In recent days, American students have been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and his leadership in the American civil rights movement. Here in the deep South where I live, my children have been taught about the Jim Crow laws and the various forms of racial terrorism that afflicted Black Americans in the previous century: from lynchings and race riots, to the murder of Emmitt Till and the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. One of the reasons that King’s activism in particular had so much power is that, in the face of hatred and violence, King led a movement that was explicitly non-violent, rooted in ideals of justice, charity, and human dignity.

King was well aware that he was putting himself in danger. Once he was designated the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, the FBI opened a file on him, his house was firebombed, his family’s lives threatened, his fellow boycotters physically attacked, and he was imprisoned, and yet he remained resolute that his movement for justice and equality must be based in love rather than hate. He preached to his fellow boycotters that “we must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us.” King always knew that his enemies wanted him dead or behind bars, but he refused to back down, as he knew his cause was greater than himself and worth all that he could give to it. And it did, sadly, eventually cost him his life.

While we have many debates about how best to teach America’s history of racial discrimination and violence, there is widespread agreement about the necessity of teaching the civil rights movement as part of state curriculum standards, and widespread recognition of King and other leaders in his movement as great Americans. Teaching this period of American history is one of many opportunities for students to receive lessons in the virtues that animated and sustained these historical social justice movements, and yet all too often this opportunity is not taken, because teachers and students lack the conceptual framework to present the material through a virtue lens. But we cannot really understand King’s life (and so many other activists) without recognizing and making explicit his courage and how it was essential to his pursuit of justice and equality.

So what, then, is courage? Courage is a virtue, a stable disposition that regulates the emotion of fear so that one feels the right amount of fear in a given situation. Fear is a felt, urgent desire to withdraw from something that appears to be bad, harmful, or threatening to one’s life or safety. Courage is a mean between two extremes: rashness or lack of fear in a dangerous situation on the one hand, and cowardly excess of fear in such a situation on the other. It is not good to be rash; some things are dangerous and ought to be avoided. But we can also fear in excess, which makes us unable to face danger when it is necessary. Students need to be taught that fear is a natural and normal emotion, but that they can and must exercise control over their fears in order to attain their goals and realize their vision of what is good.

Courage is often presented in dramatic fashion, but it is also a mundane, everyday virtue that is key to student success. Students need to overcome shyness and become capable of speaking their mind to others. They need to learn to take certain risks in the classroom, including the risk of giving the wrong answer or being proven wrong by a peer. They need to develop a strong sense of what risks are worth taking in certain situations and why. They need the rich vocabulary of courage in order to connect their everyday fears and risks at school with their own success and well-being. In particular, they need to see the connection between courage and the attainment of their goals and the preservation of their values.

It is not enough to tell students that courage is good, because courage isn’t simply about knowledge, but about our feelings, perceptions, imagination, and actions. To develop courage, our students must have more than a conceptual framework for understanding it; they need concrete opportunities to grow in courage in the school environment. Therefore, educators need to think about how to integrate courage lessons into their entire curriculum and how they can name, acknowledge, and encourage acts of courage in their classroom, regardless of what is being taught. What does it mean to read, think, imagine, deliberate, and act with courage? What acts of courage can students recognize around them in the school and in their own lives, and even in their own various forms of study? How can teachers model courage for their students?

Students should develop imaginations that are full of courageous characters, as this shapes what they themselves will aspire to become. This can be achieved in English language arts, through plays, novels, creative writing, and in history and social studies where they learn of historical profiles in courage, from Harriet Tubman to the heroes of Flight 93. Students can also be inspired not just by stories of courage, but by people in their everyday lives that exemplify this virtue in their jobs—from firefighters and police officers, to politicians and artists.

Courage is key to student success and essential to human flourishing. It is the virtue that regulates our fears so that we can pursue and preserve what we value and most deeply desire. For Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights activists, what they wanted was justice and equality, and their courage is what enabled them to do what was necessary to bring about these goods. Let us teach our students to recognize courage and to understand the depth of its value in human life, but let us also teach them and empower them to be courageous themselves.

Way back in the late 1960s, when federal officials and eminent psychologists were first designing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they probably never contemplated testing students younger than nine. After all, the technology for mass testing at the time—bubble sheets and No. 2 pencils—only worked if students could read the instructions and the questions, hold a pencil, and fill in their answers. Yes, there have been early-childhood assessments available for decades, instruments like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, but they require teachers to sit down one-on-one with students while students sound out words, identify numbers, and demonstrate other skills in person. Using those sorts of tests for a nationally representative examination system would have been logistically complex, prohibitively expensive, and politically untenable.

Furthermore, in those days, most young children were not enrolled in school. Public education didn’t start until 1st grade in most places. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when most U.S. states offered grants to help school districts start kindergarten programs, that attending school at age five became commonplace (see “What Happened When Kindergarten Went Universal?”, research, Spring 2010). And while preschools existed, only 28 percent of four-year-olds attended them, and their focus was almost entirely on exploration, socialization, and play. With school not starting in earnest until age six or so, testing at age nine made sense.

But how times have changed. Forty-one states now require districts to offer kindergarten, and half of them mandate that students attend. Nationwide, 85 percent of five-year-olds are enrolled in pre-K or kindergarten, with 77 percent in full-day programs. Furthermore, the vast majority of America’s four-year-olds are in some kind of formal preschool program—68 percent, at last count. While there is still vigorous debate about what children should be doing in preschool, there is also a broadly shared expectation that students spend at least part of their time learning pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills, so they can hit the ground running in kindergarten.

The other big change, of course, is technology. The choice is no longer between cheap bubble tests and expensive, one-to-one batteries. Modern assessments, given over Chromebooks, iPads, and other devices, can accurately assess student skills and understanding even before students can decode words on a page. Questions can be read aloud and speech-recognition software can record students’ verbal responses, which artificial intelligence can comprehend. Animated graphics and engaging videos can make the whole experience feel more like a game than a test.

This is why commercial test providers Curriculum Associates and NWEA have done what the NAEP designers may not have considered: created standardized tests for students as young as five. Banish from your head images of kindergarteners filling in bubble sheets. Instead, imagine kids playing an interactive game, much as they would on an educational app or website, during short testing sessions with plenty of “brain breaks.” The i-Ready and MAP Growth fall kindergarten assessments may look like games, but they also work to gather data that thousands of school districts use to identify student needs, spot trends, and target instruction.

Now that almost all NAEP exams are given on devices, too, there’s little reason to think that officials couldn’t design and offer a kindergarten exam as well.

Source: Education Next

Assessing early elementary

The rationale for testing academic skills in the early elementary grades is powerful. Consider the federal law behind NAEP, which defines its purpose as “to provide, in a timely manner, a fair and accurate measurement of student academic achievement and reporting of trends in such achievement in reading, mathematics, and other subject matter.” In its current form, NAEP leaves an enormous gap in our knowledge about what’s going on in schools. Most kids in this country are starting their education at age three or four, yet we don’t test them until age nine or until the 4th grade (using either the Long-Term Trend Assessment administered every four years or the newer “main NAEP” tests given every other year). That’s a long time for policymakers and researchers to be left in the dark about what’s going on and what students may or may not be learning.

Grades K–3 are arguably the most critical years of a child’s education, given what we know about the importance of early-childhood development and early elementary-school experiences. This is when children are building the foundational skills they’ll need in the years ahead. One report found that kids who don’t read on grade level by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school later on. Why do we wait until after the most important instructional and developmental years to find out how students are faring?

Gaining access to valid and reliable kindergarten data would give us a much better chance at solving some of the mysteries that have stumped the field in recent years, especially about the trends we’ve seen in past decades. Those trends show big gains on NAEP for most students from the late 1990s until about 2010 or so, followed by a plateau and then a more recent, pre-pandemic decline in the achievement of the lowest-scoring students. Since we only have scores from the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades, most of the conversation naturally focuses on what might be happening in schools that accounts for the trends. But if we had kindergarten data, we might learn that it’s what’s happening before kids ever get to elementary school that is responsible for what we are seeing. What if kindergarten readiness has changed over time, and that’s what’s causing the ups and downs in pupil achievement? We might also gain valuable information about the foundational instruction that young students are receiving in kindergarten from the teacher surveys that go along with the tests. These surveys can tell us, for example, what young students are learning, which instructional materials schools are using, and whether teaching methods are well aligned with the science of reading.

Even the test scores alone would be a huge contribution to our understanding. To get a glimpse of what we might see, consider a recent study by a quartet of scholars (see Figure 1). Using NWEA’s fall kindergarten MAP Growth assessment results from thousands of schools, weighted to represent the national population, they found a similar pattern to the one we see in NAEP data for older children: from 2010 to 2014, scores were mostly flat, followed by a significant decline through 2017 (when their time series ended).

This is intriguing but also frustrating, since we don’t have data from before 2010—NWEA wasn’t testing enough kindergartners back then—or for more recent years. But it indicates that whatever was driving down scores for older students, starting in the mid-2010s, might also have been reducing kindergarten readiness. And it also indicates how much more we could gain from the current NAEP administration with kindergarten data. Testing students in kindergarten could also give the public and policymakers a better understanding of how much students are learning in grades K–4, by establishing a baseline against which growth can be measured.

A worthy challenge

To be sure, the wizards who oversee the NAEP would have to figure out a number of technical and design challenges. For example, should the test focus on kindergarten readiness, and therefore be given in the fall? Or should officials focus on a spring assessment, to align with tests for the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades? How will they make sure that all test takers have access to similar devices and connectivity, so the testing conditions are the same from school to school? What if some kindergarteners are more familiar with technology than others? And when it comes to literacy, should the assessment focus solely on fluency, or the skill of sounding out words and making sense of them, or should it also focus on comprehension, even if students aren’t actually reading yet themselves? How will NAEP’s sampling work given that kindergarten, while ubiquitous, is not universal?

Even with modern technologies, kindergarten assessments aren’t quite as valid and reliable as those for older students. At least that’s the case for i-Ready Assessment and MAP Growth, partly because their vertical scales start at grade K and there’s always more statistical noise at the bottom and the top of such scales. Officials would need to figure out how to make a kindergarten NAEP as trustworthy as its other assessments.

And then there are the financial and political headwinds. As it stands, NAEP doesn’t have enough money to implement all of the assessments officials would like to give. So if we were to add kindergarten testing, Congress would either have to provide more money, or tests in other subject areas or grade levels would need to be cut.

None of these challenges should be insurmountable. If NAEP were being designed today from scratch, it’s hard to imagine that kindergarten assessments would not be included in the package. We’ve been operating in the dark around early childhood long enough. It’s time to turn on the lights.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.

Research (as well as common sense and folk wisdom) has shown that “parental investments” are critical to the healthy development of young children. However, studies also show that such investments—including time spent with children and other non-financial inputs—differ substantially by socioeconomic status (SES). A recent NBER paper explores how parental beliefs about child development, including the parents’ own role in it, could impact socioeconomic inequalities and whether those beliefs can be changed in hopes of narrowing that gap.

A trio of researchers from the University of Chicago begin by showing dramatic differences in parental beliefs across SES, with higher-SES parents more likely to believe that their investments impact child development (with “investments” here defined as high-quality parent-child interactions). They then carry out two field experiments focused on low-SES families to see if their beliefs are malleable and, if so, whether those revised beliefs improve their investments in their child and, subsequently, their child’s outcomes.

The first experiment involved newborns: The researchers partnered with ten pediatric clinics in the Chicago metro area that all reached traditionally medically underserved, underinsured, or uninsured populations. They worked with parents during their first well-child visit, three to five days after birth. A total of 475 parent-child dyads met the study’s SES and health eligibility criteria and were randomized into treatment and control groups. Treatment group parents watched four videos (ten minutes each) when they arrived at the clinic for additional well-child visits at one, two, four, and six months. The videos provided information on the role of parents in the early stages of child development, on brain malleability, on babies’ capabilities, and on how parents can leverage this knowledge in their daily routines with their baby, specifically around what language-rich interactions look like. The control group either watched four videos about safety tips for babies or did not watch videos.

The second experiment was a more intensive, home-visit program and, like the other experiment, emphasized language-rich interactions. The researchers recruited parents of twenty-four- to thirty-month old children in medical clinics, grocery stores, daycare facilities, and public transportation venues around Chicago. A total of ninety-one dyads met the SES and health criteria and again were randomized into treatment and control groups. The treatment group received two home visits each month for six months; the twelve visits were an hour each and followed a curriculum designed to foster both cognitive and social-emotional development by improving parental beliefs. The curriculum started with a video that covered a specific area of child development (such as linguistic interaction, incorporation of math into an everyday routine, or how to encourage your child), followed by a home visitor-led activity with the parent or caregiver to demonstrate how to put the concept into practice. The control group received a nutrition intervention with packets of information reviewed with the parents and caregivers during the home visits, which took place every six weeks over six months.

In both experiments, they collected extensive data about parental beliefs—such as whether they agree with a statement like “Children zero to two years old can learn just as many words from educational TV as they can from their parents”—data on children’s skill levels, and the quality of parent-child interactions. The latter was measured using audio recordings of all the sounds produced by and around the child (captured by a sound-recording T-shirt worn by the child) during a series of eight-hour recording days. Recordings were processed using speech recognition software to separate language from noise, sentences from words, etc., and to gauge the linguistic quality of those sounds.

Both experiments had an impact on parents’ beliefs and child outcomes, but the less-intensive version did not last; improvements faded by twelve to eighteen months. The more intensive home visits positively impacted parent-child interactions, vocabulary, math skills, and social-emotional skills, lasting the full timeline of the experiment, i.e., 3.5 years later. The researchers supplemented their results with data from a related study and found that a 1.0 standard deviation (SD) increase in parental knowledge and beliefs when the child is between thirteen and sixteen months is associated with a 0.8 to 1.2 SD increase in language skills later—up to three years and four months old. Their estimates suggest that parent beliefs alone can explain up to 18.7 percent of the variation in child language skills at this early age.

Everyone knows that there are multiple deep drivers of inequality that prevent many kids from getting a fair start in life. These daunting challenges can discourage even our best efforts. Thankfully, this study points to one potential pathway to lessen one particular mechanism of said inequality. Yet we don’t have data tracking these children into school. Will the improvements from the more intensive version of the experiment fade over the long term? It would help to know that answer before engaging in what appears to be intensive but promising parent empowerment work.

SOURCE: John A. List, Julie Pernaudet, and Dana Suskind, “It All Starts with Beliefs: Addressing the Roots of Educational Inequities by Shifting Parental Beliefs,” NBER WorkingPaper #29394 (October 2021).

“This is a book about my liberal education,” begins Roosevelt Montás’s book, Rescuing Socrates. Through four lengthy chapters, he details “the way in which liberal education has altered and enriched the trajectory of my life.” The book—which effortlessly swings between Montás’s own story and his meditations on the Western scholarly tradition—defies easy categorization. It is part memoir, part history of ideas, and part undergrad course syllabus.

Liberal education, by which students develop competencies in multiple humanistic disciplines such as literature, art, history, and philosophy, is the ideal education for the virtuous citizen in Montás’s view. Its central feature is “its concern with the condition of human freedom and self-determination.” As distinguished from professional and technical educations, it “looks to the meaning of human life beyond the requirements of subsistence—instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for.” And it often incorporates classic texts into its curricula.

The last component is familiar to Montás, who is a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for American Studies, and previously was director of that institution’s Center for the Core Curriculum. A long-lived and much-lauded type of Great Books program, Columbia’s core curriculum takes first year undergrads on a journey of literary and philosophical masterworks from antiquity to the present day. Their authors—St. Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Nietzsche, Gandhi—fill the pages of Montás’s book.

As the author readily admits, this mode of education has fallen out of favor in recent decades. In her review of the same book, Naomi Shaefer Riley notes that “today’s most fortunate students are rarely getting an actual liberal arts education,” and when they do, “they spend a lot of time protesting its bias and its irrelevance.” Derided as too old, too white, too male, too Western, texts such as The Republic and The Iliad are being abandoned by American educators. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” a teacher tweeted in June. A high school teacher responded, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”

It is not surprising that Montás discovers Plato exactly there: in the trash. Passing by a pile of garbage left on the street corner one winter night in the late ‘80s, a teenaged Montás notices a stack of hardback books. One is a copy of Plato’s dialogues. He rescues the book from the heap (providing the inspiration for the book’s title) and takes a giant leap forward on his academic journey, one that eventually leads him through the ivy gates.

It is a fascinating journey, one both intellectual and geographical. Born into poverty in the Dominican Republic, Montás made his way to New York City with his older brother just before his twelfth birthday. His mother had emigrated years before to establish a life for her family. His father, a would-be Marxist revolutionary, left the family early on to return to the Dominican Republic. Unfamiliar with American culture and speaking almost no English, Montás struggled to find his place in his new homeland. Unprepared for winter, he shivered in a leather jacket, not knowing the value of down-filled coats. His assimilation began with his discovery of Plato.

Like the classical canon itself, assimilation is increasingly viewed as a relic of a past, less-enlightened age. The commandments of identity politics tell us not only to respect our cultural differences, but also to exalt them. Nowhere is this tenet as faithfully observed as in academe. “The idea that there can be an American culture that everyone joins seems to be anathema to some academic thinkers,” acclaimed education thinker E.D. Hirsh told the Wall Street Journal in an interview last year.

“A liberal education can only take place when those notions [of identity] are held lightly and seen through,” Montás tells us. His initiation into the classics is not coercive or “problematic,” to borrow a term du jour. Instead, Montás discovered that, “As a young person trying to understand what it meant to be who I was and to be where I was, I found Plato a genuine affirmation of my identity.” This identity is not limited to race, ethnicity, or immigration status, “but something more fundamental.” The Platonic dialogues, in which the philosopher Socrates fearlessly pursues truth, beauty, and goodness through conversations with the citizenry of Athens, “pointed toward what felt like the most worthwhile way of living for me.” The reader infers that Montás has rescued Socrates and the ancient teacher has returned the favor.

Moral relativism is another progressive ideal that Montás rebukes. The purpose of education is not only the intellectual development of the student, but also the moral cultivation of the citizen. “Liberal education is not possible without a recognition that inquiry into the life of virtue—that is, into the best and most excellent life for a human to live—is not a futile endeavor but, in fact, leads to a deeper self-understanding and, in this sense, a fuller life.” The polymath scholar John McWhorter, who also taught a one of Columbia’s core curriculum courses, noted that doing so “made a better person out of me, as well as the dozens of students I ushered through it.” Yet educators have dumped this moral cultivation, much like the volume of Plato that Montás discovered in the trash. This dereliction of duty begins in our compulsory K–12 schools. A fly on the wall in any American elementary classroom would hear more about self-esteem than about virtue.

Montás’s convincingly makes the argument that the classics enrich any life pursuit. By doing so, his story should appeal to anyone who cares about education. There is something here to illuminate and inspire, for both curricular traditionalists and progressive educators, for both pragmatic business majors and idealistic scholars of philosophy. At the very least, it will motivate the reader to think twice before tossing away that dusty volume of The Odyssey.

Cheers

• Harrison Bader of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team volunteered to substitute for a class to help with teacher shortages. —Belleville News-Democrat
• Learning loss is leading to changes in school calendars, including starting earlier and ending later. —The 74
• New York City Mayor Eric Adams has a chance to leave a strong education legacy by lowering barriers to charter school expansion. —Wall Street Journal

Jeers

• Progressives have refused to admit that school closings were a historic and foreseeable blunder. That’s how they lost the public’s trust. —Jonathan Chait
• “Nearly half of all school and district leaders (44 percent) say they are receiving more threats of violence by students now than they did in the fall of 2019.” —Education Week

• Partisan overtones in the National School Boards Association’s letter to President Biden has led many members to withdraw or refuse to renew their membership. —Washington Post
• “The empty pageantry of education research.” —Rick Hess and Mike Goldstein
• In his first year, Secretary Cardona has managed to improve relations between the U.S. Department of Education and districts, but critics feel he didn’t prioritize students and reopening enough. —The 74
• “The volatile debate over how to teach about America’s racist past is wreaking havoc on states’ processes for deciding what students will learn about history and social studies.” —Education Week

1. An interesting discussion of the importance of education in the Black community comes to us from Lima. Local entrepreneur Jeffrey Kirkman reiterates that Black families want and deserve the best for their children but data show that traditional district schools are not working for many Black youth. He is a fan of the EdChoice Scholarship Program for this reason. Neither Mr. Kirkman’s strong support nor his reasoning therefor are allowed to stand by themselves, as you no doubt guessed, because this is Ohio journalism. I’ll leave it to you to see who pops up to counter his statements and the somewhat novel argument used. (Lima News, 1/15/22)
    
2. Speaking of Ohio journalistic no-brainers, both the reason for creation of Academic Distress Commissions (years, sometimes decades, of unrelenting academic suckitude) and the hard-fought resistance to ADC improvement efforts by entrenched local interests have been nearly entirely erased in this piece. It’s almost too cliché to bother remarking on, really. However, this discussion of what East Cleveland City Schools and Lorain City Schools have planned to help them finally shake off that “unfair” and “unsuccessful” ADC control. (Youngstown City Schools is likely still a bit too radioactive to fit into this story and is thus also shunted to the side.) Kudos, I suppose, to current East Cleveland CEO Henry Pettiegrew for at least admitting that his students’ test scores—and reading levels—have been wretched over many many years. But now that state oversight is waning and he and his elected board at last have a chance to fix those long-standing failures to educate students, what’s the big plan? A giant hunk of a remote, asynchronous learning. Yes, you read that right. “Pettiegrew is calling this next semester before that July start date their ‘preseason’,” the article tells us. “As a part of that, every Monday — they're calling it Mindful Monday — the students are learning remotely. They’re meeting virtually with groups, learning asynchronously, meeting with school counselors and psychologists.” Nope. I don’t get it either. (Ideastream Public Media, Cleveland, 1/18/22)
    
3. Meanwhile, out in suburbia, high school junior Mohammad Zoraiz hacked an existing math app and built his own variation designed to help his fellow students boost their skills on their own. (He was regularly asked by teachers to help tutor others.) He also won a first place award in the 2021 Congressional App Challenge and provided all the photos used in this article. Is there nothing this young man can’t accomplish? I think not. Kudos! (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 1/13/22)

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If you’re at all involved in Ohio education policy, you’ve heard about the anti-voucher lawsuit that was recently filed by the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding. The coalition, which is made up of dozens of traditional public school districts, hopes that a victory will spell the end of the EdChoice Scholarship Program, which served over 50,000 kids during the 2020–21 school year.

The lawsuit opens with the assertion that EdChoice poses an “existential threat” to Ohio’s public school system. The claims that follow outline several arguments in favor of abolishing the program. My colleague Aaron Churchill recently did a very thorough and efficient job of debunking the lawsuit’s claim that EdChoice has created an inequitable funding system. But there are a few other erroneous claims that also deserve rebuttals. And one of the most significant is that EdChoice is unconstitutional.

Most of the plaintiffs’ case is predicated on Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio constitution, which reads: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State; but, no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this State.”

The plaintiffs’ arguments against this provision can be boiled down to this: First, the expansion of EdChoice has, in their words, “created multiple state-wide systems of publicly-funded, uncommon, private schools.” The program offends the constitution in doing so, as they believe the law “authorizes the state only to fund a thorough and efficient system of common, i.e., public, schools.” Second, because many of the private schools that participate in EdChoice are religious, the lawsuit claims that the program violates the Ohio constitution by “placing hundreds of millions of dollars in school funds within the exclusive, unfettered control of private (mostly religious) institutions.”

Both arguments miss the mark, and here’s why.

A thorough and efficient system of common schools

This argument hinges on an assumption, which is that the phrase “common schools” means traditional public schools and only traditional public schools. Given that the historical common schools movement is predicated on the notion that every child should have access to free public schools, it’s not altogether surprising that the plaintiffs have gone in this direction. But ultimately, arguing that the constitution’s mandate for “a thorough and efficient system of common schools” means the state can only fund traditional public schools is misguided for two reasons.

First, the constitution calls for the state to fund a system of common schools. And a system, by definition, is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.” Ohio’s current education landscape is made up traditional public districts, charter public schools, STEM schools (which are public but operated independently of a district), and private schools. These schools are unified by a common goal to educate kids, and the ability of Ohio families to choose where to send their children means schools must regularly interact with each other and the community. Ohio’s schooling landscape—and the diverse options that are part of that landscape—clearly fit the definition of a system.

Moreover, there is no provision within the constitution that requires schools within the mandated system to operate under the same governance structure. In fact, it’s widely accepted that systems have different and unique parts. The human respiratory system, for example, is made up of the mouth and nose, the sinuses, the pharynx, and the lungs. Each part is responsible for helping our bodies breathe, but they don’t accomplish that goal in the exact same way. If they did, they wouldn’t be a system—they would be a group of identical parts. The same is true for education. Traditional district, charter, STEM, and private schools that accept vouchers reach their shared goal in distinctive ways, but striving toward the same goal makes them a system. So, too, does the fact that they all must meet the same health and safety guidelines, administer annual state tests, and hold students to the same graduation standards.

Second, the lawsuit overlooks an important precedent. In 2001, a group of traditional public school advocates filed a lawsuit alleging that Ohio’s charter school law was unconstitutional. They claimed that charters—referred to as “community schools” in law—weren’t part of the common school system. In 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law and ruled that the General Assembly had not transgressed the limits of its legislative power. Writing for the majority, Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger explained: “In enacting community school legislation, the General Assembly added to the traditional school system by providing for statewide schools that have more flexibility in their operation. Community schools were designed to give parents a choice.” She added that “the expressed legislative intent is to provide a chance of educational success for students who may be better served in their educational needs in alternative settings.”

It’s not difficult to see how this could be applied to the recently-filed voucher lawsuit. In enacting EdChoice legislation, the General Assembly didn’t abandon the traditional public school system. In fact, lawmakers have continued to support and fund Ohio’s traditional school districts at increasing levels over the past two decades. All they did was add more educational options that empower families to choose schools that best meet the needs of their children.

Religious schools

The second half of Article VI, Section 2 relates to religion. The plaintiffs argue several times that because students can use a voucher to attend a religious school, the state is thereby funding religious entities. But that claim runs counter to a precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2002, the Court ruled in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris that the Cleveland Scholarship Program didn’t violate the Establishment Clause. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the program “is entirely neutral with respect to religion” and that it “provides benefits directly to a wide spectrum of individuals.”

This same reasoning holds true for EdChoice. Any and all Ohio private schools, regardless of religious affiliation, are welcome to participate. The program doesn’t prioritize religious schools, and a program that is “neutral with respect to religion” cannot and does not provide “an exclusive right” to state funds. Furthermore, because EdChoice scholarships are given to families—a “wide spectrum of individuals,” to use Justice Rehnquist’s words—rather than to private schools, the state can’t be accused of funding private schools, religious or otherwise. The lawsuit asserts that EdChoice places “hundreds of millions of dollars in school funds within the exclusive, unfettered control of private (mostly religious) institutions.” But based on what the U.S. Supreme Court decided two decades ago, that’s not true. Voucher programs like EdChoice place funding in the hands of families who then make a choice about which school their child will attend. It’s through families, not the state, that taxpayer funds reach private schools.

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It’s telling that this lawsuit opens with a declaration that EdChoice poses “an existential threat” to public schools. It makes the plaintiffs’ intentions crystal clear. This isn’t about kids, or families, or communities. It’s not about making sure that every kid has a chance to attend a school that will meet their needs. It’s about giving a particular set of schools—and a particular group of people—an opportunity to reclaim a monopoly on state funding regardless of how well they serve kids. Ohio families deserve better than that.

Last week, five school districts filed a lawsuit in the Franklin County courts that attempts to strike down EdChoice, Ohio’s private scholarship program that serves roughly 50,000 school children, many of whom are among the neediest kids in the state. The plaintiffs allege that offering these scholarships harms public school systems and thus offends the state constitution. The complaint, however, is riddled with sketchy data and questionable arguments, and it omits solid research evidence showing that EdChoice, like kindred scholarship programs across the nation, actually has neutral to positive effects on public schools. Predictably, the lawsuit also ignores the program’s benefits to the families who now have the opportunity to choose schools that better meet their children’s needs. 

Amid their many distortions, the plaintiffs’ most deceptive claim is that students attending traditional public schools receive less funding than scholarship students. They contend that:

Under H.B. 110, the Ohio Department of Education must pay $5,500.00 for each EdChoice voucher recipient in grades K-8, and $7,500.00 for each EdChoice voucher recipient in grades 9-12. In contrast, the average per pupil foundation funding allotted to public school districts is an average of about $4,008.00 per pupil for FY22. This amount is less than the least expensive EdChoice Voucher.

This disparity in funding is even more pronounced for the students attending schools in many of the Plaintiff Districts, where those students receive thousands of dollars less in state foundation funding on a per-pupil basis than their similarly situated voucher recipient counterparts.

This boils down to a claim that school districts are victims of an inequitable funding system. That would be worrisome if it were true. But it isn’t. The plaintiffs distort the truth by omitting key funding policies and the billions of dollars that those policies generate for traditional districts. Consider what the plaintiffs either missed or chose to ignore.

First, as part of the state foundation program, Ohio requires local districts to levy at least a 20 mill (or 2 percent) property tax. Those state-required dollars are excluded from the district funding amounts presented by the plaintiffs. In conjunction with direct state formula funding, this statutorily-driven tax ensures that all Ohio districts have sufficient baseline resources. As such, it’s a policy that cannot simply be ignored in debates about whether Ohio is meeting its constitutional obligations. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs do exactly that—omitting these foundational dollars—perhaps in an effort to manufacture a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

As Table 1 indicates, when the required property tax is included, the alleged inequity goes away. Combining state formula aid with the state-mandated property tax (which is built into Ohio’s entire school funding system), traditional districts receive on average $8,654 per pupil. That’s more than twice the district average that is cited by the plaintiffs ($4,008 per pupil) and above the scholarship amounts. The table below also illustrates the “progressiveness” of Ohio’s funding formula. It recognizes the uneven property wealth across districts and intentionally distributes more state aid to those that raise smaller amounts through property taxes. Among the five plaintiff districts, for instance, Lima and Barberton receive the most formula aid from the state—$11,530 and $8,526 per pupil, respectively—which more than offsets the smaller amounts that those districts generate on a 2 percent property tax.[1] 

Table 1: Plaintiff districts’ state funding amounts, plus the state required 2 percent property tax

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† I calculate these figures by dividing a district’s net state formula funding, as reported in the Ohio Department of Education’s January 7th payment reports for FY 22, by its FY 22 enrollment. The use of FY 22 funding data ensures that district amounts are comparable to the EdChoice scholarship amounts cited by the plaintiffs, which first applied in FY 22. * I calculate these figures by multiplying a district’s property values, as reported by the Ohio Department of Taxation for the 2020 tax year (TY 20), by 0.02. Data from TY 20 are the most recent available.

Second, subject to local voter approval, school districts have the authority to levy additional property taxes, i.e., more than 2 percent. Although these discretionary dollars could be seen as being outside the state foundation program, they generate millions more in revenue for traditional districts. The vast majority of districts do this, and the average property tax rate statewide was 3.64 percent (or 36.4 mills) in TY 20. When discretionary property tax dollars are added—none of which support private school students—we see district funding rise even more. Table 2 includes these dollars (which are also excluded by the plaintiffs). It shows that district funding statewide and in the five plaintiff districts easily exceeds the EdChoice scholarship amounts by almost $5,000 to more than $10,000 per pupil.

Table 2: Plaintiff districts’ state and local taxpayer funding combined

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* I calculate these figures by multiplying a district’s property values, as reported by the Ohio Department of Taxation for TY 20, by the difference in a district’s effective property tax rate and 0.02. Data from TY 20 are the most recent available.

Third, overall spending on traditional district students’ education far exceeds EdChoice scholarship amounts. If anything, scholarship students are the ones who are treated unfairly. In the end, what matters is the overall resources available to educate students—not necessarily where the dollars come from. When it comes to overall spending totals—here including dollars generated from federal, state, and local sources—Barberton spent $14,762 per pupil in FY 21, Cleveland Heights University Heights spent $21,669 per pupil, Columbus spent $13,930 per pupil, Lima spent $16,113 per pupil, and Richmond Heights spent $18,094 per pupil. The plaintiff districts’ spending figures all exceeded the statewide district average that year ($13,387 per pupil) and were about two to three times the EdChoice scholarship amounts.

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School funding is—and has long been—a joint effort between the state and local districts. In fact, the ability to raise money locally is often viewed as central to the cherished notion of “local control.” As the lawsuit moves forward, the courts must do a more comprehensive analysis of district funding that recognizes the state-required property tax—which ensures every district contributes its fair share—and looks at money generated via all taxpayer sources. If they do this, they’ll soon see that the plaintiffs’ story is a work of fiction.

Groveport Madison Local Schools have sued the state of Ohio in response to a massive fine levied upon them for failing to properly transport resident charter and private school students over more than two weeks last school year. The case argues that aspects of the state’s definition of “noncompliance” are arbitrary and unconstitutional. We learned from the same coverage that four other districts were similarly fined last year as well: Columbus City Schools, Cincinnati City Schools, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and Elyria City Schools. Given the stern warning issued by the Ohio Department of Education and the more stringent legislation passed by the General Assembly last year, this appears to be a challenge to the state’s commitment to transporting all eligible students regardless of school attended.

Giving students what they need

Staff at Utica Shale Academy in Salineville, Ohio, recently created an outdoor welding lab at the school in order to speed up access to newly-donated welding machines. Not only will students immediately begin gaining hands-on experience, they will also be working in situations more resembling the real world environments of the oil and gas industry for which they are training.

Diverse, inclusive options

AM NY this week published a nice feature on charter schools in New York City. While it was a simple “explainer” style piece, the lauding of charters as diverse and inclusive options for families looking for a new or different fit for their children was clearly expressed. Likely very helpful to parents and guardians who had not considered charters previously.

Upcoming webinar on ESSER III funding

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is holding a webinar next week titled “ESSER III Funding and Fiscal Responsibility”. Supported by Amazon Business, the event aims to provide insights into the current status of funding distribution, share best practices from school leaders on how to stretch this funding, and provide resources on tracking spend to meet potential reporting requirements. Registration for the event, to be held January 19 at 1:00 pm ET, is here.

2022 National Charter School Conference

The annual National Charter Schools Conference is scheduled to be held in Washington, DC, June 19-22, 2022. This year’s event will center around three issues: The future of teachers, education, and charter schools; Impact of the pandemic on learning outcomes and mental health; and engaged and diverse advocacy. For more information and to register to attend, click here.

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