Teachers’ authority in the classroom is being undermined by policies of “restorative justice”—a non-punitive approach to discipline. But the predictable albeit unintended consequence of these well-meaning policies is that disruptive students get away with previously unacceptable behavior. Outbursts of student vulgarity and incidence of violence have become normalized as something teachers and other students have to endure.
Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the newly released paperback edition of Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation.
Teachers’ authority in the classroom is being undermined by policies of “restorative justice”—a non-punitive approach to discipline wherein issues are supposed to be addressed “inside the school,” not with suspensions. These policies, like so many in our education system, are well-intended. They are meant to address the problem that so many minority students end up in a “school-to-prison pipeline” after a series of “minor infractions of school rules.”
But the predictable albeit unintended consequence of these well-meaning policies is that disruptive students get away with previously unacceptable behavior. Outbursts of student vulgarity and violence have become normalized as things that teachers and other students have to endure. Two-thirds of teachers in poor school districts say they have disruptive students who should not be in class. More than three-quarters believe that the interests of well-behaved students are being sacrificed to the indulgence of bad behavior.
New York City English teacher J. Bryan McGeever paints a vivid and disturbing picture of what relaxed discipline policies have done to the learning environments of New York City schools. He writes: “Students committing outrageous misconduct often stay in their regular classrooms. Remember when cursing out a teacher was a very big deal? Well, now it’s just Tuesday.” He goes on, “We know about the brutal fights in cafeterias, the spitting in an administrator’s face without consequences, the ‘wake-and-bake,’ marijuana-addled teens who can barely keep their heads up.”
While suspension rates are down, he argues, it is not because students are behaving any better. It’s not because intimate classroom chats have made challenging students see the error of their ways or because they have subdued their rowdier inclinations. No, it is because teachers are forced to endure whatever students brazenly and flagrantly throw at them (sometimes literally). It is only in the peculiar world of modern education that teachers are told to purposefully turn a blind eye to behaviors and actions that would be unacceptable in any other setting. Only in schools are we now told to “get curious, not furious” and where we recast “standing down” in the face of student misconduct not as a dereliction of duty on the part of teachers, not as tolerating the intolerable, but as acts of heroic compassion and sophisticated understanding.
The breakdown of order, the absence of discipline, and the extinction of any concept of “tough love” is a brutal everyday reality for modern American educators. Yes, suspensions are down, but the students are not stupid. They know what they can get away with. They know that they can come to class high or tell a teacher to “screw off” or copulate in the stairway and that the penalty will be paltry or even nonexistent.
Many teachers feel that they are being held hostage to an ideological experiment that harms them and their ability to teach, that harms innocent students who are trying to learn, and that in the end harms the very people it is meant to help by not holding them accountable for their actions. If they are not held accountable by the school, why should they think they will be held accountable by society when they act in antisocial or violent ways? Certainly, within school, when abhorrent student behavior is tolerated, accommodated, and given endless indulgence, it proliferates. Teachers are often afraid to articulate their doubts and misgivings about “restorative” practices because these practices are focused on helping racial minorities. But the plain fact is that they do not remedy what’s deficient in education. Listen to what American teachers have to say. And watch many of them exit the field rather than tolerate what’s happening on it.
In 20I9, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute worked with the RAND Corporation to survey teachers of grades 3–12 on the topic of school discipline, intentionally oversampling African American teachers and teachers in high-poverty schools. Among its key findings:
We read that “Despite the likely costs for students who misbehave—and their belief that discipline is racially biased—many African American teachers say suspensions, expulsions, and other forms of ‘exclusionary discipline’ should be used more often.” In fact, Black teachers are more likely than White teachers to argue that suspensions are used too sparingly.
Some of the quotes from teachers in the Fordham study are heartbreaking to read, if unsurprising to today’s classroom practitioners:
“Over the course of my career, disrespect for adults on campus has grown.”
“The students were awful to me. I would cry in my car some days.”
“There are very few consequences for student misbehavior. Students have learned this and know they can get away with anything.”
The teachers whom students come back to thank later in life are usually those who set high expectations for their students, who challenge them, who hold them accountable. As Mark Edmundson writes in his excellent book, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference: “The two greatest teachers we know in the West, Socrates and Jesus, were not without kindness, to be sure, but both had a sharp edge. Jesus asked people to do the impossible. He wanted them to give up all of their possessions and follow him, to change their lives utterly around. Socrates asked one badgering question after another about why his contemporaries behaved as they did.” In sum, “the great teachers who matter the most” do not always come in an “all-benevolent mode.”
All well-intentioned reformers seem to operate from the premise that schools can fix the myriad problems in civil society that our laws and institutions have otherwise failed to fix or improve. But our schools are not and cannot be cure-alls. They cannot make up for students’ unstable home lives, the drug addiction of parents, insufficient medical care, poor nutrition, poverty, or neighborhoods where violence and profanity are ubiquitous and trust is fleeting.
As Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist and founder of the public-policy group Civic Ventures, wrote, “Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.”
Hanauer, like so many, had fallen prey to what I call “the magical solution illusion in education”—the idea that an illusive cure-all exists and modern educators need only to discover and implement it. There is nothing less magical and more illusionary than to believe lax discipline policies lead to better student behaviors.
I know that heroism in the classroom is possible, that a single teacher can be a transcendent figure for a child—a guide to a path of knowledge rather than ignorance, achievement rather than aimlessness, human engagement rather than human neglect. But it is both misguided and arrogant to believe that school faculties and services can supplant families and neighborhoods. Classrooms are places of impermanence, of transition from one class, one grade, to another. One’s family, whether united or broken, whether you like it or not, is forever. Inevitably, parents are the primary instructors of their children, and the culture in which children are brought up is formative. School is only one part of a young person’s education and path to maturity.
Teachers are now planning instruction for the new school year. But very quickly after their pupils arrive, many will realize that some students will not be adequately challenged by the grade-level curriculum typically assigned for the class. Some will already have mastered that material and are ready to move on.
Accelerating students beyond grade level requires that schools implement methods for determining their learning levels, group them based on learning needs, then accelerate learning accordingly. This is especially true in today’s classrooms, where teachers face a widening range of achievement and readiness, partly due to fractured learning during the pandemic. One fifth-grade teacher may have students learning two-digit addition while others are ready for algebra. This is a recipe for some students going ill-served, uncompensated, and under-challenged.
Systems need to be in place to support teachers facing such a range of achievement levels by providing a continuum of services. That means looking at: 1) identifying students’ immediate learning levels; 2) determining how services for advanced learning opportunities can be tiered; and 3) finding a match between program offerings and students’ needs. This requires flexibility in services, placements, and programming to allow for continual entrance, exit, and re-entry points.
Consider what a continuum of services might look like at the three key levels: the district, the school, and the classroom.
At the district level. Paradise Valley Unified School District in Arizona, where I worked, enrolls 33,000 students, including almost 5,000 “gifted and talented” learners. We built a reputation for supporting such pupils via a continuum of services. That made it possible for the district to provide for, and appropriately challenge, all students with high ability and high achievement. They move in and out of the various programs throughout their school years, depending on their learning needs at the time. This procedure has been sustained by the district for nearly two decades. That’s because it works.
At the school level. Grouping practices at the building level can take many forms. These include ability grouping, cluster grouping, within-class grouping, within-grade-level grouping, cross-grade-level grouping, pullout groups, and more. “Walk to math” illustrates a common grade-level grouping practice that costs nothing to implement and can be easily supported by school administrators. In this model, the teachers in the grade level all teach math at the same time of the day, with each teaching at a different level. This enables students to progress when ready, based on their demonstrated mastery of the content. When students are constantly regrouped based on readiness, the risk of negative stigma for changing classroom placements is minimized—as the changes include all pupils at all levels. This continual regrouping practice allows for more focused instruction and encourages acceleration for students who need it, as well as catch-up and grade-level for other pupils.
At the classroom level. We know that highly effective teachers continually monitor student progress and adjust instruction accordingly. Not every district or school arranges for grouping and accelerating curriculum and instruction for gifted and talented students, and even when they do, most of the burden falls on classroom teachers, as they provide the actual instruction.
Some resist grouping students for instruction, despite much research attesting to its efficacy. Grouping students can appear political or discriminatory when poorly designed and poorly communicated. Some are also reluctant because they do not feel confident that they can do a first-rate job of designing and implementing groupings.
Flexibly grouping students can be messy at first, and doing so requires professional learning opportunities, guided planning, and administrative support at the building level. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In my book A Teacher’s Guide to Flexible Grouping and Collaborative Learning, written with Karen L. Brown, we suggest the following when implementing grouping practices:
School administrators should anticipate challenges in implementing grouping practices due to the burden this places on scheduling classes and assigning staff. Principals need teacher buy-in, which sometimes means shifting mindsets. It also requires reflecting on whether existing instructional practices are positively impacting instruction for all students, especially those who are capable of learning beyond their grade levels.
Ultimately, principals need to provide transparency in placement processes and communicate their plans and rationale to parents. They must emphasize that grouping configurations are not permanent placements; they are flexible and responsive to student needs.
Grouping students for targeted instruction on a daily basis is effective and necessary for those at the highest achievement levels. The recommendations above lay the groundwork for incorporating a continuum of services that involves grouping and regrouping students at the district level, the building level, and within the classroom.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. You can subscribe on the Fordham Institute website and the newsletter’s Substack.
We in education reform are often guilty of focusing too much on theory and ideology and too little on the real-world experiences of teachers. Gifted education is no exception. Fights over equity and excellence are important, but so too is figuring out the nuts-and-bolts details of how to make stuff work. Where programs and services exist, for example, school systems often staff them in haphazard ways—assuming, it seems, that any educator can teach these students adequately. If special training is offered, it’s frequently flimsy. Many times, there’s none at all. And even in places that avoid these mistakes, curriculum and instruction can be afterthoughts. The victims in all of this, of course, are the students, whose achievement and potential are blunted by bad policy.
To learn more about these issues from the perspective of a teacher, and to better understand what leading a gifted classroom is truly like, I spoke with Janet Kragen. Residing in Washington State, Janet just retired in June after teaching for forty-three years, specializing in gifted education since 1983. She also served for more than a decade on the board of the Washington Association of Educators of Talented and Gifted. And for years, she’s contributed to Stories from School, mostly writing about gifted topics.
What made you want to teach gifted students?
In my first couple of teaching jobs, people would come into my classroom, see the way I was teaching, and say, “You should be teaching gifted kids.” They never seemed to comment on the fact that I was getting nonreaders in fourth grade to read chapter books. But they were blown away by the other reading group in the room, reading Shakespeare with me.
In 1977 or ‘78, I remember a girl didn’t understand a math problem. This was back in the days when we typically taught algorithms from the book. I abandoned the lesson and explained the problem in an entirely different way. She looked at me cockeyed and asked, “Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” My principal got a chuckle out of that story, but that was another time I heard I should be teaching gifted.
After four years in private schools, I got a job teaching writing in a public middle school in upstate New York. The principal came to me after several weeks and asked if I would teach a class for gifted. I said yes. I was a long-term sub at the school, I had no experience teaching gifted, and I had no training in gifted education. In spite of being a complete neophyte, I got to design the program, identify the students, and teach the class.
I decided to create a school journal. (I was a writing teacher, after all.) At the middle school, we focused on business letters, report writing, and persuasive essays. I wanted students to have a creative outlet.
The principal gave me a list of students who had scored well on tests. I asked those students if they were interested in joining the group. Some did. Then I went to the English teachers. I said, “Never mind test scores. Who in your class is really talented in writing?” I asked those students if they wanted to join the group and some of them did. After we put out several issues of the journal, I included an ad saying that any interested student could join the class. Half a dozen or so showed up to the next meeting. All but one dropped out immediately saying it was too much work. One boy I’ll call Jack stayed and wrote a great short story. I remember his teacher coming up to me afterwards and saying, “I never knew he had it in him.”
I called the program GTM—Gifted/Talented/Motivated.
It’s still my philosophy for including kids.
What was the most challenging part of teaching gifted students? How did that differ compared to their peers who weren’t identified for gifted programs?
Over the years I discovered that half my job was teaching academics. And half was helping my students with their social and emotional needs. In the first week of every school year, I talked with my students about insomnia, which is a characteristic problem for the gifted. We would share tips for how to get to sleep. I would discuss perfectionism and anxiety repeatedly each year, with individuals, with families, or with the whole class.
Often times gifted kids are highly verbal, so there is a lot of talking and hands eagerly raised and interrupting. As a teacher, you need to manage that enthusiasm, especially when you consider that many gifted individuals are introverts who need quiet to process their thinking. I found that little of the blurting out and interrupting was actually disruptive. It was all on topic. The students were very engaged. They just didn’t have a lot of self-control. Nevertheless, I needed to preserve pockets of stillness for all the introverts.
Gifted kids often assume they know how to do things. They think if they can’t figure it out, they aren’t as smart as they thought they were. They don’t like to ask for help. I modeled on a daily basis that it was OK to make mistakes and get help, including from the kids in the class.
Gifted kids often assume they are right. It can make discussions fraught when individuals take opposing positions. I finally required an exit ticket for one type of literary discussion. Students had to write on a 3x5 card the answer to two questions: What did you learn from someone else’s comments? How did someone change your mind? That second question changed everything, I think because it actually gave them permission to change their mind.
I did teach some general education classes. Here are some differences I found:
There are currently efforts around the country, efforts that are long overdue, to identify more marginalized students for gifted programming and to better serve them—students who are Black, Hispanic, low-income, and from other marginalized backgrounds. What could Washington State and others states around the country do differently to better diversify gifted education?
What’s the biggest difference between kids entering school from rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods? Children in high-income families hear 30 million more words than children in low-income families by age three. My question is, how can we get child care workers and preschool teachers and babysitters and parents to talk intentionally to their babies and toddlers a whole lot more? Wouldn’t it be amazing to improve all children’s verbal skills before they arrived at school? We would surely pull a more diverse clientele into our gifted programs.
But what can districts do right now? First of all, each district should screen for the type of services they will provide. Are they going to have a highly academic program? Will they focus on developing creativity? Or will they do both?
Then districts should use a universal screening tool to help identify students, like the Cogat or the NNAT3 Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test. Teacher and parent referrals can provide additional input for the evaluation team, but referrals should never be the gateway for assessment. Districts ought to have multiple criteria so no single test gets a student identified or disqualified.
Then there’s the possibility of using local norms instead of national standards. For example, your district could say, “We’re going to serve the top 5 percent from each school in the district in our program.” The top 5 percent from one neighborhood might have higher test scores than the top 5 percent from another neighborhood. Using local norms gives every school equal opportunity and equal representation.
Finally, remember Jack? No test identified him. No teacher noticed him. He came to my class and asked to be let in. I think we not only need to be open to self-nomination, we need to advertise. Students who want to dive in the deep end of the pool should be welcome to give it a shot. There’s no harm in allowing children to attempt challenging things.
Let’s change gears now and talk about your professional training for teaching gifted students. How did that work?
I took university classes. I also took classes through my district (the North Kitsap School District), a regional consortium of districts, and Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). In addition, I attended years of conferences put on by the Washington Association of Educators of Talented and Gifted (WAETAG). All told, it amounted to a couple dozen quarter units over thirty-five years. When I started out, I took all the classes I could find, so that gives you a sense of how few classes were offered. It’s definitely better now.
It was all haphazard and self-directed. Luckily, my first foray into gifted coursework, Beyond the Classroom, was excellent. The instructors pushed us to see that our job extended into community outreach and advocacy. Roger Taylor honed my skills in integration. Lisa Van Gemert inspired me to find new ways to meet the emotional needs of my kids. Multiple WAETAG speakers gave me tools that helped me in my classroom, and the conferences energized me every year.
Do you think that’s a good system? What do you wish the state and district would’ve done differently?
It’s a ridiculous system. Would you go for medical treatment from someone who skipped around from school to school, picking one class one year and one the next, with no organizational oversight, in order to qualify to work in a particular specialty?
I think that if a person is hired to teach gifted students full-time, they should be working toward their state’s certification in gifted. In Washington State, it’s possible to get a Master of Arts in Teaching in gifted education and equitable instruction or a Master in Education with a gifted education track. (Those options were not available until long after I earned my MA.)
If a person is assigned a cluster of gifted students in their gen ed classroom, they should take gifted coursework, too, even if it’s just on how to differentiate and how to meet the social and emotional needs of those unique students.
More generally, teacher quality and expertise are among the less-talked-about aspects of gifted education, at least from a policy perspective. Can you speak on that? How big of a problem is that, and how should school systems handle training and selecting teachers for these programs?
We all know the bias that claims gifted students don’t need any educational support. They can do fine on their own. We all know that isn’t true.
In much the same way, there seems to be the assumption that, since gifted students are smart, anyone can teach them. That also isn’t true.
Not everyone can teach music or P.E. or kindergarten or calculus. Trust me, you don’t want me teaching any of those classes. But I’m good at teaching gifted.
You don’t have to be smarter than the kids you teach in a gifted class. Plenty of times you won’t be. But you have to be quick-witted. You have to like these kids, with all their quirks. You have to understand asynchronicity and how a kid can have the intellectual capacity of a fifteen-year-old but the maturity of a five-year-old. In fifth grade. You have to know how to manage and care for twice-exceptional (2-E) kids, plus high-anxiety kids and the kids whose drive for perfection sabotages their ability to achieve mere success.
It can’t just be anyone who has room in their schedule.
By the way, if a teacher consistently has multiple behavior problems with gifted students, especially year after year, that teacher might not be a good fit with that group of students.
Given your decades of first-hand experience, what’s your overall assessment of gifted education today? And what’s your hope for what it can and ought to be in the future?
Once school got out this June, I started looking at state requirements for gifted education. I’ve read through the regulations for about ten states so far. My overall impression is that most states have a requirement that districts provide gifted education services. However, most states provide little to no direction beyond that. They may give suggestions or recommendations for how to run programs, but ultimately, it’s up to districts. When I’ve investigated further, I’ve found some districts leave the decisions up to the individual schools!
It’s quite a contrast to the other side of the exceptional-children spectrum. I found that, in our state, the rules for special education take up 135 pages while the rules for gifted take up 8 pages. Not that I think we need over 100 pages of regulations, but I do think we need some guardrails and protections.
In my experience, I’ve found that programs flourish under supportive administrations. They can survive and even thrive under benign neglect as long as the staff is trained and experienced enough. But they can be eliminated or gutted almost overnight—even in the face of passionate parental and educator protests—if new administrators come in who are philosophically opposed to the very notion of gifted education.
I like that Illinois calls their law the Accelerated Placement Act. The law “requires Illinois public school districts to adopt and implement policies on acceleration that, at minimum, provide opportunities for early entrance to kindergarten and first grade, opportunities for accelerating a student in a single subject area, and opportunities for ‘whole grade’ acceleration (sometimes referred to as ‘grade skipping’).” The state establishes a minimum bar for the services parents can expect to receive for their child.
I love to see gifted students reading on their level and doing math on their level, not being tied to their grade level. I love to see them connecting with each other and finding they are not alone in the world. I love to see them realize they aren’t always the smartest person in the room and that humility isn’t a bad thing. I love to see them struggle and work hard and overcome failure and finally succeed. Then we do a happy dance together!
I want gifted kids to have what every kid should have: A challenging education that pushes them to do more than they thought they could. A chance to socialize with peers. A place where they feel safe and have fun and where they learn to make the world a better place. I want them to be successful in my classroom and beyond.
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QUOTE OF NOTE
“‘I’m still a normal 13-year-old,’ said Alena, [who just got accepted to medical school, and who is] a student at both Arizona State University and Oakwood University, where she is simultaneously earning two separate undergraduate degrees in biological sciences. ‘I just have extremely good time management skills and I’m very disciplined.’”
—“Alena Analeigh Wicker, 13, just got accepted to medical school,” Washington Post, Sydney Page, July 20, 2022
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THREE RECENT STUDIES TO STUDY
“Emotional Response to Testing in Gifted and Highly Gifted Children,” by Cesare Cornoldi, David Giofrè, Irene Cristina Mammarella, and Enrico Toffalini, Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 3, 2022
“The present study examined the relationship between performance and emotional response in 468,423 Italian fifth-graders taking a national test on mathematics and language... The results showed that, although a lower emotional response correlated with a higher achievement, this relationship is nonlinear, and the estimates for gifted and highly gifted children were virtually the same. Girls showed a greater emotional response than boys on all levels of performance.”
“Will We Ever Close the Gender Gap Among Top Mathematics Achievers? Analysis of Recent Trends by Race in Advanced Placement (AP) Exams,” by A. Kadir Bahar, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, Volume 44, Issue 4, 2021
“Analyzing the test scores of more than 10,000,000 students who participated in the Advanced Placement (AP) math exams from 1997 to 2019, this study examined the direction and magnitude of the trend in gender disparity by race in participation in and top achievement on AP Calculus AB, Calculus BC, and Statistics exams. The results of this study indicated that, in general, females’ representation in all three AP exams increased significantly.”
“Identifying and Serving Gifted and Talented Students: Are Identification and Services Connected?” by E. Jean Gubbins, Del Siegle, Karen Ottone-Cross, D. Betsy McCoach, Susan Dulong Langley, Carolyn M. Callahan, Annalissa V. Brodersen, and Melanie Caughey, Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 2, 2021
“The importance of alignment between identification processes and program design is widely noted in gifted and talented education literature. We analyzed publicly available district gifted program plans (grades 3–5) from two states to examine the extent to which district identification practices matched intervention strategies... The results of this study indicated that, at least in terms of planning, districts in the two states we examined appeared to be aligning identification and programming practices to meet the needs of gifted students identified in mathematics and/or reading/English language arts.”
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WRITING WORTH READING
“Alena Analeigh Wicker, 13, just got accepted to medical school,” Washington Post, Sydney Page, July 20, 2022
“Science shows most high achievers had troubled childhoods. Elon Musk’s sister just explained why he's the perfect example,” Inc., Jessica Stillman, August 1, 2022
“The case of the missing data on AP students,” Education Week, Ileana Najarro and Eesha Pendharkar, July 29, 2022
“What to do if your school doesn’t offer AP Courses,” U.S. News, Cole Claybourn, July 28, 2022
“Back to school at Tempe Elementary: Gifted learning program opening at Arredondo,” Wrangler News, Wrangler News Staff, July 31, 2022
“Spanish students ace Advanced Placement,” Thousand Oaks Acorn, Dawn Megli, July 15, 2022
“Learning from Asian-American success,” City Journal, Neetu Arnold, June 30, 2022
Student demographics in traditional district schools largely reflect patterns of housing availability and affordability within neighborhoods. Much of that is due to strict attendance zoning. Charter schools can break this pattern by offering open, unzoned enrollment to all students in a given city. But as charters continue to expand, school leaders have had to deal with charges of racial segregation. Unlike the forced segregation of an earlier era, parents are free to opt into or out of a charter based on its racial composition—or anything else for that matter. Still, whether the expansion of charters alters the demographics of neighborhood-assigned district schools remains a non-trivial question.
A recent study conducted by Sarah Cordes and Agustina Laurito examines the consequences of charter school expansion in New York City from 2000 to 2017 on both school-level and neighborhood-level diversity. Due to its historically high level of residential and school segregation, as well as its fast growing charter sector, Gotham is an ideal location for such a query.
The sample included all traditional public elementary schools (TPS) that contained a fourth grade in the twenty-nine community school districts that also had at least one charter elementary operating within its boundaries at any time during the observation period. These selection criteria resulted in a sample of 742 schools and nearly 68,000 school-grade-year observations. They use Common Core of Data, U.S. Census data, and school zone shape files to gather student data by grade level and race/ethnicity, as well as school location data and racial composition measures at the school-zone level.
To disentangle the effects of charters on both TPS and neighborhood characteristics, they use a difference-in-differences design that utilizes two sources of variation: 1) the phase-in of charter schools, as most begin by offering kindergarten and then expand by an additional grade each year, and 2) expansion in the relative size of the charter sector as more charter schools open within the district. They are therefore comparing the racial composition of TPS-grades that are experiencing changes in charter school exposure to the racial composition of TPS-grades within the same school experiencing no changes in charter school exposure. Student demographics in grades that don’t experience changes in charter school exposure serve as a strong counterfactual since they should not be directly affected by charter expansion but should reflect other demographic changes occurring in schools and neighborhoods.
To examine the relationship between school and neighborhood segregation, the researchers analyzed the difference between the racial composition of the TPS and that of the school-age population residing in the neighborhood where the school is located, meaning they are observing the extent to which school and neighborhood demographic changes match. For the diversity measure, a value of 0 indicates no diversity (all students in a school-grade are the same race) and a 1 indicates that all four racial and ethnic groups—White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian or other race—are equally represented at 25 percent each.
Cohodes and Laurito found a small but statistically significant positive effect of the share of charter seats on TPS diversity. Specifically, a 10 percentage-point increase in the share of charter seats in a grade results in a 2.9 percentage-point increase in the racial diversity score. This change is driven by an increase in the share of White and Hispanic students and a decrease in the share of Black students enrolled in TPS-grades after charter expansion—not surprising given charter schools’ popularity with Black families.
Further, this increase in diversity occurs on a margin that also affects intense segregation, defined as a school-grade that is 90 percent or more of the same race. Specifically, a 10- percentage point increase in charter seats lowers the likelihood of intense segregation by about 3 percentage points, which largely reflects reductions in the probability that a TPS-grade is over 90 percent Black. In terms of neighborhood diversity, changes largely mirror changes in school diversity except that the latter is increasing even faster than the former.
The authors conclude that their “results suggest that charter schools increase diversity in TPSs primarily by reducing the share of Black students and increasing the share of White students enrolled in these schools.” So to those worried that charter schools amount to “white-flight” academies, you can rest easy. White students are far from “flocking to” charter schools. Moreover, this study finds that more diversity—not more segregation—is what is occurring in TPS.
SOURCE: Sarah A. Cordes and Agustina Laurito, “Choice and Change: The Implications of Charter School Expansion for School and Neighborhood Diversity in NYC,” retrieved from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University (April 2022).
It’s one of those zombie mantras that just won’t die: Letting students cut corners, giving them grades they haven’t earned, and generally lowering the bar is a nice thing to do for vulnerable kids—those living in poverty, often with turbulent home lives or mental health struggles to boot. From this perspective, holding students accountable for showing up in class, behaving, turning in homework, and learning what they’re supposed to isn’t merely unfair; it borders on cruel.
We read about it all the time. Schools should revamp homework so students get credit for work they turn in late (or never). Students oughtn’t be penalized for absence, tardiness, or classroom misbehavior. During the disruptions of the pandemic, many argued that students couldn’t possibly be expected to keep on their cameras to demonstrate attention during remote learning.
Is it really true that taking it easy on students is good for them? A fascinating new NBER working paper adds to the growing pile of evidence that relaxing standards and lowering expectations does students no favors in the long run.
The study reports results from an experiment in poor elementary schools in India, where the researchers studied a key driver of educational inequities: differences in the rate of “cognitive fatigue.”
“Cognitive endurance,” the flip side of fatigue, is defined as “the ability to sustain performance over time during a cognitively effortful task.” The researchers measured this capacity in students through their gradually falling rates of successfully answering multiple-choice questions on a fifty-question diagnostic. Following other studies of student effort, they found that performance drops in later parts of the assessment, as fatigue sets in.
Interestingly, baseline cognitive endurance and fatigue are not the same for all student groups. Students from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to give up during the exam, meaning that they exhibited steeper rates of performance decline than other students. Using data from PISA and TIMSS, two international testing programs, they found that children in poor countries showed 240 percent more cognitive decline than those from rich countries. In the U.S., there are also differences by race/ethnicity: Black and Hispanic students demonstrated a 72 percent steeper rate of decline in successfully answering questions than White students. The researchers hypothesized that this pattern exists because poorer students, across and within countries, spend less time in structured, “effortful thinking.” (Presumably, the racial differences in the U.S. are driven by the correlation between race and class.)
To test the hypothesis that effortful thinking increased cognitive endurance, the researchers focused on 1,636 students in six low-income elementary schools in India, where “time in focused cognitive activity is limited,” and “classrooms are crowded, with frequent disruptions from environmental noise and other students...[while] teachers predominately use rote memorization and recitation during the school day.” Students were assigned to either receive one of two different cognitive interventions, or to a control group.
The two interventions consisted of an academic treatment, during which students practiced math problems, and a nonacademic treatment, where students completed cognitively-intensive games like challenging puzzles or mazes. The control group was assigned to an independent, self-paced “study hall” where students were asked to copy down some math problems and then left to their own devices. The intervention sessions were twenty minutes long several times per week over several months.
Although the treatment amounted to just ten to twenty hours of structured cognitive conditioning per student, the effects were substantial. The interventions mitigated performance decline on the fifty-question batteries by 21.9 percent, with the improvement persisting when they followed up several months later. The researchers argue that the differences were driven by changes in student cognitive endurance, since they did not find an improvement at the beginning of tests, which would have suggested that the students who got the intervention improved across the board, through higher confidence or improved content knowledge.
Additionally, the researchers found that their cognitive interventions slightly improved students’ grades in school: Students who received the intervention scored higher in math, English, and Hindi (from 0.08 to .010 standard deviations). They interpret the impact on school grades to show that structured cognitive effort of any kind—regardless of content area—could improve students’ performance across disciplines.
This logic extends to having simply experienced more schooling in general, and the researchers test this hypothesis, too. Previous research by Nobel Prize winner Joshua Angrist has shown positive effects of schooling on earnings, and they use similar methods (birthday cutoffs) analyzing an even larger dataset from Pakistan to show that more schooling is associated with better cognitive endurance. Specifically, they found the fatigue-mitigation effect of an additional year of school that was three times as strong as that of the experimental intervention.
This study seems to be identifying one pathway that explains schooling’s positive effects on a range of outcomes: cognitive endurance. Sometimes education reformers pooh-pooh the idea of “thinking skills” that are transferable across disciplines. (And sometimes they are right that such skills can be empty or ephemeral.) But an important thinking skill that school can teach is the ability to stick with a problem and not give up. Unfortunately, while from some quarters we hear effusive praise of “social-emotional skills” and “grit,” the same advocates and educators often also suggest policies that risk incentivizing students to be lazy, make excuses, or otherwise not realize their full potential. Athletes benefit from coaches who hold them accountable for going to practice and trying their hardest—and as research continues to show, students benefit from hard cognitive training, too. Watering down homework, curricula, and expectations may be undermining the foundations students are laying for their future success.
SOURCE: Christina L. Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Schofield, “Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital,” NBER working paper, June 2022.
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