Any day now, Catherine Lhamon, the assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights, is expected to release new guidance for school districts that’ll reinstate an Obama-era policy limiting the use of suspensions and the like in the name of reducing racial disparities in “exclusionary discipline.” It couldn’t come at a worse time.
Any day now, Catherine Lhamon, the assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights, is expected to release new guidance for school districts, telling them how to handle racial disparities in suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and other touchy discipline issues.
It couldn’t come at a worse time.
According to news stories from around the country, including Erica Green’s searing portrait in the New York Times of a Pennsylvania steel-town’s high school, the confluence of multiple crises has turned our schools into a tinderbox. Green writes:
Three hours into a recent Monday morning, blood had already been spilled in a hallway at Liberty High School. With his walkie-talkie in hand, the principal, Harrison Bailey III, called on the custodial staff to clean up the remnants of a brawl while hurrying to the cafeteria in hopes of staving off another.
This is how Dr. Bailey has spent many of his hours since the school welcomed back its 2,800 students for in-person learning in August: dashing around the 400,000-square-foot building, outrunning bells and crowds of students, and hoping that his towering presence will serve as an inspiration to pull up masks and a deterrent to other, less obvious burdens that his students have had to contend with since returning.
Like schools across the country, Liberty has seen the damaging effects of a two-year pandemic that abruptly ejected millions of students from classrooms and isolated them from their peers as they weathered a historic convergence of academic, health and societal crises. Teenagers arguably bore the social and emotional brunt of school disruptions.
Some analysts argue that cases like Liberty are isolated examples, not typical of anything. As the adage goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. Unfortunately, we don’t have real-time information to tell us whether there’s been a widespread increase in student misbehavior since schools reopened nationwide this fall. Such data lag by at least three years.
But beyond high-quality reporting we have many reasons to believe that Liberty is no outlier. We know that American adolescents are experiencing a serious mental health crisis, one driven by school shutdowns, social isolation, two years of unfettered screen time, the trauma of losing loved ones to Covid-19, and the economic stress of the plague era. We understand that kids who experience trauma at home are more likely to act out in classrooms and corridors. We know that incidents of hostile student behavior were on the rise even before the pandemic. And we see that the world outside school is also going berserk, with murder rates in many big cities at thirty-year highs, and—less seriously but more commonly—Americans losing it on airplanes, at stores, and other places where people come together.
Frankly, it would be a miracle if student behavior wasn’t falling off the rails, given all this. Smart policymakers should hope for the best, but plan for the worst. That means grappling with what looks to be a bona fide crisis.
Into this precarious situation walks Assistant Secretary Lhamon, intending to reinstate an Obama-era policy limiting the use of suspensions and the like in the name of reducing racial disparities in “exclusionary discipline.”
Many analysts, myself included, have written ad nauseam about the problems with the Obama policy, but let’s cut to the chase. It embraced “disparate impact theory,” warning districts to expect an investigation by the department’s civil rights office if they suspended a disproportionate number of students of a particular racial group, regardless of whether members of that group misbehaved at higher rates than their peers. In particular, disproportionate suspensions of Black students were viewed as automatically suspect, even though Black students themselves report being twice as likely as their White peers to take part in fights at school.
This is sensitive stuff, no doubt, and goes right to the heart of today’s national debate about race. But viewing any racial disparities as prima facie evidence of systemic racism, as Lhamon and other cultural progressives do, ignores the effects of socioeconomic differences. Surely it’s the case that students growing up in poverty, with all the hardship and heartbreak it entails, are more likely to act up in school. Poor students are more likely to live in violent neighborhoods and face other traumas. Given that Black students are three times more likely than White students to live in poverty, is it that hard to believe that they might also be more likely to misbehave? Not because of their race, but because of everything related to growing up poor?
And that was before a horrific pandemic that exacerbated all the inequities in our society, including along racial lines. Myriad signals all point in the same direction, indicating that poor, Black, and Hispanic children have suffered the most over the past two years. They were more likely to have to try to learn from home for most of the 2020–21 school year; more likely to lack the wherewithal to do that effectively; more likely to fall behind academically; more likely to lose loved ones to Covid-19; and are now more likely to be suffering from mental health challenges.
So we shouldn’t be surprised to see more disorder in our schools this year, disorder that is most acute in schools serving lots of students living in poverty, students who are disproportionately Black and Brown. The problem is that nobody has come up with a sure-fire way to quickly reduce misbehavior and school violence that doesn’t involve removing disruptive students from classrooms and hallways. And so the very same students that have more catching up to do after a year of disrupted schooling are also facing the prospect of a more challenging learning environment if schools are hesitant to remove problem students.
We should also expect school administrators to struggle mightily with responding to these challenges. At Liberty High, according to the Times, the (award-winning) principal is dealing with suspension hearings practically every day. Meanwhile, practices that show some promise for reducing the reliance on suspension over the long term—like beefing up mental health supports, boosting teachers’ classroom management skills, and improving the culture of the school writ large—feel like pipe dreams today, given everything else that schools are dealing with, including severe staffing shortages.
My plea for Assistant Secretary Lhamon is to move with caution and show some humility. If she looks out across this vast nation, and from her office in Washington sees a school like Liberty High suspending lots of students of color, is she sure that it warrants a civil rights investigation? Or might administrators like Harrison Bailey be doing the best they can to respond to an awful situation? None of us knows for sure how to cope with this crisis, but we should start by assuming good faith on the part of front-line educators, who after all are the ones showing up to care for our students in their hour of need.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Dispatch.
Education in the classical sense is padeia: a holistic approach to student formation that is geared towards the cultivation of the student’s mind, imagination, perception, and emotions so that they become the type of person who can flourish and thrive inside the school community and well beyond. For this to happen, however, requires that the school have a clear vision of the sort of graduate it aspires to form and what are the essential elements of that formation. It also needs to have a clear mission statement that effectively communicates how the school unifies its curriculum and practices around this vision.
Many schools, unfortunately, have no explicit vision or mission statement. Even those that do can be disappointingly uninspired. For example, the vision statement of my neighborhood school is that “Every student will enter middle school reading at or above grade level.” Period. In the aspirations department, this is mighty thin gruel. The school also has a mission statement: “We collaboratively empower students to be accountable and successful.” Then one finds a list of core values, divided into age groups. For pre-K through second grade, these comprise respect, cooperation, community, responsibility, self-control, caring, and trustworthy. For third through fifth grade, the list consists of respect, collaboration, citizenship, responsibility, self-discipline, empathy, and integrity.
What is immediately striking about these lists is how many of the values are traits of good character, which shows that the school is interested in moral formation after all. But what does it mean to value cooperation and trustworthiness, for example, if the students in the school are not explicitly formed, as part of the curriculum, to become cooperative and trustworthy? Trustworthiness is not merely a value, but a disposition of good character, and students must learn to develop these dispositions over time and with explicit practice, just as students must learn to read. In other words, schools need to communicate how the vision and the mission—curriculum standards and character formation—are integrated.
Looking for a more inspiring example, let us turn to Meeting Street Academy in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which is ranked fourth in the state in terms of measurable educational outcomes. Here is its vision statement in full:
At Meeting Street Academy, we believe in the power of a rigorous and inspiring educational experience to put young people from all economic backgrounds on the path to success. Our model of excellence is built upon academic challenge, development of character and partnership with family. We provide under-resourced families with a life-changing opportunity for their children to learn what it takes to succeed both inside and outside of the classroom.
The school’s mission statement then reads:
Empowering young people from under-resourced neighborhoods to become confident, productive and principled members of society through excellence in academics.
Meeting Street Academy’s goal is to create graduates who are confident, productive, and principled members of society, and its means of achieving this goal is through excellence in academics. It is clear from the vision statement that school leaders understand this in terms of development of character in partnership with families.
In the “path to success” section of its website, Meeting Street elaborates on these statements as follows:
Meeting Street Academy’s educational belief is that strength of character is equally as important as academic progress in the long-term success of a child growing into a responsible, productive citizen of our community. To that end, we have designed our character development curriculum to be interwoven into every aspect of our student’s academic education.
The school then lists and carefully defines each character trait that it endeavors to model, teach, and celebrate: grit, gratitude, optimism, empathy, citizenship, integrity, self-control, and curiosity. It explains how each of these specific traits positively contributes to student success in the classroom and beyond. Thus it becomes explicit how the school’s mission is informed by its vision of good character, which then guides and unifies the curriculum.
It is no surprise that this school has been so spectacularly successful in meeting state standards; it has explicitly sought to form its students into the kind of people who can and want to meet them.
Every school should do this because the truth is that students do need specific positive character traits to succeed in any community, but especially in the schools where our children spend the majority of their days. Schools should be specific about the character traits they wish to instill in their students and explicitly link these traits to student success, thereby making them essential to all aspects of the curriculum. This is the necessary (but not sufficient) first step schools need to take in order to embrace the deeper vision of education that is padeia. Public schools that have done this have shown incredible success. They are shining examples for other schools to imitate.
The Nation ran quite a headline last month: “To Reduce Inequality in Our Education System, Reduce Class Sizes.” Surely we might expect substantive evidence to follow such a pronouncement, especially in the midst of a staffing shortage. Yet while the author alludes to “abundant research” and lists various anecdotes, she discusses not a single study that actually proves her claim.
In reality, the research on this topic is inconclusive at best. If anything, it tilts in the direction of showing that class size reduction policies (CSRPs) are largely ineffectual. According to one Brookings report, there is “surprisingly little quality research” to support such policies, and what evidence as does exist “is not consistent.” Countless others have made this case time and again. But this Sisyphean rock always rolls back down the hill, and we have this argument yet again.
What do we actually know? Proponents of class size reduction policies often point to the Tennessee STAR study, which did find some positive benefit of smaller classes. But it only measured reductions down to thirteen to seventeen students in a class—a substantial change. (Typical reduction strategies take classes from thirty to twenty-five or twenty-five to twenty-two.) On the flip side, another pilot program from Connecticut found no statistically significant results. Countless other analyses fall across the board—some positive, some neutral.
Such policies never happen in a vacuum, however. Legislators cannot snap their fingers and improve teacher-to-student ratios. Even if a law or mandate capped class sizes at twenty, the same number of students show up the next day and someone needs to teach the additional classes that this reduction creates. Within this real-world difficulty, CSRPs can work against academic achievement.
Christopher Jepsen and Steven Rivkin sought to determine these effects by examining a billion-dollar CSRP in California schools—one which created 25,000 new teaching positions. They found that this demand for staffing did in fact require buildings to hire inexperienced teachers on emergency licenses. This new demand created a particularly difficult situation in schools that were already struggling with record staff shortages.
What’s more, this inflow of new teachers came largely to high-poverty schools, while simultaneously incentivizing experienced instructors to seize newly created positions in affluent districts. This reality “partially or, in some cases, fully offset the benefits of smaller classes.” Understood in this way and contrary to The Nation’s headline, sweeping mandates risk worsening inequality, bringing inexperienced teachers into and experienced teachers out of the schools in most need of better instruction for needy kids.
In theory, smaller classes seem utopian—individualized instruction, fewer students to manage, more time for one-to-one feedback. In reality, when the research is surveyed, CSRPs seem to hold the most promise in lower grades and would only work if targeted at schools that need them most.
I’ve worked in affluent and impoverished schools with large and small classes. In my experience, class size made little difference. Smaller classes sometimes worked against positive behaviors as fewer students meant less peer pressure to behave. Parental involvement, curricular materials, behavioral rules, and most importantly, my own professional development were far more important than the number of pupils in my room. In my first years, it didn’t matter if I had six or thirty-two students. As an experienced educator, my larger classes now cover far more material more effectively, and with better behavior than even my smallest classes at the outset of my career. Like a child’s snack, in my experience, it did not matter how large or small the bag is if it only contains potato chips.
And that still isn’t the end of the discussion. A better question isn’t if class sizes benefit students, but if they’re the best use of funds. Put simply, they’re not. For example, devote these dollars and efforts to the policies and practices within schools that do have a track record of success—like Mississippi’s promotion of the “science of reading” that rocketed them from the bottom to the top of NAEP scores—not shifting around superficial characteristics.
And perhaps that’s the greatest trade-off of these policies. They distract our attention, advocacy, and public monies away from tried and true interventions that research has shown over and again to be effective. Alas, this false promise will likely arise yet again, and like Camus’s Sisyphus, we must roll the rock back up the hill once more with a smile on our faces.
Spurred in large part by an infusion of over $4 billion in federal Race to the Top funds, beginning in 2009, nearly all states and the District of Columbia implemented major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In contrast to previous evaluation regimens that resulted in 99 percent of educators receiving “satisfactory” ratings, the new evaluation systems aimed to better differentiate performance amongst educators.
While well-intentioned, these new reforms were unsurprisingly met with much resistance from many educators and teachers unions, and negatively affected teachers’ perceptions of job security, autonomy, and satisfaction. The controversial policies often required teachers to be regularly evaluated based on multiple measures, including students’ academic growth, and in some states, the ratings that followed were used to make personnel decisions (such as dismissal or tenure, or providing bonuses to teachers rated as “highly effective”). But did this era of “new and improved” teacher evaluation reforms actually strengthen teacher quality, and most importantly, did it increase student achievement and longer-term outcomes, such as high school graduation and college enrollment?
To find out, a team of researchers recently linked data on the timing and nature of states’ teacher evaluation reforms to district-level student achievement data based on standardized math and English language arts (ELA) test scores from 2009 to 2018, plus data from the American Community Survey about high school graduation and college enrollment rates.
Their nationally-representative study sheds much-needed light on the impact of a decade of teacher evaluation reforms.
Disappointingly, after controlling for student demographics and district characteristics, as well as pre-reform differences in student achievement and attainment, the analysts found that “on average, state teacher evaluation reforms had no discernable effect on student achievement in math or ELA.” They also found “no evidence that teacher evaluation reforms impacted high school graduation or college enrollment rates.”
To understand whether major differences between state teacher evaluation policies might impact student outcomes, the researchers also constructed an index of ten common evaluation reform components, such as requiring observations to be part of teacher evaluations and using teacher evaluation ratings to grant tenure, pay “highly effective” teachers bonuses, or fire “ineffective” teachers. They found that for math, the effect of teacher evaluation reforms did not vary by program design. For ELA, they found “some evidence that states that adopted the fewest evaluation components experienced a slight decline in student achievement post-reform,” but those that adopted the most common teacher evaluation components still had little effect on student achievement. And finally, they tested whether reform impacts varied by student body characteristics, and found scant evidence that teacher evaluation reforms impacted achievement or educational attainment for any subgroup.
While at first blush this study’s findings are resoundingly disappointing, it nonetheless offers important insights into the overall impact of these reforms, not just in terms of student achievement at a national scale, but also into how these reforms impacted students’ longer-term outcomes such as obtaining a high-school diploma or enrolling in college.
Note, though, that this analysis was national in scope. As the authors acknowledge, some prior studies of individual district’s teacher evaluation reforms found more positive impacts on student achievement, such as research on the District of Columbia Public Schools’ “DC IMPACT” system, as well as on reforms in Cincinnati and Chicago. As Kate Walsh, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality, recently stressed, “We know it’s possible for teacher evaluation [reform], when well-implemented, to achieve great outcomes,” adding that “We know it’s theoretically possible, and we know it’s practically possible.” While these cases are not generalizable to the nation as a whole, they can offer important insights into teacher evaluation policy and implementation done right—such as the importance of designing high-quality, multiple measure evaluations, and linking high-stakes accountability and teacher salaries to performance ratings, as well as reforming evaluation policies at the district, and not state, level.
Of course, implementation is also key. While state policies may have required districts to incorporate new, more rigorous components into their teacher evaluations, “the vast majority of states provided school districts with some degree of autonomy in designing and implementing teacher evaluation, either by allowing local discretion within a state-designed system or permitting districts to develop their systems given a set of guidelines.” This study does not delve into how state policies were actually implemented on the ground in schools and districts, with what fidelity, or for how long.
States also reformed their teacher evaluation policies over a wide period of time, ranging from 2009 to 2017, so some may not have had much time for their policies to make an impact during the window of time studied. And some of the states that overhauled their policies to include student growth measures in their teacher evaluations later reversed course during this exact same window, again potentially affecting student outcomes.
Given that teachers remain the most critical school-based factor affecting student achievement, strengthening the teaching profession is essential, and figuring out how to evaluate teachers well and fairly is a key piece of the puzzle so leaders can reward and retain high-performers and better support struggling teachers. This work is all the more necessary amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, with so much ground to make up in terms of both teacher morale and student learning.
SOURCE: Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erica Harbatkin, Matthew A. Kraft, Matthew Springer, “The Effect of Teacher Evaluation on Achievement and Attainment: Evidence from Statewide Reforms,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (December 2021).
While it’s no secret that pandemic-induced remote learning was a disaster for almost all students in 2020 and 2021, we must remind ourselves that in-person education models weren't so great for a lot of kids even before the plague struck. It’s also clear that some students fared better than others while learning from home. What we are still trying to understand is why some students seem to have weathered the transition to remote instruction better than others. A new report digs into Tennessee data from the early days of the pandemic to document what the experience was like for schools and students and to add detail to the larger picture.
The researchers utilized multiple data sources to capture school and district characteristics, estimates of community-level broadband access, open-ended responses from over 10,000 Volunteer State teachers surveyed in spring 2020 regarding technological challenges and types of remote instruction, and school district policy responses related to technology needs.
Prior to the pandemic, 91 percent of Tennesseans had broadband availability (i.e., at least one provider offering fixed high-speed broadband services in their census tract) and 78 percent of households had at least one computer with a high-speed broadband subscription. While the predictable gaps were found between urban and rural and richer and poorer families, the overwhelming prevalence of internet access in the state is certainly eye-opening.
Once the pandemic—and school closures—began, 68 percent of surveyed teachers reported regularly sending electronic learning resources to students via email or learning management systems such as Google Classrooms and Class Dojo. Thirty-three percent reported regularly sending physical learning resources home with students, and 28 percent reported regularly holding synchronous virtual classes or tutoring sessions with students. Rural teachers were most likely to report using physical resources (packets or textbooks), while urban teachers were most likely to report holding virtual classes. School-level economic disadvantage was negatively associated with the likelihood of teachers regularly providing electronic learning resources or holding virtual classes and tutoring in all geographic contexts.
While this makes sense if schools were sure that their lower-income families did not have broadband access or a compatible device, the FCC and ACS data throws some doubt on that possibility. Instead of the true broadband and device access information driving decisions in any given area, the researchers show that the percentage of poor students in a district was more likely to determine remote learning type provided. A 10 point increase in the percentage of economically-disadvantaged students in a rural district was associated with a 16 percent decrease in the likelihood that teachers provided electronic resources and an 18 percent decrease in the likelihood that teachers reported regularly holding virtual classes or tutoring sessions. Those decreases were 13 percent and 23 percent in city or suburban district—again, regardless of actual broadband access and subscription in any given area. Districts appeared to have made assumptions as to who did and didn’t have the ability to access virtual offerings and decided their plans based on those assumptions.
Of the 140 districts in the analysis, researchers found that twenty-two had publicly-available plans to distribute devices to at least some students (to make up specifically for those who had no devices), and thirteen districts had public plans to distribute devices to all students, regardless of their home device status. For internet access, sixteen districts had public plans that mentioned community access points (think free Wi-Fi in school parking lots) or distribution of hotspot devices for students to use at home. The districts with plans to distribute devices to all students were more likely to be located in cities or suburbs, serve fewer economically-disadvantaged students on average, and have higher pre-pandemic broadband access. This seems to reinforce the high/low socioeconomic digital divide so well documented in the early stages of the pandemic. But it also indicates that the easier the lift, the more likely districts were to do the work. Only 19 percent of rural and town districts had public plans to distribute devices to some or all students compared with 52 percent of city and suburb districts. And teachers in those rural and town districts who had plans to connect all students were 2.5 times more likely to report regular engagement in virtual classes or tutoring.
It seems simple to blame lack of virtual learning opportunities on a dearth of broadband access, especially for poor students, but this report seems to indicate more may have been at play in those early, chaotic days of the pandemic. The data and findings in this report, however, only go so far. The researchers note caveats related to building-level differences (synchronous versus asynchronous classes, third-party teaching versus district-based teaching, etc.), family-level differences (such as multi-child households required to share a single device), and non-generalizability of findings beyond Tennessee. It is also unfortunate that the researchers were only able to include traditional school districts in the analysis. Charter and private schools may have been more nimble in connecting and continuing to serve their students using creative methods that cut against the findings here.
The messy snapshot we see from March to May 2020 in Tennessee goes a long way to explaining the learning losses that researchers have tallied since that time. It also suggests that negative academic outcomes should not be laid entirely upon “remote learning” as a singular entity. Rather, the version of remote learning students were provided and their ability to engage with it productively and consistently intertwined to produce these results. Getting the larger picture will be important to tell the full story of what happened at the start of the pandemic, even if we are already reaping what was sown then.
SOURCE: Susan Kemper Patrick, Jason A. Grissom, S. Colby Woods, and UrLeaka W. Newsome, “Broadband Access, District Policy, and Student Opportunities for Remote Learning During COVID-19 School Closures,” AERA Open (December 2021).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), Erica Green, national education reporter at the New York Times, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss schools’ struggle to support teens’ mental health and respond to increasing misbehavior. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a study on whether improving access to dual-enrollment courses raises participation.
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