For any teacher, administrator, or policymaker who wants to make strong choices that are likely to benefit their students’ outcomes, Seth Gershenson’s recently-published Fordham Institute report on “the power of expectations in district and charter schools” is an important contribution.

Back in 2020, my colleagues and I published the “Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review” and summarized the best available research on the things that highly-effective teachers know, do, and believe. One such “best bet” that we presented there was high expectations for students. And when we reviewed the evidence on school environment and leadership practices in 2022, high expectations was once again a theme.

But what does that actually mean?

In practice, having high expectations for students can be thought of as a form of “tough love,” and putting them into practice may sometimes require teachers to “suspend their disbelief.” In other words, they may need to behave as though something that they don’t believe is likely is, in fact, possible.

These principles should apply to everyone. For example, great teachers are careful not to convey lower expectations for any subgroups, especially those for which a common stereotype may be negative. This sounds straightforward, but it can be difficult in practice, in part because low expectations are often conveyed unconsciously, indirectly, and with the best intentions—for example, by praising students for objectively poor work (to encourage them), posing less challenging questions to students who seem less confident, or helping these students sooner when they are stuck—all of which can undermine learning.

As noted in the Fordham report’s foreword, “the more clearly teachers can see what their exemplary peers consider ‘high expectations,’ the more likely they are to raise their own game.” However, consideration must also be given to the characteristics of the learning environments that teachers create. When goals are ambitious and demands for all are high, students must feel safe enough to “have a go” (as we say in Britain) without feeling pressured or controlled.

This requires an environment of trust, as well as a complex balance—asking a lot, but recognizing that students may not get everything the first time. And whether students succeed or fail, it matters how they, themselves, account for it: Attributing either success or failure to things they can change (such as how hard they worked or the learning strategies they used) is more likely to support future success than attributing results to things that are out of their control (like luck, “ability,” or not having been taught it).

While even the best available research evidence doesn’t reveal to us how to change teachers’ expectations, there probably is enough evidence to say that both subliminal and explicit teacher expectations can influence student attainment and become, at least to some extent, self-fulfilling prophecies. And support for high expectations can also be found in interventions such as mastery learning and goal-setting theory, which hold that, other things being equal, the more challenging the goal, the higher the level of performance actually achieved.

Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever met an educator who was not motivated to do the very best they can for the students they teach. For some, realizing this ambition may mean rethinking the sights they set for their learners, and preparing to be surprised when an unlikely expectation does, in fact, become possible for their students. But simply telling teachers to have higher expectations is likely to be—at best—an insufficient part of a much larger approach that will be needed to realize the power of high expectations. Dr. Gershenson suggests that “concrete actions should be taken to ensure that as many teachers as possible do, in fact, have and espouse high expectations for their students.” But to do this, educators and administrators need better and more context-specific and evidence-based approaches to help them develop practices that work not just “on average” but for their students in their contexts. The report suggests that “schools and districts should also consider how they might boost the expectations of their existing teacher force—for example, by incorporating student surveys that include an “expectations” dimension, something that we’ve been exploring here in the UK over the last two years.

Teachers are motivated to do the very best they can for the students they teach, and as Dr. Gershenson’s report points out, learners “frequently articulate their preference for, and the importance of, teachers who believe in them.” The best available evidence backs them up on this: Every student—and every adult—needs people around them to suspend their disbelief from time to time, and to help reframe the unlikely as the possible.

“In light of this barometer of our kids’ success, there’s no time to waste to catch our kids up. We must continue to pour on the gas in our efforts,” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said last Tuesday in response to the NAEP results. “We know our kids lost ground during the pandemic—it was not good for them. In Arizona, we kept schools open, made critical investments in literacy programs, and launched a summer camp to prevent further learning loss. Another round of AZ OnTrack Summer camp is sorely needed for our kids. This is a community effort, and we cannot afford for our kids to lose more ground next summer.”

Ducey, who declared his goal to be Arizona’s education governor during his first term, is certainly setting a high bar for the other forty-nine. After increasing classroom funding and shepherding the nation’s most expansive school choice legislation into law, he became the first of America’s governors to respond to the NAEP results with specific promises, beginning with the return of the free “AZ OnTrack” summer camp initiative that was spearheaded by 50CAN board member Lisa Keegan.

Unfortunately, far from rising to the challenge, what we have gotten from many of his fellow governors across the country is silence.

Gubernatorial leadership starts with a commitment to wisely spend the federal ESSER dollars to support programming that’s been proven to raise student achievement and accelerate students to make up for lost learning. New research from the Urban Institute drives home this point, finding that districts that focused their spending on instruction had significantly higher performance than districts that focused their spending in other areas like facilities.

Last week, The Washington Post summed up the unacceptable current state of spending, writing: “The American Rescue Plan infused campuses with $122 billion to reopen buildings, address mental health needs and help students who had fallen behind academically. The need was so urgent that two-thirds of the money—$81 billion—was released less than two weeks after the plan was signed into law and before the Education Department could approve each state’s spending plan. But despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding.”

We know what interventions will work:

• Expansive summer programming to provide as many students as possible with remedial and accelerated learning activities across the calendar year, from programs like AZ OnTrack and Summer Boost NYC.
• Small group or individualized tutoring, provided free of charge to any student who wants it. Accelerate founder Kevin Huffman has distributed $10 million across twenty-eight states to launch and refine tutoring programs, TennesseeCAN and JerseyCAN have helped to secure legislative commitments to expand tutoring, and Teach For America launched the Ignite Fellowship to place college students as tutors for underprivileged children.
• Curriculum shifts and professional development to support educators in teaching the science of reading, which powered the Mississippi Miracle.

The question now is whether state leaders have the political will and leadership acumen to enact these interventions with the scale and urgency that is needed. Every governor should become an education governor in the year ahead and meet this crisis with the urgency, prioritization, and funding necessary to provide children with the support they deserve.

Sadly, however, state leaders may fall victim to relentless attempts by so many to spin NAEP results away into a cloud of indifference. The game plan is clear: Minimize or obfuscate the results whenever possible, and in instances where it’s not, fight any attempt to draw conclusions that might require a change in the way our education system works.

“The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress results got released this week. I cannot stress the level to which I do not care,” writes Atlanta teacher Jay Wamsted in an op-ed for Education Week.

“The hysteria over NAEP reflects our continued obsession with standardized testing, which began with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law and has shown no evidence of helping improve schools. The results...keep telling us what we already know,” writes Washington Post commentator Valerie Strauss.

“The Nation’s Report Card shows score changes for large city school districts mirror national trends,” announced the headline of a press release for the Council of the Great City Schools, ignoring the enormous problems NAEP revealed in their districts.

Here’s AFT President Randi Weingarten’s reaction to the results, which sidesteps her own role in keeping schools closed far longer than peer countries: “Thankfully, after two years of an unprecedented economic, educational, and social disruption, we have the tools, vaccines, and treatments to deal with Covid-19 and re-establish a sense of normalcy in schools.”

“This was to be expected. It was the price for keeping as many teachers, school workers, children, and their families alive,” wrote former NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill.

And labor activist and podcaster Jack Schneider: “My two cents: The fact that scores didn’t drop even further is a testament to educators, young people, and families. People did the best they could in an once-in-a-century global health crisis.”

“What is the panic about pandemic learning loss actually about?” asks David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times, while Jay Caspian Kang concludes in a piece for The New Yorker that the real problem is not learning loss but “parental anxiety” about that loss.

It’s time to say: Stop. Just stop.

Our kids deserve better. We need less cant and more candor. We need less spin and more substance. We need leadership with integrity and accountability at the core. So let’s demand that our leaders treat the learning crisis with the honesty, personal accountability, and urgency it requires.

Editor’s note: This piece was adapted from 50CAN’s “The New Reality Roundup” newsletter.

Providing needed services

While they are still very new, charter schools are already finding supporters in West Virginia. Specifically, editors at the Dominion Post recently catalogued a series of woes—reported in its pages—for parents of students with dyslexia who attend district schools in Monongalia County. The editors also pointed out that a brand new charter school in the county is already providing more and more appropriate services to their dyslexic students and urged the districts to do better.

Providing needed supports

Speaking of parents and families, here’s a new piece from UnidosUS and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which gathers a plethora of data and analysis to make the case that charter schools have uplifted Latino communities across the country through the pandemic and beyond.

Mobility and choice

A recent research report looking at data from Michigan illustrates the fact that school choice is not just about educational quality or fit. Family mobility plays a vital part as well—both aiding choice and serving to hinder it depending on the situation—and we would do well to acknowledge and work to incorporate intersecting family needs within the infrastructure of choice.

More important research

A new report by Seth Gershenson and released by the Fordham Institute this week, finds that high teacher expectations have a positive effect on long-run outcomes for students such as college completion, teen childbearing, and receipt of public assistance. Additionally, teachers in charter and private high schools are generally more likely to have higher expectations for their students—such as completing a four-year college degree—than their traditional district peers. You can check out the full report here.

Digging into the data

Tressa Pankovits, co-director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, published her analysis of the recent GAO report on nearly 15 years of grants provided by the federal Charter School Program (CSP). The bottom line, she writes, is that data show “public charter schools are one-and-a-half times more likely to gain their footing and remain in the business of educating poorer, mostly Black and Brown children,” and that CSP grants are vital to this important outcome. The report, she concludes, “should be all of the evidence Congress and anti-reformers need to retire the CSP as a political football once and for all.”

A new and better system

Seven charter school networks in Newark, New Jersey, announced that they will not be participating in the city’s central application process for the upcoming school year. Their leaders cite longstanding onerous requirements on families and badly-needed modernization for the decision. They will join a new central application system created by the New Jersey Children’s Foundation which promises to be a simple, streamlined, and parent-friendly process. The hope is that other schools, including the district, will join them in the effort.

*****

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1. I want to find the good in this story about a program aimed at connecting school/K-12 education to “economic mobility and self-sufficiency” for high schoolers, but it eludes me in the end no matter how hard I parse what is here. Part of the problem is that the print version is borderline unintelligible. Who are these kids? Why are they here? What are they learning? But a bigger part is that no effort is made to explain how programs called “Rise Up Retail” and “Rise Up Customer Service” could be valuable credentials or count as points toward graduation requirements, especially when the students themselves say their goals are to “join the tech field” and to “pursue a career in criminal justice”. Feels like some serious substance is missing. (Spectrum News 1, 10/31/22)
   
   

2. I want to have some sympathy for Lorain City Schools superintendent Jeff Graham, who remains concerned about the upcoming performance audit to be conducted in his district by the Ohio Department of Education. But his complaint about the number of hours it will take him and his staff to participate in the audit rings hollow to me, especially given the lofty and important goal of emerging from more than a decade of academic distress (and all that goes along with it). And also because he still clings to his belief that the audit was supposed to be about digging into spending decisions from five years ago and not about whatever it is he’s currently doing to try and fulfill the requirements of the bill he and his elected board championed. (Chronicle-Telegram, 11/2/22)
   
   

3. I want to be excited about the new report from Cleveland mayor Justin Bibb’s office, summarizing the results of his community listening tour and distilling some broad themes around future actions, but as is often the case with these things, it appears that far more teachers, community leaders, and school officials participated than did parents and students. The messages received and responses generated, as related in the report, echo that state of affairs. (Cleveland Mayor’s Office, 11/3/22)

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Among the most pernicious consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic was a general lowering of expectations for students. Many districts simply stopped tracking attendance during the shift to remote learning. Others softened their grading policies—or eliminated letter grades altogether. Some teachers moved away from assigning homework on grounds that students were already home and probably spending too much time on screens.

Perhaps it’s unfair to second-guess those pandemic-induced changes (though not nearly as unfair as the generation-hobbling decision to shutter so many schools for so long, despite ample evidence that it was possible to reopen safely). But if we’re serious about getting our students back on track, we must be even more serious about getting our expectations for them back on track. Muttering the phrase “high expectations for all students” just doesn’t cut it.

With the Covid crisis mostly behind us, at least for now, public conversation has turned to the millions of students who are still struggling academically and emotionally—and to how our schools ought to respond. Though bits of progress can be seen here and there, pandemic-related learning loss remains a disaster that has disproportionately affected poor and historically marginalized students. According to the latest NAEP results, U.S. students have lost the equivalent of twenty years of progress in math and reading. And those are just the academic costs: Nine out of ten schools report that the pandemic has also impeded students’ socioemotional development.

How education leaders respond to this moment will determine in large part whether students recover or continue this damaging slide. For example, some states have already chosen to rescind their “third-grade reading guarantees” and pass nonreaders along to fourth grade. And in some places, no-grading policies are still in effect. Even some postsecondary institutions are now proposing to help students “adapt to college” by foregoing grades in the freshmen year. “It’s not the kids’ fault that they’re behind,” goes the thinking, “so we need to adjust our expectations.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Numerous scholars have identified a culture of high expectations as an important correlate of impactful teaching and better outcomes. For example, one recent study found that high expectations boosted fourth through eighth graders’ test scores, and a recent Fordham-commissioned study detected lasting benefits for students whose teachers were tougher graders. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s famous study of “Pygmalion in the classroom,” which found that randomly selected students did better when their teachers were told they were talented, has now been cited more than ten thousand times (though efforts to replicate it have yielded mixed results).

Although many schools say they want their students to reach for the stars, high expectations are an especially prominent feature of successful charter schools, notably those of the “no-excuses” variety. Still, because these schools and networks are also known for things like longer school days, intensive tutoring, strict codes of conduct, and any number of other features, it’s not clear how much of their success is attributable to higher expectations per se.

Accordingly, our new study, The Power of Expectations in District and Charter Schools, seeks to understand better the role that high expectations should play in our academic recovery and gain a deeper understanding of whether and how they operate in the traditional public, charter, and private school sectors. To conduct it, we reached out once again to Professor Seth Gershenson of American University, who is well known for his work on teacher expectations. Using federal data from two nationally representative surveys, Dr. Gershenson explored the links between high school teachers’ expectations of their students (in particular, their expectations regarding college completion), students’ perceptions of their teachers’ expectations, and students’ long-term outcomes.

Here’s what he found:

1. In general, teachers in charter and private high schools are more likely to believe that their students will complete four-year college degrees.
2. In hindsight, teachers in charter and private schools were also more likely to overestimate students’ actual degree attainment.
3. In general, students in charter and private schools are more likely to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.”
4. Regardless of sector, teacher expectations have a positive impact on long-run outcomes, including boosting the odds of college completion and reducing the chances of teen childbearing and receipt of public assistance.

In our view, these findings have at least three implications for policy and practice.

1. All students need teachers who expect great things of them—and behave accordingly.

Like previous research, this study suggests that low expectations can be harmful, both because of what they imply about the level of instruction that students are likely to receive and because some students may internalize them. And of course, this concern is particularly acute when it comes to students of color, many of whom are still victims of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” with predictable results.

Ultimately, teachers bear primary responsibility for the standards they set. But a common curriculum that embeds high expectations can help, and because it can be hard to know what “high expectations” look like in a vacuum, some schools may need to provide relevant professional development, in addition to being clear with staff about expectations for things like grading standards and homework loads. The more clearly teachers can see what their exemplary peers consider “high expectations,” the more likely they are to raise their own game.

2. More families should have the option of enrolling their children in charter and private schools where high expectations are a core principle.

As this study underscores, most successful charter schools take high expectations seriously. And when choosing a school, most parents consider whether it will see their child’s potential. The benefits of such an environment are real, so giving more parents more high-quality choices should not be controversial.

Imagine, for a moment, that the teachers of a child you cared for didn’t believe in their gut that he or she was “college material” or were otherwise skeptical of his or her potential.

Wouldn’t you be looking for an alternative? Shouldn’t it be your right to demand one?

3. Above all, schools shouldn’t use students’ continuing challenges as justification for lowering expectations in the wake of the pandemic.

As policymakers and other stakeholders come to grips with the staggering educational and social costs of protracted school closures, the importance of setting and maintaining high expectations for students has never been clearer. Thankfully, all schools have now reopened their doors, which means that an educational recovery is at least theoretically possible. Yet every day, it seems, there are fresh reports of inane “no-homework” policies, student-initiated “mental-health days,” or other misguided attempts to address young people’s lingering anger and despair.

Yes, many students are behind or suffering because of circumstances beyond their control. But no, the solution isn’t to expect any less of them.

How could it be?

As the Supreme Court weighs the future of race-sensitive affirmative action in admitting students to selective colleges, all manner of ideas are popping up for how to achieve “diversity” in the entering class without explicitly counting by race.

Yes, there’s much to be said for diversity of all sorts, both for the sake of students who benefit from it—future opportunities opened, chances to work and play with people unlike oneself, etc.—and for the benefit of the country’s future, as we are surely better off if those who will play leading roles in myriad fields don’t all look (and think) alike.

Don’t skip the thinking alike part. That’s also diversity. Much of the point of going to college is to grapple with ideas, attitudes, opinions, and experiences very different from one’s own. That’s lost when even a rainbow of different-looking students all share—or are pushed to share—the same views, whether the topic is climate change, Shakespeare’s sonnets, civil rights, or microbiology.

But that’s not what the Court is grappling with this term. The hot challenge is racial diversity and by what criteria to ration and allocate access to the scarce—too scarce, say I—good known as elite college educations.

Much the same issue, it must be noted, besets selective-entry programs and institutions at the K–12 level. Hence all the furor over admission to places like Bronx Science, Lowell High School, Boston Latin, and Thomas Jefferson.

Recall that, once upon a time, “objective” tests such as SAT and ACT were invented in order to diversify enrollments in elite colleges by creating a common metric that admissions offices at Princeton and Yale and Amherst and such could use to evaluate the preparation, ability, and readiness of kids from Podunk High School in Peoria or Caspar alongside those from Scarsdale, Newton, and Andover. But such “objective” measures are falling out of favor, both because such scores reveal only one side of a candidate’s qualities and characteristics and because an admission system based on them (obviously) ends up favoring high scorers, an awful lot of whom turn out to be Asian and White.

Let’s stop right here and ding the K–12 system for its failure to alter that condition, and not just take it as a permanent given. If our elementary and secondary schools were better at helping poor and Black and Hispanic kids achieve at high levels, diversity and discrimination in college admissions would not be so at odds. But that would mean a full court press on closing the excellence gap, starting in kindergarten, if not before.

Absent such gold-ribbon equalizing of opportunity, the chief alternative to test-score-centric admissions is commonly called “holistic admissions.” But that turns out to be about as precise an idea as the proverbial blind men’s elephant.

Here’s a not-bad version from the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, one that also takes account of the present legal status of this practice:

Holistic review is a university admissions strategy that assesses an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic achievement such as grades and test scores. It is designed to help universities consider a broad range of factors reflecting the applicant’s academic readiness, contribution to the incoming class, and potential for success both in school and later as a professional. Holistic review, when used in combination with a variety of other mission-based practices, constitutes a “holistic admission” process.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court officially described the strategy as a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment”....

The desired outcomes of a holistic admission process will vary depending on each institution’s mission and goals. However, one core goal of a holistic process is the assembly of a diverse student body—diverse not only in race, ethnicity, and gender, but also in experience, socioeconomic status, and perspective. A key tenet of holistic review is the recognition that a diverse learning environment benefits all students and provides teaching and learning opportunities that more homogenous environments do not.

Note that this version retains “traditional measures” such as test scores and grades, while adding a bunch of other considerations. One might say it’s meant to be both objective and subjective, though in an era of grade inflation and test-coaching, it’s hard to be certain whether what appears to be objective really is.

Other versions of holistic admission try to avoid test scores and GPAs altogether and instead rely entirely on essays, interviews, questionnaires, recommendations, and other personalized (and inherently subjective) elements of an applicant’s file. This ability to look at someone’s background, life experiences, socio-economic circumstances, and the demographics of his or her community or present school enables admissions staffers to—one might say—curate the entering class to align with the institution’s sense of its mission and values.

Lots of educational institutions, particularly in the private sector, have long engaged in a form of holistic review combined with “traditional” measures. Which is to say, they use a well-calibrated scale but then put their thumbs and fingers and pogo sticks and free weights all over it. Thus we have preferences of all sorts, such as the children of alumni, major donors, and faculty members, and we also find the kind of hand-crafting that ensures there will be a bassoon player for the orchestra, a right tackle for the football team, an editor for the college paper—and enough classics concentrators to justify continuing to pay those professors of Latin and Greek.

These have long been viewed as standard practices in college admissions. So, too, has been the use of “objective” factors to shrink the pool so that the “holistic” part can be applied to, say, 5,000 candidates rather than 50,000. (For as long as I can remember, most medical schools used cut scores on the MCAT test to whittle down the applicant population to a manageable number to put through the interview-and-references process.)

Creating a cut-off based on test scores has definite advantages. It’s vastly less expensive, and in key respects, it’s less corruptible and vulnerable to favoritism and influence-peddling. When Senator so-and-so calls the principal of Stuyvesant High School to ask why his niece wasn’t admitted, the straightforward answer is “Sorry, Senator, she didn’t make the cut-score on the test that all the applicants took.” (But of course, it’s corruptible in another way, as some kids who did make the cut-score benefited from tutoring, cramming, boot camps, and other advantages arranged and paid for by their striving and probably prosperous parents.)

Nowadays, however, the biggest issue with the traditional “objective” measures of readiness for elite schools and colleges is that they don’t yield a suitably “diverse” entering class. We’re mostly talking race here, and that’s the hottest-button issue and greatest constitutional entanglement, though it might also entail religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, geography, poverty, and other attributes of “diversity.” Yet all such balancing acts entail both winners and losers because, once again, we’re talking about the rationing of a scarce and highly-valued good. And when public institutions (and to a less extent private ones) are involved, we run into all manner of categories that are legally not to be discriminated again.

So we value both diversity and non-discrimination. But in the end, they’re mutually contradictory. You simply cannot satisfy both.

In an angry Sunday column, George Will had this to say about the current legal situation:

In two 2003 cases from the University of Michigan, the court ruled against the undergraduate admission policy of adding 20 points to each Black applicant’s admissions index (the equivalent of adding a full letter grade to the Black applicant’s record). But the court upheld the law school’s practice, which avoided such inconvenient explicitness: The law school considered race as part of what the court called a “holistic” evaluation of applicants. The court thereby endorsed a vocabulary that can nullify the legal consequences of any ruling against racial preferences. Preferences continue if the sordidness is obscured by a semantic fog.

To me, holistic admissions is more than fog, more than lipstick on a discriminatory pig. Properly done, it enables the admissions team not just to curate the entering class that their institution seeks, but also to, as the term implies, look at the “whole” applicant. Much as summative testing by schools and states (and NAEP) does tell us a lot about academic achievement, it tells us nothing about students’ creativity, stick-to-ive-ness, passion, aspirations, integrity, or circumstances.

Yet holistic admissions can indeed be a fog to shield discriminatory practices from view, from comment, and from corrective action. It gets extremely expensive if the admissions team is serious about looking closely at thick folders or computer files on tens of thousands of candidates. And it is indeed corruptible, wide open to favoritism, influence-peddling, and other practices as unsavory as discrimination.

Is there an alternative? In a fascinating Washington Post op-ed, Harvard economist Roland Fryer describes his own painful path from tough circumstances to tenure, remarkable achievement and wide acclaim. He pooh-poohs “affirmative action” as commonly practiced by elite institutions because it ends up admitting mostly well-to-do Black and Hispanic candidates, not those who are truly disadvantaged (as he had been). But he insists that a different version of it might achieve the desired purpose. Instead of relying on racial quotes and human judgments, he would entrust the review of applicants to sophisticated algorithms attached to artificial intelligence:

A machine-learning model would be fed historical admissions data, including candidates’ family background and academic achievement, and noncognitive skills such as grit and resilience, along with outcomes of past admission decisions. It would use these data to predict new applicants’ performance—as defined by each institution, such as college grade-point average or income ten years after graduation. The model could figure out which characteristics best predict performance for various subgroups—for example, how salient SAT scores are for public-school Black students raised in the South by single mothers versus private-school White kids from the Northeast. If we use only unadjusted test scores, all that context is lost.

Worth trying? Perhaps. It would surely create unemployment among today’s admissions officers. It would introduce another kind of objectivity—maybe best termed faux objectivity—into the process by subjecting everyone to the same algorithms, but of course those would be algorithms with all sorts of preferences built into them. It would also surely become more difficult to persuade judges that they are or aren’t discriminatory. In the end, such determinations would have to be based on the resulting statistics, not the selection process itself, and that (to my discomfort) smacks of “disparate impact” analysis rather than discrimination against actual human beings.

I don’t envy the nine justices on this one (eight in the Harvard case, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is recused due to having been a former Overseer there).

It makes good sense for the federal government to provide grants to high-quality public charter schools seeking to open or expand. That’s the gist of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month.

A GAO analysis of U.S. Department of Education (ED) charter school grants from 2006 to 2020 found that while few charter schools close overall, charter schools that received federal Charter School Program (CSP) awards were more likely to succeed than similarly situated charter schools that did not receive an award. Regardless of a school’s grade level, locale, or student body racial, ethnic, and poverty percentages, CSP schools are one-and-a-half times more likely to remain in operation five years after opening. The GAO concluded that, even after twelve years, the pattern of CSP-seeded schools remaining open and educating students generally held.

President Clinton in 1994 used his bully pulpit to convince Congress to pass the CSP. ED has since awarded billions in competitive grants to help applicants open new charter schools or replicate and expand high-quality charter schools. As the only source of federal funds available to public charters, the CSP is critically important. While taxes generally underwrite traditional school construction, charters must supply their own facilities. Without CSP grants, nearly a generation of kids wouldn’t have benefitted from thousands of tuition-free, locally accountable school options.

Because the CSP is so vital to the health of the public charter school sector, it is a favorite scapegoat for anti-reformers invested in monolithic, government school districts. For example, a recent headline blared, “Audit of charter school program finds big problems.” Another read, “Audit finds waste, fraud, and abuse.”

In fairness, ED’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) did release an audit last month that suggested corrective actions to CSP administrators, but the hyperbole is overblown. Unlike the GAO, which examined fifteen years of data, OIG looked only at grants disbursed from 2013 to 2016. OIG found that of the 719 schools opened during the audit period that had been in operation for two or more years, 91 percent remained open at least two years after CSP support ended—indicating that the schools were self-sufficient and the federal seed money had achieved its purpose. But OIG faulted the department for failing to do that tracking on its own volition. CSP officers pushed back, noting that neither Congress nor the department’s rules order them to do so.

The OIG also criticized the program because CSP grants had opened fewer schools than some grantees had promised on their applications. Again, the department pushed back, noting that OIG ignored that many applicants amend their goals when confronted with local realities, like charter school caps or local political resistance. 

The same folks creating political resistance on the ground seized on this OIG finding to baselessly accuse grantees of diverting, wasting, or profiting from federal dollars, instead of building schools. The GAO report dispels this rhetoric, as well. According to state education agency (SEA) officials GAO interviewed, SEAs recover CSP funds, reallocate funds to future charter schools, and redistribute purchases made to other charter schools.

GAO likely interviewed SEAs during its ten-month investigation because SEAs receive the lion’s share of CSP dollars. While detractors consistently characterize public charters as “corporate privateers” making off with public dollars, from 2006 to 2020, SEAs received $1.9 billion of $2.5 billion in CSP grants.

Yet, according to the OIG, SEAs are the slowest to open CSP supported schools. From 2013 to 2016, SEAs committed to 1,076 new charter schools but opened just 477. On the other hand, during the same period, charter school developers—individuals or a group in the community in which a charter school project will be carried out—won just forty-two grants but managed to open thirty-eight schools, for a 90 percent success rate.

This gives credence to the argument that the CSP should be more generous with its grants to small, community-based applicants—many of which seek to open a school to serve targeted populations of students perennially failed by traditional systems. The GAO determined that charter schools that received CSP awards were more likely to be located in rural or urban areas, and had higher proportions of Black or Hispanic students and students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. If local community members are more adept at opening charters to serve them, ED should prioritize that going forward.

The GAO serves as the investigative arm to Congress, where some lawmakers seek to slash the CSP budget each year. Its stated purpose for conducting a nearly year-long, longitudinal, multivariate analysis was to answer questions “raised about the effectiveness of CSP grants.” The resulting data showing that public charter schools are one-and-a-half times more likely to gain their footing and remain in the business of educating poorer, mostly Black and brown children should be all of the evidence Congress and anti-reformers need to retire the CSP as a political football once and for all.

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

• A partnership of several research organizations has announced a $31 million initiative to study the effectiveness of thirty-one tutoring programs across the nation. —Chalkbeat
• Some teachers are rebelling against lowered expectations for students by refusing to grade by the “50 percent rule.” —Jay Mathews
• The performance of Catholic schools during the pandemic offers us a bright spot amid the bleary 2022 NAEP results. —Kathleen Porter-Magee

Jeers

• In the wake of dismal NAEP scores, a staff writer for the New Yorker thinks parental anxiety is a problem, when the real problem is that most parents think everything is fine. —Jay Caspian Kang
• The gender achievement gap—which persists from the elementary grades through graduate school—reminds us about how poorly our schools serve boys. —Kay S. Hymowitz

• Several studies show a strong connection between school closures, remote learning, and learning loss, making clear that shutting down schools was a failed policy. —Atlantic
• A review of gubernatorial campaign websites shows that Democratic candidates are focusing on school funding and early childhood education, Republican candidates are focusing on school choice and parents’ rights, and that both support Career and Technical Education. —Andy Smarick
• In the lead up to the midterm elections, the political party Americans trust most on education issues is a toss-up between Democrats and Republicans. —Nat Malkus  

1. I don’t know from this piece what they were doing before now, but school districts in Licking County are reportedly “becoming pro-active” these days in addressing chronic absenteeism in the wake of state report card outcomes which were adversely impacted by the quite large amount of it occurring. (Newark Advocate, 10/30/22) Meanwhile, in the “operating as closely to the same way as we have always operated” category, the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland is this week touting its schools’ trend-bucking performance on NAEP assessments. Not perfect, mind you, especially for eighth graders, but far superior to district and charter schools in The Land… If they do say so themselves. (Diocese of Cleveland, 11/1/22)
   
   

2. Down here in central Ohio, school transportation is apparently so bad that even Columbus City Schools’ own families are being hosed regularly… (10TV News, Columbus, 10/31/22) …and it unfortunately doesn’t seem like the elected school board or district officials are taking it seriously, if this “discussion” at yesterday’s school board meeting is any indication. (ABC6 News, Columbus, 11/1/22) Due to the, shall we say, “elisive” nature of the Columbus school board’s discussion above, it is unclear what’s happening to students who don’t receive their needed busing on any given day. Transportation in suburban Reynoldsburg sounds equally bad, but we get some detailed information on how the problem is being handled. Surprise! It’s the return of widespread remote learning. To wit: The district’s entire high school student body is attending in person just two days per week. The most curious thing (for me, that is, YMMV): Ohio’s schools aren’t even required by law to transport high schoolers! (10TV News, Columbus, 11/1/22)
   
   

3. Finally today, we told you back in August that Toledo City Schools’ plan to launch a CDL training program for district high schoolers went into the ditch earlier this year (see what I did there?) due to a zoning refusal by the city’s planning department. Turns out that I was being all pessimistic for no reason. This week’s happy, sunny Blade story tells us that everything is now back on track again (translation: starting in August 2023, a year late), thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris (translation: a truckload of federal largesse), and some benevolence by city officials (translation: the district caved and will entirely redo their plan the way the city wants). Kudos! (Toledo Blade, 10/31/22)

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