Teachers are the most important in-school factor driving student achievement, and how schools compensate them matters immensely. Entry-level teacher pay is particularly important, as it affects recruitment efforts. Starting salaries influence high school and college students’ decision to pursue teaching (or not), as well as early- or mid-career professionals considering a jump into the classroom. More locally, what individual school districts pay first-year teachers impacts their ability to compete for talent with other districts. Lower starting pay will make a district less attractive to job-seekers and vice versa. High-poverty districts and schools, where working conditions tend to be tougher, need to offer higher salaries to attract talented individuals to their campus.

Conventional wisdom holds that starting teacher pay is mediocre and remains a significant barrier to developing a high-quality workforce. This perception may reflect gloomy media coverage—often influenced by the unions—that casts teachers in general as underpaid and overworked, despite evidence that the teacher “pay gap” is more myth than reality. More specific to starting salaries, state policy may also add fuel to the low-pay narrative. Under Ohio law, districts must pay a minimum first-year teacher salary of just $35,000. This amount—akin to a minimum wage—is routinely discussed by state legislators and featured in news articles, and could easily be understood as the starting salary that districts actually pay.

But what do first-year teachers in Ohio earn? Are their salaries as meager as they are often portrayed? What about high-poverty districts: Are they more prone to paying low starting salaries?

There is no system-wide reporting on districts’ starting teacher salaries. Average salaries are readily available, but first-year-only salaries are not. To locate this information, Fordham intern Heena Kuwayama and I dug up the salary schedules of school districts in Franklin and Cuyahoga counties, the two largest in Ohio. These schedules disclose the salaries that a district’s teachers make based on their years of experience and college degrees/credits-earned, and are included in collective bargaining agreements posted by the State Employment Relations Board. We focus on salaries for first-year teachers with a bachelor’s degree as their highest credential.

We begin in Franklin County, which includes Columbus and its suburbs. The figure below shows that the average starting salary in the county is $48,411—a healthy 38 percent above the minimum starting pay required in statute. Franklin County districts’ starting pay falls within a relatively narrow range of roughly $45,000 to $50,000, with Columbus paying a reasonably competitive wage that is slightly above the county average and about 10 percent higher than wealthy districts such as Grandview Heights and New Albany-Plain, though below other wealthy districts, including Bexley and Dublin. The maps below, created by my Fordham colleague Adam Tyner, show where the highest-paying school districts are located in the county.

Figure 1: Starting teacher salaries (BA) in Franklin County school districts (FY 2024)

Turning to Cuyahoga County (Cleveland and its suburbs), we notice that districts tend to pay slightly lower starting salaries than Franklin County. Here, average starting teacher pay is $47,115, or 35 percent above the state minimum of $35,000. There is somewhat more variation in starting salaries across Cuyahoga County districts, as pay ranges from approximately $40,000 to $50,000. And we also see a stronger link between districts’ starting salaries and economically disadvantaged rates. Eight of the ten highest-paying districts are wealthy, while the lower-paying districts tend to be mid- and high-poverty. That said, Cleveland boasts one of the highest starting salaries in county at just above $50,000.  

Figure 2: Starting teacher salaries (BA) in Cuyahoga County school districts (FY 2024)

As noted earlier, higher-poverty districts likely need to offer more generous starting salaries to attract top-notch teachers. But do they have the funding necessary to do so?

To explore this, Figure 3 looks at the correlation between per-pupil funding and starting pay in Franklin County. We see that mid-poverty districts such as Canal Winchester, Groveport Madison, and Reynoldsburg pay slightly lower entry-level wages, perhaps because they are more budget constrained (receiving less funding to begin with). But it’s not an especially strong correlation, as Reynoldsburg, for example, provides higher starting salaries than Groveport Madison, which receives more funding. Columbus receives relatively high levels of funding and pays better starting salaries than most Franklin County districts. 

Figure 3: Total revenue (state and local, FY23) versus starting teacher pay, Franklin County districts

Figure 4 reveals a weaker correlation between Cuyahoga County districts’ revenues and starting teacher pay. Here, the lowest-paying districts in the county often receive comparable funding to districts that provide more generous starting pay. Garfield Heights, for example, pays first-year teachers $40,418, but similarly-funded Berea pays $47,321. Warrensville Heights’s starting salary is $42,597, yet similarly-funded Independence pays $6,000 more to first-year teachers, while Cleveland pays about $8,000 more. East Cleveland is the highest-funded district in the county, spending almost $30,000 per pupil, yet manages to pay new teachers just $46,021 a year. Taken together, these data suggest that funding levels are not the primary barrier to higher starting salaries, but more so a low prioritization of entry-level salaries in the district budget.

Figure 4: Total revenue (state and local, FY23) versus starting teacher pay, Cuyahoga County districts

* * *

Three concluding thoughts on these data:

1. Starting teacher pay is reasonably good in Ohio’s largest metro areas—and that should be more widely known. Most first-year teachers in the Columbus and Cleveland areas are paid $45,000 to $50,000 per year (not including benefits). That’s not half bad, especially for twenty-two-year-olds in their first professional jobs. Of course, these salaries aren’t as large as what some students make out of college, including those who enter more lucrative STEM fields. But starting teacher pay is not that far off from the median statewide salary for all Ohio working adults of about $60,000. And it’s far superior to what a large portion of college students earn early in their careers (one study this year found that a quarter of graduates earn less than $32,000).

Making actual starting salaries better known might persuade more young people to consider teaching. Remember also that, even in its largest cities, Ohio remains a relatively affordable place to live and work, allowing these salaries to go further than other parts of the country. 

2. High-poverty districts have room to improve starting teacher pay, but they need to make it a strategic priority. If lower-salary, higher-poverty districts like Groveport Madison and Garfield Heights seek to more aggressively compete for talent, they need to consider ways to prioritize starting (and early career) teacher pay. One possible strategy is to “compress” the salary schedule—i.e., reduce the number of “steps,” or the incremental pay raises tied to experience—to free-up money to raise entry-level pay. They could also rigorously review spending on administrative and non-teaching staff to make sure that as much funding as possible is dedicated to teacher pay. Finally, while it may require changes in state law, districts should be looking to experiment with more flexible compensation structures that allow for higher pay at the front end of teachers’ careers.  

3. State policymakers could make it easier for high-poverty districts to raise starting pay by loosening spending restrictions. Ohio puts restrictions on how districts can spend on a couple pots of state funds: Student Wellness and Success Funding—a specific element within the core “base amount” that districts receive—as well as Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid, a categorical “add-on” that drives additional dollars to high-poverty districts. The limits make some sense, but they also compel districts to spend dollars on certain activities and programs—e.g., mental health services, tutoring, and other supports—and not teacher salaries. Lawmakers could relax these constraints and allow districts to use these funds to raise teacher pay. This could enable high-poverty districts, especially, to boost starting salaries, as they receive more through these elements than their wealthier counterparts.

Entry-level pay is just the beginning. How quickly pay increases is also key in districts’ ability to retain effective teachers. Stay tuned for a follow-up post that looks at how districts compensate their early-career teachers.

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Celebrating role models

Here’s a great story on Horizon Science Academy Lorain’s second annual Role Model Breakfast event. Students nominate individuals who are mentors, heroes, or otherwise important to them, and the event brings the school community together with as many of these influential people as can possibly be gathered—including one young scholar’s uncle, who drove all the way from Texas to attend—so that the community can thank them for their positive impact. Incredible!

Truth bombs

All of the various reasons given—officially and otherwise—to explain transportation exclusion for charter and other choice-exercising students in Columbus City Schools so far this year got a full airing in the first forty minutes of the All Sides radio program on Tuesday. The conclusion at that point appeared to be that “districts have tried everything” and that the declarations of “impractical to transport” that ended bus service for nearly 2,000 such students were inevitable and understandable. Then, in the last 20 minutes, Ohio Senate Education Committee Chair Andrew Brenner came on and proceeded to debunk them all with facts and data. No idea if his truth bombs will do anything to help the difficult situation families continue to find themselves in, but it felt like an important moment in the current discussion. Meanwhile, a second lawsuit was filed against Columbus City Schools this week over their transportation decisions—specifically on behalf of a private school family, but whose travails mirror those of charter students in Columbus.

Big moves in charter funding

Futuro Academy, a K-5 school in East Las Vegas, will be the first to receive a loan from a new state fund designed to help improve school facilities for charters across Nevada. The loan will enable Futuro to purchase the building they have been leasing for years, saving the school approximately $130,000 annually in rent payments. Those savings will be redirected toward providing even more services for the 450 students attending. Awesome news! Meanwhile, in East Chicago, Indiana, Urban Enterprise Academy was awarded nearly $117,000 from the Indiana Department of Education—specifically for making significant academic gains for its students over the past year. The charter school, one of just three recipients statewide, celebrated the award at the Indiana Educational Excellence Award Gala in Indianapolis. Huge kudos to the school staff, students, and families!

More funding moves…with more food for thought for Ohio

Speaking of funding boosts for charter schools, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds this week announced the first recipients of $4 million in grants from the state’s new Charter Start-Up and Expansion Grant program. Six new schools will receive $500,000 apiece for facilities, transportation, curriculum, and other equipment. And five established schools will receive $200,000 each to expand their career and technical programing. “Public charter schools provide yet another school choice for parents and guardians looking for the education that’s best suited for their children’s abilities and needs,” said Reynolds in a press release. “I applaud these industrious charter school administrators, board members and community leaders for expanding educational opportunities for students and families in their local communities.” This is fantastic, and the Buckeye State could learn a lot from these great stories.

No need to Show Me; it’s very clear

University of Missouri–St. Louis professor James V. Shuls (also a fellow at the Show-Me Institute) published an op-ed in St. Louis Today this week, summarizing the woeful report card showing for St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) and making the case that charter schools in the city are far more accountable than the district. If charters were similarly low-performing (in 2023, SLPS graduation rate was less than 70 percent, just 21 percent of students scored proficient or advanced in ELA, and a woeful 16 percent were proficient in math), they would either be closed by the state or face an exodus of students which would likely cause them to close. The same cannot be said of district schools in Missouri…or anywhere else!

*****

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

1. This news has not hit the mainstream just yet. I don’t know why. So here’s a press release announcing that another lawsuit was filed against Columbus City Schools earlier this week due to their woeful busing procedures for school choice students this school year. This time, it is specifically on behalf of a private school family. Of interest here (to me, if not the news media) are the details provided about the communication received by the family from the district and the documented material harm the lack of transportation has imposed on the family. (Citizens for Christian Virtue press release, 9/11/24) Meanwhile, Cleveland.com gives us another anti-privatization (honestly, it’s barely about vouchers at all) op-ed from what I would generously term (YMMV) the randomest of individuals. Shout out to my old stomping grounds of Lancaster, though! (Cleveland.com, 9/13/24)
   

2. Something I will happily have another of: Dayton STEM School will be celebrating the groundbreaking for its giant new addition next week. This is just a brief notice of the event without much context. But IYKYK. And I K that you K. (Dayton Daily News, 9/12/24)

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For ten years, veteran education reformer Kathleen Porter-Magee led Partnership Schools, an independent charter-like management organization that ran Catholic schools on behalf of the archdiocese of New York and, currently, Cleveland. She recently announced that she was stepping down as Superintendent to become Managing Partner of the Leadership Roundtable, an organization of lay, religious, and ordained leaders that promotes best practices and accountability in the management and operations of Catholic institutions throughout the U.S. In this exit interview, Porter-Magee discusses the lessons she learned leading the Partnership, including how to build consensus for change and the need for institutions to manage change from “the inside-out,” as well as “outside-in.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve had a terrific run leading the Partnership. Why leave now?

The average urban superintendent stays three years and I had just finished my third three-year term when I listened to a presentation from someone who had just taken over a nonprofit from a founding leader. She stopped and said, “If there are any founding leaders in the group, my strong advice to you is: don’t stay longer than ten years. After ten years, the work becomes more about you than the organization.” That really stuck with me.

Founding leaders are different in so many different ways from the caretaking leaders that you need to see the work through in a second phase. And so, in my tenth year, I said, “This is the right time for me to step away.”

OK, but the reason I asked is because you’re getting out just when it’s getting good for Catholic schools and private schools in general. I’d be looking at what’s going on in states with universal ESAs and thinking, “Families can use public dollars to enroll in my school!”

I’ve always been optimistic about Catholic schools! But, yes, over the past few years, Catholic schools have really stood apart and reminded people just how important they are to our communities. But I’m also leaving at what I think is a great time to take the lessons we’ve learned from Catholic school management and bring them to a larger mission. More specifically, as I reflect on the work the Partnership has done for the past ten years, it’s been an “outside-in” approach to change. That is, we’re driving change in Catholic schools without sitting in the diocesan Catholic schools office—we sat adjacent to the diocese. That “outside-in” relationship helped us look at things differently. It gave us a different perspective and allowed us to innovate in ways that would have been more challenging from the inside. But one of the lessons I’ve learned over the past decade is that, while an outside-in strategy can help initiate change, it’s essential to pair that innovation with an “inside-out” capacity-building strategy to ensure that lessons of reform are enduring.

Say more about the differences between the two, or how they’re complimentary.

There are two ways to drive change in established, often highly centralized or bureaucratic institutions—outside-in or inside-out. Outside-in change often is needed to initiate reform because large, established organizations are slow to change themselves. This kind of change involves people perceived as outsiders working often on the fringes of an institution or in small pockets to innovate, to raise alarms about problems, and to push for doing things differently. But inside-out change is essential to institutionalize reform. Leaders on the inside can change institutional culture and build or shift the systems and structures that make changes enduring. Inside-out change helps ensure that the benefits of innovation aren’t fleeting and wiped out by new leadership. In the early days, organizations like Teach For America started as outside-in, but then they were like, “We actually want to be seeding and cultivating leaders who have positions of power and authority from the inside-out.” Now that we have some outside-in models for change, what does it look like to support diocese and parishes from the inside-out?

At the same time you announced your departure, the New York archdiocese said it would resume control of the schools the Partnership was running. What should we make of that?

Correlation isn't causation! But I was deeply disappointed by the news. Partnership Schools had an eleven-year services agreement with the Archdiocese of New York, and we had been in active conversations to renew for many months. And I think everyone expected the contract to continue, on roughly the same terms, for another term. Unfortunately, in spite of good faith efforts on both sides, the negotiations broke down and the Archdiocese made the decision to bring the seven schools back into the fold. I will say, the timing of the decision has affected my thinking about the importance of institutionalizing reform and has helped me see clearly the importance of working to ensure that the changes that are initiated from the outside do get institutionalized in a meaningful way to ensure long-term sustainability.

You called me ten years ago when you were offered this job. I remember thinking, “Wow, Catholic education? That’s brave.” It was probably the nadir for Catholic schools.

If it was in the nadir, then that means we’re now at the beginning of a renaissance. And I’ve been proud to be part of that shift. I believe very strongly in the power and potential of urban Catholic schools, which were in so many ways the catalyst for the whole education reform movement. I grew up in the archdiocese of New York and went to Catholic schools in the 1980s. And I remember so clearly John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York at the time, constantly sort of needling the UFT, agitating for vouchers, and saying “pick the 10 percent of your most challenging students and send them to our Catholic schools, and we will do it better and we will do it for less.” I loved that era of Catholic school hubris, which still speaks to me. And obviously the reform movement that followed, starting in the early nineties, was great for so many reasons. And while it may have led to some of the decline we’ve seen in Catholic schools, I have believed my entire career that the strength—the hubris and the foundational strength that O’Connor was talking about in the 80s—still courses through the culture of urban Catholic schools. We just need to unleash it.

You and I have always been kindred souls on curriculum. When you first started, I know you had to do some evangelical work, no pun intended, to change literacy instruction in Partnership Schools. Can you talk about that challenge?

When I was talking with the folks at the Partnership about coming on board, Jill Kafka, the executive director, asked me a great question. She asked, “Is there any decision that we’ve made so far that would make it hard for you to say yes to this job?” And I said, “Yes. I don’t support the reading curriculum you’ve chosen and I want to change it.” They had already purchased all the textbooks and even launched summer training. But the Board supported my decision to undo the curriculum decision. And so that summer I met with the principals and evangelized for CKLA [Core Knowledge Language Arts]. I explained why I thought it was the right approach to teaching reading and why I was so passionate about it. And all six principals, who had just launched summer PD with a different program, agreed to take a leap of faith with me and pivot with only weeks before the start of school.

This is why I love working in Catholic schools. We had a scrappy start-up mindset and the flexibility we needed to pivot and adapt quickly. And we had deeply faith-filled, optimistic, troublemaking leaders who were willing to take bold leaps with us.

They got on board or you got them on board? Let’s be really clear.

I drove the bus and they jumped on. But it didn’t feel really heavy-handed. The six principals who led Partnership Schools when I started were amazing. I credit so much of our success to the teachers and leaders who had been working at our six flagship schools when we began. They were badass. One of our legendary principals was a leader by the name of Marianne Kraft. She had been working at St. Athanasius in Hunts Point in the Bronx for more than forty-five years before she finally retired. She was literally there when the Bronx was burning. So changing curriculum at the eleventh hour didn’t feel like a challenge compared to what she had seen before. If it was the right thing to do. She was all-in. The same was true of Sr. Patrice Owens, Abigail Akkano, Joanne Walsh, and so many other teachers and leaders across the schools. These were educators who had seen so much and weathered so many storms—but they were so deeply committed to the prospect of turning their schools around and saving them from closure.

So, I guess I got them on board in the sense that I did two things: First, I showed them that I deeply loved their schools and their communities—because I don’t think you can lead something if you don’t love it. And second, I said, “I think if we do this together, we can change the trajectory of the schools.” And they were all in.

Talk about what you’re going to be doing next.

Sure. I recently took over as managing partner of the Leadership Roundtable, which is an organization dedicated to strengthening the Catholic institutions that support our faith, our ministry, and our communities. One way to think about it is that the Leadership Roundtable does for parishes and dioceses some very similar things to what the Partnership does for schools. It brings together diverse groups of lay, religious, and ordained church leaders to bring operational, managerial, and financial best practices to Catholic institutions.

But more than that, I think about the work of the Leadership Roundtable as the work of institutional renewal. I recently read Yuval Levin’s book, A Time To Build and believe so strongly in the importance of revitalizing our civic institutions—in this case Church institutions—to better bring communities together and support those in need. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of social services in the country. Each year, more than 100 million people depend on the Church for health care, food, education, housing, disaster relief, and more through a distributed network of Church institutions and nonprofit organizations. Unfortunately, a combination of the decline in institutional trust we have seen across all sectors coupled with the crises the Church has faced in the past twenty years has contributed to a widespread loss of faith and trust. And the Leadership Roundtable works to support the leaders who are working to build a thriving Catholic Church.

I’m a huge fan of the Daniels Fund under the leadership of Hanna Skandera, the more so since the national part of their giving has grasped the nettle of civics education. And we at Fordham were longtime members of the Philanthropy Roundtable. (For a time, I served on its board.) So it was great to see funder and Roundtable recently teaming up to develop an online “playbook” for philanthropists wanting to “enhance” civics education around the country.

The good news is they say their Civics Playbook is a “living resource” meant to “be refreshed on a routine basis,” and I hope that turns out to be true. For the bad news is that the dozen organizations profiled in the debut version, while individually worthy and in some cases outstanding, are but the tip of a giant iceberg of engaged and worthy outfits in this space—and a couple of their initial choices are rather narrow in scope or outlook.

Omitted from the current Playbook, for example, are iCivics, the prolific source of civics-ed materials for educators and parents founded by the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; the University of Tennessee’s Institute for American Civics; the Institute for Citizens and Scholars; the Reagan Institute Center for Civics, Education & Opportunity and dozens of others. (You can find reasonably comprehensive lists here and on the website of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Good American Citizenship.)

A particularly curious omission is Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, as it’s incorporating the Joe Foss Institute, which for a decade has been the strongest pusher for states to require their high school pupils to pass the national citizenship test before graduating!

As for what is included, it’s no secret that the Roundtable leans right—amusing when you picture a leaning round table—and that ideology sometimes influences its choices. That’s not the case with most of the groups found in the current Playbook, though the National Association of Scholars’ “Civics Alliance,” which produced a useful draft of state social studies standards, is somewhat tarnished by its executive director’s propensity to engage in cultural warfare against other organizations (the Fordham Institute included).

Several nonprofits on the list focus on individual states, as do many philanthropists (including Daniels), but once one opens that box, the sky’s the limit on how many to include and how to select among them. An amusing selection here is the Georgia Center for Civic Engagement, amusing not because it doesn’t do creditable work in the Peach State, but because it’s party to a project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities via Educating for American Democracy, which I think well of, but which is endlessly criticized by the aforementioned head of the Civics Alliance; and the Georgia Center’s involvement with which has been savaged by another stalwart of that Alliance!

Bottom line: Three cheers for the Daniels Fund for sponsoring this effort, and two to the Philanthropy Roundtable for having the guts to fish in the vast pond of civics education. But so far, it’s failed to land some excellent specimens while netting one or two that might better be thrown back.

This summer, the Washington Post’s (fantastic) “Department of Data” columnist, Andrew Van Dam, ran a fun feature about “America’s best decade,” according to public opinion. Across a wide range of domains, from music to movies, the economy, and family life, he dug into what citizens view as America’s Golden Era. Turns out it was almost always during their childhood or teenage years.

The survey didn’t ask about schools, which is too bad. But it made me wonder: When was the Golden Age of American K–12 education? The answers might provide hints about smart policies and practices for the years to come, especially as the nation continues to dig out from the Covid debacle.

The key question is which indicators to examine. Some might point to high school graduation rates, given that educational attainment is a traditional measure of school quality. But I’m skeptical; it’s a notoriously squishy metric, since the easiest way to boost graduation rates is to lower standards—surely a major reason why grad rates are at an all-time high.

A stronger indicator might be postsecondary completion; no doubt one of the key goals of K–12 education is to prepare students to succeed in college. But there are issues with that metric, too. Colleges can inflate graduation rates by lowering standards. Plus, there’s the newfound recognition that not everyone should go, making a focus on postsecondary education feel a bit anachronistic.

But let’s look at it anyway. These data come from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which asked a random sample of adults ages twenty-five to twenty-nine about their educational attainment. If we want to use this as a measure of the K–12 system’s effectiveness, it’s important to remember that there’s a seven- to eleven-year lag between high school graduation and the reporting of the data. To make the charts easier to understand, I’ll show the years these young adults graduated from high school. (API stands for Asian and Pacific Islanders.)

Via the Digest of Education Statistics, Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, U.S. Census of Population: 1960, Vol. I, Part 1; J.K. Folger and C.B. Nam, Education of the American Population (1960 Census Monograph); Current Population Reports, Series P-20, various years; and Current Population Survey (CPS), Annual Social and Economic Supplement, selected years, 1970 through 2023. (This table was prepared October 2023.) Chart by Michael J. Petrilli.

Student achievement

The other obvious way to identify the Golden Era of American Education is to look at the high point of student achievement. This is harder, if not impossible, to game—but there are issues here, too, especially with scores for seventeen-year-olds/twelfth graders. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trends series, scores for seventeen-year-olds peaked in the late 1980s or early 1990s in reading and in 1999 in math. Meanwhile, on the main NAEP, which has been adjusted over the decades to better align with curricular changes but goes back only to the early 1990s, twelfth graders hit their peak in 1992 in reading (the math trend goes back only to 2005, so it isn’t much use).

But because high school graduation rates have increased so dramatically over the decades—from 73 percent in 1990 to 86 percent in 2023—I find the achievement trends for older students unreliable. It seems highly likely that low-performing students who today make it to graduation (and thus sit for the NAEP exams), but back then would have dropped out, are lowering recent achievement results.

So that leaves scores for nine-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds (on the LTT) and fourth- and eighth-graders (on the main NAEP).

According to the LTT, students hit their peak in 2012, both in reading and math and for nine-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds. (Granted, the reading trends, especially for thirteen-year-olds, were pretty darn flat, so “high point” might be an exaggeration.) Scores were trending down even before the pandemic, when they fell off a cliff.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1971–2023 Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessments.

Meanwhile, on the main NAEP, students hit the high point in 2013 or 2015, depending on grade and subject area, before entering a pre-Covid decline.

Trends in fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores. Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1992–2022 Reading Assessments.

So according to achievement scores, education’s Golden Era was in the early to mid-2010s.

But is that the right answer? It’s certainly when American students performed their best, both on test scores and in terms of college attainment. The adults who were in school back then—the youngest Millennials and oldest Gen-Zers, or what some call Zennials—might be considered the Smartest Generation.

Measuring school effectiveness

But I want to know when the education system was at its best. For that, we can do better than raw test score averages. That’s for a couple of reasons. First, there is the composition of the student population. Think of the mistake some analysts made back in the Nation at Risk era, when they pointed to falling SAT verbal scores as proof that America’s education system was in rapid decline. They failed to note that the population taking the SAT was changing rapidly. Whereas it used to be just elite students taking the college entrance exam, more middle-class and even working-class kids did, as well. Not surprisingly, they performed worse on the test and lowered the average scores.

That’s why the NAEP, for as long as it has existed, has been a better measure of student performance than the SAT (or ACT), given that it tests a representative sample. That addresses the selection effects problem, but doesn’t tackle the compositional effects problem—at least, not entirely. With a rapidly changing student population, as we’ve had in recent decades, average scores can mislead.

In particular, the growing number of Hispanic students entering American schools every year—who tend to come from families with lower educational opportunity, and thus score lower on average—will automatically reduce the average test scores of the nation as a whole. Especially given that so many of these new students are still learning English. Indeed, the new federal Condition of Education report finds that the number of students classified as English learners rose by more than a million from 2011 to 2021. If we’re trying to gauge school performance, we have to control for such changes.

One straightforward way to do so is to look at trends in student achievement for individual racial/ethnic groups. This doesn’t alter the picture much for math; the trend lines for the major subgroups track that national average pretty well, with all generally increasing until the 2010s. Here’s what that looks like for the Long Term Trend assessment for thirteen-year-olds:

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessments. Chart by Meredith Coffey.

But in reading, there were periods when all or most of the major racial groups were making progress, even though the national average looked flat. From 2002 until 2019, for example, fourth-graders’ average reading scores barely budged, ticking up just a single point. But both Black and Hispanic students made significant gains, with increases of 5 and 8 points, respectively. That progress remained hidden within the national averages, largely because the Hispanic population share was also growing rapidly at the same time.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1992–2022 Reading Assessments. Chart by Michael J. Petrilli

So when we analysts reported that, pre-Covid, American reading scores were flat as a pancake, we weren’t wrong—but that wasn’t the full story. Schools were doing something to boost reading performance over time, at least for Black and Hispanic students, albeit more slowly than the country would have liked.

Cohort growth

It’s also important to consider what might be changing in American society. That’s because test scores correlate highly with family background, and those backgrounds have changed a lot over time. Child poverty rates have gone up and (mostly) down; the number of two-parent families has declined; nutrition has improved; environmental risks (like lead paint) have decreased. All these factors affect test scores.

Most importantly, what happens to kids in the years before they sit for a test—especially before they even enter school—has a big impact on their achievement. Yet, there’s no good trend line for student performance before age nine (for the LTT) or fourth grade (main NAEP). I’ve called for the federal government to start testing students in kindergarten to partially correct for this, so we would at least get a good read on whether students are coming into schools better or worse prepared than in the past. We could then use those kindergarten scores as controls to better isolate the performance of schools versus everything else going on in society. (By one metric—the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress test—student readiness started to fall in the early 2010s, which might partially explain the pre-Covid slump.)

In the meantime, we can apply the same logic by using fourth-grade scores as controls. In other words, looking at the changes in test scores for the same group of students as they move from fourth to eighth grade can give a rough estimate of school performance, at least in the upper elementary and middle school grades. This cohort growth measure has become popular among some analysts, including Matt Chingos at the Urban Institute, and for good reason. (Unfortunately, LTT doesn’t work for a similar analysis because its testing schedule has been too irregular. Likewise with grade twelve trends on the main NAEP.)

We’ll focus here on math, given that progress in reading has been so slight, and see when cohort growth was the strongest. This provides a very different answer: The mid- to late-1990s were the heyday of American education. Indeed, whereas achievement kept improving until the early to mid-2010s, the trend for cohort growth is generally downward.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1990-2022 Mathematics Assessments. Chart by Meredith Coffey.

Though not shown here, the cohort patterns look largely the same when disaggregated by race and percentile level, though the mid-2010s slump was particularly bad for the lowest-achieving kids and for Black students—as was the Covid era.

Summing it up

So where does that leave us?

• Student achievement reached its all-time high in the early to mid-2010s, before slumping through the rest of the decade and then falling off a cliff during Covid. College attainment was also highest for students who graduated high school in the early to mid-2010s, though it might have kept rising afterward. The young Americans who were in school in the early to mid-2010s, then, might be considered our Smartest Generation.


• Gains in math have been particularly impressive over the years, at least until the 2010s—though schools performed somewhat better in reading than national averages indicate, given the rapidly changing composition of the student population, especially the dramatic rise in (lower-scoring) Hispanic students and English learners.


• However, schools’ productivity—in terms of boosting students’ test scores from grades four to eight—peaked much sooner, in the mid to late 1990s, before declining somewhat in the 2000s and even more in the 2010s. The mid to late 1990s, then, might be considered American Education’s heyday.

The late 1990s were indeed a Golden Age, when the Cold War was over (and the war on terrorism hadn’t started), the economy was booming, child poverty was falling, and the combination of increased school spending and consequential accountability were marching across the land. (No, those weren’t my childhood or teenage years, but it was the time when I was lucky to join the nascent education reform movement.)

As an eternal optimist, I must remain hopeful that another Golden Age might be right around the corner. I know, Covid learning loss was massive, and kids are still entering school behind where they used to be. And educators are struggling mightily with a student engagement crisis, with chronic absenteeism, misbehavior, and phone addiction creating daily challenges.

But at the same time, many states and districts have been investing in high-dosage tutoring, getting their act together when it comes to the science of reading and adopting (if not fully implementing) high-quality instructional materials. A strong economy is keeping child poverty rates low, too. All these factors should help kids make progress in the years ahead—especially if policymakers decide to bring back a measure of accountability, as well.

If we analysts focus on cohort growth rather than raw trend lines, Americans might spot a rebound sooner than many naysayers expect.

Special thanks to Fordham senior research associate Meredith Coffey for the extensive data analysis represented here.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

In February 2020, California settled a case which alleged that the state was violating the right to an education by sending kids to schools that didn’t teach them how to read. Among the terms of the settlement, the state agreed to create the Early Literacy Support Block Grant (ELSBG)—a targeted initiative to improve reading scores in the lowest-performing elementary schools in the Golden State—to the tune of roughly $50 million. Did this resolution achieve its important aims? A recent study by Stanford’s Tom Dee and Sarah Novicoff looks into the achievement impacts of the first two years of implementation to find out.

To conduct their analysis, Dee and Novicoff identified a group of 5,256 unique elementary schools (district and charter) with reading achievement data for grade three in each of seven tested school years between 2014–2015 and 2022–2023 (sans 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic). The state identified ELSBG-eligible schools by averaging the percent of grade three students across the 2017–18 and 2018–19 academic years who scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s English language arts assessment and weighting the average by the number of test-takers in each of the years. The ELSBG program was intended to improve reading in the lowest performing seventy-five elementary schools in the state. Originally, all seventy-five eligible schools agreed to participate, although the treated sample ultimately ended up totaling sixty-six. The rest of the 5,000-some schools comprised the comparison group (more on that shortly).

Based on individual school needs, ELSBG schools were awarded three-year grants that averaged roughly $642,000 per school. Besides the funding, schools received external support from the County Office of Education, lots of professional development (separate from the grant funding), and spending flexibility (with a requirement to supplement not supplant existing funds), along with a requirement to submit quarterly reports on progress toward goals. They had to develop a three-year literacy plan proposing how they would improve outcomes, with allowable expenditures on instructional coaches, diagnostic tools, instructional materials, tutoring, parental outreach, and mental-health resources to name a few. The state sponsored thirty-six sessions on the science of reading before the literacy plan was due, plus an “Online Elementary Reading Academy” during implementation. Early analysis found that staff compensation (i.e., salaries and benefits) represented 69 percent of the budgeted expenditures for the ELSBG funds in the first year.

Analysts compare the changes in outcomes over time between students involved in the school-wide program and not. However, the treatment schools were already trending downward relative to the comparison schools before the grant began, so the analysts take multiple steps to match treatment and comparison schools, including weighting the data in such a way that aligns pre-treatment trends across both groups.

The key finding is that the grant had positive and statistically significant effects on grade three ELA test scores. Specifically, it increased those scores by 0.14 standard deviations among third graders served by the targeted schools over the first two years of the grant. Similarly, it increased the share of students performing at Level 2 or higher by 20 percent (i.e., a 6-percentage-point gain relative to a pre-treatment baseline of 30.5 percent). And it led to smaller, cross-subject gains in grade three math achievement (i.e., 0.11 standard deviations) but, not surprisingly, no spillover effects among grade five students in math or ELA, who were outside the program’s focus. (Recall that they didn’t have data for school year 2020 or 2021, so the same third graders couldn’t be tracked through fifth grade.)

These are modest but positive impacts, and the analysts note that, compared to interventions that seek to reduce class size, the average one-year cost of $1,144 per pupil for ELSBG was on par for the outcomes achieved—and incidentally, way more promising than the disastrous math reform in San Francisco that Novicoff and Dee also evaluated.

Will a third year of ELSBG data show continued improvement? What about after the funding runs out (which occurred in June 2024)? Will the benefits fade? Or perhaps the wider implementation of the science of reading nationwide—which shares commonalities with ELSBG—will help the third graders of California finally reach a new level of literacy achievement and actually maintain it. Time and data will tell.

SOURCE: Sarah Novicoff and Thomas S. Dee, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (December 2023).

Cheers

• Survey results show that fewer than 8 percent of U.S. high school students have used e-cigarettes in the past month, down from 27 percent in 2019. —New York Times
• Fourteen states have joined onto an effort spearheaded by a bipartisan coalition to cut chronic absenteeism by half over a five-year period. —Chalkbeat
• Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it is time to start holding schools and students to higher standards again. —Lesley Muldoon, Hechinger Report

Jeers

• California has made data about its public school system impossible to locate and interpret, preventing parents from truly understanding how its institutions are faring. —CalMatters
• Many policymakers have pushed intensive tutoring as a solution to pandemic-induced learning loss, but a new study of a tutoring initiative in Nashville reveals that the impacts of such programs are much smaller than hoped. —Hechinger Report

• A new study asks: if schools want to maximize student achievement, should they hire more staff or raise salaries for the teachers that they already employ? —Paul E. Peterson, Education Next
• Understanding where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on Title IX, school choice, the future of the Department of Education, book bans, and other education issues is crucial ahead of [and after] the presidential debate. —NPR
• Analysts hope to learn from high-poverty districts across the country that have managed to maintain strong reading proficiency rates among elementary schoolers. —The 74

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

1. I don’t know how you officially take back kudos, but I think I’m going to have to go through that process since the leadership of Akron City Schools has decided to get a little stroppy about the overpayment they received from state Science of Reading curriculum funds. Rather than the district returning the erroneous money, as it sounded like would happen—and which your humble clips compiler praised—in Monday’s report, the state will be withholding the $800K from the district’s next regular payment to make things right. On top of that, district officials are now blaming the structure of the state’s electronic survey as being “ambiguous”, claiming that led to the mistaken reporting and overpayment in the first place. Too bad. While embarrassing, the original “we made a mistake and will give back this money which we don’t need” message was far preferable. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/10/24)
   
   

2. On to some actual kudos that should definitely stick: Steubenville City Schools is once again held out as an exemplar of how district schools in low-income areas can successfully serve their students with high-quality education. That revelation—not for the first time—comes as part of new nationwide research on schools which are doing the best job at teaching their young students to read proficiently. There are whiz-bang graphics here and a lot of available data to go through. But the bottom line is that schools predominantly serving poor students can do so to a very high level; and those that aren’t, need to do better fast. (The 74, 9/10/24)
   
   

3. Add private school students who live in the Marysville City School District and rely on the district for transportation to this list of those having bus trouble so far this school year. Fingers mainly point to a bus driver shortage as the cause, but there is some disingenuous supposition that passing the district’s levy in November would help remedy the problems. “Parents and students who have been impacted by our transportation issues early this year are rightfully frustrated,” said the district treasurer, “but a failed levy is not going to improve that issue.” Neither, I think, would a passed levy either. We are told here that “the 5.5 mil levy would help the district fund day-to-day operational expenses such as utilities, bus fuel, classroom supplies and quality teachers and staff.” So: more fuel for buses without drivers? Neato. District officials also said the revenue would “help maintain current services provided to the school community.” Yes. Now that seems right. Although I don’t think it means what they think it does. (ABC 6 News, Columbus, 9/9/24) All of the various reasons/excuses/official explanations for poor student transportation in Columbus City Schools and elsewhere got a full airing in the first forty minutes of yesterday’s edition of the All Sides radio program—with the repeated refrain of “districts have tried everything”. Then, in the last 20 minutes, Senate Education Committee Chair Andrew Brenner comes on and demolishes them all with facts and data. Good stuff. (WOSU-FM, Columbus, 9/10/24)

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