Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent reflections on her decision to send her daughter to a predominantly Black, low-income public school. They debate the tension between parental school choice and the collective good, the advantages of family stability and parental involvement, and Rowe’s argument that family structure deserves more attention in conversations about student achievement. Should family structure become a standard measure in education data?
Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study of team-based teaching in Arizona. The researchers find no overall improvement in student achievement, but positive results in middle school math and significantly lower teacher turnover, alongside mixed results in elementary schools.
Recommended content:
- In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? —Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
- Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City —Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
- Why I Send My Kid to Low-Income Urban Public Schools —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
- Family Structure, a Key Factor Hidden in Plain Sight: The Case for Federal Reporting in Education —Ian V. Rowe, Brad Wilcox, and Grant Bailey, American Enterprise
- Evidence on Team-Based Teaching Models in Arizona —Mary Laski, Calen Clifton, and Dan Goldhaber, CALDER (August 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, Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, joins us to discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones' recent reflections on her daughter's education and what her experience says about school choice, parental agency, and family structure.
Plus, why is family structure so often missing from conversations about student achievement, and should education data do more to account for it?
Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new study of team-based teaching in Arizona. The model showed promising results in middle school math and significantly lower teacher turnover, but little or no benefit at the elementary school level.
All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.
Guest introductions
Mike Petrilli [01:01]
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.
Now, please welcome our special guest for today, Ian Rowe. Ian, welcome to the show.
Ian Rowe
Hello, Michael. So great to see you.
Mike Petrilli
Well, it's great to have you on, Ian.
Ian is the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, which is right now a single charter school in New York City, but soon to be more. We can maybe talk a little bit about that.
Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and, most importantly, a trustee at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, meaning he is one of my bosses. So I am especially delighted to have him on.
If you're like, wow, it seems like Mike's asking all kinds of softball questions today, well, now you know why.
Just teasing. He and I are not afraid to debate vigorously on many issues, regardless of our roles.
Similarly, just how David doesn't care, you know, about the Fordham organizational chart when it comes to sharing his opinions.
David Griffith, my co-host, welcome to you as well.
David Griffith
We all stand for true democratic discourse.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah.
David Griffith
Competition of ideas. This is a nice change of pace, though, I have to say. I like having Mike's boss on the show for a change.
Mike Petrilli
Yes. Okay, good.
Well, I've got to say, Checker, I think, really set that tone at Fordham long ago, that we would be fine disagreeing with each other out in the open. It would be so boring.
So, you know, look, for no other reason than it's interesting, we entertain ourselves by getting to have...
[Unclear passage in the original transcription.]
Honestly, we are trying to figure out what works. We're trying to figure out what policymakers should do, what practitioners should do.
In this search for truth and search for what works, it helps to have a diverse range of views. It helps to also be willing to change your mind.
Today, we're going to talk about somebody out there in pop culture this week who does not appear to be changing her mind, even though maybe she should.
Yes, we're going to start by talking about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her long article for The New York Times. Let's do that on Ed Reform Update.
Ed Reform Update: School choice and parental agency
Mike Petrilli [03:18]
All right. So, Ian, we really invited you on weeks ago to have you here to talk about some of the work you've been doing on family structure, on making sure, or asking our statistical agencies to do a better job reporting data by this. Make sure that's part of the conversation.
We will get there.
But, you know, we woke up Monday morning, I guess maybe it broke over the weekend, to this big article, Nikole Hannah-Jones going back to kind of give us the updated story about her own daughter.
She wrote about her when she was in kindergarten, about the choice she was making to send her Black daughter to a mostly Black, high-poverty community, basically segregated public school in New York City. It attracted a ton of attention at the time, and it was part of what made Nikole Hannah-Jones a star.
And now she's back. Her daughter's sixteen, and her daughter is pissed.
Ian Rowe
Yeah.
Mike Petrilli
That her mom and dad made some bad decisions and did not put her first.
So much to talk about in this article. I feel like it can be, what drove us craziest about this article? You first, Ian, but it's more than that, right?
But you start. I mean, by the way, Ian, you're a graduate of the New York City public schools. You have run a whole bunch, not just this most recent one, but a bunch of charter schools in New York City for mostly Black and brown kids.
I mean, you know a lot about this world she's talking about. So tell us your thoughts.
Ian Rowe [04:50]
Yeah. And first of all, guys, thanks for having me on, as always.
So Nikole Hannah-Jones, I think she's done, you know, let's give her props before we criticize her, which I'm ready to. But let's give her props for doing a huge mea culpa.
She's saying the decision she made ten years ago, and she framed this ten years ago, and by the way, many of us wrote about this ten years ago, that she was willing to sacrifice her daughter for the greater good.
There's the principle that there are all these Black and brown kids languishing in schools, and it was up to people like her, Nikole Hannah-Jones, to be their savior.
And by being their savior, that meant she had to subject her own kid to go to a school that otherwise, given her means, the fact that she was married, has resources, has a platform, she could get her kid into any school. But no, she was going to get her kid into, quote, a low-income Black school.
And at the time, I think many of us said, maybe you should be making decisions for your daughter about what's best for your daughter, not necessarily some social justice agenda around race.
And so over the weekend, she then wrote an article ten years later saying that the elementary and middle schools that she had put her daughter in were by far subpar.
And ultimately, she decided when her daughter needed to go to high school, she said, you know what? I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to put the power of choice in your hands, saying to her daughter.
And the irony that I don't think Nikole Hannah-Jones gets is that the same trust and confidence that she ultimately built in her daughter to make the choice of where she would like to go to school, perhaps she should start advocating for policies that give the same trust and confidence to those same families that she says she's trying to save, the ones that are languishing.
She says there's no absolution. These families don't want absolution from Nikole Hannah-Jones. They want the same privilege of choice that she exercised in her own daughter's life.
And the fact that she regrets her decision to send her kid to schools that she now deems weren't worthy, that's something she has to confront, but it doesn't negate the power of choice.
Making bad decisions doesn't mean that you should restrict other people from making their own decisions.
Mike Petrilli
No, that's right.
And look, I said at the top that this is somebody that hasn't changed her point of view. She did decide that she made a mistake. She should have put her daughter first. She should not have chosen those subpar schools.
But when you read the piece, it hasn't changed anything, she thinks, about education policy and practice. And that's what I found so maddening.
And look, Ian, you've pointed this out. You, again, have run charter schools. She doesn't at all mention the fact that there are these schools in the same city, often the same neighborhoods, serving a very similar population of kids who are getting much better results, right?
Called charter schools.
I mean, she described some of the things happening in these traditional public schools that were just terrible. The lunch monitors not doing their jobs, teachers not showing up to teach, administrators in over their heads, in schools where they're spending something like $40,000 or $50,000 per child, right?
And her hope was that she and her husband, by being in these schools, being on the PTA, being squeaky wheels, being able to complain, would help the other kids in that school.
And look, I think there's some truth to that.
The problem is it's a drop in the bucket. Right? The problem in New York City and in most big urban districts is systemic.
Why is it that they're spending all of that money? Which, look, it's a huge success in that we're spending more money on these poor kids and Black and brown kids, but they still can't get the workers in the system to do basic things like show up and do their jobs, right?
It's not necessarily just because of segregation. She uses that word probably dozens of times, right? It's because the system's broken.
And so then you've got to ask yourself, okay, well, what can we do to fix it? Or can we create an alternative system?
I mean, and before you know it, you turn into an education reformer, right? But she doesn't do that at all. She doesn't go that far.
Ian Rowe
I think for someone as deeply entrenched in her ideology as Nikole Hannah-Jones, it would literally be a brain explosion. She wouldn't know how to process it.
I do think it's worth noting, in the original article that she wrote ten years ago when she was explaining why she was doing this, you know, we have to make decisions about the collective good, not only my individual advantage.
But she said something very important ten years ago. She said, despite all of this, I knew that we, she and her husband, would be able to make up for Najya, her daughter, anything the school was lacking.
It's a very powerful statement because basically what she was saying is, I'm going to make this decision to send my daughter to a school that I think is subpar. But I know that because I'm married, stable parent household, resources, we will make up for anything the school is lacking.
And essentially, that's what she did for ten years.
You're right. She talks about lunchtime. Kids are chasing and hitting each other. She comes into the school. She's breaking up fights. She's demanding the principal resolve these unsafe conditions. She's trying to make it happen.
And I think one point that many people aren't appreciating is that it sounds like her daughter turned out okay.
Even despite going to these bad schools, it's a function of the fact that they were able to provide the resources to be a buffer for her daughter, who now evidently got into one of the top public high schools in New York City.
So it is interesting that she never actually acknowledges the role that her strong family played in getting these better outcomes for kids.
But to your point, she never deeply realizes, okay, you may not have liked your decision, but what about you not supporting policies?
Which, by the way, she's very actively opposed to charter schools.
I don't know where she stands on this education freedom tax credit that the governor is leaning into positively in New York, even though the unions are bashing it.
But why not, Nikole Hannah-Jones, take a lesson from your own experience?
And I think that's what's frustrating many of us, that she had the courage to share this story. And I give her props for that. She didn't have to write the story.
But what's the lesson for all of us?
The lesson isn't that privileged kids or privileged parents don't need to send their kids into subpar schools to sacrifice their own children's education.
It's really to level the playing field of choice so that every parent can do what she did and have the opportunity to fail.
The thing is, our parents don't have ten years to course-correct. She wrote this article ten years ago, and that is now her mea culpa. Well, our parents need opportunities today.
And her mindset is one that diminishes this idea of agency. She seems to continue this idea that it's all these Black and brown kids that are languishing, and it's up to her to save them.
And that is just an insulting position.
Mike Petrilli
Or, you know, that the problem is concentrated poverty, right? And that the solution, therefore, is some kind of, she doesn't really get into it in this piece, but some kind of desegregation system, which we've tried and failed various forms of that forever.
But by not talking about, for example, the charter schools that also have concentrated poverty, and look, they're not perfect and they're not working miracles necessarily, or the ones that are, maybe you look at the data and you wonder, right?
But their lunch monitors are monitoring lunch, and their teachers are showing up to teach, and they're facing some of these challenges like, okay, what do you do in a classroom of kids who are way below grade level?
That's a real challenge, but they figure out ways to address it head-on. They have instructional strategies to deal with that.
David, this drove you crazy, too. Why don't you get in here and share your thoughts?
David Griffith [13:50]
Yeah, well, Ian has said a lot of what I would say, and I think more powerfully than I can say it.
I'll just say, I mean, I think the piece spends a lot of time on this notion of sort of like racism in the system, right? And I think we all understand that it's not as though race is irrelevant in the system. That's certainly not something that anyone would claim.
But I think when I read her, it seems like she views herself as kind of continuing this tradition of fighting for racial justice.
And that's powerful and noble in some ways, but it also misses some really important things that are going on, I think, in today's society.
And it kind of misses the way that the problem, if it is a problem, has evolved.
This isn't kind of like forcing kids to break the color line and go ... de jure segregation.
The problem is subtler than that. Its in many ways a collective action problem It's hard to be the first white parent to send you child to an all Black school.
It's hard to be the first Black parent to send your kid to an all-white school, right? There are some really frustrating collective action problems at the heart of what frustrates her.
I don't know. The whole thing strikes me as a little tragic because she's trying to dive in and do something about it. And the logic of these problems means that it is very hard for you as an individual to overcome them.
And I just want to tell her, instead of judging everyone harshly, including yourself, maybe cut everyone a little bit more slack and recognize that parents are trying to do what's right for their kid and be open to alternative theories of action, I guess is how I would put it.
Ian Rowe [16:00]
Well, you know, her closing paragraph is her flourish at the end, because I think it's worth reciting verbatim.
She says:
"For all of our justifications, including mine, to take my daughter out of this school, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we, the privileged, continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people's children to languish, simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here."
So think about what she's saying.
She said, as long as we, the privileged, including mine. Meanwhile, I've just sent my daughter to a selective high school in New York.
So she's never, wait, don't these people that are languishing, don't they have agency? Don't they deserve the ability to make the same choice that you are now regretting, but still?
Mike Petrilli
Yeah.
Ian Rowe
She just doesn't make that connection.
For her, it's about the privileged. It's a zero-sum game. They just have to give up what they have in order for the languishing to be successful.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. Yeah, no. And you're right that the poor families don't have any agency.
And look, in a lot of these systems, they have less agency than they should because we don't give them the opportunity to make choices, including outside the system, or we put a cap on.
I mean, she goes through and puts school choice in scare quotes throughout the piece. I'm like, come on, editor, what are you doing here? This is ridiculous.
Look, and to David's point, I get the collective action challenge when it comes to school integration.
But my frustration is about the collective action challenge of how do you deal with the systemic problems.
Why is it that you walk into these schools, again, that we have fixed the funding problem? It used to be the issue was you couldn't get good people because you couldn't pay them well enough because there wasn't enough money.
We've solved the money problem, and yet you still can't seem to get good people or hold them accountable for doing their jobs, right? What is that about?
Well, then that makes you start thinking about the unions. That starts making you think about the politics.
Ian, you though are, I mean, this whole discussion then, she would like it to continue to be about race and segregation. And your hope with some of the things you've been pushing on family structure is to try to make it so that we also have a conversation about the importance of family structure.
So tell us about that. How are we going to do that, and is it doable?
I don't know if it's doable. There's a tiny corner of people on the right who are happy to have that conversation. Nikole Hannah-Jones is never going to be willing to have that conversation, but maybe people in the middle. I don't know.
Family structure and student achievement
Ian Rowe [18:54]
Well, I guess I'm trying to embark upon an effort to make it impossible to ignore the importance of family structure.
So as you said, I've been running public charter schools since 2010 in the South Bronx, elementary and middle schools for a decade and now running high schools.
And being a school leader, look, you get a bird's-eye view of what's working and what's not working in schools.
The importance of strong leadership, great principals, a school with an actual ethos that it has fidelity toward, rigorous curriculum, content-rich curriculum. These things really matter.
But if one doesn't acknowledge, particularly in the communities we serve, the role that a kid coming from a stable family household, and that can be a single-parent household for sure, but oftentimes a kid coming from a married two-parent household, just based on my lived experience, as a phrase that people love to use, it's obvious that that makes a huge difference in kids' outcomes.
And when I first started talking about this issue, probably back in 2016, folks said, Ian, don't go down there. Don't talk about this, because if you start talking about family structure and the relationship with kids' outcomes, you're going to be embarrassing kids because a lot of their parents weren't raised in married two-parent households.
And more importantly, you're going to take the attention away from what really matters, and that's the structural racism and discrimination in the system.
And I said, okay.
But then as I looked at the National Assessment for Educational Progress and almost every report that came out, you almost always saw disparity information reported by race, reported by economic class, reported by gender.
And those things are important to track. So this is not an argument for eliminating other prisms through which we look at student performance.
But family structure doesn't appear anywhere.
And that's when it became clear to me that we are deliberately ignoring a very important dimension. In fact, a dimension that might be what I call transcendent, meaning that there are Black kids being raised in stable, married two-parent households that are doing great.
They're heading to college. They're reading on grade level. They're well-adjusted.
And there are a lot of white kids being raised in unstable family structures whose education is suffering.
And of course, you have to say the caveat, just because a kid is raised in a married two-parent household is not a guarantee that they will be successful, in the same way a kid raised in a single-parent household, their life is not a disaster.
There are many, many exceptions.
But the data, when it becomes available, disaggregated by family structure, really makes a difference.
So my colleague and I, Brad Wilcox, embarked upon an effort to do a report to say, does it make a difference?
And we learned that the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and actually it was Checker Finn who was the first person to alert me to this fact, collects data on the student questionnaire every two years on NAEP, the National Assessment for Educational Progress, the Nation's Report Card.
And what's interesting is they don't ask kids, what's your family structure? It's a simple question. It says, who do you live with?
And it's a dropdown. You can say father, mother, stepfather, a couple of other options. But basically, a kid in fourth grade and eighth grade and twelfth grade can answer that question.
And so you're able to reconstruct family structure of a given kid.
And when you do that analysis, there is enough data to indicate that this is a factor that matters, and it's worth reporting on.
And so we produced a report, Hidden in Plain Sight.
We actually looked at the National Survey of Children's Health, and we found that kids raised in what are called intact families, which are kids raised with biological or adoptive parents that are together and married, they do far better on a number of dimensions, both in school and also in depression and mental health.
And so we're arguing very strongly that family structure should become a reporting category, just in the same way we currently do what I call the usual suspects: race, class, gender. Let's add family structure.
I do believe it's possible, Mike, because I think it's a dimension that we're just ignoring, and it actually could become one of the most important factors as we talk to young people about their decisions moving forward.
It's not about shaming current families, but it's helping young people understand the factors that matter most to their ultimate success, with them knowing family formation is one of the biggest decisions that they will make for their own lives.
Mike Petrilli [24:07]
Yeah, no. And look, I think it's an interesting hypothesis to say, can that be part of shifting this conversation, making it constructive?
I mean, look, we can all, well, I don't know, maybe David can't remember. He was too young. But Ian, you and I can remember when teenage pregnancy was through the roof.
You know, 1990, just sky-high. And then we made tremendous progress as a country in reducing that teenage pregnancy rate.
And no doubt that helped. And it was one reason why the childhood poverty rate came down. Much better outcomes for lots of kids because that message got out.
And look, there were huge debates on left and right. What's the right way to do that? What's the role of birth control or not? What messages do you send?
But simply saying, hey, we can change the behavior of young people. And if we have a consistent message that says, look, getting pregnant when you're a teen is not good for you and is not good for your baby, we were able to say that, and that made a difference.
And now to say, hey, look, the message is it's better if you can finish your education, get started in a career before you find a partner and then have children.
If you follow that, which is what almost all upper-middle-class people do, people who overwhelmingly now vote Democratic, if you follow that success sequence, you're much less likely to be poor.
That maybe can start to shift the culture as well.
And look, maybe we're already seeing it. We certainly know that the teenage pregnancy rate continues to go down. There's been some stabilizing on some of these other trends. So maybe it's getting out there.
Ian Rowe
It's getting out there.
And it is important to say that the teen pregnancy, as you say, I cite this in my book, too, probably one of the greatest public health achievements of all time, the reduction of that.
What has happened is that the nonmarital birth rate, or the nonmarital births, the problem shifted. It just moved up the age scale a little bit.
So while there are a lot fewer teenagers having nonmarital births, it has shifted to young women aged twenty to twenty-four.
And so we still need that messaging for this particular age group to recognize that many of the issues that we felt plagued teen moms, those issues are now plaguing women twenty to twenty-four who are having unplanned or nonmarital births.
And the consequence, again, always have to make the exception statements, but the data is overwhelming that the likelihood of poverty, domestic violence for both the mother and the kid, is dramatically higher.
And if we can have that be part of the conversation to open the door that maybe things like race, class, gender, they matter, but they may not matter as much as something called family structure.
Mike Petrilli
All right. We will leave it there.
Ian Rowe, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's always great to see you, and we appreciate it.
Founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. We didn't get to talk about your great high school. People should check that out.
Ian Rowe
Yes. And our new high school, Westchester Aerospace and Virtues Academy. We'll have a separate conversation about how we can marry classical education with pre-professional training in aviation.
Mike Petrilli
Love it. Love it.
All right. Thanks, Ian.
Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.
Research Minute: Team-based teaching in Arizona
Mike Petrilli [27:24]
Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern
Thanks, Mike.
Mike Petrilli
We had a great conversation with Ian about what everybody's buzzing about, of course, Nikole Hannah-Jones' long article.
I heard that you were a big, big fan of that piece.
Amber Northern
Oh, Mike. So frustrating.
I said over an email, I was expecting a big Diane Ravitch conversion toward our side of the fence, and it just didn't happen.
I'm like, how could it not have happened after she wrote all that?
Mike Petrilli
Right, right.
It was interesting when you said that about Diane Ravitch because I think about how sometimes I felt like Diane's argument over the years after she had her conversion was, hey, the schools are doing the best they can.
It's that argument. It's all poverty. It's all racism, inequality, American society. You're beating up on these public schools, and they're doing the best they can.
But Nikole's reporting showed they're clearly not doing the best they can. They weren't doing the basics well at all.
All right. Well, I've been thinking, Amber, of renaming Amber's Research Minute to Dan Goldhaber's Research Minute.
Is that fair? Tell us what you got this week.
Amber Northern [28:34]
He's got some good stuff, but he's going to have to call me out because I swear this was a complicated report.
I tried to get it right. Don't know if I got it right, but I trust he'll let us know.
So we are looking at a new CALDER paper. They're looking at a workforce policy question, which is, does team-based teaching actually move the needle for students?
So we'll get into what that really means.
They're looking at this model called the New Education Workforce Model, or NEW. I'm just going to call it the new model.
It's where groups of educators are sharing responsibility for a cohort of kids, like a large roster of kids. I think it was between fifty and one hundred kids.
And in theory, this would enable them to differentiate their roles, specialize instruction, and so on.
So we obviously want to know, is it boosting achievement? Is it improving teacher retention and quality and things like that? And that's what the study looks into.
All right. I had to dig into the model because I know you're going to be like, what was the model?
They bring together two to six educators. It's supposedly a mix of teachers, paraeducators, special education teachers. Again, they collectively share this large roster of kids.
Then I had to look into what ASU, like what the model on paper is supposed to do versus what the CALDER paper, or rather the ASU AIR paper, said it does.
According to the model, it does include subject-specific specialization because I know we've talked about that before on this show.
So one teacher on the team is supposed to handle math, another science, another ELA, and so on. And then each is that teacher of record for that subject across the shared cohort.
And within that cohort, the idea is these students get regrouped flexibly based on their needs.
So one group might be getting targeted instruction in literacy. Another might be working on advanced content.
So they get this targeted differentiation rather than a single teacher trying to do the same thing, managing twenty-five kids and differentiating, which we know doesn't happen.
So then supposedly this new model introduces a specialization that a lot of the middle schools in the study already had by default.
But the paper can't confirm whether elementary schools in the district are actually doing that because principals have significant leeway in configuring the teams.
They are explicitly told they can adapt the framework to their local context, meaning we don't really know exactly what this team experience entails.
So they can't tell you in the data, okay, this elementary team reorganized their instruction. They have subject-specific specialization versus this team just spent a lot of time talking and planning together, but they still teach their own group of kids.
So that's kind of a big deal.
That said, the authors define treatment at the grade level. So if any teacher in a grade participates in NEW, all the students in that grade are counted as exposed, even if their own teacher wasn't teamed.
That's because, number one, the data were messy, but also it avoids bias from sorting within the grades.
So the whole sort of estimate here could actually understate the effects for the students who were actually directly exposed to the model.
All right. I think that's enough explanation, caveats, blah, blah, blah.
They have eight years of data, 2017 through 2025. They skipped Covid-2020.
They're using one large Arizona district. It has eighty schools, 60,000 kids, 3,000 teachers, and they have the staggered rollout of the new model starting in 2021 across these different schools and grades.
So they're using a difference-in-differences design. They're comparing changes over time in the places that adopted the new model with changes in similar places that hadn't yet adopted the new model.
For those who are methodology geeks, they also addressed some recent concerns about this model in particular.
All right, I'm not talking about that.
Key finding one: The new model produced null effects on student achievement in both math and ELA when pooling across grades, but that hides important grade-band differences.
So this was the headline finding, I think.
In middle school math specifically, the authors find consistent positive effects of about 0.08 standard deviations. So that's equivalent to moving from a median teacher to one at the 70th percentile of effectiveness. Pretty good.
By contrast, elementary school effects were negative or null, and ELA effects were inconsistent.
And then on teacher outcomes, they find that teamed educators had lower turnover, so about seven to eight percentage points lower, which was a 27 percent reduction from typical teacher departure rates.
And they had higher evaluation ratings.
But interestingly, the positive outcomes didn't align with where they saw the achievement gains.
So they kind of hypothesized that schools with better retention and ratings didn't necessarily show stronger math outcomes, which maybe suggests that those benefits were less about workforce stability and more that maybe folks were actually changing their instruction.
And then I guess the takeaway is that you can look at team-based teaching in middle school math, and we know that's where departmentalization already exists.
So they seem to be saying, okay, this model deepens the specialization where the conditions already exist for it. Maybe that's why we're seeing some positive results there.
And then elementary schools traditionally have self-contained classrooms.
So it looks like they appear to struggle with the model, but you've got this elephant in the room that we don't know whether these NEW model teams at the elementary level were doing the lighter touch, maybe just planning and coordinating and not doing the specialization piece around subject matter.
So if that's the case, then you wouldn't expect the achievement gains, which we didn't see.
And that could explain why we saw the null and negative effects there.
Did you get me on all that?
Mike Petrilli [35:09]
You know, I learned a lot, Amber, and I'm glad to hear it because I've been confused about this model, I will admit.
I sort of kind of knew about it, but then people put it in the same bucket. It's like teacher reforms and this one and then also the one that Bryan Hassel and his team at Public Impact have been promoting, Opportunity Culture, right, which is more about trying to get the best teachers in front of lots more kids in various ways.
But I'm still trying to figure out, wait, is this really a teacher reform thing or is this departmentalization, which we've talked about here before, we always feel like should work but often doesn't work for some reason in elementary school.
You would think it would work. I would think it would work. I would think if you didn't have to train as many math teachers or as many reading teachers, that would be better.
But that doesn't seem to work.
Or is this just an elaborate way to do tracking and ability grouping and not say it out loud?
I mean, right, David? We talk about this all the time. Is this a silent track? Is this just we don't want to admit that we're grouping kids by ability, so we've come up with an elaborate way to sort of do that without saying we're doing that?
David Griffith
Well, I don't know, Mike.
I mean, that's part of it, isn't it, Amber? Or that could be part of it?
They're saying they're regrouping, right, based on student need. So that could be an implication.
What I didn't really get was, okay, if you need more math, do you then take your kid and the kid gets more time in math?
It wasn't exactly clear to me if you've got differentiation of teachers and you've got fifty, I mean, seventy-five kids covered by four teachers, then what is that?
Because you still have a teacher of record for your subject.
So it's not entirely clear to me how having the team really helps them unless they're letting their kids sit in a math class when they should be in ELA.
Mike Petrilli
Right, right. They double up on the math time or something like that.
David Griffith
I'm just struggling to make sense of the elementary and the middle school results because, I don't know, if the theory is that differentiation is good, then it should be good in elementary school, right?
Mike Petrilli
You mean departmentalization?
David Griffith
Either one. Yeah, either one of them.
It's just very hard for me to believe that either one of them is good in sixth grade and bad in fifth grade.
I don't have a fifth or sixth grader yet, but I don't think they're that different.
And if anything, I would expect, if that's the direction that the team teaching pushes, I would expect bigger effects in elementary school where there's less of this happening at the school level.
Or I'm misunderstanding.
Mike Petrilli
Right.
But a lot of people that have always been worried about departmentalizing in elementary school, they say, oh no, well, that's where the relationships really matter.
For these younger kids, it's really important to have one teacher that they really get to know. And when you start messing with that, then it's a problem.
Which, again, I can buy for kindergartners. I don't know, fourth and fifth graders as much.
David Griffith
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something to that. I don't want to dismiss that.
I just know that in any given week, right now, James goes to a different teacher for science almost every day.
And he goes to atelier, which is a fancy word for playing with lights and colors and Play-Doh and blocks and getting your first grade out.
And I mean, it's not like he's locked in a room with one teacher.
It would not be that big a leap for him to be doing math in one of these alternative settings. They have library every week.
It's a caricature of the first-grade experience, I think, in many schools to say that they just never leave their homeroom.
That's the part I struggle with. It seems like there's plenty of scope for that sort of thing.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, they do enrichment stuff already, and they do music and they do art.
David Griffith
Yeah. And they do aftercare.
Mike Petrilli
Yeah. I don't know.
And Amber, this thing from a research perspective, like we don't really know what's going on in these classrooms.
I hate to say it, and Dan will correct me if I'm wrong, but it really did seem like they just didn't have the data that they needed to pinpoint what the heck was going on at the elementary level.
And they, again, to take care of the selection problem, they had to look at these grade levels because, in many ways, they couldn't link the teacher to the student in ways they would have liked to.
So I don't know. I think it was a measurement problem, or at least it was a big measurement problem relative to the elementary level.
And I kind of buy the theory that the specialization is already occurring at the middle school. So maybe this model just deepened it and kind of put it on steroids because they already knew how to do it there.
That doesn't strike me as unusual.
Amber Northern
Yeah.
Mike Petrilli
You know, if they really wanted to know what was going on in those classrooms, they could have put cameras in the classrooms and collected that data.
This is not hard, people. Good Lord.
Amber Northern
How do all my Research Minutes reach the same capstone comment from you?
Mike Petrilli
This is not hard to do. There are cameras everywhere in our world today, except classrooms. Can't put them in a classroom.
David Griffith
Six degrees of Enemy of the State here with Mike Petrilli.
Mike Petrilli
I know, that's where everybody goes. Come on.
I was joking about them being Flock cameras. You don't have to do that.
And look, guard the data. They only go to the researchers, right? Or a principal. I'm not saying put it online.
David Griffith
Right, right.
Mike Petrilli
Not like where you can see your panda when the panda's eating at the zoo. You're not looking at your kid all day.
David Griffith
Yeah, all right.
Mike Petrilli
Exactly. Whenever I talk about this, I get these emails or people on social media. Ben Reilly most recently. "Oh, when are we going to put a camera in your office, Mike?"
Which, look, if that's what it takes, I'll do it. I tell you, it will not be very interesting. But, you know.
David Griffith
How do you know there isn't one, Mike?
Mike Petrilli
Yeah, good point. Good point.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Good, good, good. It's good stuff, Amber. Look, it's getting a lot of attention. I'm glad we're learning more about it.
Amber Northern
Yeah, yeah, we'll keep at it.
Mike Petrilli [41:46]
All right. Well, hey, gang, that is all the time we've got for you 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.
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.
