| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Alicia Anderson

7.30.2026

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Across the U.S., nearly every state uses a child’s fifth birthday to determine when they can enter the public school system as kindergartners. If your child’s birthday falls just after the cut-off, those few extra days can mean an entire extra year at home or paying for preschool.

Sending most five-year-olds off to school is a relatively new phenomenon. State funding for universal kindergarten picked up in the 1970s, an extension of broader anti-poverty and education initiatives under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society legislation of the 1960s and concurrent with changing family roles that saw more mothers entering the workforce. But the shift to full-day kindergarten was not immediate, and program design often looked more like daycare than formal schooling. Gen X and elder millennial parents have vague memories of playing kickball and scribbling with crayons from that first year of formal schooling; today’s kindergartners take standardized tests.

So what happens if your child isn’t ready for today’s design?

Richard Reeves, founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has written extensively about academic redshirting—where a child waits an additional year to start kindergarten despite eligibility—going as far as to call for all boys to start school a year later than their female peers.

“The reason little boys wear almost all of the red shirts is not mysterious,” Reeves wrote in The Atlantic back in 2022. “[T]he fact that boys mature later than girls is one known to every parent, and certainly to every teacher.”

The decision to redshirt—which feels huge to any exhausted parent of a young child—is made with incomplete information. Do you register your son according to the rules? Or do you place a bet that waiting will keep him out of trouble, make him a star football player, or improve his SAT score down the road?

Like most big decisions, either choice comes with tradeoffs. Being relatively older may, in fact, lead to a range of benefits across the school years. But the research isn’t clear on how long these benefits last. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Stephanie Howard Larson explored academic redshirting back in 2017, and determined the effects fade over time. And peer effects matter: being around older, more advanced students can push kids to level up.

Against the backdrop of decision-making with imperfect information, Tímea Laura Molnár of Central European University set out to understand how academic redshirting affects student achievement and mental health by gender. She designed a causal study using academic and medical data for over 300,000 Hungarian children, plus mental health survey data for about 10,000 children, spanning from 2006 to 2017.

In Hungary, children born in September through December were subject to a school-readiness evaluation if the parent wanted to delay their start, a requirement that did not apply to those born after the first of the new year. Children born in January through May could wait for the following school year or start school without a readiness evaluation, and those with summer birthdays (those on the older end of the cohort) started on time based on a June 1 birthday cutoff. By reviewing outcomes for similar children born on either side of January 1, Molnár identified the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) and extracted valuable insights about whether the perceived benefits of redshirting play out in real situations among otherwise similar children.

It turns out that the perceived benefits are real—but only for boys, and especially for a subset of boys.

Academic gains started early for boys who waited to start school, scoring 0.3 standard deviations higher on sixth grade math tests and 0.29 higher in reading compared to their on-time peers. From there, the long-term impact takes shape. Because Hungarian children sort between academic and vocational tracks after primary school, early academic gains pave the way for redshirted boys to be 31 percent more likely to end up on an academic track. By tenth grade, the redshirted boys scored 0.20 to 0.25 standard deviations higher than on-time peers in math and reading and were 26 percent more likely to be aiming for a post-secondary degree. They went on to be 15 percent more likely to graduate high school. The redshirted boys were also less anxious, more confident, and bullied less.

Molnár’s sample design helps us understand why redshirting is sometimes a good choice. The required formal school-readiness evaluation for children born between September and December served as a deterrent for parents who were on the fence about whether their child needed extra time before entering formal schooling. Thus, the boys whose redshirting rested on that evaluation requirement were more likely to already show signs of being developmentally less ready to begin formal schooling, whereas children born just past January 1 only needed a childcare provider to sign off. By comparing children born on either side of the January 1 cutoff, Molnár can isolate the causal effect of redshirting separate from other factors that may influence a parent’s choice to delay their child’s school start.

The results did not hold for girls: redshirting had no measurable effect on their outcomes. This null effect may be part of why redshirting closed the boy-girl gap in high school completion by up to 60 percent and the boy-girl gap in academic track participation by 80 percent.

Molnár separately looked at how starting school just before or after the firm June 1 cutoff affected outcomes and found that while redshirting did not make a measurable difference for girls, being older did.

So what should parents make of this information?

The Molnár study shows that the boys who benefited from delaying their school start showed signs of being less ready than their similar age peers, though not always with a formal diagnosis. Parents, pediatricians, and preschool teachers can consider factors like delayed start to speaking, chronic illness, and attention issues, all of which point toward serious consideration of redshirting.

However, parents in the U.S. can’t look to Hungary for clear answers about when their child should start formal schooling. Molnár was looking at children who started school at age six or seven, the age equivalent of first or second grade entry for most American kids—not kindergarten. Plus, Hungarian parents had access to universal childcare prior to formal schooling, removing one of the largest barriers for U.S. parents trying to decide when to enroll their kid in public kindergarten at age five. This benefit does not apply to many American families facing heavy financial costs for delaying school. (A recent NWEA analysis on redshirting indicates a $12,000 cost for delaying school entry in the U.S.)

It’s also difficult to isolate the academic readiness aspect from competitive youth sporting culture in the U.S. When my own summer-birthday son approached kindergarten age, we were inundated with unsolicited advice from older family members worried about him being too small for sports. The term “redshirting,” after all, gets its name from the extra year of eligibility for college athletes. But student-athletes needing extra time to grow, train, and mature may be just as well off taking a gap year after high school.

Is there a viable policy solution to lessen the burden on families making this decision?

Short of subsidizing childcare costs to remove finances from the decision of what’s best for the child, states could consider a layered age cutoff system that guides parents toward thinking carefully about readiness for children who may be on the younger end of their grade level. As Reeves has written, elite private schools—serving families with the resources to make this decision under less financial pressure than the average parent—regularly encourage delayed entry for boys who are young for their grade. Incorporating a decision-making process into the standard rules for school entry nudges away from a system where wealthier families are guided to a better decision through off-the-record conversations.

Despite how fraught the decision can feel for parents, academic redshirting remains relatively rare. The NWEA analysis found that only about 5 percent of kindergartners delay entry, and the rate is effectively unchanged over the past 20 years. Whether this reflects what is best for children—especially boys—or structural barriers to doing what’s best for the child remains an open question.

SOURCE: Tímea Laura Molnár, “Can Academic Redshirting Shrink the Education Gender Gap? Causal Evidence on Student Achievement and Mental Health,” Journal of Human Resources (May 2026).

Policy Priority:

High Expectations

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Teachers & School Leaders

Jeff Murray

7.29.2026

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The elected board members of Cincinnati City Schools voted 5-2 to place an earned income tax levy on the November ballot, rather than attempting to renew an existing property tax levy. First time ever for Cincy, but as we learn in this coverage, a growing phenomenon across Ohio...sorta. “There were 32 school income tax issues on Ohio ballots during the May election,” says journalist Valerie Lyons. “Twenty-four failed.” There’s also discussion about the pros and cons—including interviews with potential voters—but those stats still make it sound like quite a gamble to me. (WCPO-TV, Cincinnati, 7/28/26)
One Cincinnatian told WCPO in the piece above that he’d be open to their levy ask if the district can just demonstrate that the dough will be spent responsibly: “As long as I know kind of where the money’s going, it’s going to the right places, and everything’s distributed properly.” Hopefully that sentiment is not widespread, because our big city school districts do not traditionally do well with such requests and will be more likely to lose support than gain it if common sense usage is the primary criteria for voters. Case in point: Columbus City Schools just revealed that it was fleeced out of $40 million by use of a health insurance consultancy firm they contracted to help the district “navigate its employee health insurance benefits package” starting in 2024. Columbus doesn’t have a levy on the November ballot—which is fortuitous because this would be a really bad omen, per the above story—but it should be noted that $40 million, an amount which I guarantee you will never be recovered from the culprits despite some tough talk here from the most-junior elected board member, would have offset about 80 percent of the budget cuts just enacted via layoffs and other unpopular austerity measures they had no choice but to make to stave off a looming deficit. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/28/26)
And in keeping with our theme of school districts’ ownership and control over other people’s money, here’s an op-ed from the Editorial Board of Cleveland.com in which they conveniently forget that the families of private school students pay taxes at the local and state levels, same as everybody else--tax money that supports public schools. But while we are free to ignore whatever argument they are making in relation to the pending SB 311 because of their ridiculous reasoning, their ill-considered decision to publish it is important. I think we can be more assured than ever that this bill’s language is ironclad and that districts who have elided established state law on selling un- and underused facilities thus far are quaking in fear of it becoming law. Bet. (Cleveland.com, 7/29/26)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

Topics:

Governance

Jessica Poiner

7.28.2026

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In 2023, Ohio lawmakers enacted a sweeping early literacy initiative aligned with the science of reading, an evidence-based instructional approach that emphasizes phonics and knowledge-building. The ultimate goal is to boost Ohio’s troublingly low reading scores. Based on the latest round of state report cards (2024–25), districts and schools have their work cut out for them. But a recently published report from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) suggests that implementation is on the right track. Let’s take a closer look at three key areas covered in the report.

1. High-quality curriculum and instructional materials

The cornerstone of Ohio’s early literacy efforts is a requirement for public schools—traditional districts, charters, and STEM schools—to use state-approved, high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) that are aligned with the science of reading. Three-cueing, an instructional approach that encourages students to guess at words based on pictures or context rather than using phonics-based word recognition skills, is prohibited, though districts are permitted to apply for a waiver on an individual student basis.[1]

Since publishing its initial list of approved materials in early 2024, DEW has “refined” how it evaluates curricula. Although EdReports was the “initial gateway” for evaluation, DEW partnered with the National Center on Improving Literacy in 2024–25 to develop more comprehensive review rubrics. During the 2025–26 review cycle, the department used these updated rubrics to evaluate revised editions of previously approved materials. As of April 2026, DEW had approved 30 high-quality core comprehensive materials: 18 for grades K–5, six for grades K–2, and six for grades 3–5. (The most up-to-date list can be found here.) Curricula that embed social studies and science topics into instruction have been identified as “content rich” and marked with a seal.[2] The majority of core comprehensive/core no foundational skills materials—28 of 33—have earned the seal.

Under state law, public schools are required to annually report the core curriculum and instructional materials they use in English language arts for grades pre-K–5. By the end of the 2024–25 reporting window, 81 percent said they were using a state-approved option. Public districts had the highest rate at 95 percent, followed by charters (68 percent), STEM schools (43 percent), Educational Service Centers (32 percent), and Joint Vocational School Districts (15 percent). In an effort to provide a more complete picture, DEW reached out to the 144 schools and districts that hadn’t yet reported their information or said they were using materials that were not aligned or partially aligned. As a result of this follow-up, 132 of them reported using approved materials by the end of December, bringing the statewide total to 99 percent. Data for the 2025–26 school year will be available this fall on the High-Quality Instructional Materials Dashboard.

2. Professional development for teachers

Ohio’s early literacy initiative requires teachers, administrators, speech-language pathologists, and school psychologists to complete professional development in the science of reading. More specifically, educators must complete DEW’s Introduction to the Science of Reading course and its Science of Reading Refresher course. Timelines and requirements depend on when educators were hired and which grade level they teach.

According to the DEW report, participation has been “robust.” Between February 2024 and June 2025, more than 79 percent of Ohio educators completed state-developed science of reading training. Table 1 breaks down completion numbers by school type. It’s important to remember that state-developed options aren’t the only way to meet this requirement. Previously completed training that’s considered comparable to the state-developed courses also counts, which explains why the numbers below don’t equal 100 percent. Unfortunately, DEW doesn’t have completion data for the other options.

Table 1. Number and percentage of teachers who completed state-developed science of reading training

Given that the initial completion deadline was June 2025, it’s too early to know whether professional development has helped boost student achievement. DEW’s report indicates that preliminary analyses show a “positive association between educator training completion and improvements on the K–3 reading diagnostic.” But the department is careful to note that these results should not be used to draw a causal relationship. Moreover, the fact that professional development was a universal requirement makes measuring impacts complicated.

3. Reading coaches

Another way DEW supports educators is through state-funded reading coaches who implement the coaching model outlined in the state’s plan to raise literacy achievement. This model includes four levels that vary in intensity from universal building support (level one) to one-on-one coaching (level four). All four focus on incorporating evidence-based strategies and how to use and analyze student data.

Coaching began in the fall of 2023 with 33 coaches in 53 schools. It expanded in the fall of 2024 to include 84 coaches in 124 schools, and then again in 2025 to include 97 coaches in 151 schools. At the direction of Governor DeWine, DEW will increase its coaching ranks by 50 additional coaches for the 2026–27 school year. DeWine also instructed the department to offer free coaching credentialing to district-employed literacy coaches, which will begin this August.

Results from year three (2025–26) won’t be available until later this summer. But according to the DEW report, preliminary analyses suggest similar results to year two. One-on-one sessions, followed by small groups, were the most frequently implemented coaching levels. The most frequently addressed coaching topic was evidence-based strategies/high-quality materials. And when coaches reported the percentage of students who scored “on track” on universal screeners, both years two and three showed similar gains on student outcomes (see Figure 1). Going forward, additional context from DEW—like including as a point of comparison the fall-to-spring percentage change in a typical school without coaches—would be helpful.

Figure 1. Change in percentage of students scoring on track in reading from fall to spring

***

DEW’s latest science of reading report offers plenty of positive signs that Ohio is on the right track to improve reading achievement. Districts and schools have adopted high-quality instructional materials at a nearly universal rate. The vast majority of educators have completed professional development aligned to the science of reading. And ongoing efforts designed to improve instructional practice, like reading coaches and the forthcoming instructional implementation teams, will help ensure rigorous implementation. There’s still a long way to go before Ohio can declare victory. But the foundation that’s been laid is solid.

[1] To date, DEW hasn’t received any three-cueing waiver applications.

[2] HQIM were identified as content rich if they met the requirements for knowledge building on the Department’s rubric or scored 80 percent or higher in knowledge building on the EdReports rubric.

Policy Priority:

Standards & Accountability

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Jeff Murray

7.27.2026

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Kudos to Laura Hancock for detailed coverage of Fordham’s new report on union strength in all 50 states. Everyone quoted seems to have read and clearly understood (and accepted) the methodology and findings—and there are a lot of interviewees. Then there’s detailed analysis of how these realities dovetail with the two major-party candidates for Ohio governor. None of which are surprising or revelatory in the slightest. (Cleveland.com, 7/26/26) If you haven’t had time yet to check out the full Fordham report, it is here whenever you’re ready for your next frothy beach read.
This piece seems simple at first blush: Alums of a charter school in Youngstown met over the weekend for a two-day reunion. But I feel there’s more we can take away from this if we just think a little deeper. Including the fact that this now-closed charter school created a true community among its students…just like a district school. The fact that more than 100 people felt positive enough about their time at Eagle Heights Academy to want to revisit their old friends…just like a private school. And that there are now adults with children in Ohio for whom attending a charter school is normal, good, and worth celebrating. So many of the best aspects of district and private schools are embodied at charter schools also. Just like your humble clips compiler has always said. And now others are (sort of) saying it too. Huzzah! (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 7/26/26)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

Topics:

Governance

The Education Gadfly

7.24.2026

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WHAT WE’RE READING

Savannah Peters looks at progress across the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education’s 183 schools, where high school graduation rates skyrocketed from about half to 79 percent in the past decade. The usual caveats apply: Soaring graduation rates should make us wonder about schools playing games via lower grading standards and credit recovery, plus this jump is at least partly due to changed data reporting procedures. Still, the article describes how local innovations are paying off in a system that doesn’t always get enough attention.

—

“The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a children’s book. I thought my son might enjoy it anyway.” —Chris Moody, The Atlantic

EXTRA CREDIT:

Matt Barnum, “Test scores have plunged, but voters aren’t making schools a top political issue”

Thibaut Delloue, “How the Other Half Chooses: A New Era of Choice for the Charter Movement”

Kathleen Porter-Magee, “Religious liberty in education: Back to the Supreme Court”

Harry Patrinos, “Real Accountability Means Marrying Standards and Markets”

Jessica Poiner, “Cleveland is a national model for closing underenrolled schools”

Mickey Revenaugh, “Why Microschools Are Multiplying”

Mike Schmoker, “The learning recession might be caused by a teaching recession”

Tommy Schultz, “School Choice Succeeds in Arkansas”

Natalie Wexler, “How Schools Can Counter ‘The End of Reading’”

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a twice-weekly free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation.

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Sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates
Curated commentary from across the ed-policy world
Lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback

The Education Gadfly

7.24.2026

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CHEERS

“It has become a summer rite to bemoan how few Black students are admitted to Stuyvesant and other highly competitive public high schools in New York City,” begins John McWhorter, who goes on to call out those who claim the selective admissions test is racist. Among the real culprits, he argues, is the loss of accelerated learning:

Since the 1990s, too many Black students have been deprived of gifted and talented programs, in the wake of an antitracking movement that called for students of all abilities (and races) to be taught together. The gifted and talented programs smoothed the way to schools like Stuyvesant for many Black students in the past.

And thus:

Faced with such small numbers of Black kids getting into Stuyvesant, there is nothing racist in asking: “How can we make Black kids do better on the test?”

Expand, don’t shrink, the number of gifted and talented programs. Expand and strengthen free, city-run test prep and tutoring.

What’s racist is pretending the test is the problem.

Kelsey Piper agrees, explaining how critiquing standardized tests is shooting the messenger instead of tackling the problem of preparedness:

Black kids in America are much less likely to be reading at grade level. They are much less likely to take advanced math classes and less likely to take and pass AP tests. But taking away the AP tests wouldn’t mean they knew the math. And taking away the SAT wouldn’t teach them how to read…

The war against gifted programs has not led to any educational improvements—indeed, it has correlated with a substantial across-the-board slump in test scores that has been most brutal for the students who started out weakest.

JEERS

School closures are painful, but a recent complaint against Pittsburgh Public Schools alleging discrimination against Black students sounds like 2020-era madness. Naaz Modan reports:

“On average, the lower a school’s utilization rate, the higher the share of Black student enrollment,” the complaint said. “The inverse relationship between utilization rate and Black student enrollment in PPS indicates that basing school closure decisions primarily on utilization rates will disproportionately affect schools serving higher shares of Black students.”

When schools are underutilized because families have voted with their feet—either by moving out of the neighborhood or using school choice to enroll their kids elsewhere—the right answer is to ensure the remaining students get access to better schools when their campuses close. (See Jessica Poiner’s excellent look at how Cleveland should serve as a national model for consolidation.) And as our Fordham colleague Brian Fitzpatrick wrote recently, the mere fact that closures hit some groups harder is not proof of discrimination. In fact, consolidations can help put children into schools better suited to serve them.

Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a twice-weekly free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation.

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Sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates
Curated commentary from across the ed-policy world
Lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback

Jeff Murray

7.24.2026

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Big news from Indy

Huge congratulations to Karega Rausch, who was unanimously chosen as the first executive director of The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation earlier this week. Rausch will be stepping down from his position as president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to take the helm in Indy and lead its new citywide education authority, which promises a unified effort to support students in all school types. Amazing news!

More coverage

Coverage of the new Ohio Pupil Transportation Workgroup report continued this week, with Ohio Capital Journal attempting to tie it to the annual bus driver recruiting season that happens across the state in mid-summer. Unfortunately, the OCJ coverage focuses on dissenters to the workgroup, its processes, and its recommendations. Their negativity spills over into discussion of bus driver hiring, serving to make what is generally a good gig sound like a nightmare assignment that no one would choose even when they earn twice minimum wage!

Help to get on the college track

Here’s some great coverage of the northeast Ohio nonprofit group called College Now. They have been doing fantastic work for years, helping young people across the region learn about college and get prepared for applying and attending in the future. This piece from Signal Cleveland features a charter school student prominently in its coverage of their recent tour of the University of Akron. Kudos to everyone involved for supporting so many young people onto the college track.

Silver anniversary

Happy 25th anniversary to the Autism Academy of Learning in Toledo! Its highly-specialized programs have served hundreds of students over the years and it remains popular among kids and parents. Melissa Birdsell is currently the office manager, but first came to the school as a parent. She tells 13 ABC News that her son is now 27 and independent and that she’s proud to work at the place that helped build a solid foundation for him. “I love when there are those little successes,” she explains. “Most people don’t notice, but they’re what I live for. It’s what makes this job so worthwhile and the hard aspects so much easier.” Beautiful!

Detailed data support quality choices

Thibaut Delloue, currently a Policy Fellow at the Florida Charter Institute, discusses why providing parents detailed data on school options motivates them to make better educational choices for their children. He blends solid research and his personal experience as a charter school teacher and administrator to make his case. “If the charter movement is to uphold its promise of serving students that need it most,” he concludes, “we must not only increase its footprint, but consider how to support all parents in choosing schools—particularly in the information provided to them and the systems to access those choices in the first place.”

Job opportunity in Cincinnati

IDEA Schools in Greater Cincinnati are hiring for an Executive Director. This senior regional leader is responsible for student outcomes, enrollment growth, financial sustainability, and community presence. Looking for experienced leaders with proven a track record of success in serving students, families, staff, and community. For more information on this great opportunity and for application details, click here.

*****

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Policy Priority:

School Choice

Topics:

Charter Schools

In April, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce released an amended ESSA plan for public comment that proposes stronger state interventions in chronically low-performing schools. More assertive turnaround efforts couldn’t come soon enough for students attending such schools. But as news reports have covered, some education advocates have sharply criticized the amendment. If their complaints prevail and the department walks back its proposal (not yet finalized), low-performing schools will be allowed to continue poorly educating students without serious accountability or consequence.

As policy background, federal education law—the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 rewrite of No Child Left Behind—requires states to identify low-performing schools and undertake improvement efforts. Schools in the bottom 5 percent statewide or with graduation rates below 67 percent are placed in “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI) status. Identified schools must create a state-approved improvement plan and are eligible for federal improvement grants. If CSI schools fail to improve within a certain timeframe (three years in Ohio), states must then implement “more rigorous interventions.”

While ESSA obligates states to help low-performing schools improve, the law does not prescribe how precisely to execute that assistance. In Ohio’s initial—and still current—ESSA plan, state officials mention things such as light-touch “supports” from regional educational service centers and vague “improvement reviews” for CSI schools—even for those subject to ESSA’s more rigorous interventions. Nothing, however, is mentioned about bolder efforts to more fundamentally restructure low-performing schools or permanently close them.

Not surprisingly, Ohio’s laid-back approach to ESSA-era school turnaround has proven ineffectual. In a 2025 study, American Institutes for Research/Rand Corporation researchers uncovered no discernible improvements in state exam scores and diminished attendance and graduation rates in Ohio CSI schools. In a necessary course correction, the ESSA amendment sharpens what intervention would look like in the state’s lowest performing schools. The department lists sixteen possible actions that it may require of CSI schools subject to more rigorous interventions. They include:

Undergoing a comprehensive school redesign led by an approved education provider;
Reopening with a new principal who is given authority to replace staff and restructure programs;
Converting to a charter school that replicates practices of high-performing schools;
Merging with a high-performing school operated by an approved charter operator;
Contracting with an external education provider to run part or all of the school;
Closing the school permanently.[1]

DEW’s tougher stance opens the door to actions that lead to better outcomes, yet the proposal received nothing but scorn from the public-school establishment. Canton City Schools superintendent Jeff Talbert asserted that DEW was pushing “unproven models that risk undermining public education and community control.” Teachers’ union boss Melissa Cropper bemoaned a lack of “stakeholder input” in objecting to the amended plan. The Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board threw a fit, accusing DEW of “trying to sneak through” stronger interventions “through a waiver [sic] request” that is “almost certainly illegal.”[2]

The complaints are off the mark for several reasons.

First, DEW is not circumventing the political process. On the contrary, with its proposed amendment, the agency is more faithfully fulfilling its responsibilities under federal education law. Recall that ESSA demands that state education agencies escalate interventions when a CSI school continues to fail year after year. Here’s the text (emphasis mine):

The State educational agency shall establish statewide exit criteria for schools identified by the State for comprehensive support and improvement, which if not satisfied…shall result in more rigorous State-determined action, such as the implementation of interventions.

When local control does not produce acceptable results, federal law obligates state officials to intervene on behalf of students through “state-determined action” in low-performing schools. What DEW proposes upholds the law—not undermines it.

Second, the low-performing schools facing these tougher, “more rigorous” interventions have struggled to make sufficient improvements for multiple years. In the traditional district sector, 34 CSI schools have been in such status since 2018 (going on a decade), and another 9 CSI schools have been so identified since 2022. In the charter realm, 20 general-education charter schools have been identified for CSI since at least 2018.[3] Simply identifying these schools as low-performers and requiring some paperwork has not made a difference. DEW is right to ratchet up the pressure when they persistently underperform. And in the charter sector, sponsors should also play their part by closing poor performers. If they refuse, the state’s recently beefed-up automatic closure law may finally kick in.

Third, some have decried charter school mergers or takeovers as a possible intervention. But their concerns are more political theatrics than an evenhanded assessment of the merits. As research from Ohio and elsewhere reveals, high-performing charter networks deliver the equivalent of weeks and months’ worth of additional learning. Handing over the keys to a high-performing charter operator may in fact be the best recourse for the school, and the students who attend it.

***

Every student deserves to attend an excellent school that prepares them for life after high school. Unfortunately, thousands of Ohio students attend subpar schools that rob them of opportunities for success. DEW’s ESSA amendment is a critical step toward fixing what ails these public institutions. Ohio policymakers should disregard the critics, dig in their heels, and start the hard work of turning around the state’s most troubled schools.

[1] Other possible interventions include mandatory instructional coaches, overhauling curriculum and teacher PD, comprehensive academic reviews by an external entity, and several other actions. CSI schools subject to “more rigorous interventions” would be required by DEW to implement one or more of the sixteen measures.

[2] The Plain Dealer misrepresented DEW’s proposal for state intervention in low-performing schools, which is an amendment to its ESSA implementation plan—not a “waiver” from federal law.

[3] This excludes 64 dropout-recovery charter high schools that almost by definition have low four-year graduation rates and result in CSI identification.

Policy Priority:

Standards & Accountability

Topics:

Accountability & Testing