Academic advancement programs (especially those branded as “gifted and talented”) are often at the center of controversy about equity in education. This has sometimes led to gifted programs being eliminated or substantially altered—such as the recent closure of the highly capable cohort program in Seattle. These headlines raise the perennial question of what school parents really want when it comes to gifted education.

In partnership with Morning Consult, EdChoice surveyed a nationally representative sample of American adults eighteen and older (N = 2,252) from June 5–7, 2024. With additional sampling, we obtained responses from 1,294 parents of children currently in K–12 education.

In this month’s poll, we asked parents new questions to learn about their perspectives on gifted education. After all, summertime is when parents make crucial decisions about the upcoming school year, including where to send their kids to school in the fall. For a lot of families, that means considering whether their current school offers academic advancement or “gifted” classes. A lack of educational options might lead them to make the difficult decision to switch schools.

This June, nearly two-thirds of all school parents (63 percent) say that it’s very or extremely important for their child’s school to offer advanced academic classes. Private school parents place even more importance on gifted education being offered, with 77 percent saying it’s at least very important. It’s clear that school parents want class options that suit their children’s academic needs.

Despite recent challenges to gifted education, school parents still want academic advancement options to be available. The majority of school parents (58 percent) disagree that schools should eliminate advanced classes in order to mix students together in the same classes. Only 9 percent of school parents strongly believe that schools should be removing advanced classes to make sure students are in the same classroom.

Perhaps most strikingly, one-third of school parents (33 percent) say they would be extremely or very likely to move their child to a different school if their current school eliminated academically advanced classes. Nearly half of private school parents (47 percent) said the same. Among parents who have switched their child’s school, 28 percent say that the change in schools was needed because their child’s academic needs were not being met at their former school. That’s approximately level with the one-third (33 percent) of parents who say they would be likely to change schools if gifted classes were eliminated—showing us that school parents are ready to back up their educational preferences by taking action.

The importance of academic advancement options to school parents shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that a lot of families have a personal stake in gifted education. In this month’s poll, 43 percent of parents say they have at least one kid taking a gifted, advanced, or honors class at school. This proportion is higher among parents of high school (54 percent) and private school (58 percent) students. According to parents of “gifted” kids, honors classes are the most common type of academic advancement, with 46 percent of gifted students enrolled in an honors class. Gifted/advanced academic programs are the next most common option at 34 percent. Notably, 27 percent of these parents said their kids take an Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) class—up from 15 percent in November 2023.

Check out the full report, and read more about what school parents have to say about gifted education.

Editor’s note: This was first published by EdChoice.

Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full.

Keep sponsor accountability strong…

Fordham’s Aaron Churchill published two important pieces last week. In the first, he explains why a rigorous sponsor evaluation system is critical to the success of charter schools in Ohio. He lambastes legislative efforts to chip away at academic accountability especially, noting that it is the best way to ensure that charters remain high-quality options for students and families.

…make charter funding fair

In the second, Aaron lays out three steps that lawmakers should take during the next state budget cycle to help narrow longstanding funding gaps between charter and district schools once and for all.

Top of the charts

Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews last week discussed what he calls “the biggest sea change in high schools” he has ever seen. What he means is that most of the top 20 schools in his Challenge Index—that is, the most rigorous high schools in the country based on student participation and success in AP, IB, Cambridge, and other challenging academic programs—are no longer part of affluent districts but are instead charter schools serving predominately low-income students. He ascribes the change to “charters’ freedom to offer hard courses to anyone” which has provided “hope and excitement among families and teachers in a growing number of low-income neighborhoods”. Expectations are high, opportunities are numerous, and success is expected. Among the charter schools singled out for praise are several from the IDEA and BASIS networks in Texas and Arizona, respectively, as well as KIPP University Prep in San Antonio. Kudos!

Good news/bad news pt 1

The first story in this category comes to us from New York City. The good news: Ten new charters were given the green light to open this fall in the Big Apple. The bad news: No more can be approved as the city has once again reached the state-mandated cap on new schools. The cap remains in place despite strong opposition from supporters and families, and despite long waiting lists at charters across the city.

Good news/bad news pt 2

The second story comes from Chicago. While the leaders of Chicago Public Schools have proposed a general funding increase for charter schools in the city for next year, charters with shrinking enrollments would likely see a funding cut. Meanwhile, district schools would all see a funding boost, regardless of enrollment, because their funding formula focuses on inputs rather than enrollment. All this comes on the heels of other policy changes in the district that all aim to restrict competition.

*****

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

The conventional wisdom is that school closures are bad—not the temporary pandemic-era variety, but the permanent shuttering of underenrolled school facilities. Nobody wants to hear that the school board (or charter authorizer) is going to close “their” school, especially when the “they” always seem to be Black, Brown, and poor neighborhoods.

So it’s little surprise that leaders facing school closure decisions are under pressure to proceed equitably. Fair enough. But what should that mean? And what if school closures, though painful, can be made to be good—for students, at least? Let’s dig in.

America has too many school buildings, and some will need to close

This issue has been all over the media of late. In short: Our schools are facing a dramatic enrollment decline driven mostly by the post-Great Recession Baby Bust, but also Trump- and pandemic-era declines in immigration. Some traditional public schools also lost students to charter or private schools during the Covid crisis, and not all came back. And some urban systems lost families to the suburbs (or to more distant environs) as the rise of remote work made urban living less attractive.

The recent surge across the southern border is blurring the picture a bit, but most school systems face long-term enrollment declines of 10 percent or more—not surprising, given that the number of babies born in the U.S. in a given year has dropped more than 15 percent since its 2007 high. In some districts it will be much worse. Experts are predicting a decline of 30 percent for LAUSD!

I haven’t seen any demographers asserting that America’s birth rate is likely to bounce back anytime soon, if ever. In fact, as is the case for most of the developed world, it’s still heading down. Nor does there appear to be a national appetite for a large increase in immigration. All of which is to say that, outside of a handful of high-growth communities, districts must come to terms with shrinking enrollment for the foreseeable future. And that means closing schools.

The evidence on closures

Do students suffer when their schools are closed—either for low performance, as occasionally happened in the No Child Left Behind era, or for underenrollment? This is a question that has been studied extensively over the past few decades, and the somewhat exasperating answer is: It depends. Specifically, it depends on whether the affected students land in higher-performing schools. If so, they tend to do better, at least in the long run. If not, they do worse. (That’s the case for charter school closures, as well.)

There’s also better-than-expected news for affected communities. While local residents understandably worry that a shuttered school will signal (continued) decline in their neighborhood, at least one study in Philadelphia found that crime, especially violent crime, declined significantly when high schools with high rates of student misbehavior and low academic performance were closed.

Closing schools equitably

So what should the equity-minded school board member or superintendent do, in the face of this challenging and fraught situation?

Rather than promise that school closures won’t disproportionately affect low-income communities or communities of color, promise that all affected students will have access to higher-performing schools. In other words, promise that, by closing schools, students will be better off than they are now, especially low-income students and students of color.

No doubt, keeping that promise will take considerable effort. It will mean:

• Identifying the right schools to close—generally meaning the lowest-performing ones, those whose students are achieving at extremely low levels and aren’t making much progress from year to year.
• Ensuring an adequate number of seats in higher-performing schools nearby[1], while working out any transition or transportation logistics that might keep students from accessing them. That might include enrollment preferences for displaced students, including in nearby charter schools.
• Communicating effectively (and promptly) with students, families, educators, and the community, both about the process of identifying schools for closure and about how to ensure that students enroll in higher-performing schools. Tim Daly has lots of great suggestions on this front.

Closing schools is a wrenching process, but ensuring that our most disadvantaged students land in more effective environments than they attend today is more than a silver lining. It should be the overriding goal, one that can narrow achievement gaps if done right. That’s real equity.

Expanding and improving career pathways for secondary students is an increasingly important priority for Ohio policymakers. As such, it will likely be a focal point during the upcoming state budget cycle. There are plenty of ideas that are worthy of lawmakers’ consideration. But it’s important to remember that policymaking is only part of the solution to expanding and improving career pathways. Districts and schools play an even more critical role—and one of the most promising ways to do so is already within their reach.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a nonprofit educational foundation that develops challenging curricular frameworks—referred to as programs—and accompanying assessments. More than 8,000 IB programs are currently offered at over 5,800 schools in more than 160 countries. Ohio is home to dozens of these schools, which are known as IB world schools. The vast majority offer three of IB’s four available programs: the Primary Years Program for students ages 3–12, the Middle Years Program for students ages 11–16, and the Diploma Program (DP) for students ages 16–19. The DP is the most widely known of the three. But it’s the IB’s fourth offering, the Career-related Program, that deserves a closer look from Ohio schools.

The Career-related Program, or CP, is specifically designed for students who are interested in career-related learning. As part of the CP, students work their way through a three-part framework that combines rigorous academic coursework with targeted career education.

The first part of the framework is academic coursework. Every CP student is required to complete a minimum of two internationally-recognized DP courses, as well as accompanying written examinations that are graded by external IB examiners. Schools select which DP courses to offer based on their relevance to students’ career-related studies. They can choose from six subject groups: science, math, studies in language and literature, language acquisition, individuals and societies (which includes courses like economics, global politics, and psychology), and the arts (which includes dance, film, music, theater, and visual arts).

The second part of the framework is the CP core, which connects students’ DP courses to their career-related studies. It provides students with an opportunity to develop both academic and professional skills with an emphasis on experiential learning. The four interrelated components of the CP core are assessed by schools. They include:

1. Personal and professional skills. The CP core emphasizes mastering transferable skills that can be applied to a variety of professional situations and contexts.

2. Service learning. Students complete service initiatives that are related to topics they’re studying in their academic courses and apply their knowledge and skills toward “meeting an identified and authentic community need.”

3. Reflective project. Over an extended period of time, students complete an in-depth body of work that identifies, analyzes, and evaluates an ethical issue arising from their career-related studies. This project is intended to promote high-level research, writing and extended communication skills, intellectual discovery, and creativity. It must be submitted by students toward the end of the CP.

4. Language development. In line with the IB mission of offering an international and intercultural education, students learn a second language.

The third and final part of the CP framework is career-related study. This portion is designed to prepare students for higher education, an internship or apprenticeship, or a position in their field of interest. The IB collaborates with a variety of career-related studies providers, including the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, Microsoft, the Savannah College of Art & Design, and the World Academy of Sport. Because schools select the career-related courses and pathways that are best suited to their students, IB also recognizes providers who work in local contexts to support individual schools. Additional providers through which IB world schools have implemented their career-related studies include Adobe, Apple, Cisco, FEMA, Knowledge Matters, The National Center for Construction Education and Research, U.S. Soccer, and YouScience.

The CP offers a host of benefits. For students, the combination of career education and rigorous academic coursework ensures they’re well-prepared for both college and career. In fact, research indicates that CP graduates enroll in post-secondary education at higher rates than high school graduates nationally, as well as career-technical education concentrators. Many of Ohio’s universities also offer students college credit for completing certain IB courses. For teachers, IB offers high-quality professional development, teaching resources, and evaluation tools. And for school administrators, becoming an IB world school means gaining access to high-quality curricula, professional development opportunities for staff, and a global network of schools willing to share best practices.

Although all high schools can implement the CP, they must become IB world schools to actually do so. As part of the authorization process, schools must meet certain professional development requirements. There are also costs associated with the program, like annual school fees and subject fees. But it’s important to remember that a key feature of the CP is its flexibility. Each school is empowered to create its own distinctive version of the CP, which gives Ohio schools a ton of freedom to design a program that benefits their students and aligns with local industries. Furthermore, since the IB is already firmly embedded in Ohio’s education policy framework—the state funds exam fee subsidies, reports IB outcomes on state report cards, offers an honors diploma that recognizes IB, and includes IB in some graduation seals—school leaders don’t need to worry about changing political winds impacting their efforts.

According to the IB, only one school in Ohio (Upper Arlington High School, which is located near Columbus) currently offers the CP. Given the steadily increasing importance that lawmakers are assigning to career pathways, more districts and schools should consider taking advantage. The combined benefits and flexibility offered by the CP are too promising to ignore.

On Monday, Donald Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, setting up the Ohio Republican as the future of the party and, in the process, mapping out the potential trajectory of federal education policy in the years ahead. Trump’s pick signals a doubling down on his MAGA brand, which, as far as education is concerned, features a fixation on culture war dogfights and using the issue as a cudgel to continue fanning the flames of populist anger. Specifically, this means tapping into broad parental discontent over educational and education-related issues, many of which were turbocharged by the pandemic.

To wit, Vance once tweeted, “Parents should absolutely be the primary stakeholders in their kids' education, and anyone who disagrees should stay the hell away from our kids” (emphasis added). Using similarly stark and uncompromising terms, the GOP veep nominee has said, “My education policy is that we should stop funding institutions that teach American kids to support terrorist killers.” Abrasive and acidic language like this is red meat for the GOP’s hardcore base, but it differs markedly from the framing used by Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, to argue for similar policy prescriptions.

Case in point is school choice, which in recent years has driven a bitter wedge within education reform. When Pence made the case for the issue, he would lead with charter schools as much as with the private and parochial variety, underscoring the benefits of choice largely accruing to poor and minority kids and communities. Trump’s erstwhile sidekick had also staunchly supported both public and private forms of choice while he was Indiana’s governor. Nowadays, however, the GOP is far more likely to view charter schools as a pallid alternative to unfettered school choice, eager to embrace the culture war in order to build momentum to expand vouchers, education savings accounts, and the like.

It wasn’t easy for Pence. Recall that the Trump administration proposed zeroing out federal funding for charter schools during its final year in office. The then-vice president sometimes had to bite his tongue and straddle lines. Vance will face no such complications. If anything, we might expect him to amplify his boss’s grievance-based rhetoric around schooling. In his 2022 Senate campaign website, Vance dutifully went after K–12 education: “As we saw from the radical left’s culture war waged during Covid-19 and the continued [critical race theory] indoctrination in our kids’ schools, it’s clear that we should never let politics drive public health decisions and deprive our kids of a good education.”

It’s a far cry from the pen the rising Republican star had wielded eight years ago, when his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was reviewed in these pages by Robert Pondiscio. Back then, Vance offered a serious and unvarnished assessment of the problems besetting poor kids in low-income neighborhoods:

Watching an episode of The West Wing on television, Vance is struck that “in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that so many of them are raised by wolves.’” The characterization is unkind, but Vance is unsparing in his analysis of the people he loves and the culture they have created. It can include “an almost religious faith” in hard work and the American dream; yet he describes his town as one “where 30 percent of the young men work less than twenty hours a week, and not a single person [is] aware of his own laziness.”

A year later, in an event co-sponsored by Fordham, Vance argued that solving the problems related to poverty requires avoiding extreme positions and meeting somewhere in between:

While specifics of education policy were not topics of discussion at the event, the individual journeys of the panelists are heavily defined by education: Vance from a small-town public school to The Ohio State University to the hallowed but bewildering halls of Yale… Vance says we must end the political blame game and stop the polarizing rhetoric that unnecessarily divides us… We must see what success for poor children and families looks like… To do that we must, as J.D. Vance tells us, “come to our senses.”

Boy, could today’s education politics use more of that version of Vance!

So how to make sense of Trump’s new partner? Unlike Pence, who brought a respectable record on education reform from the Hoosier State, Vance has little to show for his limited time in the Senate—or otherwise, save for his first book. For whatever his faults, Pence steered a relatively steady course. He didn’t zig and zag or shift and contradict himself. The former vice president displayed a kind of integrity that Vance lacks, and that’s evident in how each has approached ed reform. It’s possible that Vance will be a supporter of CTE and apprenticeships, given his working-class roots. What seems certain is that he will ignore his own earlier advice and instead will cynically use K–12 schools to sow animosity and discord when it’s expedient to do so. If Vance eventually becomes president or the Republican nominee for president at some point, we can only hope that circumstances will be different and an interest in sound education policymaking restored.

Perhaps no modern American education reform has enjoyed the success and staying power of charter schools. Three-plus decades after Minnesota passed the first charter law, 3.7 million students now attend charters, the majority of whom are children of color and come from low-income families.

Unlike other education reforms, charters have improved their performance over time even as they’ve scaled. Students attending them make significantly more academic progress than their peers attending other school types, and this is specifically true for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. Urban charter schools, in particular, have revolutionized the education landscapes in many of our country’s largest cities, providing pathways to opportunity that for far too long were only available to a select few.

Public support for charter schools remains strong, especially among Black and Hispanic families. And charters have historically enjoyed broad bipartisan political support, ranging from the White House, to Congress, to governors’ mansions, to state legislatures.

Yet today the charter movement faces significant headwinds. The national education reform consensus that spanned the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations has eroded. Amid increasing national polarization, Democrats have largely walked away from choice in all its forms, including the public kind, while Republicans have gravitated toward private school choice.

These political shifts have slowed charter growth in many blue states while universal private school voucher and education savings account (ESA) programs sweep across red states at an unprecedented pace. For the first time in the movement’s three decades, charter enrollment slightly declined nationally in 2021–22, partly spurred by the declining school-age population in many parts of the country.

Charter school leaders and advocates are a largely politically progressive group of folks who understandably long to make the case that charters should be a plank in the progressive agenda because they offer clear evidence of leveling playing fields for historically marginalized students. But attempts to win over more Democrats are often unsuccessful today and potentially come with the opportunity cost of ignoring Republicans, who have done much of the heavy lifting for charters in state capitols across the country.

The complicated politics create quite a conundrum for a sector that is largely concentrated in big, progressive cities. As a result, the charter movement finds itself at a crossroads. If it fails to adapt to this rapidly shifting landscape, it risks trading its longstanding bipartisan support for a generation in the political wilderness.

The answer to whether charters can still be a bipartisan project depends as much on geography as it does on anything else. In Indianapolis, for example, Democratic mayors and local elected officials have led the charge for high-quality charters for over two decades, as Republicans in the statehouse strove to make Indiana’s charter law one of the best in the country. But the playbook in Indiana likely can’t work in bluer states, which is why the national charter movement must remain nimble and able to appeal to a broad political cross-section.

To do this effectively, charter advocates should avoid the trap of starting with their partisan leanings and then working to get their preferred “side” to support their priorities. Advocates must instead start with the premise that charters provide life-changing opportunities and should be expanded, identify who holds power where, and then construct a political coalition that accomplishes their policy goals.

This political reality raises a key question: How can a three-decades-old movement continue to innovate and resist being left behind?

For the charter movement to strengthen its influence and serve even more students, it must prove that it is on the vanguard of education innovation. Luckily, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently made a great hire in choosing Starlee Coleman as the organization’s next CEO. So here are five unsolicited ideas for Starlee and her team to consider as they develop the next chapter of the charter movement.

• The national charter movement comprises many diverse local and statewide movements, but it’s currently missing the connective tissue that can spur collective, intentional action. It would benefit from an audacious and inspiring national goal that energizes people from across the movement. Imagine what aligned action could be spurred if it set a big goal of, say, serving 5 million students by 2030 and 8 million by 2040.


• Too often, the desire to be seen as public schools makes charter advocates too willing to accept endless regulations and one-size-fits-all accountability systems that hamper the sector’s ability to innovate. As a result, charters too often resemble the very schools that proponents used to claim weren’t working. Leaders should implement a policy agenda that works to strip away needless regulations that promote conformity, while challenging authorizers to improve their increasingly bureaucratic practices that value inputs over outcomes.


• The National Alliance should consider launching a national R & D initiative that researches, pilots, and scales break-the-mold innovations that place charters back at the forefront of innovation. This should include investing in the growth of microschools, adult high schools, and other innovative school models. It should also mean exploring what it could look like for charters to take advantage of universal ESA laws in red states so the sector can expand its reach and become more relevant in this new reform era.


• Charter advocates should be unafraid to fiercely defend the sector’s record. Is the movement perfect? Of course not. Has it accomplished more than any other structural reform of the last thirty years? I’d argue yes! If advocates are unwilling to boldly advocate for charters, they should find a different profession. While proponents engage in struggle sessions about the movement’s own faults, opponents never miss an opportunity to attack charters with their set of false talking points. Charter advocates have the facts on their side and should never shy away from trumpeting the life-changing outcomes of charter schools.


• Leaders should spur the next wave of charter school growth. Local school incubators, such as what The Mind Trust, of which I’m CEO, has implemented in Indianapolis and is planning in Connecticut, must be a key part of the solution. Charter proponents should support the next generation of education entrepreneurs to launch a new wave of schools that are steeped in a community’s context and provide life-changing outcomes for more students. Given America’s fraught politics, these schools won’t magically appear if leaders aren’t more intentional in supporting their development.

These are just a few ideas to start a conversation about what the next decade of charter growth and success could look like, and how advocates can reignite a movement that will transform the lives of the next generation of students. As Andy Rotherham has cautioned, leaders should do everything they can to avoid the possibility of charter schools not having a chair when the music stops.

Spend any length of time in education and you can’t help notice pendulum swings as ideas about what constitutes effective practice fall in and out of fashion. There’s no reason to expect the “science of reading” movement to be an exception. The welcome and overdue shift to teach phonics explicitly and to align instruction more broadly with research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience has seen only green lights ahead and tailwinds in the last few years, but an important caution is being offered by one key figure in the movement. Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and co-founder of the Right to Read Project, has expressed concerns that weaknesses in implementation threaten the momentum behind “SoR.” Worse still, those threats are going mostly undiscussed for fear that speaking up will damage, slow, or setback the science of reading.

In a blog post on the Right to Read Project’s website, which hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, Goldberg paints an all-too-plausible future scenario in which we look back at the science of reading as “a brief movement in education.” Teachers aspired to align their instruction with scientific evidence, “but due to lack of support and misinformation, they failed to implement effective practices. Student achievement remained stagnant and teachers came to believe that factors outside the classroom have a greater influence on student learning than classroom instruction,” she writes.

If Goldberg’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s been a key figure in Emily Hanford’s reports and podcasts, which have played a major role in creating momentum for the science of reading movement. Goldberg raises several concerns that could derail the science of reading movement, which she frames as a series of “What ifs.”

What if we’re expecting too much from teachers while underestimating the level of support schools need? What if schools overcorrect and provide explicit instruction at the expense of students reading and enjoying books? What if curriculum developers might continue offering content-focused units instead of the targeted lessons needed to help students comprehend complex texts? What if researchers continue to conduct studies and produce data, but never learn how to actually help teachers improve their practice?

“Anyone knowledgeable about reading research and what’s happening in classrooms has worries like these,” she writes. “But most of us have remained quiet, afraid of seeming unsupportive or of slowing the momentum that’s been building. I worry, though, what will happen if we don’t speak up?”

I share Goldberg’s concern, and painted a similar scenario in an article last year for Commentary. It’s a heavy lift to get teachers to change practices they are committed to and believe to be effective, regardless of what the research says. Moreover, and perhaps most critically, it’s unrealistic to expect every teacher to become an expert in the science of reading; it has to be operationalized in the form of high-quality curriculum, diagnostic tools, and effective training. The burden simply cannot rest solely on the shoulders of individual educators.

After reading Goldberg’s important storm warning, I reached out to ask what she’s hoping the takeaway will be from her savvy caution. “District and school leaders are largely unaware of the implementation science that could help guide their work. So they act fast and without plans,” she said. People don’t know their roles, “so teachers are trying to develop the interventions.” Similarly, school leaders are unsure of how to create the conditions for successful adoption and implementation “so they focus on glossy publications and making fiery speeches,” she observes, instead of actual planning: creating time in the school calendar for collaborative planning and putting coaching in to support implementation, for example. “We need to provide training for principals to be able to know what they’re looking for and how to give good feedback, but people don’t know what their job should be in creating the conditions where implementation can be successful,” she said. Finally, curriculum developers, Goldberg pointed out, “are trying to produce what they think teachers will like, rather than aligning their materials with research and then using them to train teachers on more effective practices.”

The “reading wars” have been waged in our schools longer than current combatants have been alive. That simple historical fact should be enough to convince advocates for research-based reading instruction that the ground they’ve seemingly gained in schools, districts, and statehouses needs to be aggressively defended. Not with cheerleading and “fiery speeches” but with curriculum and instruction, effectively delivered, that moves the needle for kids. Failing that, Goldberg’s warning will become a prophecy, and sooner than we think.

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

As policymakers grapple with pandemic-induced learning loss across the country, intensive tutoring has emerged as a promising solution. Studies show that working with a tutor can help students make up three to fifteen months of learning, and that this intervention is especially effective for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This explains why policymakers have funneled millions of Covid-19 relief dollars into establishing and maintaining tutoring programs nationwide. But tutoring a handful of students is different than tutoring the masses—and many districts have struggled to scale their programs to meet the unprecedented demand.

That is why now, as pandemic relief funds dry up, researchers have begun evaluating ways to make tutoring a more sustainable endeavor. One such recent analysis comes from Matthew A. Kraft and Virginia S. Lovison of Brown University.

With the hope of reducing the per-pupil costs of tutoring, they investigate whether small-group virtual tutoring sessions can be as effective as working one-on-one with an online tutor. Their data comprise 180 sixth through eighth graders in Grand Forks, North Dakota, who had not yet met grade-level expectations in math. Participating students were randomly assigned to either 1:1 online tutoring sessions or 3:1 sessions with peers who needed support in the same content area. The majority of tutors (58 percent) led both group and individual sessions, while 29 percent conducted individual tutoring only and 13 percent worked only with groups of students. Tutoring was held during school hours and over a ten-week period.

To assess the impacts of the sessions on students, Kraft and Lovison used two evaluative methods: standardized math tests taken by students before and after completing the program and a survey offered to every participating tutor. When reviewing the tests, the researchers looked at both student achievement and growth—and survey data were analyzed within a regression framework with tutor fixed effects to capture average differences in responses regarding 1:1 versus 3:1 tutoring.

Ultimately, their analysis offers little support for small-group tutoring. Students’ test scores showed that individual tutoring accelerated growth in math by an additional 8 percentile points compared to 3:1 tutoring. Tutors’ survey responses reaffirmed this less-than-ideal outlook. Of the eighty-six tutors who completed the questionnaire, 88 percent judged 1:1 to be the most productive student-tutor ratio for online sessions, as tutors can more effectively personalize learning experiences, build relationships, ramp up pacing, and create welcoming environments in this setting.

Some survey responses did note positive attributes of small-group tutoring. For example, certain tutors suggested that these sessions allow for unique instructional strategies—like team activities and collaborative exercises—and that some students benefited from hearing explanations of challenging concepts from their peers.

The study lacked a pure control group, which limits what the researchers can definitively conclude about the efficacy of online tutoring in small groups and its relative cost-effectiveness. But Kraft and Lovison’s findings nevertheless suggest that schools cannot simply increase student-to-tutor ratios without sacrificing some level of student progress—meaning that policymakers hoping for a silver-bullet solution to tutoring’s scalability issues may need to keep searching.

SOURCE: Matthew A. Kraft and Virginia S. Lovison, “The Effect of Student-Tutor Ratios: Experimental Evidence from a Pilot Online Math Tutoring Program,” Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, EdWorkingPapers (June 2024).

Cheers

• Rochester schools to reintroduce F’s after lenient grading policies encouraged many students to slack off. —Star Tribune
• Where previous reformers saw their policies rolled back, Superintendent Mike Miles is hoping to implement long-lasting improvements in Houston ISD. —Robert Pondiscio, Education Next
• Charter schools now make up the majority of the most rigorous high schools in the nation, as measured by the number students to take college-level exams. —Jay Mathews, Washington Post
• Young people should foster and follow their talents, not their passions. —Scott Galloway, Time
• “NY students banned from using phones first hated, then loved it.” —Bloomberg

Jeers

• Dubious questions about how the science of reading informs English language instruction have stymied the movement in California, Massachusetts, and New York City. —The Grade
• Once the leader in education, Massachusetts has placed its much-lauded graduation exam on the ballot this fall. —The 74
• Despite paying lip service to vouchers during his campaign, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro let a school choice bill die for the second year in a row. —Wall Street Journal

• The overturning of Chevron deference, which placed a high level of trust in federal agencies to interpret ambiguous statutes, could mean sweeping changes in education in the short term alongside more stability long term. —K12 Dive
• Expansive school choice laws meet rural opposition in Tennessee. —The Tennessean
• Two documents, the GOP platform and the Project 2025 policy plan from the Heritage Foundation, provide hints for Trump’s education agenda. —Education Week
• “Democrat-run cities have seen their fertility rates collapse.” —Cullum Clark, City Journal
• Intended to save money, Arizona’s universal school choice program ballooned far beyond the anticipated price tag. —ProPublica