1. Lots and lots to unpack in this one story. First and foremost, happy tenth anniversary to Springfield’s Global Impact STEM Academy! Second, congratulations on your impending expansion that will perhaps allow you to clear the waiting of list of students wanting to attend which has been steady and growing for all of your ten years. Third, while the founding director/superintendent says he doesn’t think “anyone could have imagined where Global Impact would be today when we started out,” I will suggest that there is a connection between where the school is today and the discussion of “opposition” from some folks in the area which nearly derailed the start up of the school back on 2013. I know I certainly could have predicted the success and expanding interest of the STEM model there. And I reckon all the haters could too. (Springfield News-Sun, 4/2/23) And speaking of STEM, here’s a nice look at a recurring conference held at Kent State University’s Trumbull County campus this past weekend, in which hundreds of high school students heard from local folks who are employed in STEM fields and many local employers looking for future tech workers. Sounds great! Here’s hoping that charter, private, and yes STEM school students were among the attendees. (Mahoning Matters, 4/3/23)
   
   

2. Some of you may not know that my colleague Aaron Churchill is originally from Pittsburgh. And while his brain is fully occupied here in Ohio, it seems at least part of his heart may still reside in the Keystone State. How else to explain this op-ed, in which Aaron explains in detail how the aftermath of a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on school funding will not likely follow a straight, smooth, or short path—using Ohio’s twisty saga as his evidence base. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/2/23)

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As someone who’s had firsthand experience in the ups and downs of the education reform movement, I agree with Matthew Yglesias calling it a “strange death.” Reformers did over-promise, and they did fail at scaling up once-promising ideas.

But we’ve now let the pendulum swing back too far, to a “lol, nothing matters” view on schools, and that’s wrong, too. The left has coalesced around the idea that schools just need more money and support and not much else. The right is using schools as a culture war scapegoat as it wins school choice battles. National media outlets are adding more fuel to those fires, rather than soberly monitoring how students are recovering from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the essential insights behind the education reform movement have only gotten stronger: Schools matter for kids, schools can get better, and these questions are especially important for the disadvantaged students who rely on public schools the most.

Key insight: Schools matter

A recent working paper from a team of Brown and Harvard researchers helps illustrate the importance of schools. They studied Massachusetts students who entered ninth grade in 2002 and 2003 and measured college completion rates and labor market earnings at age thirty. Because the authors were interested in the effects of the high schools, they controlled for student demographics, incoming test scores, parental levels of education, and the results of a unique survey that the students took as eighth graders asking about their plans for life after high school.

Now, there are a few things worth unpacking here. The first is that, when most people picture a “good school,” they might think of all the inputs the school has, such as the facilities or the teaching staff or the other students attending the school. But this paper was focused on measuring the unique contribution each school made to student outcomes. Did the school improve the trajectories of their students, or not?

It turns out that schools had a big, long-term effect on students. Low-income students who attended a high school at the 80th percentile of quality were 6 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree and earned 13 percent more money (or about $3,600) per year at age thirty.

Perhaps more importantly, the authors found that “good schools” could be found across the income distribution. In fact, the authors found basically no relationship between a school's poverty level and its effect on either college graduation or earnings.

These are not particularly novel findings within education. A study out of D.C. found that high schools with strong “promotion power” for high school graduation also had strong effects on college attendance. Another study out of Massachusetts found that high schools had a bigger effect on college attendance than on test scores.

It’s more equitable—and fair for the school leaders—to evaluate schools based on how much progress their students make, not on point-in-time “status” measures that tend to be more closely aligned with student demographics. Over time, state accountability systems have shifted toward growth measures, rather than merely rewarding (or punishing) a school based on their incoming students’ abilities. But it’s still hard to convince the public that school quality should be defined based on outcomes and not all of the surface-level inputs.

What does a good school do? The Massachusetts paper does a nice job peeling back the short-term indicators that are predictive of long-term success. It turns out that the proxy measures we have for measuring school quality, things like test scores, attendance, and other intermediate outcomes like college-going rates, are pretty good predictors of longer-term outcomes like completing college, finding a job, and earning a decent wage.

These may not be flashy or fashionable, but test scores, attendance, and credit accumulation all had an effect on later-life earnings. While these variables mostly operated independently of each other, the best high schools were ones that were able to both raise academic performance and elevate student aspirations for college.

To be clear, the school quality effects are not large enough to “end poverty in our lifetimes” or any other such bold claims. But that’s setting an impossibly high standard, and we need to be open to a lot of small improvements rather than aiming for one policy to solve all of our problems.

Education reform nihilism

The downfall of the education reform movement, such as it was, stems from a lot of causes.

But we’ve now entered into what I think of as education reform nihilism, where nothing that we could possibly do to improve schools would matter all that much. This is best captured by a recent Freddie deBoer piece, where he concludes that, “almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.”

He’s right, up to a point. But he misses the mark on two fronts. One, at the macro level, student achievement has improved over time and gaps are narrowing. DeBoer points to one study suggesting that achievement gaps have remained the same over time, but a more recent, peer-reviewed version of that same paper concludes, “Gaps in math, reading, and science achievement between the top and bottom quartiles of the SES distribution have closed by 0.05 standard deviation per decade.” Other papers come to similarly positive conclusions: Achievement scores are rising, and gaps are closing across income and racial lines.[i]

True, the progress here is painstaking and slow. As one of the papers noted, “At the current pace of closure, the achievement gap would not be eliminated until the second half of the twenty-second century.”

And this is where deBoer, federal policymakers, and wealthy philanthropists have learned the wrong lessons. It’s not that reforms don’t “work” or that schools cannot improve. It’s more complicated than that. Lots of things can work—there’s a whole federal website called the What Works Clearinghouse documenting thousands of successful reform efforts—but they may not work the same way everywhere.

This is an important distinction because it means policymakers need to keep their eyes focused on marginal improvements rather than trying to find one big fix. This is the exact opposite of what education policy has looked like over the last twenty years. Notable fads include:

• A big national push on phonics-based reading instruction. Congress killed that program, but the evidence around the “science of reading” only got stronger, and there’s now a renewed policy push.
• A philanthropy-driven effort helped districts break up large, low-performing high schools into smaller academies. That effort died before the positive results came in, but the idea for small schools is now rising again in a new form.
• A publicly funded tutoring program for students in need of additional support. At its peak, the NCLB-funded tutoring program served nearly 1 million students at a cost of $2.3 billion a year. That version of tutoring did not deliver results at scale and was killed off by the Obama administration, but the evidence on high-quality tutoring has only gotten stronger.
• The Obama-era effort to improve teacher evaluation systems. The national effort has famously failed to improve student test scores, but teacher evaluation reforms have been effective in places—like Washington, D.C.—that tied the results to personnel decisions like compensation.
• Alternative teacher preparation pathways. They were once seen as good ways to motivate young people to join the teaching profession, and the highest-profile program, Teach For America, produced strong results. It has been shrinking recently, in part thanks to political pushback; meanwhile, new teacher residency models are growing rapidly.

The overarching lesson from these examples is that a whole lot of things can work, but they may not work the same everywhere. That’s OK! Yglesias also noted some concrete things we could do around air quality and school lunches. These might sound like small beer, but that’s exactly the point: We might have more success with a lot of small things—and tinkering over time—rather than searching for one magic thing.

We’ve lost the thread on school quality

So, schools matter. And we have a pretty good idea about what aspects of schooling matter and how to measure them. This isn’t new or revolutionary stuff. Robert Balfanz, an education researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has long urged schools to focus on “the ABCs”—A for attendance, B for behavior, and C for course performance and credits—to identify kids who are at risk of dropping out.

Unfortunately, all of the key student indicators are currently pointing downward. Student achievement fell sharply in the wake of Covid-19, and students are still far below where they otherwise might be. About twice as many students were chronically absent last year than the year before the pandemic, and those rates are especially bad in large urban districts and among historically disadvantaged and low-income students.

Behavioral problems are also rampant. School staff report a surge in disruptive behavior, and 84 percent of school leaders reported that the pandemic negatively affected behavioral development of students at their school.

We’re already starting to see some intermediate consequences for all this. College enrollment rates are still trending downwards, especially for recent high school graduates from low-income schools.

Of course, it’s easier to identify these problems than it is to fix them, but the first step is acknowledging that these issues matter, and something can be done. We’re in a moment right now where policymakers need to re-focus on the importance of getting kids back on track.

Editor's note: This was first published by Slow Boring.

In some circles, education research has a bad reputation. All too often, policymakers ignore or weaponize education research findings, while many practitioners consider education research to be “irrelevant.”

But education research is valuable, and smart investments by the federal government in education R & D can produce dividends. Through the federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, promising innovations that make a real difference in student achievement are receiving the support they need to scale up and reach more kids. Meanwhile, federal Small Business Innovation Grants (SBIR) offered by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation provide critical financial support to develop new education technologies that help teachers improve their instructional practice and students advance their learning.

Right now, a meager fraction of the U.S. Department of Education’s budget goes to education R & D. In 2021, the department spent an estimated $322 million on it, less than 0.2 percent of the agency’s total budget. This stands in stark contrast to federal investments in other sectors. From 2000 to 2020, federal spending on health R & D increased by 125 percent, but only rose by 39 percent in education, lagging behind the overall inflation rate of 50 percent. Given the need for innovation in K–12 schooling—to improve outcomes for kids and strengthen U.S. competitiveness—the amount dedicated to education research must increase significantly.

Education R & D is a high-yield investment and should therefore be considered as Congress approaches its appropriations process. Put simply, it’s is good for students and the economy.

Let’s look at some examples of education R & D paying off for students, such as successful interventions like the ASSISTments program or Johns Hopkins’s Diplomas Now early warning system. Both have been able to increase learning outcomes for more students thanks to the EIR program.

ASSISTments is an online formative assessment tool that more high-need middle school math students were able to access due to an EIR grant. As a result of this investment from the federal government, more kids are benefitting from an intervention that produces a 75 percent increase in learning in two years.

Similarly, the Diplomas Now program expanded significantly courtesy of an EIR grant (when it was called Investing in Innovation, or i3). It has radically improved high school graduation rates by instituting early warning systems that track and respond to indicators, such as sixth and ninth graders’ attendance and math and English proficiency, to prevent students from dropping out. A recent article in the Washington Post cited this early warning system as one of the key reasons why Alabama and West Virginia’s high school graduation rates have skyrocketed over the last decade.

Beyond success in the classroom, federal investments in education R & D are making a positive impact on the economy. SBIR has spurred the development of numerous commercial ed tech tools and platforms that benefit kids, teachers, and the economy.

A few months ago, publishing giant Scholastic acquired Learning Ovations, an ed tech startup that had been funded by SBIR and EIR. These federal dollars seeded an “assessment to instruction” system that facilitates literacy screening, progress monitoring, and instructional planning—all of which are beneficial to students. An added bonus is that this grant led to a significant acquisition, which does good for the economy at large.

Other SBIR-funded technology are the Moby.Read app by Analytic Measures, Muzology, and Prisms of Reality, Inc. Moby-Read is self-administered literacy assessment for students in grades K–5 that saves teachers the time of having to conduct individual student assessments. In April 2022, Google acquired the IP rights and announced its intention to integrate the app within its existing suite of educational products. Muzology is an award-winning learning platform, grounded in psychology and music, that engages students as they learn math. Students who used it during the pandemic increased their math proficiency by two years, while other students fell behind. And Prisms of Reality, Inc. used the funding to create an immersive virtual reality platform that teaches math and physics, and is tailored for students from historically underserved populations. The platform includes modules such as “Pandemic: How Can We Save Our City’s Hospitals?” to provide students with relevant and tangible learning experiences.

To be sure, not all education research has been valued by educators and education policymakers, and the field sometimes has methodological issues. One researcher found, for instance, that most education studies have very low sample sizes, which limit generalizability.

Still, education R & D holds great promise, and when the federal government funds it thoughtfully, the return on investment is high, with positive results showing up in classrooms and the marketplace. For its part, Congress has continued to take steps to increase support for education research, having recently directed the Institute of Education Sciences to use a portion of a funding increase to support quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to significantly improve outcomes for students. Indeed, federal support for education R & D might be one of those rare areas of bipartisan agreement. Congress would be wise to increase funding further.

Late Friday afternoon, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced his intention to appoint Fordham’s president emeritus, Chester E. “Checker” Finn, Jr., as the Buckeye State’s first Director of Education and Workforce, a.k.a. state superintendent.

“When I was reminded that Checker grew up in Dayton,” DeWine noted at a press conference, “I knew I had my man.” The announcement follows on the heels of Fordham’s Vice President Chad Aldis’s appointment as the state superintendent of Iowa, his home state, by Governor Kim Reynolds.

DeWine said that Finn has a clear charge: “Return Ohio’s education system to the excellence that prevailed when you and I were kids”—in the 1950s.

“I understand,” noted the Governor, “that includes an embrace of phonics (rebranded ‘the science of reading’), but also class sizes of thirty-five or more. And the best part,” continued DeWine, “is that there were no teachers unions back then, so nobody’s going to grump.” Finn’s departure will leave big shoes to fill at Fordham, but we’re excited to see what the original Education Gadfly can do to shape up schools in the Buckeye State.

The National Education Association (NEA) reported on Friday that it had successfully recovered the remaining wreckage from a suspected spy balloon that it shot down early last week. The balloon, alleged to be owned and launched by us—the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—was spotted lingering directly above the NEA’s Washington, D.C., office.

NEA President Becky Pringle said that the teachers union intelligence community would be analyzing the debris, which is believed to contain sophisticated surveillance equipment.

“I guess arming teachers paid off after all,” shrugged Pringle in a briefing. “I didn’t like the idea at first, but our members were remarkably well-prepared to down the balloon. Now it’s time to take a look inside.”

Fordham, however, denies that the balloon had anything to do with collecting information on the nation’s largest teachers union, with which, yes, we’re often at odds over various education issues.

As Fordham president Mike Petrilli said at our recent press conference: “Fordham is a responsible think tank and has no intention of violating the territory and airspace of any other entity, no matter how obstructionist and anti-reform that entity might be. To say otherwise is to play into anti-school choice conspiracies. We were collecting data on downtown weather in the nation’s capital in order to analyze its relationship to student outcomes. I don’t want to give too much away, but we’ve got a new report coming down the pike: Think Again: Does ‘School Climate’ Literally Refer to the Weather?”

This didn’t seem to move Pringle, though, who frowned and said that Petrilli’s explanation “didn’t make any sense.” “Why,” she asked, “would a bunch of education policy wonks branch into meteorology?”

Nevertheless, the incident has exacerbated longstanding tensions between Fordham and teachers unions. Kim Anderson, the NEA’s Executive Director, reportedly postponed her highly anticipated visit to the Wawa on 19th Street, citing concerns about its proximity to Fordham’s office. And our staff barely ventures out of our homes.

Roderick N. Hess, a prominent education scholar and noted authority on whatever you were planning to write about this week, was found unharmed, brimming with enthusiasm, and dressed like a Cancun tourist on Sunday, following a worrisome twenty-four-hour period during which he failed to publish any new work.

After a half-hearted search of Arlington, Virginia by bored McCourt School of Public Policy grad students, Hess was discovered in his home office dictating an essay to nobody in particular. His personal laptop, which was still in its original packaging, lay untouched on the desk amid autographed stacks of his countless authored and edited books.

After spending the night in a local hospital, Hess told Education Week that the reason for his “editorial break” was that all twenty-five of his research assistants had vanished, and that doctors had told him to “take it down a few thousand notches” and avoid writing any books for at least seventy-two hours.

In a 2500-word missive published fifteen minutes later, Hess thanked readers for their concern and promised that, moving forward, he would “treat his long-suffering staff like the cage-busting research stallions they are.” He also shared a photo, taken shortly before he was discharged, showing him holding shards of clothing and a pair of scissors, having apparently cut his hospital gown into a pair of shorts and his slippers into sandals.

Florida Governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis announced that longtime education policy expert, and Fordham’s president emeritus, Chester “Checker” E. Finn, Jr. is henceforth banned and barred, and his written work strictly forbidden, in the Sunshine State due to his authorship of a controversial book about Advanced Placement tests.

In a fiery press conference from the state’s capital, DeSantis—who recently waged a public battle against the AP’s planned African American Studies course—took issue with Finn’s 2019 polemical Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement.

“Finn has been pushing his woke ideology of ‘high standards’ and ‘rigorous instruction’ on American students since the Reagan administration,” DeSantis stated. “It’s time someone fought back against this indoctrination.”

DeSantis, flanked by members of activist group Moms Against Checker, detailed a plan by which Finn would be cancelled in the state. “I’ve instructed Florida internet providers to block access to the website of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All physical copies of Finn’s books will be destroyed in a massive bonfire on the grounds of the recently liberated Disney World.”

More serious of all, Finn himself will face a life-time ban from entering Florida.

“Stay out of Palm Beach, Checker,” a visibly agitated DeSantis stated. “Same for Boca. Don’t even think about the Keys. No golf, no shuffleboard, no nothing. I don’t care how old you are.”

The action was hailed by right-wing ed reformers. Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, briefly looked up from his phone’s Twitter app to proclaim, “Checker had this coming. We should fund students, not ed policy analysts.”

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In the face of budget cuts, teacher shortages, and pressure to enhance student engagement—and inspired by Major League’s Baseball brand new, transformational pitch clocks—several school districts have recently cut down on inefficiencies and shortened the school day by implemented “teach clocks.” With this system of timers, teachers, students, and staff receive a set number of minutes to complete tasks and finish up those thoughts and lessons. A recent study examines the novel practice.

Schools, it finds, are implementing the clocks in intersecting ways for all three groups. Teachers often revise classroom activities such that pupils, for example, show without telling, dissect tadpoles instead of frogs, and perform songs in 2/2 time rather than 4/4. In most cases, students who violate the timer—perhaps by attempting to think before speaking—lose a point on their most recent assignment. And staff usually lose an hour of pension credit per violation.

The upshot: School days typically end two to three hours earlier.

The researchers also examined the teach clocks’ impact on achievement. The largest statistically significant gains in both math and reading occurred in schools that only implemented the clocks for administrators, followed by places that gave them to all three groups. The researchers hypothesize that shorter staff meetings and less bureaucratic micromanaging gave teachers more time to actually do their jobs.

Though these results are fascinating, several limitations to more expansive teach-clock use remain. Shop teachers, for example, have expressed concern about rising student injury rates, and music teachers complain that the songs sound terrible. Nonetheless, given waning student attention spans and the fact that the weather is getting so nice out, district and school leaders would do well to consider the intervention’s potential.

SOURCE: Sandy Alcántara, Justin Verlander, and Julio Urías, “Limiting Dead Time: Teach Clock Effects in a Generic Suburban District,” Efficiency in Schools Working Paper Series (April 1, 2023).

With inflation high and the prices of so many everyday items heading into the stratosphere, America’s home ec teachers have a new challenge on their plates: teaching students how to cook, clean, and keep house on a budget. Not a Scrooge budget, either. We’re talking Harpagon territory. That’s the philosophy, at least, at Hart Knox Afterschool Services in Hoboken, New Jersey, where a promising course has recently drawn heaps of interest and thousands of students.

“In terms of cleaning, you can forget actual soap,” says lead educator Miele Brookstone. “Those are for nepo babies and sports stars now. Our teachers are rediscovering baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, bottom-shelf booze, and citrus peels—all the software the kids’ll need for most jobs.” Students report that many of the almost-zero-dollar tips are cribbed from Glamour magazine in the halcyon days of 2009: Just blow that dirt away by opening your windows as part of your cleaning routine. Dirty microwave? Boil some water and steam clean it, wiping those grungy surfaces with rags leftover from your old clothes. Gotta wash those rags? Splash out for generic borax in bulk or go with old fashioned baking soda and vinegar. Wool dryer balls are an almost-infinitely reusable alternative to dryer sheets—and can save energy, too.

And indeed, this is all essential information for 2023. Inflation isn’t just for soufflés and quiches anymore. It’s everywhere. America’s kids need to be equipped to survive. Thanks to the good folks at Hart Knox, though, graduates’ pennies will be getting pinched so hard they’ll be screaming.