As the United States heads toward the semiquincentennial (!) of the Declaration of Independence, as we near an election that’s uncommonly consequential (!), and as many worthy groups strive to rekindle civics in American schools and colleges, it’s time to revisit and revive the superb animated video series named Liberty’s Kids.

Originally aired on PBS Kids in 2002–03—not so long after 9/11—and rerun on many public television stations for a year or so, it’s been practically invisible for the past two decades, although you can find the full forty-episode series on YouTube at no cost (save for annoying short ads) and can buy a DVD via Amazon for less than $30.

Aimed at elementary school-age children, but enjoyable well into middle school, these thirty-minute episodes feature Benjamin Franklin (narrated by Walter Cronkite) and four wonderfully engaging (and diverse) children as they experience the Revolutionary War and the early days of the new nation, starting with the Boston Tea Party and ending with Washington’s inauguration.

Included therein is a fine episode (“The First Fourth of July”) on the reasons for, debate on, drafting of, and decision to declare the independence of the thirteen embattled colonies.

The “kids” in the series are a teenage girl from England, a fourteen-year-old colonial boy (apprenticed to Dr. Franklin), a mischievous eight-year-old with origins in France, and a somewhat older former slave who learned to read, bought his freedom, and found employment in Franklin’s print shop.

All manner of celebrities—Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Douglas, and on and on, in addition to Cronkite—provided voices for the myriad historical figures that appear along the way, ranging from Benedict Arnold and Abigail Adams to John Paul Jones and General Cornwallis.

If you have half an hour to sample it, you’ll find all forty episodes listed and linked. For a taste you might try, episode 3, “United We Stand,” which goes from John Adams’s controversial defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, then back to Boston and the introduction of Abigail Adams (wonderfully voiced by Annette Bening). 

It’s a terrific and compelling introduction for viewers to that period of American history and those who made it happen. Without being preachy or political, it cultivates an appreciation for what they did, why they did it, and why we should appreciate it two and a half centuries later. Which is to say, it lays a worthy, content rich, yet entertaining foundation for civics and citizenship as well as history and should be embraced by those attempting to reinvigorate those subjects in the K–12 curriculum and in the minds and lives of young Americans.

But Liberty’s Kids isn’t the only history (or civics) video worth the attention of students and educators—plus parents and other caregivers, as these are actually simpler to access at home. PBS has just launched a new Civics Collection, which is a bit of challenge to navigate but contains a raft of excellent material. Years earlier, Disney did a nice series of short animations about important presidents. The White House Historical Association has produced a charming set of profiles of kids who have lived with presidents in that grand building. (Some are grandchildren, many are young but some are marriage-age.) The “armchair historian” has a raft of them, aimed at older kids, though you have to subscribe. There’s a terrific series for teenagers, said to align with the AP course in U.S. history (circa 2013), on Crash Course. And you may pick up a few more leads here and—extending far beyond American borders—here.

That need not be the end of it. Motivated film makers could emulate Liberty’s Kids with other periods in our history that children would find interesting as well as entertaining and that they likely could relate to as well as learn from. Certainly the run-up to the Civil War—imagine a split screen with kids on both sides—and the origins of (and life during) World War II. Coping with the Great Depression. Life during the Cold War (sheltering under desks, missiles in Cuba, Sputnik). Another approach might jump around chronologically and depict kids during the times of—and having their lives changed by—key inventions, such as the telephone, the airplane, the TV, the internet, the iPhone.

Animation or not, videos or not, the challenge and task ahead is to envelop kids in their country’s history, help them understand where it came from, how it works, what it stands for, how it’s governed, and so much more, especially why it should be important to them. In my opinion, Liberty’s Kids is terrific place to start.

“August is a perfect time to collect your notes, mine for memories, and pull together a draft of your Common App essay” —advice on the College Essay Advisors website.

“Start by identifying a quirky or challenging experience that reflects a key insight into your experience. Think about how this experience has shaped your perspective and character. Use humor and honesty to bring your story to life, and focus on how you have embraced your differences to become stronger and more resilient.” —“College Essays That Worked And How Yours Can, Too,” Forbes, June 26, 2024.

Dear Admissions Committee,

I write to you today with a sense of purpose, not in the hope that my application will be accepted, but with the sincere request that it be rejected. Yes, you read that correctly. I acknowledge that the conventions of college admissions essays demand tales of unparalleled grit and overcoming adversity. Regrettably, my seventeen years on Earth have been marked by an unbroken series of mundane and typical experiences. Accordingly, I seek your rejection as an opportunity to finally craft the transformative story I so desperately lack.

Let me begin with the Great C Catastrophe of my sophomore year. Unlike the tales of those who heroically conquer academic challenges, my encounter with a poor grade on a chemistry test was merely a brush with mediocrity. I discovered no hidden learning disability and overcame no personal hardship to improve my performance. I simply studied a bit harder, made an effort to understand stoichiometry a little better, and my grades improved. Hardly the stuff of legend.

Then there was the time I was cut from the soccer team. It wasn’t because of a debilitating injury or systemic bias. I’m simply not varsity material. My response wasn’t a Herculean effort in the gym or rising before dawn to put in miles of roadwork, determined to earn a roster spot the following year. I pivoted to the debate team, where I found modest success. Again, it’s a story that lacks the dramatic arc of overcoming insurmountable odds. Just a kid trying something new when one path didn’t pan out.

Finally, there was the high school musical debacle. I auditioned and didn’t get the lead, or any part at all. Accepting the judgment of the director, I joined the stage crew. It wasn’t a life-altering setback but rather a simple redirection of my interests. My role behind the scenes was fulfilling, yet it didn’t transform me into a beacon of resilience. It just made me realize I enjoyed the technical side of theater more than being in the spotlight.

These experiences, while formative in their own ways, fail to meet the epic standards set by modern college essays. They lack the punch, the narrative twist that makes readers’ jaws drop in awe. I am—it pains me to confess it—the product of a happy, stable home where my challenges were ordinary and my responses to them equally so.

Therefore, I implore you to reject my application. Let your rejection be the crucible through which I forge my story of overcoming adversity! Permit me the gut-wrenching experience of receiving that thin envelope or terse email! Grant me the sting of failure so that I might finally have something worth writing about!

Imagine, if you will, my future essay: “Rejected from my top choice, I faced a crossroads. With grit and determination, I transformed this rejection into a launching pad for my personal growth.” It would be a tale of resilience, of turning defeat into triumph—exactly the kind of narrative that captures the hearts and minds of admissions officers everywhere.

So, in closing, I request—nay, I demand—that you reject my application. Help me help myself by giving me the adversity I so sorely lack. Allow me the privilege of being turned down so that I can rise up, story-worthy and ready, for the next application cycle.

Thank you for considering my request. I eagerly await your rejection.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

Just when I thought that book ban debates were so last year—gone the way of critical race theory or the Common Core, subsumed by the latest controversy over Title IX or Project 2025—it seems those grouchy conservatives are at it again. Kamala Harris condemned efforts to ban books in her speech to the American Federation of Teachers in July. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on a slew of new legislation aimed at, you guessed it, banning books.

Except no one is trying to ban books. What the latest so-called “book banning” laws actually do is establish procedures so that schools can effectively handle complaints from parents and adjudicate competing claims as to the appropriateness of this or that book, hopefully resulting in more productive debates, not just partisan stalemates.

Per the Times, the law in South Carolina, for example, replaces the former “patchwork approach to challenging books and deciding whether they are appropriate” and instead establishes a formal portal through which parents and other community members can lodge complaints, as well as setting forth a system for review of those complaints and the books being challenged. In Idaho, the law delineates clear content such as “masturbation” or “sadomasochistic abuse” which would trigger a book’s removal.

These new laws are no more “bans” than a bonfire in my backyard is arson—only alike superficially. As Mark Twain famously observed, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” There’s quite a difference between a federal government black-bagging dissidents for sharing censored content, a major seller such as Barnes and Noble refusing to carry a book, a public or school library choosing not to shelve a book, and a teacher replacing one with another on a curriculum. To call routine library and curricular curation a “ban” is really a rather large categorical error.

Only a few thousand books can fit into a school library, and a handful onto school curriculum. It is the duty of school personnel to select the best books with the most educative potential to include in those small selections and the duty of our lawmakers to establish clear expectations for the personnel in and policies guiding our public institutions. Thankfully, just the other week, I strolled past a “banned books” display at my local bookstore where I could bravely buy many of these supposedly censored titles for $29.95 each. It may be false advertising, but it sure is effective.

Were we to indeed call this standard act of curation a “ban,” then by definition almost every single book in existence is banned from school libraries and reading lists. Following this logic, if anything, American schools have long been busy “banning” conservative ideas. In an amusing little study, researchers at the Cato Institute scoured the library catalogs of 200 randomly selected public schools and found a preponderance of progressive books. For example, while 39 percent of public school libraries carried Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You, only one school carried its centrist/conservative counterpart, Woke Racism.

Authors and advocates lamenting these “book ban” laws would likely take umbrage if I tried to get socially conservative books such as Ryan T. Anderson’s What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense or When Harry Became Sally into school libraries or (God forbid) excerpts onto health curricula. Many in the media did in fact clutch their pearls when Louisiana and Oklahoma mandated the instruction of biblical stories. And they have every right to express their disfavor about and seek to change the actions and decisions of these public institutions.

I’m inclined to joke that “We are all book banners when it’s books we don’t like” but that belittles what is really an important debate. What should we teach our children? What books should we have them read—and not read? Who from history shall we valorize and who shun? Plenty of considerations from literary quality to variety of genre can and should be in consideration when debating these questions. And appropriateness is absolutely one such criteria. Even authors at left-wing publications such as Salon have acknowledged, in a moment of hilarious understatement, that it might be inadvisable to distribute to children books that depict “adult bodies having sex” and “detailed drawings of genitals.”

Contrary to the Times’s framing, these recent pieces of legislation represent a productive and common sense step forward in a debate that’s been stuck in the muck and mire of partisan arguments for several years now. Creating a formal process with preset criteria will provide ideological opponents a productive means to hash out their disagreements and reach a compromise, even if perfect consensus or agreement is impossible.

To understand the benefits of these bureaucratic processes, consider another. Democracy is many things with many benefits, but it is fundamentally a process to foster political action and legitimacy. I may dislike politicians B and Q but I accept their authority, however grudgingly, because they won the formal voting process. It’s a process to manage even insurmountable disagreements.

So too, these processes lend credence to a school’s decisions about books in libraries and on curricula. No school will ever satisfy every parent, but more will accept the decisions if they’re made through formal procedures established through law. Moreover, the criteria themselves become the focus of a more productive debate. Utah, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee have saved their schools from making arbitrary decisions in response to either the passions of the loudest parents or the convictions of activist teachers.

So long as we have public schools, what we teach our children and the books that we include in curricula and school libraries will and should be a matter of public debate. These states have passed laws that should create more light and less heat in these arguments, and so should be celebrated for doing so, not subjected to New York Times hit pieces.

A recent article in the Boston Globe dug into a controversy that is dogging Massachusetts’s highly-regarded system of regional career and technical education (CTE) high schools. What makes the schools so unique is that they are highly selective. Only applicants with relatively high test scores and clean discipline records are admitted, but as the article explains, that leaves out a lot of kids who might benefit from the kinds of programs that they offer.

As far back as he can remember, Aaron Perkins knew he wanted to work with his hands. Childhood photos foreshadowed his ambitions: A tow-headed toddler wielding a toy chainsaw in one shot, the same tyke wearing floppy workman’s gloves in another. By age four, he’s on his back under a jacked-up toy tractor, absorbed in imaginary play.

It seemed inevitable, then, that Perkins—the great-grandson, grandson, and son of tradespeople—would attend his local vocational school when he reached the ninth grade.

But that never happened. He couldn’t get in.

The article highlights a dilemma that might be unusual in the CTE world but is common in public education writ large: When is it appropriate to limit admission—into a school, program, class, or curricular strand—to students with high test scores or similar attributes? This question arises most often in the context of gifted and talented and advanced education, especially with respect to the country’s most famous and academically selective public schools, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York and Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia.

Some people feel strongly that public schools should never practice selective enrollment. After all, one of the principles of public education is supposed to be that schools are open to everyone.

Of course, that’s never actually been the case, even for “regular,” open-enrollment, and “neighborhood” schools, which are typically reserved for families living within designated attendance boundaries. America’s leafy suburbs, in particular, contain many of what we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute once called “America’s private public schools.”

And yet, an absolutist position against selective-enrollment public schools carries its own problems. Not only would it lead to the demise of many excellent institutions that have long served their communities—and the nation—well, it would also mean eliminating opportunities for kids with niche needs.

Take the example of CTE centers. While the high standards of the Massachusetts schools are unusual, it’s common for CTE programs to screen out kids with disciplinary problems. If schools are going to take teens and teach them how to weld or offer apprenticeships in which adolescents are sent into corporate offices, they want to make sure that those young people have the maturity to handle the level of responsibility and function satisfactorily in the new setting.

And there’s little doubt that some educational benefit follows from grouping students of similar high achievement together, so they can all be challenged in ways they couldn’t be if their teachers also had to instruct lower-achieving peers at the same time. We don’t bat an eye, for example, when states create selective enrollment public universities. Indeed, flagship state universities—think University of Virginia, Ohio State University, or University of California, Berkeley—are typically celebrated, and for good reason. But they don’t pretend to serve everyone, even though they are “public.”

Yet obvious problems arise when programs like the Massachusetts CTE schools exclude kids who would likely succeed and benefit from them, which undoubtedly means thousands who today don’t “qualify.” So here are a few rules we might apply to make sure that selectivity and accessibility are balanced to the greatest extent possible.

1. When it is clear that there is an excess supply of qualified applicants, schools and programs that have limited slots should be replicated or expanded so that artificially-created scarcity is not the reason that well-qualified applicants are excluded.


2. The selection criteria should be tied to the actual skills, knowledge, and attributes needed for success in a given school or program. Measures of high academic achievement, like test scores, make sense for exam schools like Stuyvesant and Boston Latin, but humbler targets might work for CTE schools, such as being on grade level in reading and math. There, behavioral standards may matter more.


3. Selective enrollment schools and programs can only be justified if the services they offer would not be possible in a nonselective, heterogeneous setting. For example, advanced academic programs should go faster or deeper than what’s doable in a typical classroom. It’s not enough to just group all of the high achievers together and then have them tackle the same curriculum as everyone else.


4. Selective schools and programs should accept all well-qualified students by lottery. Admissions officers should set a high but reasonable bar for entry—whether based on test scores, behavioral records, performance in an interview, student essays, whatever. And everyone who clears that bar should be entered into a lottery, with winners chosen at random. A similar system has been suggested for America’s most selective universities. Rather than pretend that there’s a meaningful difference between kids with an SAT score of 1550 versus 1525, or a GPA of 3.9 versus 3.8, just put everyone who scores above a certain level and demonstrates a certain amount of well-roundedness into a hat and pick the winners by chance.

Back in Massachusetts, building more terrific CTE programs clearly must be part of the solution. Some could continue to serve the relatively-high-achieving students that they do now while others aim for students with more average academic abilities but a yearning to launch a career. After all, it’s possible to believe that not every school has to serve every type of student, while also making sure that selectivity is not just another excuse for inequality.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.

Cheers

• Advocates in California killed a controversial bill that would have eliminated performance assessments as teaching licensure requirements. —EdSource
• The stars of this year’s Olympic Games? Nerds and geeks. —Sally Jenkins, Washington Post
• School districts in Colorado are redesigning their gifted programs to better identify promising candidates, especially among students of color and students from low-income families. —Chalkbeat
• Despite some shortcomings, liberalism continues to shine as the superior philosophy of governance. But strong civic education is key to keeping it going. —Jonathan Rauch, Persuasion

Jeers

• A spike in verbal and physical aggression from students is driving teachers out of their schools, if not out of the profession entirely. —Education Week
• OpenAI created a tool to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper, but so far, the company has refused to release it. —Wall Street Journal

• “Shifting NYC school demographics: There are nearly as many Asian American as Black students.” —Chalkbeat
• Free meals for all children, longer-than-average Covid closures, and a focus on gender and racial equality: Did Tim Walz's policies improve Minnesota schools or cater to the teachers' union at the expense of test scores? —The Washington Post

This is the sixth in a series in which I examine issues in K–12 education that Ohio leaders should tackle in the next biennial state budget. Previous pieces covered the science of reading, funding for low-income pupils, interdistrict open enrollment, guarantees, and public charter schools. This essay looks at private-school scholarship programs.

Understanding that education isn’t one-size-fits-all, state lawmakers have worked to ensure that the individual needs of Ohio students are met. One way they’ve sought to accomplish this is through state-funded scholarships that help make private school options more accessible and affordable.

The earliest of these efforts focused on supporting families whose children were slated to attend low-performing schools and those raising children with disabilities. That was the right thing to do, as they were most in need of the financial assistance that allows them to access schools that work for their children. More recently, lawmakers have moved to expand scholarship eligibility to middle-income households, who also feel a financial pinch when paying tuition. And last year, lawmakers made all students eligible, with the proviso that wealthy parents receive scaled-back scholarships.

During the 2023–24 school year, some 150,000 students—just shy of one in ten statewide—participated in one of the state’s five scholarship programs (Autism, Cleveland, EdChoice, EdChoice Expansion, and Jon Peterson Special Needs). This almost doubles the number of participants compared to the prior year, with much of the uptick reflecting the new inclusion of private school students who had previously paid tuition without state-funded scholarship assistance.

Now that Ohio parents are more firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to their children’s education, the question is what choice-friendly lawmakers should do next. Should they keep pressing forward, or simply defend these gains? The answer is some of both. Here’s a look at how policymakers can work to advance and protect private school choice in the forthcoming budget.

Advancing choice

Low-income students typically benefit from having access to more resources. To its credit, the state provides extra funding for economically disadvantaged students attending public schools via a funding stream known as DPIA. However, it does not do this for low-income students in Ohio’s scholarship initiatives. In the next biennial budget, the legislature should add a poverty weight for low-income students in the Cleveland and EdChoice programs. Students from families with incomes below 185 percent of the federal poverty level—the historical income threshold for DPIA, as well as federal free-or-reduced-price lunch—could receive scholarships that are worth, for instance, 20 percent more than the base scholarship amount. An enhanced scholarship would fund valuable extra supports—e.g., tutoring or other supplements—while also helping to ensure that private-schools can serve low-income students well. The boost in scholarship amounts would also encourage private schools to serve more low-income students.

Another way that lawmakers can strengthen private-school choice is by providing resources for capital projects. Scholarships generally cover regular operating expenses, such as paying teacher salaries and utilities. But they are nowhere near sufficient to help fund larger projects like building renovations or expansions, which usually require hefty philanthropic support.

Some schools have access to deep-pocketed foundations, but not every school is as fortunate. To support more private schools’ facility needs, legislators should explore credit-enhancement or revolving-loan type programs that reduce debt servicing costs and make capital improvement more affordable. These could mirror the types of programs we’ve recommended for public charter schools, which also face significant facility challenges. Providing facility supports would allow existing private schools to expand, as well as incentivize education leaders to start new schools in underserved parts of the state. This could mean more private school options for more Ohio families.

Protecting choice

It’s no secret that the public school establishment is up in arms over the expansion (or as some put it, “explosion”) of private-school choice, as they see it as threatening their education monopoly and financial interests. They pull out all the rhetorical stops, and one of their most oft heard lines of attacks is that scholarships “siphon” money from public schools and leave them “underfunded.”

These criticisms are more myth than reality, and choice-friendly state lawmakers should consider ways to help clear up common misconceptions. Though not discussed below, they can also educate the public about the various ways in which private schools are held accountable—an issue I recently covered at length in another piece.

First, they should use their platforms to remind Ohioans of the significant taxpayer investments being made in public education. In FY23, traditional districts spent on average $15,428 per pupil, with big-city districts such as Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati all spending more than $20,000 per pupil. These funding levels—the highest on record—far exceed the value of Ohio’s scholarships. In addition, solid empirical evidence shows that the growth in private-school choice has done absolutely nothing to lessen per-pupil spending in Ohio’s school districts.

Second, policymakers should continue to make smart budgeting decisions. In spite of critics’ claims of funding cuts, lawmakers in the last budget cycle signed off on a hefty increase in traditional public school funding (on average, a 12 percent bump), even as they expanded scholarship eligibility. This was possible because they foresaw growth in scholarship participation and wisely enlarged the overall K–12 education budget to ensure sufficient funds for both public schools and scholarship programs. Despite the media portraying last year’s roughly $1 billion scholarship expenditure as a surprise, the amount came in just a touch above the Legislative Service Commission’s projected $965 million outlay. Future general assemblies—like this one successfully did—need to continue making sure that budget allocations take into account any anticipated growth in scholarship programs.

Third, lawmakers should improve the reporting of school finance data to ensure a clearer understanding of district funding levels. Specifically, they should:

• Include actual per-pupil funding amounts on district report cards. Presently, only an “adjusted” per-equivalent-pupil amount appears. While allowing for more appropriate spending comparisons between districts with varying demographics,[1] the equivalent amounts also significantly understate actual per-pupil funding. The report card, for example, indicates that Columbus spent $15,372 per equivalent pupil in FY23. Yet on an actual student basis, the district spent $24,467 per pupil—a figure that can only be found buried on another state web page. Reporters or citizens using the report card to locate a district’s basic per-pupil funding could easily get confused and mistakenly compare the equivalent amounts to the scholarship amounts, which aren’t “adjusted.”
   
• Report the amount districts generate on the state-required minimum 20 mill (or 2 percent) local property tax. A common trick employed by school choice opponents is to cite districts’ direct state funding, which may be lower than the scholarship amounts, to imply that lawmakers are gutting district funding. But this tactic ignores the state’s progressive approach to funding education, as well the state requirement for districts to levy a property tax of at least 20 mills to receive state aid. This minimum tax rate generates billions for districts—more in high-wealth ones—and is a crucial element that ensures public schools receive sufficient baseline funding. Lawmakers should provide a more complete picture of districts’ overall foundation aid by requiring both direct state support and revenues generated on the 20 mill tax to appear on their report card. In addition to providing more clarity about how Ohio provides sufficient base funding, this would ease concerns that scholarships are being funded at higher levels than public schools’ total foundation funding. 

***

Ohio’s private school scholarship programs have provided countless families with the financial support needed to access private schools. In the next budget, state lawmakers should seize the opportunity to further advance choice while also working to protect the opportunities that so many Ohio families rely on to find a school that best meets their child’s needs.

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

1. Fordham’s Aaron Churchill was on the radio Monday, talking about Science of Reading implementation in Ohio. Also on the guest list: the curriculum director of a small local school district. Everyone sounds really enthusiastic and positive about the switch away from the bad old ways of attempting to teach young kids to read and expresses confidence in better reading achievement to come. (WVXU-FM, Cincinnati, 8/12/24) Also on Monday, the Reading Recovery Council of North America filed an objection to a magistrate’s earlier ruling that denied a preliminary injunction to stop the switch to SoR. So the legal tussle drags on. Classic. (Gongwer Ohio, 8/12/24)
   
   

2. Also classic: Folks grouching that voucher expenses in the first year of Ohio’s EdChoice expansion to near-universal eligibility will likely end up costing not only less than budgeted, but also less than projected six months ago. I feel like it’s also noteworthy that both the original EdChoice Scholarship—for students attending low-performing district schools—and the Autism Scholarship both seem to have incurred more costs than that near-universal expansion the grouchers are hating on. But that’s just me. (Cleveland.com, 8/13/24)
    
3. Take it from somebody who knows—a school leader who didn’t close any schools during his tenure—it’s hard to close schools for so very many reasons. (Spectrum News 1, 8/12/24)
   
   

4. This piece on chronic absenteeism seems to me a bit more valedictory than it probably should. I look forward reading the full version of the yet-to-be-published research report that seems to indicate that the problem has been pretty well licked in some Ohio schools. (The Conversation, 8/13/24)
   
   

5. In Spanish: ¿Por qué no ha sucedido esto antes? In English: Why hasn’t this happened before? That is the somewhat uncomfortable question that lurks at the heart of this otherwise great story about the opening day of Painesville’s first Spanish/English bilingual charter school. That day is today—only a decade or two late given the reality of life in the area. Among the good stuff in this brief piece: the K-5 school is looking to have 100 students enrolled by the end of the first week; staffing is fully complete; most of the staff are fully bilingual; and the sky appears to be the limit for expansion of grades and services for families. ¡Fantastico! (News 5 Cleveland, 8/13/24)

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Earlier this summer, the Akron Public Schools (APS) board voted to become part of the statewide lawsuit seeking to dismantle Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship program. Coverage of their decision by the Akron Beacon Journal provides a variety of reasons for spending taxpayer dollars to join a fight aimed at limiting educational opportunities for students and families.

Many of these reasons are questionable. Board member Barbara Sykes, for example, notes that EdChoice “was supposed to be for disadvantaged students and schools that were not meeting the state standards in educating children…now it has just grown to everyone, regardless of what’s happening in their system.” 

Perhaps that argument would make sense coming from a school board member of a high-performing district. But for anyone familiar with “what’s happening” in the Akron system, Ms. Sykes’s reasoning should be hard to swallow. For those who aren’t, consider the district’s 2022–23 state report card, which shows that 65 percent of the district’s students failed to meet proficiency standards on state exams. APS moved only 19 percent of K–3 students who were not on track in reading during the prior school year to on-track. And despite praise for the district’s college and career academies, roughly 73 percent of the 1,612 credentials earned by the class of 2022 aren’t in demand by employers or are unlikely to lead to a stable, well-paying job.

Given that APS is doing this poor of a job educating students, the last thing board members should be concerned about is voucher litigation. In fact, the recent voucher expansion will have very little impact on the district, as the majority of APS students would have been eligible for vouchers anyway; forty-four of the district’s forty-seven schools were poor-performing enough to be included on the state’s EdChoice designated list for the upcoming school year. That’s 93 percent of the district’s schools.

Why are board members so intent on limiting options for families when the district’s own schools are so severely lacking? The Beacon Journal coverage offers several reasons. Many are financial, as the board will be asking citizens to vote for a levy this fall despite spending an eye-popping $21,475 of taxpayer funds per pupil during FY23. This new funding request comes in the wake of not only the dismal (and persistent) academic results outlined above, but also a district-commissioned performance audit that contains horrifying statements like “expectations for students are low” and “it is an understatement to say the culture is not one of accountability.” In APS, the audit continues, “consequences are nonexistent” and “poor performance is tolerated.”

However, the most eyebrow-raising reason for actively trying to prevent families from doing what’s best for their kids is the claim that it’s all for the sake of the greater good. According to board president Diana Autry, dismantling EdChoice aligns with the district’s goal of “getting people to understand the importance of public education” because it’s “a public good for all of us that is at risk.”

Autry isn’t wrong when she says that public education is important. But she is wrong when she implies that choosing an alternative to a district school means people don’t value or understand the importance of public education. I can’t speak for all Akron families in this regard. But I can certainly speak for my own.

I spent most of my formative years in a creaky old house with forest green carpet that was located just a few blocks from the Summit County Juvenile Court building and a mere two and a half miles from the current location of LeBron James’s I Promise school. A few months after my sixth birthday, during the summer of 1995, my parents moved my sisters and me to a different home in a nearby suburb. Education was their primary motivation for the move. They wanted their children to attend great public schools, and the APS buildings in our neighborhood didn’t fit the bill.

Up until then, my parents had dealt with the city’s lackluster schools by sending my older sister and me to a nearby private school. Doing so was expensive; EdChoice didn’t exist back then, and the only way my parents could afford tuition was by tucking away their annual tax return. It was unsustainable; my younger sister was set to enter kindergarten in the fall of 1996, and there was no way they could afford to send all three of us to private schools. It also wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted us in public schools. My mom, who not only graduated from a public school, but spent decades working in them, was especially bullish about public education.

But valuing public education—actively wanting to enroll in district schools—didn’t mean it was the right choice. The schools available to us were chronically underperforming and weren’t expected to improve any time soon. They weren’t safe, either, at least not in my neighborhood. Like millions of other families, if my parents wanted us to have access to high-performing and safe public schools, they had no choice but to move to a new district. But also like millions of others, we couldn’t afford to move, given our family income. The only reason our 1995 move was possible was because of an unexpected insurance settlement that gave my parents the funds to relocate to a suburb specifically chosen for its excellent public schools. 

It’s been nearly thirty years since my family moved out of the city. A lot has changed since then. Archie the Snowman has moved (but isn’t gone, thank goodness). The empty lot where my sisters and I used to ride our bikes is no longer empty. But the quality of the schools in my old neighborhood—and the rest of the district, too—hasn’t improved. Thousands of families in Akron are just like mine. They want better for their kids but can’t afford to move to find it. They rely on EdChoice scholarships to brighten their kids’ futures.

Meanwhile, board members at APS—those who are partly responsible for the abysmal academic outcomes in my hometown—seem unconcerned with what families want or need. Rather than focusing on improving the schools they oversee so that families actually want to enroll their children, they seek to eliminate other options and force them to attend their “assigned” school, without any regard to whether that school is high quality, safe, or the right fit.

If EdChoice ceases to exist and APS continues to underperform, those who can afford to go elsewhere will. As for everyone else? Well, they’ll just have to settle for low-performing schools. You know, for the greater good.

Dual enrollment (DE) is a catch-all term for the means by which students earn college credit while still in high school (or middle school). But that singular term covers a number of pathways with varying structures and delivery models. Do those differences impact student outcomes? And can program structure help ensure quality? A new report sought to find out.

A trio of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin examined data from the Lone Star State, which leads the nation in DE participation. Specifically, they identified over 108,250 high school students who entered ninth grade at traditional districts in 2015 or 2016 and who took at least one DE course within four years. The analysis focuses solely on DE delivered by a community college, thereby excluding any four-year institutions, and does not include students attending charter schools or any district school that integrated early college curricula with high school coursework. Although this results in an incomplete picture of the DE landscape, the findings are numerous and interesting. Here are a handful of important nuggets:

• The vast majority of students in the sample (81 percent) took only academic courses (the researchers’ term, covering things like English, biology, and psychology), while another 12 percent chose only career and technical education (CTE) courses like construction management and HVAC technology. The remaining 7 percent took a mix of both types of courses.

• Higher-achieving high schoolers (identified based on average State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness scores) favored academic-only college courses.

• The vast majority of DE students began taking college courses in eleventh and twelfth grade, but a larger proportion of CTE-only students (17 percent) started in ninth or tenth grade. The researchers note that this is likely due to the lower readiness requirements for CTE courses at the community college level.

• A large majority of both academic and CTE courses were taken solely in-person, versus online or hybrid. Only 10 percent of CTE and 34 percent of academic DE sections were offered solely online.

• Fifty-six percent of the in-person CTE courses taken by students were delivered on college campuses, 32 percent on high school campuses, and 12 percent at other locations. Approximately 46 percent of in-person academic DE courses were delivered on college campuses, 32 percent at high schools, and 22 percent at other locations.

• For both course types, the majority of DE sections were comprised exclusively of high school students. Academic courses, however, were more likely to include both high schoolers and college students.

• Forty-five percent of academic course sections were taught by non-tenure-track (NTT) community college faculty, 37 percent were taught by high school teachers, and 12 percent were taught by tenure-track (TT) or already-tenured faculty. For CTE courses, 46 percent were taught by high school teachers, with 43 percent taught by NTT college faculty and just 8 percent by TT/tenured faculty.

As for student learning, taking courses too early, mixing college undergrads with high school DE students, and taking courses fully online are all negatively associated with course passage and final grade. For example, regression models show that taking a DE course in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades are all negatively associated with course completion and course grades compared to waiting to take the same DE class in twelfth grade. This holds true for both academic and CTE courses. Interestingly, the researchers hypothesize that stronger course outcomes among high school seniors may be related to better programmatic support for them (from both their high school and college teachers/counselors) at that point in time—closer to actual college-going—than to issues of student readiness. However, lack of student preparation and readiness for college courses cannot be ruled out for any of the negative outcomes.

For academic DE courses, taking the course somewhere other than the student’s high school (like on a college campus) is negatively associated with passing the course and with their final grade. For students in CTE DE courses, taking the course at the college rather than at the high school is also negatively correlated with final grade, but taking the CTE course at another location—not the high school or a college—positively predicts both course passage and final grade.

Having a college instructor rather than a high school teacher is generally associated with a lower probability of passing the course and a lower final grade. Students in academic course sections with full-time NTT instructors experienced a 1.6-percentage-point decrease in their probability of passing the course and a 0.04-unit decrease in final grade, compared with students in sections with high school teachers. The only exception is that, for academic courses, taking DE with a part-time NTT faculty member instead of a high school teacher is positively associated with course grade, although it negatively predicts passing the course.

As to future college-going, passing a DE course is associated with an 11.9-percentage-point increase in the probability of a student enrolling in any Texas postsecondary institution after high school for students taking academic DE courses, and a 10.0-percentage-point increase for those taking CTE DE courses. Academic DE students enrolling in college tend to opt for four-year institutions, while their CTE counterparts tend to opt for community colleges. Taking DE courses early in high school (before 12th grade) is negatively correlated with enrolling in any Texas college, but the relationship is only significant for CTE DE students.

Limitations of the research include the absence of charter school students and early-college high school students—to say nothing of four-year colleges—as well as a focus on final grades and course passage to the exclusion of all other possible measures of quality. There is some analysis of differentiation of outcomes per various instructor types, but no data to indicate whether DE provided at high schools by high school teachers might have lower standards than DE courses taken on college campuses and taught by professors. More research is needed to get the true picture of the value of DE in all its forms. But some takeaways might be worth the attention of high schools and postsecondary institutions: Students appear to need a lot of support to excel in tough classes, class location and teachers can impact outcomes, and that online-only classes are not the ideal means for launching most high schoolers successfully into the college world, even if they do expand DE access.

SOURCE: Wonsun Ryu, Lauren Schudde, and Kimberly Pack-Cosme, “Dually Noted: Examining the Implications of Dual Enrollment Course Structure for Students’ Course and College Enrollment Outcomes,” American Educational Research Journal (July 2024).