How do we know whether kids in Pennsylvania are better or worse readers at the end of middle school than their peers in Colorado? We wouldn’t know that or much else without a test that may have escaped your notice altogether, unless you’re some sort of education-obsessed policy maker or policy wonk like me. I’m talking about the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
NOTE: Chester E. Finn, Jr., Fordham's president emeritus and distinguished senior fellow and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is also the author of the forthcoming book “Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP,” to be published in two weeks by the Harvard Education Press.
How will we gauge the learning loss that young Americans suffered due to Covid-forced school shutdowns? How do we see whether achievement gaps between groups of students are widening or narrowing? How do we know whether kids in Pennsylvania are better or worse readers at the end of middle school than their peers in Colorado?
We wouldn’t know that or much else without a test that may have escaped your notice altogether, unless you’re some sort of education-obsessed policy maker or policy wonk like me. I’m talking about the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known in wonk circles as “NAEP” and among sophisticates as the “Nation’s Report Card.” But what is it, and why isn’t it on your radar? How does it work? Can it keep generating vital data as testing retreats across much of American education, especially since we’re talking about a national test run by the federal government. Two scary thoughts, yes? Also scary is the possible fragmentation of its unusual decision-making body, which so far has done well at keeping NAEP out of politics.
NAEP emerged during the 1960s, followed by major overhauls in the 1980s and again in 2002. Though it has enjoyed considerable support from private foundations, today it’s almost entirely paid for by Uncle Sam and administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. It tests schoolchildren in grades 4, 8, and 12 in ten subjects, though on varying schedules and reporting its results at various levels: always for the country as a whole but sometimes just in one or two grade levels. Since enactment of No Child Left Behind, it has been required to report reading and math results every two years for states (and a handful of urban districts) as well as for the country as a whole, though state results are inexplicably limited to grades 4 and 8.
NAEP is how we learned, for example, that 44 percent of White eighth graders reached the “proficient” level in math in 2019, compared with just 14 percent of Black students, underscoring the persistent “achievement gaps” that recent reform efforts have failed to close.
NAEP is also how we found out that eighth graders in Massachusetts attained proficiency that year at twice the rate of their classmates in Louisiana. And that’s how we’ll soon know the extent of learning setbacks wrought by the pandemic.
Yet few Americans are aware of this test. Nor are many educators. That’s because NAEP tests only a sample of students and reports nothing about individual children, individual schools, or the vast majority of school systems. So it has little impact on the lives of families, teachers, or pupils.
Also shielding NAEP from controversy is that what it tests get decided through a multiyear process overseen by an autonomous policy-setting body called the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB).
That bipartisan body, which I had the honor to chair during its first two years, consists of twenty-six individuals appointed by the Secretary of Education after an elaborate vetting process. It includes two governors, two legislators, principals and superintendents, school board members, testing experts, teachers at every level, curriculum specialists, parents, a private school rep, and several members of the “general public.” The current chair is former North Carolina governor Bev Perdue (D). Her predecessor was Mississippi’s Haley Barbour (R).
For a federal entity, it’s remarkably independent. Its duties include deciding what subjects will be tested, what’s on those tests, and the methods used in gathering and explaining their results. Its 1988 authorizing statute—primarily worked out between the Reagan administration and the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—says the board shall exercise “its independent judgment free from inappropriate influences and special interests . . . independent of the Secretary and other offices and officers of the Department.”
The capacity of such a Noah’s Ark body to reach consensus over the years on all manner of touchy issues has done much to shield NAEP from political crossfire. But because its test “frameworks” need updating every decade or two, and because this is happening in a suspicious, hair-trigger country, agreement within the board is getting harder to forge. A recent fracas over future reading tests grew rancorous before cool heads pushed for compromise and pricklier subjects lie ahead.
Probably the board’s toughest trial has been creating and maintaining NAEP’s trio of benchmarks,” labeled basic, proficient, and advanced. Responding to education goals set in 1989 by Bush 41 and forty-nine governors, NAGB set out to create criteria for student achievement. Nothing like this had ever been done, and it triggered intense controversy among scholars, educators, and statisticians. But NAGB stood fast, refining the level-setting process but never abandoning it. As a result, those cut points on the NAEP scale have turned into the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to stable, rigorous national standards for student learning in the elementary and secondary years.
But can it last? Can the Nation’s Report Card not just sustain its reputation as the gold standard of achievement testing but also stay sheltered from political battles and culture wars over what young Americans should be taught?
Don’t count on it. Divisive issues loom. Can NAGB update its science framework without coming unglued over environmental issues, maybe even evolution? Can it update its history and civics tests without damaging battles over, say, 1619 versus 1776? Can it sustain its rigorous benchmarks when some view even the documentation of learning gaps as racist? Can it sidestep today’s roaring arguments about what kids should and shouldn’t read? Can it stay focused on academic achievement when senior government officials seem to be losing interest in learning outcomes, even in testing itself, and when many educators favor greater attention to kids’ social and emotional well-being? As NAEP grows ever more expensive, will Congress continue to find the money? As outside groups push for reforms and alterations, who will decide which ones deserve to be made—and can NAEP preserve its all-important “trend lines” while modernizing some of its hoary ways?
One of the secrets of NAEP’s success and longevity has been its low profile. As it gets more attention, it’s bound to grow more controversial. And that’s a risky circumstance today, especially for anything associated with Uncle Sam.
Classical education is a holistic approach that is geared toward the cultivation of students’ minds, imagination, perception, and emotions so that they can be equipped with character traits that will help them to flourish and thrive both inside the school community and well beyond. It moves beyond the idea that education is only about transmitting information and skills and embraces the far more ambitious goal of character formation, both for the sake of a well-lived individual life and for the maintenance a healthy democracy and flourishing communities.
Although I am a proponent of classical education, we do not have to choose between a classical or more mainstream model of curriculum. That’s a false dilemma for educators interested in virtue education. Virtue education can be incorporated into a more mainstream educational setting precisely because it does not need to be an extra subject that is added atop a school’s academic program. Ideally, virtue education should permeate that existing curriculum as much as possible, because every discipline affords appropriate occasions to incorporate lessons about the virtues that the school has decided are important to the formation of its students. In many disciplines, the incorporation of virtue lessons and standards will be intuitive. One obvious example is English language arts (ELA).
Looking at the ELA curriculum standards in my own state, I’m struck by the extent to which the emphasis is on technique and mechanics, even at the earliest stages of literacy. In Kindergarten and first grade, for example, the standards are wholly taken up with phonetics and the identification of the formal features of texts and stories. The underlying assumption is that reading is merely a technical skill and ought to be taught and measured accordingly. Though of course there’s an essential technical dimension, I deny that the educational value of literacy can or should be reduced to this. There is an ineradicable ethical dimension to the study of the literary arts, and we ought to think more carefully about how reading, hearing, and writing stories play an essential role in forming our moral imagination and character.
In teaching children how to read, listen to, and write stories, we are forming their imagination, perception, and moral character. We should be honest and serious about this. Hence it’s wrong to think that kids should read whatever they happen to like or that any reading is good for them. The stories we share with our students are essential to the people they will become because we come to understand ourselves and our world, to a significant extent and from a very young age, through stories. They shape our imagination, which in turn forms our practical deliberation and choices.
As creatures who deliberate and decide for ourselves—who we will become and what we will do with our lives—each one of us faces the task of writing the stories of our own lives through the choices we make, both big and small. Each one of us must decide, to some degree, what sort of character we are going to be and into what sort of dramas we are going to enter as we grow and develop over time and as the narrative shape of our lives comes into view. Furthermore, our choices are not made in a cultural vacuum—we bring to them a stock of stories about heroes (or villains or fools) and their adventures (or misadventures). These stories have watered and fed our imagination over the years and inevitably shape the possibilities we see for ourselves. Stories give us exemplars—characters we might aspire to imitate in our own lives—and show us the potential consequences of certain choices, both for ourselves and others. In this way, stories are essential to the inculcation of virtue (or vice).
From an early age, then, young children need to be exposed to stories that show them what good and bad characters are through plot that reveal the narrative dimension of their lives. They should learn to pay attention to what the characters they read about are doing and why—but also to what these characters are thinking, feeling, imagining, and seeing that helps to explain what they do. Very young readers need to learn how to name their own emotions and life circumstances and to come to understand their own experiences through stories about other people. Older readers need to learn about the difference between good and bad choices and lives. Both stages are necessary for the development of virtue.
To pay attention to the content of literary texts is not to neglect the formal elements that are important to literacy. Rather, it is to notice how, in literary art, form and content are mutually illuminating. The narrative structure of stories is an imitation of the narrative structure of human lives, which is why stories are so essential to ethical formation. A story shows us how its character’s choices shape the arc of the story itself—viz., how these choices can determine the direction of the story itself, leading them to happy endings or tragic outcomes. When we consider what stories we should teach to our students, we should be thinking substantively about what sorts of characters (good and bad) and what sorts of lives we want our students to read about, discuss, and be formed by.
Reading literature is the space where our moral imaginations are formed, so let us think deeply and clearly about how we wish to form our students and why, as well as what literature best helps us to meet our more substantive educational goals.
I spent most of my twenties in northeast North Carolina teaching English in a windowless, leak-prone trailer behind an overcrowded high school. Once I got through my first year as a rookie—what fun that was!—subsequent memories are fond (smell of mildew aside).
Teaching can be a lonely endeavor—all the more so when you’re physically separated from veteran colleagues who might choose to shelter and nurture the newbies. Without such provision, you have to make it on your own.
One thing that helped me to fly was finding in my mail cubby a quarterly newsletter ripe with engaging instructional strategies put out by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), of which I was a member. Useful pedagogical tips and resources galore these were, vetted by actual high school teachers focused on the content I was teaching—Romeo and Juliet, persuasive writing, research skills, punctuation and grammar, etcetera. You name it, they had resources for the overburdened and creatively challenged educator. Printed on glossy paper, folded in half, and secured with a sticker, the humble brochure was a godsend. At lunch, I’d tear the seal so I could devour the content (along with a chicken patty and fries) before leaving the lounge for my portable oasis. By the time planning period was over, nearly every page had been highlighted or dog-eared. It was a valuable substitute for the teaching mentor I sorely needed.
That’s why I was so disappointed—okay, shocked—when I saw NCTE’s latest Position Statement on Media Education in the English Language Arts. Rather than equip educators with high-quality classroom tools and strategies to confront the perilous state of literacy in America, the Council now prefers that they use “teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice.” Indeed, a fundamental purpose of media education in their eyes is to “explor[e] Representation and Power through Critical Reading, Listening, and Viewing.” In that way, teachers help students to become “empowered change agents” in an apparent quest to dismantle the above-referenced “isms”.
This is ludicrous, not to mention detrimental to students and teachers alike.
Barring exile to Patmos, everyone knows that millions of young Americans are struggling to read and that our high school kids have been stuck in achievement stasis for decades. In 2019, just 35 percent of fourth graders scored proficient in reading on the Nation’s Report Card; that figure was 34 percent for eighth graders and 31 percent for twelfth graders. What’s more, the latest scores show a decrease in reading proficiency among lower-performing students (those at the tenth and twenty-fifth percentiles) compared to 2015. Upon the report’s release in 2019, Peggy Carr, then associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, uttered a glum reality: “In fact, over the long term in reading, the lowest-performing students—those readers who struggle the most—have made no progress from the first NAEP administration almost thirty years ago.”
One might think that a recommitment to teaching students how to read and write at grade level and higher would be the proper response from the nation’s premier association of ELA educators. Quite the opposite. Rather, they seem to think that our time-honored mode of communication has gone the way of VCRs and MP3 players:
The ability to represent one’s ideas using images and multimedia is now a valued competency in a wide variety of professional careers in the knowledge economy. It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master.
And then the drop-the-mic clincher:
The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.
Wow.
Let’s back up a minute. No one is saying that multimedia skills aren’t important. Fordham’s reviews of state ELA standards, in fact, expect that students be able to analyze and evaluate information presented in multimedia formats, such as “how information presented in print is different from that which is presented through the use of multimedia, noting what is conveyed through the use of various visual and aural techniques, such as bias and propaganda.”
But these skills don’t substitute for a strong foundation in reading and writing. They flow from it.
It wouldn’t be so bad if NCTE were simply calling for renewed attention to media education to help students become wiser consumers and producers in our uber-politicized environment. Take the following statement, for example, which was on target:
Everyone in our society now needs the ability to assess the widely varying quality of the information, entertainment, and persuasion that surrounds them, to evaluate the veracity and validity of claims, and to debunk misinformation when necessary.
But it doesn’t stop there. English educators are “to actively understand, teach about, and compensate for media landscapes that are specifically designed to amplify narratives where some voices and points of view are emphasized and others are trivialized, demeaned, or ignored.” The purpose of evaluating the validity of claims, then, is less about learning how to develop or refute an argument with legitimate evidence than it is about “students begin[ning] to deepen sociopolitical consciousness as they recognize how power relationships structure the narratives that surround us.”
In other words, kids are now supposed to study media to sniff out and combat the underlying and oppressive power structures. In fact, that’s a recurring theme in the position statement. Elsewhere, we’re told that students of critical media literacy need to “analyz[e] relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.” Sounds more like advice from Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Crenshaw than from the leading organization of K–12 English teachers.
If that weren’t enough, they make a feeble attempt to prove that “research evidence amply shows the need to move beyond the exclusive focus on traditional reading and writing competencies.” Where’s this evidence, you say? Well, they cite two studies—one of which is published in a journal about the “cultural politics of education” and takes place in England and Northern Ireland. It finds that “when students are empowered to critically examine popular culture texts in the classroom, the process can productively disrupt classroom hierarchies.” That hardly qualifies as a bounty of research justifying the “decentering” of traditional reading and writing.
After so many years, I still recall the assignments that grabbed the hearts and imaginations of my students. Debating vociferously in teams whether or not Daisy Buchanan ever truly loved Jay Gatsby. Writing and reading aloud their own poems that mimicked the arrangement and cadence of America’s greatest poets. Questioning long after the dismissal bell Steinbeck’s decision to have George pull the trigger. Composing a structured letter to a celebrity they’d researched for weeks explaining in detail why they admired them (and their joy in getting a response!).
These assignments engaged students with rich content in multiple genres—poetry, fiction, autobiographies, letters—to develop aptitude and appetite for literacy rooted in print media and traditional writing modes. They weren’t about “disrupting the inequalities of contemporary life.” Yes, that’s one key aim of a high-quality education—to offer upward mobility for disadvantaged students. But that purpose should not decenter the bread and butter of ELA classes. It should be a welcome outcome.
NCTE, you were once my lifeboat. Now you’re sinking fast.
The Supreme Court decision that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education had a great impact on schools across much of the United States. Even though not every school received the same integration orders, and some did not receive any at all, the desegregation of schools had significant effects on Black students’ outcomes. Those effects, it turns out, varied by region.
Previous studies have attempted to investigate the effect that court-ordered desegregation had on Black students. Yet such studies were often flawed. They were unable to identify when students were exposed to desegregation orders, where the students lived while they attended school, and how the timing of their exposure to integration affected their long-term outcomes. A recent NBER working paper uses a new methodology to address these flaws and provide a better picture of the effects of court-ordered desegregation.
The initial data in this study comprise a set of districts that, in 1968, had at least 15,000 students with 10–90 percent being Black. This created a national sample of 187 medium-to-large districts with racially diverse student populations. The researchers matched each district with its date-of-desegregation order implementation by using data from a 1987 desegregation study as well as from ProPublica and the American Communities Project—each of which contained information on districts’ desegregation plans and court orders. Districts that were in the initial sample but never were under a desegregation order were used, at times, for control purposes. The researchers linked large census and ACS samples to personal identifiers called protected identity keys to determine information about their sample respondents’ counties of birth. All this resulted in 5.1 million individuals, born between 1945 and 1985, who identified as non-Hispanic White or Black. After accounting for repeats and excluding individuals younger than twenty-four or older than fifty-four, the researchers created a new data set to include, for each individual, their birth year, American Community Survey response year, county of birth, race, and sex.
With this sample, they could look at what age students were when they were exposed to court-ordered desegregation, so the researchers could dig more deeply into the amount of exposure students had to court-ordered desegregation. The researchers focused on the indicators of human capital, such as the level of education attained, and indicators of economic self-sufficiency, such as employment and income.
For Black students in the South, analysts found a 15 percent increase in likelihood to complete high school and an increase in one full year of schooling for Black students who spent the most time in desegregated schools. These findings are similar for indicators of economic self-sufficiency, and the effects on economic self-sufficiency impact even more Southern Black students. The researchers hypothesize that the strong effects of desegregation on Black student outcomes in the South may be due to the drastic change that desegregation orders brought to the region.
Although this study is historically focused, it carries important modern-day implications. School segregation is still an issue of public concern in the twenty-first century—79 percent of White students in public schools attend schools where 50 percent of the students are of their same race. In San Francisco, a recent study found that students attending schools that are indirectly segregated based on attendance zones are more likely to take part in risky behaviors. It is clear that more diversified schools have a positive impact on minority students, and it is clear that there is progress to be made. Diverse-by-design charters and other school-choice initiatives may help to break the binds of school zones and help to create opportunities for all students; it is also important to learn from past practices and mistakes to move forward.
SOURCE: Garrett Anstreicher, Jason Fletcher, and Owen Thompson, “The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation,” NBER Working Papers (April 2022).
Can children learn to read via fully online instruction? Not long ago, this question was mainly a scientific curiosity or the stuff of sometimes-rancorous political debate. With the coming of Covid-19 and extended stretches of widespread remote learning, it took on an urgency that demanded an answer. According to new research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the answer is yes—but with a number of important caveats.
In 2019, University of Washington (UW) professor Jason Yeatman created a two-week in-person summer program that was part reading boot camp for five-year-olds and part neuroscientific research project to assess the teaching method being used. While the method was touted as groundbreaking science, it just seems like good old fashioned phonics with a side order of brain imaging. It also made use of small student-to-teacher ratios, highly qualified and high-energy instructors, manipulable materials to reinforce instruction, and a strong social aspect to bond the young participants. Sessions alternated between full-group and smaller breakout sessions during the day. Think Sesame Street live. Initial results were promising, but hopes for another year of data were dashed in 2020 due to the pandemic. Yeatman and his team quickly adapted—and while no one got their skull scanned via Zoom, the researchers were able to morph their teaching method into a fully online version. Even the social aspects and session structures.
Participants were recruited from UW’s existing group of voluntary test subjects and had to be between five years old and five years and four months old, have no diagnosed neurological or sensory conditions, speak English as the primary language at home, and have demonstrated no ability to read prior to the start of the new online reading camp. Phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge, the two best predictors of reading acquisition during the first two years in school as concluded by a 2020 meta-analysis from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, were the exclusive focus of the camp’s teaching method. There were 116 children participating in the study, with eighty-three receiving the two-week treatment and thirty-three receiving no reading instruction, having gone through the full recruitment process but ultimately declining to participate in the camp. This does raise questions about why families would choose not to participate—children staying with relatives, kids attending daycare/preschool elsewhere, etc.—and whether those reasons could have impacted the outcome, but no data were collected on that.
The two groups did not differ significantly on observable measures, however. For both groups, the average parental education in years was roughly equivalent to a four-year college degree, with a wide range extending from elementary- to postgraduate-level degree completion. Socioeconomic status was measured via income-to-need ratio. Both groups included families at or below the federal poverty line, as well as families into the upper levels of wealth. Each group was approximately half boys and half girls. No racial or ethnic breakdown was provided.
Treatment children received a kit prior to the camp, which included workbooks and manipulatives like stacking blocks and modeling clay. High speed Wi-Fi and enabled devices were provided to any participants who did not already have them at home. Sessions were administered by three teachers with a bachelor’s degree in either education, linguistics, or speech and hearing sciences and who had prior experience teaching English to young children in previous lab projects. They received two weeks of training prior to the start of camp. The camp was conducted in fourteen waves of six participants each over the period of fall 2020 to summer 2021. It is interesting to note that the children were receiving “various and constantly changing” levels of formal schooling during this time, due to the pandemic. The two-week camp was held five days per week for 2.5 hours per day via Zoom. Two teachers taught each daily session, with each teacher primarily instructing three children every day, and those small groups were mixed and counterbalanced on different days so that each child became familiar with all the others. Each day included at least one full-group activity. Parents and other caregivers were instructed to assist their children with logging in and preparing the daily materials to be available. They were instructed to stay within earshot in case their children needed assistance but were told not to provide or prompt answers and to keep siblings away as much as possible. There were some cases of parental overinvolvement, which resulted in email and phone-call reminders from instructors of the proper level of interaction. No specific guidelines were provided to the families regarding additional reading-related activities outside the camp; however, they were asked to report any such activities in a post-camp survey.
Achievement and progress were measured via two pretests and two posttests (one standardized, the other not) on skills related to reading and the effect of the training program on those skills. For the control group, the pre- and postsessions took place two to three weeks apart to match the timeline of the treatment group.
While treatment and control group students did not differ significantly in their baseline pretest scores, treatment group students showed significant boosts on the posttests in the specific skills that were taught in the online sessions. These include phonological awareness and lowercase letters’ names and sounds. Interestingly, the data show increases in some reading skills that were not taught directly—such as uppercase-letter sounds and pseudoword decoding—among treatment-group students. Control group students did show small but not-significant improvement on uppercase-letter sounds, lowercase-letter sounds, rapid automatic naming, and expressive vocabulary. No correlations were found between these improvements and parental education level, and only two skill increases were found to correlate with socioeconomic status.
It feels a little odd after more than two years of pandemic disruption to read a research paper whose findings suggest that maybe we can make this online learning thing work after all—especially when members of the research team go on to suggest that it may even work for kids who take online classes by choice. Quelle surprise. This model is live, small group, super interactive, conducted by highly trained teachers. In this limited form, it resembles high-dosage tutoring more than it does “school.” More and varied research on what makes for successful online teaching for more children is required, but we’ve got a lot more data available than we’ve ever had before, as well as many examples of how it should not be done. This is at least one model upon which we can focus to figure out once and for all how do it right for anyone who wants it for any reason.
SOURCE: Yael Weiss, et. al., “Can an Online Reading Camp Teach 5-Year-Old Children to Read?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (March 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, and co-managing director of the organization of the same name, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss his forthcoming book, Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, And Belonging. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study in Tennessee providing fresh evidence that high-performing schools can raise housing prices.
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