1. As we have noted in these Bites since the passage of the state budget bill, the cold light of day is a strong antidote to formerly red hot rhetoric. It also seems to induce some caveat emptor vibes as well. How else to characterize this discussion of education funding, school choice, and other new provisions which took place in front of the elected school board of Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools earlier this week? Not only do all the district folks quoted here seem confused about what was enacted (spare a thought for the poor journalist who had to try and make sense of it), they now seem fairly confused about what they thought they had been advocating for despite being present and testifying in great numbers at every budget hearing in Columbus for the last three months. (Cleveland.com, 7/12/21) Same “what just happened?” vibes in tiny Fredericktown Local Schools, per this coverage of the most recent meeting of its elected school board. I can only conclude from all this that the “fair” part of the “Fair School Funding Plan” refers to the fair amount of confusion it has generated, despite being supported unwaveringly by all these elected school board members and administrators. Oh, and y’all are probably taking a bath on your copier contract too. Just sayin’. (Knox Pages, 7/13/21) And just in case you thought that those who led the unwavering support for the Fair(ly complicated) School Funding Plan—as in, those folks who should have really understood what it all meant—would be mollified by the passage of that plan…nah. (Statehouse News Bureau, 7/13/21)
    
2. Here is a reminder, in case anyone needed it, that students across Ohio took state tests this spring and that those test score data will be coming out soon. Spectrum News 1 gives us the briefest of first looks here. (Spectrum News 1, 7/12/21)
   
   

3. Speaking of things which are “on deck”, the state board of education this week named John Richard as Interim State Superintendent of Public Instruction, effective in September when current supe Paolo DeMaria packs up his bike, straps on his pool floaties, and heads off to retirement. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/13/21) In case you had forgotten, Mr. Richard is currently the chair of the Academic Distress Commission nominally in charge of Youngstown City Schools. Speaking of which, the elected school board in Youngstown appears to be following its typical bureaucratic path as it plans to debate how to get ready to discuss how to prepare to generate the pieces of the turnaround framework which they will eventually create which might at some point return control of the district to them. In related news, Friday marks the sixth anniversary of the signing of HB 70, the law which created the CEO-style Academic Distress Commission paradigm which, as you can tell from the foregoing, is still the law of the land for at least another year. (Vindy.com, 7/13/21)
    
4. Finally today, the Jefferson County Department of Job and Family Services is offering a school clothing voucher to area families as a way to support their constituents using pandemic-relief funds. There are no clear prohibitions on e-school students’ eligibility apparent here, unlike their counterparts in Stark County (as we noted last week), so it is to be hoped that they are not planning to shut out needy families who have chosen to attend school remotely. (WTOV-TV, Steubenville, 7/13/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

As has been reported and celebrated widely, the legislative sessions that just ended in many states brought great progress on the school choice front. According to the American Federation for Children, five states created new private-school choice programs this year, while eight jurisdictions expanded existing programs, and another two did both. Standouts include major new education savings account (ESA) programs in West Virginia and New Hampshire; major expansions and improvements to Florida’s ESA and tax credit scholarship programs; the enactment of Iowa’s first real charter school bill; and huge wins in Fordham’s home state of Ohio on the voucher, ESA, and charter fronts, including direct, formula-driven funding for choice programs.

But why? Especially given all the anti-choice talk in national politics and some Congressional pushback, what was it about 2021 that explains such an impressive string of victories at the state level, which is where it matters most? It’s important to understand so that choice supporters can work to replicate it again in the future. I see three main hypotheses to explore. Let’s dig into each.

First is what we might call the “conventional wisdom” hypothesis: It was the pandemic, stupid. As Education Week reported recently, the defenders of traditional public schools were on their heels this year, given parent and taxpayer anger over lengthy school closures related to Covid-19. Why not offer parents the option of escape, especially when the schools they are escaping from weren’t even open for business? Especially given the counterexample of private schools, which remained available for in-person learning almost everywhere, even in the face of pandemic restrictions.

It surely might have been a factor, but the problem with this argument is that the school closures were most pronounced in the states and communities that lean heavily Democratic. And it was almost entirely red states, not purple or blue, that embraced school choice during this legislative session. Indeed, of the fifteen states that created or expanded private school choice programs this year, twelve have a Republican “trifecta,” with the GOP in control of the Governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature. Two others have mixed control, and just one is fully led by Democrats—Nevada, the exception that proves the rule. 

Indeed, the parents who were most up in arms about school closures tend to live in the suburbs along the coasts, outside cities like Washington and the San Francisco Bay Area. And school choice remains nowhere to be found in those deep blue locales, except for families rich enough to choose private schools, or public schools in million-dollar neighborhoods.

The second theory—what we might call our “wishful thinking” hypothesis—is that the salience of the anti-school choice argument weakened over the past year. Namely, the talking point that school choice hurts traditional public schools. We know from years of polling that this is the attack that is most effective for school choice opponents—and for understandable reasons, given the enormous size of the public school parent population and their interest in protecting their beloved institutions.

The good news, though, is that evidence continues to pile up showing that competition from private school choice and charter schools helps, not hurts, traditional public schools. Student achievement in both district and charter schools improves as charters expand, as our path-breaking study found a few years ago. And another Fordham study concluded that school district finances aren’t harmed by the expansion of charter schools either.

Indeed, there’s a strong argument to be made that school choice and traditional public schools are better together. They are complementary, even symbiotic, as is the case in Washington, D.C., a city that has made more progress in recent years than any other. It’s surely no coincidence that it educates half of its students in charter schools, and the other half in a rapidly improving traditional school system.

If advocates could get this message through to the general population, it would be a really big deal. Consider the example of the gay marriage movement. There were many factors in its success, but as argued in this Washington Post article, opposition melted away once it became clear that there was no evidence that gay marriage hurts straight marriage. If Americans could come to see that there is no evidence that school choice hurts traditional public schools, opposition to this idea should melt away, as well.

And to be sure, we see signs that opposition to school choice has decreased in the past year—no doubt in part because of school closures. But we are still stuck with the reality that we haven’t seen much progress on the school choice front in states where Democrats have significant power. So softening opposition to school choice hasn’t yet led to bipartisan victories.

That leaves us with hypothesis number three, which I will call my “worst case” scenario. The hypothesis is that Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit for this year’s string of school choice victories. This one is a tough pill to swallow because of my deep opposition to Donald Trump for what he has done to the Republican Party and to our democracy, but I have to admit that this is the hypothesis with the best evidence.

President Trump, of course, made school choice a key plank in his domestic policy agenda during the campaign. So did the surrogates around him, and many of the speakers at last year’s Republican national convention. Not to mention Secretary DeVos’s non-stop advocacy for choice.

Granted, it’s nothing new for Republican presidents and education secretaries to talk about school choice. They’ve been doing it since Ronald Reagan. But here’s what was different about Trump: His base was not in the affluent suburbs, full of libertarian-leaning Republicans who resonate with market-based reforms, but in America’s small towns and rural communities. And until Trump, many rural Republicans have been among the staunchest opponents of school choice and charter schools. It’s not hard to see why. There aren’t that many private schools or charter schools in rural America. And rural school districts are major employers, as superintendents surely remind their state lawmakers whenever a school choice bill comes up for a vote.

But suddenly, the political calculus has changed. Rural Republican lawmakers know not to get crosswise with former President Trump. And Trump likes school choice! Ergo, Republican lawmakers like school choice now, too. 

This is still just a hypothesis, as we would need strong evidence of changes in voting behavior among rural Republican lawmakers to nail it down. That might be harder than it sounds given that school choice legislation is often rolled into omnibus bills, like Ohio’s biennial budget bill that just passed last week. Somehow we would have to see how the sausage actually got made, and whether rural Republican lawmakers who would have stopped school choice proposals in committees or behind closed doors in the past changed their behavior this session and instead assented. But the basic political math adds up. It would explain why GOP-controlled states are the ones that made the most progress this year, especially as compared to years past.

There’s good news and bad news if this third hypothesis is correct. The bad news, for me, is that I have to give Donald Trump some credit. The good news is that, if this shift in favor of school choice for rural Republicans is permanent, it should make school choice legislation easier to enact going forward. If the entire Republican caucus is united, it means that, even in purple states, school choice supporters just need to find support from a handful of Democrats. And given that so many Black and Hispanic voters support school choice, that should be doable.

The best news is that it wasn’t just the pandemic that explains this Year of School Choice. That’s good because we never want to go through this ordeal again in our lifetimes. But it also shows the importance of political leadership. And on this issue at least, President Trump’s legacy is likely to be a positive one. There, I said it!

After months of debate, the state budget was signed into law by Governor DeWine on July 1. The big education headline is the new school funding formula and increased overall spending levels.

But there are also plenty of other changes that will have huge impacts. One is the removal of geographic restrictions on Ohio’s public charter schools. Under previous law, brand new charter schools could only open in districts that were identified by the state as “challenged.” There were several ways for a district to earn that designation, including poor report card ratings. The recently passed budget, however, changed all that. Charter schools are now free to open anywhere in the state.

Eliminating these geographic boundaries is great news. It has the potential to give Ohio families access to more options. Traditionally, charter schools have been pitched as a way to give students who are stuck in low-performing schools the opportunity to enroll in a better one. And for many students, that’s certainly been the case. But choice isn’t just about escaping low-performing schools. There are also students who, despite attending a school that does well on state tests and other measures, need something more or something different. As the cliché goes, one size does not fit all. A single building can’t be everything to everyone, and it shouldn’t have to be.

Families deserve the opportunity to find a school that’s the best fit for their child, regardless of where they live. And that’s not just pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking, either. It’s possible. In Arizona, charter schools have long been available to every family regardless of geography, including those who live in affluent, high-performing suburban districts. This open environment has fostered some of the highest-performing charter schools in the country, and has produced high levels of academic growth for both district and charter schools. By eliminating geographic boundaries for new charters, Ohio lawmakers have removed a critical barrier to access and have brought the state one step closer to models like Arizona. 

By no longer linking the location of charter schools to the states’ accountability system, eliminating these geographic boundaries should also lower the temperature around accountability debates. Each year, the Ohio Department of Education releases a list that identifies which of the state’s 608 school districts are “challenged” and thus might face competition from charters. And each year, that list causes more and more controversy. Two years ago, poor value-added ratings made the list five times longer than usual. Two hundred and eighteen districts—over one-third of the state’s traditional public districts—were labelled as challenged, and the presence of a few districts that were widely considered to be “good” sparked a litany of complaints.

It’s not hard to understand why this policy could cause issues. School districts don’t like being labeled as challenged. Charter schools, especially those with proven track records of improving student outcomes, are frustrated by arbitrary restrictions on where they can open schools. And linking the challenged designation to increased competition turns school choice into a punishment rather than the opportunity for families it was intended to be. Add to that the fact that charters were being funded via a pass-through method that subtracted money from the total share of a district’s state aid, and it’s no surprise that Ohio’s education sector was rife with tension.

Now that charter location isn’t tied to state report card results—and now that charter schools are directly funded by the state—some of this tension should ease. It’s hard to argue, for example, that school choice is a “punishment” for districts when research shows that it doesn’t hurt district achievement or funding, and when the existence of charters is no longer explicitly tied to district performance. Lawmakers recently made a similar move with EdChoice when they divorced voucher eligibility from report card ratings. Such changes are critical because they allow state report cards, which recently underwent their own changes, to be purely informational, and thus more politically sustainable.

Of course, that doesn’t mean anti-choice folks won’t find new complaints. For instance, now that charters can open anywhere, we’ll likely start hearing warnings about a massive influx of new charter schools that will “steal” students from traditional districts.

But that’s the wrong take. Kids aren’t objects to be stolen. If families choose to send their students to another school, that’s their right. And the only thing the budget changed is where new charter schools are permitted to open. The actual process of opening hasn’t changed at all. That means that new charter schools still need to find a sponsor, locate and furnish a facility (which is easier said than done, given facility funding issues), hire staff, and purchase curricula and materials. That’s a lot of hoops that aren’t worth jumping through if there’s no demand from families. Just like their district counterparts, charters are funded on a per-pupil basis. That means new charter schools are only going to open in places where there’s likely to be demand.

Eliminating geographic boundaries is unlikely to lead to a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of charters. But over the long-haul, this change in policy could unlock quality public school options for more Ohio students. That’s a big win for school choice in Ohio and, most importantly, its families.

1. The powers that be in Youngstown City Schools—all of them—seem to be looking forward to the day that local control will be fully re-established in the district now that the state budget bill has changed the original way out of ADC control codified in HB 70. (FYI, this Friday marks the sixth anniversary of the signing of that bill. So plan your observances accordingly.) Luckily for them, the way out is very clear: All they need is to make a plan and execute it. Q.E.D., right? So why do I get the impression from this piece that it will be neither easy nor peasy for them? (Vindy.com, 7/11/21)
    
2. As you are no doubt aware, however, the original way out of ADC control was pretty simple too: raise and keep your report card grade out of the gutter for three years straight and Bob’s your uncle. However, reading the wide gamut of opinions on the new (and the old) report card system (including the point of rating schools and districts at all) from members of the Cleveland.com editorial board, I can see that perhaps that pathway out of ADC control sounded simpler to me than it must have to other people. (Cleveland.com, 7/10/21)
   
   

3. A 20-year Toledo City Schools veteran is taking over from Escuela SMART’s founding principal this fall. According to this sunny profile, the school for bilingual Spanish-speaking students will remain as unique a community for its students and families as it was when it was a “not entirely sustainable” (ouch) but popular alternative to district schools charter school. (Toledo Blade, 7/10/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

Gone are the days when we could all agree with Ben Franklin’s sunny admonition: “Indeed the general tendency of reading good history must be, to fix in the minds of youth deep impressions of the beauty and usefulness of virtue of all kinds.” Instead, we must cope with political polarization, schools preoccupied with the achievement gap, students who learn from social media, and adults who are too often disdainful of reason and facts (and who have lost confidence in American institutions).

In Fordham’s new report The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021, the foreword co-authored by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and David Griffith acknowledges these challenges, conceding that there is “disagreement as to how to tell the American story.” Echoing the foreword, the report emphasizes “consensus” and “compromise.” It also reminds us that standards matter insofar as they influence “teacher preparation and professional development programs” and serve as “the basis for specific curriculum decisions made by districts, schools, and individual teachers.”

Commendably, the report critiques the “broad, vague, and/or nebulous language” that characterizes many states’ standards. But not all is doom and gloom. Amid polarized debate, “many states have a reasonable handle on the issue of race and don’t downplay its significance.” Similarly, “coverage of early Native American history is reasonably strong in many states.”

The report emphasizes writing and argumentation based on evidence and argues that, in an age of alternative facts, it’s important “to think logically and communicate clearly.” As the review criteria suggest, skills development (cause and effect, explaining bias) is crucial and needs to accompany factual knowledge. Similarly, essential dispositions (respect for other persons and opinions) are important. To teach young people about “confirmation bias” is a worthy, if difficult, ideal and might indeed deter “the polarization and misinformation that plague American politics.”

The report probably cannot use the term “informed patriotism” as a goal for history and civics instruction. I will settle for “commitment to American institutions and ideals.” As the authors appropriately editorialize: “It’s incredibly important for students to internalize what it means to be an American from an early age.” We don’t have heroes, but the report does approve standards that include a long list of “historical role models.” But why role models only in the lower grades? Though the report doesn’t endorse “action civics,” it does approve of “active participation” and “successful-learning projects.”

In practice, not all of the “essential knowledge” the report identifies can be covered in the average classroom or remembered by the average student, so some instructors will argue for a “less is more” approach for “deeper learning.” Less credibly, some states will rationalize vagueness by saying it is up to the individual school district to fill in content, although the report convincingly argues that standards “can’t be vague, badly organized, or misleading” and that “without a clear destination and a map that shows the way, one’s journey is bound to be endless and probably fruitless....” Still, even if there is reasonable disagreement about the extensive knowledge suggested, there should be approbation for the many examples of skills to be acquired and essential dispositions to be demonstrated.

As the report indicates, the states with exemplary ratings have “admirably well-organized, clearly written, and user-friendly standards” that are full of specifics. For example, both the Massachusetts and California curriculum frameworks provide compelling introductions to American history, which other states could learn from.

Ultimately, the report is valuable because it is very deliberately impartial. Well-written and sprinkled with illuminating “sidebars,” commendations, and critiques, it should be read by policymakers, principals, and above all, by the teachers who are key to making history and civics central in K–12 education and encouraging the next generation to commit themselves to reasoned discourse and civic responsibility.

More on the state budget

Education stakeholders are still parsing the various new provisions enacted in the state budget bill on July 1. The executive director of School Choice Ohio spoke to the Dispatch this week regarding the school funding revamp and its impact on charter schools. And the Fordham Institute published a big picture analysis of provisions impacting charters, including increased access to unused district facilities and the elimination of geographic restrictions on where charters can locate.

New charter school

A charter overseen by Eagle Community Schools of Ohio is among a group of new schools coming to the Columbus area as discussed in a Dispatch article this week. The Shepard School, serving K-5 students, will be opening up in a former district building on the Near East Side in August.

Supporting young men

Here’s a nice look at the AMEND Together program in the Dayton area. Students at Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) are among those participating in the conversation-based initiative that helps students develop a healthier sense of self, especially in regard to their relationships with the girls and women in their lives. The program is looking to expand to other schools by starting new clubs and through virtual programs in schools that don’t have clubs.

With the exception of

We learned this week that Stark County’s Department of Job and Family Services is spending federal Covid-relief dollars in the form of school clothing allowances for area families. Public and private school students will benefit, but the effort unfortunately excludes children who are homeschooled or attending an online school.

The view from Rhode Island

Two Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Rhode Island are  competing with each other to show prospective voters which of them is the most school choice friendly.

*****

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

1. Our own Chad Aldis is quoted in this piece from public radio here in Columbus, saying that the new state budget “completely divorced” school report cards from voucher eligibility in Ohio. But I have to admit I don’t understand any other word in this piece outside of Chad’s quote. I assume that’s because it’s posted in WOSU’s “politics” section. (WOSU-FM, Columbus, 7/7/21)
    
2. Several school officials across Ohio say that they are beginning to quantify a range of negative impacts on their students due to pandemic-related school disruptions. This includes an “exponential increase” in course failures as well as absenteeism. However, the extent of the latter seems to be unknowable due to what is termed “wonky data”. Yowza. Let’s hope their recovery plans are a little more solid than that. (Spectrum News 1, 7/7/21)
   
   

3. Obviously someone in the blob forgot to tell the school officials in the piece above that the term “learning gap” is frowned upon in public. Ditto for this librarian who uses the term “summer slide” with abandon as she discusses all the ways the Toledo Lucas County Library system is trying to stop the non-existent “s-word” from being even worse this year. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 7/7/21)
    
4. Kudos to the Dispatch for including a charter school among the group of new school buildings coming to the Columbus area this fall, which are previewed here. As you might imagine, The Shepard School—a brand new charter serving K-5 students in a slightly polished up (?) former district school building they are leasing on the city’s near east side—is a lot different to the spiffy megaliths being constructed or renovated in and around the suburbs and exurbs of central Ohio. Different for a lot of reasons not touched on in this piece at all. Due to this piece and the recent changes to state law enacted in the budget, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before those fancy suburban learn-a-toriums will have charter competition right on their doorsteps? (Columbus Dispatch, 7/8/21) Meanwhile, Ohioan Denis D. Smith published a commentary piece in the Charleston (WV) newspaper yesterday promising a heap o’ trouble in the Mountain State if charter schools ever do get started there. (Charleston (WV) Gazette Mail, 7/8/21)
   
   

5. But returning to the topic of spiffy new school buildings, the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission this week approved $450 million in school construction funding for projects across the state. They are all traditional school district projects except one: The Metro Schools, a Columbus STEM school near and dear to my heart, was approved for around $14 million to cover half the tab for renovating a former district school building (hmmm…. that again?) in order to realize their long-held (you know what I mean) expansion plans. Please permit me to say a brief “wahoo” to this, and indeed “huzzah”. (Gongwer Ohio, 7/8/21) The Gongwer coverage seems to indicate that this is the first STEM school project ever funded by the OFCC, a fact which would also demand several additional “huzzahs” and perhaps a “hallelujah”. That historical detail is lacking in the AP version of same, but at least it is not subscriber-only. (AP News Wire, 7/8/21)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

The prolonged fracas within and far beyond the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) concerning a new “framework” for NAEP’s future assessment of reading has been ominous on several fronts—as I haven’t hesitated to say. But the past few weeks have markedly improved the situation to the point that a reasonable and viable consensus is coming into view.

Trouble began two years ago when the Board named a cast-of-thousands “visioning panel” that came up with a plan for a very different sort of reading assessment, one that emphasized race, deemphasized knowledge, risked concealing bona fide reading-comprehension problems, and threatened to disrupt NAEP’s multi-decade “trendline” of reading achievement.

Most of its members were remote from classroom realities and real-world reading practicalities, and many had drunk deeply at the fount of current fads and dubious research. Some had thrown themselves into contemporary cultural conflicts. That group’s wholesale redesign of NAEP’s approach to reading was destined for controversy. 

Hands were wrung, blogs were written, testimonies were submitted, feathers flew, the governing board itself seemed on the verge of coming unglued. So revisions were made—sorely inadequate revisions, unfortunately, from the standpoint of key board members and a number of outside critics (myself included). Once hints began to be dropped that some states (mostly of a vermillion hue) might refuse to participate in assessments erected upon such a framework, NAGB chair Haley Barbour (himself the former governor of one such state) took corrective action. He formed a working party of board members drawn from across several NAGB committees (and factions) but who craved consensus on reading. Ably led by vice-chair Alice Peisch, they worked hard and fast and with awesome celerity came up with yet another revision, this one dubbed the “Chair’s Draft.”

This was put out for public comment late on June 25, an “informational webinar” was held on July 1, and any written comments were requested by July 9 (i.e., tomorrow!). Barbour’s intent is for the Board to vote approval in early August and—if approved—for NCES then to commence the very heavy lift that will enable the new framework to drive NAEP reading assessments from 2026 onward.

The revision is a tour-de-force that the Board should adopt without changing a word. Sure, there are a few words I might change if I were king, but building a livable consensus around the assessment of reading is far more important than trying to please everyone, which is never possible anyway.

The Chair’s Draft is shorter, pruned of much jargon, and much more reader/user friendly. It’s also markedly less ideological—and unlikely to disrupt the vital NAEP reading trendline. Its drafters deserve huge applause. 

Yet mice are nibbling. Some, for example, including some on the original “visioning panel” that caused so much grief, want the final Framework to revert to using “unfamiliar” rather than “obscure” to describe words and terms encountered in reading passages that justify the use of “informational UDEs.” This sounds ridiculously wonky but in the long run it matters quite a lot.

UDE is shorthand for “universal design elements,” originally developed to help children with disabilities access and participate as fully as possible in assessments and other school activities. In the case of NAEP, they’re no longer limited to test-takers with disabilities. They come in several kinds, including “informational.” Within the reading assessment, an “informational UDE” might be available to test-takers in the form of a definition or “pop-up” or link, even a short video, intended to explain or define a word or term that the child may not understand. An example in the draft framework involves a passage from a story set in Turkey, where UDEs supply English definitions (translations, really) of two Turkish words.

Those words (“hodja” and “akche”) are indeed “obscure” for almost every U.S. reader in grades four, eight, and twelve who is apt to find him or herself taking part in the NAEP reading assessment. Because it’s hard to comprehend well what’s going on in that passage without the explanation, and since comprehension is the point, supplying a UDE in this case seems fully justified.

But were a new reading framework to open the door to providing such help for any word, term or expression that’s simply “unfamiliar” to readers, much mischief could commence. That’s because “unfamiliar” begins a slippery slope toward the profligate use of “informational” UDEs in any/every situation where some readers may not yet possess certain vocabulary or knowledge even though proficient readers do—and all should. And that leads on to other “informational” situations that bring us swiftly to “background knowledge,” not just vocabulary. Which would hurl NAEP back into a swirling controversy about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension—a controversy that NAGB members in the webinar last week made clear they did not want to take a position on and did not want to affect the NAEP reading assessment. 

It’s one thing to supply help when (as in the Turkish terms in the draft framework) a word is completely foreign. A somewhat similar situation arises with rarely-used—and genuinely “obscure”—English words, such as those that kids get asked to spell during the national spelling bee. (From the 2019 Bee: “The words spelled by this year’s co-champions in the final round include ‘auslaut,’ ‘bougainvillea,’ and ‘pendeloque.’”)

But words that are simply “unfamiliar” to students taking a NAEP assessment will include many that they should know. As soon as NAEP starts providing “informational” assistance with such words, it’s on its way to masking children’s actual reading comprehension. For instance, an eighth grade NAEP reading passage in 2013 included the word “epitome.” Should that have an informational UDE to define it? What if a passage were to mention the Caspian Sea, say, or Indonesia, or cantaloupes? It’s no secret that the original framework “visioners” wanted to suppress background knowledge and, when they couldn’t do that, wanted to supply it to test takers. But the cognitive scientists and reading experts who know the most in this realm view that as a hopelessly misguided quest.

They know, too, that the road to “unfamiliar” never ends. The current NAGB and NCES teams might not travel far down it, but what about their successors? Journey a bit further and NAEP risks artificially inflating students’ scores by assisting them to parse words and terms that they should already know. That’s because they’re words and terms that, when encountered in the “real world” of reading, nobody will come rushing to supply the missing information. Sure, motivated readers with sufficient bandwidth could consult the internet, but it’s impractical to stop and look up every word more challenging than “see Spot run.” Which means that if NAEP papers over things that kids should know but don’t, it will cease to be a trustworthy gauge of their true reading comprehension, at which point it loses value both for policymakers and for educators.

So may the Board in its wisdom please refrain from shifting back from “obscure” to “unfamiliar” or anything in that vein. (If for some reason they need to make a change, how about “esoteric”?)

That aside, Barbour and Peisch and their colleagues deserve kudos and thanks. And may consensus prevail on this as it ultimately has done on just about every major issue facing the Governing Board for three-plus decades. Absent such consensus, NAEP’s credibility (and value to the country) is much diminished. And in no realm would that be worse than in the core skill of reading.

A recent Reason magazine piece offers school choice as the solution to our pitched battles over critical race theory in K–12 education. “Now that the debate is escalating over more fundamental differences involving the value of liberal ideas, individualism, and rationality, it’s difficult to see how Americans of opposing viewpoints can share tax-funded schools that fall on one side or the other of the ideological divide,” writes J.D. Tuccille. “So let’s not even try when we can encourage the growing exodus from public schools to alternatives of all sorts.” The Cato Institute’s public school “battle map,” cited in the Reason piece, marshals its case for school choice documenting more than 2,400 conflicts in the last fifteen years over curriculum, values, gender, sexuality, and other flashpoints. Cato notes, not insensibly, that “public schooling often forces people into wrenching, zero‐sum conflict.”

Why fight over “CRT” when we can choose? You teach oppression studies; I’ll teach American exceptionalism. It’s a simple and obvious solution. But it’s also a naïve and unsatisfying one, and the Reason piece cited above hints at why. The “lens” through which critical race theory would have students view the world cuts to the heart of our most fundamental ideas about the role of education and the civic mission of schools in shaping children’s view of their country. School districts may be the battleground, but the war is about much larger issues and themes.

Choice supporters (and I count myself as one) often engage in a subtle sleight of hand in making our case. We argue that we should “fund students, not systems” and insist that families should have control over “their” money. But this elides that the cost of education in the U.S. is socialized. We pay school taxes whether we have children or not. Thus if we’re honest, we’re really advocating putting parents in control of “our” money (including their own, obviously). It makes good sense to put decision-making in the hands of those closest to schools and with the most at stake: their own children. But the shared cost implies a mutual interest and a literal investment in every child. School choice may “solve” the CRT problem for a family, but it can’t address the clear interest every American holds in the education of the next generation.

Neither side in the debate is merely seeking permission for their children to be taught as they prefer. This is a fight over how to explain American history, society, and culture to all our children, whom we are counting on to be morally committed to protecting, defending, and perfecting it as adults.

When you view education as a private good, choice as a panacea makes sense. When you view it as public good, the rationale becomes less satisfying. (It’s both, so the tension is inevitable.) Moreover, this may be a unique, structural limitation of the American way of running schools. As Ashley Berner of Johns Hopkins has documented, other nations tend to be far more pluralistic in the number and types of schools that are funded by their governments. But they are also far more likely to teach a national curriculum. The U.S. Constitution guarantees control of education to the states, making a national curriculum, for good or for ill, a non-starter here. So curriculum fights are a flaw and a feature our system.

“Wokeness” is proving a nettlesome challenge to the logic of school choice in more ways than one. Those with the greatest amount of capital—both cultural and financial—enjoy the greatest amount of school choice. In theory, this should more closely align school curriculum and culture with the values of the families that pay for it. But the hyper-elite, prodigiously expensive private schools favored by America’s gentry are among the very wokest schools, driving many parents to seethe privately but mostly stay put. The argument has been made that elite private schools are merely a stepping stone to an Ivy League admissions letter, incentivizing ambitious parents to hold their nose and keep their eyes on the prize. But if elite colleges, too, are earnestly committed to “dismantling privilege,” then it’s an open question whether a private prep school education will continue to offer a leg up in admission.

Lastly, choice as the remedy for CRT debates ignores that the percentage of families with ready access to more than a small handful of quality options is probably quite modest. Changing schools is not something to be done quickly or easily. There’s merit to the argument that choice can be a release valve for acute, CRT-related tensions. But in the end, it’s not a solution; it’s an activist’s talking point. And maybe it will prove a useful one for school choice advocates. But by no means is it an “answer” or “solution” to the CRT debate.

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

Today, the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals will take place at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. It’s just one of myriad academic competitions focused on different subjects, from academic bowls, to science and math bowls, to spelling bees. But one core academic subject seems to be missing from the academic competition party: reading. Why is this?

The main reason is that reading isn’t really an independent skill at all.

Of course we could imagine, say, a speed-reading competition. But if students were going to compete over who has the best reading comprehension, they would have to read about something and that would turn the competition back into something more like a typical trivia competition. Science is about science. Math is about math. But reading is about everything.

Phonics, where students learn that certain letters correspond to specific sounds, really is a basic skill students need to master early. Once they have that basic skill down, however, reading comprehension will only get stronger as a person’s knowledge and vocabulary about a range of topics expands.

Consider this sentence:

Through Monte Carlo analysis, I have presented evidence that the spectacular seven scoring system actually aggravates the post position bias inherent in jai-alai.

Sure, you can “decode” most of this technical passage from the academic journal Interfaces about how the game of jai-alai is scored, meaning you can “sound out” any words you don’t know and insert some brief pauses in places that are roughly appropriate to the flow. Yet to comprehend the text, you need to know something about statistics, the sport, and what “post-position bias” is and how it could be aggravated by the “spectacular seven scoring system.”

Now imagine you are a fourth-grader trying to read the Orlando Sentinel. You may struggle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are “bad at reading.” Instead, like the average adult trying to decipher a passage about jai-alai scoring systems, most young students haven’t yet acquired the necessary background knowledge to fully navigate headlines and understand the news. If you want to understand an article about why President Biden’s spending plans may or may not lead to inflation or how vaccine reluctance could make it impossible for the world to reach “herd immunity,” you first need a critical mass of background knowledge and vocabulary.

This is not how many educators think about reading, though. For decades, many have claimed that reading comprehension is a fundamental skill. Admittedly, the idea is intuitive. As Sal Khan, the inventor of the online education platform Khan Academy, recently told the Washington Post: “The basics are reading, writing and math. If kids are able to progress in those, or at a minimum not atrophy in those, they’re going to be able to pick up where they left off in other subjects.” Using data from a large federal survey, a recent study I co-authored shows schools are following this logic, with elementary teachers reporting a whopping two hours per day on reading. Unfortunately, national assessments show that this approach isn’t working, with around two-thirds of students still failing to reading proficiency.

In contrast, social studies and science instruction amounted to less than an hour per day, combined. But students need to learn about those “other subjects”—geography, art, science, and history—to build vocabulary and knowledge across a range of topics and become truly literate. Our study’s findings tended to support this idea as well: While additional instructional time in the English language arts did not improve students’ reading abilities, more time spent on social studies was associated with increased reading ability for elementary students. Really, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a better understanding of the social world opens the doors to everything from novels to newspapers, or that it would show up on reading assessments.

A few dissident scholars such as E.D. Hirsch, Jr. have sounded these alarms for years, but to many educators, knowledge is still disparaged as mere “trivia.” Helping students build systematic knowledge through quality texts, iterative writing, engaging projects, substantive conversations—and, yes, academic bowls and spelling bees—probably does more to deepen reading comprehension abilities than the all-too-common focus on an ephemeral “skill” of literacy.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the Orlando Sentinel.