In a new NEPC policy memo, Duke public policy professor Helen Ladd argues that charter schools “disrupt” what she claims are the four core goals of American education policy: “establishing coherent systems of schools,” “appropriate accountability for the use of public funds,” “limiting racial segregation and isolation,” and “attending to child poverty and disadvantage.” Griffith disputes all four counts.
In a new NEPC policy memo, Duke public policy professor Helen Ladd argues that charter schools “undermine” good education policymaking by making it needlessly complex.
More specifically, according to Ladd, charters “disrupt” four core goals of American education policy: “establishing coherent systems of schools,” “appropriate accountability for the use of public funds,” “limiting racial segregation and isolation,” and “attending to child poverty and disadvantage.”
That’s a lot to tackle, so what follows isn’t meant to be comprehensive—but for simplicity’s sake, I am using Ladd’s “goals” to structure my response.
Goal 1: “Establishing coherent systems of schools”
It might surprise readers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, and any number of other places to learn that their nation’s school systems are incoherent. Yet that is the logical implication of Ladd’s first line of attack, the upshot of which is that a system in which public dollars can follow students to schools not run by the government creates unworkable complexity. Either that, or she’s claiming there’s something unique about the United States that argues against the creation of a such a system here—though she never says as much, and it’s difficult to see why that would be the case.
Veterans of the charter school movement will recognize many of Ladd’s arguments. For example, she asserts that “given public funding follows students to charter schools on a per-pupil basis, the outflow of students to charters means that the local districts will be financially worse off.” The first clause of that sentence deserves at least three Pinocchios, given the well-documented exclusion of many charters from many local funding sources. But even if it were accurate, the conclusion that districts are “financially worse off” wouldn’t follow. After all, most states provide at least temporary relief when a district’s enrollment declines, and some even explicitly compensate them for charter-driven enrollment losses. In other words, simple arithmetic implies that many “host” districts get more funding per pupil when some of “their” pupils enroll in charters, as a recent Fordham study confirmed.
Figure 1. In most states, higher independent charter market share was associated with a significant increase in host districts’ total revenue and spending per pupil
Note: Hollow bars indicate nonsignificance, filled bars statistical significance at the p<0.05 level, and striped bars at the <0.1 level.
Source: Mark Weber, “Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (February 2021).
Later, Ladd claims that “in practice, many charter schools are operated by charter management organizations or by management chains operating many schools which often have no ties to the local community” [emphasis added]. But if she’s talking about the leaders of these networks, then the same could also be said of many state and local administrators (not to mention union leaders). And if she’s talking about principals and teachers, then the quoted sentence is a wild exaggeration.
For the record, charter schools that belong to larger networks hire lots of teachers from “the local community,” in addition to some Teach For America types and other imports. And of course, regardless of how that community is defined, traditional public schools don’t perfectly reflect it either. For example, a recent Fordham study found that Black students in North Carolina were significantly less likely to have a Black teacher if they enrolled in a traditional public school, as opposed to a charter.
Figure 2. Relative to their Black peers in traditional public schools, Black students in charter schools are significantly more likely to have same-race teachers
Source: Seth Gershenson, “Student-Teacher Race Match in Charter and Traditional Public Schools,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (June 2019).
Goal 2: “Appropriate accountability for the use of public funds”
Like the previous section, this one has a little bit of everything, from complaints about the rate at which charters close their doors to demands for greater financial transparency. Yet in general, Ladd’s arguments in this realm fail to engage with (much less refute) the obvious counterarguments.
Take school closure. Ladd treats it as manifestly undesirable, but lots of research suggests that displaced students benefit when they move to higher-performing schools. So, at a minimum, any argument against a school system that envisions the periodic closure of low-performers needs to reckon with that finding (as well as the deeper truth, which is that closing a bad school makes it more likely that subsequent cohorts of students will attend a better one).
Figure 3. Impact of closure on displaced students who landed in higher-quality schools, measured as cumulative learning gains by third year after closure
Source: Deven Carlson and Stéphane Lavertu, “School Closures and Student Achievement: An Analysis of Ohio’s Urban District and Charter Schools,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (April 2015).
Or consider the similarly thorny question of financial oversight. Ladd asserts that “because charter schools are run by private organizations, they are not typically subject to the financial transparency requirements of government entities.” But of course, the same could be said of the for-profit and non-profit organizations that government contracts with in other sectors, from healthcare to housing and most definitely including traditional public-school systems. So is the point that those organizations should also face greater scrutiny? And if not, then what is the rationale for singling out their counterparts in the charter sector?
To be clear, bona fide fraud can and should be prosecuted. But it’s also a fact of life. For example, below is the U.S. Department of Justice’s account of the monies it has recovered in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government over the past twelve years.
Figure 4. False Claims Act recoveries by industry, 2010–2021
Source: “2021 Year-End False Claims Act Update,” Gibson Dunn, retrieved December 7, 2022. (Figure cites: “Fraud Statistics – Overview,” Department of Justice (February 1, 2022)).
Per the chart, the federal government loses billions of dollars to healthcare fraud every year. Yet almost nobody seems to think the Department of Health and Human Services or local health departments should run America’s hospitals and pharmacies.
Goal 3: “Limiting racial segregation and isolation”
This part of Ladd’s complaint has the most going for it. After all, the most comprehensive analysis to date found that charters do marginally increase racial segregation—at least at the school level—as does some of Ladd’s own research. So if there’s an intellectually honest argument against school choice in the United States, I suppose this is it.
Still, it’s worth bearing a few points in mind.
First, there is a huge moral difference between de facto and de jure segregation, especially when the former is partly attributable to the choices of Black and Brown families, as it is in charters.
Second, the current district system is already highly segregated at the school level, and even traditional public schools that are diverse on paper can feel segregated in practice.
Third, the fact that the typical district system links the education and housing markets tends to exacerbate residential segregation, which also seems to be harmful to racial minorities. So any policy that breaks this link could do some good on the housing front.
And finally, a small but growing percentage of charter schools are diverse by design, meaning they use some combination of strategic location, targeted recruitment, and “weighted lotteries” that prioritize economically disadvantaged kids to create a desirable mix of students.
Figure 5. Growth of intentionally diverse charters1994–2014
Note: To my knowledge, this is the most recent version of this figure, although the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition currently claims 227 schools as members.
Source: Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick, “Diverse-by-Design Charter Schools,” The Century Foundation (May 15, 2018) (figure cites the National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics).
In my opinion, both the charter school movement and the country would benefit from the creation of more such schools, which haven’t received the kind of attention and investment that KIPP and other networks have benefitted from, despite a decent track record. But of course, parents can’t be forced to apply to racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. So when push comes to shove, it’s unlikely that charters or other forms of school choice can actually solve the larger problem. But then, neither has the rest of American public education in the nearly three-quarters of a century since Brown v. Board of Education.
Goal 4: “Attending to child poverty and disadvantage.”
Here’s where Ladd’s memo exhibits the most transparent and (frankly) indefensible bias. To wit:
Conceivably… the most effective charters could be the ones in urban areas serving disadvantaged students who otherwise would have attended low-quality neighborhood schools. Indeed, careful empirical studies of charter schools in the cities of Boston, Newark, and New York provide some support for that possibility. Moreover, a 2015 study of charter schools in urban regions also painted a more positive picture for urban charter schools than for those in other areas. That study made it clear, however, that despite their successes in some cities, charter schools in many urban areas were no more effective than the district schools in those areas [emphasis added].
Actually, the 2015 study referenced in the passage found that charters significantly outperformed traditional public schools in reading in twenty-six cities (i.e., “some”), while performing no better or significantly worse in fifteen cities (i.e., “many”). In math, charters significantly outperformed traditional public schools in twenty-three cities, while performing similarly in eight and significantly worse in ten.
Furthermore, the very same study found particularly large gains for poor and/or traditionally disadvantaged students who attended charters. Specifically:
Across all urban regions, Black students in poverty receive the equivalent of 59 days of additional learning in math and 44 days of additional learning in reading compared to their peers in TPS. Hispanic students in poverty experience the equivalent of 48 days of additional learning in math and 25 days of additional learning in reading in charter schools relative to their peers in TPS.
Seems like a pretty defensible way to attend to “child poverty and disadvantage.” And that’s before we get to all the other research on charter performance that Ladd doesn’t cite. Or the fact that said performance continues to improve. Or the overwhelming likelihood that charters would perform even better if they were more equitably funded. Or the ever-growing literature on their competitive effects, which suggests that their presence also tends to boost achievement in traditional public schools.
Somehow, there wasn’t space for any of those points in a twenty-one-page memo on charters’ relationship to “good education policymaking.” But that’s why we have opportunities to respond.
The “soft bigotry of low expectations” is back in the news, due to the recent passing of the great Mike Gerson, the speechwriter who is credited with crafting that phrase for then-presidential candidate George W. Bush. Here’s the heart of the address where those words made their debut back in September 1999:
The movement I am talking about requires more than sound goals.
It requires a mindset that all children can learn, and no child should be left behind. It does not matter where they live, or how much their parents earn. It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. These circumstances are challenges, but they are not excuses. I believe that every child can learn the basic skills on which the rest of their life depends.
Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some say that schools can’t be expected to teach, because there are too many broken families, too many immigrants, too much diversity. I say that pigment and poverty need not determine performance. That myth is disproved by good schools every day. Excuse-making must end before learning can begin.
At the time, this call to hold all students to high standards was an assertion of common sense that had the benefit of ringing true. But since then, it has become an evidence-based practice, thanks to several studies looking at the relationship between teacher expectations and student outcomes. For example, one recent study found that high expectations boosted test scores of students in grade 4 through grade 8, and a recent Fordham-commissioned study detected lasting benefits for students whose teachers were tougher graders. Another one found that Black teachers hold higher expectations for Black students than white teachers do. That is especially the case for Black male students, and for math.
American University’s Seth Gershenson led several of those studies, including a recent one published by Fordham, The Power of Expectations in District and Charter Schools. Tapping federal surveys of teachers and students from fifteen to twenty years ago, he found that, in general, teachers in charter high schools were more likely to believe that their students will complete four-year college degrees than were their counterparts in traditional public schools, even after controlling for student background and achievement. Students in charter schools were also more likely to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.” And regardless of sector, teacher expectations had a positive impact on long-run student outcomes, including boosting the odds of college completion and reducing the chances of teen childbearing and going on welfare.
On its face, this story makes sense: Students do better when their teachers believe in them. Black students in particular do better when their teachers believe in them, which tends to be more the case when their teachers are themselves Black. This also happens more often in charter schools, both because most charters focus intentionally on high expectations, and perhaps because they tend to hire more Black teachers, too.
But if we probe deeper into the studies, it gets more complicated. After all, we don’t have any direct measures of “teacher expectations.” What we have are a few survey questions, which are linked to nationally representative samples of students, as well as tons of information about kids’ personal characteristics, backgrounds, and eventual outcomes in college and the real world.
And what sorts of questions do researchers ask teachers? The main one used for the latest analysis was, “How far in school do you expect this student to get?” To simplify the analysis, Gershenson collapsed responses into a binary indicator for “expects at least a four-year college degree.”
I am sure that this measure captures something about teachers’ views of their students. But we shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not about college completion per se, but as Gershenson explained on my podcast recently, it’s a stand-in for lots of things we care about:
I think that being optimistic about what a tenth grader might be able to do is different from pushing someone into college as a senior who is clearly not ready for it at that time. In that sense, the expectation of, “Do you expect so and so to go to college” as of the tenth grade, I view that more as a proxy for the teacher’s general attitude towards thinking optimistically; thinking the best of students; thinking that students can learn and overcome obstacles; and a proxy for a general belief that everybody is capable of succeeding.
That’s a relief because, since the question was asked (in the early 2000s), many of us have rethought our underlying assumptions about college. Is completing college necessarily “better” than not? To be sure, Americans earn more money with a college degree than without one. But as the cost of college has risen and the college wage premium has leveled off, especially in certain fields and certain geographic areas, the cost-benefit analysis has grown more complicated. For some kids, depending on their strengths and interests and where they want to live, a different sort of credential might be “better” than a college degree.
Furthermore, note that in Gershenson’s latest study—the one comparing charter and traditional public school teachers—charter teachers were found to be more optimistic about their students’ chances of completing college—but public school teachers were more likely to be right. In other words, they were better at predicting which of their tenth grade students would and wouldn’t actually go on to graduate from college.
Maybe that’s because the traditional public school teachers were older and had a better sense of just how hard it would be for their students to climb the mountain to college completion. To be sure, some of them might have succumbed to the soft bigotry of low expectations, but perhaps they were simply more realistic than those young, starry-eyed charter school teachers.
What’s remarkable, though, is that even with all of these caveats about the survey questions and the rest, Gershenson and others continue to find significant relationships between teachers’ answers and their students’ long-term outcomes, on average. So perhaps students really do fare better when placed with teachers who are optimistic, even a bit naïve, about their prospects.
Why should that be?
I don’t have any definitive answers. But on the podcast, my colleague David Griffith—himself a former charter school teacher—offered an explanation that made sense to me:
One takeaway is that a little irrational optimism is a good thing. But the word “proxy” is really important here regardless of what questions you ask. Expectations is a complicated word that could mean a lot of different things. We’re just not going to get a survey question that’s going to ask teachers exactly what their brain state is while they are teaching at-risk kids. You’ve got to ask these crude questions about college-going prospects or “does your teacher believe in you.” These are all things that are probably correlated with what we’re trying to get at, which is this unwillingness to accept failure on the part of the teacher—dare I say, a “no-excuses” mindset—that all good teachers have, that is, frankly, a little irrational.
… What matters is you willingly suspending disbelief. It’s almost double-think, in all honesty. There’s the part of your brain that knows what’s probably going to happen, and then there’s the part of your brain that teaches. I think it’s really healthy and important for teachers to turn one side of their brain off when they go through the classroom door and think with the other part of their brain.
Based on my own experiences with this sort of thing, this sounds about right. Irrationally suspending disbelief is not always the right approach for those making policy. (Setting wildly unrealistic goals can lead to all sorts of problems, as those of us who remember the No Child Left Behind era can attest.) But for teachers—especially those working with traditionally disadvantaged students—suspending disbelief is almost certainly better than succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Simply put, we want educators to look at the kids in front of them and believe that they can know and do more tomorrow than they did yesterday, and that it will matter for their future for years to come.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. You can subscribe on the Fordham Institute website and the newsletter’s Substack.
We have ample evidence that a number of education programs targeted at advanced students significantly improve their learning outcomes. Because of that, high-quality gifted education—or what would be better labeled “advanced education”—has two primary benefits. One, it helps maximize the potential of participating students, which is something every child deserves. And two, in better developing the talent of these advanced students, it supports America’s economic, scientific, and technological prowess in an increasingly competitive global market. It’s therefore important that more school leaders adopt these policies and implement them well.
As Jonathan Plucker, Julian C. Stanley Professor of Talent Development at Johns Hopkins University, explained in a Fordham Institute article a couple years ago, the two interventions with the most robust evidence behind them are acceleration and ability grouping—with enrichment, such as summer and residential programs, having generally positive results, too.
Acceleration is “an academic intervention that moves students through an educational program at a rate faster or at an age that is younger than typical,” reports the highly-respected Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa. It comes in at least twenty forms, with the most common being whole grade skipping and receiving higher-level instruction in a single subject. It is “one of the most-studied intervention strategies in all of education, with overwhelming evidence of positive effects on student achievement,” writes Plucker. One study that looked at approximately 100 years of research on the intervention’s impact on K–12 academic achievement, for example, found three meta-analyses showing that “accelerated students significantly outperformed their nonaccelerated same-age peers,” and three others showing that “acceleration appeared to have a positive, moderate, and statistically significant impact on students’ academic achievement.” The Belin-Blank Center also offers an excellent and thorough summary of the evidence related to acceleration.
Numerous high-quality studies have also found that flexible ability grouping—arranging students by academic achievement in the same or separate classrooms—is a net positive for advanced students and isn’t detrimental to their peers. The aforementioned review of a century of research, for example, looked at thirteen meta-analyses of ability grouping, and three models boosted outcomes: within-class grouping, cross-grade subject grouping, and special grouping for the gifted. Moreover, there seemed to be little downside for medium- and low-achieving students, and often upside. Research on curriculum models can also be placed under the ability-grouping umbrella, and “those studies suggest that pre-differentiated, prescriptive curricula lead to significant growth in advanced learning,” writes Plucker.
Because these interventions work, we ought to use them. Why? Because doing so benefits both the individual students and the country in general. Each and every child deserves an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures, and advanced students are no different. They have their own legitimate claim on our conscience, our sense of fairness, our policy priorities, and our education budgets.
What’s more, many of them also face such challenges as disability, poverty, ill-educated parents, non-English-speaking homes, and tough neighborhoods. Many also attend schools awash in low achievement, places where all the incentives and pressures on teachers and administrators are to equip weak pupils with basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Such schools understandably invest their resources in boosting lower achievers. They’re also most apt to judge teachers by their success in doing that and least apt to have much to spare—energy, time, incentive, or money—for students already above the proficiency bar.
It’s advanced students from these disadvantaged and oft-marginalized backgrounds who most need these programs—but they’re also the least likely to have access to them. A Fordham study in 2018 called Is There A Gifted Gap? found, for example, that White students constitute 47.9 percent of the student population but 55.2 percent of those enrolled in advanced learning programs, while the comparable figures for Black students are 15.0 and 10.0 percent, and for Hispanic students, 27.6 and 20.8 percent. And these forces contribute to widening gaps as they progress through grades. Those latter student groups are 49 and 23 percent less likely, respectively, to participate in Advanced Placement than their peers, and 62 percent and 51 percent less likely, respectively, to take part in International Baccalaureate courses when attending a school that offers them. Better-designed programming for advanced students in more places, implemented well, would help change that.
The second big reason for more and better advanced education interventions is that the country needs these children to be highly educated to ensure its long-term competitiveness, security, and innovation. They’re the young people most apt to become tomorrow’s leaders, scientists, and inventors, and to solve our current and future critical challenges. The same point was framed in different words in the 1993 federal report titled National Excellence: A Case for Developing America’s Talent: “In order to make economic strides,” the authors wrote, “America must rely upon many of its top-performing students to provide leadership—in mathematics, science, writing, politics, dance, art, business, history, health, and other human pursuits.”
But the U.S. and its schools have long underperformed many of our competitor countries, according to two respected international metrics: the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), in which dozens of countries participate. PISA tests fifteen-year-olds in math, science, and reading, and organizes its scores into seven levels, from 0 to 6, with high scorers generally being those who reach level 5 or 6. TIMMS assesses fourth and eighth graders in math and science and splits its scores into five levels, with a high achiever judged as one who reaches at least 625 on the relevant scales.
Using these cutoffs on the most recent math assessments—2018 for PISA and 2019 for TIMSS—illustrates the magnitude of the problem.
In the TIMSS results, the U.S. ranks eleventh in grade four and eighth in grade eight. In both, America landed behind Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Russia. Worse, the top-performing countries have two, three, and in the case of Singapore, almost four times the proportion of advanced students as does the U.S. The only silver lining is that many of these countries are small. America’s vast scale means that we have a decently large number of high achievers in raw numbers.
PISA paints an even worse picture for high-achieving high school students in the U.S., mirroring our dismal NAEP results for twelfth-graders. Rankings include all members of the OECD that took the assessment, plus Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and a quartet of Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang). That’s a total of forty jurisdictions. The United States comes in thirty-fourth, behind all participants in Asia and every participant in Europe except Spain, Turkey, and Greece.
The problem, of course, is not that the United States lacks smart children. It’s that such kids aren’t getting the education they need to realize their potential, allowing other countries like China to forge ahead. Using other international test data, for example, economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann estimate that a “10 percentage point increase in the share of top-performing students” within a country “is associated with 1.3 percentage points higher annual growth” of that country’s economy, as measured in per-capita GDP. Which is to say, if the U.S. propelled more of its young people into the ranks of high achievers, it would be markedly more prosperous—with faster growth, higher employment, better wages, and all that comes with these. As the United States faces ever-steepening economic competition from China and elsewhere—not to mention mounting challenges to our national security and wellbeing, including climate change, intergenerational poverty, growing partisanship, and much more—the stakes are high and rising.
The good news is that we have evidence-based methods for reversing these trends: acceleration, ability grouping, and enrichment programs. When well-designed and carefully implemented, these interventions have long proven to boost the achievement of advanced students. This in turn gives these young people the education they deserve, and helps ensure American competitiveness, prosperity, and security for future generations. Sadly, far too many schools don’t offer these services or don’t implement them well, and there’s a misguided push to eliminate them in more places. Instead, more districts should adopt them—the sooner the better.
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QUOTE OF NOTE
“A group of U.S. children could be set up for failure, despite the fact that they have a notable academic advantage over their peers. Gifted children fall victim to a belief shared by parents, educators, and legislators alike that they ‘will be fine on their own.’”
“When the ‘gifted’ kids aren’t all right,” Deseret News, Addison Whitmer, November 22, 2022
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THREE STUDIES TO STUDY
“Who Is Considered Gifted From a Teacher’s Perspective? A Representative Large-Scale Study,” by Jessika Golle, Trudie Schils, Lex Borghans, and Norman Rose, Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 1, 2023
“Teachers play important roles in identifying and promoting gifted students. An open question is: Which student characteristics do teachers use to evaluate whether a student is gifted or not? We used data from a representative sample of Dutch primary school teachers (N = 1,304) who were asked whether or not they thought the students (N = 26,720) in their class were gifted. We investigated students’ cognitive and noncognitive attributes as well as demographic factors that might be relevant for this judgment. In sum, the findings revealed that teachers considered students to be gifted when, in comparison with their peers, students were superior in cognitive domains, especially with respect to academic achievement, scored higher on openness to experience and lower on agreeableness, were male, were younger, and came from families with higher parental education.”
“Promises, Pitfalls, and Tradeoffs in Identifying Gifted Learners: Evidence from a Curricular Experiment,” by Angel H. Harris, Darryl V. Hill, and Matthew A. Lenard, Annenberg Institute at Brown University, July 2022
“Disparities in gifted representation across demographic subgroups represents a large and persistent challenge in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we measure the impacts of a school-wide curricular intervention designed to address such disparities. We implemented Nurturing for a Bright Tomorrow (NBT) as a cluster randomized trial across elementary schools with the low gifted identification rates in one of the nation’s largest school systems. NBT did not boost formal gifted identification or math achievement in the early elementary grades. It did increase reading achievement in select cohorts and broadly improved performance on a gifted identification measure that assesses nonverbal abilities distinct from those captured by more commonly used screeners. These impacts were driven by Hispanic and female students. Results suggest that policymakers consider a more diverse battery of qualifying exams to narrow disparity gaps in gifted representation and carefully weigh tradeoffs between universal interventions like NBT and more targeted approaches.”
“The Experience of Parenting Gifted Children: A Thematic Analysis of Interviews With Parents of Elementary-Age Children,” by Jodi L. Peebles, Sal Mendaglio, and Michelle McCowan, Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 1, 2023
“This qualitative study aimed to delve deeply into the phenomenon by interviewing parents of elementary-age gifted children. We conducted 12 interviews with parents whose children attended gifted schools. The interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify key themes related to the experience of parenting gifted children. Themes identified included the parents’ description of a “child-driven” approach to parenting, experiencing social isolation due to a lack of understanding, and physical and emotional feelings of exhaustion. The findings are particularly important for parents of gifted children, and other professionals who would benefit from a better understanding of the day-to-day experience of raising gifted children.”
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WRITING WORTH READING
“Does growth mindset matter? The debate heats up,” Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay, December 5, 2022
“From a formerly gifted and talented kid, now burnt-out adult: Slow down and take care of yourself,” The Flat Hat, Vivian Hoang, December 5, 2022
“Teens embrace AP class featuring Black history, a subject under attack,” Washington Post, Sydney Trent, December 2, 2022
“NYC’s ‘gifted and talented’ application timeline moves up,” Chalkbeat, Michael Elsen-Rooney, November 30, 2022
“Should your child take AP or IB classes? It could save them thousands in tuition.” Green Bay Press-Gazette, Danielle DuClos, November 29, 2022
“Schools for gifted students: What to know,” U.S. News, Andrew Warner, November 29, 2022
“Michigan to start notifying parents of AP eligibility,” News-Herald, Matthew Fahr, November 24, 2022
“When the ‘gifted’ kids aren’t all right,” Deseret News, Addison Whitmer, November 22, 2022
“$1.5 million NSF award will power scholarships and support for high-achieving, low-income engineering students,” Temple Now, Sarah Frasca, November 18, 2022
“We need to rethink gifted and talented education in NC,” The Daily Tar Heel, Georgia Roda-Moorhead, November 15, 2022
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can states remove policies barriers that are keeping educators from reinventing high schools?” Learn more.
Changing state policies alone won’t reinvent high schools. There’s no clearer evidence than the fact that dozens of states have already created policy flexibilities specifically with the hope of seeing more K–12 schools offering customizable learning experiences connected to career paths and civic life. Plus, many colleges already don’t require SATs or even traditional transcripts. But these conditions haven’t yet translated into a flood of high schools reinventing the adolescent student experience.
At a recent meeting of state leaders focused on innovation, I was struck by how many leaders were celebrating policy wins that expanded flexibility and incentives for innovation. I was also struck by how many lamented the small number of districts actually taking advantage of these flexibilities to create radically more relevant, joyful, and engaging student experiences. Why aren’t more high schools seizing the opportunities provided by new policies?
One reason is that districts don’t know about policy flexibilities. Take Stephanie DiStasio, who leads personalized learning initiatives at the South Carolina Department of Education. She explained that when she was a principal, she believed herself to be a “loophole ninja,” collaborating with district leaders and other principals and puzzling together policy workarounds. When she joined the state agency, she was surprised—and frustrated—to learn that policies already existed to enable much of the personalized instructional model her district had been pursuing.
But if some districts don’t know the policy flexibilities exist, just as many don’t know how to take advantage of them. Sometimes that’s because states require districts to apply for multiple regulatory waivers with little guidance to navigate opaque criteria in state rules or laws. Other times, state leaders told me, they receive countless applications for waivers and other flexibilities but no accompanying vision or model of what a transformed student experience would actually look like.
Some districts don’t want to take advantage of flexibilities. One state leader reported that his biggest challenge is “schools, themselves, moving beyond the status quo and traditional norms.” Like democracy, marriage, or capitalism, “school” is governed and constrained by beliefs, values, and norms, more than laws alone. Plenty of school and district employees are comfortable with the current set of rules and don’t spend their free time—the little they have—questioning the fundamental structure of high schools. And even though charter schools are subject to fewer state education laws than traditional schools, new charter high schools tend to mimic the systems of regular comprehensive high schools.
Lastly, districts not acting on the potential for innovation are often responding to their communities. Leaders who hope to shepherd transformative changes to high schools fear running into a metaphorical electric fence when they suggest changing how, what, or where students learn and teachers teach. Many administrators have recently endured fierce community pushback to changes in curriculum and other school policies, especially those perceived as related to race, culture, and sexuality. Proposing to challenge parents’ and students’ durable ideas about what high school looks like—GPAs, sports, physics class—can feel politically or even emotionally untenable. In one comprehensive high school CRPE is studying, where career exploration and learning across traditional subject boundaries is becoming the norm, some parents are concerned that the school isn’t traditionally academic enough to attract colleges’ attention to their kids’ applications. This is despite the fact that many colleges have begun to accept a so-called “mastery transcript,” which provides evidence of a student’s mastery of a set of skills and content areas, rather than traditional grades.
Kids and families also end up developing ideas about what kinds of students go to unconventional schools, and those ideas don’t always match up with what they hope for themselves. In another CRPE study, parents told us that they felt a different kind of school wasn’t designed “for them,” even if they found it attractive. Some of the most unconventional, creative public schools I’ve visited, like Opportunity Academy in Holyoke, Massachusetts, are alternative schools that still carry a stigma of being only for failures and drop-outs.
Changing state policy is necessary, but not sufficient, to reinvent high schools. State and district leaders, as well as advocates, need to invest in institutional change.
Institutional change requires engaging and listening deeply to a broad coalition of community members to design a shared vision for the purpose and outcomes of high school. Communities can create a “portrait of a graduate” at the state level, as Utah has done, or at the district or school level, as many communities in New England are doing. In our research in New England, CRPE is finding that a coherent vision for graduate success can make it easier to convert creative experiments—such as adaptations during the pandemic—into more durable changes in the design of high schools.
Parents, teachers, and communities also need exposure to schools that have already reinvented the learning experiences of adolescents and teenagers. There’s not one big, dramatic solution that should be applied to all schools. Instead, states and districts need to listen for what parents, students, educators and employers actually want, then expose them to current examples of schools delivering on those expectations. Along with Transcend, an education nonprofit, CRPE is tracking more than 150 innovative high schools to make it easier for educators and leaders to learn about where promising work is underway.
And when a high school redesign is underway or in its early stages, state and district leaders must actively buffer the school from the magnetic pull of the status quo. That means publicly supporting the school’s deviation from conventional policies, and communicating openly about why the school’s unconventional approach is worthwhile. To pursue radical new visions, organizational management experts recommend creating autonomous spaces for innovative high school models to develop. At the same time, as these schools begin to show results, leaders must champion how those results align with the community’s shared vision for graduate success, lest innovative schools remain isolated or stigmatized as “not for my kid.”
State leaders must also more clearly communicate existing policy flexibilities and make it easier for schools to take advantage of them. In South Carolina, a recent legislative change allowed the state to approve district-wide flexibilities, rather than requiring individual schools to piece together waivers. The state agency also offers guidebooks and live coaching to help districts develop applications. In states where flexibilities either don’t exist or are difficult to attain, leaders should convene initiatives, as Nevada has done, to audit existing policies and recommend flexibilities that enable the pursuit of new school models.
Lastly, states should pair policy flexibilities with more funding and support for innovative schools and districts. In Arizona, for example, A for Arizona has distributed millions of dollars from public and private sources to support K–12 innovation. South Carolina helps its districts innovate by providing design workshops, school visits, and peer-to-peer support.
There’s no question that outdated rules like credit hours, course requirements, and subject-specific licensure reinforce the status quo. But the sobering truth is that institutionalism—not policy—is the bigger barrier to overcome.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can states remove policies barriers that are keeping educators from reinventing high schools?” Learn more.
The key to improving American high schools lies in allowing the field and families to lead the charge. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, for instance, allowed educators to create small high schools and closed underperforming ones. Bloomberg’s administration opened 656 new schools (142 of which were charter schools) and closed 96. MDRC, an educational and social policy nonprofit organization, conducted a random assignment evaluation of the small school program, finding:
Those findings show that the schools, which serve mostly disadvantaged students of color, continue to produce sustained positive effects, raising graduation rates by 9.5 percentage points. This increase translates to nearly 10 more graduates for every 100 entering ninth-grade students. These graduation gains can be attributed almost entirely to Regents diplomas attained, and the effects are seen in virtually every subgroup in these schools, including male and female students of color, students with below grade level eighth-grade proficiency in math and reading, and low-income students.
In addition, the best evidence that currently exists suggests that these small high schools may increase graduation rates for two new subgroups for which findings were not previously available: special education students and English language learners. Finally, more students are graduating ready for college: the schools raise by 6.8 percentage points the proportion of students scoring 75 or more on the English Regents exam, a critical measure of college readiness used by the City University of New York.
New York City’s small school initiative succeeded, but sadly the short attention spans of philanthropists and policymakers got distracted. The success of smaller schools, however, is not limited to the New York program, or to high school. Arizona saw a net increase of 1,221 public schools in the year before the advent of charter schools in 1995 and the 2020–21 school year. The average public school size fell from 649 to 471 during this period, and the state also adopted policies to allow students to attend private schools (which tend to be smaller).
Disentangling competitive effects from small school impacts lies beyond the limited powers of your humble author, but something went right. When the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, however, linked student testing data from across the country for grades 3–8, the results looked very favorable for Arizona. Arizona had the highest statewide rate of academic growth for poor students, and Maricopa County had the highest rate of academic growth for poor students among the top 100 counties nationwide (see Figure 1).
Just to be clear, this means that Arizona students learned faster than students elsewhere, not that they had the highest test scores. As a state with a majority-minority student population and the holder to the short end of a number of achievement gap sticks, a faster rate of academic growth is needed to close gaps. If I wanted to be cruel, I would dig up spending per pupil in Maricopa County to that in Baltimore, but that would constitute bad sportsmanship.
Figure 1. Academic growth rate for economically disadvantaged students in the 100 largest American counties, 2008–18
Source: Stanford Educational Opportunity Project.
American families have been moving on the small-school agenda faster than policymakers. Years before the outbreak of Covid-19, homeschool co-ops began to take hold, including in places like Silicon Valley. In early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit America, and a Facebook group called “Pandemic Pods” created a remarkable example of spontaneous order.
A study by Tyton Partners found that more than 15 percent of families switched their children’s school for the 2020–21 academic year. Charter schools, homeschooling, learning pods, and microschools all realized net increases. The net impact of all of these trends was towards smaller learning communities. The pandemic catalyzed the growth of supplemental learning pods (a cohort of students gathering in a small group with adult supervision and outside the framework of their traditional physical or virtual classrooms) to learn, explore, and socialize.
Many of these parents went back to district schools when lockdowns ended, but others did not. All will carry with them the memory of their time in the education wild. While many deeply disliked impromptu Zoom schooling, others made some version of it work. Polls indicate large and as of yet unfilled yearning on the part of parents for a more flexible K–12 system.
A demand-driven system will embrace and replicate schools that work and discard those that fail to produce. A top-down political system has (predictably) failed to perform this task. Families pursuing the interests of their children will succeed in driving progress. Expanding the opportunities for them to pursue happiness in small, tight-knit communities represents an appealing and productive future.
Finally, American families have ways to shrink public school enrollment besides creating small schools. They unfortunately implemented one of those in 2007 with the advent of a Baby Bust, the leading edge of which has entered the high school grades. The National Center for Education Statistics projects declines in public school enrollment in all but a small number of states. Like it or not, the status quo is not an option, but a more vibrant and pluralistic education system can be co-created by educators and families.
Of the three main postsecondary pathways for American high school graduates—college enrollment, job employment, and military enlistment—the last is arguably least studied in terms of outcomes for those who follow it. A team of analysts led by West Point’s Kyle Greenberg helps fill the void with newly-published research drawing on thirty years of data. Does military service increase opportunity? Does it reduce racial inequality? We might well expect it to, as the stable income and generous benefits (free college tuition among them), skill-building opportunities, and veteran networks for those who serve would seem to be valuable boosts into the middle class and beyond. But long stints separated from family, exposure to combat, and possible permanent injury, disability, or mental health challenges could mitigate or entirely erase any positives accruing from service.
Greenberg and his team use data on the universe of Active Duty Army applicants from 1990–2011, exploiting two different cutoff points on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which all applicants are required to take. The Army generally rejects applicants with AFQT scores below the 31st percentile of national math and verbal ability, often requires applicants to score in the 50th percentile or higher to receive enlistment bonuses, and sometimes requires GED recipients to achieve a score in the 50th percentile or higher. Using applicants’ first AFQT scores on file, the researchers find that crossing the 31 and 50 AFQT cutoffs increases the probability of enlistment by 10 and 6 percentage points, respectively. The researchers leverage these cutoffs to estimate the effects of enlistment on earnings and related outcomes for individuals just above and below those cutoffs. Administrative data come from IRS, National Student Clearinghouse, Social Security Administration, and Department of Veterans Affairs records, and are so extensive that Greenberg and his team are able to estimate the direct, causal effect of service not just on earnings and employment, but also on educational attainment, mortality, disability compensation, and more.
Applicants during this period numbered 2.6 million. Overall, they were young (20.7 years) and mostly male (78 percent), and the vast majority (93 percent) had not yet attended college. Compared to the general population, they were more likely to be Black (21 versus 15 percent); less likely to be Hispanic (11 versus 15 percent); and more likely to come from disadvantaged counties in terms of household income, employment, and measures of intergenerational mobility. Applicants came from families with approximately 15 percent lower median income than in a comparable national random sample over the same period.
The applicant sample with AFQT scores close to the two cutoff points comprised about two-thirds of the full population, i.e., 1.8 million individuals. Compared to the full population of applicants, those in the sample have lower average AFQT scores (42 versus 52), are more likely to be Black (26 percent versus 21 percent), and are less likely to have attended college (4 percent versus 7 percent). The average applicant who ultimately served in the Army did so for 4.8 years, which appears to impact the robustness of the outcomes.
Greenberg and his team find that enlisting in the Army increases average annual earnings by over $4,000 in the nineteen years following application. (That’s so at both cutoffs.) The effects of service vary over time, with the largest effects observed in the first four years—that is, higher salaries while serving than they would likely earn in civilian jobs they can get with their age and experience—and smaller effects five to ten years after application. In the longer-term, eleven to nineteen years after application, increases are smaller and statistically insignificant for those at the lower AFQT cutoff and only marginally significant at the higher cutoff.
Short-run employment increases at both cutoff points, but enlistment has no long-run effect on employment at either. Army service, consistent with the generous education benefits provided, considerably increases college attendance at both cutoffs. Army service over the period had no impact on mortality; however, there are large increases in disability compensation. While this raises the monetary return of service in raw numbers, increased health risks can have other costs down the line and may explain some of the long-term effects on income.
However, these general findings mask some far stronger outcomes for Black applicants. The researchers find that enlisting in the Army increases Black applicants’ annual earnings by $5,500 at the 31 AFQT cutoff and by $15,000 at the 50 AFQT cutoff eleven to nineteen years after application. Meanwhile, White applicants actually experience small earning losses at the lower cutoff, which rebound to small gains at the higher cutoff. In fact, compared to their counterfactual earnings trajectories in the sample, Army service closes nearly all of the Black-White earnings gap. Additional benefits which accrue for Black applicants more strongly include homeownership and marriage rates. In looking at mechanisms to explain the substantial positive outcomes for Black enlistees, Greenberg and his team note that Black servicemembers tend to serve longer than their White counterparts and have a higher probability of employment in high-paying industries and/or public service jobs nineteen years after enlisting.
These findings show that enlisting in the Army is a smart pathway for individuals near these AFQT cut-offs to follow. In the short term, their income prospects are far higher than in civilian life—and, as it currently stands, the concern of a higher mortality rate is not borne out. Both short- and long-term benefits accrue to Black enlistees even more strongly than their White peers. And to make sure that those benefits continue and grow following service, the longer an enlistee can serve, the better.
SOURCE: Kyle Greenberg et al., “Army Service in the All-Volunteer Era,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 2022).
A FutureEd report released earlier this year analyzes the problems facing early childhood education offerings across the country and how some states have tackled them. Written in part to address the devastating effects the pandemic had on enrollment in these programs, which dropped from 61 percent to 36 percent at the beginning of the 2020–21 school year, the report is also meant to serve as an example of how states can better align their often-fragmented childcare and prekindergarten data systems, as well as improve enrollment in early learning programs and strategically spend federal Covid-relief funds.
The report identifies three main issues facing early childhood education in most states, all of which existed well before the pandemic. First, these programs are often offered by several different agencies, causing data sharing and access to be an incredible hurdle to overcome, and forcing state organizations to rely on data-sharing agreements to track student information. According to the Data Quality Campaign, this lack of coordination has led most states to struggle with assessing basic metrics like student enrollment in early childhood programs at the district level. The report highlights how Virginia addressed this issue by unifying all publicly funded early childhood and K–12 education systems under the Virginia Department of Education and creating the Early Childhood Advisory Committee.
A second issue is states’ lack of means to measure the quality of these programs, leading to ineffective assessments of individual student needs. A separate FutureEd report from 2021 found that most states do not require their publicly funded early childhood programs to use universal quality measurements, with many states not having measurements at all. States that do collect these data usually don’t break it down by race or income, preventing crucial policies from carrying targeted effects. A 2019 study by the Education Trust showed no state with a system in place that could track data to measure students’ access to quality early childhood programs. Virginia is an outlier here, too, as it recently developed a system for measuring the quality of all early learning programs called Virginia Quality Birth to 5 (VQB5), and required that all publicly funded preschool classrooms serving four-year-olds administer the state’s composite kindergarten readiness assessment. This system allowed school leaders and state policymakers to identify students who will need more support as they enter elementary school and provide the necessary resources to make it happen. Likewise, this streamlined data sharing allowed for better coordination between services, a clearer picture of the pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, and more targeted funding to certain childcare subsidy programs to increase enrollment in early childhood programs.
Finally, only seventeen states and the District of Columbia have data systems that connect information on students from early childhood education through their entry into the workforce. These comprehensive systems, often referred to as P-20W data systems, include information on test scores, student demographics, attendance, grades, course enrollment, educator characteristics, school climate, funding information, and more. The report demonstrates that these systems are critical for the districts currently serving students, as well as state policymakers, as it allows for better identification of areas of need at the district and city level. For example, Massachusetts, with the help of a Seattle-based organization called 3SI, developed an index designed to identify marginalized children and calculate how well state funding targets them and their level of access to services. The system allows this information to be seen at the school or legislative district level, as well as by census tract. One final benefit of these comprehensive data systems is the data they provide researchers interested in basing studies in those states.
The report argues that these systemic improvements to data collection and sharing have provided a clearer picture for the states. This allows them to improve their prekindergarten and kindergarten enrollment rates, address the needs of their students as they leave elementary school, and target funding to areas of need, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
SOURCE: Lynn Olson, “Invisible Students: The Information Crisis In Early Education,” FutureEd (January 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith talk with Juliet Squire, Senior Partner at Bellwether, about a new initiative called Assembly, which is a deep dive into the idea of unbundling education services for all students. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber discusses a Teach For America study that examines how teacher-turnover rates affect student achievement.
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