The past two weeks have seen a growing ruckus over big changes in the Head Start regs that are reportedly nearing completion by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
The past two weeks have seen a growing ruckus over big changes in the Head Start regs that are reportedly nearing completion by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First reported by Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark on July 19 and amplified via weekend coverage by The NewsHour and The New York Times, it appears that the 120+ pages of regulations that now govern this popular, 60-year-old federal program will be slashed to a dozen or so. Among the big scrap pile will be extensive specifications of standards, goals, and curricula focused on getting these low-income preschoolers ready for reading and math in kindergarten and beyond.
Those learning expectations are numerous and quite specific. For example, operators of Head Start programs today are supposed to ensure that a child reaching his fifth birthday “Counts and answers ‘How many?’ questions for approximately 10 objects” and “understands that each successive number name refers to a quantity that is one larger.” In the literacy realm, expectations for that age include the early stages of phonics, such as “Names 18 upper- and 15 lowercase letters,” “knows the sounds associated with several letters,” and “produces the beginning sound in a spoken word, such as ‘Dog begins with /d/.’"
Many pages later, we find elements of assessment, individualization, and possible accountability; the regs say that a Head Start program must “conduct standardized and structured assessments, which may be observation-based or direct, for each child that provide ongoing information to evaluate the child’s developmental level and progress in outcomes aligned to the goals described in the Head Start Early Learning Child Outcomes Framework: Ages Birth to Five. Such assessments must result in usable information for teachers, home visitors, and parents and be conducted with sufficient frequency to allow for individualization within the program year.”
I supply this detail—there’s vastly more—as background for three points about the forthcoming deregulation.
First, Head Start is undoubtedly over-regulated! Over its six decades, rules and specifications have been affixed to every possible realm of program operations like barnacles encrusting the hull of an aging ship. The education bits are a tiny fraction of a vast rulebook. The rules specify, for example, that:
A center-based program must have at least 35 square feet of usable indoor space per child available for the care and use of children (exclusive of bathrooms, halls, kitchen, staff rooms, and storage places) and at least 75 square feet of usable outdoor play space per child.
Complying with all that stuff is expensive, too. Between 2007 and 2025, the Head Start appropriation rose from $6.9 to $12.3 billion even as enrollments fell from a million youngsters to about 715,000.
So yes, some paring back of the regulatory burden is surely in order—as is clearer alignment of Head Start with state preschool programs. Back when Sargent Shriver conceived it as part of LBJ’s War on Poverty, few states had such programs—and some shunned the neediest (and least white) kids—so Head Start was born as and has remained a self-contained island, a direct grant program from HHS (formerly OEO and HEW) to individual program operators all over the place. It’s surely past due for modernization, simplification, decentralization, innovation, and local coordination.
Second, getting serious education targets, standards, and curricula into Head Start was a hard-won victory that wasn’t really sealed into law until 2007, when (as with NCLB) a bipartisan compromise between the Bush 43 team and Senator Ted Kennedy yielded a Head Start reauthorization that, for the first time, began to treat it as a pre-school endeavor as well as the “child development” program that it had always been. Getting to that point took more than 40 years because Head Start program operators and staff—many without college educations themselves—long fought such changes, as did some civil rights groups and a handful of early childhood “experts” and lobbyists. (That’s also why Head Start never became part of the Education Department.)
The 2007 legislation was a mixed bag, as the compromise also killed an assessment called the National Reporting System that the Bush team—notably Assistant HHS Secretary Wade Horn—had put in place to determine whether local Head Start programs were actually producing cognitive gains among their wee charges. It amounted to a worthy step forward for education combined with a backward step for program accountability.
Third—returning to the present—at a time when every known assessment of children’s “kindergarten readiness” shows immense shortcomings among half or more of America’s five-year-olds and when “universal preschool education” remains a potent political war-cry and policy objective, undoing the elements of Head Start (or any early-childhood program) that focus on cognition and school preparation in basic skills should strike any sentient being as folly.
I’m reminded of the days a year-and-a-half ago when Elon Musk’s DOGE emissaries, newly arrived at the Education Department, determined that their first targets should be in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES): the statistics, assessment, and research staffers and contracts that perform ED’s most fundamental (and least political) functions. As if their instructions were “do the greatest possible damage to American education as quickly as possible.”
The parallel isn’t far off. The geniuses behind Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation had urged that the Trump team eliminate Head Start as well as the Education Department. The new administration came close to zeroing out Head Start funding in its budget requests, eventually backing off—surely aware that Congress would continue funding this cherished program—while still attempting via regulation to trim its sails in various ways (such as not letting immigrant kids take part).
The big deregulatory initiative now in the works, much like farming out parts of ED to other agencies, is a way of minimizing something the White House and OMB’s Russell Vought can’t actually eradicate.
What’s weird for me today is that over the years I’ve repeatedly criticized Head Start for its failings on the education front. Just two years ago, in a chapter for AEI’s Doing Right by Kids volume, I wrote that:
The problem with Head Start (and many other “child development” programs) is that, despite its present-day assertion that it “promotes school readiness,” in reality it is not an education program. It does not employ qualified teachers in most of its highly decentralized centers, it does not have a curriculum, and to my knowledge, its providers are barely held to account for the cognitive gains of the children they serve.
This largely explains why, over the decades, evaluation after evaluation of the Head Start program has found that either it has minimal effect on those children’s cognitive outcomes or whatever effect it has dissipates during the early years of schooling. To be sure, such slippage is also due to elementary schools’ failure to capitalize on and sustain whatever initial gains the Head Start alumni arrived with. But the fact is that, despite modern-day tweaks, Head Start has never been much about actual kindergarten readiness on the cognitive or academic side. It has been more about the health and welfare—nutrition, dentition, and socialization—of deeply disadvantaged children. These are all good things to target, but this is not a formula for securing essential domains of school readiness.
I went on to urge policymakers to reconstitute Head Start as a full-fledged school readiness program.
So yes, it’s a tad awkward to find myself defending the present version. I’m not, actually. I sincerely believe that Head Start should be overhauled from top to bottom in service of preparing severely disadvantaged youngsters for success in school. In tandem with that, of course, the schools they enter need to be overhauled such that they build upon gains made by such readiness efforts.
But that’s not what the Trump administration is about with its Head Start plans. As usual, it’s more about destroying than building, ending rather than mending. Head Start needs deregulating, yes, but it also needs reconstituting.
During my years at TIME magazine, the newsroom had a rule of thumb: If something happens once, it’s news. Twice is a coincidence. Three times? That’s a trend.
We’re not quite at three, but within the span of 10 days, The Atlantic and The New York Times opinion sections published surprising essays in support of Texas’s much-debated statewide curriculum and mandated reading list. Neither piece embraced Texas politics or dismissed concerns about religion in public schools. But both did something remarkable that would have been hard to picture even a few months ago: They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.
In his Times op-ed, veteran journalist James Traub writes that Texas is right to insist that students encounter a common body of important texts, including the Bible. Invoking E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s work on cultural literacy, he notes that we become good readers “by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text.” He praises Texas for moving away from a skills-based, content-neutral approach to reading instruction.
Similarly, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch’s essay for The Atlantic argues that “for a high school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.” He points out, for example, the value of the Psalms for understanding Lincoln’s speeches or the Book of Jonah for reading Moby-Dick.
Having spent two decades in the news business, I can attest that it would be easier, and surely more gratifying to the mostly left-leaning readership of both publications had each opted instead to publish yet another story about Texas’s “Bible-infused” curriculum or the supposed attempt by fundamentalists and right-wingers to sneak religious content into schools under the cover of a state-approved English language arts curriculum.
Instead, both the Times and The Atlantic put before readers the possibility that Texas’s curriculum architects and defenders (including yours truly) have been making a serious educational argument all along: that the Bible, along with Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, and other canonical works, is not being taught as religious doctrine but as part of the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge that undergirds reading comprehension and that literate adults draw upon, often unconsciously, to make sense of literature, history, political rhetoric, and the English language.
I don’t want to overstate the case—remember, it takes three to make a trend—but it’s hard not to wonder if something remarkable is afoot. Call it a vibe shift, or perhaps simply a new sobriety about reading and what it will take to arrest its long decline.
Perhaps there is a third data point: The Atlantic’s current print edition cover story laments the decline of reading itself. Staff writer Rose Horowitch observes that Americans are reading dramatically less than they once did. She notes, almost in passing, that we are now more likely to spend leisure time gambling than reading books—a statistic that would have sounded absurd a generation ago. Hers is more than the elite hand-wringing of the ink-stained literati. Horowitch sees the decline of sustained reading as a civilizational risk, threatening not just literacy but the habits of attention, reflection, abstraction, and reasoned argument on which a literate culture—and ultimately democratic self-government—depends. “What’s at risk,” she writes, “is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself.”
Horowitch’s essay has been among the most discussed articles of the summer. It follows a steady drumbeat of similar pieces rehearsing a familiar parade of horribles: Reading achievement has declined. Teachers and college professors report that students struggle to complete whole books. Reading stamina is collapsing as smartphones compete relentlessly for kids’ attention. Artificial intelligence makes it easier for students to produce the appearance of having read without necessarily reading—or thinking—very much at all.
When you’re no longer confident that schools are producing capable readers at all, old arguments about what children should read—and how they should be taught to read—begin to sound different. If you’re honest and fair, you become open to other ideas.
The change in mood has been building for several years, ever since Emily Hanford began publishing and broadcasting her series of public radio reports on the failure of American schools to align instruction with the “science of reading.” Hanford didn’t discover anything new or novel about how children learn to read. Cognitive scientists, reading researchers, dyslexia advocates, and a determined minority of teachers had been accumulating evidence for decades that many accepted classroom practices rested on surprisingly weak foundations. But her reporting, culminating in the popular series Sold a Story, asked a devastatingly simple question: If we already know a great deal about how children learn to read, why aren’t schools teaching them that way? Many states responded by passing laws mandating instruction and teacher training grounded in learning science. School districts abandoned balanced literacy. Parents who had never heard the phrase “three-cueing” suddenly knew exactly what it meant and why it’s not a very good way to learn to read. Lawmakers banned the practice in more than a dozen states.
All of this has done more than change reading instruction. It has also made it respectable, on both sides of the political aisle, to wonder whether education orthodoxy is often wrong. It helped that Hanford’s landmark reporting ran on public radio, which tends to enjoy revered status on the left. If the teaching profession can be shown to have been misled about something as basic as teaching kids to decode, what else might they be mistaken about?
For years, much of American education had tremendous confidence in a child-centered, pedagogically progressive vision of literacy. (In this context, “progressive” refers to an educational philosophy, not political affiliation or policy stance.) Students would become readers through authentic encounters with books. Choice would foster engagement. Reading comprehension was treated as a transferable skill. Teachers would facilitate rather than prescribe. Students would construct meaning rather than receive it.
The work of journalists like Horowitch and Hanford, along with declining NAEP scores, has made the failure of these ideas difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. The science of reading offers insights that sit in tension with these long-dominant practices. The first phase of the science of reading movement focused, appropriately, on decoding or “phonics.” But now the conversation is shifting toward harder questions. Once students can decode, what enables them to understand what they read? The answer turns out to sound remarkably traditional—and prescriptive. Fluency. Vocabulary. Background knowledge. Familiarity with canonical texts. The very things that education spent years deemphasizing have returned to the center of the discussion. Indeed, there’s rising interest in classical education, with its emphasis on the Great Books and old-school pedagogy. That doesn’t mean every item on Texas’s reading list is beyond debate. It does suggest, however, that confidence in the educational assumptions of the last two or three generations has begun to ebb.
It is fair to wonder if we are approaching the end of education’s postmodern moment—its rejection of a fixed canon, deference to students’ personal interests, and fixation on “culturally relevant” curriculum. Neither Derrida nor Foucault has never been K–12 faculty lounge staples, but to have been a teacher in the last several decades has invariably meant acculturating oneself to a broad and largely unquestioned educational sensibility that is “student centered,” skeptical of authority, and allergic to prescription. Common curricula yielded to student choice. Knowledge yielded to skills. The canon yielded to personalization. Teaching itself yielded to facilitation: Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage. None of these shifts were ill-intended. But in the aggregate, they conspired to enshrine a deep suspicion of the idea that adults should decide what children ought to know.
Accuse me of wish-casting and I won’t argue the point, but I detect a change in the weather. The shift isn’t toward traditionalism or conservatism per se. It’s simply less certain. It puts back in play many ideas that had long fallen into disfavor or been discarded:
Maybe adults really do have to decide some things for children.
Maybe students need to read books they would never choose on their own.
Maybe knowledge has to be deliberately sequenced and explicitly taught.
Maybe a common curriculum is not a tool of oppression but an instrument of democratic inheritance and equity.
I’m still not ready to declare a trend. Two opinion pieces, even in unlikely outlets, do not constitute an intellectual realignment. But there’s another lesson I learned in the news business: By the time everyone recognizes that a trend exists, it’s usually been underway for quite some time.
We’ve all visited those classrooms. They look like 30-gallon bags full of confetti, crepe paper, and Elmer’s glue exploded in the center. The bulletin boards are a mess of student work and neon posters, arts and crafts projects dangle from the ceiling, and groups of desks are buried in tassels and decorations.
Must a classroom be a confusing and unrelenting assault on the senses?
I admit that such an opening salvo leaves me vulnerable to accusations of wanton curmudgeonliness. Classrooms should certainly be welcoming, engaging places, and in light of rancid debates over curriculum, accountability, the role of the federal government, chronic absenteeism, declining test scores, and whatever complaint is currently raising the hackles of culture warriors left and right, why bemoan a construction-paper-happy classroom?
I understand that classroom organization and design isn’t the most important factor in school-level effects. Yet it matters. Improving test scores is an all-of-the-above affair. No hail-Mary solution will close achievement gaps and achieve universally high test scores. Rather, education reform requires an assemblage of blocks, tackles, end runs, and short passes. Teachers need guidance here, too.
I recall the prep days before my first year teaching, standing in an empty room, wondering about the minutiae of classroom design: Student desks in groups, rows, or pairs? Where do I put my own desk? How about the bookshelf? What should I put on the walls? Can I get a kidney table?
Research into such questions is sparse but informative. One study found that children were more distracted, off task, and demonstrated smaller learning gains when “walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed.” The results held when researchers observed students in actual classrooms, not just laboratories. Another study found students less able to complete cognitively demanding tasks in “high load visual environments.”
Too much distraction creates cognitive overload. Adults can relate. Driving on unfamiliar city streets, bustling through a busy airport with kids, or trying to read in chaotic places—each scenario presents so many stimuli to our senses that we struggle to focus. Likewise, “visual noise” in a classroom distracts students from the content of the lesson, making it more difficult to focus on what matters.
Research has also looked into the effects of seating arrangements. One older study found that when classrooms shifted from tables to rows, on-task behavior doubled, disruption decreased, and teachers provided more positive comments. A more recent review examined eight studies and concluded that “students display higher levels of appropriate behaviour during individual tasks when they are seated in rows, with disruptive students benefiting the most.”
And while this concern isn’t apt to show up in research, I wonder about the ROI of time invested. I watched colleagues labor over meticulously designed bulletin boards and highly decorated classrooms, staying late into the night. When curricular units changed, they repeated the ritual to overhaul their decorations. Wouldn’t their time be better used reflecting on and revising lesson plans, contacting homes, providing feedback, or simply leaving at a reasonable hour to spend time with their own families?
The final end of any classroom is academic instruction and learning. Thus, all decisions must be made to that end. Materials need to be easily accessible. Teachers must be able to move about freely without obstruction. And student attention should be directed towards the front where instruction occurs—not to their friends or a collage of posters and crepe paper.
Underneath the pull toward an over-decorated classroom is a prioritizing of engagement, activity, or even fun, not learning. This same tendency then manifests in classroom activities that prioritize glitter, glue, and razzmatazz over academic work. A teacher asks, “How can I engage my students today?” instead of “What are they going to learn and how can I best facilitate that?”
In the incessant push for engagement in schools, there needs to be a counterweight towards serious academic work. Mike Schmoker said it well:
Lessons need not be particularly elaborate or complex. Teachers can build them around versatile (but underappreciated) routine academic activities such as close reading, note-taking, discussions, and writing prompts about content.... Done right, these activities never become dull. Curriculum built around this core simplifies lesson planning and powerfully promotes students’ intellectual and expressive capacities.
Ideally, a classroom is orderly and free of needless distractions. Just as the famous admonition to writers from Strunk and White to “omit needless words” doesn’t mean one must always be brief or curt, just get rid of the excess, a well-ordered classroom isn’t barren and lifeless. Hang a framed painting from history, an author’s portrait, or the Declaration of Independence. Showcase the best student work on a bulletin board. Create word walls or useful anchor charts.
Obviously, I don’t expect replacing a “Dream Big, Be Kind, You Matter” pastel post with a framed portrait of Lincoln will cause fourth grade reading score on NAEP suddenly to rise. But it will signal to students that in this particular classroom, at least, the work of learning history, science, literature, and the arts is treated as a serious endeavor.
Few education interventions are more controversial than retention mandates, which require students to demonstrate minimal academic competence before moving on to the next grade. They are also some of the most well-studied, with a large body of research from a number of states—including Ohio—showing positive effects among students facing retention that persist for many years.
Now a new Ohio study led by American University professor (and former Fordham intern) Sarah Souders demonstrates that the benefits of retention requirements are even broader than previous research has suggested. It also points to an entirely different set of mechanisms through which these mandates boost student achievement, challenging narratives long embraced by both proponents and critics.
Ohio lawmakers dramatically watered down the state’s prior retention requirement in 2023. The evidence in the new study comes from the years just before this legislative change, and it starkly illustrates why weakening the retention mandate will have a significant negative impact on many more students than legislators may have anticipated at the time. The findings from the study provide compelling reasons to revisit that decision and illustrate how broader attacks on school accountability fundamentally misunderstand why high standards are necessary to ensure that all students can realize the full benefits of their academic potential.
Evidence from Ohio’s natural experiment
Until now, almost all of the research about grade retention has focused on the students most directly impacted by these requirements—those who were actually held back. These studies took advantage of discontinuities in test scores, comparing outcomes of students who barely scored high enough to avoid being retained to those of students who barely fell short of the promotion threshold.
Although this research pointed to positive effects, at least for short- and medium-term outcomes like test scores, one major limitation is that it could not tell us why retention mandates seemed to benefit students. Did spending an extra year relearning and strengthening core skills in lower elementary grades help weaker students perform better when they confronted more advanced material? Or did low scores on the tests used to make retention decisions unlock access to a variety of intensive support services and interventions available only to at-risk students—with these additional supports (rather than retention) producing improvements in subsequent achievement? Consistent with the second view, recent evidence from Michigan, which showed gains among students identified for retention but not ultimately retained, strongly suggested that the apparent benefits long attributed to students repeating a grade were actually not due to an extra year of instruction.
Repeating a grade and receiving additional interventions represent two possible mechanisms through which retention laws could boost student achievement. The new study points to yet a third possibility: The threat of retention is enough to produce significant gains. Since many more students face such a threat than ultimately end up getting retained, this means that many more students benefit from retention mandates than previously thought.
The main contribution of the new study is to convincingly separate the threat effect from the consequences of actual retention. It does so in an ingenious way, by taking advantage of a natural experiment built into Ohio’s standardized testing schedule.
Ohio students take the state English language arts assessment at least twice in third grade—in the fall and spring. Since a student’s highest score on these assessments was used to determine whether they were ultimately retained, researchers focused on students after the first round of tests in the fall. Specifically, they compared students who scored well enough to move on to fourth grade (regardless of how much they learned during the remainder of the school year) to students who had fallen just short of the promotion bar on their fall test and so continued to face the threat of retention.
Students facing the threat scored significantly better at the end of the year than those who performed just well enough in the fall to avoid the threat of retention—not only in language arts but also in math. And these positive effects, although fading modestly over time, remained significant through at least seventh grade.
Importantly, these benefits were not limited to the “bubble students” near the promotion threshold. The study showed gains in performance across the board after the adoption of the retention mandate.
Although the positive effects of facing a retention threat are smaller than found in prior studies focused on actual retention,[1] these estimates are almost certainly a lower bound of the full benefits created by accountability pressures. Under Ohio’s early literacy framework, students at risk of retention are identified starting in kindergarten, and school districts face a strong incentive to focus on improvement all through lower elementary grades. The new study captures only the additional threat that students face in third grade based on their performance on that year’s fall exam, not the cumulative benefits that begin in kindergarten.
Retention improves outcomes by changing adult behavior
Although much of the debate about retention laws has focused on impacts on students, the new evidence suggests that benefits come primarily from changing the behavior of two sets of adults—parents and educators.
Ohio’s original Third Grade Reading Guarantee required school districts to notify parents that their child faced the possibility of getting retained. These notifications almost certainly came as a shock to many parents. Recent surveys show that 90 percent of parents believe their children are performing at or above grade level, far higher than the proficiency rates recorded on state assessments. Learning that their child was struggling appears to have caused parents to increase their own effort, as demonstrated by improved school attendance levels in the new study. (Parents likely played a role in these improvements since third graders can’t drive themselves to school.)
The current, watered-down system still requires some parental notification, although it’s unclear whether information alone is sufficient to induce parental involvement without a credible retention threat.
Making parents take child’s academic struggles seriously has always been a struggle in public education. When districts proposed extending the school year to make up for time lost during pandemic-era school closures, many parents pushed back, upset about the possibility of having to reschedule long-planned vacations. Attendance at optional summer school and after-school tutoring is woeful, with students who most desperately need these interventions least likely to take advantage of them. When it comes to getting parents to take responsibility for their student’s learning, the real possibility that their child will be held back seems to accomplish what nagging, lecturing, and pleading cannot.
The evidence that the retention threat changes the behavior of teachers and schools is similarly indirect, but at least as powerful. First, the positive effects of the retention threat are largest for the subset of students whose performance most influences state report card ratings—those who were previously identified as not being on track to pass the third-grade reading test. Second, low performance on the fall state assessment causes schools to significantly increase the reading interventions they provide at the beginning of third grade to students at risk of retention. Such additional investments of time and effort not only improve reading but also appear to boost math scores. And third, the benefits of the retention threat are largest in schools with the most at-risk students, clearly showing that these schools are capable of improving performance through systemic changes without becoming overwhelmed.
The changes made to Ohio’s retention law several years ago dramatically weaken the incentives for both groups of adults. Parents must now choose to have their child retained—and schools hoping to avoid the hard work of helping these students can persuade parents that doing so is a terrible idea. The new system guts the threat effects, transforming the previous mandate with teeth into an opt-in program no different from the ones that have routinely failed to reach struggling students.
Rethinking accountability
Critics of retention laws have long complained that they disproportionately affect lower-income and minority students. The new research turns this argument on its head. Since few students are actually ever retained (even with a strict mandate), the law’s greatest impact is through the threat mechanism—which also disproportionately benefits the same disadvantaged student subgroups, including many who are successfully promoted by meeting state reading standards.
In the new study, for example, fewer than 2 percent of students whose fall third-grade score put them right above or below the promotion threshold were ultimately retained. But all of them faced the threat at some point, benefiting from the additional attention and investment from adults this set in motion.
This point is particularly important for contextualizing other recent research showing long-term negative impacts of retention on adult earnings and criminal justice involvement. Although these effects are potentially overstated—for technical statistical reasons—we should take even modest harms for retained students seriously. But we must also balance these harms with the positive effects generated by the retention threat that accrue to many more students.
Indeed, the findings from the Ohio study have a clear policy lesson: The ideal accountability system sets high standards and creates strong enough incentives for both students and adults to ensure that all students ultimately clear the bar, without having to suffer the consequences of retention.
Ohio’s original retention law wasn’t perfect, but it went a long way toward accomplishing these goals. It’s a shame lawmakers gutted it before the true evidence on the scale of its success became available.
Vladimir Kogan is a senior research fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a professor of political science at the Ohio State University. He is the author of the 2025 book No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids (Cambridge University Press).
[1] The recent Michigan study discussed above suggests that we should discount these large estimates because the technical statistical assumptions required to believe they capture the actual retention effect are clearly violated. As a result, previous findings about the positive effects of retention are probably massively inflated.
In a recent edition of his SCHOOLED newsletter, Mike Petrilli called on U.S. high schools to stop pretending to teach foreign languages.
Who decides whether they are taught at all?
According to a 2025 analysis in Foreign Language Annals, just ten states require credit or proficiency in a foreign language for graduation: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington. Three additional states—Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia—require courses for students pursuing an advanced diploma. Using NCES data from 2024, the researchers determined that 82 percent of high schools offer world language classes, along with 61 percent of middle schools and 20 percent of elementary schools.
Students, parents, and even teachers in many states may be surprised to see that their own state is not on the lists.
The scholars’ count of official state requirements understates how many American students are required to study a foreign language in practice, since requirements often flow through district- and school-level choices. In some places, like Maryland, foreign language or career and technical education electives both fulfill the same graduation requirement; for students in a traditional high school without a CTE program, they may effectively be required to take the language courses. Massachusetts currently lacks a state mandate, but the recommended and widely used MassCore curriculum requires two years of foreign language for high school students. That may soon become official: Earlier this summer, the group tasked with revising the state’s graduation requirements released recommendations to formally align with MassCore.
And as Mike hints at in SCHOOLED, many students take on foreign language courses because highly selective colleges consider the content area as the fifth core course. If you’re a high school student aiming for an Ivy, Ivy+, flagship state school, or elite liberal arts college, you should be taking at least four years of a foreign language if offered by your high school—regardless of your state’s graduation requirements.
There are reasons why elite schools want to see evidence of this type of learning, and it’s wrong to dismiss those reasons as irrelevant for all but the highest-performing students.
Studying a foreign language in school, even under suboptimal conditions, exposes kids to cultures outside their own. It can strengthen their understanding of the English language, particularly when introduced in the younger grades, and can boost standardized test scores for older students. Plus, language classes are among the only high school courses where spoken language portions are the norm for testing. You can’t AI your way through a conversation with your Spanish teacher.
Ideally, students shouldn’t wait until middle or high school to begin studying a new language. Just five states—Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Wyoming—have world language requirements beginning in elementary school, though only New Jersey retains the requirement through high school and only Louisiana outlines specific instruction time.
But there is an unintended consequence of introducing the study of foreign language so late in most American schools: It’s a subject where kids haven’t yet been sorted by ability. Some students who struggle in other subjects discover that they have a talent for learning languages at exactly the time many kids disengage from school.
For kids coasting along until things get real in advanced high school courses, the opportunity to accelerate in foreign language courses by beginning Spanish I or French I in middle school creates a rare and valuable academic challenge. Much attention is given to acceleration through math—and rightly so—but the goal of acceleration should be to give students the opportunity for productive struggle while support systems are in place, not to simply reach an academic milestone a year or two early. How many high-achieving students find themselves suddenly stuck for the first time, frustrated, in a class where they don’t understand (literally) what the teacher is saying? Providing the opportunity to work through this friction with guardrails in place is far better than waiting until the end of high school or midway through college, when the stakes are higher and there are fewer adults on hand to help.
It is true that mediocre instruction in high school foreign language classes could be time better spent on just about anything else—especially now that technology exists to translate in real time. But then, why learn long division when calculators exist to instantly solve problems? Why learn to read the written word when we have audiobooks? Why learn to write if AI can instantly craft a reasonably good essay?
School leaders are making tough decisions about their shrinking budgets, so subjects without graduation requirements or state tests are easy targets. And in our fractured political moment, with many Americans turning inward, engaging with a new culture is perhaps the easiest target of all. The timing might be right for skeptics to cut foreign language instruction, but the answer to mediocre teaching shouldn’t be no instruction at all. Instead, let’s think harder about why so few American students are successful in their courses and put more effort into teaching foreign languages well.
Congressman Josh Harder joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his push to revive the National Reading Panel and advance the READ Act. They consider whether a new panel could update the evidence base on reading instruction, how federal funding might encourage stronger implementation of science-of-reading reforms, and whether literacy could help rebuild a bipartisan federal role in education policy without repeating the mistakes of past reforms.
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study on how adding AP courses may affect school enrollment, socioeconomic integration, and academic tracking.
Recommended content:
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]
Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Introduction
Mike Petrilli [00:00]
Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.
I’m your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
This week, we’re joined by Congressman Josh Harder to discuss his push to revive the National Reading Panel and advance the READ Act. Can Washington help spread the science of reading without repeating the mistakes of past federal reforms?
Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study on how adding Advanced Placement courses may affect school enrollment, socioeconomic integration, and academic tracking.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Clip [00:36]
This is The Education Gadfly Show.
Well, first of all, I haven’t had the chance to talk yet, Mike. You don’t know what I think.
What does Gadfly say?
Mike Petrilli [00:46]
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
Now, please join me in welcoming our very special guest for this week, Congressman Josh Harder. Congressman Harder, welcome to the show.
Josh Harder
Thanks for having me. Big fan and longtime listener and watcher.
Mike Petrilli
Well, it is great to have you with us.
Congressman Harder is a Democrat representing California’s Ninth Congressional District. Congressman, where is that in California, given that you’ve got, I think, something like fifty-odd congressional districts?
Josh Harder
Yeah, for now. It’s in beautiful, sunny Stockton, California, land of all the best wine and almonds you’re ever going to find.
Mike Petrilli
Love it. Very good. All right. Well, welcome.
Joining us as always, my co-host, who’s also from wine country, David Griffith.
David Griffith
Yeah, it’s a different kind of whining, Mike. But yeah, it’s great to be here.
Mike Petrilli
No, no. Oregon has wonderful wines. Actually, I shouldn’t dismiss them.
David Griffith
Exactly.
Mike Petrilli
Well, Congressman, I think this is the first time that we have had a sitting member of Congress on the show, which is crazy to think about. We’ve been doing this for over twenty years and a thousand episodes.
I think that is correct. Maybe we’ll have to have The Education Gadfly Show historians go back and double check that. But we’re super excited, and especially to note that in both the House and Senate, at least at the committee level, there has actually been some legislating happening recently, which is nice to see.
I remember Matt Yglesias talking about the secret Congress, the Congress that actually rolls up its sleeves and gets things done, maybe without making too much noise about it. And so this could be an example of that.
We want to talk about literacy, particularly bringing back the National Reading Panel, as well as the READ Act. Let’s do that on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: Bringing back the National Reading Panel
Mike Petrilli [02:52]
All right. So, Congressman Harder, you were able to get into an appropriations bill recently some language about bringing back the National Reading Panel after more than twenty-five years. Can you tell us about that?
Josh Harder
Yeah. I think it was certainly my biggest joy in my life to teach my two daughters to read. We have a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and it was just incredibly exciting to see them start on that journey, go from not being able to sound out words to becoming confident readers.
But literacy is still a real struggle for millions of American school kids. We last had the National Reading Panel in the late 1990s, and it kick-started the entire science of reading movement. And I think that has done a tremendous amount of good, putting into practice with great effect in states like Mississippi and Louisiana and these other southern surge states.
And so hopefully bringing this back is going to jumpstart our federal response to this literacy crisis and make sure that everybody has the best tools and solutions possible.
Mike Petrilli
First of all, let’s note that you buried the lede. Your two-year-old can read already? That’s incredible.
Josh Harder
We’ve got the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and we’re very dutifully following it. I’m a big disciple, so we’re at the early stages, but so far, so good.
Mike Petrilli
Amazing. We’ll have you back on to talk about gifted education another time.
But all right. Look, like many policy wonks, I think back fondly to the National Reading Panel. I certainly agree with you that it was critically important in jumpstarting what became Reading First, which was part of No Child Left Behind, as well as a lot of state efforts. I think particularly a direct line to what happened in Florida, as well as, you said, Mississippi, back then.
But let me push on it a little bit. There were also unintended consequences, as is always the case. For example, that National Reading Panel did not say much about the importance of knowledge building. This was something that even back then, E.D. Hirsch had been writing about and arguing about for quite some time, and marshalling a lot of evidence that reading comprehension, once you do learn the foundational skills, is largely about learning history and science and other kinds of content and vocabulary.
But that was not a part of the National Reading Panel report. And you could argue maybe that’s why it took us so long to finally get to the point, really just very recently, that we start to see more people talking about the importance of that.
So I guess the question is, what if a new National Reading Panel gets it wrong? Isn’t there some risk of mischief here? What if the balanced literacy people somehow get control? What do you think about that?
Josh Harder [05:58]
I think that’s exactly why we need a refresh, because there were gaps in the original reading panel. There’s a lot more evidence now. I don’t think balanced literacy has nearly the foothold in the academic education movement. And so I don’t think it’s going to be sabotaged by some other group.
I hope what we’re able to do with this is focus not just on what’s changed when we’re talking about the science of reading, but more importantly, what has actually changed on implementation. The biggest problem that we have on reading right now, which I think you and others have written about, is that almost every state has passed a science of reading bill, but very few states are actually seeing sustained gains in student outcomes.
And so that gap is really important. How do we learn from the states that are doing it best? And how do we teach some of the states that have put lipstick on this pig and changed some of the statewide curriculum, but haven’t actually implemented that school by school and really pushed in teacher preparation to do things differently?
That’s something that a reading panel can really do well, not just saying what has actually succeeded in terms of the neurobiology of kids and how we teach folks to read at a really conceptual level, but how do we actually make sure that we’re putting this into every classroom in the country?
The READ Act and the federal role in literacy
Mike Petrilli [07:20]
Okay, well, that’s a good segue into another related development, which is that a bill called the READ Act has now passed both the House and Senate Education Committees, slightly different versions, I believe. So there’ll need to be some work to get them congruent, and then, of course, to take it to the floor of both bodies.
And again, though, I have concerns about unintended consequences. This law would basically incentivize and fund states to pass these kinds of science of reading laws. I think the money would be prioritized for states with the lowest student achievement in reading.
But as you said, we know that implementation matters. And I worry that what it would take for the federal government to actually get states and districts to implement the science of reading appropriately would get us caught up again in a big debate about federal control of curriculum, politicizing an issue.
I mean, this seems to be going pretty well. Aren’t you worried that Uncle Sam is going to mess it up?
Josh Harder
Well, I don’t think it has been going particularly well. I think my goal is nothing less than to resurrect the federal education reform movement. It did an awful lot of good. It was deeply bipartisan for many decades.
We’ve seen an awful lot of backsliding for almost twenty years on federal education policy, culminating in ESSA, which watered down No Child Left Behind. And so how do we actually bring back that bipartisan consensus?
I think one of the best ways to do it is to find states that really have succeeded. I think the reason why we have moved so far backwards on education reform is because, one, a lot of these ideas became very polarizing and very partisan. And also policymakers lost hope. They didn’t think anything they were doing was actually working. They felt like there were no silver bullets to fix education. And so they decided they weren’t going to do anything.
And so I think why I want to start with literacy is because it’s something that is deeply bipartisan. Everybody agrees on the importance of it. And two, we’ve had some real success stories in a handful of southern surge states and Mississippi.
And so the most important question is, how do we make sure that that exists, not just in a handful of states, but all across the union? And so the READ Act is trying to really make that national.
I hear you that there is a national issue. There have been some important gains, but it hasn’t been happening fast enough. And so what this is trying to do is take this grant program. We have $200 million that goes toward comprehensive literacy grants. We’re trying to get more money into this and trying to make sure that that is more focused on implementation.
So all the states that say they care about the science of reading, but aren’t really doing anything about it, actually have a financial incentive to implement this into various classrooms.
So that’s the same goal we have with the reading panel. It’s different ways of getting to the same outcome. But if we’re successful here, we’ll make not just improvements in literacy, but I hope we will bring back the idea that education is important and it’s possible to change these outcomes for students across the country.
Mike Petrilli [10:40]
Yeah, look, that all makes sense. I just have these memories of Reading First from twenty years ago where one of my good friends was in charge of that program.
And look, he made this Washington mistake of actually saying no to states when they tried to get money that didn’t follow the guidelines. They basically said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re doing science of reading,” or whatever we called it back then. But in fact, they were doing balanced literacy. He said no, became a big controversy, ends up getting fired, the program gets killed.
I mean, this is the thing, right? If you actually want to get beyond, as you say, lipstick on a pig, you actually want to make sure somebody’s going to have to say, no, we’re serious. You have to actually implement this thing. You have to actually, for example, tell your ed schools to stop with the nonsense and start teaching.
And it’s hard.
Josh Harder
Let me draw a distinction here that I think the last generation of education reform fights were a lot about charter schools and a lot about accountability. The next generation of fights, I think, are not going to be top down.
What parents want more than anything else is to make sure that their kids can actually read. And I think we’ve seen across the country enormous differences between schools that are doing real implementation well and schools that aren’t, and states that haven’t really gotten the picture.
The federal role in that is how do we catalyze success and how do we give more money to the places that are actually trying to do best-in-class, evidence-based implementation? And I think if we do that, then you’re not going to see this top-down dictate. You’re actually going to see a more bottom-up approach, but catalyzed by that federal financial support.
Building consensus around reading instruction
Mike Petrilli [12:42]
I mean, David, this is probably all music to your ears, I imagine. Other than saying amen, anything you want to say?
David Griffith
Well, first of all, I haven’t had the chance to talk yet, Mike. You don’t know what I think.
Mike Petrilli
We’ve been doing this show for years. Of course I know what you think.
David Griffith
You’re the one who wants to bring back NCLB.
Listen, I am generally supportive of this because I think in general that when we’re pushing at a national level or a state level, it makes sense to do that when we’re sure of the answer. And this is an area where I feel like we’re pretty sure.
I’ve never met someone who was literate who didn’t get phonics instruction. It has that sort of bipartisan appeal that you get when everybody has a personal connection to it. They can remember having phonics instruction, right?
So I am fairly sanguine, actually, about the potential for a backlash from either side, particularly because the folks who typically react to the federal government doing something have been taking the lead on this, right? These southern states, they’re mostly red states. It’d be weird for them to suddenly turn around and go in the opposite direction just because Democrats started saying yes.
So I think this makes sense. I think it makes sense for us to try to build a national consensus around what strong reading instruction looks like.
It is tricky. I think the part that you said that spoke to me most, Mike, was: how do we confirm implementation? Because it’s so squishy. In my view, it’s not just about people kind of saying the right words but doing something else. It’s also a generally complicated subject, and you get implementation that’s sort of okay, but when you push on it, you’re not sure they really get it, or they’re misunderstanding this or that.
I have been amazed at how difficult it is sometimes to articulate what I mean by a particular tenet of reading instruction. It’s prone to misunderstanding.
And so I think that’s where we have to be realistic. It is going to be challenging to get quality at the kind of scale we’re talking about. But I don’t see any downside personally to trying to refresh the National Reading Panel, for example, and try to get an updated understanding of what exactly strong reading instruction looks like. I think that’s appropriate.
Mike Petrilli [15:14]
Yeah. So Congressman Harder, the National Reading Panel part is actually now law, right? So what do you see happening on that front? Has there been any movement?
Josh Harder
Well, we still have to pass the budget, so it’s not quite law yet, but it’s moving.
What you’re going to see afterwards is a convening of experts. You’re going to see identifying hopefully the smartest minds on literacy, a real set of standards, not just from academia, but also from teaching and classrooms, which is something that was missing the last time we did the National Reading Panel.
And really focused on what’s changed over the last twenty-six years and then how to make sure that it doesn’t just stay in the ivory tower, but is implemented in the classroom as well.
Mike Petrilli
All right. Well, we will watch to see if that piece gets across the finish line as well as the READ Act.
Hey, really appreciate you coming on the show, Representative Harder.
Josh Harder
Yeah. Thanks so much for all the work you do.
Mike Petrilli
All right. Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite, Amber’s Research Minute.
Research Minute: Do AP courses increase socioeconomic integration?
Mike Petrilli [16:15]
Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, it’s been a little while. I know we’ve had Brian fill in recently.
Amber Northern
You’ve been, you know, gallivanting about.
Mike Petrilli
Yes, I have.
Amber Northern
Did some beach gallivanting and then tried to make it to a conference, but didn’t make it. But anyhow, yes, it’s always helpful to have a competent substitute on the Research Minute. So kudos to Brian.
Mike Petrilli
Brian’s doing great. And you know who else did great? Representative Harder, who we just had on.
David, I’m like, did you build that guy in a lab? He seems like right up your alley.
David Griffith
Yeah, yeah. And for some reason, he loves your blog, right?
Mike Petrilli
Yeah.
David Griffith
I thought he showed knowledge of the issues. We’re not going to agree on everything, but we can disagree knowledgeably. And so I think that’s what we want of our representatives, right?
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. No, I was very impressed. And yes, he, off the air, said nice things about my Substack, Schooled, that he reads it and likes that I round up what people across the spectrum are saying.
Look, it’s always interesting to me. He’s from California. And I get it. If you’re from a blue state where it is just really hard to get Democratic lawmakers and governors to kind of do good things on ed reform, having the federal government tell them to do those things is not the craziest strategy.
Even though, as I’ve made very clear, I’m worried about it going sideways and the game of telephone that happens when we go from the federal level to the state level to the local level. It’s a problem. But if every state had the politics that we see in red states, where it is more feasible to get a lot of things done, maybe we wouldn’t need the federal government. So there you have it.
David Griffith
They’re really listening to me about IES right now. So what can I say?
Amber Northern
Gosh, yeah.
Mike Petrilli
Sorry about that, Amber. Keep trying.
Amber Northern
That’s good.
Mike Petrilli
All right. Well, that’s a good segue into the Research Minute. What do you have for us this week?
Amber Northern [18:24]
We have a new EdWorkingPaper from Farah Mallah, a new name for me. She’s out of Stanford. It’s asking what I think is a really good question, which is: Does adding AP courses to a high school actually increase lower-income students’ exposure to higher-income peers, which some folks think may be important, or does it just sort kids into separate tracks?
So they use longitudinal administrative data from Texas, one of our states that likes researchers, from 2004 through 2022. She’s exploiting variation in the timing of when schools first introduce an AP course in a given subject to estimate causal effects using a difference-in-differences design.
I won’t go into a lot of this, but that design came under some scrutiny recently. And so she does do some fixes, where it basically means she’s comparing schools only to those that had not yet added the same AP course, so that she’s not clumping all the schools together in one broad comparison category, which can be problematic. So she does pay attention to that.
The key outcome is the share of lower-income students’ classmates who are higher income, and again, measured across all courses taken in a subject area. And she finds no evidence of pre-trends in the share of higher-income students prior to that AP course addition, which is good. And she rules out that these effects may be driven by simultaneous changes in teacher experience or school size. So those are important things to be looking out for.
All that said, the key finding: Rather than increasing stratification, adding an AP course increased lower-income students’ share of higher-income classmates by about 1.3 percentage points, which is roughly 12 percent over the baseline, which is about one third of the exposure gain you’d get from randomly reassigning students across schools in the same district. So that gives you some order of how this looks pragmatically on the ground.
Then they say, okay, how did we increase the share of higher-income classmates to these lower-income students? And they found two ways. One, the share of higher-income students in the school rose by up to 1.6 percentage points. And then they found that within-school sorting by income also increased. So basically this rising shift of more higher-income kids was higher on net than the sorting effect. So they ended up again on net with this 1.3 percentage points, or 12 percent over baseline, of more higher-income classmates above and beyond the sorting mechanism.
And then they found that efforts were concentrated in science, foreign language, and fine arts, but not in math. And they basically explained that math has barriers to lower-income enrollment in AP, obviously some prerequisites and that sort of thing.
And then they tried to find out, okay, what’s driving the shift in the composition of the student body? And they found that adding AP in one school looks to draw higher-income students away from other public schools in the same district. So they found that the share of higher-income students in other district schools dropped by about a percentage point.
And there was also evidence that the AP course additions modestly increased the district-level share of higher-income students overall. And they thought that perhaps they’re retaining families who might otherwise leave for private schools.
But all that said, notice I keep saying higher income because it didn’t translate into exposure to higher-achieving classmates. So again, they basically are finding that the AP integration effect is primarily by income and not prior achievement.
And then they say, okay, we don’t look at whether this AP additional course improves students’ performance, but we do look at whether the prior achievement is drawing different types of students.
So aside, we don’t know whether this policy hurt low-performing students academically. They didn’t look at that. But they did find that it was higher-income, higher-achieving students increased slightly, as I already said, but so did the higher-income students without the prior achievement, which I already said.
So basically it all kind of hangs together in terms of this finding that it was appealing not only to families who were higher achieving, but also to higher-income families more broadly.
Finally, just to wrap up, basically they say equity is sort of in the eye of the beholder. It’s sort of complicated. And if you try to remove AP courses to reduce the sort of within-school tracking that many folks do not like, obviously, then you can unintentionally accelerate this between-school sorting by income as higher-income families, as they’ve found, often exit for private schools or other districts.
But if you add AP courses, it may also be the case that you signal that there are these stronger academic opportunities to families, and at least there’s socioeconomic integration, at least at the school level. So that’s what I got.
Mike Petrilli [24:28]
Interesting. Yeah. Look, this is something I feel like Rick Kahlenberg would like. He has been a big advocate for socioeconomic integration for a long time and somebody on the left who’s been willing to say that you’re not going to get there if you’re not willing to have some degree of tracking and ability grouping within the schools. As if you have a more socioeconomically diverse group of kids, it’s probably going to be a more academically diverse group of kids. Certainly the wealthier, higher-achieving families are going to demand that their kids get challenges.
So yeah, it sounds like it can all turn out okay.
I have to say, though, some of these numbers sounded awfully small to me. So I guess you have all this huge amount of data from Texas, so you can find significant results even with these small little changes. Is the message that there wasn’t a lot of socioeconomic sorting or integration anyway, and so this is all kind of around the margins?
Amber Northern
Yeah. Well, that’s why I said 12 percent over baseline, so that kind of gives you a little bit. And then I put this in here, too, because I thought it was instructive. It basically equates to one third of the exposure gain you get from randomly reassigning students across schools in the same district. So, yeah.
Mike Petrilli
Which maybe to me means that these districts are probably not very integrated, right?
Amber Northern
Yeah.
Mike Petrilli
In Texas, districts tend to be segregated by income.
Amber Northern
Yeah, that’s what I took from it, Mike.
David Griffith
I feel like I need to spend some more time in Texas to really have a sense of it. I also say, generally speaking, when a study finds small effects, I’m like, hey, those might be real.
Yeah. I think it’s a really important study, actually, and I think this is a really important issue. The effects are modest, right?
But I think if you care about socioeconomic integration, and I do, it is worth reflecting deeply on this. Because if we refuse to make distinctions, educationally defensible distinctions, like distinctions between kids who have very different levels of prior preparation, we are basically forcing parents to use proxies for those things, right? Race, income, et cetera. And that is unambiguously worse, by the same lights that you were using to evaluate policy.
That’s actually making things worse, in my opinion. And it’s also basically forcing them, because of the way our education system works, to do it between schools, which I would argue is probably worse than doing it within schools, just for lots of reasons, like the level of teacher turnover that you get if every classroom is poor.
I think there is a strong case for essentially what this study is saying, which is that we should make sensible, educationally defensible distinctions between kids with different levels of ability or preparation, or whatever you want to call it, and basically give parents a reason to do what we’re all sort of hoping they’ll do, which is keep their kids in the system. Otherwise, of course, they’re going to exit the system.
I don’t know. I’m not going to get any pushback from this crowd. But I really think that the smart person of Richard Kahlenberg’s, he should speak for himself, but if you care about these issues, I think it is worth reflecting on these findings and on the dynamics that are at play here.
Because when you really think about it, there is a strong case for insisting that whatever sorting is going to happen happens on the basis of things that it should happen on, educationally meaningful things.
Amber Northern
Yeah. And sort of this notion of everything in moderation. If you take a position that you’re going to have to kind of hard line on equity on everything, you can unintentionally take actions that are going to push the wealthy families out, which is actually not good for equity.
So, which is not to say that you should always give in to whatever the wealthy parents want, because that’s not good. I mean, I see that here in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I do worry about, on some issues, that the rich parents are getting what they want, and it’s not necessarily good for the poor kids.
So you’ve got to find that balance. The impulse to say, hey, we shouldn’t just let the rich parents get what they want all the time, as normal politics would allow because they’ve got the political power, that impulse is right, but it can be taken to an extreme.
David Griffith
Yeah. I just think it’s important to think systemically about this, right? Sorting can happen within schools, between the classrooms. It can happen between schools within the same districts. And it can happen between districts. And so if you end it in one place, you’re going to wind up seeing more of it at a different level.
And so I just think that we need to take the most constructive approach possible to this challenge. And it’s not, I think, saying everybody needs to take Algebra at exactly the same time. That’s not constructive. That guarantees a reaction.
Amber Northern
I mean, it’s an access question, right? A long, long time ago, we found that lower-income schools often didn’t have the AP courses that the higher-income schools did. And so we obviously want those opportunities to be available as well. And of course, we want kids to be prepared.
But yeah, this is an access issue, and it’s the right way, I think, to address it, as you’ve been saying, David.
Mike Petrilli
Well, thank you, Amber, for bringing that to us. I agree with David. That was a really important one, and so I’m glad to see it.
But that is all the time we’ve got for this week. So until next week,
David Griffith
I’m David Griffith.
Mike Petrilli
And I’m Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.
Announcer
The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, located in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit us online at FordhamInstitute.org.
