There are many reasons to be skeptical of the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation, but they are worth rooting for anyway because they’ll likely lead traditional public schools to improve.
Let me state at the outset that universal education savings accounts (ESAs) are not my cup of tea. I don’t love handing over taxpayer money to rich people who don’t need it. Like my colleague Chester Finn, I’m skeptical that states will exert effective quality control over the schools and vendors that participate in such programs. I suspect that “hybrid homeschooling” and the like will remain a niche sector in American education, given how much work it creates for us (already overworked) parents. And I doubt the lowball amounts states are spending on these available-for-everyone ESAs will be enough to create a robust supply of high-quality options in the disadvantaged communities that need them most (and which I worry most about).
In my dream world, we’d instead take the school choice movement’s mojo and focus it on expanding high quality charter schools, bringing religious charter schools into the mix, and creating enrichment savings accounts with new money to help low-income and working-class families access afterschool and weekend opportunities for their kids, including intensive tutoring (along the lines of this federally-funded Ohio initiative).
Yet I’m still rooting for the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation. And that’s because I believe the odds are good that these initiatives will lead traditional public schools to improve.
If that logic sounds off, it’s because the “public school argument” is usually made to oppose such programs. The worry—and this is nothing new—is that such policies will enable the most advantaged students with the most clued-in parents to escape public schools, taking their tax dollars with them and leaving a more disadvantaged population of students behind in schools with fewer resources (financial and otherwise) than ever.
All of us should take such concerns seriously. Education is not a simple commodity, like a widget traded in the free market. What makes it complex, first and foremost, is the importance of students’ peers. Scholars have long found that “peer effects” matter—that kids learn more when certain types of students are in their classrooms and others are not. We all understand this intuitively, too. It’s why we worry about segregation, celebrate “mainstreaming” students with disabilities whenever possible, and debate endlessly about various forms of grouping and tracking in our schools.
Nor is this theoretical. When middle class families left the cities in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, it no doubt left urban school systems with fewer resources and a higher concentration of disadvantaged kids. The same thing happened in many rural areas and small towns over the last few decades, as prosperous metro areas pulled the cognitive elite away from home, leaving a poorer, more disadvantaged population behind.
Enter the evidence
We should empathize, then, with public school advocates who worry that school choice could repeat the damage done by white flight and brain drain. The good news, however, is that we now have decades of experience and evidence about whether they are right to be concerned. And the verdict is in: School choice is associated with improvements in traditional public schools.
School choice is not a life-boat, but a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Patrick Wolf at the University of Arkansas has painstakingly aggregated all of the relevant studies on the “competitive effects” of private school choice programs. At last count, twenty-five of twenty-seven studies find positive effects on public schools, with the other two finding null effects. (See Table 5 here.) As Wolf writes, “no empirical study of the competitive effects of private school choice programs concludes that the effects are negative.”
It’s worth noting that several of these studies, including recent ones from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana, find disappointing results for the students participating in the school choice programs—while at the same time finding benefits for the public school students “left behind.” It’s hard to argue that the authors of such studies are putting their thumbs on the scale.
One of the most compelling recent studies, by David Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik, examined Florida’s massive tax-credit scholarship program over the course of fifteen years, and found positive competitive effects on both academic outcomes and student behavior. The more competition that schools faced, the greater the impacts. Though the impacts overall were still rather small: less than 1 percent of a standard deviation each year. But year after year, those impacts added up, especially for the most disadvantaged students in the schools facing the most competitive pressure.
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Both sides of this debate argue that universal education savings accounts will be a game-changer. Advocates think they will revolutionize schooling. Opponents think they will destroy public schools. I think both groups are wrong. Mostly they will subsidize families that have already chosen private schooling or home schooling, will encourage a small number of families on the bubble to choose Catholic or other private schools, and along the way, will put helpful (if limited) pressure on school districts to improve.
For me, that’s enough.
The movement to reconnect knowledge and virtue is not limited to classical schools that focus on primary and secondary education (K–12). Some institutions of higher education are also taking character education seriously, such as Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2016, Wake Forest recruited Dr. Michael Lamb as a faculty member in the college, who had previously helped to launch the Oxford Character Project at Oxford University, and upon joining WFU, conceived and launched The Program for Leadership and Character in 2017. Lamb, a leading scholar in virtue ethics, created the program with the explicit mission to “transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character at Wake Forest, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.” In 2019, the program expanded into the professional schools, under the leadership of Kenneth Townsend.
I recently spoke with Dr. Lamb about his efforts to incorporate character formation into the liberal learning that is the heart and soul of a Wake Forest education. The subject of virtue, for Lamb, has both theoretical and practical aspects. Lamb begins with the recognition that our institutions of education are not neutral, but “reflect a set of values, norms, and examples that shape the character and lives of those who graduate from them.” Therefore, universities, he argues, should be more intentional about “helping student discern their values and develop their virtues” and “preparing students for lives of meaning and purpose.” Lamb emphasizes particular character traits such as courage, compassion, justice, humility, and honesty that he believes “can help us deepen our own humanity” and “better serve and support others in our communities.”
Lamb acknowledges that not all students will agree about how to express or exercise character traits in some particular complex set of circumstances. But, he argues, the university is one of the best places for students to contest, dialogue, and think critically about how to live because the university gives its students “the freedom, autonomy, and knowledge to explore those questions for themselves, with the guidance and support of diverse peers, professors, and mentors who can offer perspective and wisdom along the way.” But Lamb also acknowledges that virtue is not simply about knowledge—it is a kind of deep, personal formation. This formation takes time and commitment, and the initiative at Wake Forest reflects this.
To the end of educating for character development, The Program for Leadership and Character offers a variety of services to help students grow in virtue. The Leadership and Character Scholars Program supports about ten students per year to participate in mentoring that aims to help them strengthen twelve key virtues of character. The Leadership and Character Ambassador Program and the Leadership and Character Discussion Groups attract a wider range of students interested in character. Lamb’s staff works with over fifty departments, programs, and campus partners to develop offerings that highlight the role and value of character. Lamb also reports that, over the last three years, his staff has committed to over 900 hours of one-on-one mentoring with students.
The Program for Leadership and Character also provides teaching by the initiative’s faculty and postdoctoral fellows that focus explicitly on leadership and character across the undergraduate college and professional schools. The program also supports faculty who want to integrate leadership and character into their own courses. Lamb reports that “over the last three years, seventy-five faculty have received grants to participate in course development workshops and design new course or modules focused on leadership and character within their own disciplines.”
The coursework on virtue is informed by the latest research on character development from across the disciplines. It has drawn on this wealth of research to identify seven strategies for character formation that has proven to be effective. These are: (1) habituation through practice; (2) reflection on personal experience; (3) engagement with virtuous exemplars; (4) dialogue that increases virtue literacy; (5) awareness of situational variables and biases; (6) moral reminders; and (7) friendships of mutual accountability.
A popular course for the program is “Commencing Character,” which brings together a close study of ancient and contemporary accounts of virtue with contemporary commencement speeches that emphasize particular virtues of character. According to Lamb’s own description of the course, “it integrates all seven strategies of character development through readings, weekly reflection prompts, and various activities and assignments that help students to strengthen their character, from a profile of a personal moral exemplar and a two-week plan to strengthen one virtue to a final reflection essay and commencement speech that allows each student to share their vision of a morally good life.”
Finally, research and assessment teams conduct empirical research on the program’s courses and programming to determine what works. Lamb reports that the commencing character course “has a measurable impact on student’s character and sense of purpose.” He believes that this shows that “contrary to what many believe, character can be both taught and assessed” in higher education.
While The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest is innovative and informed by cutting edge research, it functions to return the university back to its historic mission: to liberally educate its students so that they are free to live meaningful and flourishing lives. The initiative understands that the ideal of a free person is not someone who can get what they want for themselves, but a person who is able to seek what is true, good, and beautiful, and therefore live a flourishing life and contribute to the common good. An education for freedom—a liberal education—is an education for virtue. This is true for higher education most of all.
Editor’s note: This was first published in The 74.
The education culture wars on issues like critical race theory and how to teach history create a false narrative and collective illusion on K–12 issues among Americans
The stubborn fact is that voters’ opinions and governors’ statements show broad agreement on a collection of practical education issues that offers a common-sense K–12 governing agenda, according to three recent analyses.
The two most prominent issues where there is agreement are expanding career and technical education (CTE) and increasing school funding. Others include boosting child care and early learning, raising teacher pay, and providing families and students with more education options.
The first analysis is from a 2022 bipartisan poll of 1,200 midterm voters, plus another 600 from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It identifies four issues on which voters agree.
Voters overall want more parental control and endorse specific changes. Over two in three (64 percent) believe “parents should have more control...right now” over what public schools teach. Republicans (93 percent), Independents (70 percent), and parents (70 percent) agree, though more than two in three (64 percent) Democrats disagree.
More than three in four voters overall, across parties—including in battleground states—say four issues from a list of twelve are “very important”: ensuring every child is on track (86 percent); hiring and retaining high-quality teachers (81 percent); offering more career education and real-world learning (75 percent); and improving school security and safety (74 percent).
A slim majority (53 percent) supports increasing existing school budgets if funds follow students to “where they receive their education,” though nearly seven in ten (68 percent) Democrats oppose this approach.
Almost seven in ten (69 percent) voters overall, including a majority (51 percent) of Democrats, support creating more education options, including charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling.
A second analysis, by the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick, examines the K–12 agendas of 2022 gubernatorial candidates. At least 25 percent of the candidates agreed on six out of twenty-seven issues, with two tied for first place: expanding CTE programs and increasing school funding, both endorsed by thirty of the seventy-two candidates, or 42 percent. The other four top issues were school choice (twenty-four candidates; 33 percent); expanded pre-K (twenty-two candidates; 31 percent); teacher pay raises (nineteen candidates; 26 percent); and curricular reforms (nineteen candidates; 26 percent).
Finally, an issue analysis by the Education Commission of the States of 2023 State of the State addresses found that CTE, teaching quality, and school finance ranked “among the most popular” K–12 issues the governors mentioned. A majority also voiced support for early learning and child care. Other “hot topics this year” included student health, school choice, and safety. An analysis by the National Governors Association reached similar conclusions.
This agreement creates an ideological heartland, a term coined by the American Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Streeter to describe not a physical location, but a state of mind where domestic realists live.
Domestic realists are not given to ideological political extremes. They lean left or right or are part of that group called moderates. Roughly two-thirds of Americans live in this ideological heartland, compared with less than a quarter of staunch progressives or conservatives who live at the edges of the political spectrum, immersed in the culture wars.
With Republicans in twenty-two states and Democrats in seventeen states controlling the governorship and both houses of the state legislature—the trifecta of single-party government—legislative specifics will vary based on party affiliation and voter preferences. This gives policy and civic entrepreneurs the freedom to meet state needs and local circumstances.
For example, more school funding in one state may mean increasing pay for teachers. In another state, it may mean starting new or expanding current child care and early learning programs. A third state may create education savings accounts that parents can use for private school tuition or to purchase tutoring for a child in traditional district public schools.
Or a state may use more funding for several purposes, as is being suggested in Oklahoma. There, a new legislative proposal would give private-school parents up to $5,000 in annual credits and homeschool parents up to $2,500 for tuition, tutoring, and curriculum, while also providing $500 million in additional grants, salary increases, and other funding for traditional public schools.
This implementation pluralism follows the American federalist tradition. It allows states and local communities to be laboratories of democracy that test and refine laws and policies over time. In the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel societal and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
It’s time to forge a new K–12 political coalition of domestic realists from the ideological heartland who have a practical set of governing ideas based on everyday concerns shared by most Americans.
Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel. A new study from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) evaluates a promising program that could reduce both of these sticking points to manageable levels.
Chapter One is a nonprofit group (formerly known as Innovations for Learning) founded thirty years ago to help leverage emerging technology and volunteers in an effort to boost the reading skills of children in Chicago. Today, its reach is international, but it remains dedicated to helping students in grades K–2 become fluent readers. During the 2021–22 school year, Chapter One partnered with a large, unnamed school district in Florida to conduct a randomized controlled trial of its tutoring program. Fifty-six percent of students’ families in the district qualify for free and reduced priced lunch, and 12.6 percent of students are English learners. The district chose forty-nine kindergarten classes across thirteen schools to participate. While the report covers only the first year of results, students who remained in the district were expected to receive Chapter One tutoring during first grade (2022–23), as well, and those results will be published later. Researchers plan to follow all participants who remain in the district through the end of third grade.
The first year of the study consisted of 818 kindergarten students, roughly half of whom were randomly assigned to receive Chapter One tutoring. The two groups were similar in terms of demographics, although the treatment group did have slightly lower initial scores on the Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener (FLKRS). This was controlled for in the final analysis.
The Chapter One tutoring model embeds part-time early literacy interventionists (ELIs) in schools. These ELIs meet with students one-on-one in the back of their classroom during the school day, thus eliminating the sticking point of “finding additional time for tutoring.” One ELI serves multiple classrooms in a building and tutors individual students in five to seven minute sessions during blocks of reading instruction or at other opportune moments. The short sessions are intended to forestall loss of student attention while allowing each session to focus on a progression of discrete skills. The length of a given session and the number of sessions per week is determined by student need and rates of progress. For instance, students who are making adequate progress may only meet with their tutor once or twice a week, whereas students whom the tutors identify as in need of more support may meet daily.
ELIs follow a digital curriculum created by Chapter One, facilitating the assessment and tracking of student performance over time and allowing less-experienced individuals to serve as ELIs. While some ELIs are former classroom teachers, most have no teaching experience or teaching certification. All ELIs have earned at least a bachelor’s degree and undergo an extensive series of online training courses. All of these efficiencies combine to maximize the number of students one ELI can serve—thus addressing the “finding enough personnel” sticking point—and to squeeze the most instruction into the shortest amount of time.
The tutoring curriculum moves students through phonics development, learning to segment and blend short and long vowel sounds, learning sight words, and learning strategies to fluently read both texts that are readily decodable and those that include words that can’t be easily sounded out. Its format is said to draw on a strong evidence base. Students in the treatment group are also given tablets with the Chapter One software and asked to work independently for fifteen minutes each day, with the assigned work being precisely aligned to their most recent tutored instruction. ELIs also regularly meet with teachers, reading coaches, and principals to share information on student progress.
How did it work? Treatment group students were 38.1 percentage points more likely to reach the target reading level (or higher) by the end of kindergarten than their control group peers (nearly 70 percent of treatment students versus 32 percent of control students). Treatment group students were, on average, one reading level ahead of control group students at the end of the school year and achieved growth of 1.12 levels during the year. Importantly, native English speakers and English learners in the treatment group both showed similar levels of achievement and growth. Treatment group students scored, on average, 0.23 standard deviations higher than their peers on a year-end oral reading fluency assessment. Scores on the district’s kindergarten reading assessment were not fully available, but among the available data, evidence suggests a small but statistically significant boost for students who received the Chapter One tutoring treatment. The lack of full data likely contributes to this lackluster outcome, but we cannot discount the possibility that the new tutoring program may not be fully aligned with existing district assessments.
The NSSA researchers conclude that Chapter One is an effective, scalable, and affordable model for one-to-one tutoring. More data—which are on the way—are likely needed to fully support the claim of effectiveness, but first-year results certainly seem promising. Ditto for the model’s efficient use of time and talent. As to affordability, the researchers note that Chapter One cost the district $375 per student, a price tag that covers ELIs (pay, background checks, training, etc.), all the necessary technology, and other indirect costs for implementation. In districts with more than 5,000 students, the cost increases to $450 per student to fund an ELI manager position. The researchers assert that this is “substantially lower than the vast majority of other tutoring programs.”
Committing millions of dollars per year for multiple years is no small ask of any school or district, especially as federal Covid funding dries up. But much worse remediation efforts have been bought and paid for before, and the early data for this program certainly seem promising.
SOURCE: Kalena Cortes, Karen Kortecamp, Susanna Loeb, and Carly D. Robinson, “A Scalable Approach to High-Impact Tutoring for Young Readers: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial,” National Student Support Accelerator (February 2023).
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) paints a bleak picture of student achievement in social studies. According to the most recent report from 2018, just 24 percent of eighth graders were proficient or advanced in civics. The situation was worse in U.S history, with just 15 percent of eighth graders proficient or advanced. A new RAND report hypothesizes that a “missing infrastructure” for social studies instruction led to those low scores.
Melissa Kay Diliberti, Ashley Woo, and Julia H. Kaufman analyze the support systems for social studies instruction in three contexts: the state level, the local level of districts and schools, and the classroom level. This three-tiered analysis is supported by data from a literature review of the existing research on state social studies practices, a RAND survey of 634 elementary school principals, and the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS) of 745 public school teachers in grades K–5.
The RAND report finds that the social studies infrastructure at the state level is hindered by a lack of accountability. No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act both contained accountability measures for math and reading but none for social studies, giving states little motivation to improve instruction in that subject. While many states have adopted social studies standards to compliment those in math and reading, their coherence and rigor is mixed. The report cites Fordham’s The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021, which found that just five states plus the District of Columbia had exemplary civics and U.S. history standards. Also, few states use assessments to monitor student achievement in social studies.
Moving to the local level of districts and schools, the report finds a lack of evaluative feedback and professional development for teachers. Just 67 percent of elementary school principals reported evaluating their teachers in social studies, while 98 percent reported doing so in both math and reading. The same survey showed that just 52 percent of principals dedicated professional development activities to social studies, while 89 percent and 95 percent reported doing so for math and reading, respectively.
This leads to inconsistent social studies instruction at the classroom level. The majority (59 percent) of elementary teachers considered themselves the primary decision makers on which instructional materials to use for social studies (only 36 percent and 32 percent of teachers felt the same way about math and reading, respectively). Teachers were also scrounging for social studies instructional materials. A large majority of teachers (79 percent) reported being “cobblers”—meaning they gathered materials from various sources—or creating their own materials. Just 16 percent of teachers reported using a textbook. This made planning for social studies inefficient and led to ineffective instruction.
The report recommends that state policymakers include social studies in their ESSA accountability plans. State leaders are also advised to make social studies standards more rigorous and align them to national frameworks (such as those from the National Council for the Social Studies). This recommendation is well-intentioned, but the NCSS standards are mediocre and content-free, so states would be better served by emulating those that scored well in Fordham’s 2021 review of civics and U.S. history standards. At the local level, district leaders and principals should provide more evaluation and professional development to teachers targeted to social studies instruction.
Surprisingly, the report’s recommendations neglect a proven strategy: using the reading block to teach social studies. High-quality reading curricula such as Core Knowledge Language Arts and Wit & Wisdom are rich in history and civics. As Robert Pondiscio recently noted, Core Knowledge in particular has been shown to boost students’ reading comprehension precisely because it contains so much content knowledge. Rather than teach social studies solely as an isolated topic, schools should also integrate it into existing reading lessons.
The report notes that the current state of social studies instruction threatens schools’ historical purpose as “important civic institutions that play a critical role in developing students’ civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.” Our own Chester Finn recently voiced a similar sentiment, stating that a lack of a shared school curriculum could exacerbate “diminishing confidence in the shared values, institutions, principles, and traditions that have held us together as a nation.” This confidence could diminish further if schools do not find a way to improve the infrastructure that supports effective social studies instruction.
SOURCE: Melissa Kay Diliberti, Ashley Woo, and Julia H. Kaufman, “The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary (K–5) Social Studies Instruction,” RAND (March 7, 2023).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Scott Marion of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the challenges of implementing through-course assessments, which would roll up two or three tests during the school year into a final score for accountability purposes. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam Tyner tells us about a new meta-analysis that finds how schools spend money is more important than how much they spend.
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