The relationship between teacher and student has profound effects on learning. A new study explores whether schools can strengthen this relationship over time by keeping students with teachers for more than one year.

Teacher effectiveness is traditionally viewed as a fixed characteristic: Some teachers produce greater student achievement, others not so much. The goal of school leadership is to hire and retain the former and separate from the latter. However, recent scholarship suggests that teacher effectiveness is instead “dynamic and context-specific, evolving over time.” Certain teachers are more effective at teaching certain students. And as this relationship grows and deepens, better results are produced.

The study uses student and teacher information from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, which compiles data from the Tennessee Department of Education. The Volunteer State—long a champion of education reform—gathers sophisticated data about its students, so much so that all students can be linked to specific teachers in tested grades and subjects. This makes it possible to analyze almost all public school students in grades three through eight from spring 2007 to 2015, and most of their high school counterparts from 2007 to 2017, a dataset of almost 3.7 million students.

The study defines a repeat student-teacher match as a student having the same teacher for more than one school year. This broad definition encompasses various permutations. One form of repeat matching is looping, when a teacher moves to the next grade level with the same class of students. While practiced in some elementary schools, less than 2 percent of all teachers are loopers. “Unintentional looping” is far more common in the elementary grades. A teacher may be reassigned to a different grade in between school terms and turn out coincidentally have some students she/he has taught before, although the match isn’t always intentional.

Even more common are repeat matches in middle and high school. In these situations, many teachers are responsible for multiple classes in a given subject. A high school math teacher might teach algebra to freshmen, geometry to sophomores, and precalculus to juniors. Along the way, the same students may enroll in two of the classes or even all three. (The study omits students who repeat a grade with the same teacher.)

The researchers find that 44 percent of the sampled students had at least one repeat teacher over the course of their education, most commonly in the upper grades. Though just 2 percent of fourth grade students had a repeat teacher in a given school year, 11 percent of eighth grade students had one.

By using the Tennessee data to create statistical models, the researchers estimated students who had repeat matches would see a variety of benefits. Overall, having a repeat teacher was associated with an increase in test scores of 1.9 percentage points. Broken down by subject, the increase was 3.2 percentage points in math and 1.5 percentage points in English language arts. The effect of repeat relationships was stronger in math for high school students (+4.1 percentage points) than for students in grades three to eight (+2.4 percentage points). The reverse was true for ELA, where the effect was stronger for students in grades three to eight (+1.3 percentage points) than high school students (+0.7 percentage points). Positive effects were also seen in estimated behavioral outcomes. Having a repeat experience with a teacher reduced student absences by 0.5 percentage points and suspensions by 1 percentage point. All of these findings were statistically significant.

Differences became apparent when the estimates were broken down by student demographics. Students who were high performers the previous school year and White female students saw the biggest bump in academic achievement when repeating with a teacher. Lower performing students and Black and Hispanic males saw the largest reductions in absences, truancy, and suspensions. Having a repeat teacher reduced absences 3 percent for Black and Hispanic males.

The study has implications for school staffing. If there is evidence that extending relationships between students and teachers improves learning and behavioral outcomes, school leaders should make it standard practice. Intentional looping—mentioned above as accounting for less than 2 percent of teaching assignments—might become the norm in more elementary schools. Likewise, enrollment in middle and high school classes should prioritize keeping students and teachers together. Entire classes would not need to be preserved, as the study also demonstrated that classes of 50 percent repeaters had spillover effects for the students in the class who had not repeated.

The study suggests that rather than being a fixed quality, effectiveness is dynamic and dependent on the relationship between teachers and students. Multiple studies have shown the beneficial of having a teacher of color for students of similar backgrounds. Further research may suggest even more specific teaching relationships in which students may thrive. However, simply repeating a grade with a teacher may not be a panacea for low student achievement. More information is needed about the effects of repeating a grade with a minimally effective or ineffective teacher. And if a teacher needs multiple school years with a student to produce results, were they that effective to begin with? It’s a research area that demands more study.

SOURCE: Leigh Wedenoja, John Papay, and Matthew A. Kraft, “Second Time’s a Charm? How Sustained Relationships from Repeat Student-Teacher Matches Build Academic and Behavioral Skill,” EdWorkingPaper: 22-590, retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (June 2022).

Cheers

• Progressive school leaders in San Diego support extra pay for teachers in shortage areas, despite fierce resistance in the past. —Voice of San Diego
• Teachers can now use CRISPR curriculum kits to help students better understand biotechnology, biomedical ethics, and new career options. —The New York Times
• “Teaching all aspects of the U.S.’s story will help de-politicize education and foster democracy.” —William J. Bennett
• Iowa’s governor signs a bill that expands open-enrollment to permit transfers to any public K–12 school in the state at any time. —RadioIowa

Jeers

• Journalism’s public health coverage during the pandemic made many mistakes and contributed to America’s declining trust in the media. —The Grade
• “Behavioral issues, absenteeism at schools increase, federal data shows.” —The Washington Post
• Concerns rise about lowering the bar for teacher standards as “states relax teacher certification rules to combat shortages.” —Education Week

• A fifty-year longitudinal study of over 2,000 gifted students finds no connection between success and unhappiness. —The Wall Street Journal
• The story of Glenn Youngkin’s rise to political prominence in Virginia through education. —Time

1. We’re back after a holiday break and cleaning up a little bit of old news. Fordham’s Chad Aldis was among the folks talking to Gongwer about HB 583, the education Christmas stocking bill. It was signed into law by Governor DeWine at the end of June but was still a topic of discussion as July dawned. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/1/22)
   
   

2. The elected board of Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools voted this week to spend millions in federal Covid-relief funds to hire tutors for next school year. While I kind of hoped they might also spend big to expand that idyllic-sounding summer music camp we talked about in the clips last week, this also seems like an important project to help kids impacted by pandemic learning loss. Although it also seems like it might have been a good idea to have done something like this in 2020…or 2021…or earlier this year. (Cleveland.com, 7/4/22) For the second year in a row, Springfield City Schools will be using federal Covid-relief funds to buy school supplies—you know the stuff: pencils, crayons, scissors, notebooks, glue sticks, pocket folders, etc.—for all students in grades K-8. The estimated cost is a mere $117K this year. It’s going to take a lot more than that to spend down their money, I imagine. (Springfield News-Sun, 7/4/22)
   
   

3. Meanwhile, the elected board of Toledo City Schools voted last week to spend a portion of their per-student state funding to join the lawsuit against that very state on the subject of vouchers. While it feels like they are very late to this particular game, the level of blind, senseless animosity expressed here by certain elected board members is also quite high. (Toledo Blade, 7/1/22)
   
   

4. Back in May, teachers from one elementary in Marion City Schools stood before their elected board members and catalogued numerous instances of abuse they received from their young students. The board this week announced the hiring of a former Columbus City Schools administrator (and former state supe semi-finalist) with the hope that her extensive experience can help permanently “de-escalate” any ongoing problems. (Marion Star, 7/6/22)
   
   

5. Finally today, central Ohio’s large and growing Bhutanese-Nepali community runs their own awesome-sounding STEM summer camp. I would translate something positive into Nepali but I don’t think my operating system can properly render the characters. So insert the lyrics of your favorite “Hamilton” tune here instead. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/6/22)

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Editor’s note: This is the first edition of “Advance,” a new newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that will be written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. You can subscribe on either the Fordham Institute website or the newsletter’s Substack.

The case for gifted education—or advanced education, honors education, or whatever one decides to call it—is simple. Every student deserves educational experiences that help them reach their full potential. Some children, due to high achievement, ability, or potential, require something more than can be provided in the average classroom geared toward the average student. Schools should therefore offer distinctive and high-quality advanced programs and services for those who would benefit from them. These students come from every racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic background, so for American education to fail in this regard is to fail some of the country’s most marginalized children.

Yet failure has tended to be the norm for decades, most notably for those very children. One-third of schools don’t devote any time or effort, during school, after school, or on the weekend, to their gifted students. Among those that do, “programs” may be nothing more than meager supplements that are unlikely to make much of a difference to achievement. In schools that manage to offer more robust programming, the staff often consists of teachers who have not been trained to educate these students. And regardless of whether schools avoid all the preceding pitfalls, virtually all under-identify and therefore under-serve low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American children.

But glimmers of hope are appearing on the gifted horizon. Through self-reflection, high-quality research, external pressure, and on-the-ground work, the field is improving. And that ongoing progress—tracking it, celebrating it, examining it, critiquing it when it runs afoul—is what this new newsletter is about.

Future issues, to be published every other week, will also be shaped by my experiences in the field. I’ve been writing about and researching gifted education for a decade, including a 2016 book coauthored with Chester Finn, a handful of reports for the Fordham Institute, and scores of editorials and policy articles in newspapers and education outlets. I’m also a consumer. As a child, I participated in a substantial—and, as I know now, very rare—full-time pullout program between fourth and eighth grade, wherein I was grouped with other advanced students for almost all instruction, complete with different teachers, specialized curricula, and faster and deeper instruction. This program was especially formative for me, in many good and a few bad ways, and it prompted my lasting interest in this realm of K–12 education.

All this experience solidified in me two simple truths about gifted education: It is a clear and substantial good, and it can be much better than it is in most places and has been for decades. Two recent developments have given me hope that many others are coming to believe this, too. They suggest that high-quality advanced programs will persist in America and, just as importantly, that they will serve more of the children who would benefit from them—and deserve to benefit from them—especially kids from underserved backgrounds. The first development happened in San Francisco last month. The second took place over Zoom last week.

During the pandemic, San Francisco’s school board voted to suspend merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, the area’s most prestigious institution, and install a lottery-based system that was open to all students. Many residents, especially Asian-American voters, were incensed by the decision. And earlier this year, driven in no small part by the Lowell reform, the city overwhelmingly voted to recall three school board members, with more than 70 percent supporting each member’s ouster.

Last month, those efforts bore fruit when the board voted 4-3 to reinstate the school’s merit-based system, meaning entry will again be determined by applicants’ grades and test scores. Important, too, was the board majority’s commitment to, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “confront the real equity problems in the district while also supporting academic excellence.” Hispanic and Black students make up 12 percent and 2 percent of Lowell students, respectively, despite those figures being 28 percent and 6 percent citywide. So leaders have significant work to do in identifying many more of the marginalized students who would benefit from what Lowell has to offer—even if a majority of its present pupils are Asian-Americans, a marginalized population in its own right. For this to succeed, they should start well before it’s time to apply to Lowell. As my colleague Mike Petrilli has shown, the achievement and instructional gaps that lead to discrepancies in these programs open as early as kindergarten, and the more they widen the harder they are to overcome.

The second development, which occurred over Zoom, was the second meeting of the National Working Group on Advanced Education. There’s twenty of us, including academics, practitioners, and advocates, and we’re truly diverse in terms of ideology, race, gender, and geography. In this second of four gatherings, we covered four topics: supports for advanced students who are Black, Hispanic, and/or low-income; support for educators of advanced students; high-quality instructional materials; and how best to use ability or achievement grouping. (A full summary will soon be published on Fordham’s website.)

For a very long time, gifted education has been both excessively standardized and exclusive. It has generally erred in considering “giftedness” to be an inherent trait that a student either has or doesn’t, and it has treated it as applying to virtually all academic subjects, regardless of each child’s unique strengths and weaknesses. This has caused at least two significant problems. One is that students who are advanced in a given subject but aren’t, according to the school, “gifted” have been excluded from whatever passes for gifted programming in that subject. The second is that schools and their identification procedures for these offerings have been, almost everywhere, plagued by bias against students who are Black, Hispanic, low-income, and come from other underserved backgrounds. Many children from these populations who could and should enjoy the benefits of these programs have therefore been excluded—or at least never been sought out and included.

Everyone in our group agreed that these are problems that need to be solved. But members also offered ample evidence that efforts are already underway to chip away at them. They talked, for example, of a push toward a personalized “continuum of services” that replaces binary “gifted or not” thinking. This attempts to give individual students what they need in each academic subject. As the National Association for Gifted Children explains, these services range from students receiving services in regular classrooms, to learning in a mix of regular classes and some advanced ones, to being grouped most of the time with other advanced students, to skipping grades entirely.

Other members also summarized fantastic work in transforming gifted education so it better supports, identifies, and retains students from underserved backgrounds. For example, one member explained how he and colleagues had taken an off-the-shelf program for advanced students and made it culturally relevant. In a low-performing school that predominately served Black students from a low-income community, they took an afterschool math program and paired it with basketball, which they designed specifically for Black males. Combining the activities in this manner helped the school increase the number of Black students identified as gifted from four to thirty-five in just four years.

The working group member said this worked, in part, because early success helped alleviate teachers’ “gifted referral fatigue.” This is a term coined by Dr. Tarek Grantham, a professor at the University of Georgia and a member of that working group, that represents his observations of teacher referral patterns. For years, educators had seen potential in many of their Black male students and referred them to gifted programming, but they kept being rejected, so the referrals ceased. It also helped students who started the program stick with it because it offset the effects of “stereotype threat.” This is where a person’s performance in a given situation is hindered by negative stereotypes about the abilities of that person’s groups. Black males, the member said, were worried about how they’d perform or what their peers would think of them. The work done by the program leaders to ease these concerns helped them retain more students and ensure that they kept receiving its benefits.

It's wonderful and striking that, in America as we pass Independence Day 2022, such a diverse group can agree on a unified way to accomplish so many things: getting more schools to adopt more gifted education services, especially those that educate marginalized populations; ensuring that such services are high quality and flexible and meet individual student needs; making those services more inclusive by offering them to every child who may realistically benefit; communicating all of this in a manner that emphasizes the benefits for those from underserved backgrounds; and implementing culturally responsive adaptations so as to much better prepare, identify, retain, and support marginalized students in advanced programs.

Gifted education is a fine thing when done well. For far too long, it hasn’t been. But with support for maintaining it in places as progressive as San Francisco, as well as a bipartisan vision for doing it better everywhere and for students of all backgrounds, there is hope that the progress already underway will continue.

Future editions of the newsletter will give updates on how that progress is going, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. If you have any ideas, leads, questions, or concerns, please email me at [email protected]. My hope is that we can help advance this field together.

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QUOTE OF NOTE

“‘[Success] doesn’t make us unhappy,’ Dr. Lubinski said. ‘People who choose to be highly successful in their careers shouldn’t worry that they’re putting themselves at risk for medical or psychological harm.’ This might sound intuitive to anyone other than Freud. Of course success doesn’t make us unhappy! But what’s remarkable is how counterintuitive it happens to be.”

—“The happiness data that wrecks a Freudian theory.” The Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen, June 30, 2022.

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THREE RECENT STUDIES TO STUDY

• “The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs,” by Scott J. Peters. Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 2, 2022.
  “K–12 gifted and talented programs have struggled with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, native language, and disability inequity since their inception... The purpose of this article is to outline why such inequity exists and why common efforts to combat it have been unsuccessful. In the end, poorly designed identification systems combined with larger issues of societal inequality and systemic, institutionalized racism are the most likely culprits.”


• “Reflections on Experiences at a Residential Science and Math High School: An Alumni Survey,” by Hope E. Wilson. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, Volume 44, Issue 4, 2021.
  “This study examines the results of a retrospective survey from one [residential science high school that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics], including alumni for more than 20 years after graduation. The results indicate that the alumni have high levels of educational attainment and careers in STEM fields. In addition, the alumni perceive their experiences at the RSHS to have been positive, and that the RSHS prepared them for their educational pursuits, careers, social experiences, and future leadership positions.”


• “Psychological Well-Being of Intellectually and Academically Gifted Students in Self-Contained and Pull-Out Gifted Programs,” by Trent N. Cash and Tzu-Jung Lin. Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 3, 2022.
  “This study examined the psychological well-being of students enrolled in two gifted programs with different service delivery models. Students...reported different patterns of psychological well-being when compared with students in the no gifted services control group.”

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WRITING WORTH READING

• “Johns Hopkins summer programs canceled as some students are en route.” The Washington Post, Donna St. George, June 27, 2022.


• “Helping gifted students get through summer.” The Washington Post, Letters to the Editor in response to news of cancelled Johns Hopkins summer programs, July 1, 2022.


• “The happiness data that wrecks a freudian theory.” The Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen, June 30, 2022.


• “NYC’s specialized high schools continue to admit few Black, Latino students, 2022 data shows.” Chalkbeat, Christina Veiga, June 15, 2022.


• “3 Out of 4 Gifted Black Students Never Get Identified. Here’s How to Find Them.” Education Week, Sarah D. Sparks, June 03, 2022.


• “How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school.” Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Michael J. Petrilli, June 2, 2022.

—

FYI

NAGC22 registration is now open

Happening in Indianapolis from November 17–20, this will be the National Association of Gifted Children’s 69th Annual Convention. Each year, it’s the largest gathering devoted to gifted and talented education. As its prospectus notes, the “convention will bring 2,000+ attendees in person from around the world who are dedicated to supporting the needs of high-ability children.” Learn more.

Research shows that many talented students shy away from a career in education due to salary concerns. As a result, increasing teacher salaries is often pitched as a potential solution for teacher shortages. But a recent paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University challenges the assumption that salary increases are the best method for investing in the teacher workforce by examining an alternative set of benefits and estimating how attractive teachers found them in comparison to salary bumps.

To determine teacher preferences, the researchers used an online survey that was emailed to teachers between November 2020 and January 2021. The final sample included a total of 1,030 teachers. Similar to the national teacher workforce, the sample was 75 percent female, 81 percent white, and contained a roughly equal share of primary and secondary teachers. Unlike the national workforce, however, the sample skewed slightly less experienced, and under-represented teachers from rural areas.

The survey presented teachers with pairs of hypothetical teaching jobs and asked them to identify which school they preferred. The researchers defined each school according to seven features: salary, childcare benefits, class size, and four key support roles—school counselors, nurses, special education specialists (paraprofessionals and co-teachers), and instructional coaches. The values were randomly assigned, and teachers were asked to hold constant all unstated features of the schools via the following prompt: If two schools were otherwise identical in every way—same building, same principal, same teaching assignment, same students—which school would you prefer?    

Results reveal that teachers valued working in a school that provided a full-time nurse, full-time counselor, full-time special education paraprofessional, and a full-time special education co-teacher as much or more than a 10 percent increase in salary. On the other hand, teachers valued a three-student reduction in class size and one hour of instructional coaching per month less than they valued a 10 percent salary increase. Unsurprisingly, preferences for childcare benefits depended on the size of the benefit and whether the teacher currently had children. 

The researchers classified a benefit as cost effective if the amount teachers were willing to sacrifice in additional salary to receive the benefit exceeded the per-teacher cost of offering it. Assuming an average teacher salary of $60,000 and an average of thirty-three teachers per school (both of which were, indeed, the national averages at the time of the survey), the researchers estimate that investments in nurses and counselors are highly cost effective. The average teacher is willing to forego a 13 percent salary increase ($7,800) to work in a school with a nurse, which is more than five times the per-teacher cost of employing one. Findings regarding school counselors were similar. The researchers estimate that working in a school with one full-time counselor is worth $7,487 in salary equivalents to teachers, while working at a school that employs two full-time counselors is worth $9,952. These equivalents are, respectively, worth more than four times and almost three times the per-teacher cost of employing one or two full-time counselors.

Teachers were most willing to sacrifice a pay raise for special education staffing, which isn’t surprising in light of recent research showing that the percentage of students with disabilities in teachers’ classes was associated with an increase in the odds of turnover. Survey results indicate that the average teacher would be willing to forego a 12.5 percent salary increase for full-time support from a paraprofessional, and a 16.6 percent increase for full-time support from a co-teacher. Unfortunately, the costs of offering this one-on-one support are much higher than estimates indicating what teachers are willing to pay. Based on the benefit to teachers alone, it’s difficult to justify the expense of adding special education support to every classroom. But like nurses and counselors, these support staff also benefit students and families, who aren’t included in this study and may make the cost more palatable for school leaders.

Teachers were least willing to pay for smaller class sizes. The offer of instructional coaching did not appear to strongly influence teacher preferences, either, though estimates indicate that coaches are worth roughly $2,500 in salary equivalents, which is more than double the approximate per teacher cost. As for childcare benefits, eligible teachers valued a 10 percent salary increase and a $3,000 per-child subsidy (with a $6,000 annual cap) similarly, but preferred the 10 percent increase over a benefit of only $1,500 per child. Interestingly, the researchers observed that teachers who didn’t have children still seemed to find a hypothetical school that offered childcare benefits more attractive than a school that didn’t.

Overall, these findings indicate that many teachers prefer investments in support staff rather than increases in salary, class-size reductions, or more instructional coaching. The paper offers several plausible explanations as to why. First, support staff such as counselors, nurses, and special education specialists provide services to students that are necessary and help ensure they’re ready to learn. Teachers recognize these needs and understand the importance of meeting them, but they may feel ill-prepared or unable to do so. Second, surrounding teachers with student-based support professionals frees up time so they can focus on core instructional duties. Allowing teachers to focus on teaching can in turn lead to academic gains for students. Third, sharing the responsibility for students’ well-being among a variety of professionals can reduce teacher stress and prevent burnout, which is crucial for retention.

The big takeaway here for policymakers and district leaders is that while salary matters, it shouldn’t be the exclusive focus when it comes to recruitment and retention efforts. Teacher preferences also matter immensely, as research indicates that working conditions have a strong influence over teachers’ employment decisions. To effectively invest in the teacher workforce, leaders should focus on a broad set of benefits, and that includes offering teachers what they say they want.

Source: Virginia S. Lovison and Cecilia H. Mo, “Investing in the Teacher Workforce: Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Preferences” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (February 2022).

The education world was abuzz last Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court released its opinion in Carson v. Makin. The Court struck down a provision in Maine’s tuition assistance program that barred families from using public funds to attend religious private schools, a ruling that could have far-reaching effects for school choice in America. While Carson has attracted much attention in the media, its link to Ohio has received scant mention. This is an unfortunate oversight, as a separate Supreme Court case that began in the Buckeye State twenty years ago helped set the precedent for the decision.

The story begins in Cleveland. As part of a host of reforms intended to address the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s chronic low performance, Ohio introduced a new voucher program, the Pilot Project Scholarship Program, in the fall of 1996. Eligible students received grants of $2,250 per year to attend private schools in the Cleveland area. Religious schools were permitted to participate in the program, but no participating school could discriminate against students on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin.

The inclusion of religious schools rankled some citizens. Doris Simmons-Harris filed a lawsuit against then-state superintendent of public instruction Susan Zelman, claiming that Ohio had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. After much legal wrangling, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

Zelman won in the end. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the 5-4 majority opinion that declared Ohio had not violated the Constitution. He stated that the Cleveland voucher program was “neutral in all respects toward religion.” State funds were not going directly to religious schools; they were going to families, who made the decision to attend a secular private school or a religious one. It was the first time the Court ruled that states were permitted to steer public dollars into religious elementary and secondary schools.

With a victory in the Supreme Court secured, Ohio expanded the voucher program over the coming decades. Today, more than 7,000 Cleveland students today attend a private school using a state-funded voucher, and roughly 57,000 Ohio students participate in the EdChoice voucher program—a statewide program operating since 2006. According to one estimate, 97 percent of voucher funds went towards religious schools in the 2015–16 school year.

While Zelman settled the issue of whether a voucher program violated the Establishment Clause by including religious schools, Carson v. Makin considered whether Maine’s tuition program violated the Free Exercise Clause by excluding religious schools. Much of Maine is rural and sparsely populated—so much so that there are not enough students in some communities to maintain a high school. Where there is no option for a public secondary school, the state provides tuition assistance for students to enroll in private schools. A change to the law in 1981 required that these schools be “nonsectarian.” This motivated a lawsuit by two families who, lacking a public option, enrolled their children in religious private schools and therefore could not participate in the tuition program.

A 6-3 majority of the Court sided with the families, finding that the state “violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” States are under no obligation to support private schools, the Court ruled, but if they do, they can’t leave out religious ones. Citing Zelman in the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that “a benefit program under which private citizens ‘direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice’ does not offend the Establishment Clause.” Indeed, in the course of just two decades, the Court went from permitting the inclusion of religious schools in tuition assistance programs to requiring it.

Zelman was even cited in two of the dissenting opinions, albeit to different ends. Justice Stephen Breyer—one of two justices remaining from the Zelman court—referenced his previous dissent and his belief that there is “play in the joints” of the two religion clauses. In his view, this allowed Maine to include religious schools in its tuition program but did not require Maine to do so. In her own dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took a dim view of Zelman, citing it as example of when the Court "eroded” the separation between church and state.

It is not clear what the long-term effects of this decision will be. While some have suggested that it opens the door to religious charter schools, others are more reserved. What is clear is that the Cleveland voucher program—and the Supreme Court’s landmark Zelman decision—played a crucial role in determining the shape of school choice for the rest of the nation. 

Research has found that high-quality pre-K programs can have positive impacts on children’s learning and development, improving outcomes like literacy and math skills in the short-term and even increasing employment and educational attainment in the long-term. Policymakers have leaned heavily on this evidence to argue for increased investments in early learning. Yet studies following children across elementary school have also found that the positive effects of pre-K on academic and cognitive skills can dissipate fairly quickly. This pattern across studies—commonly described as the “fadeout” or “convergence” of pre-K impacts—has received renewed attention in light of a new study finding that children assigned to Tennessee’s state pre-K program were actually performing worse on standardized tests and had more behavioral infractions in sixth grade, compared to children assigned to a waitlist control group. These findings have renewed the debate about the value of universal pre-K and the need for continued investments in early learning.

Often overlooked in understanding the “fadeout” phenomenon, however, are the types of children’s skills that are being measured by the assessments commonly used in these studies, such as the Woodcock Johnson or DIBELS. Most such assessments measure foundational academic competencies like letter and number knowledge, which are skills that all young children in the United States are expected to master in the early grades. It is not surprising then that children who do not attend pre-K typically catch up to their pre-K-attending peers on these outcomes. However, if these studies used assessments that captured a broader set of skills that children are less likely to quickly develop in kindergarten, policymakers would get more complete information on whether and how early learning investments pay off in the long term. To build better evidence on the impacts of pre-K, it is critical to strengthen existing assessments used for monitoring, research, and evaluation and to capture more robust information on children’s development across time. Here’s how:

Assess a more comprehensive set of children’s skills in pre-K and kindergarten. Across different pre-K models and child populations, researchers have generally found positive short-term associations between enrollment in pre-K and a wide range of basic and foundational skills, such as recognizing letters, letter sounds, numbers, and shapes. However, those benefits tend to shrink dramatically and cease to exist as soon as kindergarten. On the other hand, young children also develop a broader range of more complex and higher-order competencies—like critical thinking, problem solving, vocabulary knowledge, oral discourse, and executive functioning—during pre-K that are predictive of later school and life success. These skills are acquired gradually and continue to develop throughout a person’s life; they are more challenging to measure and are often described as being limitless or not having a “ceiling.”

Collecting information on children’s basic and more complex, higher-order skills can provide powerful insights into how early investments support development over the longer term. For example, researchers at MDRC conducted randomized controlled trials of two early math enrichment interventions in pre-K and kindergarten called Making Pre-K Count and High 5s. The programs had positive impacts through the end of kindergarten, as measured with an assessment called the Research-based Early Math Assessment–Kindergarten that captured basic and more complex math skills, including competencies like shape composition, patterning, and algebraic thinking. In contrast, there were no effects of the programs on the widely-used Woodcock Johnson Applied Problems subtest—a more foundational measure of math that focuses heavily on counting, addition, and subtraction—at the end of kindergarten.

In a separate study conducted by MDRC, the Boston Public Schools (BPS), the University of Michigan, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, researchers found that positive associations between enrollment in the widely-regarded BPS pre-K program and more complex, higher-order language and math skills were more likely to be sustained through the end of kindergarten compared with other more basic and foundational measures of literacy and math skills. Researchers across the country have observed similar trends when studying pre-K programs in North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio.

Reduce the burden of collecting assessments of children’s skills. However, measuring the full range of children’s skills can be time- and resource-intensive and difficult to accomplish on a large scale. Recent advances in technology may hold promise for addressing these challenges. Whereas earlier assessments of more complex skills like executive functioning required teachers to engage directly with individual children for fifteen to twenty minutes, there are now a range of tools that capture these skills in as little as five minutes and can even be administered by children themselves. The Minnesota Executive Function Scale, available on an iPad, involves an interactive, game-like interface that children complete with minimal teacher involvement. Advances in natural language processing technology also allow children to interact directly with assessment platforms to capture multiple indicators of language development—like children’s storytelling skills—that go beyond foundational literacy skills.

Some of these technological advances are already being implemented at scale. Virginia has been at the forefront of using technology-enabled early learning assessments, designed in partnership with educators, across public pre-K and kindergarten settings. Teachers collect the assessment data using an interactive tool that provides reports as well as resources to support individualized instruction in the classroom. A number of states and school districts are also using technology to collect student data with assessments like the DIBELS, NWEA MAP, and i-Ready, typically beginning in kindergarten. These more widely used tools capture skills like decoding, reading comprehension, oral reading fluency, and math skills that are used for diagnostic and monitoring purposes. These types of advances provide exciting opportunities for more seamlessly integrating assessments into the classroom, making the data accessible and usable by teachers and parents, and better supporting children’s learning and development.

Invest in data infrastructure to capture information across pre-K and elementary school. Even if policymakers invest in more robust early learning assessment systems, the data created need to be linked to information from elementary schools in order to know whether programs are achieving their longer-term goals. This is a big challenge because early learning programs are part of a patchwork system with limited centralized oversight or connection to one another.

But states and localities are increasingly developing systems to link data across the services and programs children participate in. North Carolina has invested in a state-wide Early Childhood Integrated Data System to connect data about young children across different education, health, and social service programs and settings. Mississippi has developed the LifeTracks system to securely link early childhood, K–12, postsecondary education, and even workforce data. Other states, like Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts, are using or building similar systems. Having access to this kind of linked data will help policymakers determine whether investments are paying off over time.

Building better evidence on the long-term impacts of early learning requires expanding the range of children’s skills that are assessed, making that data collection feasible and scalable, and strengthening data systems to support continued evidence-building over time. Engaging in this work will yield broader knowledge to build better early learning programs and support the well-being of our youngest citizens.

Final

Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber this week released the results of the final audit of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). The report concludes that the defunct entity owes more than $106 million to the Ohio Department of Education and more than $10 million to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

Are you ready for some football?

Here is a detailed look at the patient progress of Patriot Preparatory Academy in Columbus as they built their athletics program and approached their long-held goal of fielding a football team.

The view from Toledo’s waterfront

In the depths of this detailed piece on the recent meeting of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority board of directors is the news that Northwest Ohio Classical Academy will receive $15 million in bond funds to begin the renovation of its space.

Signing on this fall

Elsewhere in the Great Lakes region, a new charter school is opening next school year in Muskegon, Michigan. The school’s founders—a retired Navy SEAL and a boxing promoter—are promising a maritime-focused school…with a kick. Nearly half of the seats are filled already.

Exit interview

Henderson Lewis, Jr., will retire this month after seven years as superintendent of New Orleans Public Schools. This interview covers the ways in which Dr. Lewis has operated in the unique all-charter structure. He easily navigates some negative and slanted questions, using data to make his points and demonstrating the deftness with which he has continued being effective in a difficult and sometimes hostile environment.

*****

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1. Internal numbers and state test score data indicate that Dayton City Schools’ students are almost back to 2019 achievement levels. Believe it or not, this is something to be happy about after two years of pandemic-related cratering of test scores. Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli credits district teachers for the reversal of fortunes, especially the two-teachers-in-every-classroom model being used this year for lower elementary grades. It will be continued next year. (Dayton Daily News, 6/29/22)
   
   

2. Meanwhile, teachers are not the only ones in line for a $750 Covid-service bonus courtesy of the elected board members of Canton City Schools. In fact, all employees will receive the bonus—paid for with $1.5 million of federal pandemic-relief money—except for the superintendent and treasurer. (Canton Repository, 6/29/22)
   
   

3. Speaking of pandemic-relief funding, here’s a great-sounding summer camp partnership between Marion City Schools and the local YMCA. (Marion Star, 6/30/22)
    
4. We have seen before how not to do it, and it gets ugly real quick. But apparently this is how a charter school is supposed to start edging toward football competition in central Ohio: Extreme deference and 10 years of patience. (ThisWeek News, 6/29/22)
    
5. In former-state-supe-candidate news (because this is a thing we have to pay attention to again), one former short-lister has a new gig… (WLWT-TV, Cincinnati, 6/28/22) …and one former semi-finalist is leaving a cushy job on the east coast to come back to Ohio for an “undisclosed” opportunity. (Stamford Advocate, 6/24/22). And if someone out there is working on a new list, this would not be a bad place to start. Just sayin’ (Morning Journal, 6/28/22).

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