1. Lots of inaccurate and misleading information here, if you ask me, regarding the financial situation in Ross Local Schools. We can probably debate how a district can possibly cut $1.3 million from their budget and still be facing red ink. But the characterization provided of how state fiscal oversight works in such districts is just flat out fearmongering. As you will recall, however, similar fearmongering over state academic oversight induced a number of districts to move heaven and earth to boost student achievement and avoid ADCs back in the day when that was an actual thing. So I guess we’ll just have to go with this “creative phrasing” and hope it helps. (WCPO-TV, Cincinnati, 3/15/22)
    
2. In case you hadn’t heard, former Youngstown City Schools CEO Krish Mohip is one of three finalists for the superintendency of Philadelphia City Schools. The public portion of his interview process was covered by the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday. If you’re still interested in creative phraseology after the previous clip, you should have a good time reading how Mohip characterizes his time in Youngstown, especially if you actually lived through it like I did. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/15/22)
   
   

3. No obfuscation here, thank heavens. Canton City School officials report that not only have they not yet beaten the previously-nonexistent-but-now-actually-very-clearly-extant Covid slide, it is still ongoing. The district’s director of teaching and learning innovation provides data showing a two-year skills gap among many of their students. Solution options seem pretty thin. (Canton Repository, 3/15/22) Most Clark and Champaign County school districts are still seeing high levels of chronic absenteeism as well, a problem also noted in the Canton story. While the finger is pointed at remote learning during the pandemic, some of those 2019 numbers don’t look so hot either. Just sayin’. (Springfield News-Sun, 3/16/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Earlier this year, the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding filed a lawsuit aimed at eliminating the state’s EdChoice Scholarship Program. Over the next several months—more likely years—lawyers will argue the merits of this challenge in court. While it’s obviously premature to know how things will shake out, it’s important to consider what could happen if the lawsuit succeeds. Three of the biggest potential impacts deserve immediate attention.

The impact on kids and families

The most obvious—and most important—consequence of a successful anti-voucher lawsuit is its dire effect on EdChoice participants. For many parents, the school they believe best meets their children’s educational needs will once again be out of their financial reach. Those who used an EdChoice voucher to escape schools with a history of poor performance will be back to square one, searching for a better option that won’t break the bank. Others will return to districts that are satisfactory (or even good) academically, but for myriad reasons—like a lack of specific services or student behavior issues—weren’t a good fit for particular children. The fortunate few will be able to move to a different district, snag a seat at a charter or STEM school, or take advantage of scholarships and penny pinching to remain in private schools. But the vast majority won’t be so lucky.

For students, the adjustment could be difficult. Research shows that changing schools can have a negative impact on academic growth and achievement, especially if students transition to a lower-performing school. Temporary dips or difficulties might be an acceptable trade-off when families make a proactive choice, but that’s not the case when the choice is forced upon them. And that’s without even weighing the social and emotional impacts of a new school, new teachers, and new friends, none of which is easy even without a traumatic pandemic.

The impact on districts

The ultimate goal of this lawsuit is to get the 48,871 students who participated in EdChoice during the 2020–21 school year back into district schools. Public school advocates would view this as a massive victory—enrollments will increase, district coffers will swell (at least theoretically), and those pesky private schools won’t be able to “steal” kids and funds anymore.

But are districts really ready for all that? For many, enrollment increases will be small because the number of students participating in EdChoice is small. But in larger districts, the influx of new kids could be substantial. Consider Columbus City Schools, one of the districts named in the lawsuit. According to the most recent state report card, 6,720 students living in the district participated in EdChoice during 2020–21. If that program disappears, many of those students will return to their assigned public schools—and the district could see an enrollment increase up to 15 percent of its current student population.

This would have widespread impacts. School cafeterias will need to feed thousands more children. Principals will need to find classrooms and desks and textbooks and technology for an influx of new students with widely varying academic and social needs. And, most importantly, hundreds of new teachers and staff will need to be hired, or class sizes will have to increase.

Such adjustments require money. And given how often districts complain that EdChoice “steals” public funding, one might assume that eliminating the program would lead to a cash windfall for districts. But that might be illusory. Remember, vouchers are paid for using state dollars. Traditional districts, meanwhile, are funded by state and local dollars. On average, 45 percent of public school revenues are from local sources, and local dollars aren’t tied to student enrollments. That means if Columbus and other districts see a huge influx of students, the only additional funding they’ll receive is whatever the state funding formula allows. Nearly half of their budgets won’t adjust at all to the new enrollment count. District leaders are free to go to the ballot box and ask local taxpayers for more, of course. But given that many of those taxpayers are feeling the effects of price hikes and lingering pandemic impacts, that could be a big ask.

The impact on other voucher programs

From the standpoint of underserved kids and educational excellence, the most troublesome impact of a courtroom victory win is that it would open the door for challenges to Ohio’s other three voucher programs. They serve specific groups of children—two are limited to students with special needs, while the third is for children living in Cleveland—but they still allow families to use taxpayer dollars to attend private schools. If the lawsuit’s reasoning is sound, then these programs are just as unconstitutional as EdChoice. It stands to reason, then, that in time the state would need to sacrifice all voucher programs, including those that serve over 11,000 children with special needs. Families who found that traditional public schools were not equipped to handle the unique needs of their students but couldn’t afford to pay out-of-pocket expenses for the right care will be forced to return to the assigned public schools that weren’t meeting their needs in the first place. That’s immoral and inexcusable.

***

As the anti-voucher lawsuit travels through the courts, the focus will be on legal and constitutional considerations. Yet we must not forget the real-world consequences for thousands of Ohio families, students, and taxpayers should the plaintiffs prevail. Those shouldn’t be ignored. 

Almost ten years have passed since Ohio lawmakers enacted early literacy reforms that aim to ensure all children read fluently. Based on pre-pandemic state exam trends, the “third grade reading guarantee” seems to be encouraging a stronger focus on literacy and pushing achievement in the right direction. Yet despite the promising signs of success, policymakers can’t afford to let up. In fact, given the pandemic-related learning losses, they need to double down on the state’s early literacy efforts.

In a recent piece, I examined the retention provision that requires schools to hold back third graders who do not meet reading standards and offer them additional help. While some are clamoring for its removal, doing so would be a huge blunder. By reverting to the disastrous practice of “social promotion,” poor readers would once again be allowed to fall through the cracks. They would pass to fourth grade, and likely beyond, lacking the foundation needed to tackle more challenging material.

But the retention requirement is just one part—albeit a critical one—in the overall package. Several other important policies also comprise Ohio’s early literacy law. This post reviews the guarantee’s diagnostic testing, parental notification, and reading improvement provisions; at the end I’ll suggest some areas for improvement. Note, too, that we’ll cover the intervention requirements for retained third graders in a future installment.

Diagnostic assessments

Under the reading guarantee, schools must assess grade K–3 students annually every fall. In kindergarten, schools may use the language and literacy section of the statewide Kindergarten Readiness Assessment as the diagnostic or administer one of sixteen state-approved vendor assessments. In grades 1–3, schools may fulfill the requirement via vendor or a state-designed diagnostic assessment. These tests gauge whether students are reading on grade level—i.e., on or off track.[1]

The diagnostic is a necessary screening tool that encourages timely intervention, even prior to third grade. But we ought to ask whether these tests are accurately identifying struggling readers. Remember, there’s no single statewide diagnostic test, so schools could be choosing assessments that are weakly aligned with state reading standards and risk overlooking children who need extra help.

When examining pre-pandemic data, there is some reason for concern. Consider figure 1, which displays K–3 on-track percentages in Ohio’s largest urban districts and their third grade proficiency rates. In four districts—Akron, Columbus, Dayton, and Toledo—the on-track percentages in grades K–1 are noticeably higher than their third grade reading proficiency rates, by about 15 to 40 percentage points. Then they fall significantly in second grade, and by third grade they track more closely to proficiency rates. This may indicate that the kindergarten and first grade assessments in these districts are giving a faulty assurance that students are on track when they really are not.

Figure 1: Grades K–3 “on-track” percentages in reading (fall 2019) versus third grade ELA proficiency rates (spring 2019), selected districts

​​Source: Ohio Department of Education, 2019–20 K–4 literacy report and 2018–19 district achievement data.

Irregular data are not limited to these districts. In fact, some Ohio districts reported all or virtually all of their children as on track in reading, yet had low third grade proficiency rates. For instance, Waverly and Paulding school districts posted 100 percent on-track rates in all grades K–3 on fall 2019 diagnostics, but had third grade proficiency rates of 63 and 76 percent, respectively. There are some oddities in the other direction, too. Wooster and Copley-Fairlawn, for example, reported that less than 10 percent of grades K–3 students were on track, but their third grade proficiency rates were 75 and 90 percent in spring 2019.

Overall, there’s enough inconsistency in the data to question whether the diagnostic tests are accurately identifying students as being on or off track. Are some districts using tests that yield “false negatives”—failing to identify a reading deficiency when one exists? Conversely, are other tests more prone to “false positives”? Accurate diagnostic tests are crucial, as those results drive decisions about whether students receive extra reading supports.

Parental notification and improvement plans

Under statute, a school district must do two things when children are deemed off track via reading diagnostics:

• Notify student’s parents or guardians. By written notification, districts must report the reading deficiency, describe the current services provided to the student, propose instructional supports designed to remediate the deficiency, and disclose the possibility of retention after third grade.

• Create a reading improvement and monitoring plan. Within sixty days of receiving an off-track result, the district, with input from a student’s parents and teachers, must develop an improvement plan. Among a few other items, the plan must identify the specific reading deficiencies, outline the supports needed to remedy them, create a monitoring process to ensure students receive such supports, provide parents with opportunities for involvement, and offer a reading curriculum that “assists students to read at grade level.”

Per state law, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) reports the types of interventions that students with an improvement plan receive. Figure 2 displays the five most frequently reported interventions for the 2020–21 school year (the numbers are mostly similar to 2019–20). What’s noticeable are the broad intervention categories. For example, what exactly happened during “increased reading time”?

Figure 2: Most frequently reported interventions for off-track readers, 2020–21​

​​Source: Ohio Department of Education

To its credit, ODE has recently overhauled this reporting system, so that schools must now report literacy interventions with greater specificity. Gone are ambiguous terms, and instead, schools will now report using categories such as “explicit intervention in phonemic awareness” and “explicit intervention in vocabulary,” terms that appear to be well-defined by ODE and are referenced in its statewide literacy plan. The new list does include a few highly questionable but, unfortunately, still-used approaches, though ODE flags those as not being part of its literacy plan (e.g., the three cuing system). Moving forward, this change is a step forward in transparency and should yield a clearer picture of schools’ efforts to address reading deficiencies in the early grades.

Policy refinements

The diagnostic testing requirement, along with mandatory parental notification and improvement plans for off-track readers, are core strengths that should remain firmly in place. Yet policymakers could also consider fine-tuning these policies to better ensure they are being well-implemented. Here are five ideas that would strengthen these provisions.

1. Disapprove a diagnostic test if it’s not accurately identifying off-track readers. The on/off-track data raise the possibility that some assessments overlook struggling readers. To ensure accuracy, lawmakers should require ODE, before approving a vendor’s test, to demonstrate its alignment with state reading standards and include documentation that the on-track target matches the rigor of Ohio’s proficiency standard. If such an analysis does not demonstrate alignment, it should be disapproved. The analyses should be made public, much like those behind the ACT-SAT concordances.

2. Confirm that parents are notified and involved in the development of their child’s improvement plan. Because parental involvement is so crucial to a child’s ability to read, schools need to engage parents when a child is struggling. While there isn’t evidence that schools are dropping the ball, there is also no indication that ODE monitors compliance with these parental requirements. To ensure this occurs, legislators should require ODE to conduct random audits that check whether districts are notifying and involving parents.

3. Offer parents guidance and resources to help their child become a better reader. There is no one more interested in a child becoming a good reader than his or her parents. That being said, some parents may not have a clear understanding of how they can best support their child’s progress. One opportunity to provide more information is through the written notification. Legislators could require ODE to develop—with the input of parents, researchers, and educators—a standard document appended to the notification, which offers general advice and resources that help parents engage in the improvement process.

4. Ensure that the reading curriculum used to instruct off-track students aligns with the science of reading. As noted above, state law currently requires an improvement plan to use a reading curriculum that “assists students to read at grade level.” That language is overly vague. Lawmakers should strengthen it by insisting that any curriculum aligns with the science of reading, a term that refers to literacy practices backed by a strong body of evidence.[2] Following Colorado’s footsteps, Ohio lawmakers could go a step further and create a state-level advisory committee that approves early literacy curricula; only those aligned with this science would be allowed for use in improvement plans.

5. Require periodic evaluations about the effectiveness of reading interventions. To date, there has been no rigorous evaluation of the third grade reading guarantee, either as a whole or its component parts. That should change. As a good first step, ODE’s revised reporting system should yield higher quality data on interventions, which could then be linked to student outcomes. But without a legislative mandate for evaluation[3] or money set-aside to undertake one, this type of analysis isn’t likely to happen. That’s a loss for educators and parents, who would benefit from research that pinpoints which remedies work best for which deficiencies.

The ability to read fluently is crucial to lifelong success. The third grade reading guarantee has the right goals, and the policy building blocks are in place to make certain that children acquire foundational reading skills. But to truly fulfill its promise of being a “guarantee,” lawmakers need to further strengthen these policies to ensure that all struggling readers in grades K–3 receive the extra help and support they need.

1. Trust me, none of these elected school board members in Berea are any better informed about school choice than they were before the mixed up presentation they received, as summarized here. It seems entirely fitting, then, that the “reach out to your legislators to express your opinion” exhortation is noted before the recommendation to “educate yourselves”. Fordham, however, stands ready to assist with that last bit if anyone’s interested in the actual information. (Cleveland.com, 3/11/22)
    
2. The great news: Centerburg Local Schools is in the process of scrapping the “discredited” three-cueing system of teaching kids how to tread in place of good old phonics/decoding. The improvement has, apparently, been immediate. The bad news: literally everything else in this piece—from how long cueing has been used, to how reluctant some teachers are to scrap it, to the notion that its suckitude was not detected because “most kids did OK” with it, to the fact that it is still going to take at least another year to complete the vital change. (Ashland Source, 3/10/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Charter innovations

The Columbus Dispatch this week published a terrific feature on the Walkabout program for seniors at The Graham School. In case you haven’t heard of it, Walkabout is a student-driven effort to connect classroom learning to the world outside the school—jobs, internships, civic engagement, volunteerism, and the like—to help prepare young people for the next step in their lives. Check it out! Meanwhile, Cleveland.com reported on efforts to build a culinary technical program at Frederick Douglass High School—everything from food safety to knife skills to gastronomy and beyond. And by partnering with Edwins Leadership and Restaurant Institute, the hope is that students will have a direct pathway into Cleveland’s restaurant industry upon completion of the program.

More unionizing

Also in Cleveland, teachers at Menlo Park Academy have voted to unionize. There are a few remaining hurdles, but the deal will likely be done soon.

More of the same

While pandemic pivots to remote learning at various school buildings in Columbus City Schools seem to be a thing of the past, bus driver shortages in the district continue, negatively impacting charter school families as reported by ABC 6 News.

The view from Kentucky

While legislation was passed in 2017 that allows charter schools to operate in Kentucky, none have yet overcome existing hurdles to actually open. The CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions published an op-ed this week discussing a newly-introduced bill that might finally break the logjam if enacted.

Meanwhile, back in Ohio

An odd and protracted tussle between the Ohio Department of Education and the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review (JCARR) continued during a meeting this week. The rules in question relate to charter schools—and accountability of them in particular—but despite much effort to resolve the concerns, it seems that more work and more debate will be required.

*****

Did you know you can have every edition of the Ohio Charter News Weekly sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

1. Don’t look now, but it seems that a number of Ohio school districts are tentatively starting to declare victory against the Covid slide in student progress and achievement. In fact, the implication in this piece is that upcoming state testing will prove just how good a job they have done with this and that these districts are actually looking forward to the verification. This tracks, of course, since most districts previously insisted that Covid disruption-induced learning loss didn’t exist until state testing data showed that it did. (Springfield News Sun, 3/9/22). Hamilton City Schools outside Cincinnati doesn’t even need to wait that long. They’ve got their own data and are pretty well crowing about it in this piece. “Our room has seen wonderful results,” said one kindergarten teacher. “The kids are very happy; we are very happy, and we're showing a lot of learning and growing in our room.” The assistant superintendent adds, “We have classrooms where 98 percent of students are meeting growth, where they are growing not just one year, but a year and a half, two years, already and we’re only mid-way through the year.” Yep, all sorted! (Local 12 News, Cincinnati, 3/8/22)
    
2. While not fully sorted, apparently, a number of school districts in and around Ashland County are reporting that their Covid-era chronic absenteeism problems are evaporating as well. “What I’ve witnessed in schools,” said Wooster City Schools’ associate supe without hint of irony, “is that our specialty is in-person learning.” (The Daily Record, 3/10/22)
   
   
3. Meanwhile, DIY programming may be the next area of “specialty” school districts attempt to embrace. To wit, Middletown City Schools and Hamilton City Schools (those guys again?) have partnered with Miami University of Ohio to create their own, self-contained, Early College Academy program. It is unclear from this piece why the state’s College Credit Plus program, beloved of families and students everywhere, is not right for these two, but I’m sure there’s a reason. Sadly, the DIY version sounds to me smaller, more reductive, and bedecked with even more hoops than CCP. But anyway…kudos I guess. (The Journal-News, 3/8/22) In Parma City Schools, the supe is very excited about their still-gestating Parma Academy of Gifted Enrichment (or PAGE), which is scheduled to open in the 2023-24 school year. What is it? “We talked a lot about being a one-stop-shop and created different programs for different types of students who maybe don’t fit that traditional mold of what a traditional classroom or program can offer,” he told attendees at his annual State of the Schools presentation. “PAGE would be aimed at those students we want to make sure we keep in our district and provide really a pipeline to the Ivy League or a military academy appointment. It’s that type of vision we’re trying to grow there.” Seems very…specific…in a number of ways which raise questions for me. And I’m sure, just like the various other “pipelines” we’ve been hearing about lately, no guarantees of Harvard or West Point enrollment are promised or implied (and will have to be spelled out sometime between now and 2023). (Cleveland.com, 3/9/22)
    
4. Sometimes clips just write themselves. It seems that dozens of superintendents from across the country visited Lakota Local Schools (and Middletown too) as part of something called the “Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools”, which I’ve never ever heard of, which aims to “strive[s] to give students a quality education through innovative ideas.” Well, as long as they’re striving for something… “No two students learn the same way,” says Lakota schools’ info flack with a trace of irony, “so how can we personalize that learning to meet their needs?” A list of the districts’ “personalized innovations” on display per this piece include: cricket machines (by which I think they mean the automated pattern cutter made by Cricut and beloved of crafters since at least 2010), a green screen (saw that in “Doctor Who” in 1971), a podcast studio (the future indeed), a calligraphy lab (ah yes, the writing style preferred by “merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even by emperors issuing commands”…in ancient Rome), dance revolution and other old skool video games, and a stained glass window painting station (how very Augsburg, 1065). Whew! A veritable Crystal Palace full of modern ingenuity (look it up, kiddos). I sure hope the visitors to this “agora of innovation” (if you will) picked up all the intel they needed to figure out how to bring these divertissements anciens to their own children of the future. If not, I’m sure Lakota officials would be able to fax them the details. (Local 12 News, Cincinnati, 3/10/22)
   
   
5. Finally this week, back in the actual present day and looking toward the real future, MacKenzie Scott has made another huge contribution to support education in Ohio. Specifically, an incredible $10 million gifted to Fugees Academy, a private school in Columbus which serves children of immigrants. The school has always been tuition-free for families thanks to charitable donations and the EdChoice Scholarships for which most students are eligible. And while there’s no specific use designated for the new funds just yet, the need is obviously large and the services important now and going forward. (Columbus Dispatch, 3/9/22)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Folks who have “tutoring” as the hoped-for winning square on their post-Covid bingo card will want to pay close attention to a recent report detailing a field experiment in virtual tutoring. A group of researchers led by Sally Sadoff of the University of California San Diego created the pilot program and tested its efficacy via a controlled experiment. While the price tag was low, the academic boost observed was negligible, and any effort to scale it up will require much that’s still in short supply more than two years into the pandemic.

In the experiment, sixth- to eighth-grade students from one middle school in Chicago Heights, Illinois, were randomly selected to receive virtual tutoring from college students via the CovEducation (CovEd) program. CovEd was created during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, intended to support K–12 students in need of academic and social-emotional support. Tutors were college students, specifically recruited from “top-tier research universities,” who worked as volunteers (hence the low cost of the effort). A total of 230 tutors participated in the pilot from forty-seven institutions. About three-fourths of them were women; 40 percent were White, 34 percent were Asian, 20 percent were Hispanic, and 5 percent were Black. About 70 percent were science or engineering majors. Prior to the start of the program (March 2021), CovEd provided tutors with a three-hour training on pedagogical techniques, relationship building, and educational resources. During the program, CovEd offered tutors weekly peer mentoring sessions to troubleshoot challenges, share best practices, and build community.

Nearly 100 percent of Chicago Heights Middle School (CHMS) students were from low-income households; almost two-thirds were Hispanic, and just less than one-third were Black. Prior to the pandemic, just one quarter of students in the school were meeting grade level standards in math and reading. In February 2021, CMHS students were offered a choice to remain fully remote or participate in a hybrid model where they attend school in person part-time and learn remotely part-time. Only students who chose the hybrid option (approximately 58 percent of the total school population) were eligible to participate in the pilot. A total of 560 students were involved in the experiment, randomly assigned to either treatment (264) or control groups (296). Control group students participated in regular advisory period activities whereas treatment group students received tutoring. No demographic breakdown of students in each group was provided in the report. Treatment students were offered thirty minutes of one-on-one virtual tutoring twice per week—one virtual session while in person at school and another while remote at home. Thus, over the twelve-week program, students had a maximum of nine hours during which to attend tutoring. However, students were added to the treatment group in three waves, and those who joined in later weeks had fewer participation opportunities available.

Glitches occurred right off the bat. Eighteen percent of those assigned to the treatment group did not attend a single minute of tutoring. On average, participants attended just 3.1 hours. Low take-up was ascribed to weak overall attendance during this “transitional period” from fully-remote to hybrid learning, a common story in schools across the country. Student achievement in math was measured via the Illinois Assessment of Readiness test—the state’s standardized test—and in reading via iReady, a formative assessment used to track student progress. Bottom line: The pilot program produced consistently positive but very small and statistically insignificant effects on student achievement on both tests compared to the control group.

The researchers run intent-to-treat models and report that if more students had spent more time on tutoring, they would likely have done even better on the tests. Even though this seems somewhat obvious—the same could likely be said of attending more actual school—they use it as the basis for their contention that the tutoring program could be scaled to produce stronger academic outcomes. However, it must be noted that there was an extensive social-emotional aspect to the pilot program that is entirely undocumented here. Having no data on how much time was actually spent on academic support in each session versus building relationships or other SEL priorities muddies the water in terms of ROI.

Those who led the pilot remain optimistic about scaling it up, but that won’t be easy. The supply of free college student labor is finite, and even more finite when limited to research universities. And ardor for the remote option utilized here will wane as the “old normal” reasserts itself. And student absenteeism—an ongoing problem with regular school—will continue to dog any voluntary program such as this one. It seems likely that the kids who might have the greatest need of tutoring are most apt to skip, or be unable to participate in, those sessions. All of these together could serve to keep the tiny academic effects seen in the pilot at exactly the same level—at a higher cost—in a larger effort.

SOURCE: Matthew Kraft, John List, Jeffrey Livingston, and Sally Sadoff, “Online Tutoring by College Volunteers: Experimental Evidence from a Pilot Program,” The Field Experiments Website (February 2022).

In a fast-growing number of cities across the country, selective high schools are facing mounting pressure to change their admissions policies to make their student populations more socioeconomically and racially diverse. In some cases, the push is to eradicate selectivity altogether. Reforms of this sort have already been implemented in New York City, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and the Washington, D.C., metro area. But pushback—political, legal, and grassroots—is mounting, too, making this an ever-shifting landscape. And it’s an area where advocates and policymakers seeking to improve opportunity for disadvantaged students ought to rethink recent efforts, lest they force changes that—in being racially discriminatory, misguided, and ineffective—do the opposite of what many of them intend.

The desire for reform is understandable. In all the aforementioned cities, before new polices were implemented, the racial profile of teenagers admitted to these “exam schools” was significantly more affluent, White, and Asian than the district-wide populations. In New York City, for example, where the most-selective of these schools remain untouched by reforms because they’re sheltered by a state law, one-tenth of those who attend are Black and Hispanic, even though two-thirds of the district consists of such students. Similar figures exist in the other metropolitan areas.

The question isn’t whether these gaps should persist. In a better and fairer world, they wouldn’t. Virtually everyone wants them to narrow. The question, instead, is how best to accomplish that. So far, reforms have generally come in two forms: 1) reducing the weight of standardized test scores in admissions, and 2) capping the number of admitted students from neighborhoods or middle schools that historically have won a high proportion of seats when compared to their community representation. Boston, for instance, reduced the weight of tests from 70 to 50 percent and gave the city’s eight census tracts equal numbers of seats. For Thomas Jefferson High School, located in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital, policymakers dropped standardized test scores as a requirement and guaranteed seats for students at middle schools that had previously been underrepresented. And Chicago adopted a new mix of grades and tests scores, and split 70 percent of seats equally across four socioeconomic tiers based on census tracts.

It’s obvious why such changes are being pursued. Their effects are immediate and seem to directly combat some of the dynamics that lead to misbalance. But, for three reasons, they’re also the wrong approach.

First and foremost, these policies can themselves be racially discriminatory. Many directly harm another minority group—Asian-American students, including those who are low-income. Last year, a group of primarily Asian-American parents sued the Fairfax County School Board over the aforementioned admissions changes at Thomas Jefferson High School, alleging that they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. And late last month, a federal judge granted the plaintiffs summary judgment—meaning that he deemed the case so much in their favor that a trial was unnecessary—saying that the new policies amount to “racial balancing for its own sake” and are therefore “patently unconstitutional.”

Beyond the legal and constitutional problems, in cutting back the numbers of Asian-American admittees, these policies often worsen the very condition they are intended to rectify. Boston’s policy changes, for example, are poised to significantly reduce the number of seats that go to low-income students living in the city’s Chinatown. These families are neither privileged nor well-resourced. Many are immigrants for whom English is a second language, and who regularly face other forms of systemic discrimination. Policies that are supposed to promote equity should not make it harder for these students to succeed.

The second problem with these policies is that their focus is misplaced. The Black, Hispanic, and low-income children who grow up to be underrepresented at selective high schools are just as capable of high achievement as their peers. But poverty, racism, and crummy primary and middle schools stack the deck against them. So by the time they seek admission to selective high schools, they’re far behind the peers they’re competing with for seats. Being systematically shortchanged by their public education systems is a significant part of this, and that’s where education policymakers ought to focus their energy.

They should create and sustain school systems that better develop the natural ability of all high achievers, and should do so from an early age. Their schools should “frontload” their offerings for disadvantaged children, with academic rigor and academic supports from kindergarten onward so that that these students are ready for more advanced offerings later. They should identify the highest achievers in each school for services that enrich and accelerate their educations. Universally screen everyone beginning by third grade, for example, using standardized tests already in use, as well as grades and other markers of uncommon potential. And make sure to maintain these high-quality services through middle school.

The third problem with recent policy changes is that they threaten to weaken a valuable resource. These institutions have long provided unique benefits to the students who attend them, especially those from low-income and disadvantaged families. When done right, they drive excellence and upward mobility. This is due, in important part, to superior educational elements like course offerings, peer influence, instructors, and alumni networks. Abler students demand and take more advanced classes, for instance, that can cover content more quickly and deeply—especially in challenging fields like mathematics, physics, and computer science. This attracts exceptional faculty who are prepared and eager to lead such courses, and it produces graduates who are better equipped to excel and, in time, to assist fellow alumni—in part because they know what a diploma from that institution means.

When this model is weakened, its benefits begin to crumble. This is what research shows happened in Chicago after, in 2010, the city diversified its selective-high-school population by reducing the role of tests and reserving seats for students from different socioeconomic tiers. As The 74 reported, after the changes, “students at Chicago’s selective enrollment high schools see no improvement in their test scores. In fact, academic records show that they earned worse grades and GPAs than their peers who were rejected from the schools.” Moreover, “the most disadvantaged saw the biggest declines. Disturbingly, they were also less likely to enroll in selective colleges than similar kids who weren’t offered admission to an elite high school.” This means less diversity at selective colleges and myriad professions. That does nobody any good and, in the long run, undermines America’s global competitiveness.

So proponents of these changes to selective-high-school admissions should think twice. And parents, policymakers, and others should continue pushing back against the wrong kinds of reform. That pushback can have an effect. In addition to the successful lawsuit in Virginia, real change has happened in San Francisco and Boston. In the former, voters just recalled three of the five members of the city’s school board, in significant part because that board had scrapped merit-based admissions policies at Lowell High School, the area’s most prestigious institution. And parents in Boston successfully petitioned the city to change an earlier version of its selective-high-school reforms that stood to harm Asian-American students even more that the most recent iteration does.

In many ways, the fight over these schools is a reflection of America’s intensifying culture wars. But we mustn’t let partisan politics, short-sightedness, or blunt-instrument policymaking harm the thousands of students who benefit from these great institutions. Too much is at stake, both for them and for the country. Recent successes prove that there’s hope that good sense will prevail.

Remote learning is hard to love. The nation’s forced experiment in online education the past few years has been a disaster for kids. Educators and parents alike have come to view virtual learning as a necessary evil at best, an ad hoc response to a national crisis. In a survey by McKinsey & Company, 60 percent of teachers rated the effectiveness of remote learning between one and three out of ten. Many attribute remote learning to the catastrophic decline in academic outcomes and an alarming spike in mental health problems, with plummeting test scores and rising rates of depression and anxiety among students.

It’s also assumed to widen achievement gaps. The challenges of remote instruction “apply in affluent, English-speaking, two-parent households,” my colleague Rick Hess recently wrote. “Things get tougher still for single parents, families in tight quarters, or parents trying to communicate about all this in a second tongue.” Online charter schools in particular had a poor reputation even before Covid, associated in many minds with low-rigor credit recovery, poor performance, and mediocre graduation rates. A recent Brookings study of virtual charter schools and online learning during Covid was particularly grim, concluding that “the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative.”

Given that bleak and unpromising landscape, an outlier may be emerging: The online version of Great Hearts Academies is proving to be both an academic standout and popular with families. That has officials at the Arizona-based charter school network quietly thinking about launching a low-cost, online, private-school model to bring classical education to anyone who wants it at a price point below—even far below—other options, including Catholic schools. It’s one of several initiatives Great Hearts is weighing to expand its offerings.

Great Hearts is the largest operator of classical charter schools in the U.S. with thirty-three schools serving 22,000 students in Arizona and Texas. They’re high-performing; its high school students earn an average SAT score of 1237. Demand is also high, with over 14,000 students on waiting lists last year. Great Hearts Online (GHO), a tuition-free charter school, launched in Texas a little over a year ago, serving 500 students in grades K–6, more than half of whom were new to the network. An additional 600 charter school students enrolled online in Arizona for the current school year.

Early returns are promising: Seventy-nine percent of GHO students are above the 50th percentile in reading; 72 percent in math. Both of those figures slightly beat the average across the network’s traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Parent satisfaction will always be the most salient metric, and here GHO shines. An internal survey shows 85 percent of parents are more satisfied with Great Hearts Online than with their previous “brick-and-mortar” schools, a number that swells to 92 percent among families who came to the online classical school from traditional public school districts, according to Kurtis Indorf, who leads Great Hearts Nova, an “R & D” division of the fifteen-year-old charter school network.

Indorf acknowledges that GHO is not a perfect fit for every family. “I think our ideal market is almost like homeschool light,” he tells me. “The kind of parents who might think ‘I like homeschooling. I want to be with my family. But the daily pressure of planning and delivering a high-quality education that is safe and aligned to my values is too much to do.’” Then there’s the appeal of classical education, which is experiencing a boom in popularity, with demand far outstripping supply. Great Hearts Nova is looking to satisfy some of that demand and grow its footprint by franchising micro-schools, and through “asynchronous course development,” which would allow GH remote students, homeschoolers, and even some traditional public schools to tap into Great Hearts’s course content. The most intriguing concept emerging from the Nova skunkworks is the possibility of launching a low-cost, online private school, which would conceivably make a classical education available to any family with Wi-Fi.

The 2021 EdChoice “Schooling in America Survey” shows demand for private education far exceeding supply. While barely 10 percent of American children attend private schools, a whopping 40 percent of parents say they would prefer private school for their children. There’s no mystery to solve here. Availability, price, and transportation present hurdles too high for most families to clear comfortably. A trusted school “brand” at a modest price with zero transportation costs theoretically wipes away those issues in a single stroke for a significant number of middle-class Americans—a role Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited to play.

Great Hearts Online plans to enroll 1,620 students across Texas and Arizona in the coming school year. For the 2023–24 academic year, Indorf says, GHO hopes to grow enrollment in the charters and launch a private school across multiple states with an enrollment target of 2,700 students. “By the 2025–26 academic year, we plan on serving over 7,000 students in public charter models as well as a national private model in multiple states,” he tells me.

Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited for this strategy. Where most large charter networks have tended to concentrate in low-income urban neighborhoods, Great Hearts’s classical curriculum and pedagogy have proven particularly popular with middle-class suburban families. Their Texas charter briefly functioned as a private online school before it was authorized by the state, and over 100 families proved willing to pay tuition. Teachers seem no less eager. Great Hearts received 1,400 applications to fill forty online teaching slots. Even though it operates today in just two states, its staff and faculty log on from over two dozen different states.

To be sure, remote learning is not everyone’s cup of tea. But according to a study by the RAND Corporation, the demand for virtual schools is growing. About one in five district administrators have either already started an online school or are planning to start one at the end of the pandemic. Other educators and families fall somewhere in the middle: While they prefer in-person instruction, they hope that schools retain the best that online learning has to offer, even as a supplemental tool.

Could GHO become a breakthrough private school model that’s affordable and attractive to middle-income families? It’s hard to compete with free, but “free” and “excellent” aren’t always available in the same school. It doesn’t take a great deal of foresight or imagination to envision a scenario in which Great Hearts could create something truly new: a high-quality, low-cost private school that taps into Americans’ rising discontent with traditional public schools and that offers a curriculum grounded in the timeless appeal of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

I wouldn’t bet against it.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some ideas about how schools and districts can move away from the well-intentioned but deeply flawed “college for all” mindset that has permeated the education reform world and has, in turn, harmed many of the disadvantaged students whom the approach is meant to benefit. Here I build on that argument with a more granular dive into where a lot of these students actually go when they matriculate, and why those schools end up being bad choices for them.

Accepting that not every child should go to college is a natural evolution for the education reform movement. If the goal of ed reform is to narrow achievement and opportunity gaps, one way to do that is through empowering parents. Charter schools emerged as alternatives to a structurally broken education system that trapped lower-income students in poor-performing schools for generations. (It’s no coincidence that, in many cities, school district lines almost perfectly mirror redlining maps of the 1930s.) More options for families will yield better outcomes for students.

Seen through this lens, helping some students develop career paths that might run through non-college, post-secondary training is in keeping with the goals of education reform. The child and family—not the school—choose the career path, basing it on their own interests and circumstances. But our current college-at-all-costs culture minimizes the circumstances of families. It’s still common to see high schools—traditional and charter—brag that 100 percent of their seniors are accepted to college, even if we know that statistically many of those students will not persist through.

All kids deserve a high-quality education, but we also need to recognize that poor kids don’t have the same wiggle room as rich ones. The affluent have other resources to support children who may not complete college, may take longer, or may emerge with less-marketable degrees. It’s not a big deal for a wealthy family to pay the almost $200,000 cost of Sarah Lawrence College, even though its median graduate will only earn $45,000 annually ten years after enrollment.

Lower-income, first-generation students simply don’t have this safety net. Moreover, many of them wind up in less-selective or open-enrollment colleges, where they are unlikely to graduate. And even if they do graduate, these credentials aren’t as marketable as those from more-selective institutions. The numbers matter for these students, and the numbers are daunting.

This year, slightly more than 8,600 students will enroll at Medgar Evers College, a four-year college with a 90 percent acceptance rate that is part of the City University of New York system. Ninety-eight percent of them are students of color, and 67 percent will qualify for Pell grants. But according to the Equitable Value Explorer tool designed by the University of Texas system, their median annual earnings are $16,000 less annually than the overall median of those with a bachelor’s degree in New York state ten years after enrollment. A similar situation exists across the country at Los Angeles Southwest College, which is open-enrollment and serves 87 percent students of color. Its enrollees will earn $10,500 less than the median holder of an associate degree in California ten years after enrollment.

In the vast majority of cases, students don’t even complete their degree. As Michael Petrilli noted in these pages, “[w]e call it the ‘college wage premium,’ but we should really call it the ‘college completion premium.’” As much as we might wish otherwise, the colleges that low-income kids default to tend to have shockingly high dropout rates. Only 13 percent of students complete Medgar Evers or LA Southwest. Bunker Hill Community College, only a few miles from Harvard and M.I.T., enrolls over 18,000 students but graduates just 14 percent of them.

Financial concerns play a role in college persistence, but even in New York State, where the Excelsior Scholarship covers the cost of tuition at public universities for families making less than $125,000, almost 80 percent of community college enrollees will drop out. In many cases, they’re simply not prepared for the academic rigor. In New York City, even as the previous administration touted increases in college readiness metrics, the education department at the time conceded that most of the growth was tied to the removal of an advanced math requirement, not to student achievement. And this is before one considers the social and emotional challenges of the transition to college, the lack of institutional support, and for some students, the lack of a sense of purpose or motivation in being there.

College may well still be the best post-secondary plan for most kids, and we should take as many steps as we can to ensure that our high school graduates succeed there when they choose to enroll. If we do our job right, even if students enter ninth grade behind grade level, most should graduate academically prepared for the next step. Providing students opportunities to earn college credit while in high school also makes a huge difference, since kids who enter college with credits in the bank are less likely to drop out. And as the CUNY ASAP program shows, intensive support for community college students can have dramatic effects on college persistence (though the program currently serves just a fraction of community college students).

Still, given the challenges that many low-income students face every day, it’s naive to think that there aren’t some for whom there are better choices, at least immediately after graduation. Objectively, it’s hard to make a case for attending a college where more than 85 percent of students fail to graduate, and even those that earn a degree don’t gain much economically from it. But these crucial nuances get lost in the “college for all” narrative.

As ed reformers, we take pride in our focus on outcomes. A cleareyed analysis shows that, for many of our students, the college options they have are simply not good choices. We need to let go of our myths and do what’s right for our students.