| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Aaron Churchill

8.6.2026

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Attainment of industry-recognized credentials has soared across Ohio. Just 2.3 percent of students in the graduating class of 2014 earned credentials during high school, while 25.6 percent of the class of 2024 did so. These credentials include anything from basic training certificates in CPR or MS Word to full occupational licenses in welding or healthcare.

State policy is largely responsible for these skyrocketing numbers. Most notably, Ohio allows students to meet alternative graduation requirements through credentials—a strong incentive for schools to encourage credential attainment among students who are struggling to demonstrate competency in reading and math. Credentials are intended to signify students’ acquisition of technical skills and help them gain an edge in the labor market, not simply be a workaround to a diploma.

Without serious quality controls at the state level, the number of graduation-eligible credentials has ballooned to over 700. With so many approved credentials, Ohio schools have discovered the easiest ones to attain and used them to get students to the finish line (and inflate their graduation rates as well as report card ratings).

Understanding the harms of giving students diplomas based on dubious credentials, lawmakers directed the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) to review and overhaul the list of credentials applicable for graduation. Last month, the agency unveiled a leaner and more focused list that—if policymakers can hold the line—will encourage the attainment of credentials that are both valued by employers and boost students’ earnings.[1]

Here’s what to know about the reboot.

A new data-driven valuation framework

The previous framework, which linked each credential to a point value between one and 12, did acknowledge that credentials have markedly differing values in the workplace. But points were largely assigned based on gut instinct and anecdote rather than solid, data-driven analysis.

The new system is different. It ties a credential’s value to a slew of labor market and higher education data. As Table 1 shows, data elements are organized around four dimensions that indicate whether the credential opens doors to high-wage, high-demand jobs. Greater emphasis is given to “career outcomes” data—e.g., the earnings and employment rates of Ohio students who earned the credential—and to “occupational demand,” which is based on the labor-market trends of the jobs linked to a credential. Employer demand for the credential itself, as measured by appearances in job postings, and postsecondary data round out the framework. Results from the four dimensions are combined to produce an overall score ranging from 0 to 100. These results inform the approval decisions made by a state committee that is responsible for developing the list of graduation-eligible credentials. The scores, however, are not ultimately decisive, as the committee makes the final call.

Table 1: Overview of Ohio’s new credential-evaluation system

Ohio cleans up its industry credentials list blog Table 1 — **Note:** More detail about the four dimensions, data sources (primarily government datasets and labor-market data from Lightcast), and calculations are available here.

A shorter list of graduation-eligible credentials

Informed by the results from the valuation framework, Ohio’s credentials committee approved a new list of eligible credentials. Under this system, they are deemed either: (1) standalones—a credential that meets the graduation marker by itself, or (2) bundles—a group of credentials that in combination meet the marker.[2] This bifurcation should be familiar to Ohio schools, but the lists are considerably shorter. On the standalone side, the number of state-approved credentials falls from 164 to 70. Most—though not all—of these standalones are linked to careers in construction, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation.

An even more important culling occurred on the bundling side. Previously, struggling students could mix and match several low-level credentials for graduation purposes, with countless combinations possible. That is no longer the case. Moving forward, state policymakers will approve defined bundles that may be applied toward graduation. Just 21 such bundles—mainly tied to construction, healthcare, and manufacturing—made the cut. Bottom line: The new system scales back the number of graduation-eligible credentials from a whopping 738 to just 126.

Table 2: Comparison of graduation-eligible credential lists

Ohio cleans up its industry credentials list blog Table 2 — **Notes:** (*) These are credentials worth twelve points in Ohio’s current system and are equivalent to a “standalone” credential in the revamped system. (**) This number is based on the list that appeared on the Ohio DEW website in July 2026. (†) This is how many bundles were cited in the DEW press release; technically, there are roughly a dozen more possibilities as students have some (limited) options of which credentials to combine within three bundles (two related to welding and the other to construction). (††) This is the number of standalone credentials plus 56 credentials that can apply to a bundle.

What’s off the list?

The credentials that schools have commonly used as graduation shortcuts were not approved under the new system. Rightly so, as Ohio students possessing these credentials—table 3 displays five of them—do not come anywhere close to earning a living wage of roughly $44,000 per year. In all five cases, the median annual income of students who attained these credentials fell between $25,000 and $30,000, or barely above the annual salary of a worker being paid minimum wage. They also lagged the income associated with the typical credential earned by Ohio students ($30,812).[3] Though income is only one element in the overall system, the poor wage outcomes associated with these credentials helped keep them off the list. Of note, the committee did approve two frequently earned certificates—CPR First Aid and OSHA-10 safety training—but their use for graduation purposes is now limited to just six bundles (one in healthcare and five in manufacturing). In the previous system, they could apply as part of a bundle across all career fields, which contributed to their widespread use.

Table 3: Median post-high-school incomes of Ohio students who earned selected credentials

Ohio cleans up its industry credentials list blog Table 3 — **Notes:** The median incomes reflect the wages (up to three years post–high school) of Ohio students who earned the credential. The calculation excludes students earning less than $16,000 per year—students likely pursuing higher education, working part-time, or unemployed. The living wage income is based on the MIT living (hourly) wage calculator and 2,080 hours worked per year (year-round, full-time employment). The state’s minimum wage is $11 per hour and is multiplied by 2,080 to yield an annual income.

The challenge moving forward: Maintaining a clean list

The new data-driven system promotes more accurate credential valuations and greater transparency, as the public can see for themselves the underlying data for each credential. It also promises a system that is more immune to low-level credentials. In future review cycles—the next has already begun—vendors, industry groups, and schools seeking inclusion of a credential will need to demonstrate value based on objective workforce data.

But the list of credentials could balloon yet again if policymakers are not careful. Without a data-driven standard for approval—i.e., a minimum cut score—the credentials committee has wiggle room to deviate from the valuation framework. Vendors and industry groups with financial interests and schools looking to maintain sky-high graduation rates could urge the committee to approve their favored credential or pressure it to set a low bar. In fact, even in the midst of the just-completed overhaul, the committee accepted several debatable credentials as standalones. They include three cosmetology licenses that are linked to low pay (below $30,000) and are not likely stepping stones to higher-paying careers.[4] While these credentials are not necessarily “gameable”—they do require substantial time commitments—their approval raises questions about whether committee members will hold the line when other low-payoff credentials are put forward. If cosmetology is in, what about others?

* * *

Ohio policymakers deserve credit for recognizing the problems with pushing meaningless credentials onto students and creating a more empirically based framework to value them. With a tightened list, Ohio will begin incentivizing schools to offer stronger career preparation to the students most likely to join the workforce directly after high school. Policymakers, however, must remain vigilant, as all this work could easily go for naught if the political pressure to water down the credentials list catches up to Ohio yet again.

[1] The classes of 2027 to 2029 will be able to use the existing credentials list for graduation, or use credentials approved under the new framework. The updated list (without an option to use previously approved credentials) will apply to the class of 2030, with updates to the list occurring annually for the class of 2031 and beyond.

[2] By default, a third category consists of credentials not approved for graduation.

[3] This amount ($30,812) is the median of the median incomes of the 347 credentials for which data were reported among the 700-plus credentials currently approved for graduation purposes (many credentials do not have sufficient number of students earning them to evaluate workforce outcomes).

[4] Several low-paying standalone healthcare certifications (e.g., medical assistant and pharmacy tech) were also approved as standalone credentials, but they may have stronger value as building blocks for higher-paying careers.

Policy Priority:

Standards & Accountability

Topics:

Career & Technical Education

Chad Aldeman

8.6.2026

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Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

In April, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the 50 states and Washington, D.C., took in $1 trillion in federal, state, and local revenue for K–12 public education in the 2023–24 school year.

One. Trillion. Dollars.

That’s a remarkable milestone. And while it doesn’t tell the whole story—it represents only revenues, not expenditures—it speaks to five trends that help explain where K–12 finance stands today.

More money, fewer students

On an inflation-adjusted basis, schools had 22 percent more money to spend in 2023–24 than a decade earlier. One-time federal relief funds played a role here, and as a result, federal revenues had the largest jump in percentage terms (up 65 percent). But schools rely much more heavily on state and local funding, and those revenues also rose by 18 percent each. Meanwhile, schools served about 500,000 fewer students, a decline of 1.1 percent.

Put differently, schools are serving fewer students with substantially more money than they did a decade ago.

The national averages mask wide variation across the states

On average, public schools spent $17,619 per student in the 2023–24 school year. But there was enormous variation, with places like New York and the District of Columbia spending more than $30,000 per student, while states like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Mississippi spent closer to $11,000 or $12,000 per child.

These figures don’t account for cost-of-living differences, but they reflect real distinctions in how public education looks in various parts of the country. As one example, consider how different staffing levels vary across states. In Vermont, schools employ one full-time staff member for every 4.3 students. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., New Hampshire, and Wyoming all have similar ratios. Meanwhile, the average school in Utah has 11.3 students for every employee. Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Alabama, and California are also on this lower end of staffing. This all means students have very different public school experiences depending on where they live.

States also haven’t followed the same path over the last decade. In real per-pupil terms, school spending was up in 47 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, led by increases of 65 percent in California, 49 percent in New Mexico and 46 percent in Hawaii. At the other end, Alaska’s real per-pupil spending fell 13 percent, Montana’s declined 6 percent and Wyoming’s fell 1 percent.

Where is the money going? Not to teacher salaries

Education is labor-intensive, and teachers are by far the largest group of workers. But as I’ve written before, higher spending is not making its way into teachers’ pockets. According to the NEA Rankings and Estimates report, public school teachers earned an average salary of $72,030 in the 2023–24 school year. A decade prior, they earned $56,610. That’s a nominal raise of almost $16,000, but in real, inflation-adjusted terms, it represents a decline of about $2,500. In other words, on average, teachers today have less purchasing power than they did a decade ago.

Why? Because districts employ more workers, who have more expensive benefits

As I and others have written, schools employ more people than they used to. They have more teachers and a lot more instructional aides, principals, assistant principals, guidance counselors, and student support staff. In metaphorical terms, schools have gradually split up their pie into smaller and smaller pieces.

Beyond salaries, each of those employees also needs health insurance and retirement benefits, and those, too, have risen rapidly. In 2023–24, schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. As another way to look at it, for every $1,000 that a school spent on salaries, it also paid $438 in benefit costs. These trends may help explain why districts with rising personnel costs are not boosting take-home pay for their workers.

Within states and districts, spending is more progressive than you might expect

The biggest variation in school spending is across state lines (see above), and the wealthier states tend to spend more. But within states and districts, schools serving needier students tend to get more funding. As one research summary estimated, “Black and Hispanic students receive $487 and $266 more per pupil than White students, respectively, and [free- and reduced-price lunch] students receive $355 more than non-FRL students.”

The School Spending and Outcomes Snapshot tool from the National Comprehensive Center lets users see school-level spending figures for their communities. As one example, I’ve chosen to focus on elementary schools in Atlanta. In the chart below, each bar represents one school, and the schools are color-coded based on the percentage of economically disadvantaged students they serve, with green being higher-income and red being lower-income. The schools are organized left to right by lower to higher spending levels.

Atlanta illustrates the national pattern. With the exception of several charter schools, higher-poverty elementary schools generally receive more funding per student than lower-poverty schools.

Of course, how much money is spent doesn’t tell us how the money is spent. At the national level, the researchers found that low-income and Black students have more staff allocated toward their education, but those staff tend to be less experienced, and thus lower-paid.

It’s unclear if having more, lower-paid staff is better or worse for students than having fewer, higher-paid teachers, but policymakers need to understand the underlying trends to avoid making expensive errors. For example, when New York state tried to impose a class size cap on New York City, the teachers union claimed that “priority will be given to schools with higher poverty rates”—but researchers found those schools already had the smallest classes. Meeting the new statewide cap would therefore require shifting resources toward wealthier schools, at a cost of as much as $1.9 billion.

Crossing the trillion-dollar threshold presents an opportunity to ask harder questions than whether schools simply need more money. Enrollment is falling, spending has risen substantially, and staffing has expanded, yet teacher pay has stagnated and student outcomes remain uneven. The next decade of school finance will be determined by whether policymakers can resolve these competing challenges.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

School Finance

Governance

Teachers & School Leaders

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

8.6.2026

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The past two weeks have seen a growing ruckus over big changes in the Head Start regs that are reportedly nearing completion by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First reported by Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark on July 19 and amplified via weekend coverage by The NewsHour and The New York Times, it appears that the 120+ pages of regulations that now govern this popular, 60-year-old federal program will be slashed to a dozen or so. Among the big scrap pile will be extensive specifications of standards, goals, and curricula focused on getting these low-income preschoolers ready for reading and math in kindergarten and beyond.

Those learning expectations are numerous and quite specific. For example, operators of Head Start programs today are supposed to ensure that a child reaching his fifth birthday “Counts and answers ‘How many?’ questions for approximately 10 objects” and “understands that each successive number name refers to a quantity that is one larger.” In the literacy realm, expectations for that age include the early stages of phonics, such as “Names 18 upper- and 15 lowercase letters,” “knows the sounds associated with several letters,” and “produces the beginning sound in a spoken word, such as ‘Dog begins with /d/.’"

Many pages later, we find elements of assessment, individualization, and possible accountability; the regs say that a Head Start program must “conduct standardized and structured assessments, which may be observation-based or direct, for each child that provide ongoing information to evaluate the child’s developmental level and progress in outcomes aligned to the goals described in the Head Start Early Learning Child Outcomes Framework: Ages Birth to Five. Such assessments must result in usable information for teachers, home visitors, and parents and be conducted with sufficient frequency to allow for individualization within the program year.”

I supply this detail—there’s vastly more—as background for three points about the forthcoming deregulation.

First, Head Start is undoubtedly over-regulated! Over its six decades, rules and specifications have been affixed to every possible realm of program operations like barnacles encrusting the hull of an aging ship. The education bits are a tiny fraction of a vast rulebook. The rules specify, for example, that:

A center-based program must have at least 35 square feet of usable indoor space per child available for the care and use of children (exclusive of bathrooms, halls, kitchen, staff rooms, and storage places) and at least 75 square feet of usable outdoor play space per child.

Complying with all that stuff is expensive, too. Between 2007 and 2025, the Head Start appropriation rose from $6.9 to $12.3 billion even as enrollments fell from a million youngsters to about 715,000.

So yes, some paring back of the regulatory burden is surely in order—as is clearer alignment of Head Start with state preschool programs. Back when Sargent Shriver conceived it as part of LBJ’s War on Poverty, few states had such programs—and some shunned the neediest (and least white) kids—so Head Start was born as and has remained a self-contained island, a direct grant program from HHS (formerly OEO and HEW) to individual program operators all over the place. It’s surely past due for modernization, simplification, decentralization, innovation, and local coordination.

Second, getting serious education targets, standards, and curricula into Head Start was a hard-won victory that wasn’t really sealed into law until 2007, when (as with NCLB) a bipartisan compromise between the Bush 43 team and Senator Ted Kennedy yielded a Head Start reauthorization that, for the first time, began to treat it as a pre-school endeavor as well as the “child development” program that it had always been. Getting to that point took more than 40 years because Head Start program operators and staff—many without college educations themselves—long fought such changes, as did some civil rights groups and a handful of early childhood “experts” and lobbyists. (That’s also why Head Start never became part of the Education Department.)

The 2007 legislation was a mixed bag, as the compromise also killed an assessment called the National Reporting System that the Bush team—notably Assistant HHS Secretary Wade Horn—had put in place to determine whether local Head Start programs were actually producing cognitive gains among their wee charges. It amounted to a worthy step forward for education combined with a backward step for program accountability.

Third—returning to the present—at a time when every known assessment of children’s “kindergarten readiness” shows immense shortcomings among half or more of America’s five-year-olds and when “universal preschool education” remains a potent political war-cry and policy objective, undoing the elements of Head Start (or any early-childhood program) that focus on cognition and school preparation in basic skills should strike any sentient being as folly.

I’m reminded of the days a year-and-a-half ago when Elon Musk’s DOGE emissaries, newly arrived at the Education Department, determined that their first targets should be in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES): the statistics, assessment, and research staffers and contracts that perform ED’s most fundamental (and least political) functions. As if their instructions were “do the greatest possible damage to American education as quickly as possible.”

The parallel isn’t far off. The geniuses behind Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation had urged that the Trump team eliminate Head Start as well as the Education Department. The new administration came close to zeroing out Head Start funding in its budget requests, eventually backing off—surely aware that Congress would continue funding this cherished program—while still attempting via regulation to trim its sails in various ways (such as not letting immigrant kids take part).

The big deregulatory initiative now in the works, much like farming out parts of ED to other agencies, is a way of minimizing something the White House and OMB’s Russell Vought can’t actually eradicate.

What’s weird for me today is that over the years I’ve repeatedly criticized Head Start for its failings on the education front. Just two years ago, in a chapter for AEI’s Doing Right by Kids volume, I wrote that:

The problem with Head Start (and many other “child development” programs) is that, despite its present-day assertion that it “promotes school readiness,” in reality it is not an education program. It does not employ qualified teachers in most of its highly decentralized centers, it does not have a curriculum, and to my knowledge, its providers are barely held to account for the cognitive gains of the children they serve.

This largely explains why, over the decades, evaluation after evaluation of the Head Start program has found that either it has minimal effect on those children’s cognitive outcomes or whatever effect it has dissipates during the early years of schooling. To be sure, such slippage is also due to elementary schools’ failure to capitalize on and sustain whatever initial gains the Head Start alumni arrived with. But the fact is that, despite modern-day tweaks, Head Start has never been much about actual kindergarten readiness on the cognitive or academic side. It has been more about the health and welfare—nutrition, dentition, and socialization—of deeply disadvantaged children. These are all good things to target, but this is not a formula for securing essential domains of school readiness.

I went on to urge policymakers to reconstitute Head Start as a full-fledged school readiness program.

So yes, it’s a tad awkward to find myself defending the present version. I’m not, actually. I sincerely believe that Head Start should be overhauled from top to bottom in service of preparing severely disadvantaged youngsters for success in school. In tandem with that, of course, the schools they enter need to be overhauled such that they build upon gains made by such readiness efforts.

But that’s not what the Trump administration is about with its Head Start plans. As usual, it’s more about destroying than building, ending rather than mending. Head Start needs deregulating, yes, but it also needs reconstituting.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Governance

Teachers & School Leaders

Robert Pondiscio

8.6.2026

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During my years at TIME magazine, the newsroom had a rule of thumb: If something happens once, it’s news. Twice is a coincidence. Three times? That’s a trend.

We’re not quite at three, but within the span of 10 days, The Atlantic and The New York Times opinion sections published surprising essays in support of Texas’s much-debated statewide curriculum and mandated reading list. Neither piece embraced Texas politics or dismissed concerns about religion in public schools. But both did something remarkable that would have been hard to picture even a few months ago: They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.

In his Times op-ed, veteran journalist James Traub writes that Texas is right to insist that students encounter a common body of important texts, including the Bible. Invoking E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s work on cultural literacy, he notes that we become good readers “by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text.” He praises Texas for moving away from a skills-based, content-neutral approach to reading instruction.

Similarly, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch’s essay for The Atlantic argues that “for a high school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.” He points out, for example, the value of the Psalms for understanding Lincoln’s speeches or the Book of Jonah for reading Moby-Dick.

Having spent two decades in the news business, I can attest that it would be easier, and surely more gratifying to the mostly left-leaning readership of both publications had each opted instead to publish yet another story about Texas’s “Bible-infused” curriculum or the supposed attempt by fundamentalists and right-wingers to sneak religious content into schools under the cover of a state-approved English language arts curriculum.

Instead, both the Times and The Atlantic put before readers the possibility that Texas’s curriculum architects and defenders (including yours truly) have been making a serious educational argument all along: that the Bible, along with Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, and other canonical works, is not being taught as religious doctrine but as part of the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge that undergirds reading comprehension and that literate adults draw upon, often unconsciously, to make sense of literature, history, political rhetoric, and the English language.

I don’t want to overstate the case—remember, it takes three to make a trend—but it’s hard not to wonder if something remarkable is afoot. Call it a vibe shift, or perhaps simply a new sobriety about reading and what it will take to arrest its long decline.

Perhaps there is a third data point: The Atlantic’s current print edition cover story laments the decline of reading itself. Staff writer Rose Horowitch observes that Americans are reading dramatically less than they once did. She notes, almost in passing, that we are now more likely to spend leisure time gambling than reading books—a statistic that would have sounded absurd a generation ago. Hers is more than the elite hand-wringing of the ink-stained literati. Horowitch sees the decline of sustained reading as a civilizational risk, threatening not just literacy but the habits of attention, reflection, abstraction, and reasoned argument on which a literate culture—and ultimately democratic self-government—depends. “What’s at risk,” she writes, “is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself.”

Horowitch’s essay has been among the most discussed articles of the summer. It follows a steady drumbeat of similar pieces rehearsing a familiar parade of horribles: Reading achievement has declined. Teachers and college professors report that students struggle to complete whole books. Reading stamina is collapsing as smartphones compete relentlessly for kids’ attention. Artificial intelligence makes it easier for students to produce the appearance of having read without necessarily reading—or thinking—very much at all.

When you’re no longer confident that schools are producing capable readers at all, old arguments about what children should read—and how they should be taught to read—begin to sound different. If you’re honest and fair, you become open to other ideas.

The change in mood has been building for several years, ever since Emily Hanford began publishing and broadcasting her series of public radio reports on the failure of American schools to align instruction with the “science of reading.” Hanford didn’t discover anything new or novel about how children learn to read. Cognitive scientists, reading researchers, dyslexia advocates, and a determined minority of teachers had been accumulating evidence for decades that many accepted classroom practices rested on surprisingly weak foundations. But her reporting, culminating in the popular series Sold a Story, asked a devastatingly simple question: If we already know a great deal about how children learn to read, why aren’t schools teaching them that way? Many states responded by passing laws mandating instruction and teacher training grounded in learning science. School districts abandoned balanced literacy. Parents who had never heard the phrase “three-cueing” suddenly knew exactly what it meant and why it’s not a very good way to learn to read. Lawmakers banned the practice in more than a dozen states.

All of this has done more than change reading instruction. It has also made it respectable, on both sides of the political aisle, to wonder whether education orthodoxy is often wrong. It helped that Hanford’s landmark reporting ran on public radio, which tends to enjoy revered status on the left. If the teaching profession can be shown to have been misled about something as basic as teaching kids to decode, what else might they be mistaken about?

For years, much of American education had tremendous confidence in a child-centered, pedagogically progressive vision of literacy. (In this context, “progressive” refers to an educational philosophy, not political affiliation or policy stance.) Students would become readers through authentic encounters with books. Choice would foster engagement. Reading comprehension was treated as a transferable skill. Teachers would facilitate rather than prescribe. Students would construct meaning rather than receive it.

The work of journalists like Horowitch and Hanford, along with declining NAEP scores, has made the failure of these ideas difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. The science of reading offers insights that sit in tension with these long-dominant practices. The first phase of the science of reading movement focused, appropriately, on decoding or “phonics.” But now the conversation is shifting toward harder questions. Once students can decode, what enables them to understand what they read? The answer turns out to sound remarkably traditional—and prescriptive. Fluency. Vocabulary. Background knowledge. Familiarity with canonical texts. The very things that education spent years deemphasizing have returned to the center of the discussion. Indeed, there’s rising interest in classical education, with its emphasis on the Great Books and old-school pedagogy. That doesn’t mean every item on Texas’s reading list is beyond debate. It does suggest, however, that confidence in the educational assumptions of the last two or three generations has begun to ebb.

It is fair to wonder if we are approaching the end of education’s postmodern moment—its rejection of a fixed canon, deference to students’ personal interests, and fixation on “culturally relevant” curriculum. Neither Derrida nor Foucault has never been K–12 faculty lounge staples, but to have been a teacher in the last several decades has invariably meant acculturating oneself to a broad and largely unquestioned educational sensibility that is “student centered,” skeptical of authority, and allergic to prescription. Common curricula yielded to student choice. Knowledge yielded to skills. The canon yielded to personalization. Teaching itself yielded to facilitation: Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage. None of these shifts were ill-intended. But in the aggregate, they conspired to enshrine a deep suspicion of the idea that adults should decide what children ought to know.

Accuse me of wish-casting and I won’t argue the point, but I detect a change in the weather. The shift isn’t toward traditionalism or conservatism per se. It’s simply less certain. It puts back in play many ideas that had long fallen into disfavor or been discarded:

Maybe adults really do have to decide some things for children.

Maybe students need to read books they would never choose on their own.

Maybe knowledge has to be deliberately sequenced and explicitly taught.

Maybe a common curriculum is not a tool of oppression but an instrument of democratic inheritance and equity.

I’m still not ready to declare a trend. Two opinion pieces, even in unlikely outlets, do not constitute an intellectual realignment. But there’s another lesson I learned in the news business: By the time everyone recognizes that a trend exists, it’s usually been underway for quite some time.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Governance

Teachers & School Leaders

Daniel Buck

8.6.2026

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We’ve all visited those classrooms. They look like 30-gallon bags full of confetti, crepe paper, and Elmer’s glue exploded in the center. The bulletin boards are a mess of student work and neon posters, arts and crafts projects dangle from the ceiling, and groups of desks are buried in tassels and decorations.

Must a classroom be a confusing and unrelenting assault on the senses?

I admit that such an opening salvo leaves me vulnerable to accusations of wanton curmudgeonliness. Classrooms should certainly be welcoming, engaging places, and in light of rancid debates over curriculum, accountability, the role of the federal government, chronic absenteeism, declining test scores, and whatever complaint is currently raising the hackles of culture warriors left and right, why bemoan a construction-paper-happy classroom?

I understand that classroom organization and design isn’t the most important factor in school-level effects. Yet it matters. Improving test scores is an all-of-the-above affair. No hail-Mary solution will close achievement gaps and achieve universally high test scores. Rather, education reform requires an assemblage of blocks, tackles, end runs, and short passes. Teachers need guidance here, too.

I recall the prep days before my first year teaching, standing in an empty room, wondering about the minutiae of classroom design: Student desks in groups, rows, or pairs? Where do I put my own desk? How about the bookshelf? What should I put on the walls? Can I get a kidney table?

Research into such questions is sparse but informative. One study found that children were more distracted, off task, and demonstrated smaller learning gains when “walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed.” The results held when researchers observed students in actual classrooms, not just laboratories. Another study found students less able to complete cognitively demanding tasks in “high load visual environments.”

Too much distraction creates cognitive overload. Adults can relate. Driving on unfamiliar city streets, bustling through a busy airport with kids, or trying to read in chaotic places—each scenario presents so many stimuli to our senses that we struggle to focus. Likewise, “visual noise” in a classroom distracts students from the content of the lesson, making it more difficult to focus on what matters.

Research has also looked into the effects of seating arrangements. One older study found that when classrooms shifted from tables to rows, on-task behavior doubled, disruption decreased, and teachers provided more positive comments. A more recent review examined eight studies and concluded that “students display higher levels of appropriate behaviour during individual tasks when they are seated in rows, with disruptive students benefiting the most.”

And while this concern isn’t apt to show up in research, I wonder about the ROI of time invested. I watched colleagues labor over meticulously designed bulletin boards and highly decorated classrooms, staying late into the night. When curricular units changed, they repeated the ritual to overhaul their decorations. Wouldn’t their time be better used reflecting on and revising lesson plans, contacting homes, providing feedback, or simply leaving at a reasonable hour to spend time with their own families?

The final end of any classroom is academic instruction and learning. Thus, all decisions must be made to that end. Materials need to be easily accessible. Teachers must be able to move about freely without obstruction. And student attention should be directed towards the front where instruction occurs—not to their friends or a collage of posters and crepe paper.

Underneath the pull toward an over-decorated classroom is a prioritizing of engagement, activity, or even fun, not learning. This same tendency then manifests in classroom activities that prioritize glitter, glue, and razzmatazz over academic work. A teacher asks, “How can I engage my students today?” instead of “What are they going to learn and how can I best facilitate that?”

In the incessant push for engagement in schools, there needs to be a counterweight towards serious academic work. Mike Schmoker said it well:

Lessons need not be particularly elaborate or complex. Teachers can build them around versatile (but underappreciated) routine academic activities such as close reading, note-taking, discussions, and writing prompts about content.... Done right, these activities never become dull. Curriculum built around this core simplifies lesson planning and powerfully promotes students’ intellectual and expressive capacities.

Ideally, a classroom is orderly and free of needless distractions. Just as the famous admonition to writers from Strunk and White to “omit needless words” doesn’t mean one must always be brief or curt, just get rid of the excess, a well-ordered classroom isn’t barren and lifeless. Hang a framed painting from history, an author’s portrait, or the Declaration of Independence. Showcase the best student work on a bulletin board. Create word walls or useful anchor charts.

Obviously, I don’t expect replacing a “Dream Big, Be Kind, You Matter” pastel post with a framed portrait of Lincoln will cause fourth grade reading score on NAEP suddenly to rise. But it will signal to students that in this particular classroom, at least, the work of learning history, science, literature, and the arts is treated as a serious endeavor.

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Neetu Arnold

8.5.2026

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Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Introduction

Student learning depends on classrooms that are safe, orderly, and focused. Yet managing student behavior proves a challenge in school districts across the country, especially in districts serving high shares of low-income students, where schools experience higher rates of widespread disorder, fights, and theft.¹ Low-income students often rely on schools as a pathway to upward mobility. The education system fails them when it tolerates persistent misbehavior and does not correct it, exposing students to harsher consequences in adulthood.

When I’ve interviewed educators and students about the current state of discipline in schools, it has appeared that schools have been doing everything except addressing misbehavior directly. Teachers have described receiving little to no support from administrators when dealing with fights, consistent disruptive behavior, and even threats. Schools have often resorted to behavior-management approaches that had weak evidence or focused on rewards rather than accountability for persistent misbehavior.² Students have noticed this avoidance, too, questioning why their district is spending money on metal detectors when they could directly address the problem by suspending the offending students.³

More new programs or technologies aren’t going to address the problem if behavioral expectations aren’t enforced consistently, but correcting behavior and maintaining order in schools is an essential precondition for learning. New teachers’ bills of rights could delineate more clearly policies for managing misbehavior and thereby secure orderly classrooms.

The causes and consequences of misbehavior

Classroom disorder impedes student learning. Research consistently shows that students experience negative spillover effects when they are exposed to disruptive peers. Test scores fall. Nondisruptive students also become more likely to act disruptively themselves.⁴ Some researchers even estimate that exposure to disruptive peers can reduce future earnings by $80,000, “suggesting large efficiency losses due to disruptive students.”⁵

Teachers are also finding student misbehavior increasingly unmanageable. In a 2026 Education Week survey, nearly 60 percent of teachers from pre-K to third grade said student behavior had worsened over the past two years.⁶ Annual RAND surveys consistently find that teachers identify student misbehavior as the top stressor, even above low teacher pay.⁷ Teachers end up diluting instructional materials because they spend so much time managing behavior.⁸

A variety of factors are contributing to increased disorder. Some point to changes in parenting. Others cite smartphones.⁹ It may also be that the past decade’s shift toward more lenient school discipline has given parents less incentive to reinforce appropriate behavior, particularly if they believe that disciplinary decisions can be negotiated after misconduct occurs. Whatever the cause, misbehavior deteriorates a school’s culture, and so schools cannot be places that tolerate it.

Ineffective policies

Federal, state, and local governments all play a role in public school discipline policy. At the federal level, the focus is generally on protecting students’ civil rights and setting broad incentives. By contrast, school boards in 47 states have broad authority to set discipline policies for their districts.¹⁰ States establish minimum discipline requirements, setting rules for serious offenses such as possession of drugs or weapons.¹¹

Faulty assumptions underlie most of the problems in school discipline policy. Out of concern for the “school-to-prison pipeline,” for example, schools often focus on the needs of a few disruptive students at the expense of the majority of students who have done nothing wrong.¹² This approach fails to account for the costs imposed on other students and teachers. It also emphasizes the perceived harshness of punishment without considering how clear standards and consistent consequences can prevent future infractions.

Another pervasive assumption is that the presence of disparities in disciplinary outcomes automatically means discrimination has occurred. Disparities by themselves do not establish that schools are disciplining students unfairly. In reality, unenforced discipline in the name of equity subjects nondisruptive minority students to chaotic school environments.

These ideas then inform ineffective policies. Some states like California and Massachusetts either prohibit suspensions for willful disobedience or impose prerequisites on suspensions, essentially deterring administrators from using this means of discipline.¹³ Concern over discipline disparities and parental complaints can make administrators reluctant to support classroom removals, even when district policies allow them. A common scenario is that a teacher will send a disruptive student to the principal’s office, only for that student to return quickly to class, undermining the teacher’s authority.¹⁴ Student removal procedures, therefore, need clarification and standardization.

Teachers’ bills of rights

One kind of proposal gaining traction to address classroom disorder is state policies that standardize discipline procedures. Their names vary, but these policies are often referred to as “teachers’ bills of rights.” These policies are meant to strengthen teachers’ ability to maintain classroom order by clarifying when teachers may remove students, establishing principal responsibilities, and formalizing student reentry procedures. (See Table 1.)

Strong laws clearly spell out when teachers may remove students for disruptive or violent behavior, require plans for managing student behavior, and prevent school administrators from automatically returning a student to a teacher’s classroom without following student reentry procedures. In Alabama, teachers must follow a classroom management plan that’s submitted for approval to the school’s principal at the beginning of the school year.¹⁵ The state requires only that these plans exist and does not dictate what’s in the plan.¹⁶ If the classroom management plan is exhausted, teachers “may exclude” an offending student from their classroom, and the excluded student “may be readmitted to the classroom only after the principal . . . provides written certification to the classroom teacher” that explains to the teacher what disciplinary action was taken, if any.¹⁷

States have adopted different approaches to when removal authority should be exercised. Alabama relies on an escalatory approach, where persistent misconduct can lead to the harshest consequence approved by a district. This could include placement in alternative education facilities.¹⁸ In Texas, students can be removed after a single incident of bullying, interference, or behavior that is unruly, disruptive, or abusive. This approach may be justified for severe incidents like abuse but can risk overuse for vague, broad incidents like student “interfere[nce].”¹⁹

Some of these bills risk becoming merely symbolic when they simply state that teachers have disciplinary rights or when they restate laws that already exist. But even weak bills can be politically useful if a state’s politics requires incremental rather than sweeping steps. Tennessee passed its Educator’s Bill of Rights in 2017, with such unenforceable provisions as a teacher’s right to “be treated with civility and respect” and “have his or her professional judgment and discretion respected.”²⁰ The Professional Educators of Tennessee described the initial bill as a “framework that . . . can be built upon in the future.”²¹ By 2021, the state passed the Teacher’s Discipline Act, which operationalized disciplinary procedures between the teacher and principal.²²

State lawmakers should also scrutinize measures that prescribe appropriate discipline, as weak interventions could undermine the effectiveness of otherwise clear procedures provided by teachers’ bills of rights. Louisiana, for instance, requires principals to implement “at least one” disciplinary measure before a student can be readmitted to class. “Restorative justice practices” qualify as one of these measures.²³ State lawmakers should be aware that such practices don’t yet “have [their] own evidence base,” according to the co–executive director of the Midwest Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) Network, a regional hub of the US Department of Education’s Center on PBIS.²⁴ Furthermore, schools often use restorative practices to replace consequences.²⁵ So even if state law establishes a clear student removal and return process, administrators may satisfy state requirements without adequately addressing misconduct.

A well-designed teachers’ bill of rights can help close the gap between district-level discipline policies and their implementation. Because many of these bills were passed recently, their practical effects will take time to assess. Still, they show promise and should be viewed as a step toward restoring order.

Best state approaches to discipline

State governments should establish baseline expectations for school safety, outline the responsibilities of various actors, ensure accountability through quality data collection, and not compel leniency by requiring restorative justice programs or prohibiting suspensions. Students should be able to access orderly classrooms regardless of where they happen to live.

A conservative approach to school discipline begins with a simple premise: A school’s primary purpose is to educate students, and quality education requires order. States are well within their rights to establish minimum standards for the public schools under their authority.

When large numbers of students fail to receive a proper education because schools are unsafe or disorderly, everyone pays the price. We risk raising citizens who are poorly informed about our country. We weaken the future workforce. And more young people face dangers that could have been addressed earlier in a lower-stakes environment like school.

___________

Notes

Riley Burr et al., Crime, Violence, Discipline, and Safety in U.S. Public Schools: Findings from the School Survey on Crime and Safety: 2021–22, US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, January 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/first-look-ed-tab/crime-violence-discipline-and-safety-u-s-public-schools-findings-school-survey-crime-and-safety-2021.
Neetu Arnold, “The High Costs of Classroom Disorder,” City Journal, Summer 2025, https://www.city-journal.org/article/classroom-disorder-student-learning-schools-discipline.
Neetu Arnold, “Philly Schools May Not Be ‘Following the Research’ on School Safety,” RealClearPennsylvania, February 26, 2024, https://www.realclearpennsylvania.com/articles/2024/02/26/philly_schools_may_not_be_following_the_research_on_school_safety_1014373.html.
Scott E. Carrell and Mark L. Hoekstra, “Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone’s Kids,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2, no. 1 (2010): 211–28, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.2.1.211.
Scott E. Carrell et al., “The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers,” American Economic Review 108, no. 11 (2018): 3377–415, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20160763.
Elizabeth Heubeck, “Toileting and Tying Shoes: Young Students Increasingly Lack Basic Skills,” Education Week, March 13, 2026, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/toileting-and-tying-shoes-young-students-increasingly-lack-basic-skills/2026/03.
Elizabeth D. Steiner et al., Teacher Well-Being, Pay, and Intentions to Leave in 2026: Selected Findings from the 2026 State of the American Teacher Survey, RAND Corporation, June 8, 2026, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4404-2.html; and Elizabeth D. Steiner et al., Teacher Well-Being, Pay, and Intentions to Leave in 2025: Findings from the State of the American Teacher Survey, RAND Corporation, June 24, 2025, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html.
US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “Teachers’ Reports of Disruptive Student Behaviors and Staff Rule Enforcement,” September 2023, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a11.
Jackie Mader, “What’s Behind Explosive Student Behavior?,” The Hechinger Report, February 18, 2026, https://hechingerreport.org/whats-behind-explosive-student-behavior/.
Ballotpedia, “Local School Board Authority Across the 50 States,” accessed June 26, 2026, https://ballotpedia.org/Local_school_board_authority_across_the_50_states.
Bryan Kelley et al., “50-State Comparison: School Discipline Policies,” Education Commission of the States, May 17, 2021, https://www.ecs.org/50-state-comparison-school-discipline-policies/.
Max Eden and Seth Barron, 10 Blocks, podcast, “The School-to-Prison Pipeline,” City Journal, January 10, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/the-school-to-prison-pipeline.
Neetu Arnold and Daniel Buck, “Why Southern States Are Outperforming Others in Education,” City Journal, December 22, 2025, https://www.city-journal.org/article/mississippi-louisiana-alabama-education-schools-southern-states.
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, “A Growing Behavior Crisis in Wisconsin Classrooms,” YouTube, May 4, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMLYoyvQDoQ.
For example, see Raymond L. Young Elementary School, “Classroom Management Plan,” https://www.youngelem.net/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=4452197&type=d&pREC_ID=2707011.
Alabama Department of Education, “Teachers’ Bill of Rights,” September 23, 2024, https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1727281452/acsk12org/emadi8zvoiuedqfcmxf2/GBG-TeachersBillofRights.pdf.
Ala. Code § 16-28C-3 (2025).
Ala. Code § 16-28C-3 (2025).
H.B. 6, 89th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Tex. 2025).
Tenn. Code Ann. § 49-5-209 (2024).
Professional Educators of Tennessee, “Educator’s Bill of Rights,” accessed July 7, 2026, https://www.proedtn.org/page/EducatorsBillofRights.
Marta W. Aldrich, “Tennessee Teachers Could Seek to Remove Unruly Students Under Bill Approved by Legislature,” Chalkbeat, March 11, 2021, https://www.chalkbeat.org/tennessee/2021/3/11/22326158/tennessee-teachers-could-seek-to-remove-unruly-students-under-bill-approved-by-legislature/.
La. Stat. Ann. § 17:416 (2025).
Arnold, “The High Costs of Classroom Disorder.”
Jennifer Weber, “Restorative Justice Didn’t Deliver. Why?,” Education Next 26, no. 1 (2026), https://www.educationnext.org/restorative-justice-didnt-deliver-why-teachers-say-focusing-students-social-emotional-wellbeing-address-discipline/.

Jeff Murray

8.5.2026

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News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned.

This piece presents as an up-to-the-moment discussion of a current issue in the Ohio gubernatorial race—merit pay for teachers. However, it includes two…shall I say…“archival”…contributions from Fordhamites. Thus while it has ended up as a nice, nuanced take on the topic, helped immensely by Jessica Poiner’s clear-eyed analysis, it feels to this old timer like coverage that’s been fermenting in the darkened journalistic cellar for some time, waiting for the right moment to emerge. No idea, though, why today is that moment. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/5/26)
Speaking of vintage topics, here’s an editorial from Vindy.com discussing that perennial bugbear, student transportation. Feels like the editorial board agrees with the basic findings of the Ohio Pupil Transportation Workgroup. (That is, that things need to change for the better.) But they can only get consensus on one next step to help things to improve: More money. Classic! (Vindy.com, 8/4/26)
A decision by the elected board of Lakewood City Schools to close an elementary school building in order to right-size their footprint has been successfully derailed by a legal challenge related to public meetings laws. The needed savings will not materialize unless they can get their act together for another try. (Ideastream Public Media, 8/4/26)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

Topics:

Governance

[1] All districts must use state-approved materials in reading, but only those with low achievement scores must use math materials from the state list.