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1. Woot! Another piece of excellent coverage for Fordham’s recent charter school achievement report, courtesy of the Toledo Blade. But this time, the report’s findings of strong achievement boosts for students in brick-and-mortar charter schools versus their traditional district peers is getting noticed on the editorial page, rather than on the news page. Which leads to this extraordinary (if I do say so myself) sentence: “Oddly, though charter school choice has been an undisputed benefit to the residents of urban school districts, Democrats who dominate the urban districts — like Toledo — have not been fans of the concept, preferring to require that underperforming public schools continue to have a monopoly on the urban environment.” Wow! (Toledo Blade, 7/1/24)
   
   

2. Staying in northwest Ohio (and indeed staying on topic, in my own labyrinthine mind), this piece comes to the hard-hitting BG Independent News straight from the Bowling Green State University Office of Marketing and Brand Strategy. (Yes, the source is noted.) In it, the dean of the College of Education and Human Development lauds the tutoring work of her teacher preparation students, who have been providing reading supports for students in “high-need districts” in the area for the last three years, using federal Covid-relief dollars. You can tell that it’s written by marketing folks because this sentence—“Data consistently shows the practice works for everyone, as pre-service teachers tend to be effective tutors who gain additional experience, while K-12 students enrolled in the tutoring programs often make measurable gains in crucial content areas.”—is the only evidence of the program’s effectiveness for the kiddos provided, despite the fact that it doesn’t say that at all. But that lack of data doesn’t stop Dr. Bosslady from having some grandiose visions for the future of the program, including her insistence that “tutoring is teaching, and increasingly, teaching is tutoring” as well as her plan to get legislators to change state law to allow for more more more of it. All this despite the end of pandemic relief spending dead ahead and the lack of evidence that any of the college’s work has benefitted anyone but her so far. (BG Independent News, 6/28/24) Perhaps I was being a tad unfair in the preceding clip. I mean, we’ve got a lot of evidence—in northwest Ohio and beyond—that teaching often isn’t teaching these days. And we also have evidence—like this story, also from Toledo—that tutoring may matter more. But this comes to us from a small nonprofit outfit working to boost literacy for preschool and school-age kids as well as adults who lost out on instruction in the past. This piece is discussing their series of summer camps for kids age 4 to 8 to fight “summer slide” and to help boost kids up to the proper reading level for their age/grade. It’s free. It’s open to any children, no matter what school they go to. It’s held in a beautiful park right next to a city pool. And parents get books and some lessons on how to continue the efforts at home. And while we are provided anecdotal evidence only and for just a single child, I see clearly that “Read for Literacy” is focused on the right things and has the singular goal of helping kids and families in Toledo. So maybe Dr. Falcon is right after all: tutoring is teaching…when it’s done right. (Toledo Blade, 6/28/24)

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This year’s Wonkathon is over, and the results are in!

2024’s Wisest Wonks:

• “Everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions to chronic absenteeism, by Kelly James and Brad Bernatek

Second place:

• To fix chronic absenteeism, we must ask why kids don’t want to go to school, by Leslie Colwell

Third place:

• Improving school attendance in Rhode Island, by Jeremy Chiappetta, Krystafer Redden, and Tom Giordano

Thank you to all of our participants! Read about the competition, as well as all eleven entries, below.

—

The pandemic exacerbated America’s student absenteeism and engagement crisis, which continues today, plaguing schools, frustrating teachers, and harming the education of millions. Much has been tried, but little has worked. Leaders seems to be at a loss. What should they do?

Students are considered chronically absent when they miss at least 10 percent of the school year, which usually means about eighteen days. Before the pandemic, approximately 15 percent of K–12 students exceeded that bar. Yet during the last school year, 26 percent were chronically absent across forty states and D.C., according to data compiled by Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute. We see rises in absenteeism rates almost everywhere—in high-, middle-, and low-income districts; in locales where pandemic closure were long, moderate, or short; in small, medium, and large systems; and in areas that are majority white and non-white.

School systems and charter networks have experimented with many different interventions to mitigate the problem. Connecticut, for example, used federal Covid-19 relief dollars to develop a home-visit program. A Detroit school paired home visits with adult mentors for students. New Mexico requires its districts to craft attendance plans with interventions tailored to the students’ situations. Santa Fe hired attendance coaches and offered students incentives to return to classrooms. Maine and New Jersey have created attendance teams tasked with analyzing data and finding solutions. There’s been much talk about making school more engaging, building relationships with parents, and clarifying guidance about when sick children should and shouldn’t stay home.

Absenteeism rates, however, have barely budged. New Mexico’s was 41 percent in 2022 and 40 percent in 2023. Connecticut’s remained twice as high in 2023 as it was pre-pandemic. In Santa Fe, more than half the students remain chronically absent.

New solutions are surely in order. And that’s what we’re focusing on for this year’s Wonkathon: How can policymakers and practitioners radically reduce chronic absenteeism—at least below pre-pandemic levels and preferably much further? While the following questions are only suggestive, creative responses to them may provide some of the direction and answers that state, local, and school leaders need.

1. We’re especially interested in outside-the-box solutions. Is it time for more tough love—either for parents or students? Alternatively, should some schools and systems offer new learning models that don't require students and teachers to attend class in person every day? What else?
2. Reasons for absence vary. Attendance Works says they fall into four categories: barriers, like transportation, illness, or home and food insecurity; aversion to school, caused by things like academic and behavioral challenges; disengagement, wherein a kid, for instance, finds instruction to be boring or irrelevant; and misconceptions about the purpose of attendance and the harm caused by absences. How does this complexity affect solutions? Are some reasons more important that others? Harder to solve?
3. To what extent might schools’ lax policies around discipline, phone use, and grading be to blame?
4. The youngest children are often absent the most. What particular strategies do we need to get them back in school?
5. At the other end of the K–12 spectrum, high schoolers often skip a lot of school. What strategies would work for them? Should schools do more to hold those students accountable, such as by failing students who miss too much class? Should some of those older students be considered dropouts?

Particularly strong submissions will include data showing that the suggested interventions are promising.

WHAT’S A WONKATHON?

For ten years now, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have hosted an annual Wonkathon on our Flypaper blog to generate substantive conversation around key issues in education reform. Last year’s forum focused how we can harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools.

As in years past, we’ll encourage our audience to vote for the “wisest wonk,” an honor previously conferred on such luminaries as Alex Spurrier, Amy Chen Kulesa, Keri Ingraham, Angela Jerabek, Abby Javurek, Jessica Shopoff, Chase Eskelsen, McKenzie Snow, Claire Voorhees, Adam Peshek, Patricia Levesque, Christy Wolfe, Seth Rau, and Joe Siedlecki,

If you’re keen to jump in—and we hope you are—please let us know and indicate when we can expect your draft. We will publish submissions on a rolling basis, so send yours as soon as it’s practical for you, but no later than Monday, July 22. Aim for between 800 and 1200 words. Send your essay to Brandon Wright, Fordham’s Editorial Director, at [email protected], as soon as it’s ready. And please be sure to answer the fundamental question: How can policymakers and practitioners radically reduce chronic absenteeism—at least below pre-pandemic levels and preferably much further?

Let Brandon know if you have any questions. Otherwise, may the wisest wonk win!

THIS YEAR'S SUBMISSIONS:

• Change our schooling paradigm to reduce chronic absenteeism, by Hugh Osborn
• “Everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions to chronic absenteeism, by Kelly James and Brad Bernatek
• How can policymakers and practitioners reduce chronic absenteeism? The answer is sports., by Sam Duell
• Improving school attendance in Rhode Island, by Jeremy Chiappetta, Krystafer Redden, and Tom Giordano
• Let’s stop blaming kids for absenteeism and unleash entrepreneurship, by Darien Contu
• Rethinking school policies to combat chronic absenteeism, by Michael Gary and Ivory A. Toldson
• Schools cannot radically reduce chronic absenteeism alone, by Jeremy Singer and Sarah Winchell Lenhoff
• Sustainable, promising interventions to reduce chronic absenteeism, by Charles Ogundimu
• To boost attendance and outcomes, pay students, not systems, by Garion Frankel and Cooper Conway
• To fix chronic absenteeism, we must ask why kids don’t want to go to school, by Leslie Colwell
• To improve attendance, promote autonomy, by Robyn H. Gausman-Burnett
• Who gets attendance interventions is as important as what the intervention is, by Mikia Manley

Watching the debate last night, all I could think about was my time spent on the playground with my toddler. Her wobbly legs ever close to tumbling down the ladder and causing me constant low-grade anxiety. I felt the same watching Biden fumble through answers, stare into space, and exhibit all the hallmarks of an aging man in cognitive decline. Then, by the end, anxiety had morphed to pity.

I wasn’t alone in my discomfort. The top nine articles on RealClearPolitics this morning—from The Atlantic to the New York Times—all ask versions of the same two basic questions: Can Democrats replace Biden? And who will it be?

No political pundit or party operative myself, I can’t venture a guess or offer any recommendations, but I can inform the public on where potential replacements stand on education policy.

Kamala Harris

As vice president, Kamala Harris is an obvious possibility, and with her position, has perhaps the most education policy to her record. During the pandemic, she spoke to the California Federation of Teachers about the need to inject more money into the system and support SEL initiatives. In addition, while running for president, she promised a $13,500 pay raise to teachers across the country. Standard bland promises given to court the favor of teachers unions.

More interestingly, while California’s attorney general, she implemented a school truancy plan that empowered district attorneys to charge parents with a misdemeanor if children missed 10 percent of school days. While the education reform movement debates and argues about various support plans and incentives to address the nation’s chronic absenteeism, parental accountability and consequences for truancy remain the two elephants in the room. We’ve tried all the carrots. Kamala Harris used the stick.

There’s also her unprompted reference to busing while debating Joe Biden during their campaigns for presidency, likely not a serious proposition, but rather a chance to dunk on a political rival. And finally, she would likely continue the Biden Administration’s efforts for student debt “relief.” (It’s really a glorified “transfer” of wealth from the middle to upper class, but I’ll end my editorializing there.)

Gavin Newsom

California Governor Gavin Newsom is another likely option, and he certainly seems to think that he’s the best choice. But on education, he’s the worst. As I wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “Any aspiring policymaker looking for guidance on sensible education reform should take a glance at Sacramento over the past half-decade and do exactly the opposite.”

While governor, the legislators of Sacramento in his party struck down a phonics bill; implemented a math framework that will repeat all the mistakes our nation made over phonics; required an ethnic studies course, which covers every fringe progressive theory ranging from post-colonialism to the decodification of systems of oppression; and prohibited schools from suspending students for willful defiance. Speaking nationally, conservative complaints about “woke” schools are likely overwrought—I’m guilty of this myself—but in California, such accusations ring true: blatant political indoctrination and behavioral chaos.

Gretchen Whitmer

Gretchen Whitmer has a shorter record to her name. Most prominently, as the Governor of Michigan, she presided over a state budget passed this month that offers free pre-K to lower-income families and funds free community college for all. Regarding preschooling, there’s mounting evidence that Head Start and other programs that provide free or reduced-price preschool have, at best, neutral impacts. And recent studies in Boston, Tennessee, Georgia, and North Caroline have found that these initiatives may negatively affect behaviors and academics.

Notably, she also ended Michigan’s short-lived third grade retention law, a policy that, however difficult to enforce, really does benefit students in the long run. And throughout the pandemic she happily acquiesced to union demands—vetoing bills for education savings accounts, reading scholarships, and unmasking children.

The field

As for other options: Governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear blocked charter school and school choice legislation, promised a pay raise, and pushed for universal preschooling. While running for president, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said he would raise pay for teachers in Title I schools and that charter schools “have a place.” J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, promises more money and let his state’s school choice program slowly die.

—

Of course, most of these policies were proposed or passed at the state-level, where legislators and governors have real power and authority to govern public schools. The federal government has less authority over education, so few of these laws and initiatives could easily translate to presidential policy.

But there’s one simple theme across these records: no real changes to the system, just more of it. More money, more years in school, more unions, more, more, more. No accountability, no improved instruction, no modified curriculum or raised standards, and no structural changes to funding streams like school choice or governance structures like charters.

I’d take the bland, uninspired promises of Whitmer over the kombucha-fueled progressivism of Newsom, but that’s hardly an inspiring endorsement. A malaise has fallen over Democratic policymaking when it comes to education, and they’d be wise to correct it. Otherwise, they’ll continue to concede this issue to their competitors.

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Media coverage of Ohio report

The Dayton Daily News covered Fordham’s new research report, looking at the academic outcomes of brick-and-mortar charter school students in the two school years after pandemic disruption. Some excellent commentary from folks who might generally be expected to be unsupportive of charter schools, acknowledging the importance of the research and its findings, as well as asking questions about additional avenues of analysis. Nice! If you haven’t read the report yet, it can be found here.

Transportation changes coming to Youngstown

Youngstown City Schools officials announced this week that the district would no longer provide bus transportation for high school students (except for those with special needs), starting this fall. This will impact district, charter, private, and STEM school students. Youngstown is facing an impending budget deficit and says it is having trouble hiring enough drivers to cover required routes too. But additionally, they are facing a state fine of around $2 million dollars for already having failed to adequately transport those charter school students in the past. By cutting the routes, they will presumably cut their future fines, and it seems that some students won’t notice a difference if the bus isn’t available next year anyway.

NLRB ruling

A judge for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last week ruled that KIPP Columbus officials engaged in unfair labor practices while the school’s teachers were unionizing during the 2022-23 school year. School leaders were ordered to post notices about the violations for all employees to see, and to pay a withheld stipend to intervention specialists, with interest.

Shameless in Springfield

We discussed a couple of weeks ago the saga of Springfield Sports Academy, which had sued Northeastern Local Schools to stop the imminent demolition of an unused school building they wanted to buy. This week, the previously-issued temporary restraining order was lifted after district lawyers managed to convince a judge that the building was simultaneously not an unused facility (thus not up for sale) but was also in need of immediate demolition (since they didn’t need it now). All this despite the district having tried to sell the intact building to someone else (by which I mean any buyer that is not a charter school) in December. It is a shameless and transparent effort to deny a “competitor” in flagrant violation of the spirit—if not the word—of state law on the subject. It’s very likely that the building will be rubble long before the legalities shake out, no matter how they’re decided.

Another legal decision

In a 6-2 ruling, the Oklahoma Supreme Court determined that the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s vote last year to approve a virtual school sponsored by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City was unconstitutional (both state and U.S.). The ruling likely puts a kibosh on the startup of St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School for this year…and perhaps permanently.

Not re-segregation

Debbie Veney, Senior Vice President at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, took issue with the notion that having charter schools whose enrollment is majority Black is an indication of re-segregation in schools, but is instead a fulfillment of the goals of the Civil Rights movement generally and the Brown v Board of Education decision specifically--to improve educational access and outcomes for Black children. In 1954, she writes, “Getting those kids into White schools was the best way” to achieve that outcome. “Why? Because White students had access to schools with heat. They had new textbooks and fancy science labs.” But, she says, “we are no longer in 1954.” Having charter schools focused on Black excellence and chosen freely by parents from among many options is the way to continue to make progress in boosting the academic achievement for Black children today.

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1. The long-serving treasurer of Girard City Schools in northeast Ohio resigned earlier this month, following release of findings from a state audit. Turns out, dude raked in nearly half a million dollars in compensation in FY 2023 upon the instatement of an overly-generous retire/rehire agreement. The State Auditor’s report called this an “excessive and extravagant use of district resources and behavior a prudent person would not consider reasonable and necessary business practices.” Yikes. District officials and elected board members are scrambling to apologize to the community, make amends, and change their process for approving contracts to make sure such a thing never happens again. Too bad no one listened to Fordham’s school funding guru Aaron Churchill way back in December of 2023 when he told the Tribune-Chronicle in response to the contract that giving the treasurer a 2.5 percent cut of any grants he brought into the district “seems like a lot of money.” He told the paper that “If the school districts are receiving more money [from those sources], the treasurer shouldn’t take credit for that.” (Vindy.com, 6/28/24)
   
   

2. Luckily for Girard, the district’s finances are “solid and stable” enough to absorb that hit. (I mean, it’s not like they’re going to get any of that money back.) Same goes for tiny West Clermont Local Schools in southwest Ohio. District officials say the $1.7 million financial loss they suffered as a result of what is termed a “social engineering attack” on their accounts payable system “will not lead to the elimination of any programs, student services, or a reduction in staff.” Phew. (WVXU-FM, Cincinnati, 6/25/24)
   
   

3. Staying on topic, the State Board of Education is reportedly facing a budget crunch since the legislature did not complete work on a bill that would have given them millions of additional dollars in operating funds. (This piece indicates the problem is due to a provision in a bill that passed, which is not correct. But let’s not quibble over specifics.) The state supe says the board has a couple of options to get the money he says they need—including via Controlling Board request and/or raising teacher licensure fees. (WVXU-FM, Cincinnati, 6/27/24) The Gongwer version of the story offers at least one more option to close the purported gap: downsizing operations to match the downsized mandate of the board. (Gongwer Ohio, 6/27/24)

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Teacher pipelines and shortages have been a hot topic in Ohio the last several years. One of the biggest talking points has been that fewer students seem interested in the profession. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that enrollment in teacher preparation programs fell nationally from 2010 to 2018, and that Ohio posted a decline of nearly 50 percent. State data released last year reflected the impact of these drops, with the number of newly licensed teachers having gradually declined since 2014.

Federal data released this spring, however, indicate that Ohio might have reason for hope. Title II of the Higher Education Act focuses on post-secondary programs that recruit, train, and develop teachers. It includes oversight for teacher preparation programs via state- and institution-level report cards. The 2023 State Reports released this spring include data from the 2021–22 academic year (AY), as that’s what was reported to the U.S. Department of Education by its deadline in October 2023. The interactive site containing this data is worth a look. The tools provided allow for a deep dive into any state, as well as the ability to compare states and yearly data changes.

For Ohio leaders, there are two findings worthy of note. First, Ohio is one of more than a dozen states to see an increase in enrollment at teacher preparation programs. In fact, as Figure 1 shows, the number of individuals enrolling in traditional teacher preparation programs has steadily increased over the five most recent years of data available. During the 2017–18 academic year, just shy of 14,000 prospective teachers enrolled in traditional preparation programs. By 2021–22, that number had climbed above 19,000.

Figure 1: Trend in Ohio’s traditional teacher preparation program enrollment

Second, although the number of teacher candidates enrolling in preparation programs is climbing, the number of program completers has been mostly flat. Figure 2 shows that the number of completers in 2021–22 is roughly the same as in 2017–18, with increases or decreases of roughly one hundred completers in the intervening years. That’s not too worrisome; it typically takes four years to complete a teacher preparation program, so the significant jump in enrollment during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years wouldn’t yet be reflected in completion numbers. But if next year’s data don’t reveal a noticeable bump in the number of completers to match the gradually increasing enrollment numbers, then policymakers and advocates will need to ask some tough questions of preparation programs.

Figure 2: Trend in number of program completers

There are some important caveats to consider along with these findings. As previously mentioned, the federal data highlighted above are from the 2021–22 academic year. Given the lag that’s typical with federal data collection efforts, we don’t have up-to-the-minute numbers through this source. It is possible that, over the course of the last two years, Ohio has experienced even more growth in enrollment in teacher preparation programs, or perhaps there’s been another worrisome dip. Either way, the recent enrollment bumps are good news, as they should translate to more teachers.

Ohio is also in desperate need of more and better data on its teacher workforce. Although federal data are helpful, they might not tell the whole story. There could be state or local data or context that paint a different picture. But if such data do exist, they’re not easily or readily available to policymakers or advocates. In a similar vein, unless the state starts to annually collect and publish data about teacher demand and vacancies, it will remain difficult to understand the true breadth and depth of teacher shortages. Without this information, policy solutions won’t be as timely and effective as they could be. Ohio lawmakers should consider addressing these issues in the upcoming budget.

Even with these caveats, though, there’s reason for hope. The federal numbers look promising for Ohio. And over the last few years, state lawmakers have taken some important steps to bolster the teacher pipeline. These include provisions to make teacher licensure more flexible, to expand the pool of substitute teachers, to establish a Grow Your Own Teacher Scholarship Program, and to create a Teacher Apprenticeship Program. There’s still more work to be done and plenty of ideas that should be enacted. But based on this available information, Ohioans have reason to feel a little less doom and gloom about teacher shortages going forward.   

Last week, I was honored to be invited to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on issues of teacher salaries, school funding, and staff shortages. The committee chairman, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, introduced a bill last year that would set an annual base salary of $60,000 for public school teachers. In my remarks, I said no one will reasonably begrudge paying teachers more. But if the goal is to keep good people in the classroom and raise outcomes for students, higher pay is unlikely to get the job done. Teachers are just as likely to cite student behavior, job-related stress, and feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the job as their reasons for leaving. The simple fact is we’ve made teaching an impossible job for the majority of the nation’s four million full-time teachers to do well and sustainably. A RAND survey of teachers released on the eve of the HELP committee meeting largely echoed all this. 

In my testimony, I quoted Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, who said in a recent interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, “Students who are habitually ungovernable should be removed from teachers’ classrooms so teachers can actually teach and students can actually learn.” It was refreshing to hear a state superintendent say such a thing when teachers are more likely to be asked what they did to trigger the disruption, or told dismissively that students don’t act out when lessons are relevant and engaging.

Brumley’s remark wasn’t merely a casual observation. Last month, he and the state’s Department of Education issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report hasn’t received nearly enough attention, and apparently none at all outside of Louisiana. It deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction and effectiveness and raising student achievement. In retrospect, I should have attached a copy of it to my Senate testimony.

Running just three brisk pages, it features eighteen bullet points aimed at fixing professional development, changing approaches to student behavior and discipline, improving curriculum and instruction, and taking non-academic responsibilities off teachers’ plates. This includes abolishing antiquated lesson planning requirements, limiting cellphone use in schools, and either paying teachers for non-academic work or putting an end to it altogether. “Teachers are asked to be mental health professionals, social workers, and nurses on top of their instructional duties,” Brumley told me this week. “It’s too much. It’s not fair to teachers or the students.”

Brumley began the project earlier this year by pulling together a work group comprised of two dozen teachers, led by Louisiana’s Teacher of the Year, Kylie Altier. “This is not a check-the-box exercise,” he told them; he promised to take on the issues they raised and push their recommendations with the state board of education, the legislature, school board presidents, and district superintendents. Last month Brumley stood alongside Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry at a press conference touting the report and its recommendations. “There is not a job more fulfilling or better in the world, all because of children,” Altier said at the event. “However, the reality is that many teachers don’t feel they have the time, capacity, or autonomy to do this important work in a sustainable way.” Hear, hear.

Five of the report’s eighteen recommendations concern student behavior and discipline, including decoupling student behavior from school accountability systems. Currently, suspension rates can negatively impact a school’s performance metrics, discouraging administrators from removing disruptive students from the classroom. “Teachers are telling me they have habitually disruptive students, and some administrators are leaving these students to disrupt classroom,” said Brumley. That feedback was critical to recent passage of a state law to expel such students from the classroom after three suspensions. “Not expelled to go home,” Brumley explains, “But expelled to alternative sites where they can get the support that they need—academically, behaviorally, socially, mentally—to eventually return to the general school setting and function among their peers.”

Rather than putting the responsibility on teachers, the report says students should have access to trained mental health professionals. And parents’ rights advocates will be cheered by the recommendation that “families should approve and be fully engaged if students are recommended for professional support.” Still another recommendation is limiting cellphone use in schools. Devices should be off and stored away during instructional time.

If there was any doubt about how well the report’s recommendations would play with front-line educators, it was erased when Brumley presented them to 7,000 teachers at the state’s annual teacher summit in New Orleans a few weeks ago. “After sharing the first recommendation, I struggled getting to the next recommendation due to teacher applause,” he said. It took several minutes to get through the list.

Brumley is vowing to continue to press the teachers’ recommendations. “I am over disruptions in the classroom preventing teachers from teaching and children from learning. I’m over excessive bureaucracies, trainings, and paperwork on our teachers. I’m over the art of teaching being taken away from our high-quality, professional educators,” he told me. “It’s time to take back this profession, allowing teachers to be successful, while keeping an eye on the purpose—stronger academic outcomes for students.”

I’ve long argued that if we’re serious about improving student outcomes at scale, then education reform needs to evolve from its technocratic fixation with pulling policy levers to a movement focused on improving instructional practice and getting better results from the workforce we have. Louisiana’s “Let Teachers Teach” is a good place to start.

Peter Liljedahl opens his wildly popular book on mathematics instruction, Building Thinking Classrooms, with a bold gambit. He tells the story of one teacher whose students do well on end-of-course exams and standardized tests and who receives high marks from parents, administrators, and students. Despite such success, Liljedahl thinks that everything she does has to change. If it ain’t broke, break it, I guess.

Liljedahl—who has come to these conclusions after visiting forty classrooms, he reminds us several times—believes these students aren’t thinking. There was plenty of activity, as students were “taking notes, answering questions, filling in worksheets, and starting on their homework.” But apparently none of this activity classifies as thinking. It’s only mimicry. Instead, to Liljedahl, thinking only occurs when students are fumbling to solve problems for which they receive little instruction or guidance. It’s only swimming if Uncle Joe pushes you into the deep end.

In place of traditional instruction and practice, Liljedahl envisions a classroom where the walls are whiteboards and the teacher sets students to solve increasingly complex tasks in small groups. In his ideal environment, schools would “shed the burden of curriculum” to instead busy students with various mind games, brain teasers, and even card tricks (he’s very excited about the card tricks). But alas, abolishing curriculum is a political nonstarter, so teachers must muddle through.

He implements such a scheme in a number of classrooms and declares success because students are thinking more, which he defines as working on problems at wall-mounted whiteboards. This shouldn’t surprise us. If you don’t teach students how to complete a problem, they’ll spend more time trying to figure it out. Whether they actually learn the content is apparently a secondary concern to engagement.

With school-level book clubs, fawning profiles in education media, and conference presentations dedicated to it, Liljedahl’s scheme is popular in itself, but also a piece of a broader movement in mathematics education away from direct, explicit instruction. Invariably called discovery, inquiry, experiential, or constructivist learning, this student-directed philosophy of mathematics instruction is common at the district level—and most influentially, forms the basis of California’s recently adopted mathematics framework.

The fundamental misconception to this approach is that mimicry, memorization, and structured practice somehow constitute lower-order thinking. Liljedahl includes a staircase diagram that proceeds from doing to justifying, explaining, teaching, and creating to demonstrate his point. Merely doing math problems isn’t thinking in his framework.

This hierarchy of thinking almost perfectly mimics (I thought mimicry was bad) the ubiquitous “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” which similarly ranks types of thinking from remembering and understanding up to evaluation and creation. But in the 1956 Handbook where he introduced the topic, education professor Benjamin Bloom created his taxonomy simply to help teachers discuss classroom activities “with greater precision,” not to rank or judge them.

In fact, he refers to knowledge acquisition as the “primary” objective in education. Knowledge and comprehension are the bases of far more complex thinking. If students are busy counting out basic math facts on their fingers, they can’t attend to more difficult math problems. If they’re busy sounding out words, they can’t attend to higher-order thinking, such as evaluating the text in hand or creating their own poems. Factual knowledge, memorization, and comprehension facilitate and allow robust analysis, synthesis, and creation.

Moreover, both mimicry and explanation are the primary means through which we learn. At the edges of human knowledge, we must rely on experimentation and discovery, but these processes are incredibly inefficient. Instead, for everything that society has already learned, we have language to communicate these ideas and models to follow. It took humanity thousands of years to discover algebra, calculus, and geometry. Why expect students to repeat that process when we can just teach it to them?

From these fundamental misconceptions, ineffective classroom practices develop. In a telling passage, Liljedhal lets slip the truth: “The lessons where direct instruction was used allowed more students to successfully complete the task at hand.” I’d encourage him to read that sentence slowly in the mirror and reflect on what he just said.

And decades-worth of research vindicate direct instruction as the most effective model for student learning. In a seminal article on cognitive science and education, three cognitive scientists summarize the research: “The past half-century of empirical research on this issue has provided overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning.”

Look closely at one such study and the reasons grow apparent. Researchers split students struggling in math into either an inquiry or explicit instruction group. In the inquiry group, the teacher presented a problem and relied on group discussion to develop solutions. In the explicit instruction group, the teacher presented a problem, demonstrated how to solve it, and then had students practice numerous problems of a similar type. In the end, those who learned from a more formulaic lesson demonstrated greater proficiency. The researchers posited that the students in the inquiry group encountered both correct and incorrect solutions, and so these methods simply confuse students.

The What Works Clearing House, a research consortium housed within the federal Institute of Education Sciences, published a 2021 practice guide on the most effective, research-backed methods for math instruction. It includes systematic instruction, representation and models, and timed activities, all of which Liljedhal denigrates for no other reason than they don’t constitute “thinking”—which by the end of the book, in a textbook example of circular logic, he seems to only define as activities that he already approves of.

When put into other contexts, the silliness of this approach is self-apparent. Over at Education Next, Ryan Hooper asks us to apply this discovery-approach to other tasks:

What if I told you that lifeguards have a new method for teaching toddlers how to swim by throwing them in the deep end of a swimming pool without supervision, in hopes that they will learn from their productive struggle? Or that grandma’s cookbook would be thrown out because of its limiting step-by-step approach to baking a pie? Or that sixteen-year-olds should discover how to drive from their peers or, better still, on their own?

I call it silly, but it’s an unfortunately serious matter. In the previous half-decade, American education has had to reckon with the reality that generations of students struggled to read because pseudoscientific approaches to early literacy proliferated; teachers just didn’t vibe with the explicit nature of phonics instruction. We’re about to repeat those same mistakes in with math instruction, and the Pied Pipers leading us astray are applauded for it.

You remember the six-foot rule. How could you forget?

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) told us during Covid that social distancing—which it defined in July 2020 as a minimum of two arm lengths between oneself and other people inside and outside—was “the best way to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease.”

Not an “advisable approach.” Not a “precaution.” The best way. Grammar nerds note immediately that “best” is superlative, indicating that this method of Covid mitigation was weighed against other options and declared optimal.

Many of us took this guidance very seriously. We locked ourselves in our homes for months. We stood in line at the grocery store—tightly masked—on giant floor decals stuck six feet behind their predecessors.

And most importantly, we stood by as schools in large swaths of the country remained closed in fall 2020 because it was logistically impossible to fit a whole school’s worth of kids into a building while keeping everyone six feet apart. We were doing our bit for the cause. Patriots, we were.

Imagine our surprise when the Washington Post recently reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci—the adult in the room during pandemic—testified to Congress in January that “it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” and the rule was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

I’m sorry. What? Just sort of appeared? Not based on data?

That wasn’t what we were told at the time. We heard—over and over—that six feet was the standard.

Here are two examples:

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom released his July 2020 reopening plan, it said the state health department “requires that all adults stay six feet from one another and six feet away from children, while students should maintain six feet of distance from one another as practicable.”

He said “six feet” three times in one sentence.

The American Federation of Teachers, in its own reopening guide, stated: “CDC guidance remains clear: There must be a physical distance of at least six feet at all times among students and staff,” and added that “some have been pushing to allow for a distance of three feet for cost reasons, but cost should not outweigh public health guidance.”

Perhaps you find this Monday morning quarterbacking tedious. It was the early days of the pandemic, after all. We were trying to save lives. The overwhelming medical consensus, at that time, favored six feet.

Except that’s not accurate

The American Academic of Pediatrics (AAP) was never onboard with six feet of distancing in schools.

In June 2020—well in advance of the 2020–21 school year and before the statements made above—the nation’s leading organization for pediatricians released guidance saying “evidence suggests that spacing as close as three feet may approach the benefits of six feet of space, particularly if students are wearing face coverings and are asymptomatic.”

Three feet? Wait, there’s more.

According to the AAP, “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” which meant that available measures must “mitigate, not eliminate, risk.”

Translation: Reopening schools for in-person learning was more important than driving Covid transmission to zero. The AAP explicitly said six feet of distancing should not be adopted if it resulted in limits on the number of students permitted to attend each day.

Yet six feet of distancing is what many schools believed they had to provide to prevent outbreaks. As a consequence, most students were kept home for the new school year. In mid-September 2020, about 60 percent of U.S. schools were fully virtual and only 20 percent were operating a traditional in-person schedule. (About 20 percent were hybrid.)

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It wasn’t until March 2021 that a majority of schools returned to full in-person operations. A few districts—such as San Francisco—did not welcome all students at the same time until the 2021–22 school year.

Now, in 2024, we’re seeing a belated acknowledgment that we got it wrong. As three New York Times reporters put it:

A variety of data—about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19—has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

It sure seems like students nationwide should have returned to school—with robust mitigation protocols and serious adherence to them—in fall 2020. Failing to reopen schools wasn’t just a misstep we can spot with the benefit of hindsight; it looks increasingly ill-advised based on what leaders in government and public health knew at the time.

How did reopening go off the rails?

We needed a unifying effort to ensure the pandemic didn’t spoil childhood for our kids. Instead, we got a politicized food fight.

Weeks after the AAP issued its guidance, then-President Trump threatened to “cut off” money for schools that did not reopen. Not helpful.

The pediatricians soon distanced themselves from the Trump administration in a joint statement with the nation’s largest teachers unions reiterating that efforts to resume school must prioritize safety and health. Notably, the statement did not back away from AAP’s position that three feet was sufficient for distancing.

But the damage was done. That was July 10, 2020, pretty much the day reopening fell apart, as AFT President Randi Weingarten later said to reporter Alec MacGillis: “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe. Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.”

Whether you believe Weingarten or not—and many argue she had already been looking for justifications to defend continued school closures—it’s undeniable that reopening became politicized. Subsequent studies found that reopenings were strongly associated with the share of the local vote that had gone to Trump compared to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. It was a Rorschach test.

CDC guidance was not updated to allow for three feet of distancing until March 2021. By then, states like Massachusetts had engaged in their own health research and concluded that three and six feet offered similar protection. The CDC’s voice was almost irrelevant.

While writing this piece, I contacted a number of school and district leaders who braved the reopening process. Not one of them was aware that pediatricians had called for three feet in summer 2020. All they’d heard was six.

Why does this matter? Shouldn’t we move past it?

No. We need to mine the past to handle crises better in the future. Our uneven, divisive reopening—and the massive learning setbacks that came with it—exemplify some of our biggest challenges in education.

This was not an anomaly. We struggle to make good decisions more broadly. We pay lip service to doing things that are “data driven” and “evidence-based,” but our track record suggests we rely more on vibes.

Research had shown for decades that there were problems with balanced literacy as a strategy—particularly for struggling readers. But districts adopted it in huge numbers and made heaps of money for publishers and celebrity academics. Why? Vibes.

Vibes told us to take a hands-off approach to student absenteeism following the pandemic—we didn’t want to come down too hard on anybody—and it bit us hard when missing school became broadly normalized.

I think it’s inaccurate to say our reopening process was guided by science. Our North Star was vibes. Kids went back to school when the local political landscape allowed them to—not when it was safe to go.

Why?

Extreme voices dominated key moments

When one side was saying all schools should reopen immediately without any mask mandates or protections for vulnerable teachers and the other was saying schools should stay closed until everyone had taken a vaccine that had not yet been invented, it wasn’t easy to hear the voices of pediatricians, who were saying: Reopen schools with as many reasonable protections as you can implement.

We can’t silence the extremes. Everybody should have their say. But we need to stop listening to them when it comes time to make decisions.

Need an example? Consider this exchange between Alec MacGillis and NEA President Becky Pringle published in September 2020:

I asked Pringle why her union, like others, had put such emphasis on the virus’s health risks to children, and she said, “When we look at the data and they say only 0.1 percent of kids will contract it and get seriously ill and die, that’s actually around 50,000 children.” I noted that the number of children known to have died of Covid-19 nationwide was around 100. She said her estimate was what could happen if kids did go back to school.

Our institutions lack credibility

We’re at historic lows. Finding out that there was little evidence to support keeping kids six feet apart didn’t help. As Zeynep Tufekci wrote recently, if officials misled people about Covid, “why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?”

Lack of clear communication left communities to slug it out locally with misinformation, partial understandings, and fears driven by pre-existing politics.

It’s time to give the public a full, unsparing accounting of how pandemic guidance was formulated and why something as consequential as the six-foot rule could simply “appear.”

Kids aren’t as high a priority as our rhetoric suggests

Bars and restaurants reopened in many communities before schools, to our lasting shame. The issue was always whether reopening was imperative. If it was, we would have accepted some risk to make it happen. But in many communities, any risk of Covid was determinative. In-person schooling became a nice-to-have. We were told the harm of remote learning would be minimal and that opening schools would harm low-income communities because of the increased Covid transmission that would occur. That was wrong.

States should consider amending their emergency protocols to elevate students and schools above other considerations in future scenarios. How many of the states that delayed reopening too long—and there are more than a few—have ensured it won’t happen again?

Yes, the pandemic was overwhelming. Yes, we did our best under stressful circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes. Now’s the time to own them.