The Education Gadfly Weekly

When I die, I want my gravestone to read: “She insisted on double-checking.” Double-checking, and other academic behaviors like re-reading questions to make sure you understand what they are asking, are our secret sauce at Success Academy, the charter school network I founded and lead. We call these behaviors “effort,” and we teach and celebrate them religiously in our schools. We are convinced they are one of the most powerful drivers of student achievement.

This conviction is based on more than intuition. Over seventeen years of educating tens of thousands of students, careful analysis of homework, classwork, and assessment data has taught us that a large proportion of errors, up to 70 percent, don’t result from not knowing or understanding the content, but from lack of care and attention to detail. Among SA scholars who did not meet proficiency on the 2022 New York state tests, for example, virtually half failed because of careless errors—not because they didn’t know the material!

Unfortunately, educators routinely overlook the importance of student effort. This oversight is particularly significant as the country grapples with how to address pandemic-related learning loss. When our SA scholars returned to in-person school, they did have content gaps, but their atrophied “effort muscle” was a bigger problem. The same is likely true across the country, yet the issue is notably missing from discussions on how to help students catch up.

At Success, rebuilding our students’ effort capacities has been a core focus since we returned to our school buildings. It starts with changing teachers’ mindsets about the role they play. Too often, teachers treat effort as something they have no influence or control over. They don’t look out for it, and they don’t focus on it as a root cause of underperformance in their classrooms. Instead, they tend to assume that when students get things wrong, it’s because of knowledge gaps, so they end up spending a tremendous amount of instructional time re-teaching content scholars already know. This is frustrating for teachers and boring for students. It also sets off a vicious cycle: Students come to expect re-teaching and don’t exert themselves when they learn things the first time.

When the teacher approaches everything through the lens of effort, by contrast, this dynamic shifts. In reviewing a homework assignment, for example, she may notice that many students got a question on fractions wrong. Instead of assuming she has to re-teach fractions, she studies her students’ incorrect answers. She notices that the errors stem mostly from the fact that the question had two parts and her students impulsively leaped to answering the first part. They may have answered this first part correctly, proving they understand fractions, but because they didn’t take time to understand what the question was asking, their answer was wrong.

With this accurate diagnosis, the teacher focuses homework debriefing the next day on the real issue: effort. She models what it looks like to read and conceptualize the question thoroughly before jumping to solve it. She simultaneously affirms scholars’ capacities—“you know how to do this!”—and walks through how to put forth effort at the front end so they are able to consistently demonstrate that knowledge.

Increasing students’ effort requires this kind of attention and follow-up in every part of the school day. Teachers must live and breathe the expectation that scholars can get right what they already know how to do, and be absolutely consistent in holding them accountable. The formula sounds simple, but it is challenging. Insisting can feel uncomfortable and even “mean” when teachers first try it—usually because they don’t believe their students can meet the expectation. When teachers “go for it,” however, belief soon follows.

Going for it means not only having routines for double-checking and redoing careless work, but also asking students to rethink and try again in classroom discussions when they don’t respond to the question asked, don’t use evidence and reasoning, or repeat exactly what their peers said instead of building on an idea. In such classrooms, students’ behavior shifts quickly and dramatically. They rise to meet the expectation and become focused and highly engaged. They come prepared because they know their lesson moves fast and builds on what they’ve already learned.

In hundreds of our classrooms over the years, we have watched this happen. There is nothing quite as wonderful as witnessing the “aha!” moment that teachers have when they realize that, by changing their behaviors and insisting on effort, they have unleashed capacities in their scholars that they didn’t think possible. It’s empowering for educators and empowering for kids—and as a highly effective and free tactic for accelerating learning, it’s a strategy I urge every educator to embrace.

It’s a familiar and dreary tale. For twenty years, the math and reading learning outcomes of our nation’s twelfth graders have been flat. More recently, the performance gap between the wealthiest and poorest students has widened, while between Black and White students the previous gap-closing has stalled. Our math and science results on international tests are shameful. Efforts to enhance the opportunities for career and technical education (CTE) look pallid against the programs in peer countries. Civics education, at a time of intense cultural divisions and international pressure on democratic states, amounts to handwaving. All this before the pandemic knocked months off the expected learning of our children.

My new book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools, begins in such familiar territory. It probes the grade inflation that pumps up graduation rates while learning remains flat. It digs into the anguished debates on race and opportunity gaps, calls out our fundamental confusions about CTE, and presents the wasteland of civics instruction.

Out of despondency, resignation, or because they are convinced by their peers, many educators argue that we should stop worrying about meaningless test results and focus instead on the state of students’ mental well-being. Advocates of this shift in focus from academics to “social and emotional learning” (SEL) point to exciting new findings about cognition and human flourishing; for good measure, they integrate such findings into the education required by the “twenty-first-century economy.” We are told that teaching new skills—such as critical thinking, grit, positive mindset, and creativity—while nurturing students’ increasingly fragile emotions, is the best path forward. But my review of the research supporting this advice show that this emperor has no clothes—or so few as to be embarrassing.

Instead, we should return to the core mission of education: academic learning. The book moves forward to the underlying systemic reasons for our current academic outcomes. It lays out the fragmentation that results from the siloed worlds of teacher preparation, curricula, and assessment regimes. The extraordinarily wide variations in teacher effectiveness within our public schools—far greater than that of most other nations—is a core cause of our disparate results.

There are glimmers of hope, however. The introduction of longer and better supervised clinical placements promises more effective teachers. As undertaken in Louisiana, preparing future teachers to use specific high-quality curricula, combined with ELA assessments that are integrated into them, motivates teachers to pay closer attention to teaching quality content. Acceleration strategies that prepare students for grade-level instruction, rather than fruitlessly remediating them on years of lost learning, are now underway. Team teaching is showing promise. While very far from becoming mainstream, these initiatives are early signposts to a stronger system.

Academics is the core; the teaching of the humanities in their full hue matters; deep engagement with texts is what counts. But when we dissect our learning standards, it is clear that they largely treat seventeen-year-olds as if they were simply seven-year-olds reading longer words. I argue that the Common Core ELA standards (still de facto used in the great majority of states) rests on a model of reading which creates sophomoric and banal models of instruction for our older K–12 students. In admiration but also difference, I trace, too, the impact of E.D. Hirsch’s theories of interpretation and argue that they should be strictly restricted to use in the elementary grades.

Diagnosis is only the first task at hand; the second is to cast a vision for the future. In the final chapter, I address the elephant in the room—our widening distaste for academic learning—and start by arguing that this is profoundly wrong-headed. The answer to low levels of learning is not to avoid academics and to reach for placebos, but to make academic learning and content a matter of consequence. I argue that mastering a discipline is empowering, but only when its cognitive demands are extended so as to reach ethical questionings and aesthetic judgments. Reading to “find the main idea,” text after text, by contrast, numbs the mind and dulls the interest.

Current instructional policies for middle and high school students do more than prompt disinterest and “somnambulance”—they deprive them of the needed guidance towards schooling’s noblest goals. Why do we treat all but math, ELA, and perhaps science as third-class fields? Where is the invitation to beauty, to a considered life, to the adventure of distant worlds that enthrall?

I cannot speak for you, dear reader, but I believe that, as is the case for me, you would not want to “unlearn” and renounce the knowledge you owe to your schooling. I argue that, in the end, because most of our life is spent in the company of our own thoughts, education matters most because it provides the indispensable furnishings of our minds. If learned with attention, fascination, and rigor, such knowledge stays with us always, generating the content of a lifetime. In times of private distress, where the company of others cannot reach us, it is that content which is ours—by heart, in memory. How dare we trivialize the hard and long-earned gifts of human thought and creation?

In a text that moves from statistical effect sizes to Kant’s arguments about aesthetics, from problems of testing psychometrics to searing issues of race and learning, the scope is broad. But at its core, my book asks that we remember what is at stake and honor students and their teachers by inviting them to an educational journey worth taking. At the book’s close, I share a photograph of a little girl left alone to make her way unguided through an immaculate but empty school hallway. What will she find? What will the children of this nation find, if we do not aspire to the education of thought?

With rising college costs and sky-high college dropout rates—almost one-third of American undergraduates quit before completing their degree—young people are looking for alternatives to the traditional four-year college pathway. Enter career and technical education (CTE), which combines traditional academic teaching with specific technical and career-oriented skills for students in middle, secondary and post-secondary schools. When done well, CTE expands opportunities for student success after high school while strengthening workplace readiness.

Yet much of America is fumbling CTE, unlike most other modern nations, which already provide multiple well-developed career tracks for students in high school. Germany, for instance, provides a dual education system that combines salaried apprenticeships with classroom learning, likely contributing to Germany’s exceptionally low unemployment rate. Other countries also make technical/vocational learning an integral part of secondary school to help prepare a workforce equipped with advanced technical skills while ensuring that all graduates have genuine opportunities to succeed.

America’s history with “vocational education” was rocky and sometimes shameful, as it too often steered disadvantaged students and those of color into lower pathways with less earning potential. But old-style “tracking” is thankfully dying out. A 2019 Fordham Institute study found that while White students were more likely to “concentrate” in any CTE field than Black students—concentrate means take at least three CTE courses—the latter were overrepresented in courses linked to higher-paying fields, such as health science and information technology. Moreover, CTE is not a path away from college. A 2016 Fordham Institute study found that students who took more career-oriented courses were just as likely to attend a four-year college program as their peers. Other research shows a similar pattern. In other words, CTE doesn’t hinder those with traditional college aspirations.

We find five additional benefits for students who take CTE courses in high school.

First, CTE is linked to increased graduation rates. Evidence from California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and North Carolina shows increases tied to participation in CTE. A Fordham study conducted by Shaun M. Dougherty found that concentrating in CTE increased one’s likelihood of graduating. What might explain that result? Eighty-one percent of high school dropouts say they would have stayed in school if they had received relevant, real-world learning opportunities. CTE courses offer precisely that.

Second, CTE increases postsecondary outcomes, particularly for women and disadvantaged students. Female students, students of color, and lower-income CTE students also see increased rates of college attendance, and students who concentrate in a particular field are more likely to attend college and obtain a postsecondary credential in that field. More research indicates that, compared to students who don’t concentrate, Black and Latino CTE concentrators see larger increases in college attendance (an 8.9 percent difference), further demonstrating that CTE courses do not discourage students from attending two- or four-year colleges.

Third, CTE can boost one’s income. One study found that CTE concentration is associated with a large increase in initial earnings ($1,792 in the first year after high school) that persists even seven years after high school. Other analysts found that each additional year of upper-level CTE coursework taken while in high school increases workers’ salaries by 2 percent above what they would have otherwise earned. And a Fordham-commissioned study found that high schoolers who earn a credential in information technology, health science, business, or audio/visual arts experience “postsecondary-success,” meaning they enroll in college or earn a living wage (at least 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or $25,760) after high school.

Fourth, CTE can enhance other valuable skills. Research shows that possessing “soft skills” like perseverance, grit, self-efficacy, work ethic, and conscientiousness can increase life outcomes for students. Other studies indicate that appropriate social and behavioral attitudes are also essential for success in the future labor force. Good CTE classrooms blend academic skills with hands-on training and real-life experiences. For instance, students might assist in collecting blood samples, help change the brakes on a vehicle, or learn to design a website for a business. Such direct learning experiences strengthen non-cognitive skills that students will use in any type of job.

Fifth, CTE can be a game-changer for the most vulnerable students. CTE during high school confers the greatest benefit on students who need it the most, particularly when it comes to college attendance. Obtaining an industry-recognized credential (IRC)—a license or certificate demonstrating competency in a particular field—can be transformative for such young people, providing an economic boost for the whole family that gives them hope for a better future and a way out of poverty. Studies also show that, compared to non-concentrators, CTE concentrators are more likely to avoid poverty by remaining employed or participating in educational training programs—no matter what career path they choose after high school.

Current CTE programs in America already provide positive outcomes for students. But—as in other countries—they could do far more. Here are three suggestions:

1. Make more time for high-quality CTE programs and apprenticeships during the school day. High school course requirements tend to be highly regulated and prescriptive, with the majority of states specifying multiple required courses in the core subject areas, as well as in subjects like foreign language, physical education, and the arts. This reality led Fordham’s Michael Petrilli to ask recently, “How are students supposed to take career and technical programs, do on-the-job training, or tackle apprenticeships when their schedules are already full of mandatory academic courses?” One suggestion: Rethink the time-based standard for awarding course credit that we call the “Carnegie unit.”

2. Increase employer participation. If employers don’t take part with gusto, resources, and imagination, it is impossible to ensure that CTE offerings will be relevant to the workforce of today. States need to reduce the regulatory, financial, and logistical barriers that prevent employers from teaming up with schools. For starters, it’s helpful to provide guidance to industry about the rules surrounding youth apprenticeships. These take many forms. Rhode Island, for instance, offers this advice regarding risks associated with hiring minors: “For unpaid internships, it is recommended that schools and internship hosts enter into ‘Indemnification, Hold Harmless’ contracts in which schools extend their liability policies to businesses to provide added peace of mind.” Additionally, states can help districts forge relationships with employers with whom they already collaborate, including “state advisory boards and partnerships with workforce development boards and industry associations.”

3. Align calendars, schedules, and transportation systems so that schools, CTE centers, and workplaces can coordinate their efforts. When schools that send students to CTE programs close for professional development days, holiday breaks, or operate under different start and end dates, many students must miss their technical and apprenticeship training—jeopardizing completion of the programs and increasing the chances that they will opt out altogether. What’s more, transporting students between schools and CTE centers or apprenticeship locations can be difficult, not only because of differing schedules, but also high costs and lengthy travel times. Transportation must be adequately funded by the “sending” school, or else program developers must think creatively about how to handle this, such as allowing older students to drive themselves instead of having to rely on fixed bus schedules.

To sum up, career and technical education helps students attain multiple positive outcomes. It is linked to increases in graduation rates, college attendance, earnings, and soft skills—especially for the most vulnerable students. While there is ample room to improve, many modern-day technical programs are helping young people to succeed. Whether students seek to attend college right away or choose to enter the workforce, CTE can serve as a helpful launching pad.

Once inside, it doesn’t take long to soak up the climate of a school. A simple walk down the hallway can give you clues. Is it clean? Are the bulletin boards up to date? Can you hear the energetic buzz of learning versus the cacophony of bad behavior? Do students and teachers greet you with a smile or a cold shoulder? It’s a sense that you get about school culture—meaning that it’s difficult to unpack the myriad social, academic, and cultural factors that comprise it. But that’s not for lack of trying. Research tells us that things like shared beliefs and norms, strong connections among staff, respectful behavior, and positive peer-to-peer connections shape a school’s culture.

But how much influence do teachers have on how students perceive the educational environment? A recent CALDER study attempts to measure the effects of teachers on students’ perceptions of school climate—a.k.a. “climate value-added”—including how those effects vary by student race.

The research team, consisting of Ben Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, and Roddy Theobald, uses administrative data from Massachusetts for students in grades 4–8 and 10. The study covers school years from 2011 through 2019 and is replete with enrollment, course taking, transcript, test score, and disciplinary data. They connect those data to the student’s assigned teacher to generate student-teacher linked datasets. And for 2018–19, they can also link these data to statewide student-survey data, which include measures of engagement, safety, and environment, including the quality of classroom activities and of the student-teacher relationship.

To calculate climate value-added (VA), they use standard methods applied in the teacher effectiveness literature, meaning use of a two-step VA model that includes numerous student, classroom, and school covariates. They are looking at differences within a school, grade level, content area, and year and include numerous measures to mitigate concerns that “sorting” of students to certain teachers (perhaps Mrs. Jones runs a tight ship so she gets the kids prone to goof off) or other school-level factors might explain their results.

First, the researchers find that overall climate measures are systematically lower for Black than White students and tend to be higher for Asian students. When looking into the nine discrete climate measures, they see that Black students report more positive experiences relative to classroom participation and instruction but less positive experiences when engaging with school personnel and other students. Analysts also find that perceptions of students of color and White students reflect different views of the same environment more than differences in the learning environment itself, meaning the differences can’t be attributed to student assignment to a particular teacher, classroom, or track.

Next, they find that teachers do indeed shape their students’ perceptions of the school climate. And that those teachers who contribute more to the learning environment—meaning that their students report positive feelings about school climate—also have positive effects on student engagement and achievement (primarily test scores and absences). This is especially the case for students of color. In other words, there is not a trade-off between the things that makes kids feel engaged, safe, and cared for and the things that boost achievement. The same teachers do both.

Although racial matches between student and teacher somewhat improve students’ views of learning climate (especially for Black students), educators who improve school climate generally tend to do so for students of all races. Moreover, teachers whose students of color report better school climate in one year also have higher reports of school climate among students of color in other years, so analysts wonder whether this pattern is evidence of “culturally responsive teaching.”

The simple takeaways to this complex report are that having a positive school climate matters and that teachers play an important role in how students perceive it. Not surprisingly, educators who make a positive mark on the school’s climate also tend to make positive marks on multiple outcomes for kids. So, teachers, keep on high-fiving students as they enter your class, joking with them good-naturedly, pushing them to aim higher, and being there when they need extra help. Because all of those culture-enriching acts aren’t just feel-good stuff. They make a real difference.

SOURCE: Ben Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, and Roddy Theobald, Teachers and School Climate: Effects on Student Outcomes and Academic Disparities, CALDER Working Paper (October 2022).

As new kids on the school choice block, education savings accounts and pod schooling are grabbing the headlines these days. But an old stalwart—interdistrict open enrollment—is also worthy of attention. These policies have been around for decades in many states, generally yield the largest choice programs wherever they are established, and typically draw less opposition than their charter and private school choice peers. A new report from Reason Foundation examined Wisconsin’s program as an exemplar and deems it a model that other states should consider emulating.

At its most basic, interdistrict open enrollment allows families living within the boundaries of one public school district to send their children to schools located in another district. Rules regarding district participation, transportation, and funding vary from state to state.

In Wisconsin, open enrollment began as a bipartisan effort in 1998. Each school year, districts are required to identify the number of seats they will make available for open-enrollment students based on data such as student-teacher ratios and building capacities. The number of openings by school building and grade level must be publicized so that families have a list of what is available and where. Students may apply for a seat in up to three different districts. Districts can evaluate applicants based on their discipline history and truancy, as well as whether they believe they can meet the needs of the students. Random lotteries result if demand exceeds capacity. The primary application window runs from February to April of the previous school year. There is also an alternative application window in late summer specifically for students who have been the victims of violent crime, have experienced bullying, or moved to Wisconsin from another state after the primary deadline.

On the funding side, money is transferred from the district of residence to the receiving district. The dollar amount, which is state funding only, has increased every year but has always been less than the average per pupil funding amount (state and local funding combined) in the state. Receiving districts must accept this amount—$8,125 per pupil in 2020–21—as full funding, and no additional tuition can be charged to parents. Home districts keep an average of $5,624 in funding per departed student (again, state and local combined), and even the lowest-funded (a.k.a. wealthiest) districts retain more than $1,800 per student with no further requirement to provide services for them. In 2016, far larger amounts were approved for students with individualized educational program (IEPs), amounting to several thousand dollars per student above the normal transfer amount, reflecting the additional services needed. Receiving districts can also apply to the state for further reimbursement after an IEP student’s first school year if the actual cost of serving them exceeds the regular amount—up to $30,000 per student. Finally, low-income families are eligible for transportation reimbursement from the state based on a per-mile amount between home and school. However, all families opting for open enrollment must provide the transportation themselves, and needy families must accrue a year’s worth of costs up front before they can even request reimbursement. The reimbursement fund is limited and thus generally does not fully pay for eligible miles.

In analyzing participation data, the report provides four key findings. First, increasing the window for program entry increases participation. Open enrollment jumped nearly 20 percent in the first year that Wisconsin opened the second window, despite limitations on who could apply at that time. Second, families are motivated by academic performance. Districts with better outcomes on state tests tend to gain more students via open enrollment, while districts that perform poorly tend to lose more students. Third, districts that lose more students than they gain through open enrollment in a given year initially improve their performance on state tests, although these effects dissipate after three years. Fourth, increases in the transfer funding amount are correlated with greater district participation. As the amount of funding transferred to the receiving district has increased over time, districts have taken in more students through the program.

These findings are correlational, not causal, but that doesn’t stop the authors from being very jazzed about them. Their recommendations: more money and more transparency to boost all the benefits observed, and other states should follow Wisconsin’s model.

Certainly there are some positives in Wisconsin that are worth emulating elsewhere. Requiring districts to quantify and advertise openings and centralizing parental applications are huge improvements on other states’ optional participation and district-by-district, family-by-family processes. Making sure that home districts keep some funds does work to stifle predictable dissent from net losing systems, but obviously there is a limit to this as the amount following students grows. There is also some evidence that non-academic factors such as racial composition of schools and size of the student body play a factor in incentivizing moves. And finally: However much a program like this brings more resources into districts having more open seats, a skeptic might suggest that student-teacher ratios and building capacities don’t magically change as a result. Surely there is a simpler way for the state to buy (or create) more open seats in more good schools.

Nevertheless, we return where we began, noting the durability and popularity of interdistrict open enrollment. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Wisconsin’s program began with a mere 2,500 participants. Despite limitations, it continues to grow. In the 2020–21 school year, Reason reports that nearly 8.5 percent of all public school students in the state—more than 70,000 kids—opted for a district school other than the one in which they resided. That is really the key takeaway.

SOURCE: Will Flanders, “K–12 Open Enrollment in Wisconsin: Key Lessons for Other States,” Reason Foundation (February 2023).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Crystal McQueen-Taylor of StudentsFirstNY joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the battle royale to lift the charter cap in New York City. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber looks at the effects of closing and restarting low-performing schools as charter schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Recommended content:

• “Charter school expansion faces tough fight in New York” —New York Times
• “Proof that charters benefit all public-school kids” —New York Post
• “Because they can: Governor Kathy Hochul’s charter school proposal is modest—so why are teachers’ unions and state legislators so determined to stop it?” —City Journal
• Still Rising: Charter School Enrollment and Student Achievement at the Metropolitan Level —David Griffith
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Whitney Bross, Douglas N. Harris, and Lihan Liu, “The effects of performance-based school closure and restart on student performance,” Economics of Education Review (June 2023)

Feedback Welcome:

Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to our producer Nathaniel Grossman at [email protected].

Cheers

• “The debate over how best to teach children to read lends itself to a conclusive answer. That’s phonics.” —Washington Post
• “We’re going to be tough on our students in terms of their behavior,” said Anthony Smith, the interim district superintendent in Clayton County, Georgia. “Teaching and learning is at the core of what we do. We are not a social services organization.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• The Hidden Figures Revealed workshop teaches STEM lessons to middle school students by highlighting the stories of Black Ohio State University mathematicians. —Columbus Dispatch
• Virginia launches a large-scale effort to address learning loss: “We are on the cusp of losing an entire generation of students,” said Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera. —The 74

Jeers

• A tutoring program designed to fight learning loss is serving just 800 Philadelphia students. —Chalkbeat
• A new book dismisses the notion that people—particularly students from underprivileged backgrounds—have agency over their lives. —Atlantic
• Journalists are fanning the culture-war flames rather than focusing on learning loss. —Alexander Russo

• Undergraduate college enrollment has dropped 8 percent from 2019, a decline quickened by a growing number of young people entering the workforce. —AP News
• “Academic pressure cannot explain the mental illness epidemic.” —Jean M. Twenge
• The study of English “has lost its allure,” even among students who enjoy reading. —New York Times