Mike Petrilli takes the mic to consider whether America’s schools need a renewed sense of urgency around raising achievement and closing gaps. He revisits the test-based accountability era, debates whether its biggest contribution may have been less about policy mechanics and more about shifting the national “vibes,” and argues that today’s education leaders may need to be much clearer about what it means to put students first.
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new American Enterprise Institute report tracking post-pandemic chronic absenteeism and warning that elevated absence rates may be turning into a long-term condition.
Recommended content:
- The one where Ross gets rebuked by reformers —Michael J. Petrilli, SCHOOLED
- On NCLB, Wiener and Petrilli fight to a draw —Robert Pondiscio, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement —Thomas S. Dee and Brian A. Jacob, NBER
- From Attendance Crisis to Chronic Condition? Tracking Post-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism into 2025 —Nat Malkus, American Enterprise Institute (2026)
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, I go solo to talk about accountability as vibes and whether schools need a renewed sense of urgency around raising achievement and closing achievement gaps.
Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new report on why chronic absenteeism may be becoming a long-term post-pandemic problem.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Ed Reform Update: Accountability as vibes
Mike Petrilli [00:40]
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
It is again that time of the month when I go solo. Today we're going to talk about accountability, specifically accountability as vibes. Let's do it on Ed Reform Update.
Okay, so what do I mean by accountability as vibes? Let me try to explain, but I will warn you, it's going to be a journey. We will get there eventually.
There's been a lot of talk lately about the impact of test-based accountability and about No Child Left Behind. This is partly because of a big op-ed that Ross Wiener published in The New York Times a few weeks ago. We've been debating that and talking all about it over on my Substack, Schooled.
Those of us in the policy wonk world all refer to the famous Tom Dee and Brian Jacob study that found that consequential accountability policies from about twenty-five years ago led to a significant bump in test scores in math. NAEP scores went up in states that adopted test-based accountability with real teeth in the late 1990s. That's what Dee and Jacob found, versus the states that did not adopt those policies in the 90s until they adopted them in the early 2000s, when they were forced to because of the No Child Left Behind Act. Then those states saw a test-score bump at that time. We have some other studies that have also shown smaller but significant achievement gains in reading that they can connect to No Child Left Behind.
But here's the thing. It's a bit of a mystery that I've been puzzling over forever. The test-score gains that Dee and Jacob and others can attribute to test-based accountability were relatively modest. But if you go back and you look to the late 90s and the 2000s, until let's say 2012 or 2013, achievement gains as a whole for the country went up dramatically, especially for low-income kids, Black and Hispanic students, and students with disabilities. These gains were way outside what Dee and Jacob and others were able to pinpoint to test-based accountability. We're talking about twenty or thirty points, two or three grade levels of progress over about fifteen years. So it was, let's say, one generation of students. Enormous gains.
So then you say, if those test scores went up dramatically but it mostly wasn't the accountability policies, what was it?
Well, I have argued before that spending increases back then might have been a part of it. This was when there were a lot of court cases about state constitutions requiring states to spend more money. So we saw this huge influx of state money coming into education in the 90s and 2000s. It certainly could also have been that child poverty rates were going down, which was great news for this country and for kids. In the 90s, with the booming economy, maybe with welfare reform, a whole bunch of things came together, and kids were not as poor as they used to be. Maybe that was part of what was happening.
But I also wonder if there's something else, and that could be about the vibes.
Now, we all like to talk about vibes these days. It's a big word we use. We talk about the vibecession. Why are the vibes so bad about the economy when so many things about the economy today are actually pretty good?
Here, I'm talking about the vibes back then. Everybody was focused on raising achievement and closing achievement gaps. Now, I don't think I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. Maybe I am. But I remember living through it, and just about everywhere, all the time, everyone was talking about, how do we raise student achievement? How do we close achievement gaps? That is what the mission was. It's what presidents and governors talked about. State and local superintendents, principals, professional development people, policy wonks, practitioners, everybody.
Now, Ross Wiener, in his op-ed, looks back on all of that era and thinks we were too narrowly focused on test scores. And when we're talking about student achievement and achievement gaps, yes, we're talking about that measured by test scores. In the op-ed, he says, let me quote him here: "You cannot accountability-pressure your way to better educational outcomes when chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, misbehavior is common, students are disengaged and skeptical that school prepares them for the lives they want to lead, and teachers feel not just tired but stripped of the professional trust that makes the work meaningful."
All of those claims we can debate. I think there are certainly arguments to be made for them. But back in the late 90s and 2000s, we had some words for thinking like that: excuses.
We used to say, hey, no excuses. By the way, the charter schools back then were called no-excuses charter schools not because they were saying that to the kids, not to make an excuse. They were saying that we, as adults, were not going to make any excuses for low performance, low student achievement, or big achievement gaps. Because to do so, as President Bush said, was to engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
There was this consensus among policymakers and policy wonks, for sure, but also many education leaders, maybe not every teacher, but a lot of the people out there in the system, that raising achievement and closing achievement gaps was important. It was job number one, and it was doable. Those were the vibes.
And guess what? If the focus, if all the attention, if all the professional development sessions and conferences and journal articles and staff meetings are about what we are going to do to keep raising achievement and close achievement gaps, if that's the focus, maybe that helps to explain why back then we made so much progress in raising achievement and closing achievement gaps.
Now, a reasonable question is whether the accountability policies caused the vibes or whether the vibes came first and set the stage for politicians and policymakers to adopt accountability. Did they go together? I'm not sure. I may not know how to disentangle them. But I do think it's fair to say that around the same time the accountability pressure largely went away, when Congress replaced the No Child Left Behind Act with the Every Student Succeeds Act, the vibes shifted too.
Suddenly, we weren't talking all the time about raising achievement and closing achievement gaps. We started talking about other stuff. This was the time of the test opt-out movement, the Common Core backlash, and the backlash to evaluations tied to test scores. People started talking more about social and emotional learning. Of course, DEI came in, in education and in other fields.
In fact, Ibram Kendi, who was super big back then, made the argument that even talking about achievement gaps was itself racist. The whole notion that we're going to compare the achievement of different racial groups and show that Black students were underperforming white students, that even pointing that out was a form of racism.
And guess what? Because of all that stuff, we just didn't talk and focus as much anymore on student achievement, on closing achievement gaps. And, interestingly, achievement started going down. Achievement gaps started getting bigger again.
Robert Pondiscio, in response to Ross's article, was wondering whether all this accountability pressure really did a whole lot of good anyway, at least when it came to teaching and learning. Let me quote what he wrote in response. He said, "The accountability era promised more than it could deliver. The theory behind No Child Left Behind seemed straightforward enough: establish standards, measure performance, identify and target failure, and attach consequences. Schools would respond to incentives by improving instruction, and achievement would rise. The first half worked. The second half proved far more complicated."
He said accountability systems became very good at identifying struggling schools but were far less successful at helping schools improve, or even understand how to improve. And he goes on to argue that the places that are now doing well, that are seeing achievement gains, Louisiana and Houston, they still have accountability, but layered on top of that they have coherent instructional strategies. We talk about high-quality instructional materials, the science of reading stuff, a lot of support for teachers, and a lot of focus on how teachers learn. That's how you start to get real changes in teaching and learning, and thus improvements in achievement.
And I agree with all of that. But what I think Robert is missing here, and this is the final big point I want to make today about vibes, is that No Child Left Behind and test-based accountability were not just trying to encourage schools to do a better job. They were also trying to shift the politics at the local level. They were trying to get school boards to make different decisions than they had always made. They were trying to get superintendents to make different decisions than they had already made.
I don't mean about curriculum and things like that, though again, like Robert said, that's super important. I mean about focus, resources, small-p politics. Who was going to get the share of resources, and who wasn't? Most concretely, it means, were we going to spend more money, or first of all at least as much money, on the low-income schools as the rich schools? Ideally, were we going to spend more money on the high-poverty schools than the rich schools?
Were the high-poverty schools critically going to get their fair share of the best teachers, or were they going to have to continue to put up with getting mostly the new teachers right out of ed school, who didn't really know what they were doing yet, who would practice and learn on the poor kids before transferring to the wealthier schools in the district?
It was that kind of thing that No Child Left Behind and accountability were also trying to shift. It was this political science proposition that basically, left to their own devices, too many of these local school districts, and especially the local elected school boards, would just continue to let normal politics plod along. That meant responding to the politically powerful people in a district. And in most districts, that means number one, organized labor, the teachers and the teachers' unions. Even in places that don't have unions, the teachers still have a lot of political power. And number two, the wealthy parents, who knew how to be squeaky wheels and to get what they wanted.
Who is left behind in that scenario? It's the families that don't have a lot of money and therefore don't have a lot of political power.
So if the point was accountability and the vibes of saying, hey, we need to have higher expectations, we need to expect that all kids can achieve, we need to close achievement gaps, otherwise it's the soft bigotry of low expectations, all of that was also about trying to shift these politics.
Now, I say that, and I can imagine that some people would respond thinking, well, was that the point? We didn't hear people really spell that out, that we were trying to change the politics on the ground. It was also the case that a lot of these districts, even if they were interested in responding to this pressure in this way, didn't know what to do.
And here again, it's like what Robert writes about with instruction. We put all this pressure on schools, expecting them, for example, to go look for the best curriculum. They didn't necessarily know how. They didn't know what the best curriculum was. They didn't know, when it comes to reading, for example, that that means making sure there's a content-rich curriculum and not just something focused on skills and finding the main idea.
So, too, here. We were not explicit enough about what you might actually do to try to make sure that, for example, poor kids get the resources they need to achieve. We needed to be more concrete.
For example, maybe we should have said, hey, the next time your collective bargaining agreement comes up for negotiation, you need to look at taking out those master's degree pay bumps, because paying teachers more to get a master's degree has no relationship to achievement. We also should stop giving teachers big raises after maybe ten or fifteen years. Keep up with inflation, okay, but otherwise they're not necessarily getting any better. We know from a lot of research that the returns to experience peter out around ten or fifteen years, so don't keep raising that.
Retiree health care benefits: Why are we paying teachers who are retired, and their families, paying their bills for health care, especially now that there are other options with Obamacare? If you take all that money and repurpose it, you could afford to dramatically boost starting teacher pay in order to recruit great people into the profession. And most critically, you could afford to put serious stipends into the high-poverty schools, dramatically more, ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars more to teach in a high-poverty school, so that you could cut down on the teacher retention and turnover problem in so many high-poverty schools. Therefore, you could raise achievement and close achievement gaps.
We know this now from D.C., from Dallas, and other places, that this kind of stuff can work. Those are the kinds of things that we need to see districts respond to accountability pressure.
But again, we weren't explicit enough. Maybe just putting the pressure and creating the incentives is not enough. We've learned when it comes to curriculum that if we really want to see it happen, it probably needs to be some kind of state policy, if not a state mandate, to say to districts, you have to adopt high-quality instructional materials. Here's a list. Choose among these materials.
Maybe we need something similar with state policy. Maybe the accountability pressure is not enough. Maybe states should just say, hey, districts, you are not allowed to pay teachers more for getting master's degrees. You are not allowed to pay for retiree health care. You must pay teachers in high-poverty schools more, significantly more, so that you cut down on this terrible teacher attrition problem.
Maybe that's where we need to be going. Maybe we realize that the accountability pressure can't do it alone.
Let me tell you, I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I now have one son still in the public schools. There's a school board election going on. There's a teacher contract negotiation coming up. Nobody's talking about any of this. None of it. It's not going to just come out of the ether. We need to be more explicit.
The final point is this: We're not going to get there, we're not going to have these kinds of conversations, if we don't see the vibe shift again. If we're talking about everything but student achievement, if we're talking about everything but closing achievement gaps, there's not the same urgency and focus to ask, hey, could we be doing things differently in order to get to the goals that we want to get to?
This stuff is hard, let's be honest. Trying to change the way we pay teachers, for example, trying to figure out ways to drive more resources into the neediest schools, these are politically challenging things to do, just like trying to improve teaching and learning is instructionally challenging.
We can do them. But it would sure help if we have vibes saying, this is what it's about. We believe that raising achievement and closing achievement gaps matters. It matters to these kids. It matters to our country.
So I gotta say, please, let's have the vibes shift back again.
Research Minute: Chronic absenteeism as a long-term condition
Mike Petrilli [17:15]
Okay, everybody, now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.
Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern
Thanks, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
And David, welcome back to the show as well.
David Griffith
Thanks, Mike. Always a pleasure.
Mike Petrilli
Discerning listeners may have noticed that not only were you not here for the solo, because that would be weird if you were just here watching me do my solo podcast, but that you've been missing for a few weeks. So welcome back. I hope you had a good time on your journey.
David Griffith
I was in Wyoming. It was very hard to reach me.
Mike Petrilli
Really? Wyoming? Why did I think you were in Europe? Sometimes you go to Europe, I guess I just assumed.
David Griffith
Yeah, not all liberals go to Europe at every opportunity, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
Okay, I'm impressed. I've never been to Wy- What am I saying? I've been in Wyoming. I've never been to Montana. See, look at me. I'm not supposed to mistake my western states like that, and I just did. Wyoming is beautiful, though. Good. I hope you got to pretend to be a cowboy or something.
David Griffith
You just can't help yourself, can you?
Mike Petrilli
Meanwhile, we're all very sad this morning now that the United States is out of the World Cup, leaving again after the round of 16. But that kind of makes sense, right? Aren't we ranked something like fifteenth or so in the world?
David Griffith
In the cold light of day, it makes a great deal of sense, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
Right. Amber, I guess maybe you're happy we can go back to talking about things other than soccer?
Amber Northern
I am. It's been a lot of soccer, although I have loved the little videos of the folks from other countries here trying out Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and whatever. That's been kind of fun.
Mike Petrilli
Buc-ee's is another thing that I have to admit I've never been to, but they're creeping north, so they're getting closer and closer to us. I don't know what it is. It's Wawa on steroids, right? Something like that.
Amber Northern
It's like Wawa and Walmart combined. Literally, it's a gas station the size of Walmart.
Mike Petrilli
Okay, yeah. Maybe for the next Fordham retreat we can go to a Buc-ee's and report back.
Amber Northern
I know. It is a destination for folks.
Mike Petrilli
Yes. Okay, so it is time to talk education research. Just because it's summer doesn't mean we focus only on other things. What you got for us, Amber?
Amber Northern [19:48]
That's right. We have a new report from Nat Malkus over at AEI. He's our buddy. He's been tracking absenteeism for a while. He's got a new report that's tracking post-pandemic chronic absenteeism up until 2025, so super recent.
He's using district-level absenteeism data. He's got forty-four states and Washington, D.C. He's been collecting data, I think most of our listeners know, through this Return to Learn Tracker. Again, it's got the latest and greatest.
The headline finding is that attendance is still improving, but at a rapidly slowing pace. In the 2018 and 2019 school years, the nation's chronic absenteeism rate was, I think, considered already a crisis, but at least it was stable. I think it was 15 percent in 2018. In 2022, the chronic absenteeism rate for these forty-five states he's looking at with the 2025 data hit an unprecedented 28 percent. So it went from 15 to 28 percent in the pandemic.
Then it improved by about three percentage points in 2023. Nat has been reporting all this time, and we saw that three-percentage-point increase in 2023. Then in 2024, he saw a two-percentage-point increase. In 2025, the rate is now just below one percentage point. So it just keeps slowing and slowing over the last few years in terms of seeing improvements. That's not good news.
The report also examines how absenteeism varies across states and district types. Again, it shows that raw absenteeism rates remain highest in the highest-poverty, lowest-achieving, and urban districts.
But he also finds that these pandemic-era increases we've seen are proportionally similar across districts. It doesn't mean that the effects of absenteeism are the same across districts. It just means that pandemic-era change is proportionally similar across districts and across these six years.
But the most interesting part of the analysis was across grade levels, and that's where you see some of the headlines. If elevated absenteeism were primarily a consequence of pandemic-era disruptions experienced by particular cohorts, in other words, if it was just that we have these cohorts that were affected by the pandemic and we think it's only going to apply to those cohorts, we'd expect these younger kids who entered school after the pandemic to have lower absenteeism.
Unfortunately, students in those early elementary grades are exhibiting similarly elevated rates. Nat sees this as evidence of a broader cultural shift in attendance norms. He thinks that, unfortunately, this may be a new normal. Absenteeism is no longer quickly falling like it was in the early years, as I said.
He warns that half of the pandemic-era increase in absenteeism could again become the new baseline if the current trends continue. He worries again that we're talking about a new approach to schooling that's not good, relative to the pandemic, versus just, we had this one generation of pandemic-era cohort that were affected. Maybe that's not the case.
Then I dug into it, and we had a little bit of back and forth over email. I just wanted to reiterate that it is a descriptive analysis, and you can't disentangle the changing attendance norms from all these other factors that affect attendance. I remember as a teacher, there's a lot about reporting and classification. It could be that some families are really good at writing notes and navigating these excuse policies. It could be that some parents are more organized in terms of getting these notes to the teachers. It could be that they are more engaged, so on and so forth.
I remember a lot of parents would consider vacations during the school year to be an excused absence, and schools don't. So it's unclear, honestly, whether schools are overriding some of these excused absences or not.
My bottom line is that there's inevitably all these other things going on among family behaviors, school behaviors, and administration practices that might be affecting attendance. But it still seems like the big picture is that we're slowing down on the improvements, and that's not good.
Mike Petrilli [24:41]
That is depressing. I guess I'll point out that it is also in line with some other recent analyses that have come out. One very recently about DIBELS, I think, and another one, I'm trying to remember if it was MAP or i-Ready, showing flatlining reading achievement in those early grades.
We had been making progress year over year after the pandemic, again as you think about kids coming up who maybe finally were not directly impacted by being out of school, because they were not born yet or they were too young. But now we have these later cohorts, and still the progress has stopped in reading. Maybe that could be related to the fact that they're not getting to school enough.
The other thing, though, and I asked Nat this, and I'm not sure what he thinks about it, is there's this nagging question I have, which is about data and whether something might have changed in the way we track attendance.
It's on my mind. I was just talking on the solo podcast about vibes, and I referenced this idea of a vibecession: Why do Americans think the economy is so bad when inflation is bad but otherwise most indicators are pretty good? There was an article, I think Nate Silver maybe put it out, saying that the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey changed a few years ago from a phone survey to an online survey. When that happened, the sentiment went down sharply. I guess survey people know that people tend to be more negative on online surveys than on phone surveys. So maybe the vibecession isn't actually happening if you adjust for that.
Long story saying, is it possible that we changed the way that we measure absenteeism and attendance? Are we more careful about it now than we used to be? There's been so much more focus on it, and we certainly know that, I think at the middle school and high school level, there are important nuances. How do you count it if a kid misses one class? Does that count as an absence all day, or do they have to miss four classes? Could that be an issue? That's not an issue for kindergartners or first graders, I would think.
But it just makes me wonder, how confident are we that this is real versus something that is about the way we collect the data? Am I coping here, David? Does this seem like a big cope on my behalf?
David Griffith [27:12]
Well, probably. But by definition, if the way we're collecting the thing has changed, unless we have documentation of that, we wouldn't know.
It's possible there has been more focus on partial-day absenteeism and that sort of thing. I don't know. I think where my gut is at is still that this is a tech-based shock. There is something about, and I sound like a broken record, but when I look back at how life changed between before the pandemic and after the pandemic, people are working from home. Screens have become ubiquitous. The intersection of those two things probably is significant.
You used to have to go to a movie store to get a movie. Now you can just stick your kid in front of a screen all day, and you can also be home, and you're not breaking any laws. I don't know if that explains all of it. I think some of it is also kind of this broader cultural shock and just not being as attached to school.
But the fact that we're still seeing it, and to me that's the most significant thing about the report, is that we seem to still be seeing it in these younger cohorts, which did not have a chance to detach from school. That suggests that that's not a full explanation to me.
I guess the other thing I would say is, I think we're getting mixed signals about these new cohorts. You mentioned the DIBELS, but NAEP, if you look carefully, had maybe some more positive news for the younger kids. They weren't as young as the ones I'm talking about. Those were fourth graders recently. I'm talking about kindergartners recently.
But nevertheless, I think there's some tension. We're not sure if the newer cohorts are rebounding or if we have a permanent downshift. Depending on which data source you believe, that either is in tension with the absenteeism data or it's not. I wish I could shed more light on what's happening, but I don't think it's clear.
Mike Petrilli [29:40]
When I think about older kids, we know there's always been this U-shape for absenteeism, right? It's highest for kindergartners and high school seniors, and then maybe lowest for, say, sixth graders. I feel like it doesn't take a lot to think about solutions for the middle school and high school kids. For example, you say if you don't show up enough, you don't get an A. You gotta show up if you want good grades. We are going to dock your grades. That would help to some degree, right?
We also know that a lot of it is that it's just so easy to get all the slides and lectures and notes and everything online, so why show up? You can just stay home instead. That's one set of issues.
But the kindergartners, right? How do we get parents to send their kindergartners to school? Here's where I think you're right, David. It's much less painful to keep your kindergartner home than it used to be, because you can entertain them. That does change the dynamic quite a bit.
Yeesh, that's a scary thought, right? We can just put them in front of a screen now and not have to babysit them, so it's okay to keep them home. Well, I don't know. If they don't want to go, if they don't feel like it, if maybe they've got the sniffles, I don't know.
I think it's still this mystery, again, assuming it's real. Most states didn't track chronic absenteeism until ESSA and a few years after that, so I just wonder if we set up all these data systems to track this stuff and maybe it's not as dramatically worse as we think it is. I'm just saying that. I'm putting it out there. Nat, tell me if I'm wrong.
Amber Northern [31:26]
So I can explain the whole thing, though, Mike? I really don't. This is like NAEP. We can look at the data and then we can all have our theories, isn't it? It makes it so fun.
Mike Petrilli
All right. Thank you, Amber. Thank you, Nat. It's important stuff, and it continues to obviously puzzle us, so we'll keep tracking it.
Closing
Mike Petrilli [31:47]
All right, gang. 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.
Narrator
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.
