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1. I’m a little late to this piece that started making the national rounds last week, discussing the Republican National Committee’s proposed platform plank calling for “universal school choice”. Fordham’s own Chad Aldis is quoted within, tossing some cold Ohio water on a hot national discussion by noting that declaring something a policy goal and actually carrying it out are two different things. (Associated Press, 7/11/24)
   
   

2. One of Chad’s wise implementation questions in the above piece is where all the money will come from to expand school choice of any variety. Maybe a conundrum for other states, but luckily not for us here in Ohio it seems. On Friday, we learned that Ohio Lottery sales during the fiscal year just ended totaled $4.5 billion, which is more than $80 million higher than the previous fiscal year. Sales were boosted by strong interest in Powerball drawings and scratch off tickets, as well as the first full fiscal year of sportsbook availability in the state. As a result of all this, the Lottery Commission transferred a record $1.514 billion into the education fund. Amazing! And the real winners are the kids of Ohio. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/12/24)
   
   

3. Staying on the topic of education funding (when aren’t we on that topic, really?), Governor DeWine on Friday announced a new incentive program to encourage active duty service members, veterans, and military spouses to work in Ohio’s public schools. The Military Recruit Award program is open to traditional district, charter, independent STEM, and joint vocational schools. Those hiring military personnel will receive a $1,500 signing bonus and an additional $3,000 via reimbursement from the state if the hired individual stays on the job for a year. “Individuals from our military exemplify service, leadership, collaboration, and many other skills that translate to and strengthen the education profession,” said Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Director Steve Dackin. “The Military Recruit Award will boost Ohio’s education communities by attracting and retaining these revered individuals to careers in education.” Nice! (Spectrum News 1, 7/12/24)
   
   

4. Finally today, I’m quite late to this story too, but to be fair it’s not from one of my typically-perused sources. Future Nurse Academy is a summer camp for high schoolers in northeast Ohio. Sounds like some great hands on experiences—and some very good networking opportunities—for any young person potentially interested in pursuing the nursing profession in the future. It is open to any rising high school sophomore, junior, or senior from any school (you know what I mean) and is not only free but provides a small stipend for kids who complete the program. Wow. No wonder it’s become super popular in only its second year of operation. If you’re interested in next summer, best get started now! (Becker’s Hospital Review, 7/3/24)

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The letter and the spirit of the law

In the midst of a piece on Columbus City Schools’ effort to right-size their facilities footprint, the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch seemed to give full understanding to districts that wish to flout state law and deny charter schools the opportunity to acquire their underutilized buildings due to concerns over "competition". This thinking is counter to everything the ed board wants and, if followed by district leaders, would ensure increasingly-inefficient use of dozens of properties and the continued waste of millions of taxpayer dollars annually.

New charter coming to the Dublin area

No such facilities problems for the Heart of Ohio Classical Academy, getting ready to open this August in the northerly part of Columbus just outside of Dublin. That’s because school leaders are redeveloping a long-empty office building there rather than trying to wrest a purpose-built (but also long-empty) building from the hands of a school district. (By the time folks in the area learned that a charter was going in, it was way too late to NIMBY it into oblivion.) Best wishes to HOCA students, families, teachers, and staff for a great inaugural year!

Supporting charter school students to success

Five charter schools will become the first to join the Center for High School Success effort in Washington State. The long-standing goal of the group is to substantially increase the number of ninth graders who are on-track for graduation within four years. Partner schools are provided with coaching, peer learning opportunities, data analysis, training, and tools and resources to better support incoming freshman to achieve and succeed throughout high school. Kudos to Washington for recognizing charter school students as deserving of these vital programs and resources.

Authorizers matter

Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, published a piece in The 74 this week, highlighting the importance of authorizers (sponsors) in the success of charter students, especially via accountability systems. “My organization has seen time and time again,” he writes, “that a strong authorizer will have a strong accountability system, which in turn creates a greater number of students achieving at high levels and a shrinking number of kids learning below grade level.” He concludes by saying that “the combination of authorizing, accountability and innovation almost always creates the results education professionals and families so desperately crave — improved student learning.” An important lesson.

New Fordham report

The Fordham Institute’s latest report examines a key implementation step in Ohio’s effort to enshrine the Science of Reading as the law of the land: Creating a state-approved list of high-quality literacy curricula and instructional materials. It includes detailed data on curricula currently being used by charters across the state in addition to great info on the state’s progress toward implementing the new literacy provisions. Check it out!

Medicaid in Schools changes on the horizon

Passage of the last state budget bill (HB 33) set off a process to review and update the state’s Medicaid Schools Program, to further Governor DeWine’s support of schools and investment in children’s health. Potential changes to the program, to begin with the 2025-26 school year, are currently under review, and could direct federal funding to support qualifying health care services that schools are already providing. It’s not too late for interested charter leaders to review and provide feedback on these changes. More information can be found here, including an email contact to ask questions and submit comments.

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News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’. 

1. In case you missed it, my colleague Aaron Churchill published a report this week, looking at a key implementation step in Ohio’s effort to enshrine the Science of Reading as the law of the land: Creating a state-approved list of high-quality literacy curricula and instructional materials. The report was covered by the media in Youngstown…. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 7/10/24) …and by the good folks at Gongwer. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/11/24)
   
   

2. Here is an interesting story about school choice under the guise of something else. Specifically, what schools the children of military families assigned to Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base attend. At least 10 districts outside of Dayton are listed as the top destinations, taking from 130 to more than 900 students each. It is not clear from this piece how they all end up in each of these districts, although having housing specifically for base personnel within district boundaries seemingly contributes to the top two on the list. (And those school communities are super welcoming and supportive, too, as we learn. Lovely.) So, proximity to home is important to many, but we are also told that “military families are much like other families transferring for job reasons when it comes to them deciding on a school district: They’re looking for schools with good academic programs and are willing to drive farther to get to work.” Meaning that those with the money to buy or rent in the high performing Oakwood or Northmont districts will often do so, no matter how far Mom and Dad have to travel to work at the base. I was interested to see that good old Yellow Springs Exempted Village Schools, did not appear on the top 10 list, despite being very high-performing and located closer to the base than several of those other, lesser choices. Kind of makes me wonder if interdistrict open enrollment might not play a part in some of these choices as well. Sir! Just sayin’, Sir! (Dayton Daily News, 7/11/24)

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The Advanced Placement program is undergoing a radical transformation. Over the last three years, the College Board has “recalibrated” nine of its most popular AP Exams so that approximately 500,000 more AP Exams will earn a 3+ score this year than they would have without recalibration. If this process continues in other exams in the coming years (as I expect it will), approximately 1,000,000 more AP Exams every year will earn a 3+ score. The end result will be a win for AP students everywhere: Millions of high school students will save millions of dollars in college credits in the coming years.

In this article, I’m going to break down the most recent data on this “Great Recalibration”. I’ll also explain why the College Board is changing AP scores and what these changes will mean for AP teachers and students in the coming years.

Breaking down the data

The new score distribution data of AP Exams is astonishing. Beginning with AP English Literature in 2022, a total of nine AP Exams have been “recalibrated” upward so that average scores, the proportion of scores of 3 or above, and the proportion of scores of 4s and 5s, have all increased, while the proportion of scores of 1s and 2s (sometimes referred to as “failing” scores) has decreased. Here is a graph of scores of 4s and 5s for seven of the nine recalibrated AP Exams:

No matter which way you assess the data—means, medians, modes, 3 or above, 4s and 5s, pre-covid, post-covid—the trend is always the same: AP scores are being deliberately and intentionally increased. Here is a more comprehensive graph of scores of 3 or above from 2018 to 2024:

These are not minor adjustments. In AP U.S. History alone, approximately 100,000 more students have earned a score of 3 or above this year than they did last year. The interactive visualizations over at Higher Ed Data Stories are particularly compelling. Consider this breakdown of AP U.S. Government and Politics, which shows that the score distributions were not merely adjusted, they were completely inverted. Whereas the vast majority of students used to score a 1, 2, or 3 on this exam, the vast majority now scores a 3, 4, or 5.

Why is this happening?

None of this should be a surprise. The College Board has been publicly discussing recalibrating exams at conferences over the past few years. According to the College Board website, “annual studies of AP student performance in college consistently find that AP students with scores of 3 or higher outperform in subsequent college coursework the comparison groups of college students who took the colleges’ own AP-equivalent course.” By “recalibrating” AP Exams, the College Board can better align AP scores to equivalent college grades.

There is no reason to doubt the efficacy of this research, but since almost none of it is publicly available, there is no reason to accept it at face value either. The College Board has known for years—at least as early as 2021—that there are serious misalignments between AP scores and college grades. Why has the Great Recalibration been stretched out over multiple years? What about all the students whose AP Exams have not been recalibrated in time for them to earn college credits for the work they did? The lack of transparency about this recalibration project (and the uncertainty about which exams will be recalibrated in which year) has left a lot of teachers confused and frustrated.

Consider AP Environmental Science, for example. The exam has not yet undergone a recalibration, even though Trevor Packer previewed the research that showed a serious misalignment between AP Environmental Science scores and equivalent college grades. This was at the AP Annual Conference in 2023, where he also highlighted significant discrepancies between recalibrated and non-recalibrated AP Exams. It is clear that AP English Language, AP Physics, and AP Environmental Science are all overdue for a similar recalibration. AP English Language teachers have been particularly vocal about the lack of calibration for the more than 500,000 students who take that exam every year. Did 100,000 AP English Language students miss out on the opportunity to earn college credits this year because the College Board is not moving quickly enough with the research already in its possession?

Are other factors at play?

It is entirely possible that the Great Recalibration is a straightforward result of academic research in an effort to resolve the discrepancy between AP scores and equivalent college grades. The College Board claims it is following the science, and that may very well be the case, but it is possible that other factors are shaping the rollout of the Great Recalibration. Over the past few decades, the AP program has ballooned by more than 700 percent, and the program now generates approximately $500 million annually for the College Board:

• 1992: 580,143 exams
• 2002: 1,585,516 exams
• 2012: 3,698,407 exams
• 2022: 4,762,347 exams

At the same time, dual-enrollment programs have also ballooned, but those programs have little oversight and no high-stakes exam at the end of the year. Across the country, dual enrollment is competing head to head with AP. (Why risk getting a 2 on an AP Exam when you can be guaranteed college credit just for attending class?) While “recalibrating” AP scores higher may be based purely on “psychometrics,” it also confers an undeniable benefit to the AP program’s bottom line. Higher scores are good for business.

Another clue that the AP program is responding to its new, much larger audience is in the changes beyond the Great Recalibration. Many exams are getting easier with new, much simpler free-response rubrics in AP History subjects and simpler multiple-choice questions across AP English subjects. Behind the scenes, some AP Exam readers are reporting that they are being encouraged to award points on free-response questions more freely than ever before. It seems that nearly all of the recent changes to AP Exams are tending in the direction of simplification.

While it is clearly better for the program to grow and welcome students of all skill levels, the democratization of AP means that, unless all these new students meet the rigorous standards of AP, they will “fail” the exams or else the standards will need to be lowered to accommodate them. This issue was at the heart of a high-profile critique of the AP program in the New York Times last November. In that article, Dana Goldstein asked why some $90 million of taxpayer funds were being channeled into a program with so many “failing” scores of 1 and 2. The Great Recalibration may have nothing to do with this critique of the AP program, but it certainly helps address the issue.

The financial impact

Speaking of taxpayer funds, the Great Recalibration of AP Exams will affect the flow of millions of dollars into and out of high schools and colleges around the country. In states like Florida and Arizona, AP teachers are eligible to receive bonuses when their students achieve scores of 3 or higher on AP Exams. Some AP teachers in Texas are earning significant salary increases through the Teacher Incentive Allotment program when AP data are linked to improvements in their students’ outcomes. The Great Recalibration is going to help unlock even more of these public funds for AP teachers at a time when teacher pay remains dismally low.

Most public colleges and universities in the United States are required by law to grant college credits for sufficiently high AP scores. Students are able to earn college credits based on AP scores of 3, 4, or 5, depending on the policies of their college or university (the policies are searchable here). This means that when the College Board recalibrates scores for an AP exam, tens or hundreds of thousands of students will be automatically granted college credits for that exam.

The precise financial impact of this trend will depend on (1) how quickly the College Board finishes the Great Recalibration, (2) how credit policies evolve at colleges and universities, and (3) how many students actually use the credits. But the net result is undeniable and very good news for students (and very bad for colleges that will lose tuition for these credits).

The future of rigor in Advanced Placement

The College Board has argued for years that grade inflation is rampant in schools and that objective standards like SAT and Advanced Placement exams provide a stable measure of student success. But by aligning AP scores to college grades, is the College Board pegging its currency to another currency that is experiencing its own runaway inflation?

Whatever is happening with this increase in AP scores, it is destabilizing the year-over-year and course-by-course comparisons that undergird how many K–12 schools, districts, and even state governments use AP data. The College Board insists that “AP scores’ only valid use is for placing a student out of a corresponding college course” and that “AP scores have not been designed nor validated for evaluating student growth, student potential, or teacher quality.” Nevertheless, that’s not how many schools are using the numbers in practice. Will the College Board provide more guidance on how to properly use data during this era of the Great Recalibration?

I expect the Great Recalibration to continue over the next few years, and I expect this recalibration to always lean in the direction of higher average scores and a larger proportion of 4s and 5s. Will all of these changes undermine the AP program’s position as the gold standard of rigor in high school education? Probably not, but that will depend on whether anyone is actually paying attention and whether the College Board’s appeal to “psychometrics” will convince them.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Marco Learning.

Work-based learning initiatives provide a direct connection between K–12 education and the workforce. They offer students invaluable work experience, hands-on training with experienced mentors, and a chance to apply technical skills and develop soft skills. They give employers an opportunity to bolster talent pipelines and train future staff on in-demand skills. Robust work-based learning experiences are also one of the hallmarks of high-quality career pathways.

For states like Ohio, where expanding and improving career pathways is an economic priority, ensuring students have access to high-quality work-based learning experiences is crucial. But it’s also notoriously difficult, as it requires schools and the business community to work together. To their credit, Ohio leaders have spearheaded efforts to encourage collaboration. But are those efforts enough? And if not, what else should lawmakers do?

A recent report from ExcelinEd, Ohio Excels, and Workmorphis seeks to answer these questions. It does so by examining the current state of work-based learning in Ohio and identifying how state leaders can ensure that all students have access to high-quality experiences.

To start, the report offers a broad overview of work-based learning in Ohio. Student experiences fall into two distinct categories that cross-reference each other but “operate separately in both policy and practice.” The first is career connections, a framework that focuses on career awareness for grades K–5, exploration for grades 6–8, and planning for grades 9–12. The second category—and the focus of the report—is formal work-based learning.

DEW defines the latter as “a coordinated sequence of experiences designed to provide students with real-world learning through partnerships with local business and industry.” These activities should help students explore careers and choose a pathway. They must occur at a worksite,[1] be co-supervised by an instructor and an employer or business mentor, and be formalized by a learning agreement. They can be paid or unpaid, occur during or outside of school hours, offer credit (or not), and be of varying lengths. Internships, apprenticeships or pre-apprenticeships, simulated work environments, and entrepreneurship are all among the approved types.

The report’s authors conducted focus groups and distributed a statewide survey to gather input from stakeholders in four groups: public policy, business and industry, education, and intermediaries like community-based organizations. Findings indicate that, although stakeholders believe that work-based learning experiences are beneficial and should be available to all students, that’s not the case in many places across Ohio. The disconnect between formal work-based learning and career connections was cited as a challenge, with a mere 8 percent of respondents reporting that current state policies and program requirements are easy to navigate. Many stakeholders also identified worrisome gaps in measuring experience quality and student performance.

The biggest challenges, though, seem to be funding, capacity, and transportation barriers. For example, although most stakeholders believe they’ve exhausted all available state funding sources, public policy leaders are concerned that many of the available state programs and funding sources are underutilized (the report doesn’t specify which ones). Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent agree that transportation is a significant participation barrier, especially for students from lower income families and in rural areas.

The bottom line is that, although work-based learning has widespread support and promises many benefits for students and employers, Ohio has some significant issues to address. To help, the report offers four solutions. 

1. Establish a unified vision and governance. Lawmakers should create a cross-agency, cross-sector work-based learning leadership council. This council would be charged with providing a common vision, strategic direction, and ongoing evaluation of the state’s K–16 work-based learning continuum. As part of its duties, the council could create and codify definitions for work-based learning experiences, set quality standards at the program level and for individual students, and streamline resource and information distribution.

2. Provide stakeholders with the data and information they need to make decisions. This means collecting and publicly reporting data on participation, quality, and outcomes. It also means providing resources to practitioners, students, and families. One way to do so would be to create an online work-based learning hub that could provide definitions, a program inventory, best practices, and technical assistance.

3. Invest in strategies that build local capacity to expand high-quality experiences. Lawmakers could accomplish this by providing funding for work-based learning coordinators and/or coaches who are responsible for ensuring consistent communication and coordination between schools and employers. Given that more than 90 percent of survey respondents agreed that mentorship is an essential element of successful work-based learning experiences, lawmakers could also consider strategies to cultivate a pipeline of high-quality mentors.

4. Address common barriers to work-based learning. Providing scholarship accounts for students that cover state-approved expenses like transportation to and from worksites or required equipment and uniforms could help remove participation barriers. Streamlining licensure requirements to help industry experts become teachers and scaling up initiatives like the state’s teacher boot camps would help providers and educators. As for employers, collaborating with chamber and industry associations to develop and distribute clear information about available programs, partners, and resources would go a long way toward eliminating confusion and increasing engagement.

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Ohio leaders are investing significant time and funding into expanding and improving career pathways. These efforts include a renewed focus on work-based learning experiences, which benefit both students and employers. To capitalize on the potential of these experiences in the coming budget cycle, Ohio lawmakers should heed the report’s recommendations and establish a clear governance structure for work-based learning, improve data collection and transparency, invest in capacity building, and address common barriers. 

Closing schools during the Covid pandemic was an enormous and tragic mistake. Some red-state governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Greg Abbott of Texas, deserve credit for taking the political risk to reopen schools quickly, over the objections of officials in Democratic cities. These conservative governors could have leaned on the conservative principle of local control and let each community do its own thing—with disastrous results. Instead, they decided that education was too important to leave to the left.

Now the country faces a different wave of school closings, and conservative governors must step up again.

Driving that trend is the collapse of America’s birthrate since the 2008–09 financial crisis. The number of babies born every year is down 14 percent, from 4.3 million in 2007 to a three-decade low of 3.7 million in 2022. Demographers don’t all agree on what’s causing this baby bust, but they don’t expect a baby boom anytime soon.

So now many places have too few students for the schools, thousands of which will have to be permanently closed in coming years. Postponing the inevitable only makes the process more expensive by wasting scarce tax dollars on half-empty buildings and unneeded principals, gym teachers and attendance clerks.

Whereas leaders on the left were eager to close schools during the pandemic, they are allergic to doing so now. Teachers unions worry that their members will lose jobs, and the social-justice crowd fears that minorities will be disproportionately affected by closings.

But there’s no way to avoid them. Schools have been adding teachers and other staff for decades, even more so when Covid relief dollars poured in. That’s no longer sustainable, and it will be impossible not to close lots of schools in heavily Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, given demographic shifts. Many parents have already voted with their feet, either through school-choice programs or by leaving cities altogether.

Officials should meet this challenge head on, using data to identify schools with a history of lackluster academic achievement and putting them on the chopping block. The best outcome is for affected students to end up in better schools than they attend now. They should get priority for enrollment at high-performance campuses nearby, including charter and private schools.

But how likely is it that superintendents and school boards in the cities and inner-ring suburbs, where most of the underenrolled schools are, will follow this advice? We can get an idea by looking at communities such as Houston, Chicago, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, which face the greatest declines in student enrollment and the largest budget crises as a result.

Unions are pushing districts to delay school closings while attacking charter schools for taking “their” students. Progressives are asking school boards to promise not to close schools in minority neighborhoods. Some “equity” hawks even want to make it illegal to consider the quality of schools and their students’ education when making closing decisions, on the theory that this has a disparate impact on minorities.

Some of these blue districts are in states with conservative governors. They may be tempted to avoid this political mess, but if they show leadership and get involved, as they did during Covid, they can improve the school-closing process. Gutsy state leaders could work with legislators to enact laws that force districts to close schools promptly. They could require that a school’s educational performance be a major consideration. They can press for choice policies that help students move from bad schools to good ones. They could have their appointees help local districts get the process right so students end up in stronger schools.

The alternative is to let left-wing officials mess it up, as they did during Covid. That’s too high a price for students to pay, particularly those the school system is already cheating.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The Wall Street Journal.

Long after Covid-inspired shutdowns, schools remain chaotic according to recent surveys and umpteen stories of hallway brawls, bus fights, and general mayhem. Teachers have told me it’s a crisis, that we’re accepting as normal in schools behavior that would warrant public outcry or arrest outside their walls. It’s no wonder analyses in recent years have found that stress and behavior topped pay as the primary reasons that teachers were considering leaving, and that they prefer stricter discipline policies.

With disorderly school environments that are at times actively hostile towards the wellbeing of both students and staff, I have a simple question: Where are the unions?

The answer: Nowhere to be seen.

For reasons that I struggle to comprehend, the national teachers unions have fully embraced the weakest approaches to school discipline, the kind that entail few or no consequences for misbehavior. AFT President Randi Weingarten has written against consequences, going so far as to praise the Los Angeles Unified School District for banning suspensions of students who defy their teachers. Of course, another way to describe a prohibition on punishment for defiance is to say that LAUSD has told children that they do not actually need to listen to or respect the adults in the building. Meanwhile, the NEA has published extensive guides and resource lists advising schools to replace punitive discipline with restorative practices.

The NEA also held its annual conference last week, where president Becky Pringle gave a speech that whined about Donald Trump, demanded equitable funding, genuflected before various progressive causes, complained about parents who take umbrage over sexually explicit books in public school libraries, and praised the Portland teacher strike, which included property damage, vandalism, and the publication on the internet of the addresses and contact information of various board members as a pressure campaign for higher wages.

No mention was made of student behavior or learning loss or much of anything else that goes on in classrooms really. Ironically, she spoke about the “joy of teaching” and “educator respect” while glossing over the very issue that most saps the joy from teaching. And if the NEA does end up discussing discipline policies, as Pringle has suggested it might, it will almost certainly do so counterproductively. They have consistently denigrated discipline in the past.

One of the foremost reasons for even having unions in the first place is for them to defend the interests of their members. Given that surveys—even those that unions themselves carry out—consistently find that student behavior is a primary reason that educators list as they consider leaving the profession, the unions ought to be a leading voice of sanity on this issue. Unfortunately, I doubt any discussion of our behavioral debacle is coming. So far as I can tell, two threads have resulted in this abdication of duty.

First, there’s a reaction against the popularity of zero-tolerance policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Weingarten herself confesses her former support of these (supposedly) anachronistic policies. They’re the bugaboo that justifies an overcorrection. I’ll concede that the no-excuses trend went too far—handing out demerits for glancing at the clock—but the reaction has advanced to an opposite and equally incorrect extreme.

Second, a concern for equity and racial injustice has led administrators, policymakers, and activists to embrace the excesses of the DEI-social-justice bandwagon and thereby sluff off any remaining commitment to sanity. The NEA has published numerous guides and resource pages that make copious mention of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline—a laudable concern, but acknowledging disparities is not itself a justification for any policy.

Indeed, solutions popular with unions may only worsen the problem. When schools abolish suspensions for defiance or move from punitive to restorative practices, they create the kinds of chaotic, ungovernable schools that create lasting disparities between them and students educated in more orderly classrooms. Numerous studies confirm that misbehaving students are detrimental to the learning of their peers, and so by refusing to hold students accountable for their actions, restorative justice advocates construct a whole new school-to-prison pipeline. What good does it do Johnny if we keep him from suspensions or expulsions, but his school is full of fights, clamor, and disorder?

Regardless of the reason, I’m waiting for unions to step up and defend teachers. Leading unions have bucked progressive excesses for the good of teachers and children before. For example, in 1967, the UFT went on strike to win teachers more power to manage unruly students in their classroom. More recently, the AFT published a controversial smackdown of the Howard Zinn–ification of American social studies. These unions went on strike over sensible policies and have taken stances to check the progressives in their ranks. They should do so again. If anyone has the proper incentives to pick this fight and the resources at their disposal to pressure real improvements, it’s them. If they don’t, they’ll continue to cede this issue to their opponents. Already, Republicans have overtaken Democrats as the trusted party on education according to polls.

And indeed, there are efforts to support teachers, but it’s from the right—the side that’s usually associated with antagonism to educators. Most recently, Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley released his “Let Teachers Teach” set of policy recommendations with an entire section dedicated to student discipline. These include removing discipline rates from school accountability systems so that administrators can maintain order without taking a hit in the state accountability system, empowering principals and school leaders to remove disruptive students from the classroom, and no longer asking teachers to play-act mental health professionals. Other conservative-led localities and states such as Oklahoma, Florida, and Houston have done likewise.

Albert Shanker infamously (if apocryphally) once quipped that, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” Now there’s a convincing case to be made that they don’t even represent teachers anymore. If their membership continues to plummet, they’ll have only themselves to blame.

In my final college semester, I had the privilege of being a full-time student teacher at a Catholic middle school, teaching seventh and eigth grade history and theology. It was the highlight of my life. The students were curious, polite, and thoughtful, caring to one another and welcoming to me. The boys in particular took a liking to me, and staying after school for sports club and playing recess football with them was a blast. But in the classroom, nearly all of the top students were girls.

My experience is not merely anecdotal but part of larger educational trends. Boys are not faring as well as girls in school. Women outperform men in school in terms of school readiness in kindergarten, GPA, and increasingly in college enrollment and degree attainment. According to Richard Reeves, of the top 10 percent of students, two-thirds of them are girls. On the flip side, boys comprise nearly two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent of students. Though boys outperform girls overall on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT, girls perform better on the written and verbal portions of the exams while boys outperform on STEM subjects.

Not only from a grades standpoint but also a disciplinary standpoint, boys are not faring as well. Boys are roughly 2.5 times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than girls; of all expulsions from public school in the 2017–18 school year (the last year the National Center for Education Statistics has available data), 72 percent of all expulsions and 70 percent of suspensions were of boys.

Why do these disparities matter?

Men who lag behind in school are less likely to graduate high school than girls. More high school dropouts means more crime, more suicides (even after controlling for gender disparities in the suicide rate), greater poverty, and greater unemployment. Rather than producing productive, well-adjusted citizens, high-school dropouts threaten the social fabric and increase stresses on the tax base.

At a cultural level, marriage suffers. Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart that people in “Fishtown” who were non-college-educated were much more likely than the college-educated “Belmont” sample to never marry, be divorced, and have children living with a single parent, and less likely to report a “very happy” marriage. Those in “Belmont” suffered very little of these negative effects, and the single-motherhood rate for highly educated women was very low. We should try to arrest the deterioration of life outcomes for the lower and working classes that comprise the demographics of “Fishtown,” but absent that mighty task, reversing the decline in male college attendance is an important priority for helping build strong families with the necessary elements for success and stability. To do this, we must start earlier.

What drives these disparities?

It should be stated at the outset that no one intends these outcomes. America’s schools today intend to provide an equal playing field and give equal treatment to boys and girls. However, attempting to create a completely equal environment can lead to unequal outcomes because boys and girls react differently to the same sets of policies, and exhibit generally different behavior. For instance, if boys and men are more aggressive, competitive, and prone to antisocial behaviors (the vast disparities in the prison population show that this is true at the extreme), then it makes sense that they would be more likely to be suspended or expelled from school, given a “zero-tolerance” policy regarding playground fights.

But are there policies that give girls a natural advantage in reading or social studies? As recently as 2023, a study by Emil Smith and David Reimer showed that girls spend more time reading outside of school than boys; starting in fourth grade, girls read 100,000 more words than boys, which adds up over time. However, Mike Petrilli has shown that this gap does not emerge sui generis in fourth grade, but develops roughly from parity starting in kindergarten and is driven by teacher perceptions of literacy ability being skewed by gender. Without anyone intending it, there are policies that affect this outcome, specifically in curricular decisions about reading: Schools overwhelmingly assign fiction books.

There is research on reading interest in school-age children that explains the problem of over-assigning fiction. A 2021 study by Chantal Lepper, Justine Stang, and Nele McElvany showed that girls were more interested in fiction than boys, and boys were more interested in non-fiction books than fiction (though both boys and girls were equally interested in non-fiction). Boys were more interested in war, comedy, sports, and science fiction and more excited about informational texts, whereas girls preferred narrative books and romantic stories. According to Deloitte, boys are also far less likely to read books by female authors or with female protagonists, but girls were willing to read books written by men and with male protagonists. Lepper, Stang, and McElveny’s findings showed the same pattern, and actually showed that girls had a higher interest in books with male protagonists than boys!

As for what is being read in schools today, it is overwhelmingly fiction. I used Renaissance’s What Kids are Reading: 2024 Report, which shows the top books for grades K–12 in every state, to analyze what is being read, looking at the breakdown between fiction and non-fiction works in the top ten for grades 5–12 in each state. Overwhelmingly, there was little to no non-fiction on offer. Only two grades in the entire country had five non-fiction books in the top ten. Six grades had four non-fiction books, seven grades had three, thirty-five had two, and ninety had one non-fiction book; 213 grades had only fiction in the top ten.[1] Of the non-fiction books, it was overwhelmingly memoirs, featuring a narrative structure more appealing to girls.

What can be done?

There is much to be said about possible interventions: the importance of recess, the need for more male teachers, and more hands-on activities such as labs—or even resurrecting shop classes. Petrilli’s research—in addition to pointing out the need for more male educators—suggested that teacher bias in literacy expectations drove disparities in literacy. But perhaps the bias in teacher perception is driven by real behaviors rather than the “good girls” stereotype, which is itself driven by student interest and effort because of selected reading materials. From my own experience, the boys did fine, but the girls in general were more engaged learners. More systematic research is needed on what drives teacher perceptions.

I propose a rebalancing of reading material in schools specifically targeted at boys. This is tricky, in part because English classes seek to introduce and immerse students in a literary canon. Everyone reading the same core texts gives stronger cohesion in terms of shared language, ideas, and referents. That said, improving male performance in the classroom is an important goal, and making appeals to boys in terms of reading material is a necessary means to do so.

History and science classes offer the most potential for introducing non-fiction books into the curriculum. If students love and can learn from the musical Hamilton, why not learn from reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton? Similarly, books like Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided lays out detailed arguments on each side of the “Lincoln-Douglas debates,” offering a potential launchpad for reworking those debates in the modern classroom. The Barnes & Noble science section offers a wide array of contemporary reads interesting to most boys. In English classes, making appeals to books with male protagonists would be worthwhile for helping engage male reading interest.[2]

After my first publication of this article at the Institute for Family Studies, Katya Sedgwick replied in The American Mind suggesting that history and science are subjects already covering non-fiction, instead arguing for the recovery of literary classics, poetry, and fantasy tales. Classic literature, which features many male protagonists, also gives romantic themes (such as that of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) that appeal to women and reveal important teachings regarding gender roles. Rather than classics, modern literature with female leads promotes confusing “girl-boss” mantras, which kills romantic stories and inspires more radical political action—and in which most boys have no interest because it has nothing to say to them other than “step aside; the future is female.”

I strongly agree with her critiques and suggestions for the cultural and formative reasons she mentions, but I will add that more reading of books outside of textbooks—biographies, period histories, political histories, works of political philosophy—would be beneficial additions to science and history curricula. English should be left for poetry, fantasy, and the classics: Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, Arthur, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the like.

“Equality” in schools can only go so far. Improving outcomes for boys means utilizing interventions that appeal to boys as boys. For teachers and librarians, preparations for next year can be as simple as restocking libraries with books that boys want to read. For administrators, moving towards subjects, disciplines, and skills that appeal to boys should be introduced back into the curriculum in future years, and recruiting and retaining more male teachers is an important and tangible goal. More generally in our culture, “letting boys be boys” must become a cri de couer for raising our future generation of boys into the successful men that we need. 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this was first published by the Institute for Family Studies.

Between 1990 and 2013, the share of students nationally who enrolled in algebra or a similar advanced math course in eighth grade more than doubled to 46 percent. Since 2013, however, the trend has reversed, with just 36 percent of eighth graders enrolled in algebra as of 2022. Successful completion of algebra or related math courses in grade eight can put students on track for calculus and more in high school. Some research finds that, without that early boost, subsequent mathematics achievement shrinks. Yet other studies find that broad policies to increase enrollment in early algebra lead to test score declines. Which is it? A recent working paper aims to resolve these conflicting findings.

The research team uses test-score, demographic, course enrollment, and other data from the Oregon Department of Education that include eighth grade students enrolled in any math course during 2014–15 to 2016–17. They had to have seventh grade test scores and attend schools with fifty or more eighth graders. Statewide, around 31 percent of eighth graders took algebra or advanced algebra. Since there isn’t a formal cutoff score on the test that determines whether eighth graders are enrolled in algebra, the researchers take a number of analytical steps to identify one. In a nutshell, they find various discontinuities in enrollment patterns by each school and run multiple simulations to identify those that represent true cutoff points in terms of algebra enrollment (which sets up the analysis for a regression discontinuity design). They end up with forty-nine schools that enroll roughly 5,500 kids, and control for the fact that schools have varied cutoffs. As intended, they show that placement rates into eighth grade algebra increase by more than 40 percentage points at the respective threshold.

Key results reveal significant increases in eighth grade math test scores of 0.12 standard deviations (SD), and smaller increases in eighth grade English language arts test scores of 0.06 SD for students who score above the cutoff. They also find a decrease in absences that equates to nearly one day. All positive.

Then they look into the extent to which teacher and peer exposure account for the impacts. They find that being placed into eighth grade algebra has a significant impact on the education level, experience, and value added of a student’s eighth-grade math teacher. For example, scoring above the threshold results in the value added of a students’ eighth-grade math teacher increasing by 0.09 standard deviations; moreover, such students are significantly more likely to be exposed to a math teacher in the top quartile of value added. However, the same pattern is not seen in ELA, so they conclude that, while teacher characteristics might account for the math test score effects, they are unlikely to account for ELA test score effects.

Moving on to peers, the results show effects on peer test scores in both ELA and math classrooms, such that eighth-grade algebra course enrollment reduces the number of math class peers who have experienced school suspensions and leads students to be exposed to higher-achieving peers in math classrooms. For example, among students scoring above the cutoff, analysts see large increases (0.55 SD) in the mean seventh-grade math score of a student’s eighth-grade math class. The differences in eighth-grade ELA classes are substantially less.

Because the math courses that students take can shape their course schedules more broadly, they also examine the mean achievement of classmates with which focal students share three or more classes. They find that students in eighth-grade algebra courses move through their school day with significantly higher-achieving peers—and that the magnitude of those peer effects is so large that it could account for the majority of eighth-grade algebra’s observed effects on student achievement.

The bottom line is that students who are prepared for eighth grade algebra or related advanced math courses gain immediate benefits from taking those courses, beyond math learning itself. But whether students are ready to take a higher math course is obviously a pivotal decision, and one for which schools have set varying thresholds. In addition, the mechanisms behind the success of the policy—high-quality teachers and high-achieving peers—are fixed commodities in any given school, at least until we approach staffing and acceleration differently. So simply expanding advanced algebra policies won’t do the trick. If only we had a magic wand.

SOURCE: Quentin Brummet et al., “Early Algebra Affects Peer Composition,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (November 2023).