A new school year should be a time of hope and joy, perhaps with a side of butterflies for parents, kids, and educators alike. But if recent surveys are any indication, this new year is instead bringing trepidation for students and teachers across the country. Whereas life in our society as a whole has largely bounced back from the dark days of the pandemic (crime and inflation down, jobs and earnings up), with the exception of a welcome decline in violence, life inside our schools is arguably worse than ever.

Attendance is dismal. Cheating is pervasive. Cell phones are everywhere. Disorder abounds. And for all these reasons and more, kids are learning less, year over year, than they were back before the plague struck. Students and teachers are crying out for help.

As an eternal optimist, it pains me to paint this picture of American carnage in the classroom. But we can only fix a problem if we own up to it.

Let’s take a look at what recent polls have been telling us.

• According to the Center for Disease Control’s biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 20,000 U.S. high school students, as reported by Education Week, 15 percent of Black and Native American students, 17 percent of Hispanic students, and 22 percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students “reported missing school out of fear.”


• A new Education Week survey finds a dip in teacher morale, in part because of discipline issues. “More public school teachers wanted to see more support for dealing with student discipline issues. Elementary (74 percent) and middle school (71 percent) teachers, and teachers in suburban districts, are more likely to say that more support for dealing with discipline would help improve their mental health. In the survey, teachers wrote in open responses that they felt they weren’t able to discipline students. Even when misbehaving students are sent out of class, they come back with snacks and don’t change their behavior, teachers said.”


• Pew research from April reported that 68 percent of teachers say that they have experienced verbal abuse from their students—and 21 percent say this happens at least a few times a month.


• The RAND State of the American Teacher survey from this winter found that 45 percent of teachers ranked “managing student behavior” as a top source of stress in their job—which, as a new Wall Street Journal article reports, is causing teachers to burn out.

Heeding the call

The right way to respond to these pleas for help is to embrace tough love. And the tough part and the love part should be in approximately equal doses.

That means, first and foremost, holding students accountable for their behavior again. No more looking the other way when they cuss out their teachers or vape in the bathroom or fail to show up for school.

Bring back lunch-time or afterschool detention, Saturday school, or mandatory summer school. Dock grades for poor attendance or disrespectful behavior. Flunk kids when necessary. Grab the attention of students and their parents and make it clear that bad and dysfunctional behavior must change.

And for teachers, it means being willing to tell those who are floundering that they need to get it together or find another line of work, especially now that the pipeline is filling up again with promising college graduates who might make great instructors.

That’s the tough part. But the love part is important, too. The goal is to hold both students and teachers to a high standard, but also to help them reach it.

For kids, that includes providing the mental health supports necessary to address their misbehavior and other forms of acting out; the tutoring supports necessary to help them get decent grades without resorting to cheating; and the mentorship and counseling necessary to help them find their place in a school community, via sports, music, art, or other extracurricular activities.

And for teachers, it means having their back when dealing with unruly students, upholding academic standards and integrity, and holding the line on cell phones. It also means giving them the support they need to be effective educators, especially via high-quality instructional materials that have been shown to work well in real classrooms.

Tough love for 2024–25: Put it on a bumper sticker today.

It’s widely acknowledged that a bit of healthy competition is a good thing in most contexts. Among other things, it pushes businesses to create better products and athletes and musicians to train longer and harder.

But what about in education?

Over the past decade, charter schools have driven much of the growth in competition experienced by traditional public schools across the country. And they are delivering impressive results. According to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, charter schools produce, on average, more year-to-year academic growth than comparable district schools, particularly in urban areas and for students from traditionally underserved communities.

Still, many critics believe that this success comes at the expense of the students who remain in traditional public schools. So it’s worth reviewing the empirical research on this point.

How do charter schools affect traditional public schools?

The research on charters’ academic spillovers is positive overall, with at least a dozen studies finding that the arrival of new charter schools increases the achievement of students who remain in traditional public schools. Consistent with this finding, average test scores for all publicly enrolled students in a geographic region rise when the number of charter schools increases.

Positive effects have also been detected for other academic outcomes. For example, some research shows that charter school competition can reduce student absenteeism and the probability of grade retention in traditional public schools. And one national analysis found that geographic school districts’ graduation rates increased by about 2–4 percentage points when new charter schools were introduced.

Finally, charter schools may have some important fiscal spillovers. For example, districts that experience enrollment losses may struggle to reduce their fixed costs and consequently become less efficient. Still, these challenges tend to fade as districts adjust. In the long run, the evidence suggests that charter schools may actually make traditional public schools more efficient—and that most of their fiscal spillovers are perhaps best understood as transition costs.

That said, there are some counterexamples. At least four studies have found that charters have negative effects on the achievement of students remaining in district schools, while at least seven others have found null impacts.

When are charters’ competitive effects strongest?

Research suggests that three conditions are associated with stronger competitive effects.

First, charter schools seem to have stronger competitive effects when they are in direct competition with traditional public schools. For example, effects seem to be bigger when charters are physically located closer to traditional public schools. Similarly, research suggests that competitive effects are strongest in grade levels that are served by both the charter school and traditional public schools.

Second, some research suggests that non-district sponsored charter schools have stronger positive competitive effects—which makes sense, since a principal goal of the charter movement is to break the district monopoly.

Finally, multiple studies have found that higher-achieving charters have more positive effects on students in traditional public schools, presumably because they create more competitive pressure.

What explains these effects?

Ultimately, any number of mechanisms could be driving charters’ competitive effects. For example, some research suggests that charter school entry can encourage traditional public schools to devote more resources to teacher salaries or other instructional inputs. Or perhaps it leads to increased effort from teachers and administrators or to structural changes, such as reforms to teacher tenure, evaluation, and pay scales.

According to one recent study, charter-driven enrollment losses lead to the closure of low-performing district schools—which probably helps the students who would have attended them, insofar as they wind up in better schools.

The bottom line

In a country with upwards of ten thousand school districts, there can be no universal truths. Yet what we know of charters’ effects on traditional public schools is promising.

While charters may negatively affect districts’ finances in the short run, the competition they introduce ultimately has a positive effect on the academic achievement of students in traditional public schools, as well as other outcomes. In other words, a little competition in education—as in other sectors, contexts, and walks of life—is almost certainly healthy.

Over the past six months, I’ve had an extended conversation about “equitable grading” with Joe Feldman, the author of Grading for Equity (see here, here, here, here, and here). It’s been a lively conversation that has sparked a lot of thoughtful feedback and strong reactions. Well, I recently received one response from veteran Fairfax County, Va., teacher Eric Wolf Welch, which seemed well worth sharing. Fairfax County moved to adopt equitable grading in 2022. Welch, an AVID program coordinator and social studies teacher at the district’s Justice High School, is leading a group of educators, parents, and community members who want the district to reverse course. Here, he makes his case, explaining why “equitable” grading undercuts the educational value of grades by focusing too narrowly on content mastery.

—Rick

Dear Rick,

Thank you for covering the issue of grading and developing a deeper understanding of this important debate going on in education right now. I am a high school teacher in the Fairfax County public schools in northern Virginia. My district adopted the “grading for equity” policies you’ve discussed, making us an early adopter of these reforms. I lead a group of educators, parents, and other community members in advocating these policies be reconsidered.

I think it is helpful to understand that the debate over grading boils down to one simple question: What is the purpose of grading? By focusing on that question, it becomes easier to evaluate which approach is best.

In this debate, there are two camps. The first is the “grading for equity” camp, the philosophy on grading advanced by Joe Feldman, among others. As you’ve pointed out in your discussions with Feldman, this camp believes traditional styles of grading are too subjective, fail to truly measure a student’s mastery of content, since noncontent tasks factor into the final grade, and are not equitable because they too often favor those with socioeconomic advantages. In their view, things that don’t measure a student’s mastery of content—homework, classroom participation, student behavior, meeting deadlines, and even attendance—should not count toward a student’s grade. All that should matter are the “summative assessments,” or the big tests that display how much a student knows on a specific subject. Most notably, retaking these tests over and over until a desirable result is reached is acceptable, since equitable grading advocates believe that with each retake the student’s mastery over the content increases.

The other camp believes that grading is a holistic measure of a student. This “holistic grading” approach is based on the notion that a grade is a tool to help students develop the skills, traits, habits, and attitudes to be a successful learner. A major part of holistic grading is knowing the content. But another, equally important part is demonstrating the ability to be an engaged student. That means coming to class on time, participating in class activities, turning in assignments on time, demonstrating intellectual curiosity, collaborating with others, and putting in the effort to learn. In the long run, these characteristics matter much more to a student’s success in life than simply their mastery of content.

This is why I am strongly in the holistic-grading camp. Think about the students we are trying to produce. Do we simply want to measure what a student knows about a specific academic subject? Or do we want to measure how a student learns and all that comes with it? Which is going to better prepare an adolescent for success in life?

Grading for equity advocates will argue holistic grading is too subjective. My answer to that objection is that life is subjective. A job interview is subjective. A business proposal is subjective. A doctor’s “opinion” is subjective. This fear that our grades may be too subjective ignores reality.

That said, our grading should not be entirely subjective. Our expectations of students should be well communicated. We should have clear rubrics for how we grade. There should be standardized tests on the content that factor into the student’s overall grade. But the score on that test should not determine a student’s entire grade. Instead, the test should be one part of a holistic measure of the student.

This debate is not just a trivial matter for teachers. How we grade students will impact how they develop into the next generation of citizens. I ask very seriously: What do we want that next generation to know, how to pass tests or how to be productive, ethical, and responsible members of society? I think the answer should be the latter.

The grading for equity camp claims that in their system, students will learn all these essential skills and work habits; they’re just not graded on them. Students will develop these skills and work habits as part of the process of preparing for the tests—studying, participating in class, and completing homework. That’s a rational way of thinking. However, as any parent or teacher knows, teenagers do not always think rationally. I would say any human being, and especially teenagers, will not do something they don’t want to do if they are not held accountable.

Two years ago, representatives from my school’s student government spoke to teachers and administrators about a variety of topics, including grading. I’ll never forget the statement from one low-income, minority student, the exact type of student the grading for equity camp claims they’re so concerned with: “If you don’t grade it, I won’t do it.” I find it shocking that school leaders and education experts who advocate equitable grading, like Feldman, do not understand this element of human behavior.

The ability to handle accountability is, in my opinion, the most important thing a student should learn in school. When we eliminate that from our grading, we no longer prepare students for success in life. If we focus on that objective, it becomes easy to understand why the grading for equity approach should not be adopted.

Thanks again for your continued attention to this critical topic.

Editor’s note: This was first published on August 22, 2024, by Education Week on the author’s opinion blog, Rick Hess Straight Up.

For years, researchers have pointed to the quality of educators as the key to school performance. On the EconTalk podcast in 2015, Eric Hanushek argued that “in both developed and developing countries, the thing that makes the largest difference in schools is the quality of the teachers.” Professor Hanushek himself has done much of the work illumining the importance of teachers, showing stark variation in teacher effectiveness. A 2013 Education Next article by Hanushek, economist Steven Rivkin, and a coauthor used data from Texas to show that principals can also have an impact on student achievement. Alongside research from Raj Chetty and colleagues, who identified effects of teachers on a range of long-term student outcomes, this research has shown the power of high-quality educators to shape students’ educational and career trajectories. 

Now a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper from Hanushek, Rivkin, and several colleagues extends their prior work using Texas data to examine the impact of principals on student achievement to assess potential impacts not just on short-term outcomes like test scores and attendance, but also on students’ longer-term outcomes, such as higher education, employment, and involvement in the criminal justice system.

The researchers analyzed data from eighth-grade cohorts from 2001 to 2012, assessing the impact of middle-school principals in two stages. First, they use a value-added framework that controls for students’ background characteristics to examine how principals affect students’ short-term outcomes, such as test scores, absences, and suspensions. These outcomes serve as indicators of principals’ influence on students’ cognitive and noncognitive skills, although, as with their prior research, they do not have an effective method for distinguishing between the effects of the principals themselves and the other effects of the students’ schools. Still, they say that their method of identifying effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills prior to examining effects on long-term outcomes reduces potential bias. They measure cognitive skills by calculating improvements in test scores, while noncognitive skills are assessed from patterns in attendance and suspension rates.

In the second stage, the authors investigated whether these short-term impacts could predict students’ long-term success. This was made possible by the comprehensive nature of Texas’s administrative data, which not only cover an extensive period, but also capture a large and diverse student population, reducing the likelihood of students leaving the dataset due to moving out of state.

The study demonstrates that middle school principals don’t just shape students’ academic performance during their school years; their influence extends far beyond the classroom. For instance, students with principals whom the researchers identified has having high test-score value added were more likely to pursue higher education and persist through college: Attending a school with a principal who was one standard deviation above average on their metric increased the likelihood of attending college by about 10 percent of a standard deviation.

Moreover, students with principals whom the researchers identified has having high value added for suspensions—perhaps by creating stronger school cultures—had a profound impact on their students’ future interactions with the criminal justice system. Male students who attended schools with principals who were 1 standard deviation above average at on this metric were about 15 percent of a standard deviation less likely to be arrested later in life. This finding underscores that what happens during students’ school years can have long-range consequences.

Interestingly, the effects of principals were not uniform across all student demographics. The researchers found that although the influence of a principal on noncognitive skills (such as reducing suspensions) positively affected all students, the impact was significantly greater for Black students compared to their peers. (Other principal effects were more consistent across racial groups.)

This new study provides new evidence of the importance of school leadership. The influence of school leaders can extend far beyond academic performance, affecting students’ life trajectories in meaningful ways. It also adds to the evidence that shorter-term academic outcomes, such as standardized test scores, can be useful proxies for important long-term student outcomes. Understanding the role of principals could be key to ensuring that more students have the opportunity to succeed both in school and in life.

SOURCE: Eric A. Hanushek, Andrew J. Morgan, Steven G. Rivkin, Jeffrey C. Schiman, Ayman Shakeel, and Lauren Sartain, “The Lasting Impacts of Middle School Principals,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 32642 (2024).

The demographic makeup of America’s K–12 students is steadily changing, with schools nationwide welcoming increasingly diverse cohorts of young learners. Policymakers searching for the best ways to support this evolving population have arrived at a promising solution: Maintain a teacher workforce that reflects students’ growing diversity. Studies have shown that Black students in particular benefit academically, behaviorally, and socially from exposure to teachers who share their race.

Yet fostering a more diverse workforce has proven challenging—as evidenced by the fact that 80 percent of public school teachers were White in 2021. One contributing factor is a higher turnover rate among Black teachers. In response to this worrying trend, analysts are working to identify what drives Black educators to leave their jobs in hopes of informing better retention policies.

In their new working paper, researchers from Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, and the Learning Policy Institute posit that racial isolation may contribute to Black teacher turnover. They define racial isolation as “being in a racial or ethnic numerical minority among colleagues.” (This characterization raises challenges. While having few or no same-race colleagues clearly signals isolation, one could argue that labeling a school with a nearly half-Black teacher workforce as “isolated” is at odds with the broader demographic context and the rarity of such representation. Nevertheless, the study still offers valuable insights by considering varying degrees of racial isolation within its analysis.)

The authors hypothesize that isolated Black educators face tokenization, exclusion, and discrimination in their schools, leading to more strenuous work experiences and a higher likelihood of leaving. To test this theory, they use longitudinal Tennessee data on public school staff to construct measures of racial isolation and turnover. Between the 2006–07 and 2018–19 school years, they document over 740,000 educator-by-year observations. They then combine these data with Tennessee Educator Survey (TES) results from available years. The TES captures teacher feedback on school climate, leadership, instruction, and more, making it a helpful tool to gauge any potential negative on-the-job experiences.

With these data in hand, the team asks two questions: First, how do different levels of racial isolation impact the probability that Black teachers leave their schools? To answer, they look at whether each teacher turned over from one year to the next, as well as whether departing teachers stayed in the same district, changed districts, or exited the Tennessee public school system entirely. Second, they ask: To what extent is racial isolation associated with adverse work experiences? For this, the authors examine trends in teachers’ frequency of collaboration with peers, perceptions of school climate, job performance ratings, and salaries.

They begin by confirming that racial isolation is indeed more common among Black educators in Tennessee than their White counterparts. While a “vanishingly small fraction” of White teachers work in a school where less than 15 percent of their colleagues are the same race, this is the case for 18 percent of Black teachers.

The authors then show that racial isolation is positively correlated with turnover. A Black teacher without any Black colleagues is 5.2 percentage points more likely to leave their job than a Black teacher with 41–100 percent Black colleagues. Similarly, the predicted turnover rate for a Black teacher with less than 15 percent Black colleagues (but at least one) is 3.6 percentage points higher than that of a non-isolated Black teacher. These departures are mainly exits from the profession and out-of-district moves to schools with larger Black teacher populations.

The team’s look at work experiences may help to explain these troubling results. Racial isolation is associated with both lower job performance ratings and reduced collaboration with fellow teachers. Teaching is difficult to start with, but it only gets harder without support from colleagues—and juggling these challenges just to receive poor performance reviews can be discouraging. It comes as no surprise, then, that such circumstances could compel Black educators to search for new jobs.

School leaders should heed these insights. Attempts to diversify teacher workforces one educator at a time may backfire, as new hires feel the effects of racial isolation and seek employment elsewhere. To promote retention and best serve students, the study’s authors instead recommend “cluster-hiring” talented teachers of color.

But to make cluster-hiring possible, policymakers must also assess teacher pipelines to ensure that they produce an ample supply of teachers of color. This could mean investing in well-structured Grow Your Own programs or providing mentorship and support networks for teaching candidates from marginalized communities. If the goal is empowering today’s increasingly diverse student body, policymakers need to see the bigger picture—and work towards an integrated strategy that touches every stage of a teacher’s career progression.

SOURCE: Shirley H. Xu, Francisco Arturo Santelli, Jason A. Grissom, Brendan Bartanen, and Susan Kemper Patrick, “(Dis)connection at Work: Racial Isolation, Teachers’ Job Experiences, and Teacher Turnover,” Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, EdWorkingPapers (July 2024).

Cheers

• The number of failing Houston Independent School District (HISD) schools has decreased by 66 percent since the state’s 2023 takeover. —K–12 Dive
• A Fairfax County public school teacher argues that “equitable grading” does not provide the accountability that students need to develop essential life skills. —Eric Wolf Welch, EducationWeek
• British performer MC Grammar is helping students learn about the English language in a fun and creative way. —New York Times
• A writing teacher explains why high school English classes should focus on time-tested literature, not Kendrick Lamar or Taylor Swift lyrics. —Liza Libes, The Hechinger Report
• A new Florida law requires teachers unions to prove that they have the support of their members in order to keep representing them. —Wall Street Journal

Jeers

• Oklahoma officials failed to explain a major change in the state’s scoring system for standardized tests. The result: an artificial spike in student proficiency. —The 74
• An El Paso Independent School District plan to enroll all eighth graders in algebra, regardless of their level of preparation, may be setting students up for failure. —The 74
• Buckling under public pressure, the Maryland Department of Education weakened its plan to hold back third graders who struggle to read. —The Baltimore Banner

• A Walton/Gallup survey finds that half of all Gen Z teens do not plan to attend college—but schools are not doing enough to engage and challenge students pursuing non-college pathways. —Gallup
• New data show that Hispanic student access to advanced courses has improved, but significant racial inequities remain in both access and preparation for these courses. —Ileana Najarro & Gina Tomko, EducationWeek
• Black families face tough decisions about where to send their children to school in a town that is home to several high-tuition, majority-White “segregation academies.” —Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica
• Baltimore City Public Schools’ Re-Engagement Center helps chronically absent students earn their diploma by any means, from providing students with shoes to wear to school to allowing credit recovery. —Robert Pondiscio, National Review

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

1. “There is an argument that we fund all students in the public school system regardless of their family’s income. Our state has moved to the idea, and I think it’s a reasonable one, that we should provide some level of financial support for every student who wants to attend a private school.” These are the only sane words in a Pennsylvania-originated voucher story published yesterday that is otherwise a very negative, multi-state take on the topic. That tiny handful of sane words comes from Fordham’s own Aaron Churchill, who is at least the right person to talk to if you want to create some semblance of “balance” in what otherwise feels like bit ol’ hit piece on private school choice. (Erie Times-News, 8/27/24)
   
   

2. Aaron is also quoted in this piece, which reveals that Akron City Schools received nearly $801,000 more in funding from the state to buy Science of Reading-aligned curriculum materials than it should have. The story provides plenty of details as to how the overpayment occurred, which are all pretty embarrassing, and explains how this error quite literally robbed other districts of funding they required (but did not get since it was already disbursed elsewhere) to actually comply with the state-mandated switch. “Having the dollars go out based on honest, accurate information is really important,” says Aaron, with exceeding diplomacy. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more on this story soon, although I bet it will take longer than is seemly to get that extra cash back. (Akron Beacon Journal, 8/28/24)
   
   

3. Let’s stop for a moment of good news before we delve further into the journalistic mire. Big party in Salineville, Ohio, last Friday as state and local officials gathered for a ribbon cutting ceremony at Utica Shale Academy. They were all there to celebrate the completion of a Connecting Communities Through Workforce Training project at the popular and fast-growing charter school. A state workforce development grant and a partnership with a number of community organizations led to the creation of a training center for certified health workers housed at the school. And there’s more to come as well. Awesome. USA! USA! USA! (Morning Journal, 8/27/24)
   
   

4. Feeling happier now? Good. You’re ready to go back to the mire, then. Multiple families of students with special needs are coming forward with some rather scary allegations against Pickerington City Schools this week. The basic issue, it seems, is a severe lack of paraprofessionals to provide required support for students as called for in their IEPs. This is bad enough, but at least a common, understandable issue today. However, it seems from these parental reports that the district has elected to “deal with” the problem by simply not providing any such support for several years now. This includes disputing IEP requirements about whether a para was needed and seemingly allowing the family of a non-verbal child to believe a paraprofessional was assigned to her when no such staff member existed. Awful to hear. (NBC 4 News, Columbus, 8/26/24)
   
   

5. Let’s end today’s clips talking about transportation. (I mean, how bad could it be after that preceding story?) We learned on Monday that Westerville City Schools (yes, that Westerville) has a protocol in place that dismisses high school and middle school students early—and staggered—on any days when the administration believes there will not be enough bus drivers to bring them home all at the same time. We learn how understaffed the district is on drivers this year—so bad that the shortening of the school day for the entire district has already occurred twice in the first two weeks of the year—and how many times that protocol was used in the previous two school years. What we don’t learn? How they all got to school on all those days in the first place! (10 TV News, Columbus, 8/26/24) Maybe those Westerville kids took rideshares? Seems to be a popular alternative for Dayton City Schools families, even with the strictures that rideshare companies impose on transportation of unaccompanied minors. However, some miscommunication at the start of the year has caused some families to think the district was trying to curtail their use. “The district was not saying families could NOT use these services…,” said Dayton’s transpo director. “Our goal was to prevent inconveniences to families due to trip cancellations.” (Dayton Daily News, 8/27/24) Charter school families and leaders addressed the elected board of Columbus City Schools last night, begging them to attempt some other fix to their transportation woes than declaring a mass of charter and private school students “impractical to transport”. This includes a grandparent who lost her job because she needed to be available to drive her grandchildren to school. The elected board members heard it all…and then voted unanimously to make the impracticality determination final. Charming. (ABC 6 News, Columbus, 8/27/24) Same thing in Cleveland Metropolitan School District, where the board yesterday deemed it “impractical” to transport 1,700 district-resident students who opt for charter, private, and “other specialty schools”. They, like the Columbus choice students, will be offered a $600 payment to provide their own transportation…but of course that is pretty low and will only available as a reimbursement at the end of the school year nine long months from now. Likely untenable for most families affected. (Signal Cleveland, 8/28/24) No idea what school district(s) students attending Mahoning Valley Community School live in. But they will not have MVCS families to kick around this year, as the Youngstown-area charter school has taken charge of its own busing (via third party contractor). “We believe this opportunity will significantly improve attendance and remove barriers to education,” said the school supe, “in order to allow our students to be successful.” Say it loud, ma’am. So everyone else will hear. (WFMJ-TV, Youngstown, 8/27/24)

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Ohio students have yet to fully recover from pandemic-era declines in achievement. Although English language arts scores for the average Ohio student have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, test scores in math remain approximately 10 percent of a standard deviation lower—equivalent to students missing roughly one-third of a school year of learning. This average decline masks the fact that current Ohio middle and high schoolers—those who bore the brunt of the pandemic—are behind by approximately 15 percent of a standard deviation.[1] These declines in math achievement are concerning because students’ future incomes, as well as our state’s economic growth, depend heavily on the type of knowledge and skills captured on mathematics exams. In other words, everyone’s economic well-being suffers when math scores decline.

The estimated financial impact of pandemic learning loss, based on the historical relationship between math scores and societal outcomes, is substantial. A 2022 study found that, between 1990 and 2019, an increase of 1 standard deviation in eighth-grade math scores corresponded to an increase of 8 percent in adult incomes, as well as “improvements in educational attainment and declines in unemployment, teen motherhood, incarcerations and arrests.”[2] This estimate implies that each student in the pandemic cohort that lost 15 percent of a standard deviation in math achievement will lose approximately 1.2 percent in lifetime income (approximately $14,400).[3] That’s a total loss of $720 billion nationwide (approximately 50 million students) and $25 billion in Ohio (approximately 1.7 million students). Some have suggested that these estimates are on the low end, however. For example, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek suggests the economic impact of the math achievement decline is comparable to shutting down the U.S.’s $28 trillion economy for a full year. And if such losses persist for subsequent cohorts (Ohio students currently in grades 3-5 remain 5–10 percent of a standard deviation behind and could fall further behind due to financial mismanagement), the losses will be staggering even if the most conservative estimates are used.[4]

Forecasting financial impacts is a tricky exercise that requires strong assumptions, so one should not read too much into the precise dollar figures above. The important takeaway is that it is reasonable to conclude that the economic cost of math achievement declines will be huge. Indeed, since many of these students have already graduated high school (or soon will), we can treat these economic losses as already having been incurred. The cost of failing to bring subsequent cohorts up to pre-pandemic levels will be even larger.

The good news is that, in addition to avoiding future achievement deficits, we can compensate for losses we have already incurred. To do so, however, we need to set our sights higher than simply helping current students recover to pre-pandemic achievement levels. Math achievement did not start declining in 2020. The decline started after math achievement peaked in 2012, in the wake of the Great Recession, when federal stimulus funds ran out and policymakers moved away from test-based school governance. The causes underlying this post-2012 decline are debated, but no one contests that achievement declines predate Covid and that the two decades leading up to 2012 featured significant increases in math achievement. In other words, we know that we are capable of significantly improving students’ math achievement because we’ve done it before. In Ohio, for example, the increase in NAEP scores from 1990 to 2019 (i.e., including the 2012–2019 decline) totaled 60 percent of a standard deviation—a magnitude four times greater than the pandemic-era declines I describe above.

The pre-2012 increase in math scores took twenty years of concerted, bipartisan effort to achieve, and there are reasons to believe that realizing such gains again would be more challenging in our current political environment. Politicians in general have expressed little concern about math achievement and, even if math achievement were a priority, the bipartisan education reform consensus is gone. Nonetheless, the pre-2012 math gains show that we are capable of making up for pandemic learning loss and then some. Doing so would take many years and significant effort, but it is doable if we remind people of the stakes involved. The economic benefits of once again realizing such gains could vastly increase the economic well-being of Ohioans. Importantly, we now also have a wealth of evidence indicating how we might achieve this feat.

What we know about the impact of more public spending

The evidence is clear that we cannot spend our way out of this mess. Recent studies have found that the $190 billion in federal Covid relief funds that districts received had a minimal impact on test scores. Whether those studies focused on all U.S. States (notably the Harvard/Stanford and CALDER/AIR studies) or Ohio (where federal funds exceeded $6 billion), they indicate that the relief dollars had modest effects. Specifically, for every $1,000 dollar spent per pupil, math achievement increased by 0.8 percent of a standard deviation. This estimate implies that additional spending would need to total approximately $10,000 per student (on top of what has already been spent) to address the remaining achievement deficit of 10 percent of a standard deviation. Of course, only a portion of relief funds were meant to address learning loss, but there is little reason to believe that districts would target additional money more efficiently—particularly given what we know about the average impact of spending increases. Indeed, the estimated impact of federal Covid relief funding is approximately what one would have expected based on a recent meta-analysis of the most rigorous quasi-experimental studies.[5]

The best estimates available on the returns to school spending imply that a full recovery for Ohio would require increasing public-school spending (which currently stands at approximately $15,000 per pupil annually) by at least $3,000 per pupil, in perpetuity, to get back to pre-pandemic achievement levels (when spending was lower than it currently is!).[6] “In perpetuity” because pandemic academic losses may be a long-term phenomenon that will continue to affect future cohorts of students, as opposed to a short-term phenomenon limited to a single cohort of students who can recover with a one-time investment. It is prudent to assume that we are in the midst of a new normal characterized by low achievement and chronic absenteeism, and history suggests the impending expiration of Covid relief funds could very well erase the little progress we’ve made.

Unfortunately, there is no way that simply increasing spending by $3,000 per pupil, in perpetuity, is financially worthwhile if increasing math achievement is the goal.[7] Not only is extra spending an inefficient way to address deficiencies in math achievement, it is also likely politically infeasible and won’t enable us to compensate for economic losses we’ve already incurred due to pandemic-era math achievement declines. At the very least, the goal should be to get back to math achievement levels from 2012, not 2019.

The most promising strategies for promoting math achievement in Ohio

Fortunately, extra spending is not necessary. There are at least three options that can yield superior achievement returns at no additional cost:

1. Personnel management reforms. As I detailed previously, reforming district personnel management so that schools have discretion in hiring and compensating teachers could be a very effective option, as research consistently indicates large variation in teacher quality and significant achievement improvements when students spend time with a better-than-average teacher. Providing schools with such managerial discretion—by disallowing collective bargaining over rigid teacher compensation schedules, for example—could empower schools to direct their funds towards their greatest teaching needs.[8] That would be particularly helpful for addressing math achievement deficits, as a tight labor market for math teachers has made filling these positions as difficult as ever.[9] “Step and lane” salary schedules that require equal compensation across teachers with similar experience and degrees, regardless of their subject-matter expertise or effectiveness, make it more difficult to attract and retain effective math teachers—particularly in schools serving low-achieving students from low-income households.

2. Strategic school closures. Holding schools accountable for student achievement could bring back the kinds of math achievement gains we saw during the golden age of public schooling. As districts right-size their budgets to deal with declining enrollments and the expiration of relief funds, they need to close underperforming schools so that students are directed toward more effective options. This strategy yielded considerable achievement gains in both district and charter schools during the 2000s. Specifically, Ohio students attending urban district and charter schools that closed experienced achievement gains of 7–9 percent of a standard deviation after moving to a new campus—just about the effect size needed to bring student achievement back to pre-pandemic levels. Importantly, these gains were driven by students who ended up in schools that were higher achieving than their closing schools. Since large urban districts often lack the political will to close schools of any kind—let alone prioritizing the closure of poorly performing schools—Ohio should consider enforcing its school closure law for low-achieving district schools, just as it should enforce the test-based automatic charter school closure law that helped strengthen Ohio’s charter sector in the late 2000s.

3. Charter school expansion. Ohio’s brick-and-mortar charter schools yield achievement gains in both math and English language arts (relative to district schools) of 2 percent of a standard deviation every 1–2 years. Roughly, this estimate implies that after 5–10 years of charter-school attendance, student achievement is 10 percent of a standard deviation higher than it would have been had those students attended district schools. In other words, if low-income students currently in third grade were to switch from their current district school to a nearby charter school, their average achievement would be back to pre-pandemic levels by the time they graduate, without any additional spending. To realize these gains, one needs to provide families with easy-to-access information on the quality of nearby schools (not all charter schools are high-quality), make it easy to enroll their kids in those schools, and support efforts that allow existing charters to expand (e.g., by supporting the financing of school facilities) if they have a track record of improving student achievement.

Critically, the above strategies—related to personnel management, school closure, and charter expansion—must be directly tied to student achievement. The era of strong growth in math achievement from 1990 to 2012 was characterized by test-based accountability systems. These systems were far more heavy-handed than the strategies I suggest above (the federal No Child Left Behind was unpopular in part for this reason, in spite of some positive impacts), but their essential feature is that they used test scores to drive school closure, changes to personnel management practices, and school choice. Research has shown that these primarily-state-designed, test-based systems incentivized districts to realize superior student achievement with the state funds they received.

Student achievement deficits in mathematics cost all Ohioans, and they will continue to cost us and our children long into the future. Some argue that these expected economic consequences justify throwing more money at the problem, but rigorous research makes clear that this is a poor strategy. We have strong evidence that other options can address pandemic-era achievement declines at no additional cost and far more effectively. Indeed, if we pursue all three of the above strategies—making sure that they are explicitly tied to student outcomes—we may very well exceed pre-pandemic achievement levels in the years to come.

In 2003, as part of a broader education reform package, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began requiring high school students to pass Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams in math, English language arts, and science in order to earn a diploma. A timely new report examines the impacts of this momentous change in Bay State education policy. Why timely? Because a teachers-union-backed initiative on the November ballot threatens to permanently eliminate the testing requirement.

A team of analysts from the Annenberg Institute’s Educational Opportunity in Massachusetts initiative—a research-practice partnership with the Massachusetts Departments of Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education—examined the first twenty years of student cohorts required to pass MCAS exams to determine how the policy has impacted college enrollment, performance, and graduation, as well as labor market outcomes. College data come from both the National Student Clearinghouse and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, while labor market data come from the state unemployment insurance system. Limitations include the inability to follow high school or college graduates who leave the commonwealth for work and the fact that the latest testing cohort with a full suite of outcome data took their exams way back in 2012.

The main findings are a mixed bag that echo some larger education trends. First and most importantly, MCAS test scores accurately predict long-term outcomes. The higher the scores, the better the college and career outcomes. While there were analogous findings regarding high school course grades in the first several years of the data (that is, stronger course grades predicted better long-term outcomes), starting around 2011 the analysts noted that the share of students earning As and Bs began a substantial upward trend. Over that time, MCAS scores declined overall (even controlling for several increases in cut scores that were implemented), and the mismatch between course grades and test scores appears to have widened during the pandemic. The upshot is that MCAS scores have become an even better predictor of later success, versus course grades, than they used to be. The authors express concern that many parents and students are being misled about college and career readiness due to the ongoing inflationary pattern in course grades continues. If MCAS is wholly abandoned, their concerns will become a near certainty.

Next, the analysts zero in on students just around the passing margin, trying to get at the causal impact of passage versus non-passage of similar students. They find that those who barely pass the tests on their first attempt have better post-secondary outcomes than those who fall just below the cut scores. (Most students did pass the assessments on their first attempt.) However, nearly all of those who failed were English learners (ELs), students with disabilities, or students with inadequate course preparation (such as those who were taking below-grade-level courses at the time of MCAS testing or who earned very low grades in their on-grade-level courses).

But most students who initially failed went on to pass the tests upon retake. Appeals of non-passing scores after multiple retakes were also generally successful. (An appeal requires students to “demonstrate through their coursework that they have the knowledge and skills to meet or exceed the passing standard.”) The small cohort of students with successful appeals—almost entirely ELs or students with disabilities—earn a “certificate of attainment” rather than a diploma. Those students generally fare worse in outcomes than their peers who pass the MCAS tests at any point during high school. However, the MCAS scores of ELs underpredicted their later earnings relative to other students—whether they ultimately passed or not—which is a notable exception to the general results. The analysts speculate that their test scores reflect a lack of proficiency with English rather than their overall academic ability.

Finally, most high schools that boost test scores also improve their students’ long-term outcomes. However, some schools, including some of the Bay State’s highly-regarded career and technical education schools, improve students’ long-term earnings without raising test scores.

The report’s authors offer no recommendations, and the report was completed before the ballot initiative was approved. If MCAS survives and continues as the central arbiter of graduation status, their findings suggest that Massachusetts schools must better prepare English learners and students with disabilities to take and pass the tests. Inflated course grades and non-standard portfolio projects are not fitting substitutes for rigorous exams, which this report shows are an accurate predictor of long-term success. If the effort to remove MCAS as the pathway to a diploma is successful, however, those may be the only options remaining.

SOURCE: John P. Papay et al., “The MCAS as a Graduation Requirement: Findings from a Research-Practice Partnership,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (July 2024).