Gadfly Bites is on vacation Friday and Monday. We’ll be back on Wednesday, February 23 with however much snark you can stand.

1. The state board of education met this week with a wide-ranging agenda. Two interesting items in my estimation. First up, we learned of another delay in operationalizing a high profile legislative creation: Afterschool Child Enrichment Educational Savings Accounts for families. Is the delay due to a difficulty in ODE finding an interested vendor to operate the thing, a funding issue, or because ODE is “jumping through hoops” to do early legwork work that the vendor should be tasked with…once said vendor is locked down? Based on the coverage, I’m not sure this week’s debate answered the question or helped spur movement. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/14/22)  Later on, ODE’s transportation chief told the board that the current bus driver shortage in districts across the state is “going to be here for a while”, despite whatever legislation has been passed and whatever actions the board and the department are thinking about taking in response. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/14/22)
    
2. Speaking of legislation, House Bill 290, the so-called “backpack” funding bill, got its first committee hearing yesterday. More to come, I’m sure. (Toledo Blade, 2/15/22)
   
   

3. Here is a great news story about a driven and successful high school student in Cleveland who seems willing to stop at nothing to reach his dream of an MIT degree and much more beyond. His hard work is deemed a “shining example”, but this story’s got two big question marks for me: Why is this young man having to create his own summer research program? And why can’t he get any transportation to school?! (News 5, Cleveland, 2/15/22) Let’s hope that someone tips off Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s new Chief Education Officer—most recently the head of Teach for America in the region—about this amazing student who could use a bit more support. I’ll bet she’d come up with some quick options if she was asked. (News 5, Cleveland, 2/15/22)
    
4. Sticking to northeast Ohio for a moment, Akron City Schools’ superintendent Christine Fowler-Mack is looking to beef up her administrative staff quite substantially. It all sounds reasonable enough to me, but more high-level admins come at high-level salaries: likely an additional $500K per year. Sounds very similar to the ways in which our erstwhile ADC-district CEOs were trying to “upscale” their workforces, all of which have now been dismantled. Maybe the Akron supe’s effort will eventually run similarly aground due to sticker shock or concerns about “too much overhead”, but at least for now it doesn’t feel like the big ask is being criticized out of hand. You know, like it was when those CEOs did the same thing. (Akron Beacon Journal, 2/15/22)
   
   

5. Despite previous admonitions, it seems that educators in the Dayton area have reached the stage of acceptance that the Covid slide actually occurred among their students. How else to explain the ginormous efforts underway to remediate it? Dayton City Schools’ $3.6 million (and counting) work to reduce class sizes by hiring nearly 100 additional teachers is of particular interest here. Especially as compared to the more modest suburban efforts described. (Dayton Daily News, 2/16/22)

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Over the past two decades, student enrollment has gradually declined across Ohio, reflecting demographic changes and out-migration that have reduced the overall childhood population in the state. But with the pandemic wreaking havoc on education, public school enrollment fell more sharply between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years. Taken together, Ohio district and charter schools’ K–12 enrollments declined by about 30,000 students last year. That represented a 2 percent loss, slightly less than the national decline of 3 percent in public school enrollment. Analysts have pointed to a number of explanations for the dip, including more parents choosing to “redshirt” their kindergarteners, increases in homeschooling and private school enrollments, and perhaps higher numbers of dropouts.  

This year has been marred by fewer disruptions, but does that mean enrollments are bouncing back? A first look at the 2021–22 data indicates that they remain depressed. Figure 1 displays the statewide numbers—traditional districts and public charters schools combined—showing that enrollments are flat compared to last year.

Figure 1: Public school enrollment, Ohio school districts and charters, FY 2017 to 2022

​Source: Ohio Department of Education (ODE). Traditional district enrollments for FYs 2017–21 were calculated based ODE’s FY 21 Final #2 Payment file and the FY 22 district enrollment was pulled from the February 4, 2022 payment information in its Foundation Payment Reports. Charter school enrollments for FYs 2017–21 were calculated based on ODE’s Community School Annual Report (Table 2) and the FY 22 charter school enrollments were calculated based on its FY 22 December Payment file.

Analyses of last year’s data found that Ohio’s major urban districts suffered the greatest enrollment losses. That pattern has continued into this year. Figure 2 shows that Dayton and Cincinnati’s FY 22 headcounts are more than 2 percent below last year. On average, Big Eight district enrollment declined 1.1 percent year over year, even as district enrollment statewide inched upward by 0.1 percent.

Figure 2 also reveals a couple interesting patterns in charter school enrollments. First, continuing a pattern seen last year, headcounts across Ohio’s urban brick-and-mortar charters once again remain more stable than their urban district counterparts. This year, charters located in the Big Eight cities report enrollments that are just 0.2 percent lower versus the 1.1 percent slide for urban districts. Second, we notice that e-school charter enrollments fell rather substantially, declining by 6.5 percent compared to last year. This suggests that some of last year’s spike in e-school enrollment was transitory, i.e., parents using e-schools as a temporary alternative to brick-and-mortar options during the earlier days of the pandemic.

Figure 2: One-year percentage change in public school enrollment, FY 2021 to 2022

Figure 3 looks at changes in enrollment from the pre-pandemic year of 2018–19 to the current school year. Here, the enrollment declines in the Big Eight districts are more marked, particularly in districts like Youngstown, Dayton, and Columbus. In contrast, we see brick-and-mortar charter enrollments slightly increasing, despite the disruptions of the pandemic, rising by 1.2 percent over this period. Even with this year’s enrollment loss, as was shown in Figure 2, e-school enrollment rose significantly during these years.

Figure 3: Three-year percentage change in public school enrollment, FY 2019 to 2022

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We don’t know all the reasons behind these trends, nor can we predict with certainty whether lower enrollment levels will be a permanent “new normal.” That being said, these patterns do have policy implications, two of which deserve brief mention.

• School funding: Ohio’s funding system has long included—and continues to include—guarantees that shield traditional school districts from funding losses even if their enrollments decline. Under the current formula, for instance, districts are guaranteed the amount of state funding they received in 2020, a pre-pandemic year in which enrollments were higher. Therefore, due to the recent declines in enrollment, the state effectively funds thousands of “phantom students.” To direct dollars to where they are most needed, state lawmakers need to dispense with guarantees and ensure funding is based on current headcounts—not those from prior years.
   
• Educational choice: Enrollment patterns reflect parent demand for particular schools, and types of schools. The decades-long exodus of students from Ohio’s urban districts—accelerated by the pandemic—continues to reveal dissatisfaction with clumsy, bureaucratic school systems. Conversely, the more buoyant enrollments of charters and other educational options likely reflect the positive attitudes that families have towards these more nimble and family-driven alternatives. State policymakers should value and respect the decisions of Ohio parents, remembering that—contrary to the anti-choice rhetoric—no one “system” has any inherent right to educate students. Rather, the choices of millions of Ohio parents should be decisive in matters of school enrollment.

The pandemic has altered life in many ways, some fleeting but others more permanent. In K–12 education, it’s led to some notable shifts in where students attend school. Moving ahead, policymakers need to work to ensure that Ohio’s education policies line up with this new reality.

Just like the term “virtual schooling,” the moniker “hybrid learning”—which came to the fore at the start of Covid disruptions—does not denote one educational model. At its most basic, a hybrid system means that sets of students in any given school or classroom are experiencing their education in different ways. Variations beyond these basics, however, are numerous. A new brief analyzing teacher survey results digs into the variations from the educator’s perspective.

Researcher Lora Bartlett of the University of California, Santa Cruz surveyed seventy-five teachers from nine states in November 2020 and conducted two semi-structured interviews with thirty-six of them in mid- and late-2020. The full set of respondents represents a close match to the demographics of the U.S. teacher labor force as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey for the 2017–18 school year, but we do not know the demographic breakdown of the thirty-six teachers interviewed.

Twenty-two teachers reported teaching in one of the following hybrid learning modes in the first stages of the pandemic:

A parallel hybrid, in which students participate either fully remotely or fully in person. The teachers interviewed indicated their schools sorted students via parental opt-in, although quarantine requirements would also certainly have involuntarily affected the population of each group. The six teacher respondents in this category indicated they taught in one mode or the other consistently.

An alternating hybrid, in which students are split into two groups (A and B) and participate in a portion of the school week in person and a portion remotely so that buildings and classrooms are at approximately half capacity at any given time. This model has variations, with some schools splitting the day between groups A and B, some schools splitting the week, and still others alternating groups weekly. The four teacher respondents in this category indicated teaching both in-person and remote students, but not at the same time.

A blended hybrid model, in which students are participating in any given class simultaneously both in person and remotely. The seven teacher respondents in this category were required to teach both groups synchronously (what some have referred to as Zoomers and Roomers).

Five additional teacher respondents reported some fluctuation of models during their pandemic teaching.

The point of this survey and the resulting report was to document teachers’ working conditions during the early pandemic and to open the black box of the classroom in all of its revised forms. While respondents shared that in-person teaching was, in general, more difficult than in pre-Covid times due to masking, Plexiglas barriers, distancing, and more, they also expressed a preference for sticking as close as possible to what they knew. The subset of teachers who discussed hybrid learning in detail were less vexed when teaching in only one mode at a time, although any amount of remote teaching, they reported, resulted in technological headaches, absent or unengaged students, and an increased workload. Special ire resulted from having to teach in-person and online students simultaneously. Class time devolved into “chaos” for various reasons, with either in-person students or virtual students or both getting the short end of the stick—as the teachers described it.

The onset of the pandemic unleashed a hodgepodge of rapid and unplanned changes in work environments. Teachers, like many others, were forced to adapt. The sample here is small, and all those surveyed worked in traditional districts where change is almost always a dirty word, but their reported experiences are likely similar to others’ across the country. Bartlett is part of the Suddenly Distant research group, from which more reports on teachers’ working conditions during Covid should be forthcoming. Hopefully some brighter news will result from additional research into the later stages of pandemic-era teaching.

SOURCE: Lora Bartlett, “Specifying Hybrid Models of Teachers’ Work During COVID-19,” Educational Researcher (January 2022).

1. An opinion piece posted in the Dispatch late on Friday is advertised as a response to the previous pro-voucher op-ed which appeared on those pages earlier. To me, it reads like unsupported—and unsupportable—family-unfriendly, voucher-loathing blather workshopped in an echo chamber. YMMV, of course. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/11/22)
    
2. Facilities follies are ramping up again in Columbus City Schools. The shiny showpiece here is the possibility of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on up to 19 new facilities, despite the fact that the district is shrinking and already has too many buildings, with the note that “this is not about closing buildings” even though it has to be. It feels too early for the inevitable dooming and glooming, but physical danger to kids is already trotted out as a reason to close old buildings and get new ones and the fear of charter schools lurks behind discussion of not selling off closed buildings. Quite a conundrum, I reckon. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/14/22)

    

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If New York politics were sane and rational—if our elected officials were serious about the pursuit of educational excellence and what’s best for children—the city’s charter school sector would be a point of civic pride.

Our leaders might point to the thousands of Black and Hispanic children charter schools launch into competitive colleges annually from the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

“If you want to see what equity looks like,” they might brag with no small amount of big-city swagger, “come to the Big Apple.”

If we cannot have sane and rational politics, can we at least have a little less hypocrisy?

City ally’s about-face

State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) earned praise for fending off ill-conceived attempts to scrap the entrance exam at Gotham’s specialized high schools. Standing up for New York’s Asian community, he defended the high-achieving institutions as a path to success.

So it’s hard to reconcile Liu’s more recent effort to diminish equity and excellence among New York’s charter schools, which are no less valued and beloved by the city’s Black and Hispanic families than Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are among Asian parents.

Liu last month introduced a bill that would remove the authority of the trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY) to grant or renew charter schools, handing over that critical oversight power to the state’s Board of Regents.

New York’s charter schools are tuition-free public schools but under private management and overseen by a public “authorizer.” For the majority of New York City charters, that’s SUNY, which happens to be among the best and highest performing charter-school authorizers in the nation; its portfolio includes top charters with national reputations, including Achievement First, Icahn, KIPP, Success Academy, and Uncommon Schools, all of which are academically strong and oversubscribed with long waiting lists.

Turning oversight of these schools to the state’s Board of Regents may seem like a minor bit of bureaucratic shuffling, but as a recent New York Post editorial noted, Liu “know[s] perfectly well that the Regents are a creature of the teachers unions, which despise charters because these alternative public schools expose the failings of the regular public systems that serve the unions so well.”

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which closely follows charter-school performance nationwide, has estimated that New York City charter-school students gain the equivalent of twenty-three days of additional learning in reading and an additional sixty-three days of learning in math over their peers in traditional schools run by the Department of Education.

“The independent role of SUNY as full-time authorizer and expert is part of the equation,” says Margaret Raymond, the center’s director.

If the pursuit of excellence means, “Do more of what’s working, less of what’s not working,” SUNY-authorized charter schools are part of the solution. Some 88 percent of SUNY charters in New York City outperformed traditional public schools in their neighborhoods on the English language arts state exam the last time they were administered, in 2019; the results were even better in math, with 91 percent outperforming city-run schools in the same neighborhoods.

Don’t mess with success

It makes no sense educationally to change the oversight structure that’s served a generation of families effectively.

It makes even less sense to artificially limit the number of quality charter schools available to New York City families. For the 2019–20 school year, the most recent year for which there is data, more than 80,000 applications were submitted for 33,000 available seats in NYC charter schools.

Alas, that pent-up demand is going unmet: There are literally no more charters to give out at present. Legislation passed in 2015 put a hard ceiling on the number of charters available in New York City. If Liu were serious about equity and excellence, he might shift his focus to lifting that cap.

John Liu, why defend opportunity for Asian children and deny it for Black and Hispanic students? Let’s show a little consistency to lift everyone.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the New York Post.

Since the 1980s, parents in London, England, have been guaranteed the right to choose a state-funded school for their children, with capacity being the only barrier. Since 1996, school performance tables have been made publicly available to aid them in sorting through what can be a wide array of options. While the ideal randomized school choice experiment is not possible in this environment, a recent working paper from Queen Mary University Ph.D. candidate Marco Ovidi approximates random variation in school selection by utilizing the tie-breaking mechanism of the centralized assignment process. Turns out that parents seem to know best for their children, even when their choices go against the publicly available school information.

For primary school in England (ages five to eleven), parents are required to rank up to six schools at the time of application, in order of preference. Those preferences are informed by publicly available information including standardized test scores, value-added measures, and the student composition of the schools. Local authorities (LA) overseeing schools are required to provide a seat to local applicants—those living in closest proximity—and to assign all applicants to the highest preference school available. Institutions with excellent test scores are typically sought after and usually become oversubscribed before seats are assigned. In these cases, distance to the school is used as a tiebreaker between applicants with equal priority, generating catchment areas that vary year by year. This divide allows Ovidi to identify applicants living at a similar distance from a given school—thus, having the same chance of admission—and compare those who got a seat in their most-preferred school and those who did not.

Ovidi’s data include administrative and demographic information on 199,220 applicants to London primary schools and the value-added scores of those schools in 2014 and 2015. The average parent ranked three or four options upon application. London students are more likely to have a disadvantaged background, with a higher proportion of students eligible for free lunch or with special education needs as compared to students in the rest of the UK. London schools, however, typically outperform the national average in terms of test scores. As befits the density of a major European capital city, catchment areas around London primaries average just 600 meters (just over one-third of a mile) and can be as close as 300 meters (less than one-fourth of a mile). One caveat Ovidi notes is that schools are allowed certain admission priorities—such as siblings of currently-enrolled students—that override the centralized assignment system, although he does his best to identify and correct for these relatively-few outliers.

Not surprisingly, parents overall show strong preference for primary schools with higher test scores and for institutions located closer to their homes, regardless of socioeconomic status, although parents in higher-income areas of London have access to more high-performing schools nearer to them. However, any given school can be ranked very differently by different parents without observable characteristics to explain the variation. Ovidi suggests parents are making personal, child-specific judgments about schools with information gathered from sources as yet unknown. Even more interesting, it seems these gut decisions ultimately create better school matches. While higher-performing schools will, in general, produce higher student achievement than will lower-performing schools, Ovidi finds that students who land in their parents’ first-choice school perform even better than expected based on test scores and value-added data. Enrollment in a preferred school increases achievement in mathematics by 0.09 standard deviations above what would be expected based on school quality compared to a similarly effective institution with lower parental preference. To state it another way, a student will actually do worse academically if the tie-breaking algorithm sends him to a less-preferred school, even if it is statistically identical to the school that his parent ranked first.

A specific example of positive parental preference effects explored in the paper also shows the complex interactions at play. Ovidi looked at male students who entered primary school with relatively low achievement levels. Parents of these students, unusually, tended to prefer schools with lower overall performance ratings than other options near them. Those boys did better in their parents’ preferred institution than did their peers in higher-performing schools. And since the match effects observed in his sample are largest in schools in the bottom quartile of the peer quality distribution, he also suspects that such seemingly paradoxical preferences are driving the positive outcomes. Ovidi hypothesizes that these parents preferred to place their lower ability students with peers at or near the same level rather than with children who are more advanced. While he cites other research showing that males react “less productively” than females to new environments with higher-ability peers, the data do not go far enough to prove this conclusively.

The bottom line appears to be that parental choices, while informed by school quality and proximity, are child-specific and based on other factors beyond the obvious. But that is not to say that they are arbitrary or focused on non-academic considerations. Quite the contrary, it seems. Parents can not only spot a good school generally, but can also home in on the school that is the best fit for their child. We must respect these abilities when designing school choice programs. As EdChoice’s Mike McShane puts it in his brief analysis of Ovidi’s work, “By understanding the skills that parents have in navigating their choices and the differential quality within the options...we can better understand how to improve them. That improvement falls to policymakers, so understanding the factors that lead to the adoption and expansion of programs is all the more important.”

SOURCE: Marco Ovidi, “Parents know better: Primary school choice and student achievement in London,” Working Paper No. 919, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance, London (December 2021).

The big news of the week

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated more than $133 million to the Communities in Schools Network, a nonprofit whose mission is to support students at risk of dropping out of school through a wide variety of in- and out-of-school programming across the country. The organization’s Columbus-based affiliate, which serves district and charter school students primarily in central Ohio area, will receive $2 million as part of the larger donation.

What happens in Indy…

As we noted last month, Indianapolis Public Schools agreed to share proceeds of a previous funding referendum with a number of affiliated charter schools in the state. A new law wending its way through the Indiana legislature would make such fund-sharing a requirement in the future. HB 1072 passed the House this week by a vote of 52-39 and advanced to the Senate where it will be heard first in the Appropriations Committee.

A “better route” to give parents choice

A blog post written by two Kennesaw State University economics professors and published by the Education Freedom Institute suggests that empirical evidence of charter school success is a better guide for parents than other informational resources available to them. They have a new report on states’ “charter school ecosystems” which explains their idea in detail.

Getting report cards right

Aaron Churchill of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published a blog post looking at the on-the-ground implementation of new school report cards in Ohio. A committee of the state board of education has been diligently working to operationalize the report card framework passed by the General Assembly last year and the blog post digs deep into the nuances of that effort which will impact both district and charter schools.

College scholarships

Grand Valley State University outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, authorizes 80 charter schools across the Mitten State which graduate between 900 and 1,000 students each year. This week, GVSU announced that every graduate from those schools would be eligible for a $1,000 annual scholarship to help them attend the university. A fantastic incentive for students to get to and through college. Kudos!

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1. It’s an all-voucher issue of the Bites today. And it’s gonna get crazy. First up, I don’t know what an “opinion reporter” is, but the independent news outlet run by students at the University of Cincinnati has one of those. And that young person has got some seriously blinkered thoughts on vouchers and education in Ohio. The unsupported assertions and liberal usage of the first person leans far more toward “opinion” than “reporter” to me. Wowza. (News Record, 2/9/22)
    
2. But it doesn’t take an “opinion reporter” to stoke the fires on vouchers around here these days. Here’s a story from the estimable Gongwer Ohio that equates the addition of one or two private schools to the list that Cleveland Scholarship Program students can choose from to an “expansion” and a “broadening” of vouchers writ large. And some folks don’t like it one bit. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/9/22)
   
   

3. Finally, a group of parents whose students qualify for and utilize EdChoice vouchers have filed a motion to intervene in the pending court case against EdChoice. They will, as common sense would indicate, be directly impacted by the case, especially if the immediate cessation of vouchers is granted even before the case is fully heard…which could take years. (In fact, my naïve self assumes that that disruption is at least 55 percent of the point of this legal exercise. But what do I know?) The good school districts of Ohio who are using state funding to bankroll leading this anti-voucher effort have made a counterfiling through their erstwhile attorneys in which they argue these families “do not have sufficient knowledge about either the Ohio Constitution or the EdChoice Voucher Program to be of any use to the Court in deciding this case.” This endeavor always promised to be a wild ride, but holy cow. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/10/22)

Meanwhile, and apropos of nothing particular, yesterday was the first day since at least December that no school buildings in Columbus City Schools were required to go to remote learning due to staff absences. (You know I pay attention to this stuff even if I don’t clip it.) The gold standard of “all-in” education lasted one day.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the vast distance between our rhetoric and reality on career and technical education. Despite our oft-voiced enthusiasm for “multiple pathways,” we force almost all high school students through what’s essentially a college-prep track. Instead, I argued, we should reserve that route for students “who like school and are good at it,” and let kids with other strengths focus on career preparation. Yet in virtually every state, numerous and exacting academic course requirements (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) make it virtually impossible for high school students to spend much time doing real work-based training.

As expected, I was attacked for calling for a return to 1950’s-style tracking. To my surprise, however, even my colleague and mentor Checker Finn criticized me on those grounds! In last week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, he charged me with taking a “Back to the Future” approach.

And you know what? I’m guilty as charged, at least on some counts.

No, I don’t want to go back to the old way, whereby The System decided who could take college-prep courses, and who should “work with their hands.”

And hell no, I don’t want The System making those decisions based on the color of students’ skin or their zip code.

But do I think there should be tracking in American high schools? Yes. More to the point, tracking in our high schools is simply a fact and we would do well to stop pretending otherwise or believing that it could be any other way. At the very least, we should allow for diverging paths after the tenth grade. We also need to completely rethink our approach for our lowest-performing kids.

Consider this: According to the latest (pre-pandemic) data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between the 10th and 90th percentiles of public school students in eighth grade reading was 96 points (on a 0–500 scale). In rough numbers, that equates to six grade levels. Math is even worse, at 101 points. So some kids enter high school at a fifth-grade level, others at an eleventh-grade level. Does anyone think we can effectively teach students with such extreme degrees of academic preparation (or lack thereof) in the same classroom and serve them well? Or that we can’t predict which group is likely heading for success in college and which is going to need to get a job after high school, whether immediately or when they flame out of college?

So, yes, high schools track students. It’s a practice, by the way, that a recent American Compass survey found is overwhelmingly popular with parents of all socioeconomic groups—which helps explains the fierce political reaction when policymakers go on the warpath against the advanced track, as we saw recently in Virginia.

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In the 50s-era “James Bryant Conant High School,” as Checker called it, there were four tracks: “It had Honors, for those who thought they might want to go to Duke or Wellesley,” Checker explained. “It had College Prep for those who wanted to go to the state school nearby. It had Voc-Ed for those who were heading for a trade. And then it had something called the General Track...and frankly [those students] weren’t prepared for anything when they came out of high school.” (Of course, back then, many of the General Track students never made it to high school graduation, since they dropped out long before, and often found an acceptable job anyway.)

All these years later, after decades of “de-tracking” policies and the like, we’ve really just collapsed those four tracks into three:

• The Honors Track. This one remains, largely untouched, though in many high schools it now features a heavy load of AP and IB course-taking, and happily serves a larger number of students. That’s because of reforms to encourage more schools to create AP programs, efforts to reduce the gatekeeping to those courses, and the growth of the American upper-middle class, which is who’s most obsessed with getting their kids into (and able to afford) selective and highly selective colleges, even those far from home. High school course requirements are generally not a problem for the students in this track because they would take four years of most academic courses anyway. Let’s estimate that this track now serves about 20 percent of all students.


• The College and Career Ready Track. Here’s where the big change has happened. In essence, we’ve tried to collapse the old College Prep track and the old Voc-Ed track into one. And in some respects that’s for good reason, since we’ve learned that the technical jobs of today generally require at least some postsecondary education, and that means getting students to a relatively high level of preparation in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as various social and emotional skills that are valued in the modern workplace. As I wrote two weeks ago, though, we’ve loaded up students’ schedules with so many academic course requirements that we’ve squeezed out most of the time that could be spent doing technical training. So the students in this track really do mostly college prep, sometimes including a handful of AP, IB, or dual-enrollment courses, while perhaps also taking a few CTE courses as electives. This track serves the mass of students—probably about half—generally those from the 30th to the 80th percentile of achievement nationally.


• The Credit Recovery Track. Of course we don’t call it that, but we should. Students in this track are often enrolled in “on level” courses, but that’s a ruse. These are the kids entering high school with very low levels of academic preparation, who struggle through their academic course requirements, racking up a lot of failure along the way. Unlike the old General Track, most of these students stay in school—a success of sorts, and the result of state policies that hold schools and districts accountable for boosting graduation rates. But since many of these students were so ill-prepared to start with, we’ve had to invent workarounds, especially credit recovery programs of dubious value (except perhaps to the for-profit companies reaping juicy financial rewards, and administrators who used it to boost their graduation numbers), plus grading “reforms” that make it easier for students to earn passing grades. None of which helps these students, and it probably devalues the high school diploma to boot. I’d estimate that 30 percent of American high schoolers are in this track; that’s about the number that NAEP deems to be “below basic” in math (32 percent) and reading (28 percent) coming out of the eighth grade.

To be sure, today’s system is in some ways an improvement over yesterday’s. Collapsing the College Prep and Voc-Ed tracks means that more students are pushed toward high-level work, surely a good thing. Dual enrollment, at least when properly done, seems to show particular promise in getting more kids onto a pathway toward college. Efforts to help kids earn technical credentials while still in high school are also encouraging.

But there are trade-offs, too. It means we don’t give students the time to do bona fide career training while still in high school, the kind we see in Austria and Germany, where their equivalent of juniors and seniors might spend virtually all day in apprenticeships or technical courses. Are we so sure that career-minded students are better off spending their time taking Spanish, Fine Arts, and English IV than, say, interning at a hospital center or first-rate restaurant kitchen or electronics plant? A better approach is the one embraced by Maryland’s Kirwan commission, whereby students who demonstrate mastery of key college and career ready skills at the end of the tenth grade are allowed to proceed to either true college prep or real career training. That would split the College and Career Ready track into two again—but after tenth grade.

My biggest concern, though, is with what I’m calling the Credit Recovery track. Yes, it’s good that most of these kids aren’t dropping out. They are safe and warm and fed and cared for in high school, and are off the streets. That’s no small thing. But I wonder whether the approach we’ve backed into is the best we can do—which is to have students experience a lot of failure, then make them click through a bunch of boring computer-based make-up programs, and finally hand them a diploma they can hardly read, with no plan or training for what happens the day after graduation.

I’ll explore other options in a future post.

What’s undeniable is that we continue to track kids, and until and unless we send many more kids into high school at much higher levels of achievement, we’re going to continue to track kids until the end of time, whether or not we admit that that’s what we’re doing. The only real question is what the tracks look like, and where they head. The sooner we’re honest about that, the better.

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted with permission from the cover story of the March issue of Commentary, “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.”

The middle school two blocks from my New York City apartment is named for Jonas Salk.

Today, teachers in that school, which honors the man who cured polio, treat children as moving, breathing, virus-shedding hot zones. In other U.S. cities, teachers have walked off the job even when fully vaccinated rather than risk contagion. Imagine the psychic toll this takes on children: The world is deadly and dangerous. I am myself a lethal threat to my teachers, my family, and my friends.

Now imagine that Covid had struck fifty or sixty years ago. It is almost certain that the arrival of life-saving vaccines less than a year into a global pandemic would have been framed for schoolchildren as a triumph of science and human ingenuity, a matter of national pride, even a cause for celebration.

By any reasonable measure, the world is safer and more stable today than at any time in the living memory of most Americans. Adults are more active in children’s lives today than in previous generations, but at the same time we play a less reassuring role. This is particularly true in schools, where curriculum and school culture seem nearly to revel in the bad and the broken, suggesting to children that they have suffered the great misfortune to have been born into a country that is racist to its core, whose founding documents were lies when written, and where democracy is hanging by a thread. Not that it matters, since we are just a few short years away from irreversible climate catastrophe, all but certain to render the world a spent and burned-out husk by the time they are grown.

Neither is it a given that American children will get the idea in school or through the media or culture at large that their country is a force for good in the world, or an engine of freedom and prosperity. In fact, quite the opposite.

Worst of all, this pedagogy of the depressed—America the Problematic—is thought to be a virtue among a significant number of professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication. We want children to grapple with “honest history” starting in elementary school and discover the power of their voices by writing authentic essays about their personal problems. “Socially aware” young-adult literature demonstrates a fascination with adult themes of tragedy and dysfunction bordering on fetishization. Small wonder, then, that adolescents are more depressed and medicated than ever before.

A half-century of psychological research indicates that our beliefs about the world shape behavior and our sense of well-being. Whether one views the world as good or bad, safe or dangerous, enticing or dull, is correlated with outcomes such as life satisfaction or depression. We may think that we are doing children a good service by being “real” with them, refusing to spare them from the unpleasant facts of the tired world they will soon inherit, thus inspiring them to seize the day and set the world right. But there are worrisome hints that this is all a little too much for many young people to bear.

The evidence of an accelerating mental health crisis is troubling enough. But a bracing essay published by Yuval Levin at The Dispatch late last year hinted at the emergence of a quiet crisis of despair that is changing the nature of social breakdown in America. Chaos and unruliness are yielding to a “disordered passivity,” a failure to engage or seek fulfillment that “strikes deeper and earlier than the danger of unruliness,” he writes. This places a particular burden on schools to address the problem, not to admire or indulge it. “The hallmark emotion of depression is hopelessness, and it’s on a global scale,” agrees Christine Sefein, a therapist and former professor of clinical psychology. “That continuous repetitive message, ‘There’s no reason to care because it’s all messed up. I’m always gonna feel guilty that I’m white, or I’m always gonna feel badly that my people were slaves or oppressed, there’s no way out, there’s no light’—that message is going to throw people into depression.”

There is a fine line to be walked here. Few would argue that children should grow up in a protective bubble, cosseted and coddled, insulated from history and the realities of life. It would be impossible in our information and social-media-saturated age. But there has been a change in the weather that alters how children perceive the world and their place in it. As adults and as educators, we are not merely failing in our responsibility to be a reassuring presence in their lives; we seem perversely determined to normalize and even valorize their despair.

It doesn’t matter if our intentions are good, if we see virtue in being honest with children, or seek only to “empower” students to take on and change the world. We have broken childhood. We are creating a generation of children who feel overwhelmed and powerless, lacking in agency, and who are saying to themselves, in effect, “Why bother?”