The Education Gadfly
8.27.2026
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WHAT WE’RE READING

Aleksandra Appleton reports on Indiana’s efforts to build postsecondary pathways that avoid the shortcomings of many existing apprenticeship models. The plan lets high schoolers begin training for in-demand careers, then helps those students earn a college degree down the road—often with financial support from their employers.

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After years of falling or stagnant student achievement, Maryland is changing how students learn math. The source of the declines isn’t completely clear—Baltimore Banner’s Liz Bowie wonders whether raising the bar with Common Core inadvertently harmed struggling students:

Theories abound, but today educators believe the way teachers translated the standards into the classroom didn’t help. Students were expected to perform at higher levels than ever before, and often there was no plan to help students who were already behind. In addition, many of the concepts were taught once, rather than being reinforced in the next year or two. That meant struggling students fell further behind.

It’s a mystery also on Nat Malkus’s mind, as he considers factors ranging from smartphones and social media to the pandemic and the Great Recession. He wonders about the timing of federal efforts, too, but suggests it was ESSA and the decline of NCLB that caused—or reflected—a broader cultural shift against high standards.

EXTRA CREDIT:

Chad Aldeman, “Why Common Tests Matter” (in state voucher programs)

Daniel Buck, “Kentucky Audit Reveals Systemic School Failure — What’s Happening in Your State? ”

Corey DeAngelis, “A Nebraska Lawsuit Claims Public Schools Are Unconstitutional”

Ray Domanico, “Private Schools Are No Threat to Democracy”

Jessica Grose, “AI in Norway’s Schools”

Michael Hartney and Vlad Kogan, “Absentee Teachers: The Other Attendance Problem”

Colleen Hroncich, “In the AI Era, School Choice Is Crucial”

Patricia Levesque, “The Three Prongs of Education Reform Success: Policy, Programs, and Political Perseverance”

Kenneth Marcus, “Why Moving the Office of Civil Rights from ED to DOJ Will Be Better for Families”

Karen Hawley Miles, “What Districts Actually Need to Implement College & Career Pathways at Scale”

Kelsey Piper, “Why parents love a school with bogus numbers”  (about Alpha School)

Benjamin Riley, “The 50 Percent Problem”

Natalie Wexler, “Do We Need Another National Reading Panel? ”

Daniel Willingham, “Students Should Only Use AI for Things They Already Know How to Do Well”

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.

The Education Gadfly
8.27.2026
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CHEERS

We said goodbye this week to Dolly Parton. Beyond her legendary contributions to the American songbook, she cared deeply about literacy and used her fame and fortune to provide millions of free books to children around the world—every month. In her honor, check out Linda Jacobson’s 2024 piece on Dolly’s Imagination Library.

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And in a new article from The 74, Patrick O’Donnell reports on how Ohio is addressing the “mismatch…between what schools offer and business want” when it comes to industry-ready credentials, and highlights Fordham-Ohio’s work on the issue:

Fordham has reported multiple times the last few years on ways some districts, notably urban, high-poverty ones where some students struggle to graduate, have large numbers of students earning low-value credentials just to earn a diploma.

“Credentials are intended to signify students’ acquisition of technical skills and help them gain an edge in the labor market, not simply be a workaround to a diploma,” wrote Fordham’s Aaron Churchill. “Ohio schools have discovered the easiest ones to attain and used them to get students to the finish line (and inflate their graduation rates as well as report card ratings).” That system, Churchill and Fordham’s Jessica Poiner reported, had more than 9,000 students earning RISE UP retail sales and customer service credentials in 2023—credentials that, combined, allow students to graduate—but were sought by employers for just three jobs statewide that year.

JEERS

Last week, Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson used her popular Substack to create a misleading narrative about the history of school choice in America. By cherry-picking events and attributing singular intentions and perspectives to major events and initiatives—all calibrated to make her argument against parental choice—she loses the chance to teach her readers about the nation’s complex history of public schooling.

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In a post that Pangram flagged as being (appropriately)100 percent AI-generated, Dana Williams says “effort migration”—outsourcing tedious learning—is the way of the future, that “AI isn’t helping students cheat,” and that “the ability to think critically with technology will become one of the most important forms of literacy a student can learn” since that’s what employers will want in adults. Dana says we should rethink academic integrity as a result, but applying this reasoning to K–12 schools, where students haven’t developed independent critical thinking skills, is a dangerous path.

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D.
8.27.2026
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We’re approaching the end of an era: New York State is scrapping its storied high school Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Initially administered in the 19th century, the Regents were the first standardized state assessments of their kind. And since the early 2000s, students have had to pass five Regents in four subject areas to graduate with the standard “Regents diploma.”

Under the new plan, however, students will take Regents only for federal compliance purposes; passing won’t be required to graduate. Instead, as part of a new framework called the New York State Portrait of a Graduate, a high school diploma will be based upon students’ demonstration of six vaguely appealing “interconnected attributes”: academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused.

The specifics of the new graduation requirements are still in the works, but so far, official documents indicate that students will “establish their readiness” through “exhibits of evidence,” apparently the state’s hazy umbrella term for tasks including “performances, portfolios, assessments, [and] presentations.” Also, “real-world projects” and “work-based learning” may be involved. Individual teachers will design, administer, and score their students’ “exhibits of evidence” according to a statewide rubric with mastery levels, rather than letter or number grades. I’m really leaning on quotes here because, frankly, most of the guidance is too nebulous to paraphrase.

Though some other states are similarly deemphasizing traditional state testing and developing “portraits” and “visions,” New York is an outlier in its aggressive effort to overhaul its entire assessment system—and to effectively give up on clear academic expectations. As terrible as that is, it’s also more than a little troubling that the Empire State has committed to dismantling the Regents requirements without a clear sense of what will replace them.

As an English language arts (ELA) teacher in New York City in the 2010s, I certainly saw room for improvement on the ELA exam. (I’m looking at you, Part 3, with your overemphasis on “identifying the central idea.”) More broadly, I heard valid concerns around teaching to the test, inadequate support for low-performing students, and the exams’ relevance to labor market demands.

But I also saw real value in the Regents. The graduation requirement set a reasonably high bar for all students throughout the state. And while opponents contended that the exams created an inequitable barrier to graduation, EdTrust and others have rightly argued that such an argument amounts to shooting the messenger, given that the tests simply revealed schools that were failing to educate already disadvantaged students.

In fact, I taught many such students at one of New York City’s “transfer” schools, serving 16- to 21-year-olds who had left traditional high school settings. For our student population, Regents exams were indeed a substantial hurdle—one that gave us a high bar to work toward. Finishing school couldn’t just be a box-checking exercise; rather, my students knew that they had to pass the same exams as the kids at Stuyvesant. This non-negotiable standard communicated that they were still being taken seriously. That’s a powerful message for students who’ve been written off before.

Yet, it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all system. In limited circumstances, if a student with disabilities made a genuine attempt but absolutely could not pass a Regents exam, there existed a “local” diploma alternative. Conversely, students who wanted to go above and beyond could take four additional exams to earn an “advanced” Regents diploma.

Alas, Regents diplomas are now headed for the sunset. As for what’s next, current New York educators have noted that the incoming “portrait of a graduate” framework could prove either transformative or “one of the most well-intentioned failures in recent education policy,” and there’s good reason to fear it’s careening toward the latter.

Similarly flexible statewide systems have flopped before. Kentucky and Vermont both tried portfolio-based assessment in the ’90s. External reviews found administrative burdens, drains on instructional time, rampant cheating, uneven rigor, and scoring that managed to be both inconsistent and inflated. In Vermont, scoring reliability was so poor that a grader had a better chance of correctly predicting the outcome of a coin toss than agreeing with a colleague’s score. Both programs were largely abandoned by the early aughts.

Given that New York’s current plan is even fuzzier than what Kentucky and Vermont attempted, its prospects look pretty awful. The portrait-of-a-graduate bell won’t be unrung, but with three years left to go before full implementation, there’s opportunity to mitigate the risks. Here are three of the likeliest pitfalls, and what New York can do about them.

First, the portrait-of-a-graduate approach creates substantial challenges around transparency and buy-in from families. Most parents could readily understand what it meant for a kid to earn a 75 on the Algebra I Regents. But the same can’t be said for a “proficient” rating for “global citizen.”

New York needs to develop a robust and realistic family engagement plan (including support for educators, who will simultaneously be expected to learn the ropes and explain it all to students and families). Where did the number grade go? What’s an interconnected attribute? Why should families care about abstract concepts like “reflective and future focused”? And, even if they’ve been persuaded, how can they support students who need extra help? If a student isn’t cutting it as a “creative innovator,” families aren’t going to intuit the most effective interventions.

The burden of adapting to this new system will be even greater for families already facing disadvantages, such as immigrant families navigating language barriers and unfamiliar institutions. New York must take that seriously.

Second, the portrait-of-a-graduate rollout and implementation are going to pose significant logistical difficulties. Plans are taking shape to have educators participate in a handful of virtual and regional in-person training sessions. But that’s barely more than the usual back-to-school PD. With the new framework, teachers will have to internalize a radically revised assessment system and rubrics. They will have to rewrite entire courses and design tasks aligned to the new state guidance. Performance-based assessments can take many hours to execute. Administrators will have to ensure that the six interconnected attributes build on one another across subjects and grade levels. They’ll have to develop new infrastructure for tracking students’ evidence of learning. And that’s all while maintaining the normal instructional load amidst staffing shortages and chronically low morale.

Maybe these “growing pains” will be worth it in the long run, but New York can’t afford to underestimate them. The state should provide exemplar “exhibits of evidence,” along with the lessons and materials required to get students there, so that teachers aren’t forced to start from scratch. New York also ought to establish protected, compensated planning time dedicated specifically to portrait work, rather than compelling teachers to be stretched even thinner during their existing prep periods. And a state-funded, standardized digital platform would ease the administrative burden around creating and maintaining portrait-of-a-graduate student records. Plus, when students move, everyone will benefit if their evidence moves seamlessly with them—not across disparate systems cobbled together by different districts.

The most serious challenge emerging from the new framework, however, will be maintaining rigorous, consistent baseline expectations for all students. Research shows that higher expectations translate into more student learning. But when “exhibits of evidence” are to be designed, administered, and scored by the students’ own teachers, there’s little incentive to hold students to high expectations. In fact, incentives point in the opposite direction: Teachers typically want their students to graduate, and they want themselves and their schools to earn good ratings.

The official language around the portrait-of-a-graduate framework already implicitly encourages “leveled” assessments, celebrating the flexibility to adapt to “local context, community priorities, and district readiness” (emphasis mine). But such flexibility invites lowered expectations and poses tremendous equity risks. First, disadvantaged students are already more likely to receive assignments that aren’t challenging enough. What’s more, if New York lacks a consistent measure of student performance, then there is no way for the state to know which students are being underserved. Rather than revealing where students need more resources, an inconsistent assessment system will conceal those needs. In a state with huge disparities in district size, capacity, and prosperity, this is a systemic disservice.

The current guidance describes a plan for calibration, such that teachers across schools will be trained to score “exhibits of evidence” comparably. Despite the common rubric, I’m skeptical that it’s possible to ensure comparable scoring of entirely different tasks, but even in the best-case scenario, calibration isn’t enough to combat the powerful, systemic incentives to pass one’s own students.

When possible, “exhibits of evidence” should be scored blindly or by external graders to maximize objectivity. New York should also consider developing a handful of statewide anchor tasks; schools could be required to choose a small number of tasks from a limited menu, which would boost consistency while allowing flexibility for the remaining “exhibits.” These tasks could still include end-of-course exams; Massachusetts, for example, has proposed a “portrait of a learner” model that still includes end-of-course testing, with equity as a stated rationale. And accountability matters: Both the “exhibits” and the scoring should be subject to auditing, and data should be publicly reported.

New York is set on its highly questionable course. But realizing the promise of the new portrait-of-a-graduate framework—that every student will be prepared for what comes next—will depend on whether the state builds a system that’s consistent and rigorous, or settles for one that clings to abstract ideals. There’s still time to shape the plan so that New York doesn’t become another cautionary tale.

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Accountability & Testing
Curriculum & Instruction
Governance
Harry Anthony Patrinos
8.27.2026
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More than a dozen states now require that third graders who can’t read at grade level repeat the grade rather than advance to fourth, where every subject assumes literacy. The theory is sound. But in state after state, exemptions meant for a narrow set of students are being granted so widely that the policies aren’t benefiting the students they were designed for.  

Arkansas, the state I know best, is the latest to confront this problem. I wrote earlier this year that its version of a retention law—called the LEARNS Act and modeled in part on Mississippi’s approach—would only succeed if exemptions are paired with mandatory support. This year was the first in which Arkansas enforced the legislation, and third-grade reading proficiency climbed from 35 percent in 2024 to 43 percent, according to recent data. But exemptions were granted at alarming rates in some places. In North Little Rock, for example, more than half of students who failed the reading standard were exempted and promoted. In Pulaski County Special School District, the same was true of roughly half of the roughly 200 students scoring at the lowest performance level. A provision meant for a narrow set of circumstances is being applied well beyond it.

Or take Ohio, whose “Third Grade Reading Guarantee” had worked well. Retained students made significant gains compared to peers who narrowly avoided retention. But lawmakers functionally repealed the law in 2023, because of political pressure. Now, the state has a massive loophole that permits struggling students to advance based on a parent request.

Something similar happened in Tennessee and Michigan. In the first year Tennessee’s retention law took effect, 60 percent of third graders fell short in reading, but only 1.2 percent were actually retained. In Michigan, exemptions were granted to students based on parental request or an existing individualized education program (IEP), and as a result, fewer than seven in 100 eligible students were held back. So like Ohio, Michigan simply removed the requirement instead of narrowing the loopholes.

The problem with all of this backtracking is that research on retention generally shows that it works. The foundational study of Florida’s policy found that students who were held back made substantial gains in reading proficiency compared to promoted peers, and that the gap widened in the second year. A follow-up study found that exemptions were a strong predictor of which low-scoring students moved on to fourth grade without those proficiency gains. And a later analysis that tracked retained students through tenth grade found that retained students took fewer remedial courses and had higher GPAs, compared to peers in the same grade. Two decades of research point in the same direction: Retention plus remediation improves academic outcomes, and exemptions prevent those gains.

Considering the state of American education, states should reverse this trend and restore the strength of their retention policies. Arkansas’s fourth-grade NAEP scores hit a 21-year low in 2024, for example, and the national trend isn’t much better. Third grade is when children stop learning to read and start reading to learn. A 2012 analysis of nearly 4,000 children found that 16 percent of students who aren’t reading proficiently by third grade fail to graduate high school on time. For proficient readers, it’s just 4 percent. And the gap widens for children living in poverty.

This is not an argument against exemptions themselves. Students who, for example, have significant disabilities or limited time in English instruction need a different bar. But as Arkansas’s education secretary, Jacob Oliva, said in September 2025: Low-scoring students who advance to fourth grade without real intervention will keep struggling regardless of the paperwork.

The fix is the same everywhere: Strengthen the rules. Most importantly, permit only good-cause exemptions. Second, require that those exemptions be paired with proven, documented, monitored supports. Arkansas, for example, already funds individualized reading plans, high-impact tutoring, literacy coaches, and a $1,500 family tutoring grant. Make these a condition of promotion for exempted students.

Mississippi requires this of every exempted student, and it is a large part of why Mississippi’s version of the reform has held up where others haven’t. Other states with retention policies should follow suit before exemptions leave their neediest students without the support these laws were designed to provide.

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Curriculum & Instruction
Governance
Teachers & School Leaders
Daniel Willingham
8.27.2026
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Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.

A story is told about Harold Alexander, British field marshal in command of the evacuation at Dunkirk. At the end of the workday he had the habit of taking any correspondence still in his “in” tray and simply putting it in the “out” tray. When his assistant once asked about it, he said, “You’d be surprised how little of it comes back.”

That sums up my approach to the winds of educational change. When a new technology appears and people are asking themselves “what about my teaching should change?” my instinct for my own teaching is “change nothing,” partly because I suspect that the excitement is overblown, and partly because I’m happy to let more venturesome people make a change first, and learn from their experiences.

But that strategy can’t be applied in the case of AI. In 2023 I, like every other educator, realized that I had to respond to student access to large language models.

Administrators have had a few years to think through how teachers should change classroom practice to meet the new reality, and many districts have posted guidelines. The policies I have seen have much in common, and I think they are wrongheaded.

(Throughout this post I’m referring to students’ independent use of AI, not to educational software nor to teachers using AI in their work.)

There seems to be widespread agreement that there’s a problem, and even on how to characterize it. Learning is a product of engaging in mental work, and students may use AI to replace that mental work and hence, not to learn. The question is what to do about it.

Almost no one advocates for “no restrictions on independent AI use” nor for “No independent AI use by students. Period.” The overwhelming majority have taken the position that students should use AI, but there should be limits.

Mashable recently ran an article summarizing the response of the U.S.’s largest school districts. Here are the one-sentence versions, as I read them:

New York City: Students are allowed to use AI for basic “research, exploration, and creative projects.” There must be educator oversight. Los Angeles: No AI use under age 13. Over 13, students can use AI to brainstorm and to edit their text, but students must produce text. Students must cite what AI contributed. Chicago: Students can use AI for tasks like brainstorming and summarizing. They are encouraged to use AI as a study partner.

The policy of my home county (Albemarle, Virginia) is similar. There are published categories of AI support from which teachers may choose.

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In short, teachers are given a good amount of leeway to allow students to use AI or to forbid it. There is, however, little or no guidance about how that choice should best be made.

These policies share a vibe. The goal is that students use AI as an associate in their work, but the student is still very much the lead. The second goal is that students be honest about exactly what AI has contributed.

This lead/associate orientation makes sense for life after graduation. Once a student is in the workforce, they will use AI to produce products: new ideas, reports, and so on. A guiding principle of “Use AI, but let me see your work” makes sense.

This is not, however, an optimal guiding principle for students. Students produce products, but the product is seldom the point. No one wants to read the papers they write, and the math problems they solve have no practical value. Teachers have them do these tasks because they provide practice in cognitive abilities that we think matter.

Writing is an especially interesting example. Writing a substantial paper requires integrating what you know across multiple sources, formulating a detailed argument, articulating your thoughts precisely, anticipating what your reader knows and can understand, and more.

For many educators, writing papers was the only tool we had to ensure that students engage these cognitive processes. AI took that tool from us, and we don’t know of a good replacement.

This loss was unprecedented. The closest analog might be math problems and calculators or Google Translate for foreign language. But in those cases a teacher could still remind students that they would not have these tools available during in-class assessments. I can’t give my students an in-class assessment that is cognitively comparable to writing a ten-page paper.

So the point of assignments is the mental processes required to complete them, and the point of the mental processes is learning. That seems to suggest a simple litmus test for the use of AI. Artificial intelligence tools should not substitute for tasks wherein students would benefit from doing the mental work themselves.

So…do students learn when they brainstorm? Do they learn when they edit their work? Of course they do. This principle indicates that students should use AI only when doing the work themselves would yield little learning. This guideline echoes how most of us think about calculator use. Once you’ve mastered arithmetic operations, there’s no benefit to hand calculations when you’re solving an algebra problem. But if you’re still learning algebra, don’t use the algebraic functions. The slogan might be:

“Only use AI for what you already know how to do.”

I can see two objections.

First, can’t AI scaffold learning? Part of the learning process is doing things badly. Can’t AI offer pointers for improvement?

I see two problems with this idea. The first is that the novice is not going to be a very good partner to AI in learning. The novice doesn’t know enough to ask good questions. He will give the AI system a vague prompt about the goal of the exercise whereupon AI will sharpen it for the user. Essentially, it will chivvy the user toward the polished product, and the novice will simply accept the suggestions. (Remember, I’m talking about independent use of LLMs, not about a product custom-made to provide instruction. That’s a different matter.)

The second problem I see with AI-as-scaffold is motivational. Sure, students could learn from AI by asking it to critique their work, to generate counterarguments, and so on. And I’m sure some would, some of the time. But I think it’s asking a lot of students—or better, asking a lot of human nature—to expect them to take a much harder mental path for a project in a typical curriculum, even if it is in the interest of their own learning.

A second objection to the principle might be this: even after you reach competence, you still need practice; that will deepen and refine the skill and/or knowledge. For example, if a ninth-grader can write a good paragraph, is it now okay for AI to write paragraphs for the student?

If students are competent, a teacher should ask whether doing the task themselves is still part of what students are meant to learn or practice. When students are writing, editing, reasoning, problem solving, or brainstorming (for example), the mental process is usually the thing. You don’t want the help of AI because it replaces the mental work that contributes to learning.

The alternative is that AI is replacing a task that merely supports the actual mental work you want the student to do; the replaced task was soaking up the students’ time and energy and providing no benefit. That would be the college student hand-calculating long multiplication problems required for her engineering problem set.

For this reason I add the word “well” to the candidate principle: “Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.”

Now of course there’s a judgment to be made here. A physics teacher might think “It’s great that AI will polish my students’ writing for their lab reports” whereas someone else might argue “your students need to learn to write in your class too.” But of course this problem is not new. We’re just seeing the issue in a new guise.

We’ve all heard “They’re going to have to learn to use AI.” But I think that slogan applies to how students will use AI at home and in the workforce, where the product is the thing. For students, learning is the thing. That’s how I come to the principle, “Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.”

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack.

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Curriculum & Instruction
Teachers & School Leaders
Mike McShane
8.27.2026
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“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.

School choice programs are no exception. How they are structured, how much money they offer, what regulations they place on families and providers, and more will determine if schools choose to participate and the level to which they will choose to participate.

For researchers, the fact that some states have choice programs and some states don’t and some schools choose to participate and some schools don’t provides the variation necessary to understand the differences in participation rates.

A new paper by Matthew Lee, Benjamin Scafidi, Roger Tutterow, and Damian Kavanagh does just that. Using a brief survey of 473 private school leaders, they collected information on school characteristics, including ethos (Liberal arts, Montessori, Classical, etc.), methods (language immersion, boarding, single-gender, etc.), enrollment, tuition, and private school choice program participation.

They then used some fancy statistical modeling to examine what factors are correlated both with participation in choice programs as well as the timing of that participation.

Here are the key findings:

In our preferred specification, we find ceteris paribus that religious private schools are nine percentage points more likely to participate (p < .10); private schools in the northeastern US (Pennsylvania and Maine in our sample) are 23 points more likely to participate than schools in the southeast (p < .01); and private schools that are specialized to focus on special needs students are 39 points more likely to participate in choice programs (p < .001), where the reference category on school type is private schools that are neither religious nor designed to serve only or mostly special needs students. Private schools with tuitions above $20,000 are 33 points less likely to participate than schools with tuitions below $20,000 (p < .001). Finally, small private schools that serve less than 250 students are 14 points less likely to participate in choice programs than larger private schools (p < .01).

With respect to timing, they found:

Among private schools participating in choice programs at the time of our survey, 43% participated in choice program at launch, but 40% of participating schools “waited” an average of 7.35 years to participate (SD = 6.15, ranging from one to 28 years); and the remaining 17% of participating schools were unsure about the first year of program participation.

I think of these findings as falling into three buckets: ones I expected, ones I didn’t expect, and ones that I can’t really make heads or tails of.

Expected findings

That schools whose tuition far exceeds the scholarship value do not participate should not surprise us. Given the smaller dollar value of scholarships in many of the states studied, it also shouldn’t surprise us that smaller schools are less likely to participate, as larger schools can take advantage of economies of scale that stretch the scholarship dollar.

The special needs finding might seem surprising, but given the fact that many programs are specifically for students with special needs and others plus up the value of scholarships for students with special needs, the fact that those schools participate at higher rates makes perfect sense.

Unexpected findings

I was surprised at the mean time schools waited to participate in choice programs. I wasn’t surprised that a healthy chunk of schools chose to participate from the outset and another sizeable chunk decided to wait and see, but I would have thought that waiting and seeing would have happened for a shorter period of time than nearly seven and a half years. What became apparent in year seven that wasn’t clear in year six or year five? That one is worth thinking about and trying to unpack.

Not sure what to do with these

I don’t really know what to think about the regional differences in participation. Why Northeastern schools are more likely to participate than Southeastern ones is not clear to me. Perhaps digging into the specific states and the funding/regulatory combinations would explain that.

Takeaways

Matt Continetti wrote a wonderful piece for the Wall Street Journal at the end of July titled Milton Friedman was Right. When thinking about research like the paper above, I sometimes ask WWMT (What Would Milton Think)?

I imagine he would tell me that organizations respond to incentives. If they get enough money to cover their tuition costs, they’ll participate in the program. If they get additional funding for students with special needs, they will enroll them. If they don’t, they won’t.

This is why, for years, I’ve been a sliding scale guy. I think that the amount placed in a student’s ESA should vary based on his or her needs. John broke down how the Arizona ESA program has a series of plus-ups for students with different identified disabilities, and how that varied funding has ensured that the program serves children at all points on the spectrum of special needs.

The same could be true for student disadvantage or anything else that we think might cause a child’s education to cost more. More disadvantage, more money. It is how public school funding formulae work. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

But regardless of my half-baked thoughts, this was an interesting and thought-provoking paper that everyone should check out.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Informed Choice.

Policy Priority:
Quality Choices
Topics:
Evidence-Based Learning
School Finance
Charter Schools
Governance
Private School Choice
Jeff Murray
8.26.2026
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  1. As the new school year gets fully underway across Ohio, NBC 4 News is here to remind us that this is the first full year that all Ohio schools are subject to a bell-to-bell cellphone ban for students. (NBC 4 News, Columbus, 8/26/26) The first day for most Norton City Schools students was last Thursday. Which means that today is the first No-Tech Wednesday of the school year, a new rule requiring students (and teachers too) to put their devices aside for screen-free learning one day per week. District leaders are using the catchphrase “Teach Like It’s 1999” to boost the effort, which superintendent Bryan Farson explains: “This is not about turning back the clock. It is about recommitting ourselves to the instructional practices that have always been the foundation of great teaching.” Given the report card standing in Norton, it’s likely that whatever they’re doing is going to turn out just fine. (Akron Beacon Journal, 8/26/26)

  2. Meanwhile, here’s an interview with three students attending Franklinton High School, a dropout recovery charter school in Columbus. The reportorial focus is the amount of missed days they all racked up at previous schools and the reasons for it, but their candid answers reveal a lot more than that. They were all so disconnected from school for various reasons that even when they showed up, it doesn’t sound like they were learning too much…or caring about it one way or another. (ABC 6 News, Columbus, 8/24/26) Ditto for this companion piece which digs into the ways in which Franklinton High School has reduced its chronic absenteeism rate—by 30 percent—over the past three years. Their efforts include buying multiple small transit vans to pick up kids who might need a ride from time to time. But again—there’s more to it than that. “We have to build trust with them so that they trust us and know that we’re going to take care of them and help them,” principal Jennifer Griffith explained. “That hasn’t always been their experience.” Reading about the students’ new focus on education and their future plans in the previous piece, I believe her. (ABC 6 News, Columbus, 8/24/26)

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Policy Priority:
School Funding
Topics:
Governance