a briefer prep session. Team members were also available via video conference, phone, and email to help teachers daily throughout the project. Control group teachers met in person with the research team at the beginning of the school year for a one-day workshop on the NGSS but made no changes to their typical curricula.

The initial sample comprised a diverse group of seventy schools in Los Angeles Unified School District, San Diego County Office of Education, Detroit Public School Community District, and a handful of other districts across Michigan. However, attrition claimed nine buildings before the end of the treatment window. The reasons for this—fiscal problems, a teacher strike, medical emergencies, and “mismatch between the course timeline and student abilities”—are perhaps not relevant to the ultimate findings, but they do indicate that certain aspects of the school environment can stunt the best-intentioned innovations. The final analytic sample therefore included sixty-one schools (thirty treatment and thirty-one control), 119 teachers, and 4,238 students (2,127 treatment and 2,111 control).

All students in both groups were given a pretest drawn from NAEP’s question bank to get a baseline science achievement level and a summative assessment at the end of the intervention timeline. The exam consisted of items developed by the Michigan Department of Education for use on the state’s eleventh grade science assessment and was designed to encompass both grade-level NGSS standards and the three dimensions of science learning as articulated in the NGSS.

Results show that treatment students, on average, performed 0.20 standard deviations higher than control students on the summative assessment. There was minimal variation among students of different genders and racial and ethnic groups, an important indicator that the CESE curriculum was equally engaging to diverse students. Post-participation surveys showed an across-the-board increase in student interest in pursuing science education beyond high school, as well. The summative assessment, while also aligned to NGSS, is not specific to the CESE curriculum. Thus the positive outcomes seem to reflect the generalizability of CESE, but more research is needed to confirm this connection.

In the end, the researchers are buoyed by the outcome of this efficacy trial, which makes sense considering they created CESE! As scientists themselves in a number of disciplines, they feel that their push to get students and teachers to “do science” as a means of teaching both the method and the discipline is supported by the findings. The next step? Hopefully expansion of the curriculum.

SOURCE: Barbara Schneider, et. al., “Improving Science Achievement—Is It Possible? Evaluating the Efficacy of a High School Chemistry and Physics Project-Based Learning Intervention,” Educational Researcher (January 2022).

The Covid slide has both expanded the need for students to take remedial classes and produced greater familiarity with remote learning. As a result, online credit recovery options have become more necessary and readily accessible at the same time. But pre-Covid concerns that these courses don’t actually improve academic achievement persist. Now comes some timely research looking at the long-term labor market prospects of students who complete high school graduation requirements via online credit recovery. The results add more bad news to the pile.

Data come from a large, unnamed urban school district in the Midwest that began offering online credit recovery in 2010. The researchers started by identifying all of the nearly 12,000 district graduates from the 2010–11 to the 2017–18 school years who had failed at least one high school course. Using administrative records, the researchers identified those who recovered at least one of those lost credits via the district’s online vendor and defined them as the “treatment” group. Students who were identified as having retaken the failed course(s) in a traditional classroom setting were the control.

The final sample includes over 8,700 students in both groups whose education and employment records could be connected one year following graduation—5,154 in the treatment group and 3,559 in the control group. Black students were more likely to engage in online credit recovery in this district during the time period, as were students who were absent more frequently, had lower grade point averages, and earned fewer credits overall. White and Asian students, English learners, and those with disabilities were more likely to recover failed credits in traditional classrooms. The researchers identified a subsample of both groups whose employment data were available up to four years after high school graduation.

The researchers ran an instrumental variables estimation, which showed that, initially, students in the treatment group had earnings on par with those in the control group. Over time, however, a large negative differential emerged. By the fourth year post-graduation, students who recovered credits online were earning an average of almost $3,000 less annually than their peers who recovered credits traditionally. At the same time, there were no statistically significant differences in the likelihood of graduates in either group being employed or retaining employment. Thus the earnings gap was likely a case of lower wages and/or a slower rate of increase in earnings over time.

In discussion, the researchers note that the observed pattern fits with existing labor market research. A high school diploma is, in itself, a signal to employers about an individual’s work potential. And since high school transcripts do not specify how a course was passed or a credit earned, the same signal is sent by both groups’ diplomas. However, human capital theory insists that individual ability is gradually revealed over time in the labor market. If so, it seems that online credit recovery is a weaker preparation for work than more traditional means of remediating a failed course. (Although not having thousands of students failing courses during high school would be better than both of those options.) While we do not know how or why students sorted into the two credit recovery pathways, the researchers do caution that the continued expansion of online credit recovery could lead to a devaluation of all high school diplomas if its time-honored signal of work readiness is drawn into question in this manner.

SOURCE: Carolyn J. Heinrich and Huiping Cheng, “Does Online Credit Recovery in High School Support or Stymie Later Labor Market Success?,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (January 2022).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), Daniel Buck, Fordham senior visiting fellow and English teacher at Holy Spirit Middle School in Appleton, Wisconsin, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to argue that the educational harms of face masks now outweigh their benefits. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses a study on whether alternative pathways to graduation benefit students who fail exit exams.

You can find this and every episode on all major podcast platforms.

Recommended content:

• Dan’s piece, which cites studies and European and World Health Organization’s policies on masking children to make his case: “End school mask mandates.”
• A great read in The Atlantic by Emily Oster making a similar case: “Kids-Last COVID Policy Makes No Sense.”
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Jane Arnold Lincove, Catherine Mata, and Kalena E. Cortes, “A Bridge to Graduation: Post-Secondary Effects of an Alternative Pathway for Students Who Fail High School Exit Exams,” retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (February 2022).

Feedback welcome!

Have ideas or feedback on our podcast? Send them to our podcast producer Pedro Enamorado at [email protected].

Cheers

• “Based on the science, the kids-last approach [to removing Covid mitigations] makes no sense. Kids should face fewer restrictions than their parents, not more.” —Emily Oster
• In New York City, and across the country, charter schools adapted better to the pandemic than district schools—and students of every race and ethnicity benefited. Let’s drop the charter caps. —City-Journal
• We must extend the school year. Reversing learning loss is “a matter of national urgency.” —Boston Herald
• “American Exchange Project: No Passport Required.” —Philanthropy Roundtable

Jeers

• Despite his professed support for charters, New Jersey Gov. Murphy’s administration blocked charter school expansions that would serve low-income students of color. —Washington Post

• San Francisco school board’s decision to end test-based admission to Lowell High was the catalyst for the recalls—and the grassroots mobilizing of Asian parents. —Jay Caspian Kang
• Two states are considering unmasking in schools. What that could mean. —The 74
• “Some school systems pause diversity programs amid pushback.” —AP News
• Partly due to the pandemic, Democrats are scrambling to recover the public will in education, as evidenced by recent electoral losses. —Washington Post