• “Pandemic babies are behind after years of stress, isolation affected brain development.”—USA Today
• This insightful project surveys a parent focus group on American history, and how they want their kids to learn about race and gender in schools. —New York Times
• Here’s how some states are ensuring the quality of classroom materials. —Education Week
• Assistant U.S. Education Secretary Roberto Rodríguez acknowledges the potential burden of proposed charter funding changes and the need to improve their clarity. —Chalkbeat
• Ballotpedia data show that parents are shifting school board elections, with one-third of incumbents losing reelections this year in three states, compared to 18 percent in prior years. —Wall Street Journal

Some people like fall. Some people like summer. My favorite time of year is graduation season, especially when you get an interesting crop of news stories like these.

1. Charter school Utica Shale Academy is celebrating its largest graduating class ever this year. What’s more, many of them have earned more than double the number of industry credentials they needed to earn their diplomas. (Morning Journal, 6/6/22)
   
   

2. How about this one: A graduation ceremony for homeschooled students. Ten young central Ohio grads were celebrated by the Mid-Ohio Christian Home School Association this year. You can read about all their extracurriculars and their postsecondary credits and their college plans as well. Nice! (Mount Vernon News, 6/7/22)
   
   

3. The individual stories are super interesting too. Abigail Sanders, an Ohio Connections Academy student, earned her bachelor’s degree (with a major as well as a minor) and her high school diploma simultaneously! Watch the interview to see how she did it and especially the way in which her online charter school helped make it possible for her and for others. (ABC6 News, Columbus, 6/4/22)
   
   

4. There’s a lot to love in this story too. DECA graduate Alexander Joseph’s personal story is inspiring; but DECA itself, the Dayton Promise scholarship program (including charter school students in a city-based college support program, what a concept, right?), and the University of Dayton are all to be commended for supporting students who might otherwise have been overlooked through high school and into college. (Dayton Daily News, 6/7/22)
   
   

5. But let’s not forget to look at student success in the traditional district sphere too. Bay High School graduate Olivia Konschak’s story is not unlike several of those we’ve already clipped. She did well in high school, was able to earn an associate’s degree from Cuyahoga County Community College at the same time by means of the state’s College Credit Plus program, and will have all those credits transfer to Baldwin Wallace University. Bay Village City Schools is, by many measures, one of the best school districts in the state. Bay is a very expensive place to live and, thus, cost families a ton to access the schools there (house purchase, taxes, H.O.A. fees, extracurriculars, etc.). One suspects that Olivia’s story is fairly common there. Given all that, though, take a look at Olivia’s mom’s extensive comments in this piece and see what percentage of credit you think she gives the school district for her child’s success. (Cleveland.com, 6/6/22)
   
   

6. In other news, and staying in northeast Ohio for a moment, despite the extremely sketchy connections being made here between the resignation of our short-lived state superintendent and the level of student achievement in Ohio, Cleveland.com is going all in on their outrage over it. (No, this is not an editorial; it is what passes for an actual news story up there these days.) Unfortunately for them, they seem to be the only ones who are so exercised about the equivalence they have attempted to build. Seriously, they couldn’t find anyone else to bolster their stance? (Cleveland.com, 6/6/22)
   
   

7. Back in the real world, here’s a brief piece covering the fact that two new IDEA charter schools will be opening in Cincinnati this fall. Yay! (Local 12 News, Cincinnati, 6/6/22)

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Successful school choice requires that parents have ample access to high-quality information. Even though choices made might not fully accord with easily observable data, parents want—and deserve—as much detail on available schools as possible. Research can help determine the most influential types of information and the preferred formatting and delivery of it. That’s the case with a new paper by Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution and Lindsay H. Weixler of Tulane University.

In New Orleans, families choose schools via the city’s central OneApp system and can rank order up to twelve choices per child. Valant and Weixler’s study focuses on families choosing pre-K, kindergarten, and ninth grade slots, the primary entry points for students heading to a new school. Before families requested placements for the 2019–20 school year, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a “growth” group, which received information from the researchers on the highest-performing schools they could request, regardless of distance from home; a “distance” group, which received information on all of the schools available near them, regardless of ranking; and a control group, which received communications that did not highlight any particular schools. All families, regardless of group, received this information via mailed flyers, text messages, and emails.

Academic performance information for K–12 schools came via a new state ranking system focusing on academic growth measures; for pre-K programs, a statewide early childhood education scoring system—also new that year—was utilized. The researchers note that providing the list of nearby schools is not an idle effort. Unlike many other cities where school options can be static for years, New Orleans annually sees many new schools open, old schools close, and some existing schools relocate. In theory, nearly all public schools and a large proportion of private schools anywhere in the city are available to any family.

Now for the results. The information provided to families on high-performing schools led to a 2.7 percentage point increase in the probability of growth group students requesting at least one high-growth school compared to the control group. It also led applicants to request .09 more high-growth schools on average and to request .2 more schools overall. These effects were driven almost exclusively by students entering ninth grade.

By contrast, there was little observed impact of providing location information to the distance group as a whole, who did not exhibit a statistically significant difference in requesting a nearby school, though kindergarten students were significantly more likely to choose a nearby school that the researchers advertised to them.

Among student subgroups, only one impact stood out, but it was significant: Students with disabilities receiving the growth treatment were 15.5 percentage points more likely to request at least one high-growth school than their control group counterparts. Those students also requested 1.6 more schools overall and requested an additional 0.5 high-growth schools on average.

Not for the first time, a randomized control trial has found that parents pay attention to—and respond to—school information provided to them when they have options from which to choose. As important as this knowledge is, such research designs remain idealized situations, even when real parents are involved. Valant and Weixler note in their analysis that they have no way of knowing what information parents was actually seen by parents—including their own—or sought out from other sources. Additionally, transportation and other barriers, school type, and school culture all can loom large in school choice decisions and are largely unanalyzed in research. Most importantly, this research does not include data on which schools were offered by the algorithm or which ones were ultimately chosen by families. Some researchers are getting closer to understanding actual choices, finding that parental calculus is complex, but there are so many more variables to assess than the typical research design can accommodate.

SOURCE: Jon Valant and Lindsay H. Weixler, “Informing School-Choosing Families About Their Options: A Field Experiment From New Orleans,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (May 2022).

1. There’s only one real news story to clip today, but it’s a doozy. Late on Friday, brand new state superintendent Steve Dackin resigned the position after an extremely short tenure. Former Interim supe Stephanie Siddens, who might have hoped for a bit of a break, will be right back in the fire until a new supe can be sourced. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/3/22)
   
   

2. Back in the real world, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill published a letter to the editor in the Akron Beacon Journal over the weekend, citing data regarding the importance of the positive importance of maintaining the retention requirement of the state’s (still accurately titled for now) Third Grade Reading Guarantee. (Akron Beacon Journal, 6/5/22)

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Each year, millions of Americans struggle to navigate the job market. Rapidly changing technology and a volatile economy can make it hard for many workers to find the right fit. ExcelinEd, a national educational advocacy organization, argues that another key difficulty is that many adults lack the skills that employers demand. Educational background, whether it’s a high school diploma or a college degree, doesn’t necessarily translate into a job as the economy and technology change.

High-quality educational pathways that are closely aligned to in-demand, high-wage jobs could help address a lack of readiness. But for many learners, such pathways are difficult to find and even more difficult to access. State policy can fix that, as state leaders are in the best position to connect policies, programs, and institutions across sectors. That’s why ExcelinEd created Pathways Matter, an online tool that outlines a continuum of education-to-workforce policies.

The Pathways Matters framework is divided into six focus areas: learner pathways, postsecondary acceleration, postsecondary credential attainment, workforce readiness, employer engagement, and continuum alignment and quality indicators. Within these areas, there are twenty recommended policies that provide learners of all ages with on and off ramps to high-quality educational pathways. To give state leaders an example of what’s possible—and some tips about where to start—ExcelinEd analyzed the policies of several states.

Ohio was one of these states, and its case study identifies several strengths and weaknesses. We’ll examine the weaknesses in a later piece, but for now, here’s a look at two focus areas where the Buckeye State has made some positive inroads.

Postsecondary acceleration
This focus area homes in on the importance of streamlining postsecondary learning and empowering high school students to earn college credit and reduce the time it will take them to earn a postsecondary degree. Ohio’s current dual-enrollment program, College Credit Plus (CCP), fits that bill, as it allows students in grades 7–12 who have demonstrated academic readiness to take college courses at no cost. The program’s most recent annual report notes that despite pandemic-related disruptions, more than 76,000 students participated in the program during the 2020–21 school year.

But CCP isn’t Ohio’s only postsecondary acceleration initiative. The state also covers the cost of AP and IB exams for eligible low-income students, and state law guarantees that students can receive college credit from state institutions for any available AP test as long as they earn a score of three or higher. Ohio is also home to Career-Technical Assurance Guides, which are statewide articulation agreements that require all public colleges and universities to award postsecondary credit for certain career and technical education (CTE) courses. Not every available CTE course is included in these guides, but there are a wide variety of options, and their existence ensures that courses of all types—not just typical academic subjects—can translate into college credit. 

Workforce readiness
This focus area emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the skills Ohioans are taught, the credentials they earn, and the work-based learning opportunities that are available will effectively prepare them for the future. Ohio still has some work to do in this area, but the state has made some big strides. Consider the following:

• TechCred is a program designed to help Ohioans earn credentials and help businesses upskill current and potential employees. Only certain credentials are eligible for reimbursement: They must be short-term (able to be completed in no more than one year), industry-recognized, and technology-focused. Participating in the program requires some legwork by businesses, as they must identify potential employees who would benefit, partner with a credential provider, and apply for reimbursement within a designated time frame. The 2021 annual report from the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation (GOWT) notes that after eleven TechCred application windows, a total of 1,615 employers were awarded over $35 million to cover the cost of 32,269 tech-focused credentials.
  

• The Individual Microcredential Assistance Program, or IMAP, is designed to help low-income and unemployed Ohioans complete training programs and earn credentials at no cost. The program was part of the legislation that created TechCred, and as such, it follows a similar framework. Training providers—state institutions of higher education, Ohio technical centers, private businesses, and other institutions that offer microcredential training—cover all tuition, fees, and costs associated with helping eligible Ohioans learn new skills. Once participants have earned a credential, providers are permitted to submit a reimbursement application. The 2021 GOWT annual report notes that since the creation of the program, more than $2.2 million has been awarded to eleven training providers who assisted approximately 1,592 Ohioans.
  

• The Innovative Workforce Incentive Program (IWIP) provides grant funding to school districts to help them establish new programs for students to earn qualifying credentials in “priority” industry sectors. All districts were eligible to receive a share of the $25 million allocated for the program. As a further incentive, when a student earns a qualifying credential, his or her school receives an additional payment of $1,250. According to the 2021 GOWT annual report, fifty-four school districts have received grants totaling $13.5 million thus far.

***

If Ohio wants a strong and vibrant workforce, it’s crucial that learners of all ages are well-prepared. Effective state policy that bridges the K–12, higher ed, and workforce sectors is crucial, and the Pathways Matter framework offers some solid policy recommendations for how to get it done. Ohio already has several of these policies in place, especially in the postsecondary acceleration and workforce readiness areas. State leaders deserve kudos for these efforts. But there’s still plenty of work to be done, so stay tuned for an analysis of Ohio’s areas for growth.

Legislation update

On Wednesday, House Bill 583 gained final approval in the House and was sent to Governor DeWine. This is the bill which became a vehicle for a plethora of education-related amendments, including a questionable change in the state’s sponsor evaluation system.

Empowering alumni

Congratulations to the Breakthrough Schools Network in northeast Ohio on the launch of their alumni support network. Beyond Breakthrough will provide access for their alumni to personalized support from dedicated staff members; peers; community resource providers; and high school, postsecondary, and employment partners.

Helpful assistance

A charter school in Columbus has unknowingly run afoul of city zoning rules. However, school leaders are receiving helpful assistance from the city’s Department of Building and Zoning Services to not only stay open to continue to serve students until the end of the school year but also to resolve the problem permanently for the future. Nice!

Busing standoff strands students

Last Friday, in response to a contract dispute between Groveport-Madison Local Schools and its transportation provider, district cars were used to blockade buses in their lot, canceling transportation for all resident charter, private, and STEM school students that day. (Students attending district schools were not affected as Groveport had already dismissed for the year.) Mercifully, district officials worked with the contractor over the holiday weekend to reach an agreement which resumed transportation for school choice families on Tuesday.

From charter to college

Good Morning America recently aired a great feature on GEO Academies in Indiana, highlighting their success in helping young scholars—especially low-income students of color who are often underserved by schools—prove their college readiness before high school graduation. A fantastic story!

*****

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1. In case you missed it, the bill which would remove the retention requirement of the state’s (currently accurately-named) Third Grade Reading Guarantee passed the House on Wednesday evening. Chad Aldis’ testimony, as one of the very few to argue against the measure, is quoted extensively in this coverage. The bill moves on to the Senate. (Cleveland.com, 6/1/22)
   
   

2. The same day, House Bill 583 (a.k.a. Education Christmas in June), gained final approval in the House and was sent to the Governor for his signature. (Gongwer Ohio, 6/1/22)
   
   

3. First Jeremy Kelley and now Patrick O’Donnell in my clips this week? Permission to “squee”, please! There are a lot of great quotes from Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb in this piece about his leadership of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. To wit: “Having mayoral control of our schools is a special moral obligation for me.” And: “I will consider it a failure of mine as mayor, if in the next decade, we don’t improve the quality of learning in our school system.” He also tells Patrick that a better “quality of learning” means more schools highly-rated by the state, better test scores, and students who are better prepared for college or jobs. But it all takes a turn after about 264 words. The focus of this piece is that the mayor is “weighing” whether to replace district CEO Eric Gordon in order to kickstart the improvement he wants and the pros and cons to doing so. Unfortunately, it may be that so much effort has been spent over the years to illustrate that Gordon has already improved things quite a bit during his tenure—you know what I mean, don’t you, dedicated Gadfly Bites subscribers?—that CEO replacement may not be as simple as it seems, even for a district under the control of a morally obligated and audibly motivated mayor. My version of the dilemma is that while the mayor says, “We have to actively accelerate the pace of change inside the district”—especially after years of Covid slide—he has named his effort “The Great Reset” and everyone seems to think that that indicates a quest for said improvement. With “reset” as your big objective, it might not even matter who is leading the charge. (The 74, 6/1/22)
   
   

4. And speaking of Covid-disrupted education, here is a nice piece interviewing eight central Ohio members of the Class of 2022. Bucking the accepted wisdom of “everything sucked”, there is a great variety of responses as to how they all handled school closures and remote learning during the last three school years, some of them polar opposites. Remote learning was hard for some, too easy for others, and so right for another that she stuck with it even after in-person learning was available again. Some started businesses in their downtime, some formed associations, and on and on. Kids being kids, I reckon. (But that’s probably just me.) The only really common refrain: they missed extracurriculars when they were cancelled. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/3/22)

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If there’s anything we can be sure of following last week’s horrific rampage at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, it’s that few, if any, federal laws are going to change as a result of it. That’s because Americans are split over whether legal remedies would lead to fewer mass shootings, and public support for additional gun restrictions has actually declined. The dominant “conversation” around school shootings, to the extent it can even be called one, is about whether we should arm teachers and make schools more like prisons rather than figuring out how to keep guns away from lunatics who shouldn’t have access to them. Despite the earnest entreaties to do something, anything about gun violence in schools, it seems unlikely that any meaningful restrictions will be placed on firearm possession in our lifetimes.

We know this, of course, because of the historically passive reaction among lawmakers to mass shootings in U.S. schools, of which there have been fourteen, killing a total of 169 victims since 1999’s bloodbath at Columbine High School. Many assert that these school shootings could have been prevented with additional regulations. But even if lawmakers were to suddenly find religion on gun control, the effect of any new laws would almost immediately be diluted. It also wouldn’t change the fact that there are more guns than people in the U.S. and Americans aren’t simply going to hand them over on their own volition.

For better or worse, firearms will remain ubiquitous. The question then becomes whether policymakers can bring measured thinking and nuance to bear in solving the thorny problem of gun violence in schools. This is particularly challenging in a media climate that hypes and distorts the prevalence of what happened in Uvalde, and while schools continue to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic (which incidentally helped trigger a surge in gun sales nationwide). After these tragedies, people tend to point fingers and focus on the weapons themselves (e.g., assault weapons bans) while politicians are incentivized towards chest-thumping and grandstanding. The obstacles are daunting, but we desperately need a new approach that goes beyond the stale and warmed-over rhetoric.

For starters, it would be useful to recognize that today’s mass shooting dilemma is downwind from culture—in this case, the cultures of the Uvalde middle school, junior high, and high school where by all accounts the gunman had a difficult experience. School shootings are not random events. There are common signs and signals. The Uvalde shooter was reportedly a troubled young man who was raised in a tumultuous environment and frequently threatened teen girls online. Devoting energy and resources to proactively shutting down bullying, discrimination, and harassment should be an ongoing effort in schools. No one in education has written more forcefully and persuasively on this topic than my friend Andy Rotherham:

Banning [assault rifles] is not the key to solving our school shooting problem... When a young person gets to the point where they are going to use a firearm to harm others at their school the type of firearm available is not the issue. Rather, culture is. A culture of firearms responsibility, safe storage, and access, and a school culture that does far more to interdict and prevent these episodes long before any shooting starts.

It’s hard to overstate the virtuous cycle created by a positive school climate and culture. This goes doubly so when it comes to identifying and swiftly responding to risk signaling behavior. At the same time, solving for school culture is a long-term project, and a less than satisfying answer for those who crave a more immediate response. This means legislation. And although, as I mentioned earlier, new federal laws feel like a pipedream, a lot of this remains in state hands even if Congress remains deadlocked. To wit, there are a couple of policy responses that might have made a difference last week if they had been in place.

The first is raising the minimum age limit for purchasing and possessing firearms. In Uvalde, the assailant legally bought two assault rifles and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition just after turning eighteen last month. There’s a reasonable argument to be had as to why teenagers are permitted to buy semiautomatic guns. Despite our country’s contradicting positions on when adulthood sets in (e.g., voting versus drinking), six states—Florida, Washington, Vermont, California, Illinois, and Hawaii—have already increased the minimum purchase age of long guns (shotguns and rifles) to twenty-one; the majority did so following the 2018 massacre in Parkland. Texas in some ways resembles Florida in its politics, so it’s possible, albeit improbable, that the Lone Star State might entertain this change following the second largest school shooting in U.S. history.

The second is “extreme risk protection orders,” or what are commonly referred to as red flag laws. The idea is fairly straightforward: If a person exhibits risk signaling behavior that they might be a threat to themselves or others, a family member, a school official, or a law enforcement officer can secure a court order that allows police to confiscate that person’s weapons and prohibit the purchase of additional firearms for the duration of the order. Currently, nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have some form of red flag law on the books. It’s unclear whether one would have helped in Uvalde, but it might have at least given communities a fighting chance in some of our nation’s deadliest school shootings.

The long odds of any of these ideas materializing, however, is indicative of our broken politics. The ratcheting up of distrust and assumption of bad motives on either side has been a cancer on our political culture and discourse. Politicians and pundits alike are fruitlessly seeking, not to be crass, a silver bullet when what’s required is a serious and deliberative weighing of tradeoffs between liberty and protecting our children from this awful scourge. There are no quick or easy fixes. Thankfully, mass murders in schools of the variety we saw last week are exceedingly rare, but it’s a sad reality that we have now experienced enough of them to recognize the all too disturbing patterns.

In recent weeks, I’ve dug into the “excellence gap“—the sharp divides along lines of race and class at the highest levels of academic and educational achievement. My argument has gone something like this:

1. The excellence gap at the twelfth grade level largely explains why Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are underrepresented at our most selective universities. Without affirmative action, this underrepresentation would be much worse.

2. Sadly, the excellence gap appears long before high school. It looks much the same as far back as fourth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For example, just 4 percent of fourth graders who score Advanced in reading are Black, as are just 6 percent of Hispanic students.

3. That said, the gaps are slightly smaller in fourth grade than in twelfth, especially for Black and low-income students, indicating that middle schools and high schools may be making the problem worse.

4. The excellence gap is even apparent at kindergarten entry. That indicates that much of the gap is driven by out-of-school factors, especially socioeconomic inequality between the ages of zero and five.

5. Yet many more Black and low-income students are achieving at high levels in kindergarten, especially in reading, than in later years. This indicates that something is causing the excellence gap to widen in the early years of elementary school. (Other achievement gaps tend to grow during these early years, as well.)

That last point is what gives me hope. If we can understand why a disproportionate number of Black and low-income high-achievers are “losing altitude” in grades K–3, we might identify strategies to reverse this trend.

So what might explain it? And what, if anything, might be done about it? Let’s dive into some possibilities.

1. Socioeconomic inequality continues to exert downward pressure on these students’ achievement. It is likely that the same factors that keep some students from developing their full potential before they ever get to school continue to wreak havoc as they make their way through childhood. The left would point to systemic racism and a weak social safety net; the right would point to family structure and culture.

2. Black and low-income high achievers may lack access to high-quality elementary schools. This is both common sense and a bit circular: These students aren’t making as much progress as their peers, so by definition their schools are not as effective at boosting achievement. It’s probably true but not particularly helpful in identifying what precisely schools might be doing (or not), and what we might do to fix the situation.

3. Early elementary teachers may be biased against Black and low-income high achievers. Now we’re hitting on something that policymakers and practitioners might try to fix. In my post last fall on the gender gap in reading, I offered evidence that teachers in the early grades were biased against boys. That was apparent when researchers used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) to compare students’ test scores to teachers’ evaluations of the same children’s abilities. Teachers systematically underestimated boys’ reading prowess, perhaps conflating their bad behavior with struggles in learning to read. As a result, they might have placed “good girls” in their highest reading group, and left “bad boys” to languish in groups that weren’t challenging enough.

Perhaps something similar is happening by race or class? I couldn’t find direct evidence for the early elementary grades, but we know from other studies that teacher expectations matter, and they tend to be lower for Black students. This is of course why leading thinkers in the field of gifted education are so adamant about universal screening; we know that teacher or parent recommendations can be biased, so we need objective ways to identify students who could benefit from advanced education. More on that below.

4. These students may be struggling with reading comprehension, thanks to limited content knowledge. As E.D. Hirsch, Jr. has argued for over three decades, many children struggle to comprehend because they lack the vocabulary to be fluent readers. And their vocabulary deficit comes from a knowledge deficit; they haven’t been taught enough about science, history, geography, and the arts to recognize common words when they sound them out.

There’s tantalizing evidence from ECLS—the source of the kindergarten achievement data I’ve been using—that this is precisely what’s happening. As discussed in previous posts, that study tested incoming kindergarteners in the fall of 1998 in reading and math, using an assessment read aloud by teachers. Given the age of the students, the reading assessment focused on basic literacy skills: “recognizing the printed word, identifying sounds, word reading, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.”

Intriguingly, ECLS also assessed students’ “general knowledge,” defined this way:

General knowledge represents children’s breadth and depth of understanding of the social and physical environment (i.e., the social, physical and natural world) and their ability to draw inferences and comprehend implications. Dimensions of knowledge measured by the ECLS-K battery include factual information from the physical, earth, biological and social sciences. The skills children need to establish relationships between and among objects, events or people and to make inferences and to comprehend the implications of verbal and pictorial concepts, are also measured. It addresses such topical areas as history, geography and science.

Lo and behold, a much larger proportion of Black and low-income students scored in the top quartile on reading than on general knowledge—10 percent versus 4 percent for Black students, and 21 percent versus 16 percent for low-income students.

By the fourth grade, the NAEP reading assessment tests both the basic literacy skills included on the ECLS reading exam and the reading comprehension ability related to the ECLS general knowledge assessment. Especially at high levels of achievement, basic skills (such as decoding) can be taken for granted; the best readers, then, must also have a strong command of comprehension. And that means having a broad vocabulary built atop a strong base of knowledge.

So perhaps many Black and low-income high achievers are “losing altitude” in the early grades because their strong decoding and other basic literacy skills are not matched by strong content knowledge. If so, building up their content knowledge might make a big difference. Encouragingly, a recent Fordham Institute analysis of the ECLS data found that students made more progress in reading when their teachers spent more time on social studies.

Potential solutions

So what might we do to keep the excellence gap from widening in the early grades? The first item on my to-do list is already familiar to the gifted education field:

• Identify students with the potential for high achievement via universal screening and local, school-based norms. This increases the likelihood of identifying students who might otherwise be overlooked and guards against potential bias in teacher recommendations. Students identified as gifted or high achieving should have opportunities to learn with other advanced students at least part of the day, and otherwise have access to accelerated programs.

But there are other actions policymakers and practitioners should take that get less attention in gifted-education circles:

• Start universal screening in kindergarten. Many districts wait to use the third-grade state assessment as the universal-screening tool. But that means not identifying and serving students until the fourth grade—which is way too late, as much of the excellence gap has already opened up by then. Schools should use whatever high-quality assessment they already utilize in kindergarten instead, such as the MAP or i-Ready. And they should continue using such assessments every year to identify older students, too.


• Go big on content knowledge, especially in grades K–3. Advocates already call for “front-loading” the curriculum, making sure that all students receive a rich, challenging curriculum as soon as they arrive in school, and providing opportunities for educators to notice students who show great academic progress but might not test well yet. Perhaps that front-loading should be loaded with content knowledge, as Hirsch has argued all these years. Thankfully, some of the best new Common Core–aligned instructional materials, like Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit and Wisdom, and EL Education, take content knowledge seriously. Gifted educators should become their champions.


• Incorporate grades K–2 into state testing and accountability systems. It’s absurd that the most critical years in K–12 are the ones we don’t include in our accountability policies. Today’s technology makes assessing young students quite feasible, valid, and reliable, and including these grades in accountability systems would encourage a greater focus on helping kids get off to a great start (and discourage schools from placing their weakest teachers in grades K–2). As with other grades, we should focus most of our attention on student progress from year to year (rather than snapshots in time), and should hold schools accountable for helping all students, including their high achievers, make ample gains.

We’re never going to erase the excellence gap entirely until we erase socioeconomic inequalities from conception through kindergarten. But those of us in K–12 education have a responsibility to do everything we can to help every student achieve their full potential. We’re clearly not hitting that standard today, and the earlier we start doing so the better.

Natalie Wexler has done much (along with the likes of Jeanne Chall, Don Hirsch, Dan Willingham, Kate Walsh, and Robert Pondiscio) to establish the fact that there’s science behind the act of reading and the related proposition that real reading (not just “decoding”) is no isolated skill but, rather, a complicated process of making sense of what one reads on the page in the context of what one already knows.

Wexler’s important book, The Knowledge Gap, as described in her own words, “focuses on the relationship between our current largely content-free elementary curriculum and the so-called achievement gap. The book will take readers inside schools and classrooms, showing them what the skills-focused approach to literacy instruction looks like, explaining how and why it has become so entrenched, and charting possible routes to the knowledge-focused instruction that is our best hope of achieving educational and social equity.”

Bravo and huzzah. Everyone should read it, alongside such works as Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit and Willingham’s The Reading Mind.

This week, Wexler turned to what she sees as the strengths and weaknesses of my own new book, Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP.

I’m mostly grateful. She spelled my name correctly and finds merit in the book: “Finn seems to know everyone and everything NAEP-related, and he makes the intricacies of the story surprisingly engaging.”

But she really, really doesn’t like the way that NAEP tests reading, and she really, really wishes I had made a similar criticism.

Her fundamental point isn’t limited to NAEP. It’s about the way America nearly always tests reading, whether at the local, state, or national level. (PISA does the same—even more so—with its claims to test “literacy” among fifteen-year-olds around the world.)

For years, Hirsch, Willingham, Pondiscio, and others have made essentially the same point. As Robert explained it in a fine Education Next essay in 2014, back when the Common Core State Standards were hot:

Students who score well on reading tests are those who have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of subjects. This is precisely why Common Core calls for (but cannot impose) a curriculum that builds knowledge coherently and sequentially within and across grades. That’s the wellspring of mature reading comprehension—not “skills” like making inferences and finding the main idea that do not transfer from one knowledge domain to another.

As a practical matter, standards don’t drive classroom practice. Tests do. The first—and perhaps only—litmus test for any accountability scheme is, “Does this encourage the classroom practices we seek?” In the case of annual reading tests, with high stakes for kids and teachers, the answer is clearly “no.” Nothing in reading tests—both as currently conceived or anticipated under Common Core—encourages schools or teachers to make urgently needed, long-term investments in coherent knowledge building from grade to grade that will drive language proficiency.

In other words, reading tests that are divorced from curriculum and student knowledge encourage teachers to approach reading as a collection of disconnected skills, rather than helping students to approach “the wellspring of mature reading comprehension.” And the higher the stakes attached to those test results, the more damage they do.

Unlike state and local tests, NAEP is low-stakes. Wexler understands that, but also notes (correctly) that it has an “indirect but substantial influence” over how reading is approached. That’s why last year’s protracted, painful effort by NAEP’s governing board to come up with a new “framework” for future reading assessments triggered much controversy.

Wexler points out that the self-same governing board convened an expert reading panel a few years back, including such luminaries as Willingham, Tim Shanahan, and Marilyn Adams—which, she writes, told it that, “comprehension depends more on background knowledge than abstract skill. But instead of focusing on subjects that could build the kind of knowledge kids need to read complex text—social studies, science, the arts—elementary schools have cut back on those subjects to focus more on comprehension ‘skills.’ The result is that children from better-educated families generally score higher on reading tests—and achieve academically—because they’re able to pick up academic knowledge at home.”

The way reading is generally tested, Wexler similarly argues, leads to teaching practices that do worst by disadvantaged kids and thereby widen achievement gaps.

She’s right. But a different problem arises—an insoluble one at this point in our history, I fear—when we get to Wexler’s proposed remedy for NAEP’s failings in this realm. As she has proposed elsewhere, Wexler would have NAEP “secure congressional permission to stop giving its biannual ‘reading’ tests and instead focus on subjects like history and geography.” That, she suggests, “could send a powerful signal about what’s actually important to reading comprehension.”

My book does suggest that NAEP shift from biannual testing of reading and math to a four-year cycle, which would (inter alia) create some budgetary slack to test “subjects like history and geography more often.” That would be a fine thing to do.

But as Wexler well knows, regardless of the frequency of the assessments (currently two years for grades four and eight), testing reading qua reading via NAEP is currently mandated by Congress as part of ESSA (and previously NCLB), and those results are used for multiple purposes, including a sort of “audit” of results reported on states’ own reading assessments. Moreover, the kind of reading test that Wexler (and Hirsch et al.) favors depends on a unified curriculum with prescribed content to be learned by all students, more or less the way the Advanced Placement program works.

Imagine—just try to picture—the firestorm that would greet anyone suggesting the sort of “national curriculum” that would have to precede Wexler’s kind of nationwide reading test. I’m not aware that any state has even managed such a thing for itself, though Louisiana is inching in that direction.

Yet without uniform content in what students have read and learned, there’s no practical way to have a standardized reading test that does justice to true reading comprehension.

Test-makers make a stab in this direction by supplying test-takers with extended reading passages that are supposed to contain within themselves the information that students need to possess in order to answer the comprehension questions. But it’s never that simple, for knowledge (and vocabulary) are cumulative things and there’s no way to supply all the background—and thus level the playing field—within a test passage.

Knowing that problem cannot be solved, understanding that Congress isn’t about to do away with the testing of reading, and recognizing that NAEP does have some value—“it provides valuable information about trends in student achievement and highlights disparities between demographic groups”—Wexler ends with a small, somewhat nebulous suggestion: “NAEP officials could at least explain what ‘reading’ tests are actually assessing rather than making vague comments about how we need more time on reading ‘skills.’”

Sure, it matters how we talk about what NAEP results do and do not show. Sure, we’re certainly given to overinterpreting and overthinking them en route to (in Stephen Sawchuk’s phrase) outright misNAEPery. Sure, it would be good if everyone who presents or interprets those results would start with a dozen cautions and limits. But c’mon, folks, we’re living in a world of soundbites, headlines, and tweets. Take the thermometer out of your mouth and you’re looking at your temperature. Take the cuff off your arm and you’re looking at your blood pressure. Take the eighth grade average reading score on NAEP and you’re looking at the reading prowess of the average U.S. eighth grader on the closest thing we have to a pressure cuff. It is what it is—which means, of course, it’s only the beginning of what you really want to know about how well kids are reading and why more of them are not reading better.

One more thing that Wexler surely knows but didn’t mention. Because NAEP is a decent tracker of trends over time in reading prowess and because it does that for states as well as nation, if any state pushed hard in the curricular and pedagogical direction that Wexler and her allies favor—i.e., a knowledge-rich, statewide curriculum from kindergarten onward that’s full of history, science, civics, and such—in due course we’d see a difference in that state’s NAEP reading score! Others might want to know what that state was doing differently. Then they might even try to do it themselves.

Thank you, NAEP.