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Following up

Last week, we noted that Dohn Community High School in Cincinnati experienced some fiscal troubles that derailed the start of the school year and resulted in the departure of more than 50 staffers, including the long-time superintendent. This week, we learned that Cincinnati Charter School Collaborative, the entity that ran Dohn for years, was also terminated by the school’s board and is now under investigation by the Auditor of State’s office.

Disrespect, disappointment, and a legal dispute

Earlier this month, charter school students in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, were turned away from a community-wide college fair, despite having scheduled meetings with recruiters there. The district on whose grounds the event took place says the students of Gillingham Charter School were invited by accident and were disinvited before the event with the explanation that it was intended for traditional district students only. Gillingham officials sued the event organizer—an educational service center in the region—alleging a number of serious constitutional and civil rights violations for both the exclusionary nature of the fair and for the treatment students and staffers received on site. Last week, district lawyers responded, saying the suit was without merit and asserting that an agreement had been reached regarding the rescinded invitation long before the date of the fair and that Gillingham’s arrival at the fair was an “orchestrated and premeditated” act in contravention of that agreement.

Ohio charter school students learning and building community

Middle school students from Heir Force Community School in Lima recently spent the day at Ohio Northern University, working with and learning from engineering students there. It’s an annual event designed to get youngsters excited about science and going to college. Sounds awesome! Also super awesome: Maritime Career Day in Toledo, hosted by the National Museum of the Great Lakes earlier this week. High school students from far and wide were invited to the event to help raise awareness of the “huge cross section of maritime careers” available to them in the region. Kudos to the students of Maritime Academy of Toledo—whose unique charter school has already helped prepare them for such careers—for joining in to educate their peers.

Novel efforts to combat chronic absenteeism

Two of the leaders of Caliber Public Schools, a charter school network in California, discussed their efforts to cut down on chronic student absenteeism. These focus on nonpunitive approaches involving data analysis, family outreach, and something called “Mystery Fridays”. You’ll have to read the piece to see what that is! By the end of the 2023-24 school year, the network had reduced chronic absenteeism by more than 13 percentage points, from 40 percent to 26.8 percent. And in the first month of 2024-25, they report an average of 95 percent daily attendance.

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In 1990, 48 percent of our nation’s eighth graders had very weak math skills. How did we know? They scored in the lowest performance category, Below Basic, on the national test given to a sample of American students every two years.[1]

By 2013, something remarkable had happened. The share of eight graders Below Basic was just 26 percent.

Even better, the progress was shared across every demographic group. For example, the percentage of Black students with Below Basic scores dropped from 78 to 48 percent.

It was an incredible victory for American schools. Fewer struggling math students meant more opportunities to complete advanced coursework, qualify for good jobs, and earn higher wages.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, 2013 turned out to be the high-water mark. Achievement stopped improving. First, it stagnated. Then, toward the end of 2010s, it began to decline. And finally, along came Covid.

Below, you can see the picture as of 2022. The share of low performing math students increased compared to 2013 for each racial group—with especially large jumps for Black and Hispanic eighth graders. Much of the progress from the earlier period eroded.

Why did this happen?

Short answer: No one seems to know.

This goes far beyond the pandemic

We’re in the midst of an education depression. By depression, I mean an extended era of shrinking outcomes and opportunity. I hesitate to call it a “great” depression because that feels hyperbolic. But the duration—over a decade already—makes the term plausible.

I’m not the first to describe this problem. Mike Petrilli and Chad Aldeman are just a few of the policy-world voices who have been sounding the alarm for years. Journalists have covered it. In the past month alone, Kevin Huffman wrote about it in the The Washington Post and Jessica Grose of The New York Times generated chatter by calling it the crisis that neither presidential candidate has a plan to address.

But due to a generalized stance of denial in the public sphere, this is still news to many people. If that’s true for you, don’t feel bad. Plenty of education conversations at the state and local level revolve narrowly around recovering from Covid learning loss—as if it would be a momentous victory to return to 2019 achievement.

Wrong. Our true problem is larger. For more than thirty years, education indicators almost uniformly got better. We occupied ourselves by arguing (sometimes aggressively) about whether they were improving fast enough and whether marginalized students could close gaps entirely with more privileged students.

Those debates are no longer happening. Why? Because we’re moving in the wrong direction. Who wouldn’t love to return to the good old days when our biggest grievance was the velocity of our victory? It’s now become easier to ignore the big problem than to fix it.

Is there any evidence of this so-called “depression” beyond national test scores?

Yes, loads of it.

• Absenteeism. Longtime readers remember that I covered this issue in detail last fall, and there’s still regular mainstream news coverage, so I’ll spare you a lengthy recap. At its core, absenteeism reflects disengagement from school on the part of students and families. In 2014, just 14 percent of students were chronically absent. In 2023, it was 26 percent. Figures are up in every single state that measures absenteeism.
• Higher education. Participation in college has moved steadily in one direction—up—for pretty much the entirety of American history. Until recently. In 2012, 41 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds had enrolled in a two- or four-year school. In 2022, enrollment declined to 39 percent. That drop is small, but dig beneath the surface and there are surprising trends. Enrollment in two-year colleges was down 34 percent over the decade, with declines particularly driven by White students, who are more likely than peers to express skepticism about the quality of education colleges are offering. The FAFSA debacle has further depressed enrollment. Views of higher ed have split along partisan lines. A college crisis is brewing.
• Reading. Let’s put achievement aside for a moment. We prioritize literacy among elementary students partly to create lifelong, passionate readers. How’s that going? In 2012, 27 percent of thirteen-year-olds reported that they read for fun “almost every day.” By 2020—in surveys taken before the pandemic—the figure had dropped to 17 percent. That’s a big change in eight years. For the first time since the survey was launched in 1984, the share of kids who “never or hardly ever” read for fun—29 percent—exceeded the share that reads almost every day.

Make a list of educational outcomes that matter to you personally. Then look up whether those measures were better for your local community in 2013 than they are now. I’m willing to bet you’ll see much the same pattern.

Why does this depression attract so little notice?

There was an era from the 1980s until Barack Obama’s second term characterized by heightened national attention to learning standards, school improvement, choice, and test-based accountability. Almost everyone uses the same term for it: education reform.

This past decade—which has been seen a shift away from reform priorities in addition to falling performance—has no name. It’s the nameless depression.

When I ask folks about this, they bring up a few dynamics:

1. Losses were concentrated among low-performing students. We have roughly the same number of high-performers on national tests as a decade ago. Far more students are receiving perfect scores on the ACT exam. Elite colleges are awash in qualified applicants. At the same time, we have more struggling students—and their achievement levels are noticeably lower than was the case for strugglers in 2013. Old gaps have re-opened. But elite, affluent communities with highly educated (and influential) populations have been substantially spared.
2. We can blame COVID. In some respects, this is reasonable. Learning setbacks related to the pandemic were enormous and lasting. But it’s misleading to suggest that our educational downturn began when schools sent kids home in March 2020. The depression was well underway. Covid only exacerbated it. We can’t use Covid as a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card. Nor should public officials over-celebrate small gains that only cement our anemic recovery.
3. Test scores lost credibility. Data showing declining achievement have been clear and publicly available. But in the wake of the reform movement, nobody wanted to discuss it. In the 2010s, teachers unions and fed-up parents waged war on testing—nearly succeeding in removing the federal requirement to assess students annually in math and reading.[2] Additionally, almost every state changed its tests—some more than once—during the transition to new learning standards. It was difficult to compare results from one year to another. The construction dust led observers to overlook a national pattern.
4. There were conflicting signals. Not every indicator has deteriorated in the past decade. High school graduation rates, for instance, have climbed significantly, from 80 to 87 percent. Hard to complain about good news. But graduation rates are almost entirely controlled by local schools. If they relax expectations and inflate grades—which is exactly what researchers find they’ve been doing—graduation rates will rise even if students are performing worse. Academic leniency has papered over learning deficits in many communities.

What now?

The original Great Depression ended when the American economy mobilized for World War II. We can’t wait around for a geopolitical event to fix this mess. We need leadership.

Some things for us to do:

• Acknowledge reality. It’s time to stop pretending. This applies to everyone—not just education officials. Funders and non-profits are just as guilty of hiding out in recent years. I’m on the email distribution list for dozens of organizations. Most of them never mention the crisis we’re in. It’s long been fashionable to say we are “data driven,” but the past decade suggests that’s a hollow claim. Having the wrong frame for our situation has prevented us from setting the right course.
• Resist the urge to find a simplistic scapegoat. Remember, our declines are evident in all fifty states. There is no national conspiracy to deliver poor results. Schools have focused on the priorities we’ve given them in the best ways they know. We can’t write off long-term trends to hot-button issues—like book bans or DEI initiatives—that draw big heat in a handful of places. My concern is that we have not been clear with schools about what’s most important and we have asked them to focus on too many things outside their core competence.
• Brace ourselves. In just a few months, we’ll have a new president and another round of NAEP results. We don’t know whether we’re about to see signs of hope or new reasons for despair. Based on state test scores released for 2023–24, I am not optimistic about big gains on NAEP.[3]
• Pass a new federal education law. The Every Student Succeeds Act, enacted in 2015, has been a dismal failure. It is wholly unsuited to our present challenges. We need bipartisan congressional leadership to develop a successor for the new era. Where will that leadership come from?
• Stop playing small ball. In the face of this depression, it often feels like our available solutions are piecemeal. Let’s start by establishing clear goals. Where will we be in 2030? 2035? And how big must our ideas be to get us there?

Next month, I’ll accept my own challenge and offer a few possibilities. Thanks for reading.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly.

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

1. Channel 4 News in Columbus has heard that Dublin City Schools is highly recommended by local parents of students with special needs, and that families are moving there specifically for the quality of services offered. District personnel are happy to explain at length how and why they are so awesome. (If it were me, I might have added the note that it ain’t cheap to live within the Dublin City Schools borders and that they do not allow interdistrict open enrollment, but I am probably alone in wanting to include a follow-up question of this nature and bring dim reality into an otherwise sunny story.) (NBC 4 News, Columbus, 10/31/24)
   
   

2. Dayton City Schools, too, is touting a sliver of its awesomeness today. Specifically, the “success” of its International School. The handful of Gadfly Bites subscribers with long-enough memories (howdy, you four; you rock, despite some questionable judgment in thrice-weekly reading material) will recall that this effort—to cram all non-English-speaking students from K-12 into one building along with the handful of local neighborhood students who wanted to attend—raised some questions with your humble clips complier when proposed in 2022. One of my biggest concerns was a small student population at the start (even smaller than the gen ed school had when it was supposed to be closed due to chronic underenrollment. That has clearly been eliminated as a problem, given the student numbers touted here—one assumes by families having fewer options since all the English Learner resources of the district are now concentrated here. Most or all of the 60 or so English-speaker students from the neighborhood seem to attend a separate Montessori program in the building. yay. And while district leaders say that students are learning English, growing in ability, and performing academically (the school got one star on its report card, the least possible, but it’s “overall score” was higher than four other district buildings—by which I think they mean Performance Index), there are a lot more references to and focus on behavior management (that is, “how to behave in an American school”) than to test scores or reading prowess. So yeah. Feels like today’s theme is “tout awesomeness wherever you can”. But do so in the hope you don’t have to answer any follow-up questions. (Dayton Daily News, 11/1/24)

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It is rare, but not unusual, for presidents to ask members of the opposing party to serve on their cabinets. Both Trump and Biden were strictly partisan with their appointments, but if Vice President Harris wins, she has pledged to bring back the symbolic gesture, historically used at key moments to project unity and bipartisanship—both of which will be in short supply no matter who emerges triumphant from this coarse election contest. The defense secretary stands out as the most common fit for such an appointment (e.g., William Cohen under President Clinton and Robert Gates under President George W. Bush and President Obama). But there’s a compelling argument to make that a President Harris would do well to shine a spotlight on education, given the federal government’s retreat on the issue in recent years.

Picking a Republican to serve as education secretary would also be uniquely historic: None of the twelve men and women who have served as the nation’s top education officer ever did so under a Commander in Chief of a different party. The New York Times recently ran a list of GOP prospects for the Harris cabinet that featured a constellation of former and current state and federal officials. Let’s work from that to see if any might fit the bill, and speculate on the implications for Uncle Sam’s role in education:

1. Sen. Mitt Romney (UT): Not seeking re-election to the Senate, Romney would be a brow-raising choice—at least among “progressives”—for education secretary, in light of his “vigorous opposition” to blanket student loan forgiveness. But he would be a breath of fresh air, given his track record on the issue dating back to his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts:

We added more school choice. My legislature tried to say no more charter schools. I vetoed that, overturned that… These kinds of principles drove our schools to be pretty successful. As a matter of fact, there are four measures on which the federal government looks at schools state by state. My state's number one among all the states in all four of those measures, fourth and eighth-graders English and math. Those principles, testing our kids, excellent curriculum, superb teachers, and school choice. Those are the answers to help our schools.

2. Sen. Todd Young (IN): It’s not reflected in his committee work, but education is an issue that’s near and dear to the senior senator from my old stomping grounds in Indiana. No fan of Trump’s, Young has called for “modernizing” America’s education system, with a focus on strengthening career and technical education. On the need for skilled workers, he might find common cause here with the “opportunity economy” that Harris keeps talking about. Young has also worked across the aisle to reduce college costs and promote upward mobility, and is a staunch supporter of school choice.

3. Former Gov. Jeb Bush (FL): For the past twenty-five years, governors have been central to education policymaking, yet few can rival Bush’s dedication to making it a top priority. During his time leading the Sunshine State, Bush implemented sweeping education reforms that set the bar for other states. His policies emphasized standards, testing, and accountability, along with school choice. Through his organization, ExcelinEd, the former governor continues to have an outsized impact on education, promoting and advocating for the reforms that he championed in Florida.

4. Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (AR): A vocal critic of Trump, Hutchinson was spotted making the rounds at the DNC convention back in August. The former governor and GOP presidential candidate has been coy about his interest in a Harris administration but clear about his desire to add another chapter to his long and storied political career. Secretary of Education would seem to be a perfect fit if Harris tapped the folky and affable Arkansan who made computer science education a priority alongside other popular ed policies.

5. Former Gov. John Kasich (OH): Known for his centrist views and willingness to work across party lines, Kasich endorsed Joe Biden back in 2020 and briefly appeared at the Democratic convention that year. His record on education reform is extensive but without the high-profile of, say, Jeb Bush. From A–F letter grades to charter school accountability, Kasich wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers. He may be best known for his attempt to rein in collective bargaining for teachers, an effort that was ultimately struck down by voters.

Here are a couple of others not mentioned by the Times that would also be worth praising:

6. Former Gov. Brian Sandoval (NV): A former federal district judge who has already been confirmed once by the Senate, Sandoval would be a dark horse pick. In 2015, as governor, he spearheaded what was arguably the most comprehensive education reform package in the nation that year. The dizzying array of bills flying out of the Silver State included the nation’s first nearly universal ESA law, a read-by-three law, teacher pay-for-performance legislation, additional funding to grow more charter schools, and the establishment of a special statewide district for Nevada’s lowest performing schools—which was initially led by Pedro Martinez, currently the embattled CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Unfortunately, some of these initiatives have since been repealed, but the boldness of Sandoval’s vision was remarkable for its era.

7. Former Gov. Charlie Baker (MA): Now president of the NCAA, Baker was consistently one of the nation’s most popular governors during his time in office. He firmly supported MCAS, the state’s standardized test, emphasizing its essential role in creating a “level playing field” and setting a high standard for academic achievement. Baker also appointed members to the state board of education that shared a focus on accountability and improving educational outcomes. Harris’s team should also note that the former governor has expressed interest in returning to politics.

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Like the election itself, the selection of any of these Republicans for education secretary would be sui generis. Harris would surely face significant pushback from within the Democratic Party and the teachers unions on any of these candidates. Still, if she chose to buck her coalition’s most progressive voices—as remote a possibility as that may be—it would be less about ed reform and more about sending a signal about the importance of character, temperament, and civility as embodied by each of these estimable public servants. Of course, he or she would have to endorse enough of Harris’s education policies to make the cut, something that remains to be seen.

To be sure, nobody knows what those policies will be, but odds are Harris’s will be a continuation of Biden’s. As such, there’s little reason to get excited, regardless of whom she picks. But even if little gets done in the way of policy over the next four (or eight) years, a Republican secretary of education serving in a Democratic administration could augur well for the eventual revival of bipartisan education reform. In and of itself, that would be a minor victory.

Election Day is almost here, and the presidential contest is not the only one that matters. Those of us lucky enough to have on-cycle school board elections also get to choose our representatives on perhaps the most important policymaking boards in local government. Here are twenty questions you might ask your school board candidates to answer.

1. Do you agree that our schools were closed to in-person learning for too long during the pandemic? If something like that happens again, how should the district balance the needs of students against the health concerns of adults?

2. Given the massive learning loss still plaguing our students, would you support continuing the district’s high-dosage-tutoring programs? How would you pay for them? How would you make sure they get the best results possible?

3. Chronic absenteeism continues to be a major challenge, with significantly higher numbers of students missing at least a month of school every year than before the pandemic. The absent students tend to be disproportionately kindergarteners and high school seniors. Would you support any tough-love measures to get students back to school and to hold them and their parents accountable?

4. How confident are you that the district is following the science of reading when providing literacy instruction in the early years? Can you name the foundational literacy program the district uses?

5. Data indicate that young students continue to come into our elementary schools farther behind academically than their peers were before the pandemic. Given that, would you support retaining students by no later than the third grade if they have not yet learned to read? How about adding an extra year of elementary school for these students?

6. Do you believe it is important for young students to learn their math facts, such as the multiplication tables?

7. The state requires that teachers be granted due process rights, also known as tenure, after a few years in the classroom. What do you think junior teachers should have to do to earn that designation, if anything?

8. Evidence suggests that it’s possible to recruit the best teachers to the neediest schools, but only if we pay them a sizable salary stipend, such as an extra $10,000 or $15,000 a year. Would you support such a policy? How about for principals in high-poverty schools? How would you pay for it?

9. Local officials have little control over the state pension system, which is demanding an increasing amount of district budgets, but it does have discretion over granting healthcare to retired teachers and other staff. Would you support eliminating retiree healthcare benefits, especially given the existence of the Obamacare exchanges?

10. The districts’ gifted and talented programs disproportionately serve White, Asian, and upper middle-class students. What would you do to diversify those initiatives, if anything?

11. Do you support accelerated math programs for students who are ready for them? Starting in late elementary school? Middle school? High school? Do you support honors classes in all of the academic subjects in middle school? High school? What do you think about placing all students in honors classes and no one in “on-level” ones?

12. What can the district do to increase the number of children of color and children from low-income families who participate in its Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs? And not just taking the classes but actually passing the exams?

13. What more should the district do to promote engaged citizenship among its students and its graduates? Is the district doing enough to teach students’ core content knowledge in history, geography, civics, science, and the arts?

14. Would you support allowing students to opt out of traditional college prep courses after their sophomore year of high school so they can focus on career and technical training, including internships and apprenticeships?

15. Are you concerned about grade inflation in the district? Do you support the so-called “no zeros” policy, whereby the lowest grade a student can receive is a 50 percent, even for assignments not turned in? What percentage of high school students do you think should be getting straight A’s? How does that compare to the situation today?

16. Do you think the district has a problem with cheating? What are the root causes? What might you do about it?

17. Do you support suspensions and expulsions for student misbehavior? If not, how would you address student violence toward teachers or their peers? Chronic disrespect toward teachers? Distributing AI-generated deep-fake nude pictures of their peers?

18. Would you support a “phones away for the day” policy? Locking up students’ phones in lock boxes or magnetized bags?

19. Studies suggest that participating in extracurricular activities, including athletics, provides all sorts of benefits for students. But these opportunities are not equitably distributed. How would you change that?

20. The district’s high school graduation rate is at an all-time high. Are you confident that all students have earned their diplomas? Do you think the district is serving its lowest-performing, least-engaged students—the ones who might have dropped out in previous eras?

Yes, these are tough questions, but being a school board member is an important job! See how your candidates do on this test—and try not to grade on a curve.

Editor’s note. This was first published by Forbes.

I student-taught during the Republican primary of 2016. One afternoon, I watched my mentor teacher, an avowed socialist, berate a student during class for daring to express support for Donald Trump. After the election, many of my colleagues breathed nihilistic tirades to their charges about the hopelessness of our country. One stood sentinel in the hall every passing period wearing a red shirt with a raised fist of solidarity. All this in a purple school district.

So forgive me if I am skeptical that our teaching force is capable of covering the election without bias and with equal respect to all sides of the arguments. Given that the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn Education Project are popular online resources to which history teachers turn, the promise that schools will cover “just the facts” seems unlikely.

Almost a decade into my education career, I cannot fathom a reason that any teacher should cover the election in their classes.

Considering this argument first in a microcosm—the individual tutor and student—will bring clarity to the interests and ethics involved. Tutors receive payment to teach specific topics, ranging from academic content such as math and English to extracurriculars such as dance or piano. It would be an obvious breach of contract for tutors to stray from their hired purpose to instead cover unapproved content. Math tutors would waste their patrons’ money were they to spend their hours discussing the finer points of Tolkien’s mythology.

In the case of classroom teachers, they too are hired to teach specific content, only their patrons are society itself and their charges are a collection of students. They fill a clear, prescribed role: to teach math, American history, or whatever other course to the students in their class. A teacher of ninth grade English has no more business discussing politics than a chef at a high-end Italian restaurant has preparing lutefisk for a diner who ordered pappardelle.

There are, of course, times teachers can and should stray into controversial topics. I’m a literature teacher by trade. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”—these books all touch on sensitive issues. When I taught them, I never shied away from the controversies. But parents knew the content we’d cover. I often argued for positions with which I myself disagreed to challenge my students’ thinking. And the students encountered such topics in the context of history and literature, not contemporary issues. There are clear policies that school boards can enact to make sure such topics are handled prudently in the classroom.

As American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio never tires of pointing out, it is school boards, not teachers or administrators, who determine the content a school is to teach. As such, teachers are “hired speech.” Within school walls, they are speaking in a professional capacity and cannot spout off on price controls or whatever cause most recently grabbed the attention of their corner of Twitter.

There is a distinct, circumscribed condition where a teacher can and should cover contemporary issues: if a school board has decided that certain classes should include discussions of current events. If teachers are going to do this, though, it’s imperative that they heed John Stuart Mill’s wisdom: It is not enough that a student “should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

If discussing abortion, for example, teachers should not present pro-life arguments only as strawmen to smack down. Instead, they must present their students with pro-life arguments made by pro-life advocates. A teacher should hand students conservative arguments from National Review, for example, not caricatures of them from the New York Times.

But even so, I believe such a class would be ill-advised. Contrary to popular belief, mountains of cognitive science have determined that there is no abstract skill called “critical thinking.” Discussing contemporary issues will not teach students to “think critically” in some generalized capacity. Rather, our ability to think well about a topic comes from our knowledge on that topic. Even a very intelligent professor of chemistry would provide little to a discussion of bridge mechanics or the minutiae of health care policy because he or she would likely know little about those topics.

Instead, it’s the content of courses themselves that furnish students with the knowledge that they need to thoughtfully consider contemporary issues. A student will be better prepared to discuss an impeachment if she has had read the Constitution and discussed the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in a civics class or learned of previous impeachments in history. A student will better question the motives of a politician if he has witnessed Macbeth’s violent ambition or Iago’s corrupting whispers.

As with room on a dinner plate, there’s only so much time in a school day. Filling space on the plate with junk food will leave less space for meat and potatoes.

If teachers waste time fretting over dated contemporary controversies that will likely be obscure by the day’s end, that leaves less time for a robust curriculum of history, literature, science, the arts, and other subjects that create thoughtful, wise citizens.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The Hill.

The academic impacts of pre-kindergarten programming for children are a matter of unsettled science, with some research finding a positive impact, some a negative, and much showing the fade out of all impacts by third grade or soon thereafter. A new working paper by researchers from Brown and Yale adds to this literature by examining a universal preschool program in New Haven, Connecticut. But it also looks at a less-studied question: What about the economic impacts of this pre-K program? Specifically, how much workforce support does readily-accessible childcare provide for parents?

The New Haven program was established in the mid-1990s. Its current iteration, dating to 2003, includes separate programming for three-year-olds (PK3) and four-year-olds (PK4). It is free of charge, operates mostly in New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) elementary buildings, and is available to all Connecticut residents via open enrollment. The structure includes 6.5 hours of educational curricula, as well as wraparound care starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m. five days per week during the school year. Both PK3 and PK4 are oversubscribed each year, so seats are assigned by lottery.

The researchers started with all applications submitted between 2003 through 2022, including full data from students’ applications, the administrative rules and student priorities used to process the applications, and school placement outcomes. They observed 18,795 applications from 16,037 individuals. Just under 42 percent of applicants were Black, and 28.5 percent were Hispanic. Forty-eight percent applied to PK4, and 52 percent to PK3. The median household income of applicants was $59,708. And just over 26 percent of applicants ultimately enrolled their children in a pre-K program each year on average.

The report’s findings on academic outcomes focus on standardized test scores for students in grades three through eight, chronic absenteeism, and grade retention. To do that, all pre-K applicants were linked with NHPS records to track their academic outcomes over time. Those who went on to attend public schools anywhere in Connecticut were linked to enrollment and outcome records by the Connecticut State Department of Education. These data cover the years 2006 through 2022. A majority of pre-K applicants were tracked through middle school, many into high school and beyond.

All academic outcome impacts were null or slightly negative, with enrolled and non-enrolled pre-K applicants showing no statistically significant difference in outcomes. This was true across the board. The researchers surmise that these findings are likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and parents of non-enrolled children finding other pre-K programming of similar quality.

The impacts on parental income, however, are another story. Workforce data came from the Connecticut Department of Labor, linked to parental records submitted during the pre-K application process. These were further linked to Connecticut Unemployment Insurance records and ultimately cover the years 1999 through 2022. All earnings figures were reported in terms of 2015 dollars. Administrative data were supplemented by parental survey responses from 840 pre-K applicants. It’s a small number, considering the time span of the analysis, but is positive in that they have responses from applicants in every year, even if the earliest years are more sparsely covered.

The researchers find that enrollment in the pre-K program increased childcare coverage by eleven hours per week, on average. As a result, parents of pre-K enrollees worked an average of twelve more hours per week, and their earnings increased by 21.7 percent in the year following application, as compared to parents who applied but did not enroll their children. Both administrative and survey data showed high baseline rates of labor force participation among applicants and little evidence that children’s enrollment raised these rates further. Put simply: Most parents applying for the pre-K spots were already working and looking to pre-K for support to continue, rather than trying to use pre-K to get into the labor force.

As a labor market policy, New Haven’s pre-K program is a boon. It’s pricey, yes—$15,500 per child per year (in 2015 dollars)—but each dollar of net government expenditure on this program yielded $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents’ earnings gains, which persist for at least six years after the end of pre-K. The researchers note that this is a large return on investment compared to other labor market policies they examined. As an education policy, the picture is far less rosy. For each dollar of net government spending, education benefits were only $0.46 to $1.32. Even children’s health interventions analyzed by other researchers (such as expanding affordable health insurance for children) have been shown to generate better education returns than that.

In the end, these and other findings suggest that the academic dimension of pre-K programs may be best ignored as a value proposition (or simply accepted as having null value long-term) in favor of their workforce dimension. That doesn’t mean a lowering of quality or shuttering of programs, but simply an admission, hard as it may be, that accessible pre-K is a work support for grown-ups rather than a kindergarten training ground for kiddos. It certainly seems that working families in New Haven view them as such, and the families who were able to access pre-K placement took full advantage of the opportunity. Such a change in mindset could allow new versions of pre-K—perhaps more connected to business than to schools—and new funding sources than the public school/government-funded model that currently predominates.

SOURCE: John Eric Humphries et al., “Parents’ Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten,” NBER Working Papers (October 2024).

Cheers

• Billionaire Jeff Yass will cover this semester’s private school tuition fees for students impacted by the South Carolina Supreme Court’s rejection of the state’s voucher program. —South Carolina Daily Gazette
• Solutions for chronic absenteeism should consider communities’ specific attendance barriers, balance effectiveness with cost and ease of implementation, and be evaluated thoroughly. —Thomas S. Dee, Phi Delta Kappan
• Teacher contracts should increase educators’ compensation more strategically, as well as offer them more flexibility and overhaul “last in, first out” policies. —Karen Hawley Miles and David Rosenberg, Education Week

Jeers

• The Chicago Teachers Union convinced charter school educators to join, then used its funds and political influence to undermine the public school choice movement, ultimately leading to charter closures. —Jed Wallace, CharterFolk
• Unfortunately, education policy has shifted from an “eat-your-vegetables” approach that emphasized accountability and rigorous reform to a “sugar-frosted” approach that prioritizes issues that have more immediately visible benefits for various constituents. —Rick Hess, Education Next
• Today, just one in four American high-school seniors agree that their country is exceptional, compared to 67 percent in the early 1980s. —Jean M. Twenge, The Atlantic

• To combat pandemic-induced learning loss, the federal government must take sweeping and decisive action. —Kevin Huffman, Washington Post
• Dual enrollment has surged in recent years—but equity issues persist, and it remains unclear whether such programs have encouraged any students to go to college who wouldn’t otherwise have, or helped students get through college any faster. —Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report
• From the botched FAFSA rollout to the lack of accountability regarding federal education funds, Miguel Cardona has proven himself to be the worst Secretary of Education in U.S. history by consistently prioritizing politics over student learning. —Rick Hess, National Review

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

1. The unthinkable happened on Monday: No clips worth paying attention to. Sad. (Particular apologies to all of my highly-invested subscribers—you know who you are. Hopefully you found some leaves to rake or Halloween candy to test out using your additional free time that day.) We are back today, kind of where we left off on Friday. That is, our Aaron Churchill being quoted in a piece about the state of Ohio’s voucher programs. Also the same as Friday’s piece: This feels to me nicely calm and balanced. I especially appreciate, as journalist Eileen McClory often provides in her work, the inclusion of local private school leaders in the discussion. (Dayton Daily News, 10/29/24)
   
   

2. Not to cause any concern to Aaron, who I maintain is the foremost expert on Ohio school funding anywhere in the state, but there appears to be someone who might like to knock him off his pedestal if possible. And although WOSU-FM’s “resident education funding expert” Anna Staver is clearly armed with some solid knowledge of the topic, her cake analogy is (shall we say) over-egged in this piece. And even worse, she doesn’t use her knowledge to actually answer the question posed in the headline. Maybe next time. (WOSU-FM, Columbus, 10/29/24)
   
   

3. Maybe I need to be careful of competition too. Frank O’Linn, Superintendent of Schools for the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, displays a hitherto unknown penchant for snark as he discusses the state of Ohio’s voucher programs in this piece—dropping truths and busting myths, with an Austin Powers-related throughline that never falters. Inspired, baby! Yeah! (Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, 10/28/24)
   
   

4. Finally today: The headline of this piece—“Seeking to better a Canton neighborhood, starting with its children”—is good. As are the plans for an early childhood center that are discussed within the piece. However, while I read the phrase “any child living in the Gibbs neighborhood will have access” to the new center, I am struck by a lot of exclusivity in the discussion focused around students attending Canton City Schools. A quick map search shows lots of charter and private schools nearby. I sure hope I’m not reading more into the words of center administrators and community leaders than what was truly meant—that “any child” truly does mean “any child”, and that where one’s family chooses to attend school won’t exclude them from services that should indeed be offered to “all”. (Ideastream Public Media, 10/28/24)

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