The Education Gadfly Weekly

1998 was a rambunctious year, as both Google and iMac arrived, Bill and Monica made headlines, and Seinfeld ended with a widely-panned finale. It was also the year that we at Fordham published our very first report on advanced education (née “gifted & talented”). It dealt with tracking and ability grouping and was authored by the estimable Tom Loveless.

Since then, we’ve published fourteen other reports or books on how to improve education for America’s high achievers. Suffice to say, we’ve been among a wee group of reformers interested in that topic over the last twenty-five years. Wee because too many assume that advanced education is about increasing privileges for the already advantaged, rather than identifying and maximizing the strengths of every student—including poor kids and kids of color with potential for high academic achievement.

This disregard has resulted in serious neglect of a vital student subgroup, with future national repercussions for weakened, less diverse leadership and less innovation, progress, and economic growth. More pragmatically, it has also resulted in a lack of informative research for the field of advanced education.

Fordham’s latest report, The Broken Pipeline: Advanced Education Policies at the Local Level—our sweet sixteenth in this realm, if you will—aims to address just one of many unknowns: whether districts across the nation have adopted policies and programs to identify, support, and cultivate the talents of all students capable of tackling advanced-level work.

Our National Research Director, Adam Tyner, was keen to conduct this investigation, having previously completed research on gifted education in high-poverty schools. Adam also participated in The National Working Group on Advanced Education, leading to last year’s release of dozens of recommendations to aid state and local officials in developing a continuum of advanced learning opportunities across K–12.

The key aim of the current project was to determine whether districts have in place policies that align to the National Working Group’s recommendations. Thus, from May through October 2023, we surveyed a random sample of district and charter school administrators in charge of advanced education. Nearly 600 responded, and using stratified weighting, we adjusted the results to be representative of large and medium districts and charter school organizations, which together educate 90 percent of public-school students. So to what extent have districts adopted smart approaches to advanced education? To some extent, we discovered, but not nearly enough.

Adam aggregated the policies recommended by the Working Group such that a district (or charter network) could earn a total of 1,000 points. The results showed that the typical (median) district earned less than half of the possible points (485 out of 1,000), a majority earned 350 to 600 points, and only one-fourth of districts earned more than 600 points. Were the rubric translated into a traditional A–F scale, three-fourths of the districts and charter networks would flunk. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Still, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s quite common for districts to universally screen students for advanced education services based on their performance on standardized assessments. Specifically, more than three-fourths of districts with advanced programs in K–8 reported screening all students using a standardized assessment, at least in one grade. Given the strong research backing for “universal screening,” that’s reassuring.

Yet other worthy identification policies are scarce—in particular, screening students for advanced programming based on their “local” peers’ academic performance. In fact, only one-fifth of respondents say that their districts compare students’ performance to peers within the same district or school for identification purposes (a.k.a. “local norms”)—rather than a state or national benchmark. Applying local norms—such as identifying students performing in the top 10 percent of their school, district, or state—helps to detect a wider swath of advanced and potentially advanced children, especially those in high-poverty schools, and deserves more consideration.

We also found some encouraging evidence in elementary schools of the popularity of part-time pull-out classes for high achievers, giving those students an opportunity to engage with peers of similar abilities on advanced curriculum (45 percent of districts offer this). On the other hand, districts rarely accelerate young students by grade level or content area (no more than 4 percent of them), which enables children to “skip a grade”—either in all subject areas or one, say, math. This despite voluminous research evidence supporting the practice.

As for admission into advanced services, over half of districts do not allow early entry into kindergarten based on children’s readiness. But nearly the same percentage allow those who participate in advanced education in elementary school to be automatically enrolled in advanced courses in middle school and beyond.

So it’s quite a mixed bag, containing ample room for improvement. We see two overarching takeaways.

First, the identification side of advanced education is in better shape than the programmatic side. As indicated, a majority of districts use various assessments to screen elementary and middle school students for advanced programming, including performance on cognitive tests, diagnostic assessments, and state-mandated or other end-of-grade tests. Over three-quarters of districts (77 percent) use a standardized test to screen all students in one or more grades.

But there is so much more that districts should and could be doing for advanced learners once they are identified, especially in the early grades. Nearly half report that one of the most common types of advanced programming in elementary and middle schools is “in-class differentiation in general classrooms with no clustering of gifted students.” It’s not hard to see the drawbacks to that approach—as Loveless pointed out so many years ago. Likewise, 44 percent report using the same curriculum for advanced students as for other students, albeit with some modification. Barely 11 percent of districts report offering distance or online learning opportunities for advanced learners in the elementary and middle grades. Come on—clearly, we can do better!

Second, the difficulties associated with providing advanced education are most keenly felt in the elementary grades (after students are identified) and in the middle grades, when advanced courses are often limited to math. Once students get to high school, they typically have more opportunities to be challenged. In fact, 58 to 80 percent of districts offer high school honors classes in one or more core subjects, and two-thirds of districts—according to federal data—offer AP Math or AP Science classes (though with clear variation among schools within districts). About half of districts also expand access to advanced courses by allowing high school students to take AP or IB courses online.

To our eyes, then, there’s a sizable leak in the pipeline after early elementary school, when students are identified for advanced services, and before the high school grades, when they gain more exposure to advanced courses, both in person and online. But not nearly enough is happening in between. Hence the title of this report, The Broken Pipeline.

Still, leaks or not, we aren’t glass-half-empty types. Our glass-half-full view is that broken pipes can be fixed. So let’s get out those toolboxes!

More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning and “Zoom school” made attendance optional, which is a hard habit to break.

A letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to chief state school officers a few weeks ago cited “multiple, often interconnected factors” for chronic absenteeism. High school students, he wrote, might face “competing demands such as staying home to be caregivers to younger siblings or a sick family member or working outside the home to support themselves or their families.” While that may be true for some number of students, I fear there’s a larger and even more troubling trend at work. A New York Times report, circling but not quite landing, came closer than Cardona when it suggested that “something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school in ways that may be long lasting.” 

Since the start of the school year, I’ve been visiting schools and talking to educators about faltering school attendance and learning loss associated with the pandemic, which vaporized twenty years of achievement gains at a stroke. I’m left with a nagging sense that we’re misreading chronic absenteeism almost entirely. It fits a larger pattern of young people absenting themselves not just from school, but from life.

Alarm bells ring when young people leave the rails, make poor decisions, and live recklessly, driven by unchecked appetites for pleasure, wealth, or status. But as my AEI colleague Yuval Levin observed in a disquieting essay for The Dispatch a few years ago, disorderly lives now seem “less like exorbitant human desires driving people’s lives out of control and more like an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing and enervated.” Worse, this lassitude is masked by data that can make it appear things are actually improving. Teen pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births might be down, for example, but that’s because marriage and birth rates are declining overall. Fewer teenagers die in car accidents because fewer of them are getting drivers licenses. “There is less social disorder,” Levin concluded, “because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together.”

The thing young people “do together” is go to school. At least they used to. The phrase Levin coined, “disordered passivity,” or simply a “failure to launch,” fits more comprehensively the rise in chronic absenteeism, which was a problem even before Covid; the pandemic merely legitimized it. Nearly one in six U.S. students missed fifteen or more days in 2018–19, the last full school year before the pandemic. Seen through this lens, school is just one more activity from which young people are becoming estranged, one more opportunity to stay on the sidelines, but the easiest to quantify: we take attendance.

In the past, even bored or indifferent students might have dragged themselves to school to escape their parents, to avoid the drudgery of being housebound, or to socialize. But as David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York State education commissioner, points out, smartphones and social media have made leaving the house unnecessary. Worse, they feed this poisonous passivity. “You think you are enjoying the experience, but it’s cementing you into a cognitive and emotional coma,” he told me. “Others are living ‘for you’ in ways you know you never will, so why try to take any baby steps? Just keep scrolling.”

Schools seem increasingly inclined to yield to the forces of enervation rather than resist them. A survey conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences found that 72 percent of public schools have higher teacher absenteeism rates since the pandemic. At least 900 school districts have now adopted four-day weeks, as if to normalize declining attendance of students and staff alike. “We gave a lot of grace” during the pandemic, one middle school teacher and administrator told me. Students didn’t just get passing marks, they got good grades for minimal effort. Now there’s a lack of perseverance. “When things get hard, kids tend to just shut down. They don't have the problem-solving skills or the will to go through something hard because, during Covid, not all of them really had to,” she said. Parent behavior has also changed. “It’s way more likely now for parents to say, ‘My kids are having a hard time, so I’m letting them stay home for a little while,’” she added.

The passivity and enervation are evident and even more dispiriting when they afflict individuals and institutions—specifically schools—nominally charged with reversing it. Arthur Kirk, who founded and runs a community recreation center in West Baltimore, describes visiting a local principal last fall with a list of kids who routinely come to his center but not to school. “Oh, they come to school,” he was told. “They just don’t come like they should.” The response infuriated him. “It’s November!” he sputtered. “Why aren’t they following up? Is anyone going to put a foot in those parents’ ass? You feel what I’m saying? It’s that bad.”

On another recent trip to Baltimore, I spent an evening with a staffer from Concentric Education, which has contracted with Baltimore City Schools to visit the homes of chronically absent students, not to threaten or cajole, but to listen, connect with parents, and offer to help them break down whatever barriers are keeping their kids from attending school regularly. At one home, the mother of a ten-year-old girl first cited transportation problems for her daughter’s absences. Then she explained her child would always miss at least three days a month because of her daughter’s uncomfortable menstrual cycle. Next, she cited bullying. The longer we stood on the porch, the longer the list grew. I never laid eyes on the child, but it was hard not to think her school career was already drawing to a close in fifth grade. Her mother attached no discernible urgency to her daughter attending.

The conventional wisdom is that Covid broke school and the habits associated with it. Attendance is now optional, a “new normal.” A young man who graduated from high school in upstate New York last June described how the pandemic “delegitimized” school even among the academically inclined like him and his friends. “What’s the point in putting more effort into it when I’m just gonna pass all my tests anyway, and I can get out of online class by telling the teacher my computer glitched out?” he asked. “That attitude definitely shifted over to post-Covid learning, as well.”

There’s a vexing, blind-men-and-the-elephant feeling to all this. School district officials and education policymakers will tell you the post-pandemic lesson is that schools need to adapt and be more flexible, appealing, and relevant to students’ lives and needs. Counselors, mental health professionals, and even teachers talk about the need to make “social and emotional learning” co-equal to academics. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, worries about “the radical transformation of childhood into a phone-based existence.” But it’s none of those things, it’s all of them plus disorderly homes, inattentive parents, directionless lives, and moral exhaustion.

It's a bromide now among teachers, administrators, and education policymakers to say chronic absenteeism is a canary in a coal mine. The implication is that schools as we have known and run them for generations need to change. I pray that’s so because the other possibility is nearly overwhelming to consider: that the canary is a large and growing cadre of disengaged and disaffected young people, and the coal mine is much, much bigger than just school.

It may seem tone-deaf to focus on layoffs when the news is fraught with reports of teacher shortages, but much as pandemic recovery funds helped drive these shortages by opening new positions to staff, so too will the end of those funds bring about a painful wave of layoffs. For years, districts across the country have employed a seniority-based layoff approach when making tough decisions to reduce the teaching force. This practice, known as “last-in-first-out” (LIFO), in which the last teachers hired are the first to be fired, is harmful. Not only do LIFO practices threaten the dual goals of diversifying the workforce and ensuring teacher effectiveness, but they also hurt students of color and students living in poverty the most.

Given that districts will face (or are already facing) these challenging decisions, there is no time like the present to eliminate LIFO policies.

Early signs of impending layoffs

Chad Aldeman’s recent analysis of new data from the National Center on Education Statistics in 9,500 districts across the country shows that on a per-student basis, “staffing levels hit an all-time high” in the 2022–2023 school year. Unfortunately, as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds run out, many districts won’t be able to maintain current teacher staffing levels—meaning layoffs are looming. (Other analyses support this one, such as this deep dive into staffing in Washington state.) Districts simply won’t be able to afford to keep teachers on the payroll, especially in the face of significant student enrollment declines.

Why are LIFO policies so harmful?

Laying off teachers is wrenching, and when districts are not discerning about which teachers they lay off, the consequences are worse. LIFO policies harm teacher diversity and teacher quality and, in turn, negatively impact student learning.

Seniority-based layoff policies work against districts’ goals to increase teacher diversity–an essential goal given the positive impact of teachers of color on all students, especially students of color. Many states and districts have prioritized teacher diversity with positive results: The newest cohorts of teachers include more teachers of color than veteran cohorts do. But because teachers of color are more likely to be earlier in their careers, when districts use seniority as the sole criterion for layoffs, the newest group of teachers will be the first to get cut, undoing these efforts to diversify the workforce.

Besides the threat to teacher diversity, LIFO policies also put teacher quality at risk. It’s true that many first-year teachers struggle to match the higher performance of more seasoned teachers, but that difference virtually disappears by their second or third year as performance gains slow. Firing a highly effective third-year teacher over a poorly performing veteran of fifteen years leaves students at a major disadvantage. Further, researchers have found that even the threat of being fired—a “pink slip” issued during a reduction-in-force (even when a teacher is re-hired later)—has negative consequences on teacher performance. Students who attend high-poverty schools are more likely to experience weakened instruction when districts issue layoff warnings, since these schools tend to employ more novice teachers.

Ultimately, it is an equity issue for students: Seniority-based layoffs disproportionately affect students of color and students living in poverty, who are more often taught by novice teachers.

How widespread are LIFO policies?

In 2021, NCTQ analyzed state laws on the use of seniority in layoff decisions. We found that only ten states do not allow districts to consider seniority, and eighteen states either permit them to consider it among other factors or require it as the sole factor. In twenty-three states, districts have discretion regarding the inclusion (or exclusion) of seniority in layoff decisions.

Figure 1. Do states require teacher seniority to be considered when making layoff decisions?

Source: National Council on Teacher Quality. 

NCTQ also published a report on district layoff policies. We found that forty-six of the 148 districts in our sample (nearly a third) of the largest districts across the U.S. use seniority as the primary or sole criterion for teacher layoffs. This has remained relatively stable over the past five years. In twenty-eight of these districts, seniority is the only criterion considered when teacher layoffs need to happen. This is a troubling state of practices that will perpetuate inequities for students. We found one hopeful note: The data also showed that a more holistic approach to layoffs—using multiple criteria including performance and/or seniority—has become more prevalent; the number of districts using multiple criteria increased by roughly 10 percentage points compared to seven years ago.

What should state and district leaders do?

The writing is on the wall: Given impending budget cuts, declines in student enrollment, and the imbalance between new hires made in response to the pandemic and currently shrinking numbers of funded positions, teacher layoffs are imminent. District and state leaders need to stop focusing on teacher shortages writ large, and start focusing on policies and practices to strategically manage and staff schools.

States should begin by requiring that school districts consider classroom performance as a factor in determining which teachers are laid off when a reduction in force is necessary, and stop using seniority as the sole criterion. Where there is flexibility in state law, such as the twenty-three states mentioned above that give districts discretion in using or eliminating seniority, districts should seize the opportunity to eliminate seniority or at the very least, expand to additional criteria.

In addition to performance, states and districts have a variety of additional criteria to use when making tough layoff decisions:

• Specific consideration of student needs (e.g., reading specialists)
• School and district needs, such as whether a teacher has highly sought or shortage-subject qualifications (e.g., dual language speakers or special education teachers)
• School characteristics (e.g., a school designated for support because of low-performing status)
• Pathways to the classroom: whether a teacher has taken a specific, district-sponsored pathway to the classroom (e.g., Grow Your Own programs)
• Whether the teacher performs additional duties (e.g., department chair)
• The teacher’s attendance and discipline records

Many states and districts are already heeding these warnings and taking important steps. After the “Great Recession” of 2008, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (NC) gave their principals discretion over layoff decisions. The principals used performance as one of their criteria, targeting teachers who earned low evaluation ratings, along with other measures, including whether teachers had previously retired, were recently hired, unlicensed, non-tenured, or taught elective subjects. Evaluation of the approach found that on average, by using these additional criteria and giving principals more discretion, the district reduced total job losses and laid off fewer effective teachers than they would have following a last-in-first-out policy.

Additionally, a recent report by E4E highlighted two examples of alternative approaches. In Minneapolis (MN), following the passage of a 2019 state law that stopped requiring the use of seniority as the only criterion in layoffs, the district and union negotiated in the contract the use of additional criteria that prioritized teacher diversity, such as keeping licensed teachers from underrepresented groups, teachers who graduated from Grow Your Own programs, and teachers in schools designated as “racially isolated.” In Oregon, advocates successfully worked to change state law so teachers with cultural or linguistic expertise are prioritized over more senior teachers. These new policies will soon be used: Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MN) most recent budget proposal indicates that about 40 teacher positions will be cut. Similarly, just last week, Salem-Keizer Public Schools (OR) announced that more than 400 public school employees will lose their jobs at the end of the school year to balance district budget forecasts.

Also hearteningly, a number of districts (Brevard Public Schools (FL), Chicago Public Schools (IL), Clayton County Public Schools (GA), Cleveland Metropolitan School District (OH), and Cobb County School District (GA), among others) have named performance as the sole criterion or the preponderant criterion for teacher layoffs. More districts can be found in our Teacher Contract Database.

Where do we go from here?

Given the rapid shifts in the teacher labor market as well as current and impending teacher layoffs, state and district policymakers, along with their unions, under the watchful gaze of local advocacy organizations, must center student needs when defining the criteria and processes to use for teacher layoffs. To advance the companion goals of diversifying the teacher workforce and supporting teacher effectiveness, we must design and implement thoughtful means of reducing the teacher workforce that will benefit all students. If we stand aside and continue with the status quo, students will suffer the costs—especially our most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged students.

Editor’s note: This was first published by NCTQ.

While it seems likely that the end of ESSER funding in September will engender a(nother) seismic shift in the school staffing conversation, education leaders are—for the moment—still talking about teacher shortages, long-term vacancies, hard-to-staff specialties, burnout, dissatisfaction, and attrition. On top of that, they seem interested in talking about how they’ve staffed their schools in light of these realities. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) synthesizes lessons learned from dozens of interviews of school leaders practicing what is termed “strategic staffing.”

At its base, “strategic staffing” is about moving away from the traditional one teacher, one classroom model and implementing strategies like establishing new pathways into the teaching profession, creating new structures for differentiated professional development and pay scales, and rethinking the daily work of teachers and support staff.

CRPE analysts interviewed forty-two leaders (principals, superintendents, etc.) and technical assistance providers working in six different school systems. All the systems are anonymous in this write-up and little description or differentiation is provided, except to say that the list includes both traditional districts and charter management organizations, and that some systems are in right-to-work states, while others are in collective-bargaining states. Interviewees were already well-versed in the tenets of strategic staffing, and were able to answer researchers’ questions regarding the origins and growth of their models, their implementation efforts, stakeholder support and opposition, barriers and enabling factors, and outcomes.

The analysis does not say when the interviews were conducted, though most leaders report that they’d been implementing strategic staffing for “more than three years” at the time of the interview. Several leaders report using federal Covid-relief funds to support their strategic efforts, though that’s not the only funding source noted, and there is no specific discussion of pandemic-era staffing. The overwhelming sense is that these new protocols for recruiting, deploying, supporting, and retaining talent are responses to persistent staffing concerns that predate the pandemic.

The report identifies seven strategies that two or more of the systems have implemented. The most common are creating new teacher leadership roles (which enable teachers to advance in their careers without leaving instruction) and personalized teacher development (defined as providing opportunities that support leadership development as well as teachers’ daily work and personal growth). Other common strategies were redesigned schedules and workloads, broadened recruitment programs, and additional compensation for staffers who take on additional responsibilities or exhibit strong performance. Every system covered in the report was implementing at least three non-traditional staffing strategies, with one system reporting five simultaneous efforts. Leaders explained in their interviews that they believed no one strategy by itself would adequately move the needle on staffing concerns, and that they were working to implement everything they could.

The bulk of the CRPE report discusses challenges, both big and small, that leaders faced in their efforts to make changes. The most frequently-cited—and most difficult to overcome—emerge from the codified aspects of traditional education models. For example, teacher licensure requirements limit who can be recruited to teach and which classes/subjects can be covered by any given teacher; class size requirements complicate team teaching efforts; state-mandated pay scales often forbid bonuses to incentivize teachers to take on new/additional roles; and collective bargaining agreements contain myriad ironclad clauses and requirements based on the oldest of old-school teaching models.

Some leaders, however, offered anecdotes of hope. For example, one system found that union leaders were willing to be more flexible than expected in their interpretation of contract terms, and another discovered that a longstanding district “policy” regularly cited as the reason they couldn’t hire part-time paraprofessionals didn’t even exist! But these fortuitous outcomes weren’t the norm. Policies and prohibitions that looked like roadblocks to change generally were just that.

Leaders also reported another category of potential barriers that were ultimately more permeable. These include inflexible data systems that, in one example, only track student outcome data (attendance, test scores, discipline, etc.) for a single-teacher classroom structure; creating a master schedule for all teachers and support personnel to accommodate new forms of collaboration; HR and other central office staff resistant to changes in recruiting, hiring, and training of teachers; and school-level processes, such as how students are assigned to teachers at the beginning of the grading period, semester, or year. These, leaders say, can be overcome with enough effort and buy-in from staff.

In the end, this report is more about starting points than results. For example, the authors write: “Because of sampling limitations and our reliance on leaders’ recollections and self-reports, the findings do not represent the full breadth of leaders’ experiences, nor the chances that other leaders may encounter similar experiences.” Translation: School systems—while often bound by similar rules, traditions, and norms—are staffed by individuals whose devotion to those strictures can vary widely. “Further,” the authors add, “we do not claim a causal relationship between the strategic school staffing initiatives and the leaders’ reported efficacy.” This is an important caveat because there is really no efficacy information provided at all. Did these six school systems fully solve their staffing issues with what often sound like Herculean (and sometimes Sisyphean) efforts? No idea. And even if they did, how are their students faring in the wake of the changes they were able to make? Again, no clue. It makes sense to think that schools and their students in 2024 might benefit from a refresh of the staffing style of the previous hundred years. But this report is more about compiling a roster of possible ideas than proving their effectiveness.

SOURCE: Lisa Chu, Lydia Rainey, and Steven Weiner, “‘So hard, but so rewarding’: How school system leaders are scaling up strategic school staffing models,” Center on Reinventing Public Education (March 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Adam Tyner, Fordham’s national research director, joins Mike and David to discuss his latest study on advanced education policies across the country. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines new research on how the decentralization of teacher accountability under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act affected student achievement.

Recommended content:

• The broken pipeline: Advanced education policies at the local level —Adam Tyner, Fordham Institute
• Building a Wider, More Diverse Pipeline of Advanced Learners —The National Working Group on Advanced Education, Fordham Institute
• “Teacher evaluation reform was very successful—on paper” —Tim Daly, Fordham Institute
• “Jayden Daniels to Commanders with No. 2 pick in NFL draft” —ESPN
• Eric A. Hanushek, Patricia Saenz-Armstrong, and Alejandra Salazar, Balancing federalism: The impact of decentralizing school accountability, National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2024).

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].

Michael Petrilli:

Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B Fordham Institute. Today Fordham's Adam Tyner joins us to discuss his latest study on advanced education policies across the country. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating the effects of the rollback of teacher accountability under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. All this on the Education Gadfly Show.

Hello. This is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Adam Tyner. Adam, welcome back to the show.

Adam Tyner:

Thanks for having me back.

Michael Petrilli:

Yeah, Adam is the national research director here at the Fordham Institute. Also joining us as always, also from Fordham, my co-host, David Griffith. That's right. All Fordham all the time today. And that must mean we are talking about a new Fordham study. Let's do that on ed reform update.

Okay. Adam, new study by you. It's called the Broken Pipeline Advanced Education Policies at the local level. This was a project that in some ways goes along with our national working group on advanced education. That final report came out last year. Great group of people left, right, and center, scholars, practitioners, policy makers sending, hey, when it comes to advanced education, including things like gifted and talented programs or advanced advanced courses in high school, when people are worried about equity, the goal should not be to end it, but to mend it, to extend it, to get lots more kids into advanced education, kids who could benefit from it. This study is based on a survey of school districts and charter networks trying to find out what's going on out there at the local level. How many of these practices are in place? First of all, Adam, just real quickly tell us about the survey. Who was it that we got this information from?

Adam Tyner:

So this was a survey of district administrators. So it was people who were working in districts and we primarily targeted people whose portfolio was around advanced or gifted education. So many districts around the country have an administrator that serves to coordinate different types of advanced programming in that district, although some don't. And so in some cases we targeted just the superintendent or an assistant superintendent who had an academic portfolio. But these are district administrators telling us about the policies that they have in their districts.

Michael Petrilli:

Okay. And how many? A few hundred, right? How many respondents here?

Adam Tyner:

Yeah, I think we're somewhere around 500.

Michael Petrilli:

Yeah. Alright. So this is a big, big group people you were able to, then you've got data on these school districts, so you're able to wait it. So we are able to see, get basically a representative, look at what's happening across the country. So as I read it, Adam, the good news is that there is indeed a lot of universal screening going on out there for gifted education programs. This is one of the big recommendations of the report. Also comes out of a great study by Nobel Prize winning economist David Card and a working group member Laura Juliano, which says that you want to do universal screening, meaning don't just rely on recommendations from teachers or from nominations, from parents about who should be in gifted education. Use something like a standardized test score to look at everybody. And that's actually quite prevalent out there, right?

Adam Tyner:

Well, after I worked up all of these charts and graphs and came up with some findings and everything we were all talking about, and we kept going back and forth about whether the glass was half full or half empty, was it good? Was it bad? And I feel like universal screening for me is one of those where the glass is maybe like three quarters full because we find that there's a lot more universal screening than I think people thought. And in 77% of the districts in the country, we see that they're doing some kind of universal screening based on a standardized test. Now when you dig into that and start finding out, well, how does that work in the district? One thing that I'm still a little bit disappointed by is that in many districts that just is happening in one or two grades. So there's not a ton of on-ramps, even though screening is universal. But universal screening is happening more commonly than I think a lot of people thought.

Michael Petrilli:

So, right? They may be using the third grade state test or something like that, or maybe they're using an i-Ready scores or MAP scores, but they're only doing it for a few grades. Now, the other bad news, and this is a big one when it comes to identifying kids, is they are also generally not using local norms. Now, this is a term that people in the advanced dead world talk about a lot. Again, it came out of some studies by David Card and Lord Giuliano. And the idea of a local norm is saying, Hey, you should select kids who are scoring at the highest levels in their school, even if that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all that high achieving within their district or their state, right? And yet there's places where they still say, to be identified for advanced education, you got to score at the 97 percentile nationally. And what we're saying is that it would be better to just maybe take the top 10% of kids in every school, and we mean every school, so that every school, including high poverty schools, would have gifted education programs and they'd serve kids who are just higher achieving than their peers and therefore need some extra challenge. But that is not as prevalent around the country.

Adam Tyner:

That's right. We see that 20% of districts are using some kind of district norm, about 20%. It's 21% I think are using a school norm. Those are the kind of local norms that we're looking for. And like you said, Mike, that's especially important in places that are generally on average lower achieving, right? Because if on average people are lower achieving, then that means that we may not be capturing, there may be nobody in that top 5% nationally or whatever if you're setting a national norm. But if you set the bar at the top 10% in your school, then you're still going to capture those students who are really ready to excel beyond their peers, but are not meeting that super high kind of arbitrary national standard.

Michael Petrilli:

Now that said, one thing that was interesting is that you did not really find any major differences based on the demographics of the districts. Fair enough that when you look at the overall, at least across a lot of different policies, and I should be clear a lot more in here than just identification, we'll get a little bit to that in a minute. But on all these policies and practices, for the most part, the districts look more similar than different.

Adam Tyner:

To me, that's one of the glass is completely full findings of this report is that when we look, we made this index where we tried to look at the policies that we thought were the most important for districts to have, and then we tried to score them. So if you had did universal screening, for example, you got more points and we turned that all into an index so that we could really compare at a macro level, how is this district doing versus that district? And when we look at the scores of districts by poverty, by race, by the size of the district, we really don't find much difference when we look at that. We don't just look at some binary like high or low poverty. We look at it by quartiles. We're really getting some nuance and we just don't see the scores being much different.

They're very similar. Now, I think larger districts did tend to have a very slightly higher score on our index, meaning they had slightly more comprehensive policies than the smallest districts that we included. But when you look at race and socioeconomic status, it is not a good predictor of the comprehensiveness of the policies. And actually this is a finding that is similar to something that we found in one of the first reports I did for Fordham back when in I think 2018, I did a report as co-authored with now Dr. Chris Lum, he just got his PhD at Ohio State a couple of weeks ago. I think he defended his dissertation. But he and I worked together to look at federal data and look at the prevalence of just having a gifted program in higher versus lower poverty schools. And we found a similar pattern, meaning that there was no pattern. It wasn't that higher poverty schools were more or less likely to have gifted programs. Of course, fewer students are enrolled in gifted programs in higher poverty schools, but those schools were just as likely to report having at least some students involved in their programs. And so I think that's a really positive thing that we're not seeing some big inequity where really good policies are in one type of district and really bad policies in another type.

Michael Petrilli:

Yeah, no, that is good. So the other encouraging trend, once you look at the high school level, there's not surprisingly a lot going on around advanced education, a lot of advanced placement courses we know that has expanded dramatically in recent years, or international baccalaureate dual enrollment. There's less gatekeeping than there used to be perhaps at the high school level. But here's the thing is we identify kids for advanced ed or gifted ed early, like say maybe third or fourth grade, but then there's not much for them until they get to high school where they can take a bunch of AP classes. But it feels like in the middle when we're talking about elementary school offerings, even some middle school offerings kind of lame, right? Is that fair to say? Not a lot there.

Adam Tyner:

Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of those places where it's really a Rorschach test because part-time pullout classes are the most common type of service for elementary and middle school students. And that part-time pullout class, we all know that could be pretty high quality or it could be almost nothing. And so it's really, unfortunately, I think at future research with the knowledge that part-time pullout classes are so prevalent, we need to ask some even more detailed questions about what that means. But it really is disappointing that stuff like having a whole school or a whole program that's dedicated to those students is very rare in elementary and middle grades. That's right.

Michael Petrilli:

And things like ideas that have been around forever, like grade skipping or acceleration, just for a subject like letting a second grader who's amazing at math, take third grade math even just for that hour a day, go move up to be with the third graders or take a group of kids who are ready to cover maybe fourth and fifth and sixth grade math over the course of two years instead of three. That sort of thing. Still not super prevalent. David, as you're listening to this, any thoughts or questions you got for Adam?

David Griffith:

Yeah, I don't think I'm too surprised by any of it. I think what stands out to me, like you guys are saying, is kind of I guess the inherent complexity of the solutions, right? Because a whole long list of things that schools, districts, teachers might do, and yeah, I'm with you guys. I think pullout certainly my experiences with it were mixed and I think it probably means something very different depending on what the resources the school is able to bring to bear. I don't have a whole lot to add guys, except that this is increasingly personal to me as my kids move through the education system here in dc found out last month that in the wake of the pandemic, the goal for kids in DC is for them to be able to count to 10 by the time they enter kindergarten. Now, some kids can count higher than that without saying anything about national norms or local norms. I'm just going to assert that some kids can count higher than that and

Michael Petrilli:

You can be very proud of your son. Who can,

David Griffith:

I'm very proud of my son. I'm not even, look, I'm not even talking about him. I just think in general, some kids can count higher than that, even in DC. And I mean, we can talk about how low that expectation is, but it should be just to try to make it real to people. It is frustrating if that's the standard, right? You don't have to be Einstein really to exceed it. And there has to be some sort of plan, right? For continuing to push kids. The goal cannot be, the sort of attitude cannot be that nobody moves forward. Nobody gets to 11 until everybody can get to 10. That's crazy. So anyway, that is my only comment. It's not hypothetical, right? And I don't think it's just about the top 1% or the top 0.1%, right? It's potentially about a very large class of kids who may not be well-served if you have a sort of one size fits all approach.

Michael Petrilli:

And my sense is that there's been a lot of progress at the high school level. Again, left, right, and center. I mean, I see groups, education trust is one for example, that very much on the left, very much supportive of the idea of we should have lots of AP classes, dual enrollment, ib. It's not for everyone though. It's for more kids maybe than we used to have in the past. We should worry a lot about access and diversity in those courses. But we should have it right, even though it used to be that tracking. So-called tracking was not okay on the left. So that's changed, but there's still those same attitudes when it comes to my senses, middle school and certainly elementary school. And so what happens, we don't do enough to prepare kids, especially kids from low income backgrounds to succeed in those advanced placement courses. Once they get to high school, you got to start in kindergarten, and yet we're not doing enough when it comes to that. Alright, I will give myself the last word then. As I see David and Adam shaking their heads, Adam, hey, great job on this study. I know there's a ton of work to get districts fill out the survey and charter networks.

Adam Tyner:

It was, and I didn't do it all myself either. There were a lot of Fordham colleagues who were calling up people in random parts of the country and blasting them with emails and pestering 'em to get them to answer our surveys. So a lot of credit around the whole office.

Michael Petrilli:

Alright, so again, check it out on our website, the Broken Pipeline advanced education policies at the local level. Adam, thanks for coming on. Hope to see you again on time soon.

Adam Tyner:

Alright, thanks guys.

Michael Petrilli:

Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's Research minute. Hey Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern:

Thanks, Mike.

Michael Petrilli:

Hey, so yeah, the NFL draft give you some hope for your Washington commanders.

Amber Northern:

Oh my gosh, I missed it. Mike, did we get a bunch of good players?

Michael Petrilli:

You got the number two quarterback and I'm going to forget his name.

Amber Northern:

I've been a little bit out of it over the weekend. And what's this guy's name?

Michael Petrilli:

Oh my god, I'm going to forget. I'm terrible. See, I pretend. I try to pretend I'm all sporty. For our listeners here it was the LSU quarterback.

Amber Northern:

Alright, good. Well we need some talent on that team, I got to say.

Michael Petrilli:

Yeah. Does Major League Soccer do this sort of thing? David? Is this a big thing? They have a draft, yeah.

David Griffith:

Yes. You're so sporty, Mike. Yeah.

Michael Petrilli:

Is it nationally televised?

David Griffith:

I believe so. Whether anyone watches is another question.

Amber Northern:

Clearly we got to practice this lather beforehand.

Michael Petrilli:

Yeah, I guess I really should have looked up the guy's name. Jalen something. Alright, I'll look it up. While you're doing the research minute and which is a good segue, it is time for the research minute, what you got for us this week.

Amber Northern:

It's a new study out from NBER by Rick EK and two other economists that attempt to evaluate the impact of moving from NCLB to essa, at least, I'll just say the impact of one part of it, which are the actions that states took to change personnel policies for teachers with the added flexibility that they then had under essa. So they break teacher policies into input and output based policies using data from NCTQ. Output based policies relate to teacher accountability included in NCLB, but that were relaxed in essa. These include the use of student growth measures and teacher evaluations, whether state legislation explicitly indicates that districts are required to evaluate all teachers each year, whether states can use instructional ineffectiveness as grounds for dismissal, and whether legislation requires effectiveness to be considered when making teacher layoffs. So those are all output based. Then they've got another set of input based teacher policies that were unchanged and they act as the control policies to what would've happened in the absence of the change federal laws.

So the second set, again, unchanged input related elements, not directly related to student achievement outcomes, but that affect the teacher labor market. So these are things like compensation for advanced degrees, higher pay, if you teach in a high needs school loan forgiveness for teaching in a high needs school. The various policies are related directly to the provisions of NCLB and essa. So they look at the state changes in those policies that coincide with the move from NCLB to essa. And of note ESSA gave development of teacher evaluations and teacher policies back to the states. So they're saying that's really integral to what they're trying to measure here.

Michael Petrilli:

Now. Okay, but let me just pause for a moment here because I'm scratching my head. I'm thinking what? Alright, I mean, for example, no Child Left Behind did not, I don't think, say anything about teacher evaluations, right? That came later. That was in Race to the top. Well

Amber Northern:

They did, I'm sorry. They also put race to the top in with NCLB, but I'm just saying NCLB versus NCLB race to the top every time.

Michael Petrilli:

Okay. Alright, fair enough. So that's important. Alright. And some of this other stuff though still, I'm like really, I don't know that it's all that related to federal policy one way or the other.

Amber Northern:

Well, or that it's all that clean in terms of an input versus an output. But I do agree that the outputs are more related to student achievement than the inputs. Okay. So the treatment, again, it's complicated, but the treatment is the relaxation of the federal rules or a change in the locus of decision making. They make a point to say it's not about all these specific plans and regulations and laws, that all those things are mediating factors that affect the student outcomes that result from the change in federalism. So they relate these various teacher policies to growth and student achievement across states. So then they go to NA and they say, okay, well NAP doesn't provide longitudinal data for individual students, but it has representative data for the student populations of each state at different times from 1990 to 2019. They construct a measure of average achievement growth in each state by comparing grade four scores and math or reading to grade eight scores four years later with these various controls that are available to them. So they're following the same cohort in each state. And then the analysis again focuses on two cohort students in each state in grade eight in 2015, and then in 2019, and they're looking at achievement growth for the cohort and school at the end of NCLB and for the cohort at the beginning of essa. Alright, I think that's the main thing you need to know.

Michael Petrilli:

So wait, the cohort goes, okay, wait, basically 2015 to 2019 from when they were fourth grade going to

Amber Northern:

Eighth grade. Eighth grade, yes. They follow that, those two cohorts. That's right. Alright. And then they use prior achievement so they can measure the depreciation or the growth of achievement between the end of NCLB in the beginning of essa. Alright, I got to get to the findings. We could be forever on the methods. Given the change in decision-making from federal to state government states tended to pull away from the NCLB output based policies. No surprise there when they link the teacher accountability changes to state growth and student achievement measured by these changes in NAP scores between fourth and eighth grade, which I just told you about. They find that the strong output-based teacher policies are associated with greater student achievement gains in both math and reading. On the other hand, these input based policies are associated with lower state achievement gains, but when they combine the two, they find that the shift in federalism inherent in ESSA was associated with a small but significant fall in student achievement.

They estimate that going from no such policies to having all of these identified policies implies an increase in growth of 0.2 standard deviation in math to 0.3 standard deviation in reading. But then they argue that these estimates, this is just the immediate impact that maybe it's going to be worse. These responses as over time they say, Hey, we don't know what covid did. Covid may have made things worse. And besides, we know this is small potatoes, but we're also looking at a national policy that impacts millions of public school students. So that's what I've got.

Michael Petrilli:

Okay. I'm really, this is a head scratcher here

Amber Northern:

And it's hefty. It's hefty. So

Michael Petrilli:

I mean it, is it fair to say that, I mean, one piece of this sounds pretty intuitive to me, which is states that let's say, kept their teacher evaluation policies, I don't know, Tennessee and the District of Columbia, I could buy that maybe they did better. I think in this trend it's sort of making at least staying steady, whereas a lot of these states were, I think losing ground in this time as we started to see a slump even before the great recession. But okay, so if you kept something like teacher, I mean, is it basically teacher eval? Is that basically what they're

Amber Northern:

Looking at? Well, let me look. It is teacher, they were very specific about the output. You had to use student growth in your teacher eval. You had to say that districts are required to evaluate all teachers, and you had to say that instructional ineffective was grounds for dismissal and you had to consider teacher effectiveness when you considered making layoffs.

Michael Petrilli:

So all that stuff that states, in some cases adopted under race to the top and then quietly or not let go of as that ended and as there was a huge political backlash to teacher valuation and it seemed like in most places it was not done very well and didn't have much of an impact. Again, I guess this was somewhat related to federal policy, but I dunno. David, what do you think? Is this really about federal policy and federalism?

David Griffith:

I guess I'm sort of curious to know if they characterize the states that backed away from, we'll call it accountability just for simplicity's sake, if they characterize them in any other way. Are these red states because they don't like top down accountability? Are they blue states because the teachers unions quad back, whatever it is they wanted to call back. What states are these?

Amber Northern:

They're not categorized. David,

David Griffith:

I mean, I'm a little torn because on the one hand I basically buy the conclusion and the theory of action here. But on the other hand, there's a whole lot going on. And the million dollar question is like, are the states that are selecting into less accountability? Are they different in some other way? Were they already going to be seeing declining achievement for some other reason? And that's strikes me as a very difficult question to answer. I have not read the study in detail, so it's not intended as a critique, but it strikes me as a high bar

Michael Petrilli:

And look, all the research and following of teacher eval that we did, I feel like we knew that it was not very effective in most places. And so a lot of these places they gave up on it. I'm not sure they gave up on anything that was working anyways. And whether, I mean, I get it that they were trying to look at any growth patterns ahead of time, but I'm not sure they could have picked up on that. I don't remember any state which was really kind hardcore, we're actually going to do this. We're actually going to evaluate teachers in this tough way. Were actually going to have a chance of laying teachers off. I feel like it was just Tennessee and DC was basically it at the state level, and they kept their systems, otherwise, these other states that gave up on 'em were all BS anyways.

Amber Northern:

Right. You're saying they weren't differentiating them anyway. They

Michael Petrilli:

Went through the motions. They followed the federal guidance. But we knew that the districts, the states might've had policies, but the districts didn't follow them. The action was at the district level and the districts maybe went through the emotions and it was a mess. And so I don't know this idea that it was, if only we had a federal policy saying, you still have to do that thing that we quote call teacher eval, and we would've had better impacts in these other states. It's only because Tennessee and DC did it. Well, I'm assuming these are the main places that we're seeing much by way of impact.

David Griffith:

I mean, to me, the question is really what is the sustainable, politically sustainable version of accountability here that we're after? You can scream into the hurricane all you want about, oh, let's bring back no child left behind. I don't really think we should, to be honest. But the more important point is we can't. Right? It's not going to happen. And I mean, I feel like for me, it's tough to disentangle the effects of these things from the sort of short-term nature of them. Yeah. If you scare the heck out of people for a couple of years and you think they're going to close their schools and fire all the teachers, yeah, you'll see an effect. But if it's got the sort of seeds of its own destruction built into it, then it's not much of a plan. And so what we really need is accountability that will still be here a decade from now. That's the best form of accountability. And I'm not sure I can articulate exactly what that looks like, but you could make the case that the move to a sort of Ian move to state accountability is a better platform for getting there than NCLB. So in that sense,

Michael Petrilli:

Well, and if you're talking about teacher accountability, look, I think honestly, I think we know there's not much you can write into federal law and there may not be a lot you can write into state law. Yes. Some of these state policies, if you mandate last in first out, if you make it impossible for districts to hold teachers accountable, those things can matter. But even if you permit districts to be tough on teacher accountability, I think it's hard to mandate that they be tough on teacher accountability. And so it's at the local level, that's where the action is. But we don't have data very many local places.

Amber Northern:

And by the way, it's really hard. It's a really hard sell to make with the shortages we're seeing in some places and the overall discontent we're hearing anecdotally from the teaching workforce. So,

Michael Petrilli:

All right. Well, so much more. We could unpack this to be continued. This topic is not going away. Tim Daley's been writing great stuff for the education Gad Fly in our Fly paper blog in his blog about the history of teacher EVI that is worth checking out as well as it seems quite relevant here. But thank you Amber. Good

Amber Northern:

Stuff. Yes, indeed.

Michael Petrilli:

Alright, well that is all the time we've got for this week. So until next week,

David Griffith:

I'm David Griffith.

Michael Petrilli:

And I'm Mike Petrolli, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.

Cheers

• The Maryland state board of education appointed interim superintendent Carey Wright to a permanent role. —Washington Post
• Indianapolis Public Schools plans to transfer ownership of a district building to a KIPP charter school and help finance a renovation at the site. —Chalkbeat
• A Connecticut school found success banning phones with Yondr bags, and even many students came to appreciate it. —Washington Post

Jeers

• Equity grading grows in popularity, a part of a larger trend of education consultants selling dubious theories to schools at a high price. —RealClearInvestigations
• A combination of records numbers of applications and FAFSA issues made this year’s college enrollment season uniquely chaotic. —New York Times
• A new book addresses the very real problem of Black students’ underrepresentation in advanced education programs, but the author seems to encourage the idea that the programs are racist and should be ended rather than mended. —Teen Vogue

• New York State’s budget law weakens mayoral control of the Big Apple’s schools and empowers the United Federation of Teachers. —Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg
• Teachers unions are hopping onto the “ban phones” bandwagon. —Education Week
• According to new federal data, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12 percent nationally between 2018 and 2022. —The 74
• Schools are implementing policies to skirt around the prohibition on affirmative actions. —The Dispatch