One common and longstanding argument made in defense of gifted education (including by some of my valued colleagues) is that we as a nation must cultivate the talents of these bright students in order to remain economically competitive and because th
One common and longstanding argument made in defense of gifted education (including by some of my valued colleagues) is that we as a nation must cultivate the talents of these bright students in order to remain economically competitive and because they will be our future leaders.
It’s a shame that we feel the need to make this economic argument. It should be enough to say that all children deserve to have their learning needs met in school, whether they have learning delays, special needs, or are ready for more advanced content than their peers.
It’s also important to understand that gifted and high-achieving students are not one and the same. High-achieving students are not always gifted, and sadly, many gifted students are not high-achieving. While many people understandably conflate the two, gifted children have high intellectual potential, advanced comprehension, uncanny memories, and high levels of curiosity. But they also face unique challenges and problems, such as difficulty relating to same-age peers because their development and abilities are so out of step with their age, and they’re prone to intensity, impatience, sensitivity, and perfectionism.
As a result, as I wrote in a recent essay, being the parent of a gifted child is simultaneously a massive responsibility, a constant challenge, and a never-ending, heart-swelling source of pride. One recent qualitative study on the experience of parenting gifted children found it to be physically and emotionally exhausting, as well as isolating due to lack of understanding of these unique kids. As one parent summarized life with their son, “it’s really hard not to drop everything and have the whole house revolve around him all the time.” My husband and I could have written that sentence ourselves!
Being the parent of a gifted child is feeling the need to explain to your four-year-old’s swim instructor why he wants to know exactly how many more times he’s going to have to keep practicing the same stroke, or why he’s the only child all summer to ask who this person called a “life guard” is, what his name is, how old he is, and what purpose he serves at the pool. It’s feeling obligated to explain to your child’s (understandably) frustrated kindergarten teacher why your child struggles so much with transitions (gifted, and especially profoundly gifted, children tend to be really intense and single-minded when they’re intent on completing a task, which, combined with their ability for complex thinking, can make even rote transitions exceptionally challenging). It’s your heart aching when your preschooler looks up at you and says things like, “it’s hard being a kid.”
On the flip side, being the parent of a gifted child is being astounded when he begins to spell with blocks at just two. “Look mommy, T-R-U-C-K!,” (then adds an “S”) “Now I spelled TRUCKS!” It’s locating Jupiter and some of its beautiful moons on your home telescope, and your four-year-old musing, “I think one of those moons must be Ganymede...”
As with their parents, gifted students both amaze and take a lot out of their teachers. They’re best served by gifted-trained educators who are comfortable with students who work independently, who ask a seemingly endless stream of questions, and who have sky-high levels of curiosity.
In fairness to all exhausted parents and educators out there, no, meeting gifted children’s needs is not an easy task. But it is something we owe each of these special and unique little people, just as we want to help all other students learn and thrive in school.
At the end of the day, gifted children are children first, and gifted second. We should serve our gifted children not because they are gifted and talented, but because they are children. Please let’s stop the rationalizing there.
A common observation made by critics of school choice is that it has little to offer families in rural communities where the population isn’t large enough to support multiple schools, and where transportation is already burdensome. I’ve made the point myself, and I’m a school choice proponent. These days I live in a small town in upstate New York, whose school district pulls in students from eleven townships scattered across well over 100 square miles. Meaningful choice seems unlikely to be a feature of the educational landscape anytime soon, if ever, in my neck of the woods.
A new Heritage Foundation paper from Jason Bedrick and Matthew Ladner challenges that notion. The 14 percent of Americans who live in rural areas already have more options than commonly assumed, they argue. For starters, seven in ten rural families live within ten miles of a private elementary school. Counterintuitively, they note the share of rural students in private schools is the same as their urban peers, about ten percent.
In Arizona, where both authors live, more than eight in ten students live in the same zip code as at least one charter school. This point is less compelling when you consider that more than two-thirds of Arizona’s population lives in Phoenix. But the Grand Canyon State has one of the nation’s most robust and popular charter sectors, and a political environment that has long been far more congenial for choice than most other states. Last year, Arizona expanded eligibility for its K–12 education savings account (ESA) program to every one of its 1.1 million school-aged students, making it “the gold standard for education choice,” in Bedrick and Ladner’s view. ESAs poll well among Arizona parents, presumably creating conditions congenial to a further flowering of private choice options statewide. If the point is that other states might want to look to Arizona as a model, that point is well-taken.
Rural areas in Arizona and elsewhere are seeing the rise of microschools, which the authors describe as “a modern reimagining of the one-room schoolhouse.” The pair also argue that “high-quality virtual schools are available to anyone with a decent Internet connection.” One surprising piece of data (to me, at least) is that broadband access is not markedly different in rural America: 72 percent of country-dwellers have a broadband Internet connection at home, compared 77 and 79 percent of urban and suburban homes, respectively. That said, the paper is somewhat blithe about the checkered performance of online learning, particularly during the pandemic. “Virtual leaning might not be the right fit for every child,” they note. “But for some it opens a world of possibilities they otherwise do not have locally—all without having to leave the rural community that they know and love,” they write. Fair enough.
Rural families are twice as likely to be homeschoolers as their urban and suburban counterparts; about 5 percent of rural students are homeschooled. Bedrick and Ladner don’t say so explicitly, but the paper implies that political and cultural discomfort with traditional public schools could be a significant factor driving the appetite for choice among rural Americans. “There is a growing disconnect between parents and public schools over the values taught in school,” they write. Citing a poll conducted for the American Federation for Teachers (!), the nation’s second largest teachers’ union, 44 percent of respondents agreed that public schools “often go too far in promoting a political agenda in the classroom.” Half of those surveyed expressed concern that education “has become too politicized.” Similarly, a 2022 Pew survey showed that only half of public school parents said that the teachers and administrators at their child’s school share their values, compared to eight of ten private school parents.
The implication is clear enough: Rural families are disproportionately politically and culturally conservative, thus more likely to see the appeal of choice as an alternative to traditional public schools with which they’re increasingly at odds.
And, indeed, that’s exactly the case. Bedrick and Ladner point out that in last year’s Texas Republican primary, a ballot proposition asked voters whether Texas families “should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.” GOP voters said yes by a staggering 88 percent to 12 percent. “Some of the highest levels of support came from the most rural counties in Texas,” they note. “Likewise, a survey conducted in January 2022 found that 70 percent of rural Oklahomans supported school choice, while only 25 percent opposed it.”
Of course, supporting choice in theory and in practice are not the same thing. The paper unwittingly raises another question for school choice advocates to answer: If choice is more widely available than assumed, then why aren’t more rural residents availing themselves of it? My sense is that school choice advocates habitually underestimate what a heavy lift it is for families to do something other than putting your kids on the bus to school five days a week. It can be profoundly disruptive to family routines. Cultural habits are hard to break. In my community, the district school has served multiple generations; it’s not uncommon for children to have the same kindergarten teacher as their parents. Families deserve the opportunity to direct their children’s education in a way that comports with their interest and values. Choice has to offer something compelling (or the local school has to be truly awful) to break longstanding behaviors that have both habit and convenience on their side.
“Critics of school choice often assume a static marketplace in education, but the reality is more dynamic,” the report concludes. “However, choice policies have the potential to increase private school options in rural areas.” On this there’s no disagreement. In states like Arizona, West Virginia, and Florida, the path is clearing for a flowering of choice and a dynamic marketplace in education options to emerge. After decades of choice theorizing, it will be worth watching closely to see if parents—and not just rural parents—can be motivated to avail themselves of it.
Sold a Story, the podcast series from American Public Media, is essential listening for parents and teachers. Through six episodes, host Emily Hanford documents how schools failed to adequately teach reading to students over the past thirty years. In her telling, curricula based on the work of education scholar Marie Clay came to dominate reading instruction in American classrooms, despite a dearth of evidence showing their effectiveness. It’s likely that these programs even hurt students’ ability to read by deemphasizing—or completing ignoring—phonics instruction.
As a parent, the series has made me adamant that my son—now on the cusp of entering prekindergarten—receive high-quality, research-backed reading instruction from his future school. As a former teacher, however, each episode feels like a punch in the gut. That’s because I was using those shoddy curricula for the better part of a decade in my own kindergarten, first, and second grade classes.
In the same way that most parents want the best for their children, most teachers want the best for their students. Not only did I fail to provide the best reading instruction to my students, I used material that might have damaged their long-term reading ability. Realizing this now fills me with regret for those children who struggled to turn letters into words and words into ideas because they never got the help they needed. It’s a regret from which I hope other teachers learn. But the responsibility for change does not fall on teachers alone. I also hope that parents, policymakers, and the general public demand high-quality, research-backed instructional materials for all students.
The reading curricula we need to jettison are those based on Clay’s work: the Leveled Literacy program of Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (referred to as F&P by most teachers); and the Units of Study by Lucy Calkins. Hanford is correct in describing these two programs as ubiquitous in American classrooms (I used one or both almost every year I taught). Hanford also accurately describes what reading instruction looks like in these systems. Reading behaviors are privileged over reading mastery. Teachers show students what “good readers” supposedly do and have them go through the same motions.
One of the first behaviors that students are taught to copy is finding a comfortable spot in which to sit with a book. Students as young as five are told to read independently (i.e., with no teacher support or guidance) in cozy spots around the room. It might be sitting at a table, or lying on the floor, or even in the hallway. I knew a teacher that collected cardboard boxes and built individual “reading forts” for her students.
This trades the appearance of reading for the actual thing, a phenomenon which Robert Pondiscio has described as “cargo cult” reading. In a classroom of twenty-five students, no one teacher is conferring with each child during independent reading. Students are on their own, often making errors, with no one to correct them. And that’s if they’re reading at all. Administrators eventually trashed those reading forts when it became clear that many students were off task. I’m pretty sure more than one was caught napping.
Book selection is another imitated reading behavior. Students are taught that good readers choose books that interest them. So, each week, students “book shop” from the classroom library. While teachers are responsible for building this library, they don’t assign specific books to students. A student is free to select five books that are all about tigers. The same goes for the student who’s interested in space exploration or motocross. As long as the books are on students’ predetermined reading level, they’re fair game (book leveling presents its own thorny issues, too complex to explore here). In theory, this allows them to explore their passions, which in turn builds intrinsic motivation to read. Why assign kids books they’ll find boring when you can turn them into life-long readers through freedom of choice?
In practice, many students select books on the same topic for weeks (or even months) on end. Students—like adults—can become set in patterns of behavior that are difficult to break on their own. Part of a teacher’s job should be to guide students beyond these patterns and expose them to new information, new ideas, and new ways of doing things. Book shopping makes that difficult, if not impossible. Instead, students begin to construct their own information silos.
And that’s assuming students are learning any worthwhile content from their self-chosen books. I had a student that would pick the Guinness Book of World Records every week. Other students are completists: They’ll finish every entry in a series like Magic Treehouse or Bad Guys, which are repetitive to the point of being predictable. Other students simply choose the easiest books available, even if they could handle more challenging titles. More than a decade ago, Kathleen Porter-Magee pointed out that using this “just right” model of book selection ensures that students who are behind in reading never catch up to the peers who are on grade level.
At the time, I had doubts about these reading programs but failed to act on them. Thankfully, teachers no longer need to make the same mistakes. The science of reading—a growing body of academic research that analyzes how children become literate—shows us what works for early readers: systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Kids need to know what sounds letters make. They need to know how to blend those sounds together into words. They need to practice these skills in decodable texts. When these skills are supported with teacher read-alouds and scaffolded readings from rich, complex texts, they support kids in becoming fluent readers. Not only are these strategies more effective than those found in F&P and the Units, they’re also simpler and easier to replicate across classrooms, schools, and districts. This doesn’t mean that students should never explore their interests or choose their own books for reading. However, it does mean that teachers should choose appropriate materials for direct instruction.
Thankfully, the tide is turning. Journalists like Hanford are raising awareness about reading instruction. Programs aligned to the science of reading are gaining popularity and have become mandated in several states. Even Lucy Calkins—the once highly-lauded and highly-compensated creator of the Units of Study—has been a forced to admit the importance of phonics instruction.
Most importantly, the public has access to information on what works. Websites like EdReports rate the effectiveness of most commercially-available curricula. Google Scholar puts decades of academic research at the fingertips of anyone who cares to search. With these tools, parents and teachers can make long-overdue changes to reading instruction in the classroom. They should waste no time in demanding that all students be taught to read with high-quality, research-backed curricula.
School district superintendents have an unenviable job description—ranging from high-level policy decisions on curriculum and finance to small-scale daily operations questions and small-p politics with stakeholders at all levels—so it’s no surprise that many tell us that they are unprepared for the challenge. In short supply are programs that deliver preparation in real-life leadership-related trials on topics that superintendents will routinely face in school buildings. A recent study published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis takes a close look at a well-known training program intended to circumvent the traditional path to the superintendency and reveals both dark clouds and silver linings.
Academics Tom Dee, Susanna Loeb, and Ying Shi examine the impact of superintendents who participated in the Broad Foundation-funded Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA) over twenty years. The foundation is a self-avowed supporter of reform-minded leadership and charter school networks. In 2019, a gift from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation was used to establish The Broad Center at Yale School of Management, which now runs a leadership development program, The Broad Fellowship—a successor to the Superintendents Academy. The former Broad Superintendents Academy culled talent from the private sector, nonprofit organizations, the military, and traditional public schools and trained participants in the demands of the superintendency—including topics such as labor relations, student interventions, data management systems, school board relations, operations, and public engagement. The analysis examines BSA from its beginning in 2002 through 2011 when it was a ten-month program and from 2012 through 2015 when it expanded to two years and included additional training in educator effectiveness, school choice, innovative learning models, and accountability.
Analysts merged demographic and employment data from BSA trainees with overlapping data from the largest 300 school districts, which enroll over one-third of all public students in the country. Likewise, nearly one-third of these districts were served by a BSA-trained superintendent during the study period. Several outcomes are examined including changes in the number of charter school schools, charter and traditional public school enrollment, closures of traditional public schools, per-pupil expenditures, high school graduation rates, and student achievement (pulled from SEDA). The analysts compare the characteristics of BSA completers who eventually lead districts compared to non-BSA superintendents in the same district. They use a difference-in-differences design, which basically compares the changes in district outcomes following the hiring of a BSA superintendent to the contemporaneous changes in districts that did not make such hires. They also construct three other models with different underlying assumptions to see how their results might differ.
Descriptive findings show that BSA enrolled almost 200 leaders between 2002 and 2015 of which only 53 percent assumed any role in a public-school district. Although only 42 percent worked as a superintendent during a twenty-year window (1996–2015), BSA superintendents at their peak served nearly 3 million students. Half of the pool had teaching experience, and 19 percent had served in the military. Fifty-four percent identified as either Black or Hispanic, and BSA superintendents were 40 percent more likely to be Black then non-BSA leaders. Only 6 percent of the pool worked in a charter school CMO or EMO. Compared to non-BSA superintendents, BSA-trained leaders were typically employed in districts that served high concentrations of Black and Hispanic students. They also had shorter tenures: an average of 3.5 years, which is roughly 1.5 years shorter than non-BSA superintendents.
As for the impacts, Broad-trained leaders had little to no effect on student achievement, school closures, enrollment, spending, or high school graduation rates. All of which points to a sobering implication: It is extremely difficult for a superintendent, even one who is the beneficiary of intentional training, to catalyze supercharged results in American educational bureaucracies. All that said, there were no negative impacts per se, and the increased diversity of BSA hires—relative to both race/ethnicity and varied background—is valuable in itself as a part of diverse school leadership more generally.
Now for that silver lining. The hiring of BSA superintendents was linked to increased enrollment and growth in charter schools that extended beyond the short tenure of a Broad superintendent. The analysts’ various models each report differing magnitudes of these increases, but all are positive, with the highest estimates showing that charter enrollment and the number of charters grew by about 6 and 4 percent, respectively, for each additional year after the Broad hire.
The report contains little discussion as to what might account for such an outcome, aside from reminding us that the Broad Foundation has been historically interested in high-quality charter schools. It’s not a stretch to think the philanthropy’s zeal for school choice might rub off on their superintendents, even if they are not employed in charters (which most aren’t). So the dark clouds part for some light because choice-friendly district superintendents are something we can always use more of!
SOURCE: Thomas S. Dee, Susanna Loeb, and Ying Shi, “Public-Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (August 2022).
Editor's note: A prior version of this article inaccurately cited the Yale SOM as operating the same program as the Broad Superintendents Academy.
One hallmark of charter schools—distinct from their traditional district peers—is flexibility in their HR practices. Ideally, this means that charters are free to manage their vital human capital in order to better attract and retain great teachers—particularly from non-traditional backgrounds—quickly and efficiently replace low performers, create incentive pay structures, and deploy talent with an eye toward maximum impact on students. However, it is an open question whether charter schools are able to actually capitalize on these flexibilities. A report recently published in the Journal of Public Economics looks at labor mobility within and across the charter and district school sectors in Massachusetts in an effort to provide an answer.
Researchers Jesse Bruhn, Scott Imberman, and Marcus Winters start by creating a simplified model of what is termed “regulatory arbitrage”—the extent to which an employer is able to maneuver within a given set of regulations—in the education sector. In the model, which is based on Bay State regulations, charter schools may hire licensed or unlicensed teachers at a wage of their choosing. Traditional district schools are assumed to have a continuous demand for teachers, to be required to hire only those who are fully licensed, and to be bound to wage levels determined by collective bargaining. Teachers are assumed to have an equal desire to remain in the field regardless of school type, and both charter and district teachers are assumed to be able to move freely between school types—in pursuit of optimal pay—even though full licensure is often onerous and expensive to obtain if pursued later in one’s career. The simplistic model indicates that, given the cost of licensure and hiring flexibility around it, charter schools will hire unlicensed teachers and have high attrition relative to traditional public schools. Ineffective charter school teachers will exit the profession entirely and effective charter school teachers will obtain licensure (if they don’t have it) and switch to traditional public schools. It is important to note that no differential is assumed between charter and district funding levels. While they may approach parity in the Bay State, it is very different in other states, a situation which would render the idea of incentive pay a distant dream.
Using data on the entire universe of public school students and teachers provided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from the 2008–09 to the 2016–17 school years, the researchers’ findings largely reflect their model. Charter schools are more likely to lose both their highest- and lowest-performing teachers relative to traditional district schools. Where departing charter teachers end up also mimics the model: Experienced teachers that are high performing within their charter tend to move to other public school employment opportunities; inexperienced teachers that are low performing within their charter are more likely to exit the Massachusetts education system entirely. Among unlicensed teachers working in a charter school, the decision to obtain a license predicts a sudden and permanent increase in the probability of them moving to a traditional district school. Incidences of teachers moving from traditional district schools to charter schools are “nearly non-existent” in their data.
There are some obvious limitations to the study: Lack of data on private school hiring, no information on teachers that move out-of-state, and lack of generalizability beyond Massachusetts due to varying teacher regulations and funding schemes in each state.
But, in general, the researchers conclude that regulatory flexibility in terms of hiring rules and pay scales does not result in charter schools being able to recruit and retain the best teachers. If incentive pay structures exist in charters, they are not enough to hold onto talented educators. However, charters might be able to deploy the talent they have more efficiently than traditional district schools. The data show that charters are able to maintain their academic quality in spite of relatively high teacher turnover. The fact that charters tend to stay at the same performance level year after year while regularly losing their best teachers to higher-paying jobs indicates that something inherent in the charter model may be driving student results (for better or for worse) beyond a singular reliance on teacher quality. Perhaps a focus on culture and recruiting teachers who are simpatico could be the key flexibility rather than money.
Additionally, the researchers hypothesize that charter schools are creating a positive externality on traditional district schools by increasing the average quality of teacher labor available to them. That is, the lowest-performing charter teachers exit the profession quickly and permanently—a rare occurrence for low-performing district teachers due to tenure and union rules—while the highest-performing charter teachers are motivated to move on to districts, arriving with more experience than first-year teachers hired directly from college.
More study is required to focus in on each of these many possibilities, but it seems clear that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to regulatory flexibility and the teacher workforce.
SOURCE: Jesse Bruhn, Scott Imberman, and Marcus Winters, “Regulatory arbitrage in teacher hiring and retention: Evidence from Massachusetts Charter Schools,” Journal of Public Economics (November 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith talk with Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute about what schools should resolve to do better—and resolve to do less of—in 2023. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber tells us about the effect of school-based telemedicine clinics on student outcomes.
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