“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 Postsummed 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 OnTrackand 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, TennesseeCANand 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.
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,” writesWashington 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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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 especiallyprominent feature of successful charter schools, notably thoseof 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:
In general, teachers in charter and private high schools are more likely to believe that their students will complete four-year college degrees.
In hindsight, teachers in charter and private schools were also more likely to overestimate students’ actual degree attainment.
In general, students in charter and private schools are more likely to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.”
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.
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 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
Now that the most acute phase of the Covid crisis is over, public conversation has turned to the millions of students who are still struggling academically and emotionally—and how our nation’s schools ought to respond. Decisions that education leaders make right now will determine whether this generation of students recovers or continues to lose ground. That’s why policies that lower expectations—such as rescinding “third-grade reading guarantees” or keeping pandemic-era no-grading policies in effect—are so troubling.
Are we really helping students by lowering the bar? What sorts of expectations should teachers set as they begin to dig out? And what can research and prior experience—particularly from the charter sector, where the need for high expectations has long been a rallying cry—teach us about how to approach this monumental challenge?
Conducted by American University’s Seth Gershenson, this study uses nationally representative survey data to explore how teacher expectations differ by sector, and how they affect achievement, attainment, and other outcomes.
To read the full report and its implications for educational leaders and policymakers, scroll down or download the PDF (which also includes the appendices).
Foreword
By Amber M. Northern and David Griffith
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.[1] Others softened their grading policies[2]—or eliminated letter grades altogether.[3] Some teachers moved away from assigning “homework” on the grounds that students were already home and probably spending too much time on screens.[4]
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 most acute phase of the Covid crisis seemingly behind us, 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,[5] pandemic-related learning loss remains a disaster that has disproportionately affected poor and historically marginalized students.[6] According to the latest NAEP results, students nationwide—and in every state—have lost the equivalent of twenty years of progress in math and reading.[7] And those are just the academic costs: Nine out of ten schools report that the pandemic has also impeded students’ socioemotional development.[8]
How education leaders respond to this moment will determine in large part whether students recover or continue their precipitous slide. For example, some states have already chosen to rescind their “third-grade reading guarantees” and pass nonreaders along to fourth grade.[9] And in some places, no-grading policies are still in effect.[10] Even some postsecondary institutions are now proposing to help students “adapt to college” by forgoing grades in the freshmen year.[11] “It’s not the kids’ fault that they’re behind,” the thinking goes, “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,[12] and a recent Fordham study detected lasting benefits for students whose teachers were tougher graders.[13] 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).[14]
Although many schools say they want their students to reach for the stars, high expectations are an especially prominent feature of successful charter schools,[15] especially those of the “no-excuses” variety.[16] 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,[17] it’s not clear how much of their success is attributable to higher expectations per se.
Accordingly, this new study seeks to understand better the role that high expectations should play in our nation’s 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 to Professor Seth Gershenson of American University, who is well known for his previous 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 (including but not limited to college completion).
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 effect on long-run outcomes such as college completion, 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.[18]
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 professional development on the subject, in addition to being open with staff when it comes to 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 of course, when choosing a school, most parents consider whether a place 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,[19] student-initiated “mental-health days,”[20] 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?
Introduction
Although we don’t know as much as we’d like about what makes for an effective teacher, evidence is coalescing around the importance of high standards and high expectations, which seem to boost an array of student outcomes, including test scores, college completion, and everything in between.[21] We also know that parent and student expectations matter. For example, girls’ higher expectations for educational attainment are a primary reason the gender gap in school performance has reversed in recent decades.[22]
Yet, despite the fact that many charters are founded on the mantra of accountability, rigorous standards, and high expectations, surprisingly little is known about how expectations—including but not limited to those of teachers—operate in the charter school context. Much the same can be said about private schools, which often have a specific focus on college prep.
Understanding whether there are sectoral differences in the level and impact of teachers’ expectations for students could provide new insight into the mechanisms through which charter schools boost student achievement. Ultimately, it could improve how we recruit and develop educators for all sectors.
To look into these differences, we analyze nationally representative survey data from the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), which track the cohorts who were in the tenth grade in 2002 and 2009, respectively. Because they capture several postgraduation years, they tell us a great deal about students’ postsecondary schooling and early work histories.[23]
Background
Students at every level frequently articulate their preference for, and the importance of, teachers who believe in them.[24] Similarly, parents and educators have long sensed that high expectations on the part of teachers are critical to children’s success. However, the modern debate over whether and how such expectations affect child development has its origins in the classic psychology experiment conducted by Rosenthal and Jacobson, in which teachers were told that some (randomly selected) students were unusually talented.[25] Famously, these students went on to display larger test-score gains, a result sometimes dubbed the Pygmalion Effect. Yet successive attempts to replicate this provocative finding yielded mixed results.[26] And of course, experimentally manipulated beliefs about students are not necessarily the same as “real” expectations. Consequently, some researchers have used quasi-experimental methods alongside high-quality survey and administrative data, with the goal of teasing out the impacts of teachers’ real-world expectations and biases.
Such analyses are challenging, as a host of other factors could influence both teachers’ expectations and children’s outcomes, and only in the past decade has credible evidence emerged on the importance of expectations.[27] For example, one recent study used administrative data from North Carolina to document the arguably causal effects on students’ academic achievement (measured by end-of-year standardized tests) of having a high-expectations teacher in grades 3–8.[28] Similarly, the study that laid the groundwork for the present study used a nationally representative survey of U.S. tenth graders in which two teachers of each student were asked how much education they expected the student to complete; the authors found that all teachers were overly optimistic, on average, and that optimistic teachers significantly increased the chances that their students would ultimately complete a college degree.[29]
Meanwhile, a culture of high expectations is a common feature of many successful charter schools,[30] especially those that have taken what has been called a “no-excuses” approach to high achievement (e.g., KIPP).[31] These lofty expectations generally start with the school leadership and teachers but are expected to trickle down to students and parents as well. However, because these schools are also known for qualities such as increased instructional time, consequential behavioral policies, and an explicit focus on boosting student achievement,[32] it’s hard to determine the extent to which these inputs and practices—as opposed to high expectations per se—are responsible for their success. Ditto for private schools, which typically have greater resources and a better-off student body, making it difficult to distinguish a culture of high (optimistic) expectations from accurate expectations based on the many advantages enjoyed by private school students, just as it’s hard to distinguish the impact of those expectations from other home and school inputs.
In short, despite the apparent connection between high teacher expectations and mission-driven charter and private schooling, much remains to be examined.
Data and Methods
Data for this study come from two sources: the ELS and the HSLS.[33] In addition to being nationally representative, these surveys are longitudinal, meaning they track participants from their early years in high school through college and into the labor force. Specifically, the ELS conducted follow-ups four and ten years after the initial survey, when respondents were about twenty and twenty-six years of age, respectively. Moreover, both surveys contain rich information about individual students, teachers, and schools.
Importantly, every student in the ELS was assessed by at least two teachers, each of whom was asked, “How far in school do you expect this student to get?” In contrast, the closest thing to measuring teachers’ expectations in the HSLS is a question about students’ assessments of their teachers’ general expectations for students in the school. Specifically, ninth graders were asked to what extent they agreed with the statement, “Your math teacher thinks all students can be successful.” Finally, both datasets include straightforward measures of student and parent expectations for the student’s future educational attainment. To simplify the analysis, we generally collapse these responses into binary indicators for “expects at least a four-year college degree.” For the exact wording of each survey question, see Appendix A.
Defining High Expectations
A culture of high expectations is much more than narrow beliefs about whether a student will pass a specific test or complete a specific degree. Indeed, there are other routes to a stable and fulfilling life and other dimensions on which teachers might hold and espouse optimistic beliefs about their students’ chances for success in school and in life. Still, most of our analysis defines “high expectations” in terms of beliefs about eventual educational attainment—specifically, the completion of four-year degrees—because they are a well-defined, readily available, and generally agreed-upon measure of success. Our definition would have been different had teachers been asked to choose between expecting a bachelor’s degree or expecting an apprenticeship in a trade that leads to stable employment and comfortable wages.
Hence, a teacher’s belief that a student can complete a four-year degree is best understood as a proxy for trusting more generally in that student’s potential to grow, learn, overcome obstacles, and experience success. What’s more, we would find similar results and patterns if instead we focused on “expects a high school diploma”—and it’s hard to argue that failing to complete high school is optimal for anyone in the modern economy. Receipt of a college degree is also correlated with many other positive traits (e.g., effort, persistence, and self-control).[34]
This study seeks answers to the following questions:
1. To what extent do teachers’ expectations for their students—and students’ perceptions thereof—differ by school sector?
2. How accurate are teachers’ expectations?
3. To what extent are any sectoral differences in expectations due to differences in student or school characteristics?
4. To what extent does the impact of teachers’ expectations on students’ long-term outcomes differ by school sector?
To answer the first two research questions, we compare average teacher expectations across sectors and compare expectations to actual student outcomes, respectively. To answer question three, we control for observable school and student characteristics. The school level characteristics we adjust for include school size (enrollment), locale, and the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The student-level characteristics we adjust for include race and sex, mother’s educational attainment, family income, language spoken at home, and standardized math score at the end of ninth grade.
To answer the final research question, we exploit the fact that two teachers assessed each student in the ELS. This allows us to control for one teacher’s expectations when gauging the impact of another’s, thus accounting for any unobservable student characteristics insofar as both teachers observe them. In a nutshell, we are comparing students with similar academic backgrounds, sociodemographic characteristics, and expected educational outcomes according to one teacher—who differ only in what a second teacher expects of them.
For more on the model, see Appendix B. For more on the causality premise, see Appendix C.[35] For more on data not presented, see Appendix D.
A Word about Confounding Factors
It may seem odd when comparing average expectations across school sectors to adjust for variables like prior academic achievement, considering that those sorts of things should influence teachers’ expectations. But that’s exactly why the adjustment is informative: so we can understand whether the higher expectations observed in private and charter schools merely reflect the students in those schools being better prepared, teachers in different types of schools forming different expectations for otherwise similar students, or some combination of the two. Though we stop short of making causal claims about the effect of school sector on teachers’ expectations, it is still useful to think of these observed student and school characteristics as potential confounding factors, meaning they that might jointly influence both teachers’ expectations and the type of school in which they’re teaching.
If students from better-off households are more likely to enroll in private schools, for instance, then they are likely to have objectively better odds of completing a college degree than their peers in public schools, even if the private school itself doesn’t confer an additional advantage. In this sense, controlling for prior test scores is no different than controlling for family income, as we want to see whether expectations vary across sectors for students who are otherwise similar. Of course, we can only adjust for the factors that are observed in the dataset, and there may be many other dimensions on which students differ, things that teachers observe but that we cannot “see.” Usually, though, the observed and unobserved confounding factors would push in the same direction. Because we tend to find that the sectoral gaps in expectations remain—and, in some cases, become larger—after making these adjustments, we feel comfortable interpreting them as real differences across school type in how teachers form expectations and not merely the result of different types of students enrolling in different types of schools.
Findings
Finding 1: Teachers in charter and private high schools are more likely than their district counterparts to expect their students to complete four-year college degrees.
Collectively, teachers in traditional (district-operated) public high schools expected slightly fewer than half of their students to complete four-year college degrees (Figure 1). In contrast, private school teachers expected about 80 percent of their students to complete such degrees. In charter schools, math teachers were roughly halfway between these extremes, while English language arts (English) teachers held expectations that were closer to their district counterparts. Again, these are raw averages that do not adjust for student or school characteristics (which we’ll do next).
Figure 1. Teachers in charter and private high schools are more likely than their district counterparts to expect their students to complete four-year college degrees.
Note: This figure shows the percentage of ELS students whose math and English teachers expected them to earn a four-year college degree (or more).
Importantly, the charter and private school advantages in teacher expectations are not due to observable differences in student or school characteristics (Figure 2). In fact, the gap between charter school and traditional public school teachers’ expectations increases after making those regression adjustments, suggesting that the charter advantage is (if anything) understated due to unobserved selection.[36] The private school advantage, on the other hand, shrinks by about one-third after making these adjustments, in large part due to the household-income disparity present in the raw comparisons, though it still remains large and statistically significant.
Figure 2. Even after adjusting for student and school characteristics, charter and private school teachers have higher expectations than teachers in traditional public schools.
Note: Bars represent the difference between charter or private school and traditional public school teachers’ expectations before (raw) and after adjusting for student and school characteristics. The underlying regression estimates for this exercise are reported in Appendix Table D2.
It’s interesting that, while the private school advantage is similar across subjects, the charter advantage is notably larger among math teachers. Mechanically this is because charter English teachers’ expectations are lower than charter math teachers’ expectations; in traditional public schools, math and English teachers’ expectations are quite similar (Figure 1). Why might this be? One possible explanation for this is that in charter schools that foster a general culture of high expectations, it may be easier for math teachers to buy into the idea that all students can succeed because most math learning takes place in schools and/or because math achievement is measured more objectively than is English achievement. Finding 2 provides some evidence of this.
Finding 2: Teachers in charter and private schools are more likely to overestimate students’ actual degree attainment.
Previous research suggests that on average, teachers are overly optimistic in the sense that they expect more students to complete a four-year college degree than actually do.[37] Given the sectoral gaps in high expectations identified in Finding 1, a natural follow-up question is whether those gaps mimic sectoral gaps in college-graduation rates. We examine this question by checking to see what percentage of teachers’ stated expectations (when students are in the tenth grade) turn out to be incorrect eight years later.
First, however, let’s look at accuracy rates. Overall, both math and English teachers in the ELS are correct about 71 percent of the time, meaning they accurately predict whether students will or will not complete a four-year degree. These accuracy rates are fairly similar across sectors, particularly in traditional public schools and private schools. However, charter school math teachers are something of an outlier, with a 62 percent accuracy rate. Of course, the way in which a teacher is wrong matters, as being wrong about a student who eventually completes college implies pessimism, which is potentially harmful, whereas being overly optimistic is mostly harmless.
Decomposing the inaccuracy of teachers’ expectations separately by sector and by students’ eventual attainment reveals a few interesting patterns. Figure 3 shows that traditional public school teachers tended to be more pessimistic than their charter and private school peers. This led them to be both more accurate in identifying students who would fail to graduate college but also less accurate in identifying students who did go on to earn a college degree. Math and English teachers in traditional public schools were inaccurate for about 15 percent of eventual college graduates and for about 35 percent of those who did not graduate college. These figures are in stark contrast to private school teachers, who were more likely to err on the side of optimism and thus were inaccurate about the prospects of less than 10 percent of college graduates but more than 60 percent of students who didn’t graduate college. Private school teachers, one might say, had unrealistic expectations about how many of their students would eventually graduate college. That, of course, may be related to the “everyone from here goes to college” signal sent by many private schools.
Charter school teachers’ inaccuracy tends to be somewhere in between traditional public school and private school teachers. The most notable difference between charter school and traditional public school teachers’ inaccuracy rates is in math teachers’ predictions: charter school math teachers were twelve percentage points (33 percent) more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to inaccurately predict that their students would graduate from college. In other words, they were overly optimistic.
Figure 3. Traditional public school teachers tend to be more pessimistic than their charter and private school peers when it comes to students' actual degree attainment.
Note: This figure shows the percentage of teachers who were incorrect about the actual eventual attainment of college graduates (defined as overly pessimistic) and nongraduates (defined as overly optimistic) separately by subject and sector.
Finding 3: Students in charter and private schools are more likely than their district counterparts to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.”
Like teachers’ actual expectations, students’ perceptions of teachers’ expectations seem to differ by sector (though they are generally not statistically significant at traditional confidence levels). For example, charter students were fourteen percentage points likelier than their traditional public school counterparts to “strongly agree” with the statement that their math teacher “thinks all students can be successful” (Figure 4). Moreover, like sectoral differences in teacher expectations, sectoral differences in students’ perceptions of teacher beliefs are not driven by observable differences between students and schools (see Appendix D, Table D3).
Figure 4. Students in charter and private schools are more likely than their district counterparts to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.”
Note: This figure shows the percentage of ninth graders who strongly agreed or agreed with the statement, “My math teacher thinks all students can be successful,” separately by school sector.
Intuitively, if students aren’t convinced that their teachers believe in all students’ ability to succeed, then at least some students may feel that their teacher doesn’t believe in them personally.
How do parent and student expectations differ by sector?
Although this study focuses on sectoral differences in teacher expectations, parent and student expectations also differ by sector (Figure 5). For example, more than nine out of ten private school parents expect their children to complete a four-year college degree, as do a similar percentage of private school students. Like the sectoral patterns observed in teacher expectations, charter school parents’ expectations are lower than those of private school parents but 7 to 9 percent higher than the expectations of their district counterparts. This is true for students’ expectations in the HSLS survey, as well. In fact, the only case in which charter expectations were not notably higher than in traditional public schools was among students in the ELS survey, where average expectations were about the same in the two public sectors.
Figure 5. In general, students and parents in charter and private schools have higher college-completion expectations than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
Note: This figure shows the percentage of ELS and HSLS students (and parents) who expected that they (or their child) would earn a four-year college degree (or more) separately by school sector.
Like the differences in teachers’ expectations, these sectoral differences generally remain even after adjusting for student and school characteristics (Tables D4 and D5 in Appendix D). What accounts for these differences is less clear. For example, changing parent and/or student expectations is one of several plausible channels through which teacher expectations could affect students’ long-run outcomes.[38] However, parent and student expectations could be shaped by the same school culture and leadership attributes that shape teacher expectations—as well as by unobserved differences in motivation and preferences for educational attainment.
Finding 4: Regardless of sector, teacher expectations have a positive effect on long-run outcomes, such as college completion, teen childbearing, and receipt of public assistance.
Regardless of sector, high school teachers’ expectations that students will earn college degrees have a positive effect on at least three of the five long-run outcomes that we consider (Figure 6). For example, regardless of whether the teacher and student are in a traditional public school or a charter school, having a math teacher who fully expects a student to obtain a college degree (relative to one who thinks the student has no chance) boosts that student’s odds of college completion by about seventeen percentage points. Similarly, high teacher expectations for their students’ education reduce the chances that students will have children before the age of twenty by about three to six percentage points and reduce their probability of receiving public assistance at age twenty-six by approximately five percentage points. However, we don’t see similar impacts on the likelihood of marriage or employment (by age twenty-six).
For some outcomes (like employment), there is suggestive evidence that the effect of high teacher expectations may be bigger in charter schools (though due to small sample sizes, these differences aren’t statistically significant). In other words, the evidence suggests that the effects of high expectations are at least as big in charter schools as they are in traditional public schools.
Figure 6. Regardless of sector, high teacher expectations have a positive effect on at least three long-term outcomes of interest.
A. Effects of math teachers’ expectations
B. Effects of English teachers’ expectations
Note: These figures show the estimated effect on five long-term outcomes of having a tenth-grade math or English teacher who fully expects students to obtain at least a four-year college degree. The actual regression estimates are reported in Tables D6 and D7 of Appendix D.
Although some of these estimates may seem implausibly large, their magnitude is at least partly a consequence of the binary nature of the independent variable. Because of this feature of the data, what the estimates in Figure 6 capture is the effect of replacing a teacher who has zero faith in their student’s ability to complete a college degree with one who is certain that the student will do so. But of course, this scenario is unrealistic, so it makes more sense to imagine the effects of a more marginal change. For example, what would happen if a student’s teacher changed their confidence in the student’s ability to complete a college degree by twenty-five percentage points (e.g., from 50 percent to 75 percent confident)?
Roughly speaking, the estimates in Figure 6 imply that such a twenty-five-percentage-point increase in a teacher’s confidence increases the probability that a student will actually complete a four-year college degree by about 4.2 percentage points. Given that about 45 percent of the sample completed a college degree, this represents an increase of nearly 10 percent.[39]
Takeaways
Teacher expectations are higher in charter schools than in traditional public schools, even after accounting for sectoral differences in student and school characteristics. They’re highest in private schools, which is unsurprising given the “college-prep” aura of many private high schools, as well as their selected student body, plus the material advantages common to many of their pupils. What’s more, teacher expectations matter just as much, if not more, in charter schools as they do in traditional public schools. In other words, the data suggest that charter schools have an unambiguous “expectations advantage” over traditional public schools.
These results have at least three implications for policy and practice.
First, policymakers should continue to give charter schools flexibility to keep doing what they’re doing with respect to hiring and developing teachers who believe that all students can succeed. For example, prior research suggests that charter schools have more Black teachers than traditional public schools—in part due to relaxed certification requirements—and that the effects of “race match” are particularly large in charter schools.[40] This presumably leads to higher average expectations in charter schools that enroll nontrivial shares of non-White students, since White teachers tend to have lower expectations for students of color than for White students, all else being equal.[41] Similarly, many alternative certification programs, such as Teach For America, explicitly focus on and succeed in producing teachers who truly possess high expectations for all students.[42]
Second, education researchers and leaders of traditional public schools should try to learn from charter schools’ success on this front. After all, it may be that teachers’, parents’, and students’ expectations for the future are all driven by aspects of school culture that are theoretically transferrable (e.g., unusually strong school leadership or “college talk”).
Finally, concrete actions should be taken to ensure that as many teachers as possible do, in fact, have and espouse high expectations for their students. One way to approach this is in the hiring process (i.e., by treating high expectations as a teacher characteristic for which to select). For example, schools might try to hire from training programs known to emphasize high expectations for all or address the question during the interview process. However, 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 into their teacher-evaluation systems, by adopting light-touch professional-development interventions that increase teachers’ empathy and expectations for students, or by making them aware of this research.
Limitations
The analysis that is the basis for this study has several limitations.
First, although charter school teachers’ comparatively high expectations aren’t attributable to observable student or school characteristics, they could be attributable to unobservable characteristics. Consequently, the results that are the basis for findings one through three are perhaps best characterized as descriptive.
Second, because students aren’t randomly assigned to teachers with high expectations, the validity of the estimates in finding four depends on the degree to which controlling for one teacher’s expectations accounts for otherwise unobservable characteristics of students and teachers (for evidence that suggests it may, see Appendix C).
Third, although the two surveys that are the basis for the study included more than 15,000 students between them, after constructing the analytic sample of students with usable data, only about 500 of these students were enrolled in a charter school. Consequently, the estimates for charters are considerably less precise than those for traditional public schools.
Finally, any analysis that relies on survey data has inherent limitations. For example, participants’ responses could be subject to social-desirability bias. Also, while it is analytically necessary to collapse teachers’ expectations regarding students’ education into a binary indicator, interpreting the resulting estimates requires some assumptions about the distribution of teachers’ expectations and their relationship to long-run outcomes (e.g., that this relationship is linear, at least for the thickest part of the distribution) and about how the underlying probability that teachers place on students completing college maps onto their stated expectations.
[8] National Center for Education Statistics, “More than 80 Percent of U.S. Public Schools Report Pandemic Has Negatively Impacted Student Behavior and Socio-Emotional Development,” July 6, 2022, https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/07_06_2022.asp.
[14] Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the classroom,” The Urban Review 3, no. 1 (1968): 16–20, doi:10.1007/BF02322211.
[15] Julia Chabrier, Sarah Cohodes, and Philip Oreopoulos, “What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 57–84, doi:10.1257/jep.30.3.57; Roland G. Fryer, Jr., “Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1355–407, doi:10.1093/qje/qju011.
[16] Joshua D. Angrist et al., “Inputs and impacts in charter schools: KIPP Lynn,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 239–43, doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.239; Sarah Cohodes, Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap (Princeton, NJ: The Future of Children, 2018), https://futureofchildren.princeton.edu/sites/futureofchildren/files/resource-links/charter_schools_compiled.pdf; Philip M. Gleason et al., “Do KIPP Schools Boost Student Achievement?” Education Finance and Policy 9, no. 1 (2014): 36–58, doi:10.1162/EDFP_a_00119.
[17] Philip M. Gleason, “What’s the secret ingredient? Searching for policies and practices that make charter schools successful,” Journal of School Choice 11, no. 4 (2017): 559–84, doi:10.1080/15582159.2017.1395620.
[18] Nicholas W. Papageorge, Seth Gershenson, and Kyung Min Kang, “Teacher Expectations Matter,” Review of Economics and Statistics 102, no. 2 (2020): 234–51, doi:10.1162/rest_a_00838.
[21] Nicholas W. Papageorge, Seth Gershenson, and Kyung Min Kang, “Teacher Expectations Matter,” Review of Economics and Statistics 102, no. 2 (2020): 234–51, doi:10.1162/rest_a_00838; Andrew J. Hill and Daniel B. Jones, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Classroom,” Journal of Human Capital 15, no. 3 (2021): 400–31, doi:10.1086/715204; David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas, “D Do High Grading Standards Affect Student Performance?” Journal of Public Economics 88, no. 9–10 (2004): 1815–34, doi:10.1016/S0047-2727(03)00039-2; and Seth Gershenson, Great Expectations: The Impact of Rigorous Grading Practices on Student Achievement (Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2020), https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/great-expectations-impact-rigorous-grading-practices-student-achievement.
[22] Nicole M. Fortin, Philip Oreopoulos, and Shelley Phipps, “Leaving Boys Behind: Gender Disparities in High Academic Achievement,” Journal of Human Resources 50, no. 3 (2015): 549–79, doi:10.3368/jhr.50.3.549.
[23] Obviously, our data do not allow us to examine teacher expectations in grades K–9, which may be considerably different than what is reported for high school teachers in this study.
[26] Lee Jussim and Kent D. Harber, “Teacher Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Knowns and Unknowns, Resolved and Unresolved Controversies,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 2 (2005): 131–55, doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0902_3.
[27] Papageorge, Gershenson, and Kang, “Teacher Expectations Matter”; and Hill and Jones, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Classroom.”
[28] Hill and Jones, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Classroom.”
[29] Still, the degree to which White teachers are overly optimistic is significantly larger for White students than for Black students. See Papageorge, Gershenson, and Kang, “Teacher Expectations Matter.”
[30] Julia Chabrier, Sarah Cohodes, and Philip Oreopoulos, “What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 57–84, doi:10.1257/jep.30.3.57; and Roland G. Fryer, Jr., “Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1355–407, doi:10.1093/qje/qju011.
[31] Joshua D. Angrist et al., “Inputs and impacts in charter schools: KIPP Lynn,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 239–43, doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.239; Sarah Cohodes, Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap (Princeton, NJ: The Future of Children, 2018), https://futureofchildren.princeton.edu/sites/futureofchildren/files/resource-links/charter_schools_compiled.pdf; and Philip M. Gleason et al., “Do KIPP Schools Boost Student Achievement?” Education Finance and Policy 9, no. 1 (2014): 36–58, doi:10.1162/EDFP_a_00119.
[32] Philip M. Gleason, “What’s the secret ingredient? Searching for policies and practices that make charter schools successful,” Journal of School Choice 11, no. 4 (2017): 559–84, doi:10.1080/15582159.2017.1395620.
[33] Table D1 in Appendix D summarizes the characteristics of students in both datasets.
[34] In addition, if one subscribes to the notion that not everyone needs to attend college, even the tenth grade—when teachers in this study are asked about students’ future prospects—may be too soon for a teacher to know each student’s optimal path, providing yet another reason to encourage having high expectations for all. Plus, there’s scant evidence that unfounded optimism is harmful.
[35] This is the same identification strategy used—and cross validated by a structural measurement error model—by Papageorge, Gershenson, and Kang (2020).
[36] Specifically, we measure sectoral gaps using the estimated coefficients on charter and private school indicators from regressions that control (or don’t control) for a host of student and school covariates, including school size (enrollment), the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, mother’s educational attainment, family income, language spoken at home, and standardized math score from ninth grade. This argument is similar in spirit to bounding approaches to selection on unobservables—e.g., the following: Joseph G. Altonji, Todd E. Elder, and Christopher R. Taber, “Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables: Assessing the Effectiveness of Catholic Schools,” Journal of Political Economy 113, no. 1 (2005): 151–84, doi:10.1086/426036.
[37] Papageorge, Gershenson, and Kang, “Teacher Expectations Matter.”
[41] Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas W. Papageorge, “Who believes in me? The effect of student-teacher demographic match on teacher expectations,” Economics of Education Review 52 (2016): 209–24, doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.03.002.
[42] Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer, Jr., “The Impact of Voluntary Youth Service on Future Outcomes: Evidence from Teach For America,” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 15, no. 3 (2015): 1031–65, doi:10.1515/bejeap-2014-0187.
About this study
This report was made possible through the generous support of the Walton Family Foundation, the Louis Calder Foundation, and our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. In addition to those institutions, we are grateful to Andrew Hill, Associate Professor at Montana State University, and Brian Kisida, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, for their timely and lucid feedback. We also extend our gratitude to Pamela Tatz for copyediting and Dave Williams for designing the figures and tables. At Fordham, we would like to thank Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli for reviewing drafts; William Rost for handling funder communications; Victoria Sears for her role in dissemination; Lilly Sibel for developing the report’s cover art and coordinating the release; and Jeanette Luna for her assistance at various stages in the process.
Introduction
