While most of the country debates restricting children’s access to books, at Liberty, a Core Knowledge school that emphasizes character education, the debate runs in the opposite direction: Which books should kids be reading?
A few months ago, I was invited to give a talk to teachers in Ft. Collins, Colorado. My host was Casey Churchill, who runs Liberty Common School, a charter school with a classical curriculum. Afterwards, I sat in on a professional development session with the school’s librarian, who was explaining the school’s library collection procedures. While most of the country debates restricting children’s access to books, at Liberty, a Core Knowledge school that emphasizes character education, the debate runs in the opposite direction: Which books should kids be reading?
For years, Liberty has maintained lists of recommended books for parents to read aloud with little kids, or for independent reading for older students. The school’s academic advisory committee actively reads and approves every single book on the list, not just for “age appropriateness” and themes, but for text complexity, vocabulary, and syntax (too many incomplete sentences, casual language, or overuse of slang are strikes against a book), and for “domain knowledge,” such as whether a book’s historical and scientific references are accurate. But the most interesting screens are for “moral literacy” and meaning. Liberty’s evaluation rubric asks questions that many educators would likely not even consider or might be uncomfortable weighing if asked: Would we want our students to live the life of the characters in this story? What is the compelling reason we want students to read this book?
We have become almost entirely unaccustomed to thinking about books as a contributing factor in character formation, but at Liberty it’s a central consideration. Not long ago, a parent wanted to add books from the popular “Junie B. Jones” series to the list for K–2. The suggestion was denied. “The main character is brash and obnoxious,” Churchill explains. “We don’t want to teach kids that it’s OK to be a brat.” Ditto the Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid. At first glance, the book might appear to be a strong contender since it’s based on Egyptian mythology, which reinforces Liberty’s Core Knowledge curriculum. Not only was the book’s language and sentence structure found wanting, but the main character was deemed to have too little respect for his father and siblings. “Overall, this isn’t a book we want to encourage the students to read because it doesn’t inspire, elevate, or add value to the students,” was the verdict. To be clear, Liberty students can still read The Red Pyramid on their own—it wasn’t “banned”—but neither was it added to the select list of “recommended” books.
As a school of choice, Liberty enjoys a permission structure that allows it to be this selective and prescriptive, and that might be difficult for traditional public schools to emulate. When parents vote with their feet, you can reasonably infer that they are supportive of a school’s culture and curriculum. Still, it was a breath of fresh air to speak with educators who are crystal clear on their school’s culture and values. They’re thinking very intentionally as adults about the signals they’re sending to kids about the ideals and behaviors they seek to promote among children.
Liberty’s recommended reading list and its emphasis on moral literacy, themes, literary merit, and character development draws inspiration from William Kilpatrick’s 1993 book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It. “Good literature,” Kilpatrick insisted, “doesn’t introduce a child to ‘kids like me’ but to others who are better than himself—who are just like he might become if he fulfills his potential for goodness.”
Of course, introducing students to “kids like me” is often precisely the justification given for clearing shelf space for some particularly controversial books, such as Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, and All Boys Aren’t Blue. “There are a lot of people who are questioning their gender, questioning their sexuality, and having a real hard time finding honest accounts of somebody else on the same journey,” notes Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer. “There are people for whom this is vital and for whom this could maybe even be lifesaving.”
Churchill is unpersuaded by such didactic views of the role of literature. And unapologetic in response. “We just don’t think that ‘kids like me’ books are necessary or important in schools,” he explains. “There are a lot of values-based books that begin to step on the toes of parents. We need to be respectful of values they want to impart to their kids.” Is there a role for schools in signaling inclusivity? Churchill isn’t so sure and likens that query to asking for a sandwich at Jiffy Lube. “They do oil changes. They don’t do sandwiches,” he responded. “Schools should do education and academics. We don’t do sexual preferences or mental health. That’s the job of the family and parents.”
The average middle school library has a collection of 13,000 volumes, a figure that represents fewer than one out of every ten thousand books ever written in English. Over the course of our lifetimes, most of us will read only a tiny fraction of those—far fewer than a thousand books. Given these figures—massive supply, minimal demand—our current obsessive argument about limiting children’s access to certain books in school libraries feels a bit like insisting there are grains of sand on the beach we must not put our blankets on. Coming at this question from the opposite direction—which books are worth students’ time?—is a refreshing approach to this divisive issue.
Churchill is quick to add that no one should confuse his school’s refusal to add books to its curriculum or recommended reading lists with a “ban” on books that don’t make the cut. “There are just good books that we want to have in front of our kids,” he said.
In the summer of 2018, I was thrilled to learn that I would be teaching AP English Language and Composition starting that fall. As part of New York City’s AP for All initiative, I became one of the first two AP teachers at my small, alternative public high school.
I absolutely loved teaching “AP Lang.” I respected its content: The emphasis on rhetorical analysis reminded me of the freshman composition courses I had taught at a large public university. I also enjoyed the collaboration: AP for All training sessions brought me together with colleagues from across the city, I received classroom visits from an AP mentor teacher, and AP Lang social media groups brimmed with creative lesson ideas.
Most of all, I loved seeing the change in my AP students. Ours was a “transfer school,” meaning that all its students had attended a traditional high school for at least one year, but things hadn’t worked out there for one reason or another. As a result, many didn’t see themselves as top students—but being in AP Lang genuinely shifted their beliefs about their potential.
So you can imagine my surprise at the title of Annie Abrams’s new book, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. The book has already received attention from major media outlets, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Ed, and Forbes. Intrigued, I read up on Abrams and discovered that we have a lot in common. We both finished literature Ph.D.s in 2016, loved teaching undergraduates, and didn’t want to battle the academic job market, so we went directly to teaching in New York City public high schools. Also like me, Abrams taught AP Lang.
How could someone with such similar experiences have walked away with such a different take? I had to get my hands on a copy of the book.
Shortchanged begins in the first half of the twentieth century, offering an intellectual history of AP’s creators. The level of detail is not for the faint of heart—there are several pages just on former Harvard president James Conant’s interpretation of Jeffersonian thought—but this history becomes important to the book’s argument. AP’s founders were elitist, but they also prioritized liberal education, democracy, and teacher autonomy.
In recent years, however, contends Abrams, AP has departed from those admirable values. The second half of Shortchanged lays out a critique of twenty-first-century developments, such as curricular changes, the advent of the digital tool AP Classroom, and the expansion of AP. (In 2003, 19 percent of high school graduates took an AP exam; by 2022, that number had nearly doubled to 35 percent.) In essence, Abrams argues that, rather than meeting the College Board’s goal of democratizing AP, recent changes have intensified hierarchical divisions: between non-elite and elite schools, between high schools and colleges, and between high school teachers and college professors.
This certainly sounds alarming. And Abrams does not shy away from rhetoric that heightens this alarm. She reports that the “totalitarian structure” that is AP “infantilizes citizens while pretending to empower them,” leaves students with “mangled or hollow understandings” of course content, and “destroys divergent thinking and innovation.”
Well, yikes. Can all this really be true?
Claim 1 (non-elite versus elite): Elite colleges and high schools “have moved away from” AP, which implies that AP has decreased in quality, leaving students at non-elite schools with a lesser educational experience.
In literal terms, the first part of this claim is not entirely accurate. Some of the colleges Abrams claims don’t accept AP courses for credit actually do (yes, Harvard does give AP credit, as does MIT for AP Calculus BC). She is right that some Ivies “offer neither credit nor placement” for AP English courses, but contrary to her implication, this is not a new development in response to changes within AP (source: I enrolled as a freshman at Penn in 2005). Moreover, she doesn’t unpack the implications of AP policies at schools like Amherst, which doesn’t grant credit for AP but does allow students to skip intro courses. As others at Fordham have noted, doesn’t such a policy suggest that the AP credit indicates knowledge and skills gained, but the school doesn’t want to sacrifice the tuition that accompanies each credit?
Abrams also observes that a handful of top high schools (mostly private) have stopped teaching AP courses. True. But she interprets this decision as an indication that AP courses have dropped in quality; if Sidwell Friends doesn’t want it, then it must not be great, right? I’d urge another consideration. Elite private schools must justify exorbitant tuition fees by providing exclusive educational experiences. If high schoolers can access AP courses at their neighborhood schools for free, then why should their parents cough up over $50,000 a year for an elite school? Scarcity and exclusivity increase value, regardless of the quality of AP courses. And that’s not to mention factors like the perceived indignity of submitting a syllabus to the College Board, as Checker Finn wrote about in 2019’s Learning in the Fast Lane.
Claim 2 (high school courses versus college courses): “Looking to the rich variety in what college-level courses...challenge students to do also presents a stark foil to the College Board’s mandates.”
As Shortchanged demonstrates, AP’s creators wanted top-performing high school students to access courses representative of college coursework. Abrams argues that AP history and government courses, basically by virtue of being survey-style courses, aren’t representative of college courses, which often delve more deeply into narrower areas of study. As counterexamples, she cites top New York high school non-AP courses with titles like “Gender and Legal History” and “American Conservatism” as more aligned with this component of AP’s original mission.
Maybe. But high school isn’t college, and students need to understand the big picture in these fields before diving into details. I loved my college course on Outsiders and American Identity, but I wouldn’t have fully understood our fascinating unit on Mormon history, for example, without prior knowledge of nineteenth-century westward expansion. And while some elite high schools may pull off elective-style courses, I’d venture that their students—and those at Abrams’s own, highly selective Bronx Science—arrive with considerably more background knowledge than most. When only 22 percent of students about to enter high school are proficient in civics, and only 13 percent in history, it’s hard to argue that “New York City in Crisis” is a better bet for most high schoolers than a rigorous overview of the nation’s entire history.
Claim 3 (high school teachers versus college professors): AP “curtails teachers’ autonomy and highlights the differences between their roles and those of college instructors.”
Another of the AP founders’ goals was to foster relationships between high school teachers and college professors. Now, however, Abrams finds that AP demeans high school teachers by way of a digital resource called AP Classroom and revised course curricula. These attacks are among her fiercest, and they are also among the furthest from reality.
Rather than a mechanism for “perversely dehumaniz[ing]” the teaching profession, AP Classroom is an entirely optional resource for teachers. It features “course pacing and sequencing suggestions,” “sample optional instructional activities,” video mini-lessons, and practice exam questions (emphases mine). Honestly, that sounds pretty useful to me—and I say “sounds” because I never once opened it myself. Current AP teachers tell me they use it occasionally, maybe to pull some sample questions or to find a better way to explain a particular topic. Some teachers “unlock” Classroom so that their students can access the materials directly, and others keep it “locked” so they can pick and choose what to share with students. In other words, it’s a resource that teachers use entirely at their own discretion—much like the offline resources that the College Board has offered for decades.
For Abrams, however, AP Classroom is a particularly nefarious facet of overly prescriptive course curricula, at least in history and government. Yes, these courses include a lot of content (isn’t that a good thing?). And in the words of an AP World History teacher of over twenty years: “I have quite a bit of autonomy in how I choose to present the material.... World History is a lot of information no matter which level it is. If a person is cutting topics and regions out, then it is not World History.”
Yes, the College Board does require AP teachers to submit a syllabus, but it doesn’t have to align perfectly with the suggested course framework, nor does it have to be highly detailed. Further, the odds are good that no one from the College Board is ever going to look at any one syllabus, unless that teacher happens to get audited. And certainly, no one is pounding on the classroom door to see whether the class has completed Unit 2 on the right day. At an AP for All training, I was explicitly told that I could revise my syllabus based on student needs or interests as the course progressed.
On some level, Abrams understands that AP does not truly restrict teachers. In the epilogue to Shortchanged, she fondly recalls an interdisciplinary course she co-taught with a colleague from the history department, “an ‘alignment of AP English Language and AP US History.’” The two developed their own course, choosing their own readings, themes, and focus skills. Abrams portrays the duo as mavericks going against the grain, concluding without evidence, “In the age of AP, collaborating and innovating at the school level is a liability, not an asset.”
Why is it that Abrams was able to craft her own AP course, but she frets that other AP teachers will not be able to do so? She argues that AP should give teachers greater autonomy, but she doesn’t trust that other teachers will exercise the same autonomy that she did. This contradiction alone should give readers pause.
By no means do I think that AP programs or the College Board are above criticism. No institution is. And I agree with Abrams that the College Board’s highly concentrated power over American education is unnerving. But the critiques in Shortchanged don’t hold water. AP courses benefit many thousands of students each year; what doesn’t benefit them is fearmongering, hyperbolic allegations that AP is undermining American democracy.
Thomas Sowell famously quipped that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Even seemingly beneficial policies have repercussions. Reduce the prison population and crime increases. Close schools to prevent the spread of Covid and standardized test scores plummet. What’s more, even historic, society-altering changes come with side effects. Bring about unprecedented wealth and connectedness with technology, and we all grow addicted to our screens and depressed by them.
Education policies are no exception to this rule. The common school movement of the 1800s represented a fundamental inflection point in the history of education. Activists knew that a thriving democracy requires an educated populace, and a diverse nation needs a common culture to bolster it where factions work to break it apart. As such, early laws required that newly incorporated towns establish a certain plot of land for a common school. This initiative made public schooling accessible to more than just an aristocratic few, but its inherent tensions—the need for uniformity, bureaucratic control, public inefficiencies, and more—have left it unworkable. Especially after the pandemic exposed the ideological capture and intransigent union power, public education in America seems to be crumbling under its own flaws.
School choice could represent the next historical era in American education. In the essay that opens the Law & Liberty forum in which this piece was first published, Rick Hess argues that to fulfill school choice’s full potential, we must acknowledge its limitations—that “bureaucracies, industrial-style collective bargaining agreements, and hoary colleges of education” all work against school choice as a singular solution. To bring about the promise of choice requires further legislation. I agree, but we must go one step further. As a teacher, I saw not just the limits, but the potential tradeoffs of school choice.
Why emphasize the shortcomings of school choice now? Why provide ammunition to its opponents? The answer is simple: To effectively implement school choice, proponents must anticipate and have an answer for the very real tradeoffs that school choice will bring. What’s more, its shortcomings will inform the next battle—the legal fights and policy frameworks—in education’s protracted culture war. It’s not a criticism of a policy to acknowledge its inevitable faults and plan accordingly. It’s both good advocacy and governance.
Strings attached
The first tradeoff worth consideration is the effect that choice will have on private and homeschools. Some schools in my home of Milwaukee, the city with the oldest voucher program in the country, have fared exceptionally well. Milwaukee Lutheran High School receives 80–90 percent of its funding from voucher programs and has formed itself into one of the premier private, urban schools in our city. Other schools have closed or struggled with rapidly shifting student demographics alongside drastic shifts in enrollment.
What’s more, many families choose homeschools and private schools precisely because they are unconnected with public institutions. Private teachers and parents can teach their children within a different set of underlying values, using their preferred pedagogical style and a curriculum they prefer. Unfortunately, with government money inevitably comes government strings. If families can use ESA monies on any “educational expense,” someone will have bureaucratic power to determine what exactly counts as an “educational expense.”
Many homeschool organizations are quite wary of school choice via vouchers or education savings accounts. Robert Bortins leads the homeschooling organization Classical Conversations, one of the largest homeschooling networks in the country, and he’s an outspoken critic of vouchers and ESAs. He champions the almost miscreant, individualist roots of homeschoolers, who “flew under the radar,” teaching children at home even in states where it was illegal to do so. School choice could strip them of their independence as the irresistible apple of choice money curses homes and private schools with stifling government oversight.
With this in mind, as choice spreads, the conservative legal movement needs to begin anticipating the inevitable cases that will seek to limit and constrain the liberty that vouchers are meant to allow. Already, Milwaukee Lutheran High School has faced countless controversies because of its unwillingness to abandon its traditional Christian doctrine or cheer the latest progressive fads. Local advocates have argued that “with public money should come public accountability.” Can vouchers fund a school that opens and ends its day in prayer? Will governments require religious schools to accept and affirm students with transgender identities?
A policy, legal, and regulatory framework will build around an education system built on school choice. All signs point to court support for religious charters and high schools, but even if a state passes a universal choice bill that prevents vouchers or ESAs from functioning as an ideological litmus test, laws can change. And conservatives must remain vigilant.
Shifting incentives
The second tradeoff I want to address here is the increased transiency that I have personally witnessed while working in a choice system.
In my city of Milwaukee, there’s a subculture of urban private schools that exists as an alternative to the local public district. The teachers and administrators know each other. We attend the same conferences. We model our policies, curriculum, and instruction off of each other. In many ways, it’s exactly what school choice proponents want, but it’s still flawed.
To begin, without zoning laws dictating attendance, there’s a transiency among students like I’ve never encountered. I’ve had the same core twenty or so students in each of my classes. But there has been an ever-changing cast of characters that constitutes the other five to ten kids. At one point in the year, I had a new student almost every week. It’s a high turnover that choice allows, and it disrupts the classroom. Our class may be 200 pages into a book unit when two new kids walk into my room, unable to comprehend the day’s chapter because they weren’t around for the first half.
Likewise, there are hard questions about which students schools should choose to accept and keep. Where many accuse private and charter schools of skimming the cream—accepting only the best students—many choice schools are incentivized to accept and keep even violent students precisely because they’re another revenue stream. Similarly, they may accept students that require special education services without adequate staffing for the very same reason.
Teacher turnover, too, is far higher. Teacher retention has been an ever-present problem in the charter and private school sectors. Without long-term staff, administrators struggle to build an experienced teaching workforce with a unified ethos, and instead exhaust resources and energy training a new crop of teachers every year. Even whole schools themselves pop up and disappear within years. Many choice activists defend this as the normal churn of a market system winnowing out inadequate products, but it places a heavy strain on families that then need to seek out new schools for their kids.
In this case, there’s no clear policy to counteract this increased churn and transiency. High-performing schools may keep kids while low-performing schools struggle, thus incentivizing improvements. Steps could be taken to ensure that it’s not too easy to switch schools, preventing students from ping-ponging around. Perhaps localities could require students to complete at least a semester before transitioning. Or it could be that some of these challenges are an inevitable outcome—a tradeoff we must simply accept—in a system that prioritizes choice.
School choice Jacobins
Finally, community public schools, though imperfect, are one of the foundational institutions upon which American society rests. The principle of Chesterton’s fence seems pertinent here: Do not raze a fence or institution before grasping its original intention.
Public schools are one of our few remaining communal institutions. Through instruction in language, they provide us not just a common grammar, but the common idioms, vocabulary, and expressions that make a national language. Through instruction in literature, veritable strangers could strike up a conversation about their love or hate of the bard. Through reading the preamble and the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., we develop common civic values. For many towns, the high school football game or musical are the most exciting weekend events.
Perhaps this vision seems pollyannaish, but the reverse, unrelenting criticism, is equally cynical. The reform-minded academic journal Education Next runs a national poll every year asking respondents to grade both their local schools and national education more generally. And every year, Americans rate the broader system poorly but give their local school an A or B. It’s easy to hate our education system as an abstraction, but most Americans remain satisfied with Miss Penny, the kindergarten teacher who has taught just down the street for thirty years. We often characterize public systems as major, urban behemoths, but most public schools are small organizations in small towns—the little platoons that conservatives revere
Hess, in the aforementioned essay, is wary of choice advocates who seem “giddy about the chance to disrupt lives and communities” and “reformers who seem like revolutionaries.” Choice advocates—and I count myself among them—must be wary of becoming education Jacobins. Too quick a change without a sufficient replacement could trade out old problems for new ones.
With proper caution in mind, it’s imperative that conservatives keep school board seats and the cultural battles around our schools competitive. For the foreseeable future, most American children will still attend public schools. Conservatives cannot choose the Benedict Option, cloister themselves into their private institutions, and leave these schools for everyone else. As AEI scholar and Fordham Institute Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio succinctly put it, conservatives cannot give up fighting for public schools for one simple reason: “They are where the children are.” While perhaps irredeemably beset with bureaucratic rot and progressive ideology, public schools are inherently conservative institutions—handing along our traditions and knowledge to the next generation—and we cannot abandon them, at least not yet.
None of these shortcomings of school choice policies are clearly damning, nor can all of them be solved with regulation or legal frameworks. We can likely maintain much of what public schools promise, but increased transiency may just be a new reality. Similarly, many failings that people like to heap upon public schools are really failings of the society at large. For example, schools cannot fix broken homes, and so we will see many of the same ills plaguing our schools after universal choice.
That being said, Hess rightly acknowledges that we don’t speak about airline or telecommunication choice as sufficient policies, but instead talk of “deregulation, infrastructure, and supply-side dynamics.” Education policy too must deal with more than mere choice. Do ESAs phase out in higher incomes? What will be the place of standardized tests and centralized curricula requirements? How are teachers licensed and schools accredited? What happens to system schools or homeschools that fail to educate their students?
Hess casts a compelling vision of what this could be—families mixing and matching homeschooling with two-day-a-week in-building classes, course choice, co-ops, microschools, and much more. To bring that almost Cambrian explosion of different options and choices to reality, conservatives need to begin planning for everything that happens after states pass universal ESA or voucher laws. That begins with anticipating the very real tradeoffs and difficulties of the new system, and working to form the legal, policy, and cultural framework that can support a thriving educational system.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Law & Liberty.
Quantifying learning loss experienced by students whose schools closed for extended periods during the coronavirus pandemic is vital. Figuring out the mechanisms by which the losses happened, in contrast, is more of a forensic exercise. Schools have generally been open for more than a full school year now. At least two classes of seniors have graduated, many of their peers seem to have given up, and those remaining are experiencing whatever version of remediation is available to them. Whatever happened is already done, and time has marched relentlessly on. Nevertheless, setting the record straight on the means by which school closures impacted student learning must be part of our reckoning with the pandemic responses chosen and our planning for the future.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist and adviser with the World Bank, offers us a new working paper that extends an ongoing series of World Bank Group research attempting to identify the mechanisms of learning loss for primary and secondary school students all around the world. He specifies that this publication is a “work in progress,” but its findings form part of the full, grim picture we will eventually have.
Data come from numerous studies of pandemic-era impacts in more than four dozen countries. Many findings were already published earlier this year, and the new work adds additional countries and data. Patrinos looks at eleven factors potentially increasing or mitigating learning loss, which is defined using test score data via country-specific instruments that were standardized for comparison. Some of the factors are obvious—pre-existing school quality, school closure duration, private school enrollment, and internet availability and access—while others such as trade union strength and “measure of democracy” seem somewhat tangential. Control data include Covid-19 death rates per 100,000 population, a lockdown stringency index, vaccination rates, and national income. The working paper notes that not all available data are nationally representative. While learning loss in the United States is representative of all students, school closure duration varied state to state and is reported as a national average. Nepal’s data, as another example, come from a study that only includes adolescent girls from one disadvantaged district, but is compared directly to countries with much more robust datasets.
First and foremost: There is a clear link between school closure duration and learning loss. Closures as part of government-imposed lockdowns averaged twenty-one weeks’ duration and resulted in an average learning loss of 0.23 standard deviations across the countries studied (representing two-thirds of the world’s population). Testing for mitigating factors or other means to explain learning loss produced no significant findings, meaning that school closures appear to be directly responsible for student learning loss.
Patrinos notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics released the first school guidance for safe in-person learning in the United States on June 24, 2020, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control released its recommendation on August 6. “By the time of the 2020–21 school year,” he writes, “it had become clear that it was possible to safely open schools.” However, many schools around the world remained closed for many more months. Sometimes that was due to longer (or recurrent) lockdown requirements, but data show that other factors were associated with non-mandated closures. Higher-income countries had shorter durations of school closures, while a low vaccination rate was associated with longer school closures. Higher test scores before Covid-19 were associated with longer school closures—perhaps an indication, Patrinos suggests, of hope for resilience of students or a belief in whatever remote learning was in place—as was a higher proportion of private schools in a country. Interestingly, the death rate does not correlate with school closure, suggesting that closure decisions were based on many factors other than actual Covid fatalities.
Whatever the reason for extended closures, Patrinos finds that each additional week of school closure increased learning loss by a further 1 percent of a standard deviation. In short: The longer schools stayed closed, the less students learned, no matter what else was done to blunt the losses.
Despite the huge trove of data we now have available, more will come. Researchers will continue to enlarge and sharpen the picture, but it seems pretty clear already. “The main lesson learned,” Patrinos concludes, is that “if a similar situation arises, keeping schools open should be a priority, as the evidence shows that the health benefits of school closures seemed to have been lower than the cost of learning losses.” Sobering thoughts for some unwanted “next time,” hollow validation for everyone who believed that reopening schools quickly was the best move, and a steep climb ahead for those trying to undo the damage already wrought.
SOURCE: Harry Anthony Patrinos, “The Longer Students Were Out of School, the Less They Learned,” World Bank Group Working Paper (April 2023).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Kathleen Porter-Magee of Partnership Schools—a network of Catholic schools in New York City and Cleveland—joins Mike Petrilli to discuss the debate over religious charter schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber discusses a Virginia study that compares labor market outcomes between community college students from higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
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