Two Americas are emerging from the pandemic. One features well-paid, highly educated, technically adept workers who can do much of their work sitting at a computer at home. The virus forced these people out of their offices and into their homes, but they went right on working and collecting their paychecks. Their employers, to their surprise, found that their productivity, if anything, went up, not down. That’s not least because many of them no longer had to sit in cars for two or three hours of commuting. Employers all over the country are now planning to bring their staff into the office only one or two days a week. Pollution from commuting traffic will go way down and the cost of building and maintaining the highways needed to accommodate rush hour traffic will plummet, as will the need for expensive office space. Many managers and professionals are deciding that they will be much better off moving to what have been vacation homes in idyllic locations to take up residence full time while continuing to work. That will bring a new and welcome source of tax revenue to many rural states and perhaps even stem their steady population decline and bring new sources of ideas and skills to seed a new economy. These Americans have employer-provided medical insurance and 401(k) plans. As the Fed poured money into the economy to prop it up during the pandemic, the price of equities soared and a good deal of that money wound up in these people’s greatly enlarged retirement and brokerage accounts. For the Americans I just described, Covid-19 has been an inconvenience, a source of anxiety, an annoyance, and dare I say it, an unexpected financial boon.

And then there is another America. These Americans used to work in restaurants as cooks, servers, and dishwashers; or in malls as clerks and cashiers; or in department stores as stockers and inventory takers and fitters; or as barkeepers or on cruise ships as cleaners, crew, and entertainers. They drive cars, trucks, limos, and taxis, take care of our kids in child care centers and serve as pickers in our warehouses. They butcher our meat and prepare our ready-to-eat frozen meals. They pick and pack our crops. They mine our coal and make our steel. These are the Americans with less than a college education. They are most Americans. The ones who worked in industries decimated by Covid-19, who have lost their jobs and can’t find other ones.

The outlook for those in this second group, the group with little education or technical skill, is rather grim. Many of the jobs they lost will not be coming back, now or ever. Yes, it is true that many American manufacturing firms are diversifying their supply chains and some are bringing work back to the United States. But most of that work is being automated. Automated manufacturing equipment cannot get Covid-19, does not require social distancing and special air conditioning, and will not sue if the company is not strictly following CDC recommendations. Yes, it is true that e-commerce firms like Amazon are hiring, but if you look closely, they are busy automating the work they are hiring people to do. Yes, the restaurants will come back, but a growing number will have iPad terminals for customers to place their orders and automated machines preparing the food. Many that served the commuters will simply disappear. We will get self-driving trucks before we get self-driving cars, but eventually millions of workers will be put out of work by automated machines.

Much of this would have happened anyway, in time, but Covid-19 is rapidly accelerating the speed with which work is being automated. That is in part because big companies have great big piles of cash but not much demand. As they look at the return of demand, they have a choice between investing in hiring people back to do the work or buying machines that will do it. For years and years, the real value of the minimum wage has been declining with inflation. It is long past time to increase the minimum wage but increasing it will just increase the already strong incentive for employers to substitute machines for people.

Automation is not a threat to everyone. Workers who are highly educated and who bring a high degree of technical skill to their jobs are more likely than not to be using intelligent technologies to make them more productive. People who do work that requires them to be in the same place as the person they are serving—like an occupational therapist, a caregiver in a nursing home, or a hair stylist—are not going to be replaced anytime soon by someone at the other end of an internet connection.

Years ago, researchers at Oxford University estimated that 47 percent of jobs in the United States could be done by automated equipment that was available then. Since then, the cost of that machinery has declined and the machinery has grown steadily more capable.

Thirty-one years ago, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued a report titled “America’s Choice: high skills or low wages!” The report was front page news in the nation’s top newspapers and was featured on all the leading networks and cable channels. The thesis of the report was neatly encapsulated in its subtitle. The country had a choice. Advancing globalization and automation had created an environment in which the country could either greatly increase the skills of our workforce or we would have to lower our standard of living.

Everything forecast in that report if we did nothing has come to pass. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there has been no improvement at all in the skills of graduating high school seniors while more and more countries have exceeded us both in graduation rates and student achievement. According to an analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) done by the Educational Testing Service, the basic skills of millennials in the American workforce are the lowest or tied for lowest among all the countries they surveyed. It seems that the country understood that the choice was between higher skills and lower wages and chose lower wages.

The Fed has said that it won’t rest until we get back to full employment. In my opinion, that goal is unachievable without a radical improvement in the skills of the American workforce. Workers in the United States are now competing with countries in Asia whose workforces were largely illiterate forty years ago, but whose high school graduates leave high school now with the equivalent of as much as two-and-one-half years more education than our high school graduates. Our high school vocational education system has almost vanished. Our community colleges have adjusted to the poor performance of our high school graduates by offering a curriculum that would be regarded as a high school curriculum by the standards of any country leading the OECD league tables. They are the primary source now of vocational education in the United States, but the quality of the technical training available in most of our community colleges is far behind the quality of vocational education in Switzerland, Singapore, and many other countries. Our firms are investing much less in staff training than they used to. The Army, which was once a major source of middle-level technical skills for the whole country when young people were being drafted, now keeps the people it trains, so they are no longer available to the civilian economy.

More than half our workforce and easily half of the young people coming out of our high schools are in what amounts to a double bind. If they face one way, they see young people in countries on the other side of the world who are better educated and better trained than they are and are more than willing to work for much less because their wages will go much farther there than they will here. Those are the countries which only a few decades ago were largely illiterate. The global internet, just emerging when the “America’s Choice” report was released, now makes it possible for well-educated people in those countries to work for American firms without leaving either their country or their home. Whereas the first wave of globalization had to do with manufacturing and affected mostly those with very little education, this second wave is largely focused on services and encompasses all kinds of work that can be done remotely. Thus far, the educated in the United States have been largely insulated from the ills of globalization. In this stage you had better be very well educated and highly skilled in the right kinds of work. If you are not, those people in those other countries who are better educated will be coming for your job, too. And they won’t have to move.

But competition that comes through the internet from abroad and from others engaged in manufacturing who have better skills and more education are only part of the challenge. If the less educated in the U.S. look the other way, what they will see is the advance of intelligent machines right here in the United States. The scale and speed of that advance since “America’s Choice” was released thirty-one years ago is simply breathtaking. Since that report came out, there have been stunning advances in natural language processing, machine learning, sensing, the ability of the machines to handle things that are fragile, and more. They can now write music, stories, and news reports and invest money and destroy military targets and drive trucks and mine ore and cook food in ways that rival the best that humans can do and do all these things far better than was possible when the “America’s Choice” report was released.

What has not changed is the American education and job training system. Nor have any of the performance metrics that matter changed in decades, while one country after another plows right past us.

My message to the Biden administration system is very simple. You are focused now, for reasons that are perfectly understandable and with which I agree, on measures intended to put our economy back on track, especially for the most vulnerable and, with respect to education, providing better access for those who have not had access to the services they need and deserve. Ninety-five percent of Americans “favor” or “strongly favor” a national program that would provide a combination of paid work and job training opportunities for those who lost their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Do it. Make it possible for millions of unemployed people to get the training from the nations’ community colleges and other providers that will make them more attractive to employers offering jobs and, while you are doing it, give them the income support they and their families will need to stay afloat while they are in training.

But if all you do is provide better access to the system we have for education and training, you will fail. That system does not have to be improved. It has to be replaced with a much better system, one designed not to meet the needs of the mass production industrial economy for which it was designed a century ago, but the kind of modern economy we have now. The McKinsey report I cited above makes it clear that, because of the pandemic, almost all the growth in employment from now on will be in high-skill, high-wage jobs. That is impossible to do with the education and job training system we have.

So while you are working in the near term to provide income support and a form of what amounts to triage training to the today’s unemployed as an emergency measure, work at the same time to put in place a strategy to create the kind of education and training system the country needs in the long-term to build widely shared prosperity for everyone.

In the nineteenth century, when American ships entered Japan and forced it to open up trade on American terms, the Japanese were furious. Young Turks in the government overthrew those in power. Among the first things they did was put together a delegation to the foreign powers that had invaded them to demand more equal treaties. When they got to Europe, they were astounded at the technical achievements of the countries that had conquered them. They observed that they had been overcome by countries in which the common people had been educated. They came back determined to match their achievements in both education and industry. And they succeeded.

Since then, Singapore, Taiwan, China ,and Hong Kong have done the same thing, benchmarking the best and doing it even better.

At the onset of the twentieth century, we—the Americans—sent emissaries to Europe to see how the best in the world ran their chemical industry, made steel, and shaped their research universities, and we came back and did it better.

At least half the American workforce and an equal proportion of our high school graduates is headed for a very difficult future, long after the pandemic is over. If the Biden administration wants to build it back better, it might consider creating a presidential commission on the skills of the American workforce, and charging that commission with visiting the countries with the best education and job training systems in the world, and then reporting back to the president and the American people on what it would take to build a system here in the United States that would perform as well or better than the best systems in the world. I do not doubt that, if the president created such a commission and put his prestige behind its recommendations, the whole country would pay attention.

Give the commission two years to do its research and finish its report. Involve the people and institutions here in the United States that have done an outstanding job with the triage program in the work of the commission so that they can not only be a source of good ideas and an American sounding board, but can also be ardent supporters for the report of the commission when it is released.

But don’t wait until the commission publishes its final report to begin putting in place some of the key elements of the continuous lifelong learning system this country will need to move forward. Task the commission with making interim reports with findings and recommendations that will enable us to get a jump start on building key components of the system we so desperately need to support broadly shared prosperity for all Americans.

If we want not just to build it back, but to build it back better, that’s what we will have to do. There is not a moment to lose.

Editor’s note: This was published by the National Center on Education and the Economy on its Tucker’s Lens blog.

Improving the technical skills of Ohioans to meet changing workforce demands has been a priority for Governor DeWine since taking office in 2019. During his first budget, he introduced several policies aligned with this goal, including a statewide initiative aimed at helping businesses upskill current and potential employees, as well as funding to help high schoolers earn industry-recognized credentials (IRCs).

The governor’s second budget proposal is now before the House. It follows in the footsteps of its predecessor by prioritizing credentials in both familiar and new ways. Here’s a look at three of the proposals.

Credentials and graduation requirements

During the last budget cycle, the General Assembly enshrined a new set of graduation requirements into law. As part of these requirements, students in the class of 2023 and beyond who do not achieve a competency score on algebra I and English II end-of-course exams can demonstrate their readiness in other ways.

One way is by earning an IRC and meeting other workforce-related criteria. The state maintains a list of credentials that high school students can earn, and assigns them point values ranging from one to twelve. For example, the health care field includes dozens of options. Some of them—such as CPR First Aid—are valuable but don’t necessarily give students a leg up in the workforce, so they’re worth only one point. Others—such as the Phlebotomy Technician Certification—are more rigorous and tied more directly to a career pathway, so they’re worth the maximum twelve points.

Under previous graduation requirements, students could earn a diploma by obtaining a credential, or a group of credentials in the same career field, worth twelve points. The new graduation standards put in place during the last budget cycle, however, were interpreted to mean that students must earn a single, twelve-point credential. The governor’s proposed budget seeks to clarify the requirements and allow students to earn a group of credentials that add up to the twelve points needed for graduation. The budget would also permit students to earn a group of credentials as part of their graduation seals, a separate requirement under the new standards. Both changes should help clarify the state’s expectations and provide students with more options.

IRC funding targeted at high schools

The budget also sets aside money to support the attainment of IRCs. It does this in a couple ways. First, schools whose students earn an IRC or a journeyman certificate recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor can apply for reimbursements that cover the costs of these programs. Schools have up to six months after the student graduates to seek payment, and the budget allocates $8 million each year for this purpose. The budget also incentivizes high schools to offer additional credential opportunities through the Innovative Workforce Incentive Program. This program was originally created in the previous budget, but wasn’t officially established thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting budget cuts. Now, the state is giving it another go. Under the proposed budget, the Ohio Department of Education and the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation would be permitted to use up to $12.5 million each year to establish and operate the program. Schools would be paid $1,250 for each qualifying credential that students earn in the school year preceding the fiscal year. The state is responsible for establishing a list of credentials that qualify, and funds will be prorated if demand exceeds the appropriated amount.

TechCred

TechCred was created and funded in the previous state budget. It was designed to help Ohioans earn technology-focused credentials and help businesses upskill both current and potential employees. Over the last two years, the program has proved immensely popular. More than 900 different Ohio employers were awarded funding during the initial five application periods, resulting in 11,941 credentials earned. It’s not much of a surprise, then, that the governor opted to keep it. The executive budget allocates $25 million in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023. These funds would be enough to support a whopping 45,000 credentials.

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Governor DeWine’s focus on credentials isn’t surprising, given his interest in improving the technical skills of Ohio’s current and future workforce. But it’s praiseworthy to see his office continuing its commitment to career-technical education and workforce development. It’s in Ohio’s best interest to help high schoolers earn meaningful credentials, encourage businesses to upskill their workers, and empower job seekers with more and better training. Fortunately, the proposed budget does all three.

NOTE: On Thursday, March 11, 2021, members of the House Finance Committee heard testimony on House Bill 110, legislation creating state’s next biennial budget. Chad L. Aldis, Fordham’s Vice President for Ohio Policy, gave interested party testimony before the committee on a number of important education provisions in the bill. These are his written remarks.

Thank you Chair Oelslager, Vice Chair Plummer, Ranking Member Crawley, and House Finance Committee members for giving me the opportunity today to provide interested party testimony today on House Bill 110.

My name is Chad Aldis, and I am the Vice President for Ohio Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The Fordham Institute is an education-focused nonprofit that conducts research, analysis, and policy advocacy with offices in Columbus, Dayton, and Washington, D.C. Our Dayton office, through the affiliated Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, is also a charter school sponsor.

HB 110, at least as it pertains to education, is a bit unusual for a budget bill in that it isn’t filled with hundreds of policy changes. We salute Governor DeWine for taking this step and urge you to follow his lead.

Nevertheless, HB 110 still makes a number of significant changes. In the interest of brevity, I’ll offer praise or raise concerns on a few issues without going into too much detail.

School funding formula

Governor DeWine did not propose a new school funding formula in HB 110. Instead, he proposed continued funding at FY19 levels for another two years. Given the work that this chamber and your colleagues in the Senate have done on school funding, the governor’s deference makes sense. I’m optimistic and hopeful that you’ll reach a positive result on school funding before June 30 as schools need to be funded based on the students they’re serving and not through the current hodgepodge of caps and guarantees. We’d urge you to incorporate HB 1 into this bill before passage. To be clear, while we support many of the principles encompassed in HB 1, we think that it can still be improved. My testimony to Chair Richardson’s subcommittee last week reflects what we believe to be the bill’s strengths and weaknesses. I won’t repeat that for this committee but would be happy to expound further if there are questions.

Quality community school support fund

Governor DeWine’s budget increased spending for this important initiative from $30-million-per-year this biennium to $54 million per year in FY 22 and FY 23. We urge to retain this important program that provides up to an additional $1,750 per economically disadvantaged student to charters that qualify based on academic performance. These dollars help narrow funding gaps, provide extra resources that enable charters to serve more students, and make Ohio a more attractive locale for excellent national charter networks. We also encourage you to shift this from a line-item appropriation and include it in permanent law with direct funding from the state.

Transportation for charter and private school students

HB 110 makes a host of changes regarding district transportation of charter and private school students. We support the governor’s recommendations. Everyone knows that transporting students across a city isn’t easy, but over the last couple of years a number of districts (even pre-pandemic) started breaking from their long-recognized responsibility to transport choice students. HB 110 would directly address many of the most troubling issues including placing limits on the use of mass transit for our youngest students, requiring the development of transportation plans each year, providing additional time for choice schools to opt to provide their own transportation, and putting teeth in the law when a district—however rarely—acts in bad faith.

Graduation requirements

After many years of debate, the legislature passed new less test-focused graduation requirements last year. The requirements were the result of a coming together of a variety of groups and represented a smart compromise. HB 110 makes a number of clarifying changes to the graduation requirements and most are okay. However, the changes around graduation seals would be a huge setback.

As a quick refresher, to earn a diploma, students now need to do three things: complete state required courses, show competency in math and English, and earn two seals from 12 options that show mastery or deeper engagement in a specific area. The bill modifies the citizenship and science seals to give them to any student who simply passes a class in the subject area with a B or better. Currently, a student needs to pass an EOC, AP, or IB exam (or pass a College Credit Plus course) to demonstrate a deeper learning of government or science. By awarding a seal for passing required classes, HB 110 would eviscerate any potential benefit seals were supposed to have. It would be preferable to simply eliminate the seals requirement and the accompanying bureaucracy altogether than to make them meaningless.

FAFSA as a graduation requirement

HB 110 makes a variety of changes to encourage and facilitate higher FAFSA completion rates. These are well-intentioned, and we support the underlying efforts. Many high school students incorrectly believe that education post high school is beyond their financial reach. This is often not the case, and if federal discussions around increasing the size of the Pell Grant come to fruition—it could be even less true. The biggest nudge to increase FAFSA completion is making it a graduation requirement. Judging by the experience in other states, this can dramatically increase completion rates. HB 110 contains some exemptions if parents refuse or are unavailable to complete the forms. These are important, so we’d urge to keep these in the bill for families who—despite the nudge being provided by the state—choose to keep their finances private. The goal, after all, is for the FAFSA requirement to open doors to higher education and not be a barrier to high school graduation.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on HB 110.

Last week, the Ohio House passed legislation (HB 67) that addressed graduation requirements and a few other issues in K–12 education. The bill, which is currently being heard in the Senate, gives schools temporary authority to determine whether seniors may receive high school diplomas. This extends an emergency policy enacted last year for the class of 2020 that waived standard graduation requirements because of the pandemic.

While giving seniors a reprieve may be sensible, HB 67 goes a step further by allowing any high school student—this year’s freshman, sophomores, and juniors—to substitute course grades for their end-of-course (EOC) exam scores taken this year. If this sounds familiar, it is. Last June, legislators enacted a bill that allowed high school students whose EOC exams were cancelled to substitute course grades in that subject for the purposes of graduation. For instance, any grade of “C” or above was deemed equivalent to a “competency” score on the key EOCs that students need to achieve to graduate (algebra I and English II). This substitution policy would continue under HB 67.

All this was an acceptable Band-Aid last year when state tests were not given. But it’s nonsense to prolong this supposedly temporary policy. First off, schools will soon be administering state exams, including EOCs, so there’s no need to find a substitute for cancelled exams this year. Moreover, maintaining this workaround only reinforces a misguided notion that course grades are appropriate substitutes for exam scores.

On this blog, we’ve discussed at great length the problems of using course grades or GPAs to meet graduation requirements. Just a few days ago, my colleague Jessica Poiner rightly blasted inappropriate provisions in the budget bill that would permanently allow course grades to substitute for strong EOC scores as a demonstration of mastery in biology, U.S. history, and American government. Why are we so adamant about not allowing course grades to stand in the place of exams? In briefest form, the objections boil down to the fact that the policy undermines basic principles of educational equity and excellence, two of the pillars upon which sound policy rests.

Violating principles of equity. Many educational leaders today emphasize the need for “equity” in K–12 education policies. For good reason. Equity, properly defined, works to ensure that all students are equally challenged to meet rigorous standards. Under Ohio’s conventional graduation requirements, students must pass certain state EOC exams (or meet career-technical or military-enlistment criteria). This adheres to equity principles that, when applied to graduation, expect all students—no matter their background or the school they attend—to meet standard requirements that indicate baseline readiness to succeed after high school.

This important equity principle is undermined when policymakers allow course grades to substitute for exams. There is no assurance that students receiving a “C” in one school versus another are equally competent in a subject. Remember, statewide grading standards do not exist. Every teacher has his or her own criteria. One may have extremely stringent grading practices, while another’s are less challenging. Some educators might include classroom participation and attendance in course grades, and others might lean more heavily on quizzes and exams.

Teachers’ grading practices shouldn’t be micromanaged by the state, but relying on course grades results in double standards. Unfortunately, disadvantaged students are more prone to fall victim to lower expectations, one of the regrettable consequences of policymakers failing to uphold basic principles of educational equity.

Violating principles of excellence. Education policies should motivate educators and students to strive for excellence in all that they do. As a way of encouraging high school pupils to reach their academic potential, Ohio has long required young people to pass state exams before they graduate. The prior iteration of state high school tests, known as the OGTs, assessed roughly eighth-grade-level content. But rightly understanding that the OGTs were a modest bar, Ohio developed a set of more demanding EOC exams that now ask students to demonstrate a greater depth of knowledge and skill in core academic subjects.

In contrast, course grades don’t offer the same incentives for students to master rigorous academic content. For instance, a Fordham study found that more than half of North Carolina students who failed to demonstrate proficiency on state algebra I exams received a course grade of “C” or above—wrongly affirming their mastery of the subject. Unfortunately, there has been no comparable analysis in Ohio, as course grades aren’t even reported to the state. But it’s plausible that thousands of students receive satisfactory course grades but struggle to achieve competency on state exams. Rather than lowering the bar and pushing through students who haven’t demonstrated firm literacy and numeracy skills, policymakers would better serve these young people by slowing the promotional train and asking them to solidify their abilities in content areas that are essential to lifelong success. 

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Some may argue that Ohio’s high school students deserve a free pass because of the disruptions of the past year. We must, of course, recognize these challenges and work to overcome them in the months ahead. But the year’s events don’t give policymakers free reign to discard policies that advance educational equity and excellence. To the contrary, it’s now more important than ever to hold fast to principles that put young people’s long-term best interests at the heart of policymaking.

Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final installment in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic. Find the first four posts here, here, here, and here.

Last week I explored how we might truly personalize instruction and blow up the whole notion of grade levels so that elementary students could learn at their own pace and get what they need as they recover from the pandemic. I argued that it’s harder than it looks, especially at the elementary level, for several reasons. First, much of what the youngest learners are supposed to master in school is how to behave and get along with other kids and adults. Especially after everything children have been through over the last year, we need to put relationships front and center. Thinking of young students as knowledge-building machines is not going to cut it.

And second, I discussed concerns about grouping students homogeneously with other kids with similar readiness levels, as in the redbirds and the bluebirds. That’s because of research showing that students in the lowest groups rarely catch up. Yet teaching students in small groups is not only a time-honored practice, but one of the most obvious ways to individualize instruction.

At the elementary level, then, any approach to personalize learning has to balance attempts to individualize instruction with plenty of opportunities to build relationships and social skills with other kids and adults, while also making sure that the lowest-achieving students are not permanently consigned to low-level instruction and grouped all day and exclusively with other low-performing peers.

To my knowledge, very few elementary schools can claim to exemplify such an approach, but the nonprofit network of Rocketship charter schools can at least make a strong case. As I wrote a few years ago, Rocketship schools use an elegant model that combines whole-class instruction, small groups, individual work, and an extended day, one that provides ample time for core academics, including STEM and humanities, plus social and emotional learning and enrichment activities. Rocketeers get more individualized instruction than most elementary students do—and it shows in their impressive results. But the bulk of their day is spent with the rest of their classmates, or in heterogeneous groupings, which impart important social skills and avoid the downfalls of grouping the lowest performers together all the time.

That said, Rocketeers still progress through the grade levels on a traditional schedule. To bust up the age-old link between a child’s age and their grade level, we have to look to another model I’ve discussed in the past, Montessori. In those elementary schools, grade levels are collapsed so that students spend their days in multi-age classrooms—almost always ages 3–6, 6–9, and 9–12. Students can move to the next level when educators deem them ready. And it works because there’s very little whole-class instruction—though there is a lot of work in pairs and small groups. Mostly, students rotate through stations, at their own pace, to a large degree guided by their own interests. If a five-year-old is ready for second grade content, no problem. It’s the closest thing we have to personalized learning for little kids—and it’s over 100 years old! Furthermore, by keeping kids in the same classroom for three years, children get to build deep relationships with one another and their teachers.

The rub with Montessori is that students have so much choice that it can lead to more depth than breadth. Skilled teachers can encourage students to build skills in the areas to which they aren’t as naturally drawn so that children learn important material that they will need to know one day. But in public Montessori schools especially, where schools are held accountable for helping students reach standards in the Three Rs, there’s an unavoidable tension between letting students follow their interests and ensuring they spend enough time on every content area. To loosen that tension, Montessori teachers are trained to use detailed observation protocols and particular intervention strategies to recognize when students are struggling and to support them without controlling them. But given the number of standards and students in each class, even the most gifted teacher can struggle to see and respond to everything that’s going on.

Wildflower Schools, a non-profit charter network that embraces the Montessori model, is developing creative ways to expand teachers’ capacity to observe to make sure that its pupils get the necessary exposure to a breadth of important topics. They are piloting a fascinating hybrid of high-tech and low-tech that uses sensors to track where students are spending their time—though the learning activities in their classrooms are traditional enough to be recognizable by Maria Montessori herself. Data from the sensors can give teachers and administrators insights into whether certain kids need to be nudged toward reading, writing, math, and other key domains to progress academically.

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What all of this means for elementary schools in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, then, is if they want to allow for personalized pacing, they should:

• Balance the use of small, homogeneous groups, typically for reading or math instruction, with plenty of whole-class lessons so students are learning with kids who are below and above their current readiness level.
• Use high-quality digital programs to individualize instruction, especially given how effective they can be at pinpointing the knowledge and skills students are ready to tackle.
• Offer students the opportunity to rotate through learning stations, Montessori-style, to explore their interests and work on core skills, including plenty of practice in reading, writing, and math.
• Consider multi-age classrooms, which may allow for more targeted instruction without the stigma of “holding back” the lowest-achieving students, while also allowing children to build deep relationships with their classmates and teachers.

None of that sounds easy. Some of it may require waivers from state regulations. But for schools committed to meeting each child exactly where they are, the effort might be worth their while.

One of the best-selling education books of the Covid era is one you’ve probably never read and maybe never even heard of. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons was written nearly forty years ago by Siegfried Engelmann, who passed away in 2019. The cover of the most recent edition claims “more than half a million copies sold,” but one of the surviving coauthors, Phyllis Haddox, was recently told by her publisher that a surge over the past year has now pushed sales over one million.

If you’ve never heard of it, that’s not entirely surprising. It’s a modification for home use of “DISTAR,” the Direct Instruction System for Teaching, Achievement, and Remediation, pioneered by Engelmann and colleagues. I’ve previously described Direct Instruction as the “Rodney Dangerfield of curriculum,” unloved by schools despite a half-century’s worth of evidence in support of its effectiveness. The book was written “specifically to circumvent schools,” says Haddox, who explains that “DI” had been “systematically suppressed, denied, and ignored by school systems, administrators, and colleges of education.” Frustration with the lack of traction, evidence be damned, prompted Engelmann, Haddox, and a third author, Elaine Bruner, to publish 100 Easy Lessons in 1983. It has sold steadily ever since, and periodically returns to the limelight as new readers, almost always outside of the education profession, discover it. For example, John McWhorter described teaching his daughter to read with the book in a 2019 piece in The Atlantic. “My wife and I are not unusually diligent teachers,” he wrote. “The book worked by, quite simply, showing our daughter, bit by bit, how to sound out the words. That’s it. And yet in the education world, Engelmann’s technique is considered controversial.” Simple, effective, and controversial? Go figure.

The current surge of interest is clearly a product of panicky parents who probably assumed their children would be in school five days a week this year and fear they’re falling behind. The recent traction for the “science of reading” may also be aiding the renaissance. Marcy Stein, a DI expert and retired professor of education at University of Washington Tacoma, assumes parents aren’t closet connoisseurs of curriculum. “For the general public, it’s about phonics,” she says. “If you go to Amazon and say ‘phonics programs,’ my guess is it’ll come up.” She’s exactly right. When you type those words on Amazon, 100 Lessons is one of the top-line selections. But with over 10,000 reader reviews (far more than other books in the search result), a “#1 Best Seller” icon, and the non-intimidating title—a bit of marketing genius—it stands out as an obvious and intuitive choice. Type in “how to teach my child to read” and it pops right to the top.

The intriguing question as we gear up to reopen schools and make up for unfinished learning is whether the book could work as well in schools as it has for motivated parents. Here, even Direct Instruction enthusiasts are chary. The book is an adaptation of the DISTAR “Fast Cycle” program, essentially a compressed version of the first two years of the Reading Mastery curriculum; thus it might not lend itself to general classroom use. “For the kids who can handle it, it’s acceleration,” Stein cautions. “But the pace is quite challenging for some.” Haddox suggests any large-scale implementation in a school setting should include training and monitoring.

One possibility is using or adapting 100 Easy Lessons for one-on-one or small group tutoring, which will almost certainly be a cornerstone of post-Covid recovery interventions. Elsewhere in these pages, Mike Petrilli wraps up his five-part series on “envelope-pushing strategies” to help little kids who’ve lost a year or more of schooling, including “truly personalized” instruction, “blowing up the whole notion of grade levels,” and most controversially (in my opinion), adding an extra year, “a second 2nd grade,” to high-poverty elementary schools. At the risk of picking a fight with the man who signs my paychecks, I’m generally not a fan of Big Ideas and moonshots. Miseducation tends to be less a matter of too little ambition than poor execution. More of what hasn’t worked makes no sense. It makes even less sense to add layers of complexity to teachers’ jobs in schools where there’s been little evidence of success with less challenging instructional strategies.

With the bluntness that seems second nature to Direct Instruction advocates, Stein admits she’s unimpressed with most school-based tutoring programs. “Typically, volunteers come to a school once a week, sit down, and read with a child. They’re more like mentoring programs than tutoring in reading,” she says. “You’d have to be not that to improve reading performance.” Another long-time DI advocate, Dr. Susan Syverud, a former professor at the University of North Florida, describes using 100 Lessons with great success among teacher candidates she worked with in a Title I school in Jacksonville, Florida. “They were required to use it, but I was able to train them, provide support, and monitor progress,” she recalls. “We primarily tutored the lowest-quartile first graders and had phenomenal results.” Echoing Stein’s caution, Syverud sounds guardedly optimistic about tutoring at scale. “I have found that some people pick up 100 Easy Lessons and implement it well, and some do not. I would want any implementations of this to have some supervision, coaching, and progress monitoring,” she tells me. “But one coordinator with lots of volunteers? That’s not a big investment.”

Indeed, at $14.99 per book, you could buy ten copies for every one of the 20,000 Title I elementary schools for less than $3 million—not even a rounding error on the $120 billion schools are slated to get in the newest Covid-19 relief package from Uncle Sam. Heck, you could buy a copy for every Title I school parent.

A proven track record half a century long. And a million parents can’t all be wrong. Where resources are being made available for early elementary tutoring, thirty-five years after publication, perhaps the time has come for 100 Easy Lessons to be used in schools not in spite of them.

Centering the work of charter schooling and authorizing in communities means listening to the aspirations and needs they have for students—especially communities that have been overlooked and not prioritized, like communities of color, those from lower-income tax brackets, and those with disabilities—and delivering with, not to, them.

Working with communities is not just the right thing to do. It works to produce better, more sustainable results for students and communities. I have experienced it first-hand as a charter school authorizer in Indianapolis.

One of the most successful schools that my team authorized was The Excel Center, which opened in Indianapolis in 2010 in partnership with Goodwill Industries to meet the need of overage, under-credited students who often were trying to get their high school degree for a second or third time. The genesis for the idea came from conversations the Indianapolis charter authorizing team had held with members of the community, listening to their concerns that current educational options relied too heavily on the GED as the only means for adult students to finish high school. That conversation ultimately led to today’s growing network that now comprises fifteen Excel Center locations throughout Indiana, and more in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and D.C.

A second example of successfully authorizing a school that came from the community is the Tindley Accelerated School. Since its founding in 2004 and expansion over the years, the school has been among the highest-performing networks of schools in Indianapolis, focusing on getting students into and through four-year colleges and universities. Tindley wasn’t conceived out of the blue. It was the first step of a community-initiated effort to revitalize a neighborhood, which included residents, local educators, civic organizations, city officials, and philanthropists. That work, aided largely by the quality of Tindley’s middle and high schools, has attracted reinvestment in the community.

In a recent Fordham Institute essay, Chester E. Finn, Jr. described the complicated realities of working with communities and offered a welcome push on several organizations, including the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, where I am president and CEO. I’m thankful for people like Finn, who are willing to highlight the potential unintended consequences of engaging communities in school improvement, and especially the risks of doing it poorly. It’s a mistake to miss important learnings from past efforts or tune out people who ask tough questions.

I walked away from his piece, not with second thoughts about centering communities, but with an enhanced commitment to doing it wisely, with a deep level of humility, and with the knowledge that figuring it out together will be complicated.

Make no mistake, working with communities does mean upending traditional power arrangements and shifting power to those who live there. But it doesn’t mean shifting power to structures, entities, and people who have failed communities and students—especially Black students who look like me—for generations. The loudest voices in the room do not always speak on behalf of kids and communities. Families, students, and neighborhoods must be able to voice what their kids aspire to, and have the power to make it so.

Competing interests in communities are real; no community is monolithic. Who decides whose voice is heard is a big challenge. Creating new power structures that also fail kids and communities is a real threat. Anyone who tells you that they have easy answers to these complicated, value-laden questions isn’t being candid. Those of us in positions to help deliver on community aspirations and needs must start from a place of humility. We might have critical policy expertise, but we also don’t know the exact right path and need to start by listening more. That also means perpetually asking questions of a lot of people in communities, prioritizing the voices of often unheard people there, and muddling our way to workable, albeit imperfect, solutions together that ultimately lead to better life outcomes for students.

In too many political and policy debates, the tendency is to go black or white, leaning on pendulum swings. We either are in school every day or doing fully remote learning during Covid-19. We either focus on reading and writing or pursue racial justice. We either listen and act on community aspirations or we have excellence. But pursuing either-or thinking is damaging and unhelpful. While we can never compromise our values—and excellent schools are among our values—finding the both-and is usually the best, if hard-to-implement and hard-to-sustain, solution. That’s where the intricacies of implementation exist, and frankly, where policy wonks, like Finn, myself, and others, can listen to communities, roll up our sleeves, create new kinds of coalitions, and figure out the right policy levers that speak to common values and get the results we all want for kids.

Among the most challenging areas, where competing interests and power dynamics are the most visible in charter schooling and authorizing, is the idea of closing a school. Closing a failing school is extremely important to ensure students, current and future, do not get stuck in low-performing schools that do not educate them. But it’s not an easy nor simple process, especially when working with communities who may value and support schools that others would deem a failure.

I remember one instance as an authorizer where I had to lead the closing of a school. Many families were well served by that school, and those families wanted it to stay open with some modifications. But there were far more families who weren’t well served, many of whom had already left for other options, whom we also listened to. Add in that the owner of the school’s facility was a relatively small, local community organization that needed the revenue from the facility, but also wanted residents to be well served academically. Competing interests indeed.

We did the right thing by announcing the closure of the school nearly a year and a half before its contracted end date, so that families could find a better alternative far in advance of the school closing. But if I could go back, we could have done more with the community. For instance, we should have focused more intently on a replacement strategy earlier—that is, finding a new and better operator in the area that could build a better school based on the community’s aspirations for their children. We could have listened better to parents and students to find ways of maintaining the good things from the closing school to continue forward with a new operator; or ensure the facility could be used for community advancement, if not a school; or advocate more forcefully for policy changes so that students from closing schools would have admissions preference to other schools of their choice. (Fortunately, this exists today, but didn’t at the time.)

When charter school authorizers—and anyone in education—see themselves, not as distant authorities who don’t want to get involved with communities (which NACSA sometimes sees among authorizers who claim getting involved “isn’t their job”), but as people who can work with communities to make their aspirations a reality, we have an opportunity to create outstanding options for kids and to ensure that we are delivering with, not to, communities. Will this be complicated, as Finn cautions? Yes. Must we learn from successes and mistakes in our past? Yes. But that cannot replace the moral imperative of working to deliver on the smart ideas and with the talented people in communities across the country. Sign me up for the challenge and complexity if it means we can have community- and life-changing options like Tindley and the Excel Centers.

Research and common sense suggest that teachers are the biggest school-based factor influencing student learning. A landmark study conducted in 2004 shows that principals matter hugely, too, concluding that “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school.” But how has the principal workforce and role evolved since this seminal study was conducted nearly twenty years ago? And to what extent do principals affect student achievement and the schools they oversee today?

An extensive new report explores these questions and more, drawing on two decades of data. Specifically, it asks: How has principalship evolved over the past twenty years, in terms of the policy landscape and workforce composition? How much do principals contribute to student achievement and other school outcomes, such as absenteeism and teacher turnover? And finally, what are the principal characteristics, skills, and behaviors that best promote student learning?

In terms of the shifting policy context, researchers explain that changes in federal policies in recent decades, such as No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act, placed greater emphasis on school accountability, student achievement, and testing. This facilitated the collection of more and better student data. But as the researchers explain, it also “changed how they focused time and other resources on tested subjects and grade levels. Principals also experienced higher levels of job stress and a higher turnover rate.” The study also finds that at state and local levels in recent decades, principals have spent more time in classrooms and away from other managerial responsibilities. In particular, “the widespread implementation of educator evaluation systems based on multiple measures of performance has represented perhaps the largest shift in school principals’ roles.”

Next, researchers explore principal composition and find that, based on nationally representative data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, principals today are more likely to be female and racially diverse, but are less experienced than their predecessors, especially those working in high-need schools. They also have not kept pace with changes in student demographics in recent decades, leading to “growing racial and ethnic gaps between principals and the students they serve,” with Hispanic and Black students being the least likely to attend a school led by a principal of their same race or ethnicity.

As to the burning question of how principals impact students, researchers analyzed six studies with data for over 22,000 principals across four states (North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas) and two districts (Chicago and Miami-Dade), and estimate that the impact of replacing a principal at the 25th percentile of effectiveness with a principal at the 75th percentile would “increase annual student learning in math and reading by almost three months.” As the researchers stress, this is almost as large as the effect of having a similarly effective teacher. They also contend that principals’ effects “are larger in scope because they are averaged over all students in a school, rather than a classroom.”

Based on their analysis of prior studies, researchers also find that principal effects extend beyond student achievement, positively impacting student attendance, suspension rates, and teacher satisfaction and retention. While not nationally representative, this analysis confirms what many of us working in the education world have long suspected: Principal quality matters, and it matters a good deal.

Finally, in terms of what drives principals’ contributions, they conclude that the most effective principals don’t just engage instructionally with teachers, they also foster a productive school climate, facilitate productive collaboration and professional learning communities, and manage personnel and resources strategically. Given the big focus on instructional leadership in recent years, this finding has big implications for leadership development and professional development programs.

As Will Miller, president of the Wallace Foundation that funded this report, underscores in the study’s foreword, “Principals do not create value directly. They deliver results indirectly, by enabling others to achieve more.... This [study] suggests that, rather than thinking in terms of either/or, we need a balance of investments in developing great principals and great teachers.”

Indeed, for parents, advocates, and policymakers seeking to accelerate student achievement, strengthening principal leadership, diversifying the principal workforce, and figuring out how to retain top principals is a great place to start. And as our nation continues to face myriad educational challenges posed by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, there’s never been a more pressing time to do so.

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom, Anna J. Egalite, and Constance A. Lindsay, “How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research,” Wallace Foundation (February 2021).

• “Thomas Jefferson High School students and parents are fighting changes to admissions standards. Here’s why.” —Washington Post
• “Biden prepares blitz of action to prod schools to reopen.” —Politico
• Harvard assessment expert Andrew Ho advocates for using state tests this year as a kind of educational census. —EdWeek
• An inside look at the Biden administration’s struggle to find a coherent position on school reopenings. —Washington Post
• Jennifer Butterfoss and Patrick Wolff, parents in the San Francisco district, want a school board that’s responsive to community needs—not union interests. So they are pushing for mayoral control. —San Francisco Chronicle
• Every year, the SAT identifies thousands of low-income and minority students who can handle the rigors of selective colleges but otherwise would have been overlooked. Keep it in the admissions process. —Andrew Sullivan
• Aggressive antiracism isn’t just affecting high school students. Now grade school children are being taught to check their privilege—and their peers’. —Wall Street Journal
• The pandemic has created a crisis for teenagers’ physical and emotional health. —ProPublica
• Elite private schools are now indoctrinating students to reject capitalism and embrace critical theory. —Bari Weiss
• The superintendent in Providence, Rhode Island, is targeting teacher seniority in a bid for more diversity. —Boston Globe

As it has for much of the past two years, the Ohio House is currently discussing the latest version of the Cupp-Patterson funding plan, a significant rework of the state funding formula. The legislation (House Bill 1) may again sail through the lower chamber this spring, but whether it passes the Senate and garners the signature of the governor is another matter. While the plan has its strengths, a number of questions remain, most notably around its estimated $2 billion per year price tag.

The plan’s overall cost should be a first-order concern, but its policy details also merit attention. Lawmakers shouldn’t enact a system that future legislators will deem unsustainable and need to fix down the road.

With that in mind, the following piece examines one important aspect of the Cupp-Patterson model that hasn’t received much scrutiny thus far—its approach to setting a “base amount.” Note that this essay doesn’t address other concerns, already discussed on this blog, such as the absence of reforms that encourage wise spending or the inequitable treatment of charters. A forthcoming piece will tackle two additional issues: guarantees and interdistrict open enrollment.

Determining a base amount

One of the foundational elements of most funding formulas is a base amount, which is usually seen as representing the minimum cost of educating a typical student without any disadvantages or special needs. A distinctive feature of the Cupp-Patterson model is its extensive calculations that attempt to capture the cost of educating students, which is then used to determine districts’ base funding.

Before going any further, it must be noted that there is no settled way of determining the cost of educating a typical student. Analysts and consultants have developed a range of approaches that rely on different assumptions and methods, and that sometimes produce wildly varying results. For instance, during the early 2000s, two teams of analysts worked to gauge the costs of educating students in Texas and came up with estimates that were billions of dollars apart and equivalent to more than 10 percent of the state’s total education spending.

Despite the unsettled “science,” the Cupp-Patterson developers took a stab at estimating the costs and chose to implement an inputs-driven model that focuses on staffing ratios and salary data. The table below displays the major components of the formula. For instance, the framework provides one teacher per twenty-five students in grades four through eight. Thus, if a district has 100 students in those grades, its costs for that component would be four teachers times the average statewide teacher salary plus benefits. These computations, which would be written into statute, directly determine districts’ base amounts.

Table 1: Base cost calculations under the Cupp-Patterson funding plan

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Note: Some elements that don’t rely on staffing ratios are omitted (e.g., supplies, building maintenance, and professional development). Districts are not required to actually implement these ratios as they are used only to calculate costs.

Because districts have different enrollment patterns, the Cupp-Patterson plan yields variable base amounts. According to LSC, these range from $7,000 to a whopping $15,000 per pupil, depending on the district. The base amounts of most districts (86 percent) fall between $7,000 and $8,000 per pupil, with a statewide average of $7,199 per pupil. This is a major shift from Ohio’s current approach to base funding, one that is also used by a majority of states. Rather than including cost calculations, the present formula sets a fixed amount that applies to all districts (currently $6,020 per pupil).[1] 

It’s also important to note that, although the base amount applies to the core component of the state funding formula, it does not reflect the entirety of district revenue. Ohio districts receive billions more from state “categorical” funding (e.g., extra dollars for special education and economically disadvantaged students), supplemental local property taxes, and federal aid.

Concerns with the Cupp-Patterson approach

There are tradeoffs to these different approaches. The current formula’s fixed amount could be viewed as positive feature. It’s a straightforward and transparent way of setting the base, as it allows anyone to examine state law and find every district’s base printed in black and white. A fixed amount could also give legislators more budget flexibility. A simple change in dollar amounts can address a fiscal crisis, adjust funding for inflation, or boost expenditures above and beyond inflation. In fact, if legislators are intent on increasing education spending, they could simply ratchet up the current base amount to, say, $6,800 per pupil. On the other hand, the biggest criticism of a fixed base is that it’s often seen as an arbitrary figure, one that isn’t necessarily tied to the cost of educating students.

Now to the Cupp-Patterson plan. The advantage of this model is that it more explicitly links base amounts to costs, something that its advocates have routinely pointed out. They have also contended that putting the entire cost model into state law is more transparent, as one can see the “cost drivers” of education. Yet there many potential problems with the method, as well.

1. The wide variation in base amounts might lead one to question the assumptions that are inherent in the cost model. For example, why do a few districts have such astronomical bases—up to $15,000 per pupil? Which districts are the outliers? (Honest questions, as I have not seen individual district’s base amounts reported.) Since there is no fixed amount set in legislation—only calculations—it’s hard to decipher what exactly is happening inside the black box. 
2. The ratios in the cost model are arbitrary and could easily be changed by future legislators. For instance, the student-to-teacher ratios are grounded in nothing more than subjective judgments. As a result, legislators could face intense pressure in future years to reduce ratios and thereby increase the state’s funding obligations. Though less likely, they might also increase the ratios in an effort to cut funding. 
3. The use of statewide average employee salaries and benefits is also questionable. For one, these data reflect compensation derived from total district revenue in FY 2018—not dollars received specifically through the base funding formula. Moreover, akin to the ratios, the use of statewide averages could also be viewed as an arbitrary decision, not one tied to the actual costs faced by each district. For instance, districts in pricier areas of the state may face higher staffing costs than the average district. That being said, using a district’s own salary data in the model risks another set of problems, as it directly incentivizes inflated payrolls (see point five). 
4. The cost calculations would need to be recomputed at some point, likely putting the state on the hook for further spending hikes in future years.[2] House Bill 1 relies on FY 2018 statewide employee salary and benefits data to compute districts’ base costs—those data are the basis for the $2 billion per year cost that takes six years to fully implement. But what happens when the phase-in period ends? In all likelihood, there will be calls to recompute costs using up-to-date salary and benefits data. In that case, the state will be staring down another spending increase because it hasn’t gradually increased funding with inflation. 
5. Although not an immediate concern because House Bill 1 relies on data from 2018, a model driven by employee salaries and benefits could create incentives for districts to inflate costs. If districts know that the state will regularly recompute costs, they have good reason to push salaries and benefits upward. Why? The state will be obligated to spend more on education—a good thing for school employees—if salaries and benefits are on the rise. At the least, there will be less incentive for districts to contain payroll costs when those are passed on to the state.

While many have praised the base-cost model of the Cupp-Patterson plan, legislators should step back and rethink whether putting the entire cost model into state law is a wise idea. If they feel a need to link the base with costs, they could disclose the calculations in a report. But putting the whole framework into statute might leave future legislators dealing with runaway spending—or facing cries (or litigation) arguing that they are failing to fund the state’s school funding model.