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1. Big thanks to the Dayton Daily News for covering Fordham’s new report on brick-and-mortar charter school performance versus traditional district schools in the first two years after pandemic disruptions. Kudos to reporter Eileen McClory for finding folks to comment on the paper who actually accede to the accuracy of the findings, even as they protest (very gently, if I may say so) that more research into other comparisons between school types would be interesting to see. I couldn’t agree more! (Dayton Daily News, 6/21/24)
   
   

2. Personally, I feel that Akron City Schools has other, more important matters on its plate than joining the voucher groucher lawsuit, but it seems that the elected school board disagrees with me and will vote later today in favor of paying out $40K of their precious state funding to join the folks suing the state over the EdChoice program. All of this while trying to get folks to give them more money via a levy in November and while seemingly actively ignoring that disastrous performance audit that showed the district failing to serve students across numerous aspects of education. The arguments for joining are pretty dubious, too, I think. Would it really sway the judge/strengthen the legal argument if more districts or specific districts were involved? And would it really show the public at large that “we are doing everything we can to bring money into the system and keep money into the system” (per elected board member Barbara Sykes’ logic) if one of families’ educational options were forcibly shut off? (Akron Beacon-Journal, 6/24/24)
   
   

3. Businessman (and former elected school board member) Philip Derrow, responding to the overload media coverage grouching about vouchers lately, published on op-ed in the Dispatch this morning. He says that underperforming school districts are losing families to alternatives (all the alternatives) simply because they want something better for their kids, and that nothing will change for those districts—including the steady decline in enrollment—until their leaders right the academic ship. “I have long argued that the primary role of K-12 education is to successfully impart foundational knowledge to students in literacy, math, the natural sciences, history, civics and the arts,” he writes. “Schools that cannot fulfill that role shouldn’t spend a penny on much of anything else.” And that includes pricey lawsuits meant to eliminate one of those educational options. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/24/24)
   
   

4. Axios Columbus gives us some succinct data to corroborate Mr. Derrow’s thoughts, showing the enrollment declines in Columbus City Schools and Cleveland Metropolitan School District over the last few years. It is worth noting that Columbus City Schools is an OG member of Team Voucher Groucher, having now made at least three annual payments to their lawyers with nothing at all to show for it yet. Even though the payment amount has likely shrunk each year (it’s based on enrollment), this still seems to me like an awfully expensive roll of the dice, especially when the ability to actually give families what they want is already within your power to do…if only you would spend your money on that effort.  (Axios Columbus, 6/24/24)

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Celebrating Ohio students

Kudos to the three Ohio Connections Academy students who received the school’s Community Service Recognition Award this year. Here’s a look at one of those awardees, recent graduate Sage Robinson of Columbus. She is a member of the YMCA Teen Leaders Club, works at the Y’s annual Thanksgiving Day 5K race, and regularly volunteers at the Columbus Metropolitan Library.

School choice takes root

National Public Media outlet WFYI in Indianapolis dug into school attendance data across the state and determined that “school choice has never been more popular in Indiana” than it is right now. The variety of options—as well as the ease of opting in—has increasingly led parents to make choices beyond their residentially-assigned district school. Nearly 1 in 5 Hoosier students attend a school other than their home district today (up from 1 in 13 ten years ago), with interdistrict open enrollment, charter schools, and private schools all popular options. Great stuff.

Enshrining choice

A signature-gathering effort is underway in Colorado. If successful, Initiative #138 will be placed on the November ballot, aiming to enshrine the right to educational choice in the state constitution. Supporters of the effort say that despite decades of bipartisan support for charters and other school options, legislative efforts to protect traditional school districts at the expense of charter schools and parental choice are on the rise. Only by writing it into the constitution will Centennial State families be assured that their right to choose the best education for their children will be fully protected.

Illinois lawsuit

Three charter school networks this week sued both Chicago Schools’ and Illinois’ state education boards, looking to strike down a recently-enacted state law that is intended to make it easier for charter school teachers to unionize in the state. The Illinois Network of Charter Schools, Intrinsic Schools, and the Montessori Network, claim that provisions of the law violate their free speech and property rights, and is preempted by federal labor law. “The act,” they say, “is a state regulatory measure that seeks to advance Illinois’ chosen labor policies in direct contravention of the rights guaranteed to charter schools and their employees under the National Labor Relations Act.”

How to be ready to apply for a federal grant

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently released a video series intended to help smaller charters, especially those operating as their own local educational agencies (LEAs), get ready to compete for federal education grants alongside larger and better-resourced networks. Topics include project selection, building internal capacity, writing a competitive application, planning for implementation, and more. The videos share wisdom and strategies from grant writers with long experience and success. You can check out all the videos here.

*****

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In many states and districts, post-pandemic learning recovery began with literacy. Not only had students fallen behind in reading, but a new body of research pointed to deep flaws in the way reading had been taught for decades.

Now, policymakers and education leaders are beginning a pivot to math, where drops in scores on both the PISA and NAEP exams have been far more acute.

What’s the plan?

One strategy states will assuredly consider is to focus on the continued adoption of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM)—curriculum aligned to college- and career-ready standards. The trend toward these materials in both reading and math accelerated when troubling evidence emerged that disadvantaged students were not getting equitable access to high-quality teaching. Federal recovery dollars then helped to turbocharge adoption across the country.

These materials have been a major step forward for teachers who, for decades, were provided with low-quality textbooks or online resources that didn’t reflect high standards or research-based teaching practices. Introducing an objective quality rating into the textbook adoption process disrupted the K–12 publishing industry for the better and helped to ensure that all students had access to educational programs rooted in high expectations.

But before going all-in on HQIM in math, state and district leaders should consider the implications of an important nuance in how instructional materials are evaluated by EdReports and other ratings agencies: To qualify for an acceptable rating, the materials must focus on grade-level work.

In reading, most students can benefit from grade-level instruction so long as they have passed the decoding threshold. They become better readers when they build knowledge and vocabulary, learn to navigate more complex texts, and exercise critical thinking—all of which can happen regardless of the students’ starting point. A seventh-grader at a fifth-grade reading level can grapple with seventh-grade content and become a better reader. The struggle can be productive.

But in math, specific topics that are taught during one school year are foundational for what’s taught in the next. If students fall behind, gaps in learning can quietly accumulate, making it harder to catch back up. A student who didn’t quite grasp enough about the concept of decimals in elementary school can struggle to understand percentages in sixth grade and then to apply them in seventh. Teachers can have a hard time addressing unfinished learning when their materials are focused largely on grade-level content. Math is cumulative—a fact that doesn’t change when a student happens to move on to the next grade level.

Each day, we see a clear relationship between foundational concepts and grade-level mastery in the data we gather within our supplemental math program, Teach to One Roadmaps. For example, when students attempt to learn the Pythagorean Theorem having already understood concepts such as estimating square roots and classifying triangles, they have a 72 percent chance of achieving mastery. When they don’t know these predecessor concepts, that success rate drops to 32 percent. Similar rates exist for nearly all the topics in the program.

The importance of addressing unfinished learning in math proficiency is also consistent with learning science. Among the most foundational principles of cognition is that students have limited working memory capacities, which can be overwhelmed by tasks that are too cognitively demanding. Once students memorize information and master skills, their brain is free to use their working memory on other, higher-order tasks. But if they don’t master those lower-order skills, their working memory strains and their understanding of new ideas is impeded.

Does this mean that students should instead spend all their time addressing every learning gap from previous grades? Of course not. Instructional time is too limited. If students spend an entire school year working only on unfinished learning, they finish the school year behind again, having missed out on grade-level content that’s foundational to the next year. The cycle continues, year after year, making it nearly impossible for them to ever catch back up.

But it also doesn’t mean that instruction can ignore those gaps. As Dan Weisberg and I argued in 2019, teachers need strategies to both maintain high expectations and address unfinished learning from prior years. Advances in technology, and especially in artificial intelligence, make both objectives more achievable than ever. However, a curriculum that does both would have a hard time qualifying as high-quality instructional materials, since it would not focus on the major work of the grade.

Teachers clearly recognize that students are behind. So do advocates for HQIM, many of whom guide schools to access resources that help teachers better understand predecessor relationships. But guidance documents aren’t the same as instructional materials that could actually help teachers address foundational learning gaps. And since those materials don’t fit a grade-level-only definition, teachers often need to source their own materials to diagnose and address foundational learning gaps and then somehow integrate it into their classroom workflow. Not only is this difficult to do, but it’s what HQIM was supposed to avoid.

What can be done to ensure students have access to both grade-level content and pathways to proficiency?

Some states are broadening their definition of HQIM to allow for more than just grade-level content. Texas recently launched a curriculum review process in math that allows publishers to include both on- and off-grade material so long as the grade-level standards are fully covered. California seems to be on a similar path, as its new math framework is now more focused on grade bands (i.e., grades 6–8), as opposed to individual grade levels. (Most states use grade-level bands in their science standards.)

Others who prefer to hold tight to grade-based core instruction can consider changing the definition of HQIM when it comes to evaluating supplemental resources. Rather than simply applying the same grade-level-only filter, evaluation criteria for intervention solutions can focus on the ability to accurately diagnose relevant skill gaps (no matter how far back), embed rigorous content and assessments, develop custom learning pathways, activate student engagement, and integrate with core instruction. 

High-quality instructional materials help to ensure students have access to an academic trajectory that’s aligned to college and career readiness. But access alone is not enough to unlock social mobility. Mastery is what matters. For as long as the nation’s schools have taught math, they have struggled to serve students who, for whatever reason, are not performing at grade level. That’s been true regardless of the quality of the curriculum or the training of the teacher.

Instructional materials are the most important tool an educator can put to use in the classroom. But as with any tool, quality should reflect both an aspirational vision for what it can do and the science to make sure it can deliver.

The current definition of HQIM sets an appropriately high aspirational vision. But for students to meet that bar in math, their teachers need more than what HQIM—as currently defined—can offer.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

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1. It’s only June and the voucher groucher lawsuit doesn’t get its day in court for five more months. But the court of public opinion is apparently always in session. Case in point: Here is yet more whininess about EdChoice voucher expansion, this time focusing on the apparently horrible situation of suburbanites using them. I know it’s presented as “case closed”, but I’m sure there’s much more to come. (Dayton Daily News, 6/19/24)
   
   

2. Remember that total solar eclipse a while back that was being treated like the impending end of the world? Well, it wasn’t. The same northeast Ohio public officials who were warning for a year of a swarm of eclipse tourists so massive that all schools had to be forced to close for the whole day in order to save the children from…[checks notes] traffic and sewer backups as well as cellphone signal blips…cannot now say how many people really came to the area to see totality. And, frankly, only the Beacon Journal even seems to care at this point. Was all the hysteria worth it? Hotel receipts were up slightly for the full month, and apparently a lot of eclipse-themed ice cream and beer were sold. That’s it. And the kids? Eh, who cares? It’s just school. (Akron Beacon-Journal, 6/20/24)

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Classical education has surged in popularity, with 264 new schools cropping up since 2019, a host of think pieces analyzing its growth, and state-level policy shifts that bolster its expansion. I found myself a proponent of classical education via a roundabout path, backing my way into it after following the research on effective instruction.

In many ways, my discovery of classical education resembles an amusing passage from G.K. Chesterton’s theological classic Orthodoxy. He imagines a seafarer, caught in a storm, who runs aground on England’s shores and mistakenly believes that he has discovered a new land. Each verdant forest and rolling hill appear to him as a new London, when in reality he’s a few miles outside old London. To Chesterton, the story analogizes his conversion. He step by step built what he thought was a unique philosophical framework only to realize he had constructed the outlines of orthodox Christianity.

My discovery of classical education followed a similar trajectory. While teaching, I grew enamored with instructional research and (often in these pages) gradually dismantled my commitment to dubious beliefs, including student-directed curriculum, project based learning, soft-on-consequences theories of discipline, differentiation, and the workshop model for literacy instruction, to name a few. In their place, research led me to such things as knowledge-rich curriculum, worked examples, low-stakes quizzing, direct instruction, and lots of memorization, discussion, and writing.

Lo and behold, I looked around and found myself on the shores of classical education. The research that I thought had led me to novel theories of learning placed me but a few miles outside of old education. That is a long way to the question posed in the title: Yes, classical education has all the elements of a research-based education.

In visiting a number of classical schools and conferences in recent months, I’ve seen many aspects of effective instruction. Elementary teachers practiced phonemes with their charges. Administrators told me about the importance of well-established routines and behavior systems. The Hillsdale Barney School Initiative posts its curriculum online and would make any knowledge-rich or phonics advocate cheer.

The canonical texts of classical education reference many instructional best practices. For example, Mortimer Adler’s The Paideia Proposal emphasizes the importance of didactic instruction (what researchy types call direction instruction). And Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind discusses the need to furnish the minds of children with facts, pictures, stories, and other such knowledge—which sounds an awful lot like schema theory.

Such similarities between research-backed practices and classical education shouldn’t surprise us. Our institutions and traditions don’t appear ex nihilo. Rather, they emerge from trial and error and from generations of inherited knowledge. “Well, that’s just the way we’ve always done it” might well be a good reason to keep doing something that way.

Each element of a traditional classroom serves a purpose. Raised hands allow classroom discussions to flow without devolving into a cacophony of voices, bells and passing periods allow swift and uniform transitions, while desks in rows keep attention forward and temptations to distraction minimal.

It’s unsurprising then that research confirms that “the way we’ve always done it” actually works pretty well. If it didn’t, people would have started doing it differently!

Accordingly, it amuses me whenever I see supposedly innovative schools try to in fact do things differently, only to revert to traditionalism. As I’ve written about here before, the concept of “open classrooms” crops up every few years, wherein students move from learning station to learning station at their whim in giant rooms with flexible seating. And every time, schools end up rebuilding walls, or failing that, teachers use whiteboards and bookshelves to create makeshift boundaries.

With a foot in both worlds, I’ve noticed that the research-based wing of education reform—such as the systems of “no excuses” charter schools or organizations such as researchEd—and the world of classical education have much in common; they share similar ideas and advocate for similar instructional and curricular norms, even if they use different language. If anything, modern proponents of research-backed instructional practices have merely rediscovered an old-fashioned liberal arts education and rebranded it with philosophically positivist vibes.

That being said, while classical education certainly has all the right ingredients for a research-backed educational initiative, the movement would benefit from studies of their particular systems of schools.

For example, charter schools such as KIPP have opened their doors to researchers, allowing them to run various lottery and comparative studies to see how these schools stack up against traditional public schools. The resulting data have made for some of the most forceful arguments in defense of charter schooling. Were Hillsdale’s Barney Schools or the system of Great Hearts Academies to do the same, I’d wager that such research would find they are indeed quite effective and so provide incontrovertible evidence to bolster, justify, and expand the classical education movement.

And if research vindicates that bet, the classical education movement could prove a powerful force in American education. Where some “no excuses” charter systems have compromised on their core beliefs, classical education’s foundation in objective virtues and the Western tradition could provide it a stronger base upon which it can weather political pressures. Moreover, its popularity could positively influence the broader public school system away from its current obsessions with identity solipsism and politically charged content and back towards a traditional, liberal arts education.

Ten years ago, when Florida launched the nation’s second education savings account program, a beautiful thing happened. Friedrich Hayek would have called it “spontaneous order.” Parents, within days, began forming a multitude of Facebook groups where they traded advice on how to access the accounts, how to use them, and what learning options were available in their area.

Parents helping parents. What could be better?

In those days, Florida’s ESAs, then called Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts, were exclusively available to students with special needs. The parents who applied were often highly engaged. They were used to fighting for their children, overcoming objections from decision-makers who misunderstood them, and having to do their own research or assemble their own solutions.

These high-agency parents played a critical role in the early days, helping stave off a teachers union lawsuit and convince legislators to increase funding each year.

Looking back, the self-organized parent groups made other essential contributions. They provided what marketing gurus call “social proof.” They shared their experiences and showed potential skeptics that this new program that allowed them to direct public education funding to options of their choice was legitimate and valuable. They often provided more actionable how-to advice than official information sources.

And they made visible a reality about education that is often invisible. Parents’ social networks often play a critical role in discovering information and solving problems, from finding out which schools are the “good schools” to working the system to get children what they need.

Not every parent has access to the same social networks, however. And demographics often predict who gets left out. This is a problem in education generally, but it’s especially salient with education savings accounts, which place parents in charge of their children’s educational destinies, even more so than conventional school choice programs, since they allow parents to mix and match a panoply of learning options that could include one school, multiple schools, or a fully customized education with no full-service school in the mix at all.

Recently, researchers with Tyton Partners interviewed ESA parents in Florida and Arizona, the two nation’s two most mature programs of this kind. They found that, compared to families making more than $150,000 per year, families earning less than $50,000 were less likely to be aware the ESA programs even existed and less likely to sign up for them.

Among those who did sign up, the lowest-income parents reported less desire to re-enroll. They were less than half as likely as those in more affluent households to indicate they were “highly likely” to recommend the programs to others.

This disparity underscores the value of folk knowledge. Information about what programs exist and how to derive the most benefit travels through social networks, which disproportionately benefit affluent and highly engaged parents. This need has generated growing enthusiasm for organizations that exist to make this information accessible to everyone: education navigators.

A new series of reports from Bellwether, “Charting a Course,” identifies four functions of navigators:

• Understanding students’ needs, interests and goals.
• Identifying potential learning options.
• Addressing logistical barriers to access.
• Building families’ confidence in their choices.

This year, Florida made the nation’s first effort to support education navigators in an ESA program, defining choice navigators in statute and making their services an eligible expense for scholarship families.

So far, roughly 200 individuals have signed up to offer navigator services, many of them tutoring companies or homeschool consultants. Under Florida law, navigators need to show they hold credentials or can document expertise sufficient to serve as a classroom teacher.

These small, parent- and educator-run businesses are mostly helping families with the first two functions Bellwether identified: setting learning goals and identifying options to meet them. Receiving this help from a qualified educator has clear potential value for a parent directing their child’s education.

But it’s no replacement for the value more fortunate parents glean from their social networks: the information necessary to make informed choices, the resources to overcome logistical barriers (from carpools to ad hoc childcare), or connections to fellow families who can help build confidence in their choices.

For one thing, there’s still a chicken-and-egg problem. What about the families who don’t know the ESA program exists or that navigator services are available? What about the families who don’t have ESAs but still need help navigating the hidden curriculum of public education? Some of the most valuable contributions of navigators, in other words, do not lend themselves to fee-for-service business models and will require other forms of support.

Additional Bellwether reports unpack the potential policy and funding solutions that make navigation services sustainable. Each model has its drawbacks. Philanthropy is hard to sustain long-term and at scale. Dedicated public funding relies on the support of policymakers who must weigh competing priorities, like addressing learning gaps exacerbated by the pandemic after federal funding expires.

Some models that get tried don’t work out. The Bellwether report cites Ed Navigator’s efforts to offer navigator services as an employee benefit. There, again, the chicken-and-egg problem surfaced. In economically diverse workplaces (think a hospital that employs doctors as well as food service workers), the more affluent employees were more likely to take advantage of navigation services.

There won’t be a single solution, but each experiment with education navigation our understanding about the mix of solutions that might work. It’s time for states and local community organizations to experiment with diverse models to invest in building the social capital of families who otherwise find themselves left out of the spontaneous order.

Tennessee lawmakers adopted a new school funding formula in 2022, moving from a staffing-based to a per-pupil-based model with the intent of directing more state dollars to students who need them most. A recent report looks at the first year of implementation— 2023–24—to see if this aim was achieved.

The new model is weighted based on characteristics of student need. It begins with a base amount for every student—roughly $6,900—and provides additional funding for those who are poor, English learners (EL), or have special needs, as well as students in schools and districts that are small or located in sparsely populated areas, among other attributes. The weighting for each category varies, but here are three examples: Economically disadvantaged (ED) students receive 25 percent of the base amount added on; EL students receive between 20 and 70 percent add-on, depending on fluency level; and special education students receive between 15 and 150 percent add-on, depending on the intensity of support their learning challenge requires. Students in multiple categories can receive each additional amount for which they qualify on top of the base.

Analysts projected funding levels for each district based on the new categorical allocations and accounting for student and school demographics. Researchers compare these projections to the actual funding received in 2023–24 to see how well the system was functioning: Did it direct more resources to high-poverty students (meaning more progressive in nature)—or did the plans on paper not match up to reality?

Results show that the base amount accounts for the majority of funding dispersed under the formula—75.6 percent—and that, outside that base, the largest category is for ED students, whose needs account for 6.3 percent of total funding. Students with language needs account for 4.4 percent, while the various special education needs together account for 5.7 percent. The different add-ons for district and school attributes account for the remaining 8.2 percent of the total.

On paper, the formula intended a funding advantage between ED and non-ED students of $1,715 per pupil. But analysis of the distribution of funds at the start of the 2023–24 school year—capturing the difference in real-life exposure to per-pupil funding—finds the actual advantage was just $299, a mere 17.4 percent of the formula-intended difference. That reduction was driven by the blend of poor and non-poor students within districts. That particular mix depends on a combination of factors, such as segregation by income, district boundary lines, and how districts are distributed by size—and of course, these are complex interactions.

We’ve long hand-waved away such complexities, in part because we didn’t have better data. But knowing how districts allocate funding to schools and how schools allocate funding to students would help us better account for the aforementioned mix of students within districts—and how that mix interacts with intended funds. Those data tracking efforts are thankfully underway.

This is, of course, not the first time that a well-intended legislative fix did not work out as planned. School funding is subject to geographical, political, and bureaucratic contexts that have long proven difficult to adjust for in a formula. But it is worth the headache to figure it out. This study gets us another step closer.

SOURCE: Christopher Candelaria, Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, and Kenneth Shores, “Weighting for Progressivity? An Analysis of Implicit Tradeoffs Associated with Weighted Student Funding in Tennessee,” Annenberg Institute (October 2023).

Kudos to the Strada Education Foundation for its brand new State Opportunity Index, designed to gauge how well post-secondary education in each state prepares graduates to join the workforce and earn a living wage. The index establishes a baseline for how states are doing in five priority areas: clear outcomes, quality coaching, affordability, work-based learning, and employer alignment. 

The resource begins with a state-by-state return on investment (ROI) calculation for graduates who earn bachelor’s and associate degrees. To determine the ROI, the index compares the cost of obtaining a degree—including paying off student loans within ten years of completion—to the individual earnings that a graduate can expect based on the type of degree they earn.

At the top of the heap, 78 percent of degree-earners in California and New York can expect a positive ROI within ten years of completion. The lowest is Idaho, at 54 percent. Bachelor’s degree holders can generally expect a quicker positive return than their peers with associate degrees, despite the substantially cheaper price tag of the latter. Only three states—New Mexico, Vermont, and Wyoming—show a stronger ROI for associate degree earners than for those who earn bachelor’s degrees. Workers who are making at least $50,000 per year are likely to experience positive ROI in even the most expensive state. Workers earning less than $30,000 per year, on the other hand, will not experience positive ROI no matter how inexpensive their postsecondary education was, as their earnings do not exceed those of a high school graduate with no degree.

The bulk of the index then looks at those five priority areas and provides a rating for each.

The “clear outcomes” priority examines whether the data are available to allow high school students to know what their post-secondary education journey will look like—trade school, university, certification, apprenticeship, military service, etc.—and what types of jobs each option could lead them to. The biggest winners here were states whose data sources connected education and employment across numerous agencies and were (or were becoming) publicly available.

The “quality coaching” priority asks whether college students received timely information and guidance to help them navigate their chosen pathway. Data come from a national survey of college graduates from 2020 to 2023. On the upside, students who reported receiving coaching saw measurable benefits from it. On the downside, all states individually and the nation as a whole ranked very low in providing employment-related coaching to post-secondary students.

The “affordability” priority looks to see how well states eliminate cost as a barrier to postsecondary education. These data were calculated based on the number of hours a college student would need to work annually—while earning their state’s median wage—to cover the net price of their education. California and Washington are the most affordable; Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota are the least. These outcomes, like the ROI analysis, are driven mainly by the median incomes in the various states.

“Work-based learning” describes the number of students who completed an internship (paid or unpaid) during college and the benefits of those internships. Data again come from that big national survey. Graduates who complete a paid internship are much more likely to end up with a first job that requires their degree (73 percent), compared to those who did not (44 percent). They are also more likely to be satisfied with their first job and their progress toward their long-term career goals, compared to students who completed an unpaid internship or no internship at all. Internships were more prevalent for bachelor’s degree students (approximately 50 percent) than for associate degree students (approximately 25 percent). Associate degree students were more likely to have unpaid internships, while their bachelor’s degree peers had paid internships.

Finally, the “employer alignment” area scores each state on the supply/demand ratio of workers for a variety of high-demand and high-wage jobs, including cybersecurity, health care technician, software development, and engineering. The methodology for this important area is restrictive, focusing only on jobs that require bachelor’s degrees (and fewer than three years of experience) and only on bachelor’s degree earners who have these jobs. Additionally, the analysts aren’t able to factor in graduates who move to another state in pursuit of a job after earning their degree or who live in one state but work remotely in another. Since this area is restricted only to talent supply and demand data within a single state, it is probably not surprising to see low grades for all of them.

For each priority, the index gives a raft of recommendations aimed at helping states climb the rankings. My colleague Jessica Poiner has taken a deep dive into Ohio’s ratings and what they mean. All states could benefit from taking these findings and recommendations seriously.

Yet the index itself has room for improvement: expanding its focus to include non-college pathways to opportunity (such as military service and credentialing), looking at how K–12 education impacts these priority areas, and an examination of how remote work figures into economic opportunity, to name just three.

SOURCE: Strada Education Foundation, “State Opportunity Index: Strengthening the Link Between Education and Opportunity” (May 2024).

Cheers

• A fundamental change is sweeping American education wherein public tax dollars fund private, home-, and micro schools. —New York Times

Jeers

• New research finds that Covid school policies did little to slow the spread of the virus, while robbing children of several years’ worth of learning. —Vinay Prasad, Sensible Medicine
• Equity hawks remain committed to the policy of detracking, which creates an unworkable spread of ability levels and so an impossible task for teachers. —Education Week

• A solid program for advanced education should focus on both acceleration and enrichment. —Education Week
• In the aggregate, “gifted” individuals tend to live lives just like everyone else. —David Brooks, New York Times