Will Democratic leaders opt their states into the new federal school choice provision, allowing families to accept scholarships that are funded by charitable donations from taxpayers nationwide? Or will they bow to the demands of the teachers unions and bar the schoolhouse door instead, creating a grand opportunity for GOP candidates running against them?
One of the first rules of partisan politics is to promote issues that unify your own coalition while dividing the other party’s. That’s why the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are a gift to Democrats. Over the past fifteen years, forty states opted for Medicaid expansion, including twenty that Trump won in 2024; lots of Republican governors proved unwilling to turn down an offer that had Uncle Sam paying 90 percent of the costs. Congressional Republicans have reversed much of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion and thereby handed Democrats an election issue.
With much less notice, the act created a school-choice program that poses a headache for elected Democrats. It provides a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for individual taxpayers who donate up to $1,700 annually to “scholarship granting organizations,” which give money to students to cover private-school tuition and other education expenses.
Republicans sought to make the provision mandatory nationwide but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that such a dictate would violate the Byrd rule, so it was stripped out. Now states have to opt in. That could be fortuitous for Republicans, because the issue sharply divides Democratic voters. Teachers unions and white progressives overwhelmingly oppose any public support for private schools. But school choice is popular within the Black and Hispanic communities, especially among parents.
It’s a tough dilemma. Will Democratic leaders opt their states into the new federal school choice program, allowing families to accept scholarships that are funded by charitable donations from taxpayers nationwide—scholarships that don’t cost their state a penny, and therefore can’t be said to be taking any money from their public schools?
Or will they bow to the demands of the teachers unions and bar the schoolhouse door instead, creating a grand opportunity for GOP candidates running against them?
There’s no excuse for blue states that want to get to a “yes,” especially since jurisdictions can set their own requirements for scholarship-granting organizations. They can target their state’s program on poor and working-class families. They can also add requirements that participating students take standardized tests, allowing comparisons with traditional public schools.
Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro has indicated limited support for school choice, while Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear have been dead set against it. What about California’s Gavin Newsom and Maryland’s Wes Moore? As with Republicans and Medicaid expansion, it will be fascinating to watch Democratic governors—potential presidential candidates—grapple with this conundrum.
If past is prologue, congressional Democrats will work to extinguish the federal school choice provision once they are back in power, just as congressional Republicans have clawed back much of Medicaid expansion. Political scientists used to think that social assistance—such as healthcare and school scholarships—would be impossible to repeal once real live Americans had become beneficiaries. But as in so many other areas these days, the old laws of politics no longer seem to apply.
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which also published letters to the editor in response from Michael McShane and Jeff Yass.
Over the last few years, schools and teachers have begun to realize the importance of building students’ background knowledge when it comes to new learning. Research has shown that background knowledge makes learning new material easier and richer for a variety of reasons—increased vocabulary and knowledge in art, history and science bolsters reading comprehension, for example, while greater stores of knowledge in long-term memory eases cognitive load and makes it easier for new knowledge to stick.
The idea that prior knowledge is key to learning—“What you know determines what you see,” as Paul Kirschner wrote more than thirty years ago—is a relatively new one to American education. Most teachers say they never learned about the role of knowledge, long-term memory and working memory in their training.
But now things are beginning to change. Books like Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap and the work of cognitive scientists like Dan Willingham have spurred national attention to helping increase kids’ knowledge of geography, history and science topics, including ‘knowledge-building’ ELA curricula like Core Knowledge and Wit & Wisdom. Academic texts like the recent Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival (a recent Bell Ringer book club pick—you can watch our reader discussions here and here) outline how knowledge works in the brain, and then dissects how educators can help build the “web of knowledge” in students’ minds that leads to analyzing and deep thinking.
Yet the same push to focus on building background knowledge hasn’t happened in math—even though it plays just as important a role in student success. “Everything in math requires background knowledge and knowledge of math language,” said University of Texas at Austin professor and math education expert Sarah Powell.
“We really need to be thoughtful about how all of this knowledge works across grade levels and even into our adult life, so that people actually understand math instead of just all these bits and pieces of math,” she said.
Because math is entirely cumulative—new skills are built upon already mastered ones constantly—background knowledge plays an essential role in everything students do, Powell said, in ways that go beyond the basic math content. Students need knowledge of math vocabulary and strategies. Word problems, which are quite complex, require stores of knowledge in reading and language as well as being able to do the math.
Powell, who spends much of her time training math teachers, said a knowledge-building movement for math looks different than for reading. In a recent interview, she outlined how teachers and schools can think about intentionally building knowledge in math.
Building math knowledge
Math vocabulary is essential background knowledge, and often overlooked.
Though math is made up primarily of numbers, it’s learned through language, Powell said. If students don’t have a handle on math’s extensive vocabulary—kindergarteners are exposed to more than 100 math vocabulary terms in common math curricula, middle schoolers over 500—as well as all the symbolic language of numerals, they will have trouble fully accessing math content.
“Not every math teacher sees themselves as a language teacher or a vocab teacher, but they are,” Powell said.
“If I am talking about a proportion, do I know what a proportion is? Can I use the word ratio to be able to describe the two ratios that are in comparison in this proportion?” she said. “If I am talking about place value, do I know what hundreds is and how that's different from hundredths? There are so many nuances here.”
Math vocabulary shows up in speaking about math ideas in class, but also in reading and writing—especially in story problems, a key indicator used to measure how well students are performing in math. Many math terms have other non-math meanings—think “degree” or “base”—that can be confusing for students, and teachers often have to be explicit with how the math term differs from its other uses.
Students who are learning English, or who have dyslexia or other learning disabilities, might need extra attention to all the words associated with learning math.
Continual practice is what activates needed background knowledge—and students may not be getting enough.
As educators add new concepts and build up student understanding over time, yesterday’s math content becomes today’s background knowledge. But often teachers are working from curriculum pacing guides that move too quickly through new concepts, Powell said, making it challenging to do the kind of review that’s essential knowledge for whatever is in the new lesson.
Turning math content into background knowledge stored in long-term memory takes practice, repetition and time—something math teachers are notoriously short on. To continually activate background knowledge, Powell said, students need well-placed interleaved and distributed or spaced practice to revisit key knowledge multiple times. But a lot of math curricula doesn’t prioritize it.
“We do this chapter within this unit, and then we don't always come back to it later on in the year. Because everything that we learn in math is learned through practice, it’s the practice that helps us continually activate that background knowledge,” Powell said.
For example, take place value—something Powell has often heard teachers say students struggle with. “How much are we explicitly working on place value? Because place value is always there, but are we actually really digging into it and making sure that students understand it—not just in September and October, but also in January and March and May and so on?”
Teachers should focus on teaching for retention, not just for pacing, she said. Students won’t be able to activate the background knowledge of things like place value when they need it if they don’t have it.
Solving word problems needs several different kinds of knowledge all working at the same time.
Word problems are unique in that they require crucial background knowledge from multiple areas in order to solve, Powell said. Students need to be able to read the problem and know what the words mean; they need to be able to understand what the problem is asking them for, and be able to filter out irrelevant information; and they need the math skills to solve it.
Weakness in one area can stop a word problem in its tracks. “If you do have difficulty with working memory, if you do have difficulty with reading, or if you have difficulty understanding let’s say place value—that's going to make the word problem solving just so much harder for kids, than if all three of those things are working in balance,” she said.
In her work with teachers and students, Powell has found that the reading and cognitive components are the most difficult hurdles for students—they’re the components that help get the problem set up correctly, and require both domain-specific math knowledge (do students know what the numbers mean and represent, do they know how to do the calculation being asked for), and some general knowledge (how to read and understand the words, and how to organize and translate those words into an equation and answer that makes sense).
Students also need strong executive functioning skills, which help with planning and organization. “Outside of the math domain, these skills are really integral for at least setting up a word problem and then being able to make sure that your answer makes sense,” Powell said.
Then there’s the math. “If there's a word problem that says, ‘Holly buys five dog bones for each of her three dogs. How many dog bones did she buy?’ First I have to understand—she's got these dogs, and each dog has the same number of bones. So there's this grouping structure, this kind of relates to word problem schemas,” Powell said.
“I've got these dogs and each dog has the same number of bones, now I could set up this equation. I have to understand multiplication or understand repeating grouping. So either I have to have multiplication knowledge or addition knowledge to help me solve that problem—and that's a very simple problem. In a lot of word problems, we're talking about multi-digit operations that are involved fractions, decimals. If I don't understand the math and grouping, it's going to be really hard to visualize that each dog has the same number of dog bones.”
Once the problem has been correctly set up, students rarely mess up the computation.
“Teachers always agree that the setting up of the word problem is actually more difficult than the solving,” she said. “If we get to the point where I understand that that problem is three times five, more often than not, kids are going to be able to answer that correctly. The hard thing for kids is getting to the point where they get to that setup of three times five. It’s a combination of your outside-of-math knowledge and your inside-of-math knowledge.”
Educators should pay more attention to all the knowledge that goes into solving a word problem, Powell said.
“The expectations that we have for students are often quite unreasonable,” Powell said. “It doesn't matter if the kid knows five times three is fifteen. They have to be able to read these seventeen words and extract all of that information, and get to the point where they know that they have to end up multiplying five times three.”
My own thoughts: a word on math background knowledge for teachers
Though Sarah Powell and I only discussed the role knowledge plays in student math learning, it’s become clear in my reporting how teachers’ math knowledge—both of the content and how to teach it—plays a central role in student success. I’ve spoken with quite a few elementary school math teachers who feel like they didn’t know enough about math to teach it well. Teachers have also said they learn little or no research on how the brain learns, or teaching techniques supported by research.
There’s some substantial research showing that teachers (a) don’t get the opportunity to learn enough math in their undergraduate and graduate prep programs and (b) don’t feel confident—sometimes downright anxious—in doing math as well as teaching it.
If background knowledge is essential to learning, it must be doubly so for teaching. One of the most important developments might be that universities and colleges recognize the role background knowledge and long-term memory play in teacher learning, too. Then teachers walk into classrooms better prepared, less anxious and more confident, to teach math to students.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Bell Ringer.
On Tuesday, the second week of state testing, I noticed an unfamiliar name on my roster. That was the day I met Darius.
While it can be challenging to help transfer students get acclimated and caught up, it’s also a joy for me to get to know them. Some of my fondest memories come from students who arrived mid-year and found a good fit.
That wasn’t the case for Darius. When he walked into my seventh grade classroom, I introduced myself. “Thanks, but don’t get too friendly,” he stated wryly. “This is my fifth school this year, and I doubt I’ll be here long.”
I fixed my face to hide my shock. In over a decade of teaching, the amount of student turnover has gone up every year. But five times in a year was a new record. I checked his file later, and he wasn’t kidding. Constant switches, from school to school, all within our same district.
And he wasn’t kidding about his tenure, either. Two weeks later, he was gone. An administrator told me that his mom complained about getting “too many phone calls” from a teacher and transferred him to a new school.
I felt a flavor of frustration I don’t typically experience as a teacher. There are many valid reasons for students to change schools mid-year: moving, family emergencies, health. But I knew that transferring him was a mistake. He had barely given our school a chance, and changing again so close to the end of the year would do more harm than good. It was just as likely to end up in the same outcome: an interrupted education, devoid of relationships with supportive peers and trusted adults.
No student should be stuck at a school that isn’t right for them. Giving families the choice to change is one way to address this problem. But if we don’t acknowledge the cost of churn that’s baked into our system of school choice, we are in denial about an extremely damaging problem.
Mid-year turnover isn’t just like arriving late to a movie, although it sometimes feels like the plot of one. Students enter classrooms with seating charts already filled, usually getting the last desk available. They have to find a spot in the cafeteria and fit in with a group of friends who’ve known each other for months. They must get people to remember their name after the icebreakers have long passed.
They must trust a new set of adults, while catching up on content they may not have learned at their last school—some students transfer just in time to take a test! They might be able to join sports teams, but the cutoff has probably passed. They may be waiting a few days for a bus assignment. High school credits may have to be re-earned. If they have a disability, they need to have a move-in conference, and their paperwork documenting their services may take weeks to arrive from their old school.
There are real, tangible impacts on a students’ learning and wellbeing at every churn—especially mid-year. These students see worse academic outcomes, including slower reading growth. They also experience more behavior issues. Students who switch high schools have lower graduation and higher dropout rates, and are more socially isolated and academically disengaged. While we’d hope a student may switch from a poor-fit school to a better one, too often, students end up at another school that they leave.
In spite of the harms, student churn is getting more common. While mobility used to be typically limited to the summer, a growing number of families are considering and actually changing schools mid-year. Especially since the pandemic, this type of mid-year transience has skyrocketed, and not equitably. Low-income students change schools more often than wealthier ones, and urban students more than suburban ones. A sample of students in foster care averaged eight school transfers in seven years. Some critics blame charter schools for disenrolling students mid-year due to academic, attendance or behavioral issues, but the data supporting their contribution to churn is limited and mixed.
So what can be done to address the churn while preserving the choice?
First, states should provide educational navigators that follow students, similar to health insurance navigators. Right now, schools all pay for their own record-keeping, and the myriad platforms rarely talk to each other. The many social service and housing agencies supporting these students operate in silos. We must keep better track of students as they move. We need centralized information that follows the student so that receiving schools can be better prepared. And we need a single, dedicated point of contact for each family to prevent highly mobile students from getting lost in the cracks. Some states and districts already have models for this to support students experiencing homelessness or in foster care. Let’s scale them to include all students.
Second, states should implement transfer windows at semester breaks, unless there is a qualifying life event, such as a change in address. This limit on choice is far from unusual. Open enrollment windows are standard insurance policies. When a doctor prescribes a new medication, patients are barred from switching rapidly to avoid side-effects and interactions. Even colleges typically prohibited mid-semester enrollment. In every other sector, we regulate choices to minimize collateral consequences. Why not in K–12 education?
And third, parents and students need meaningful and accurate information about schools beyond what shows up on a billboard or a website. Students need exposure to a school environment—sample classes, shadow days, summer building tours, extracurricular events, even having lunch in the school cafeteria. Private schools typically require students to visit the school and meet teachers for informational interviews before enrolling. This is also the norm in higher education and most preschools. Let’s make this the expectation at all K–12 schools, regardless of type.
I hope that after leaving us, Darius ended up at a school that he was successful and could call home. But data and logic tell me that this probably wasn’t his fate. School choice is empowering to families, but that power instills responsibility to steward a child’s education with stability. We should structure the system of choice to encourage that.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
Acquisition of workforce credentials—certificates or licenses that are earned over a short time period and which signal mastery of a specific career-relevant skill—has surged in recent years. For example, U.S. Department of Education data show that short-term (one year or less) certificate attainment grew at a rate of 33 percent between 2013 and 2023. By comparison, bachelor’s degree attainment grew at a mere 8 percent over the same time period while associate degree attainment fell by 5 percent. This rapid rise in the pursuit of credentials has led to concerns over an equally rapid rise in low-value or low demand credentials that cost money to earn but don’t produce a measurable economic benefit for earners. A new report from AEI and Burning Glass Institute digs deep to try and identify which types of credentials are beneficial to earners and which are not.
The research team uses data from Burning Glass Institute’s comprehensive labor market database, called Lightcast, which comprises the detailed career histories of over 65 million Americans, and Credential Finder, an exhaustive registry of more than 1.1 million credentials offered by universities, employers, labor unions, nonprofits, and many other entities in the United States. They start by identifying a set of the most-commonly earned credentials—a total of 23,444—then use advanced AI and natural language processing tools to gather detailed information about the education, employment, wages, and demographics of the individuals who earned those credentials. Labor market outcomes for credential earners are compared to a counterfactual cohort of similar workers (matched on gender, race/ethnicity, education level, work experience, and pre-credential occupation) who did not pursue the given credential, so as to isolate the impact of the credential on three outcomes of interest: wage changes, job promotions, and job switches. Additionally, they analyze the more than 2,050 providers from whom these credentials were earned, looking for evidence of differential quality or effectiveness among them.
On the upside, the researchers found that the top 10 percent of credentials examined provide an incremental earnings boost of nearly $5,000 annually just one year out from earning the credential. Nursing credentials seem to provide the biggest returns. On the downside, the average credential earner overall gets only $1,200 more than their non-credential-earning peers. Depending on the cost of the credential program, it could take years for the average earner to break even. This wide span of wage outcomes persists even when narrowed to specific job fields. Meanwhile, very few of the most common credentials led to promotions, with the share of credential earners moving up in their field only 4 points higher than it would have been without the credential. The maximum boost is 15 points, in the project management field (think Six Sigma certification and the like).
Job switching is another strong motivator for pursuing a new credential. The results here are variable, with earners in the bottom decile of credential quality seeing a 3-percentage-point bump in job change success, while the top decile of credential quality see a 20-percentage-point bump compared to job switchers without credentials. Once again, nursing is the area where earning credentials is most likely to lead to successful job changes.
As for provider quality, the researchers find a mixed bag. There seems to be no direct connection between a well-known “brand name” provider and outcomes. One example provided is Stanford University. Their (now-discontinued) Data Science Foundations program was associated with $4,200 in incremental wage gains, while their project management certification failed to boost wages meaningfully for any credential earner. A similar disconnect was found among certain credentials offered by LinkedIn. The findings suggest there’s a complex dynamic at work among providers, specific credentials, credential-earners’ goals, and employers’ mindsets that will require more analysis to understand.
Short-term credentials are more attractive than ever, as they can help learners master workplace skills on a flexible schedule at lower cost than a college degree and potentially lead to higher pay and/or a better job. These benefits explain the rapid rise in attainment. The authors of this report conclude from their analysis, however, that “most credentials fail to deliver” on the promise. They call for “a new mechanism for assuring quality,” eschewing process-based evaluations that are the hallmark of traditional accreditation regimes, and instead focusing on empirical data on the outcomes that earners experience.
SOURCE: Matt Sigelman et al., “Holding New Credentials Accountable for Outcomes: We Need Evidence-Based Funding Models,” AEI and Burning Glass Institute (June 2025).
The future of the U.S. economy and workforce relies on effective STEM education, and that education begins with the basics. Mathematics is a cumulative subject, and if elementary students don’t learn foundational skills like addition and division, they’ll face major challenges when it comes time for algebra and physics. It’s no surprise that well-trained and properly-certified teachers are key to effective math instruction.
In a new report titled “Assessing the Quality of Math Licensure Tests,” the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) assesses the extent to which each state ensures the quality of its new elementary school teachers by using math tests as part of their licensure. NCTQ seeks to answer three key questions: What is the quality of those math licensure tests? Which states use acceptable tests? And which also require that aspiring elementary teachers pass that test?
The analysts organize licensure tests into four categories based on quality: strong, acceptable, weak, and unacceptable. The tests—mostly purchased from national vendors—were analyzed based on their attention to four key domains: numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement, and data analysis and probability. Strong tests adequately address at least 75 percent of these topics, acceptable tests address at least half, weak tests address less than half, and unacceptable tests do not address any.
Here’s the key finding: only thirteen states require all elementary teachers to pass a math test that’s at least acceptable. The majority of states (twenty-nine) offer weak or unacceptable tests, and two states (Iowa and Maine) do not offer any math licensure test.
Additionally, seven states with acceptable or strong tests make testing optional, allowing substitutions for licensure exams such as completing a master’s degree in the certificate area, having a certain GPA, or submitting a portfolio of coursework. It’s obviously not too constructive for a state to have an acceptable licensure test if teaching candidates aren’t required to take and pass it. That’s like creating speed limits on the highway without ever putting up signs or enforcing them.
And at least thirty-one states need to revise their math licensure tests so they actually address the skills and knowledge in this realm that competent elementary teachers need, such as operations, fractions, and geometry. It’s not possible to successfully teach something that one doesn’t even know. All states must ensure their licensure exams reflect the demands of high-quality math instruction, not just check a box.
Of course, licensure exams typically come near the end of teacher preparation, while good pre-service education begins with equipping candidates with deep knowledge of math content and pedagogy. A previous analysis by NCTQ found that only 16 percent of undergraduate teacher prep programs—and an even more shameful 2 percent of graduate programs—devote enough time to teaching essential math content. Experienced teachers also need relevant in-service training on the material they’re teaching. The answer to our dearth of effective math teachers is not a $600 million dollar cut to teacher training.
If we want students to thrive in STEM fields and secure our economic future, we need to get a lot more serious about preparing—and certifying—their early math teachers. NCTQ’s findings highlight strong licensure tests in Massachusetts, New York, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Colorado, and Texas. Among these states, only Alabama, Kansas, New York, and Texas require all elementary teachers to actually pass the test. It may be time for states with unacceptable—or worse—tests to follow their lead and adopt higher-quality exams so that all elementary students can receive the strong math instruction they deserve.
SOURCE: National Council on Teacher Quality, “Assessing the Quality of Math Licensure Tests,” June 3, 2025.
