News from the pre-pandemic era

Three Ohio school districts in Ohio – Cleveland, Dayton, and Toledo – won a court victory this week in a very old case. As Jeremy Kelley explains it in the Dayton Daily News, each district was awarded millions of dollars by a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge, who ruled that the state “improperly calculated funding tied to charter school enrollment” from 2004 through 2007, “as well as ‘add-in students’ who enrolled in charter schools after the state’s annual October enrollment count.” The process “resulted in [those districts] getting less funding than called for in the state formula.” No word yet on whether the state will appeal the verdict whose legal wranglings have gone on for a decade already.

Meanwhile, in the present day

Here’s a terrific students-eye view of the first week of this year’s virtual classes at various schools in Cuyahoga County, including Parma Community School. This is an honest and hopeful assessment of the problems and opportunities as described by the students in their own words.

Virtually the new normal

The same tone of optimism pervades this story, looking at the first month of school for one Huber Heights fourth-grader attending an online charter school for, it appears, the first time in her school career. Her likes and dislikes are those of a typical fourth grader, although she seems surprised at how much she enjoys the lack of classroom disruptions she was used to in a brick-and-mortar school.

Pandemic pods

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently took a look at the way charter networks across the country, including Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, were adapting the “pandemic pod” idea to support their families with remote and hybrid learning. Some great work on display here in difficult times.

Ohio’s K-12 coronavirus case dashboard debuts

This week, Governor Mike DeWine rolled out Ohio’s dashboard for reporting Covid-19 cases in district, charter, and private schools across the state. Coverage of the dashboard’s debut is here. You can take a look the dashboard itself—updated weekly—at the Ohio Department of Health’s website.

1. In case you missed it earlier this week, Fordham’s Chad Aldis testified before the Senate Education Committee urging the resumption of state testing this school year. (The Center Square, 9/16/20) And Chad wasn’t the only one. He was echoed by Ohio Excels president Lisa Gray, representing the business community in the state. (Gongwer Ohio, 9/16/20)
    
2. In case I don’t say it enough around here: Jeremy Kelley is da bomb. He has, once again, taken the meager data released on this year’s school report cards and managed to craft a super interesting piece comparing local districts on graduation rates, credentials earned, honors diplomas issued, dual enrollment credits, and remediation-free ACT/SAT scores. This is all lagging data, unfortunately, so a bit out of date, but fascinating nonetheless. I will reiterate what I said Wednesday: the lack of test-based data from 2019-2020 allows for one positive outcome: an ability to focus squarely on what data we do have without the smokescreen heat that comes from the other stuff. (Dayton Daily News, 9/17/20) Speaking of which, it is usually those data-filled report cards that editorial boards are quick to say don’t mean much. What are we to make of the fact that editors at the Toledo Blade don’t think the new data-vacuum report cards don’t mean much either? I think they just don’t like report cards at all. (Toledo Blade, 9/18/20)
    
3. Speaking of Toledo City Schools, Superintendent Durant this week announced that the currently all-remote district will begin transitioning to a hybrid in-person/remote schedule in early October. They are the largest district in the state so far to make such a change after the school year began. It is interesting to note (and interesting to me that it is only noted in the very last paragraph, after the info on sports) that families will not be allowed an all-remote option if they had not already done so via the Toledo Virtual Academy before the start of the year. Bold strategy, IMO. (Toledo Blade, 9/17/20)
    
4. South-Western City Schools here in central Ohio has also begun the transition from all-remote to a hybrid learning model. Here’s a nicely-detailed look at what the in-person part of that hybrid model looks like so far in one district elementary school. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/18/20)
    
5. Even if this remote/virtual learning lark proves fleeting, we can only hope that the digital divide, both urban and rural, will end up closed forever due to efforts undertaken during the pandemic. Case in point: the awarding of 951 BroadbandOhio Connectivity Grants to districts and schools across Ohio earlier this week. Awesome news. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/17/20)
    
6. Finally this week, we have some very old news reaching us from pre-rona days. Three Ohio school districts in Ohio won a court victory this week in a very old school funding case. Because he’s da bomb, as previously noted, and because Dayton City Schools was one of the victors, I’ll let Jeremy Kelley explain it for us: a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge ruled that the state “improperly calculated funding tied to charter school enrollment” from 2004 through 2007, “as well as ‘add-in students’ who enrolled in charter schools after the state’s annual October enrollment count.” The process “resulted in [those districts] getting less funding than called for in the state formula.” (Dayton Daily News, 9/17/20) The legal wranglings in this case have gone on for more than a decade. No word yet on whether the state will appeal the verdict…nor any discussion of how much the districts’ lawyers stand to reap from the big win $23.67 million windfall. Also included in the win windfall: Cleveland Metropolitan School District, to the tune of $13.7 million… (Cleveland.com, 9/17/20) …and the having-a-very-good-week-indeed Toledo City Schools, cha-chinging up $4.8 million. (Toledo Blade, 9/17/20)
   

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In the last six months, as the nation has struggled in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been a lot of controversy and disagreement over what schools need and how they should reopen. As we head into election season, the controversy will probably only increase. But there’s one thing that everyone should be able to agree on: Students need talented teachers now more than ever.

To be fair, schools have always needed talented teachers. A multitude of research has shown that quality teaching is necessary for student achievement and for positive labor market outcomes, so saying that teachers matter when it comes to closing achievement gaps isn’t exactly a startling revelation. But as Covid-19 fallout continues to build, and recommendations for how schools can mitigate learning losses pile up, there aren’t a whole lot of people talking specifically about beefing up our teaching force with as many talented educators as we can find. Ideas like high dosage tutoring and summer school are important. But the sheer size of coronavirus impacts means we need to invest in a solution that can reach every community in the coming years—and teachers are one of the few things all schools have in common. 

Although effective teachers are the key to helping students everywhere catch up, some communities will need them more than others. The pandemic’s persistence has forced hundreds of Ohio schools to reopen this fall fully remote. Starting a new school year with distance learning is hard no matter who you are. But it appears that certain groups of students are more likely to be stuck with distance learning. Nationwide, minority students are more likely than white students to be starting the new year online. And in Ohio, many of the districts with the highest concentration of low-income students—Cleveland and Columbus for instance—are fully remote while neighboring affluent suburbs provide in-person options.

To be clear, some of these differences are due to parental preferences. And in many places, distance learning is still the safest option. But being physically present in school is critical for students, not just in terms of academic learning, but also for healthy development and well-being. In affluent districts, parents have options that can mitigate the loss of school. Families in underserved communities don’t have those options, so their schools need to invest in an intervention that promises the best results to the most students—finding, hiring, and retaining high caliber teachers.

Until we get results from reliable and comparable tests like state assessments and NAEP, we won’t have hard data about just how much ground low-income and minority students will need to make up. But there are indications that achievement and progress gaps have grown considerably. The 74 recently reported that when schools shut down this spring, participation and progress on Zearn Math, an online math program for students in grades K–5, decreased among students from low- and middle-income communities but increased among those from high-income areas. David Williams, the policy outreach director for a research group based out of Harvard University known as Opportunity Insights, confirmed that the data seem to suggest school closures have widened existing learning gaps. He told The 74: “This crisis is really impacting low-income kids and low-income communities in a real way that could spell trouble down the road.” 

Obviously, Zearn Math is just one example. But so is a canary in a coal mine. In low-income and minority communities, students are more likely to still be learning remotely, and we know distance learning didn’t work. Existing achievement gaps were already wide. A lack of academic opportunities during this pandemic almost certainly expanded them. Research suggests that when it comes to achievement and growth, teachers matter most among school-related factors. To make up for lost ground, underserved schools need talented and effective teachers more than, well, anything.

Unfortunately, hiring and retaining talented teachers is far more complicated than it sounds, even in normal circumstances. The pandemic hasn’t just impacted student learning, it’s also impacted the current teaching force and the pipeline of prospective teachers. It’s going to be difficult for schools to find the talent they need, but not impossible. Stay tuned for a closer look at how to make it happen. 

Note: Today, the Ohio Senate’s Education Committee continued hearing testimony on SB 358 which would, among other things, make critical changes to the state’s testing and accountability system in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Chad Aldis, Fordham’s Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy, testified as an interested party on certain aspects of the legislation. These are his written remarks.

Thank you Chair Lehner, Vice Chair Brenner, Ranking Member Fedor, and Senate Education Committee members for giving me the opportunity today to provide interested party testimony today on Senate Bill 358.

My name is Chad Aldis, and I am the Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy 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.

The last six months have been challenging, as we’ve learned to live with Covid-19 and its many impacts. As we’re all well aware, education hasn’t been spared. This past spring, students across the state were thrust into remote learning. This fall, many students are still learning either remotely or through hybrid models that have greatly reduced the number of student-teacher interactions.

The bill sponsors should be applauded for recognizing the strain on both educators and students, and for taking steps to ameliorate any potential negative impacts. At Fordham we’ve been thinking along the same lines, and we published a policy brief and set of recommendations in June (attached) on how to reset and restart the state accountability system after a year without state assessments.

We support a number of the recommendations included in SB 358 including:

• Putting a hold on the use of assessment results and growth measures in teacher evaluations
• Foregoing state report card ratings during the 2020-21 school year (though this will likely require a federal waiver)
• Prohibiting the use of assessment data in the coming year for anything that might be considered a sanction, such as academic distress commissions, charter school closures, and changes to EdChoice eligibility

That being said, the change that received the most attention in prior testimony—cancelling this school year’s state assessments—would be the wrong approach for a host of reasons.

First, the shift to distance learning this spring combined with continued uncertainty this fall makes it more important than ever to gauge where students are academically. Nationally, experts have suggested that students—especially those already facing the biggest hurdles—may have fallen so far behind that they’ve lost anywhere from 7 to 12 months of learning. To determine whether this is true in Ohio and to identify what students learned during these tumultuous months, spring state assessments should be administered. Figuring out which students were most impacted by school closures would also allow the state to allocate more resources to the areas where the biggest learning losses occurred.

Second, it’s critical for parents to get objective information on their children’s progress. Moms and dads know that their children are only going to be fifth graders once. If they haven’t learned what they’re supposed to learn in fifth grade, then those gaps could make things harder in middle and high school. This is especially important now, as many schools issued grades last spring on a pass/fail basis. In my daughter’s school, passing a class resulted in a grade of “100.” This gave me very little information as to what she actually learned, and made her school-created report card essentially meaningless. Objective, detailed information helps parents know when to seek assistance—whether that’s reaching out to their child’s teacher, supplementing in-class work, or even engaging a tutor.

Third, while we hope this pandemic will soon be behind us, we simply don’t know what the future holds. Ohio needs to be prepared for whatever comes next. Because each community crafted its own reopening approach, state testing can help us understand which communities had the most success during this time. What strategies worked the best with remote learning? Was hybrid learning superior to all-remote instruction? There’s much we can learn from this experience, but having high quality data is essential.

Finally, this situation is temporary. Eventually, Ohio’s schools will return to something resembling normalcy. When they do, it’ll be important to have baseline data that allows us to gauge how schools perform in the years after 2020-21. This is critical for report card elements like student growth and achievement gaps—the fairest measures to high poverty schools—as they require multiple years of data. By administering spring assessments in 2021, we’ll be able to establish a new normal. This will ensure schools aren’t rated based upon pre-Covid academic performance and allow Ohio, at the appropriate time, to restart the state’s education accountability system.

In conclusion, we support reducing the pressure and any sanctions associated with state assessments in 2021. However, this committee would be wise to avoid a protracted discussion on eliminating the assessments entirely. A recent letter from Secretary of Education DeVos makes clear that—at least for now—the federal government is not likely to grant waivers from state testing requirements in 2021. The secretary’s letter drew praise from a variety of education and civil rights groups including ExcelinEd, the Center for American Progress, the Education Trust, the National Urban League, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. Importantly, Secretary DeVos’s letter indicated that some flexibility may well be allowed around accountability. That creates an opening for states like Ohio to request a waiver not from testing, but from issuing grades and ratings. We’d urge this committee to pursue that option. Most of what is in SB 358 can still be implemented without eliminating assessments. Furthermore, the state (and parents) would benefit from getting accurate information about where students stand academically, be empowered to direct additional resources to places where students were most impacted, and be well-positioned to move forward when this virus is finally behind us.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony. I’m happy to answer any questions that you may have.

1. “I just think it’s not a terribly appropriate time to be [measuring districts]. I think we all suffered through enough last spring and it seems to me it’s a terrible waste of resources to go through this again.” (ABC13, Toledo, 9/14/20) “Those [getting students out of remote learning, making sure students and teachers are safe and healthy, and bringing back programs and athletics] are the things that keep me up at night, not testing or so forth. We understand where our kids are at. At the end of the day, I put my confidence in our educators and teachers, because they go above and beyond each and every day in providing personal sacrifices in order for our children to learn.” (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 9/15/20) The foregoing quotes are just two among many pre-emptive strikes being made by school district leaders in their local press regarding their hatred of testing and why state tests should not be given again this school year due to the pandemic because they hate them. Here’s another quote for you on the same topic: “What I have said is, I think there has to be enough tests, requisite tests, so that parents and schools kind of know where they are. Because this has been difficult, we had a spring that was unusual, we’re having an unusual fall … We need to be able to measure.” That’s Governor DeWine saying that, in case you need to know. It is interesting to note (at least to me, it’s interesting) that Cleveland.com did not actually include that verbatim quote in their coverage, instead paraphrasing it. No. I don’t know why. You can listen to the full quote (and more) starting more than 1 hour into yesterday’s episode of Stories from the Homestead. Here’s hoping that news outlets will cover this part of the story with the same vigor and quotiness as the other side. (Cleveland.com, 9/15/20)
    
2. As promised, the Ohio Department of Education yesterday released what remains of our school report card data. Let’s take a look at the variety of immediate response: School leaders in Toledo expressed “shock” that the state would release report cards at all with so much data unavailable. “Much of it is incomplete, so it provides very little information,” said Toledo City Schools supe Dr. Romules Durant. “But at the end of the day as a school district, we provide daily information and that comes from our educators who are truly the best assessors of a child's education.” (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 9/15/20) Education reporters, who usually LOVE report card release time, seem to be at a bit of a loss as to what to write about just now. The folks at the Dispatch decided to at least talk about what data was available—most prominently the stuff that “lags” and thus is published complete from the 2018-2019 school year. Specifically: graduation rate and K-3 literacy/fourth-grade promotion. I am probably the only one, but personally I think this “data minimalism” may actually be a good thing. As with many other aspects of our lives, the rona has served to clear the air—shining a big bright light on pre-existing issues without a lot of the usual smoke and mirror-type distractions around them. Quite literally, in the case of this data. And the clarity gives us no place to hide from the reals. To wit: “Of 50 districts in the central Ohio region,” writes Alissa Widman Neese in the Dispatch, “31 advanced 100% of third-graders in 2020, compared to 17 districts in 2019. No district advanced less than 96.6%. But those figures are likely skewed because the state relaxed the program’s requirements due to the coronavirus pandemic.” You don’t say. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/15/20) Jeremy Kelley of the Dayton Daily News lives (lives, I tell ya) for report card release week. His first piece out of the gate, looking at the two above-referenced data points and the Prepared for Success measure, shows him only the effects of poverty on kids. His analysis seems supportive of the following statement from the head of the state teachers union: “The fact that the state recognizes that any 2020 letter grades and rankings would be useless without spring testing data proves just how overly reliant the existing grade card system is on standardized tests.” (Dayton Daily News, 9/15/20) So, to sum up: Districts are “shocked” that any report cards were released at all, the response to the minimalist report cards is literally the same as ever, and the same folks believe that report cards are clearly and obviously “broken” even though they look very different than usual. Despite all that, the pseudo-Vindy is claiming that the data we have shows awesomeness (“schools of promise”, they call it) among schools that have previously not appeared to be so awesome…because there is a ton of data not included. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that that is a “don’t measure it and everything will look fine” mentality. Luckily, I’m almost sure I know better. Almost. (Vindy.com, 9/16/20)
    
3. In news of the present day: Revere Local Schools is making a hasty switch of providers for its online education program—already in progress—after learning that its original provider, Edgenuity, is experiencing a teacher shortage. Ironically, at least one (quite a bit larger) district in the state announced it was making a swift mid-stream switch to Edgenuity a week or so ago after some dissatisfaction with its first choice. Am I the only one who remembers that just last month it was possible for an education professional to pull off two full-time remote jobs at once? My how far we’ve fallen. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/14/20) Good news from Mansfield City Schools: The Falcons and the Tygers will be reuniting! That is, the two cohorts of students currently sharing the district’s schools for two days each week in a hybrid arrangement will soon be attending in-person together for four days per week now that the county’s Covid alert level has fallen. Probably good since they too experienced a cyberattack on their online learning system. You know what else appears to have fallen? The scales from some school district leaders’ eyes. The Mansfield school board was told by the district admins that “the Ohio Department of Education is no longer exempting schools from state testing requirements.” Busy meeting! (Richland Source, 9/15/20)
    
4. In age-old-wisdom-of-the-young news: All of the quotes from the kids featured in this story about the start of the new school year are straight up gold. They sound 100 percent authentic when you read them, they cover both remote and in-person learning, and you should just read them all. But here are two standouts: “I've been in high school for years. I've gotten all straight A’s and B’s. You know, I've picked up amazing grades. And, you know, for me to have a 4.0 GPA and then all of a sudden they come in and just do bare minimum work and they also get a 4.0. It’s kind of insulting.” That one is specifically about some of the low expectations around remote learning this past spring. Here’s one, however, that transcends school type: “(Kids) learned that some people’s moms can't be teachers because they don't know how,” said one youngster with equal parts sincerity and love. “Because they're moms. They don't know how to be teachers.” Awesome moms shouldn’t have to be awesome teachers too. (News5, Cleveland, 9/15/20)
    
5. Finally, in non-rona news: The school territory transfer law that we have been following for a year or more was struck down by a federal judge late last week. The district coffers of hearts of the representatives of Plain Local Schools are heavy with joy. (Canton Repository, 9/14/20) On the other side of the state, where four townships’ worth of money students recently transferred away from Bowling Green City Schools, response from district folks was similarly joyous. Both reports take great pains to note that the merit of the law was not commented upon, but rather was struck down because the process of its passage as part of the state budget bill was determined to violate the state constitution’s single-subject rule for legislation. I imagine that opinion will garner some widespread response, don’t you? (Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune, 9/15/20)
   

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Six months into the pandemic, the nation’s forced experiment in remote learning has resumed. While some places have seen improvements in the form of live instruction and greater consistency, many others are still dealing with the fallout from last spring against the backdrop of a racial divide between schools that are offering in-person instruction and those that aren’t. The problem isn’t so much a shortage of effort (though there’s plenty of that, too) as a lack of expertise among schools and districts. Simply put, our education system’s design is ill-suited to the unique quandaries posed by Covid-19.

District officials continue to ask parents for grace and patience, and many have continued to oblige, but what happens if current conditions persist into next year and beyond? It’s almost certain that the demand for choice will increase as a large number of parents keep their children at home. Talking about school choice in the way we typically do—best illustrated by the ceaseless tug-of-war on the test-based evidence for and against non-traditional models—misses the bigger and broader unanswered questions germane to today’s extraordinary circumstances: What do communities need schools to do? What kinds of choices do parents actually want? How do we ensure these choices are viable for students and families? And moving beyond “backpacks full of cash,” what are the practical implications for school choice?

To answer these questions, Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, asked me to offer some pragmatic solutions that policymakers could use at a time of emergency. My report, released last week by AEI, presents eight interesting ideas—some new, some old—to consider.

1. Hybrid homeschooling

Before the pandemic, this form of educational choice wouldn’t have been contemplated in a public school setting. Coined by Michael McShane, hybrid homeschooling calls for children to split their time between homeschool and a traditional environment. This could be three days at home and two days at school or any other combination that involves spending part of the day away from a school building. The key innovation here is that hybrid homeschooling blurs the lines of what we traditionally think of as school.

2. Employer-provided early childhood education

In his treatise on expanding the conservative education agenda, Hess put forth the novel idea of making early-childhood education (ECE) proximate to employment, an approach that would be a boon to both parents and children. Rather than duct-taping it onto the existing K–12 system as called for in most ECE proposals, Hess advocates expanding employer-provided ECE, which could be achieved by reforming the tax code in ways to make it cheaper and more attractive to prospective employees.

3. Open enrollment

Interdistrict choice laws, also known as open enrollment, allow families to choose schools beyond the ones assigned to them based on their places of residence. As states face the dual threat of an enrollment crisis this fall and the unpredictability of new coronavirus outbreaks, strengthening open enrollment laws could be one of the easier ways to put students and families more in the driver’s seat.

4. An education appraisal market

Although nine in ten parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math, only about a third of students perform at grade level. To bridge this disconnect, the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke believes states should create a market for an accurate and real-time assessment of student skills. Using the independent appraisal process as a model, Burke argues that parents should be given the financial flexibility to participate in an education appraisal market.

5. Education savings accounts and Covid-19 refunds

Due to the poor performance of schools last spring, Burke has provocatively suggested that parents should get some of their money back. This would be incredibly difficult to do, but there is certainly something to be said about adopting such an approach prospectively. In all but six states, this would require enabling legislation.

6. Education savings accounts and homeschoolers

Education savings accounts, as currently configured, don’t do much for homeschoolers. Many have a litany of eligibility requirements or regulations that artificially constrain the supply of potential education providers, and aren’t as useful when all schools are closed. In the coronavirus era, states should consider expanding eligibility to all students in the state to both reflect the pandemic’s impact on all families and recognize that homeschooling has become more urban, secular, and socioeconomically diverse.

7. Homeschool enrichment

Nearly half of states have requirements that allow homeschooled students to participate equally in extracurricular and interscholastic activities such as band and sports. In the other half that don’t have equal access laws, the decision to grant access to school-based opportunities is often left to individual school districts and the whims of local school boards. In either scenario, parents can count on there being plenty of strings attached in the form of regulatory and financial hurdles. If states are genuinely concerned about the welfare of students being home educated, they should do more to reduce this type of friction.

8. Pandemic pods and microschools

Skeptics worry that pandemic pods are a dark sign of deepening inequities ahead. For every person who views these microschools as the worst manifestation of privilege and opportunity hoarding, others see rational actors who cannot reasonably be expected to resign themselves to the current state of affairs when they have the means to take action on behalf of their children. States and districts should watch this development closely and might do well to consider a formal mechanism for pod creation to increase their availability and accessibility.

—

The future of school choice rests in expanding the choice palette and blurring the lines of what schooling entails. More flexibility will be required to reinvigorate the choice movement—with the convenience of students and families at the forefront.

Setting the right tone with lawmakers will be important if choice advocates are serious about advancing any of these eight ideas. To quickly get to—and keep the focus on—solutions, making any new legislation time bound (e.g., including a sunset provision) could create additional space to provide greater flexibility to families while acknowledging the need to be adaptive to future challenges after Covid-19 recedes.

American schools have recovered from other calamities—including previous pandemics. Children show remarkable resilience when their interests are placed above all else. To get the most out of this coming school year, it won’t do to shoehorn the complexities created by Covid-19 into our normal policy frameworks. Our charge will be to reach deeply into our reserves to advance the current school choice debate beyond the zero-sum stalemate toward new solutions to the challenges of this moment.

Ohio legislators recently introduced Senate Bill 358, which proposes to cancel all state testing scheduled for spring 2021. The provision calling for the cancellation of state exams would only go into effect if the state receives an assessment waiver from the U.S. Department of Education—something that a handful of states have already requested, but that thus far the agency has signaled a reluctance to issue.

The department is right to resist such requests. Indeed, in a June report, in sharp contrast to the Ohio legislation, my Fordham colleague Chad Aldis and I argued that lawmakers should resume state assessments this year. A similar stance has been taken by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, other education groups, and the Columbus Dispatch editorial board, a leading newspaper in the Buckeye State. This is important for at least three reasons—not only in Ohio, but in every state in the nation.

One, state assessments gauge where students stand against grade-level expectations. The pandemic may have upended our lives, but it has not changed the timeless reality that students need to master reading, writing, and arithmetic. To this end, Ohio has, for example, implemented rigorous academic standards that set forth the knowledge and skills that pupils are expected to learn by the end of each grade level. State assessments that are aligned to these standards gauge the extent to which students meet such expectations. Taking only about 1 percent of a student’s school year, these “summative” exams serve as a vital check on learning that enable parents, schools, and communities to better understand whether children are on-track academically or need extra help.

Importantly, state assessments also encourage schools to meet state standards and help guard against lowered expectations. This purpose of testing is especially crucial as schools continue to rely on remote instruction during the pandemic. Widespread concerns have been raised about student learning via this delivery method, especially among children with special needs and from low-income backgrounds. Upholding the assessment system this year would help to ensure that schools are doing everything in their power to keep all students engaged and working towards grade-level standards. Indeed, concerns about schools falling prey to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” is one reason why civil rights groups have been such outspoken advocates for assessments, including their administration this coming spring.

Two, state assessments provide an “external audit” of proficiency that complements course grades and diagnostic tests. Some have argued that course grades and diagnostic tests provide all the information that’s needed to understand pupil performance. While grades and diagnostics are very important tools, they alone cannot offer a complete picture of student achievement. Course grades typically reflect non-academic factors, such as attendance or participation, and are subject to “grade inflation,” the harmful practice of assigning grades that overstate students’ actual mastery of the course material. Perhaps reflecting such inflation, surveys find that a vast majority of parents believe their kids are on-track, even though exam data indicate far fewer students meet proficiency targets. Diagnostic exams can help educators pinpoint specific areas where students struggle, but using them as substitutes for state assessments would create immense confusion for parents and communities. Does an 80 percent proficiency rate on the NWEA MAP test mean the same thing as an 80 percent proficiency rate on the iReady exam? A testing expert may know, but those who don’t work in education will be left scratching their heads. 

State exams round out our view of student achievement. Unlike course grades, they offer an impartial, unfiltered assessment of proficiency. And unlike diagnostic tests, they provide comparable information that allows communities to see how their schools stack up against statewide averages and neighboring districts. As Americans across the country undertake the hard work of supporting children’s academic recovery, they’ll need a full toolkit of information about pupil achievement—one that includes state assessment results.

Three, baseline state assessment data is essential to tracking progress moving forward. Speaking of recovery, it will be an immense undertaking to support the thousands of students who have struggled to learn during the pandemic. It’s vital that baseline information is gathered sooner rather than later. While the cancellation of last year’s state tests was necessary, it also means that up-to-date information about achievement doesn’t exist. Another year of cancelled state tests would only compound the problem, leaving us even less informed about the academic toll of months of disruption. Communities would likely have to rely on anecdotes and assumptions about student needs—hardly the foundation for effective planning—and they’d need to wait yet another year to begin tracking progress moving forward. Another gap year in state testing would also complicate the calculation of student growth (or “value-added”), a critical measure that provides a look at school quality that isn’t tied to pupil demographics. Analysts are already raising alarms about widening achievement gaps due to the pandemic. Without reliable value-added data, we won’t be able to identify and learn from high-poverty schools that are helping low-income and minority students make progress in the midst of the pandemic.

The past year has presented a host of challenges to parents and educators. But students are no less in need of an excellent education than they were before the health crisis struck. To understand where students stand—and to offer help if necessary—parents and communities need the information yielded by state assessments. Cancelling them would be a mistake.

Covid-19 is upending what parents think about America’s schools, motivating them to seek different ways to educate their children. It’s also inspiring enterprising individuals and imaginative policymakers to create new ways to support that parent demand for change. And together, though often working in uncoordinated ways, these parents, individuals, and policymakers are fostering an approach to change best characterized as “evasive entrepreneurship.”

This approach uses existing resources, especially technology, in inventive ways that work around the limits of current school systems to create and use new education services and products. These innovative methods meet the needs of today’s Covid-19 families and children, challenging existing K–12 systems to be more effective in the way it serves them.  

Parents want something different 

A July poll of public-school parents by Echelon for the National Parents Union found that two of three parents (63 percent)—regardless of income, race, and political affiliation—believe that in response to Covid-19, schools “should be focused on rethinking how we educate students.” Twenty-one percent “plan to send [their] child to a different school or homeschool...next year.” Add 19 percent who are undecided” and it’s two of five parents (40 percent) looking at alternatives. 

An early August Gallup poll of parents overall shows that satisfaction with their child’s education dropped 10 percent from last year, while the number of parents saying they will withdraw their child from public school and teach them at home as homeschoolers doubled to 10 percent.

A late August poll by Civis, a data analytics firm, found almost two in five parents changed their plans for their children’s schooling for the 2020–21 school year. Nearly three of five of those moms and dads chose an online learning program, with the balance going almost equally to either a public or private school.

Finding alternative approaches

What alternatives are parents considering? Some of them are newer innovations like family PODS, including microschools. Others are familiar—homeschooling, charter schools, and private schools—with new twists. Here’s a snapshot of what this looks like.

Parent Organized Discovery Sites—or PODS—are a newer alternative parents are pursuing, typically falling into two categories. There are those serving families who withdraw their children from school and use PODS as a new form of schooling. And there are those serving families whose children are enrolled in a school’s online learning program but supplement this program with specific PODS services.

PODS are paid for in a variety of ways. For example, families can pay directly “out of pocket” or receive them as employee benefits. Some PODS provide scholarships for low-income families. Other approaches include using state or local tax dollars or support from nonprofit and philanthropic organizations.

PODS as a new form of schooling can be seen in the emergence of microschools, which reinvent the one room schoolhouse. They usually are groupings of fifteen students or less, engaging three to six families. They might employ one teacher or alternatively, parents teach, hiring a college student or other “grown-up” to assist.

Prenda is an Arizona based network of micro schools, growing from seven students in one neighborhood in 2018 to over 200 schools. Its website traffic increased 737 percent in June compared to June 2019. 

PODS as a supplement to online learning can add services like tutoring, childcare, and afterschool programs so students socialize and pursue academics or extracurricular activities with friends. A variety of actors—governments, non-profits, parents, corporations, etc.—are starting these programs.   

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and the city’s school district are opening and financially supporting PODS in libraries and community centers. This program will serve at least 6,000 K–6 high-need students who are using the school district’s online learning curriculum. Students will be in small socially distanced groups supervised by staff from community nonprofits. 

In Columbus, Ohio the YMCA is offering PODS for students ages five to sixteen who are attending school virtually. Students can arrive as early as 6 a.m., with learning sessions starting at 8 a.m.

In Minnesota, the Minneapolis based African American Community Response Team is creating the North Star Network to establish community ZOOM learning PODS. They will supplement online learning offered by schools, providing a quiet learning space, technology, and tutors.

JPMorgan Chase offers discounts on virtual tutors and learning PODS for eligible employees that they access through its employer sponsored childcare provider, Bright Horizons. It’s also opening its fourteen childcare centers to offer employee children at no cost a place to do remote learning instruction with supervision.

Homeschooling is an established alternative to traditional public schools that has parents overseeing their child’s education. It includes home instruction, often using online curricula so parents don’t need to create their own nor do much instruction. Families frequently form small groups or cooperatives for extracurricular activities.

Homeschool filings in Nebraska are up 21 percent as of late July. In Vermont, they’ve increased about 75 percent over the same time in 2019. In North Carolina, so many parents filed notice on a government website of plans to homeschool that the website was temporality unable to accept applications.

Classical Academic Press reports that curriculum sales to homeschooling families are up by 50 percent, with enrollment in its online Academy increasing by 100 percent since Covid-19.

National Home School Association Executive Director J. Allen Weston has been inundated with calls for homeschooling information. The organization received more than 3,400 information requests on a single day in July, up from between five and twenty per day. He estimates by the end of the 2020–21 school year, homeschooling enrollment will rise from around 4 million to as many as 10 million students.

Public charter schools are another option, coming in many forms, including online learning. More families are choosing virtual charters as “brick and mortar” schools remain closed or because they’re wary of sending kids into school buildings. Oklahoma’s Epic Charter Schools is a virtual school enrolling 38,026 students. It’s the largest school system in the state, surpassing Oklahoma City and Tulsa, adding up to 1,000 students a day. Students who enroll in Epic’s online learning program have access to a $1,000 “learning fund” to use for everything from karate lessons to art classes. The school manages the money and parents must choose from approved vendors.

Meanwhile. Florida Virtual School is a tuition-free school that works with public, private, charter, and homeschool families and school districts nationwide. It has seen an increase of 64,107 course requests in its Flex program since July 1, representing an increase of 93 percent. Full-time applications have increased by 5,738, or 177 percent, over the prior year since registration opened in March.

Private schools are another familiar option. They have the flexibility to do things differently than public schools, including smaller class size and lower teacher-student ratios. Such features are attractive to parents during the pandemic. Enrollment information so far is anecdotal. Myra McGovern of the National Association of Independent Schools relates that member schools have had “an influx of inquiries about admissions.”

Emily Glickman of New York City based Abacus Guide Educational Consulting helps families enroll children in private schools. Covid-19 has produced a surge of inquiries, leading her to expand student placement options, including residential schools in Florida, Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere. Her clients “…perceive that private schools are in a better position to implement safety measures, [like] putting in a new ventilation system or doing a better job distancing the students.”

Enterprises supporting parents

Websites like SchoolHouse, LearningPodsHub, and Selected for Families are helping families form PODS and assist teachers and tutors in providing services to these families.

SitterStream is a startup created at the beginning of the pandemic. It offers on-demand babysitting and tutoring to students, individually or in PODS. It has partnerships with small and large businesses who provide these services to employees, with Amazon one of their corporate clients.

Transportant, a high-tech school bus company, makes “school buses as smart as your phone.” With the onslaught of the pandemic, it began working with school districts to convert buses into rolling Wi-Fi hotspots. It now provides high speed internet services for an entire street or apartment building to students who lacked access.

iCode is a national computer science education franchise that offers onsite and virtual computer coding for young people. They now offer supervised, in-person, full-day or half-day remote online learning support at its locations to help working parents manage school closures and online schooling for their children.

New financing approaches

Today, twenty-nine states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, offer parents many ways to use public dollars for expenses associated with enrolling children in alternatives to traditional public schools. The Covid-19 schooling crisis is an opportunity to deploy those financing options to support new forms of parent choice and wider access to extant forms. 

Arizona offers a good example, as we see with Prenda working with charter schools to provide tuition free microschools. They also accept funds from Arizona’s Education Savings Accounts program (four other states have similar programs), enabling families to use public dollars for private school costs, tutoring, online learning, and other educational expenses.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico provide parents with twenty-nine different publicly funded scholarships—or vouchers—to pay private school tuition and fees. Another eighteen have twenty-three different full or partial tax credits giving individuals and businesses credits when donating to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships to low income families.

Individual tax credits and deductions in nine states allow parents to receive state income tax relief for educational expenses, including private school tuition, books, supplies, computers, tutors, and transportation.

Public charter school laws exist in forty-four states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. They have created more than 7,500 tuition-free schools of choice in many varieties and specialties.

During the pandemic, some states also are providing imaginative financial support for families seeking new education options for their children. For example, the federal CARES Act provides discretionary funds for governors to support innovative education programs and services, fostering creativity and enterprise in policymaking.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is using $30 million from the CARES Act’s Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund to create a $12 million “Learn Anywhere Oklahoma” program so students can access online content with a teacher; an $8 million “Bridge the Gap” digital wallet program offering $1,500 to more than 5,000 low-income families to purchase curriculum content, tutoring, and technology; and a $10 million “Stay in School” fund providing up to $6,500 to over 1,500 low income families with a pandemic-related job loss so their children remain in their current private schools.

Governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, and Ron DeSantis of Florida announced similar programs for low-income families wanting to enroll their child in a private school.

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How much of this will “stick” beyond the pandemic? The honest answer is the obvious one: No one knows. But yes, some will stick. The Civis survey referred to at the beginning of this essay reports that eight of ten (83.3 percent) K–12 parents who disenrolled children from school say they will reenroll them in their original school once it is safe to do so. This suggests some significant number of students will return to some version of the “old normal.” So the long-term effect becomes a question of magnitude: How much will stick and what effect will that have over the long term?

It’s taken nearly forty years, more or less, going back to a Nation At Risk—or thirty years, going back to the nation’s first school choice program in Milwaukee—for us to have created our present education reform framework that allows us today to undertake many of these alternatives that parents are now pursuing.

Covid-19 has thrown K–12 schooling into disarray. But is has also catalyzed creative and determined parents, innovators, and policy leaders to respond as evasive entrepreneurs. The creativity and entrepreneurship involved is characteristically American and impressive, even if driven by urgency and exasperation. These entrepreneurs are charging ahead, not waiting for permission to create impressive innovations and alternatives to the current K–12 system so learning can continue.

I’ve made no secret over the years of my admiration for the work of Doug Lemov. When I was a new and clueless fifth grade teacher in 2002, his essential book, Teach Like a Champion, was unfortunately still a few years away. My first year or two of teaching would have been better—and more importantly, better for my students—if everyone in a position to educate and train...er, develop...new teachers had the instinct and insight Lemov put between covers a decade ago: There are certain things effective teachers do that makes them effective, and that by observing those competent women and men, we can identify and isolate those moves, name, practice, and master them. No one has done more than Lemov to make teaching teachable.

Just in time for a school year that is starting under a Covid-19 cloud of uncertainty, Lemov and his TLAC colleagues have pulled together a timely new book, Teaching in the Online Classroom: Surviving and Thriving in the New Normal. I’m not crazy about the title because I’m not convinced remote learning and hybrid models are anything close to a “new normal.” If a natural disaster forces you to evacuate, even for an extended period of time, your intention is to get back home—your once and future normal—as soon as possible. Until then, you do the best you can to recreate the habits and routines of your disrupted life. Gregg Vanourek’s recent Fordham report on how high performing charter networks adapted in the spring underscores that one of the big things they did was try to recreate as close to possible a normal school day and stick with familiar school routines.

Lemov and his co-author in the edited volume’s lead essay, Erica Woolway, understand this clearly. “No one asked for the world to change, but it has,” they write. “As teachers, that means there’s work to be done.” By their own admirable admission, they acknowledge “the absolute necessity of getting better at what we do now, no matter the circumstances.” The patented TLAC focus on practicality that has helped a generation of teachers achieve competence quickly is very much in evidence. “We won’t be making any Ted Talks on the seamless, frictionless, automatic teaching future waiting for us if we could just embrace technology,” Lemov and Woolway write. Amen.

On balance “the experience of learning online will likely be less productive for most students than classrooms are. It may be profoundly so for many, and in a way that impacts the most vulnerable learners most,” they observe. Covid-19 has created a “second, educational pandemic” that is best fought, they insist, by focusing on “the core of the craft.” Note the word, since it undergirds what makes Lemov’s work in this and previous books so vital: Let others natter on about how teaching is an “art” or how teachers are born not made. No, teaching is a craft. The distinction matters, as does the mindset, if we are to have any hope of making it something millions of men and women can do competently—online or in person.

The book is divided into seven brisk and readable chapters, reflecting and respecting that the clock is ticking, and that our students don’t have the luxury of allowing us to fumble our way forward through trial and error. Like Lemov’s legendary “taxonomy” of teaching techniques that gave rise to Teach Like a Champion, the new book names and describes techniques that are unique to remote learning with links to about thirty video clips to show them being used. An entire chapter, for example, is given to tactics intended to “dissolve the screen,” or heighten awareness of the back-and-forth exchanges between students and teachers that still exists, even when learning happens at a distance. “It’s not merely connecting to let kids know that we care about them (though hopefully there is plenty of that),” note chapter authors Jen Rugani and Kevin Grijalva. “It’s establishing a connection through the work so that kids feel both accountable and connected at the same time.” Another chapter takes on perhaps the most prodigious challenge of the new (not) normal: how to create and sustain a culture of attention and engagement from a distance, particularly when lessons may vary, occurring in real time or “asynchronously.”

To the degree teaching has a common language (check for understanding, cold call, ratio, wait time, etc.), it’s because Lemov made an obsessive study of effective teachers and gave it a shared vocabulary. This is something TLAC critics routinely misunderstand. It’s not “do this because Doug Lemov says so.” It’s “here’s is a technique that we see successful teachers doing time and again that you can do in your classroom.” It demystifies teaching, empowers teachers—and benefits kids.

The work of Lemov and his Teach Like a Champion team represents one of the few clear victories to emerge from the ed reform era, but it would be a mistake to associate his work exclusively with the urban-charter-school world from which it emerged. TLAC trainers are more likely these days to be working with traditional public school teachers and leaders, even international school personnel, than urban charter schools. But it’s no coincidence that so many high-performing charter schools bear Lemov’s thumbprint: high levels of teacher turnover inherent to those schools mean they can least afford to wait for teachers to hone their craft, find their voice, and feel fully in charge of their classrooms. In the fall of 2020, that impatience and urgency applies to nearly every school and teacher. It may not be possible at all to “teach like a champion” remotely. But we don’t have the time to experiment and fumble our way toward effectiveness. Lemov’s new and timely book is probably our best shot to make the best of the turbulent and unpredictable school year that’s now upon us, ready or not.

SOURCE: Doug Lemov, editor. Teaching in the Online Classroom: Surviving and Thriving in the New Normal (Jossey-Bass, 2020).

The pandemic has left us in a world quite different from the one before. While we’re faced with plenty of new challenges, we also have the opportunity to test out creative solutions. One such idea is offered in a report from Nicholas Munyan-Penney and Charles Barone of Education Reform Now—high-dosage tutoring.

Learning gaps between low- and high-income students have long presented issues of equity in education. And now, as the authors point out, some families are hiring tutors to supplement their children’s online curricula. While these families are certainly within their right to do so, it could essentially mean—for students in poor-quality online programs or without access to technology—that some students will get schooling this semester and some will not. To remedy this, the authors suggest that schools implement high-dosage tutoring programs for students whose education will be “most negatively impacted by closures.”

Munyan-Penney and Barone propose that high-dosage tutors—sometimes referred to as individualized tutors—will instruct a group of two to three students daily in learning areas these students may be falling behind in. Tutoring groups would be determined by diagnostic assessments, a tool proposed by the authors in a previous brief to determine each student’s academic level at the start of the school year in order to target instruction. It’s worth noting that, while many states recommended diagnostic assessments in their reopening plans, no states recommended grouping students by ability, likely to avoid accusations of tracking.

The authors point out that some challenges created by Covid-19 may be remedied with high-dosage tutoring. They submit that tutoring may be a desirable option for college graduates, for example, whose unemployment rates are currently at around 14 percent. Tutors could also ensure students receive enough instruction time, as some districts grapple with teachers union negotiations. And finally, high-dosage tutoring can be implemented in person, online, or in a hybrid model; since groups are small, social distancing measures can be observed in person, and Zoom calls with three students are certainly much easier and more effective than those with twenty.

Lastly, the authors acknowledge the biggest challenges to implementing high-dosage tutoring are cost and time. Tutors can cost $3,000 or more per student, so it’s unlikely that districts will have the funds to implement this program, especially low-income districts, for whom it’d be most relevant. Hiring and training tutors, as well as assessing students and assigning them to groups, would have been challenging even at the time this brief was released in July, and now school has already begun for most, if not all, students. But this isn’t to say that high-dosage tutoring necessarily had to be implemented at the start of the school year. It could be implemented at any time, even next semester, and for some students, that would still be better than nothing.

One-on-one or small group tutoring has been shown to produce positive learning gains in students. What is unknown is how well these programs would scale up while maintaining a level of quality high enough to justify their cost. But while logistical issues would certainly arise, the implementation of high-dosage tutoring may be the creative solution for unprecedented times that schools need right now. And considering U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s announcement that federal testing will commence as usual this year, it’s even more important that schools find ways to support students who are falling behind—many of whom haven’t had any schooling since March. There’s been an array of proposed ideas such as this one to mitigate learning losses in students—and now it’s up to districts to take action.

SOURCE: Nicholas Munyan-Penney and Charles Barone, “Covid-19 Response: High Dosage Tutoring to Accelerate Student Learning,” Education Reform Now (July 2020).