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1. The export of opinionated voucher grouchers (a repetitive phrase if there ever was one) continues apace. Today, a…[checks notes]…researcher in the area of media psychology who resides in the best, bougiest school district in central Ohio has got some erroneous notions longstanding union talking points strong thoughts to share with Clevelanders to make sure they are against that money-stealing, public-school-ruining EdChoice program to the same degree that he is. (Cleveland.com, 6/9/24)
   
   

2. In this piece on the Battle Against Smartphones in Cincinnati-area schools, we learn, among other things, that Yondr pouches are used by comedians and rockstars to stop ticketholders’ phone use during their shows (which I take as a proxy for “it’s totally OK” “it’s awesome”), that to get Yondr pouches for every Cincinnati City Schools high school building would cost upwards of half a million dollars (which “is really nothing” in terms of cost, per the interim supe, and would be taken out of federal funding meant to be used “to help improve school conditions for learning”), that TikTok has already taught kids how to get into the pouches during the day, and that students in schools using pouches and other means to ban smartphones have also continued to evade detection and keep/use their devices during the day even without defeating the admittedly-clever technology. The latter two points are also urged by school officials to not be a deterrent to a blanket ban because they have this whole carceral process ready to go—by which an escalating series of punishments can be meted out to those caught scoffing at the new law. Hmm…. Sometimes the old tricks are the best tricks, I guess. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 6/9/24)

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Demolition on hold

Representatives of Springfield Sports Academy filed an emergency suit this week against Northeastern Local School District, alleging that they did not properly follow Ohio law giving charters right of first refusal over unused district properties before any other sale or disposal plan. Demolition of the decommissioned Rolling Hills Elementary School building, which was imminent, has been halted while the case is heard. It will be an interesting case to follow.

Ranking the charter ecosystem of Ohio—and other states

Due to some methodological choices, Ohio does not end up faring very well in Education Freedom Institute’s latest Charter Ecosystem Rankings. Fordham took a look at those choices and their impact in this review. Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, the District of Columbia, and Colorado come out on top, driven by the relatively strong academic performance of those states’ charters versus their district peers. Despite lingering questions, EFI’s effort to change the conversation on what makes for a “good” charter school sector deserves to be taken seriously.

Blueprint

Jason Gaulden, an education fellow at the Common Sense Institute in Colorado, penned an op-ed last week extolling the virtues of the Denver School of Science & Technology. The charter school, he writes, achieves a 100 percent college acceptance rate (and have maintained that achievement every year for the last 20 years) all while serving a student body that includes a wide range of racial and economic diversity. He calls DSST “a welcome inspiration and blueprint for other traditional public schools.”

Nevada update

A few weeks ago, we discussed an effort to expand charter schools in Nevada by allowing two cities to become sponsors. Last week, the applications from the Cities of North Las Vegas and Henderson were accepted, and new charters will likely open in those cities in fall 2025…although it sure sounds like there are a lot of hoops to jump through before any classes can be held and a number of district-centric limitations on the cities which will serve to keep schools small for a long time. But progress is progress, I guess.

The national scene

Christy Wolfe, senior vice president for policy, research, and planning at NAPCS, was a guest on EdNext’s Education Exchange podcast last week, discussing how President Biden’s executive budget proposals would serve to block the creation of new charter schools across the country. It’s an interesting discussion, including the strong expectation that the most destructive cuts can be avoided.

*****

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In his recent column “Let’s Talk About Bad Teachers,” Michael Petrilli fearlessly seized the third rail of U.S. K–12 education. Depressingly, after reviewing the multiple obstacles preventing school districts from getting rid of bad teachers with significant experience (e.g., union contracts, defined benefit pension plans, and extensive due process protections against dismissal in many states’ law), Petrilli concluded that “the Gordian Knot remains unbreakable” and, thus, “we’re pretty much stuck with them.”

Given the importance of high-quality teachers to improved education results, if Petrilli is right (and there is abundant evidence that he is), the consequences are grim—and in my experience, they are poorly understood by most people in K–12 schooling.

At the individual level, Raj Chetty’s research found that “students assigned to high value-added teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-ranked colleges, earn higher salaries...and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.”

For employers, access to talent that understands and can apply rapidly improving technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, data analytics, and automation) is critical not just to their success, but increasingly to their survival. But in 2023, a Manpower Group survey found that 75 percent of U.S. employers reported difficulty in finding the skilled talent they need—up from 36 percent in 2014.

Problems for individual employers add up to problems for the overall economy.

In their book “The Knowledge Capital of Nations,” Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann showed that “long-run economic growth is overwhelmingly a function of the cognitive skills of the population.” For example, between 1948 and 2019, U.S. labor productivity grew by 2.2 percent a year. Today, the Congressional Budget Office projects that it will only grow by 1.3 percent a year over the next decade. Since the Civilian Labor Force is projected to grow by only 0.4 percent over the same period, maximum real GDP growth is only 1.7 percent per year. In our knowledge economy, improving workers’ cognitive skills should lead to higher annual labor productivity growth. If this increased back to 2.2 percent, then after ten years, potential U.S. GDP would be more than 9 percent ($3 trillion) larger.

That would go a very long way towards meeting many of the macroeconomic challenges facing the United States without the need for ever larger increases in federal deficits, including funding future increases in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure, and national defense spending.

But as the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently found, “The United States needs to reinvigorate its STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education system if it is to compete successfully in the twenty-first century. STEM proficiency has been declining in America since the 1980s, threatening the nation’s continued technological leadership. Particularly as emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are set to put STEM proficient nations on the highway to innovation-based competitiveness, the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind.”

For example, in 2022 only seven percent of American fifteen-year-olds could do math at advanced levels, as measured by the OECD’s PISA math assessment, which evaluates their ability “to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts to describe, predict and explain phenomena.”

Now consider national defense. The Ukraine War has made two stark facts brutally clear. First, technical skills are critical to the rapid adaption needed to prevail on today’s battlefields. Second, talent shortages have limited the ability of America’s defense industrial base (DIB) to rapidly replenish the enormous volume of weapons expended in a high intensity conflict.

Now, faced with such conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and potentially another one over Taiwan, America’s talent shortage has become a critical, and possibly existential, national security threat.

A report last summer from the Aspen Strategy Group concluded that “America is engaging in the global technological competition with an education system that is not fit for purpose—it does not adequately prepare our students. We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China, in K–12 and higher STEM education outcomes... The U.S. must create a cohesive strategy that aligns its national security with a first-rate K–12 and higher education system.”

Unfortunately, the evidence is overwhelming that America’s district run schools will not improve their performance in the time frame and at the scale required to meet the talent shortage threat we face today.

Some believe that expanding school choice will solve the problem, via more charter schools, education savings accounts, and other mechanisms. But with accelerating enrollment declines in district-run schools, opposition to choice is rapidly mounting. And as Ashley Berner’s research shows, expansion of choice without a mechanism to ensure quality (unlike the systems used in many other countries) is unlikely to produce rapid improvement in academic outcomes at scale.

So where does that leave us? The warnings voiced in the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983 are now our reality. Can we do anything to quickly do to meet the rapidly worsening economic and national security talent crisis we face today?

I propose that the federal government create a national network of free STEM academies that are funded and held accountable by the Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA). Admissions would be based on competitive exams. Some of these schools could be run by contract operators competitively selected by DoDEA, provided they agreed to follow a common set of core policies, including non-discriminatory admissions, curriculum, instructional materials, professional development, assessments, grading, information systems, and employment.

Today, more than 90 percent of America’s fifty-two million elementary and secondary students attend district-run, non-charter public schools. To have a significant impact on reducing America’s STEM talent shortage, these new academies would aim to enroll one half of one percent of current elementary and secondary students, or about 261,000 students across the fifty states and District of Columbia.

Rapid scale up would almost certainly not be a challenge for the Department of Defense. And the cost would be miniscule compared to $857 billion in federal, state, and local funds that Americans spent on public elementary and secondary education in fiscal year 2022 for poor and declining results.

While questions have been raised about DEI programs in DoDEA schools, there is no evidence that they have degraded their academic performance. Moreover, there is no reason why such programs would have to apply to the DoDEA STEM Academies.

Let’s not forget that on the most recent NAEP assessment, DoDEA schools delivered better results than schools in any of the fifty states. While selection effects, such as the students coming from military families, are often cited as a contributing factor, there is evidence to suggest that the causes of DoDEA’s success are broader.

DoDEA schools follow many of the practices found in high performance education systems around the world, as documented by Ashley Berner. These include a rigorous and standardized curriculum, emphasizing core academic subjects, and employing evidence-based instructional practices. This consistent approach across DoDEA schools may contribute to better learning outcomes. They also have stringent teacher recruitment and retention policies, attracting and retaining highly qualified educators. Additionally, DoDEA invests heavily in curriculum-aligned professional development programs for its teachers, which can enhance instructional quality. Finally, DoDEA has a robust system for monitoring school and student performance, using data-driven decision-making to identify areas for improvement and implement targeted interventions.

To be sure, implementing this proposal would likely require new legislative authority (DoDEA schools are currently authorized under Section 2164 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code), similar to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, whose passage was given added urgency when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957. But if that authorization was not forthcoming, it still might be possible to expand DoDEA schools using the Defense Production Act (Section 4501 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code), which gives broad authorities to the President to influence domestic economic sectors in the interest of national defense.

In sum, the dangerous threats we face compel us to unflinchingly face the implications of Petrilli’s blunt warning that, as a practical matter, school districts cannot remove most bad teachers from their classrooms. This is yet another reason we cannot expect the performance of district-run schools to improve quickly enough to meet the critical talent shortages that increasingly debilitate the United States’ economic growth and national security.

Creating a national network of STEM Academies under DoDEA schools is one way to quickly begin to meet this challenge in a scalable and consistent way. It is admittedly an unorthodox approach that will attract substantial criticism. But we should demand that those who oppose it meet one of two tests: Either explain why our worsening talent shortage is not a critical challenge facing the U.S. economy and national security, or offer another solution that has a better chance of meeting this challenge more quickly than the one I’ve proposed.

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1. Judging by their enthusiastic contribution to this editorial from Kentucky, Ohio appears to have successfully exported all of our loudest and sourest voucher grouchers to the Bluegrass State. Can they please stay there? (Kentucky.com, 6/6/24) Sadly, they didn’t stay south of the border for long, because here they all are again saying the same stuff in this news story about the EdChoice expansion in the Dayton area and statewide. I feel like the multiple instances noting when a private school “did not return a request for comment” are meant to be some sort of indictment, but it is summertime, y’all. Kudos to the long-hours-pulling private school reps who did respond and offer simple, commonsense, and “this is clearly a good thing for families who want it” messages in response to whatever questions were sent to them. (Dayton Daily News, 6/7/24)
   
   

2. Let’s return to the other big hot button issue of the spring/summer: School closures. Ideastream takes a long look at one neighborhood in Akron which had a number of district school buildings close over the last 20 years as its population declined. (While we are told that lots of local families also opted for private schools as voucher eligibility came to—and expanded in—Akron City Schools over that time, these schools are not apparently seen as “neighborhood schools” or “community anchors”, since they weren’t mentioned or located on the neighborhood map, to say nothing of the charter schools that have also no doubt launched in and around the neighborhood in that same time). But I think the biggest takeaway here for districts is that if you are ever able to close a school building—which generally only happens in the most extreme fiscal distress or underutilization situations—you should definitely not leave the building boarded up “just in case”, while you dreamily hope that the enrollment decline will magically reverse itself and you’ll have the sudden need for a 1,000-student space…which will only cost you $25 million and take 3 years to reactivate since you left it to deteriorate for 10 years. (Ideastream Public Media, 6/6/24) Staying on topic to close the week: The final public comment sessions related to Columbus City Schools’ Facilities Task Force were held yesterday. And I feel like the reasons quoted in this coverage for not closing way-undersubscribed buildings were, once again, great clues as to how to actually close and merge buildings successfully. Such as: Make sure parents know that all schools provide free breakfast, lunch, snacks, and other family supports. And make sure your busing system is the most efficient it can possibly be. As I understand the teachers’ comments here, the district could actually improve their absenteeism districtwide with this effort…although that may not have been what they meant. (10TV, 6/7/24) However, current “public” comment (be fair, folks, it was mostly employees) may not even matter, seeing as how the teachers union is deeply questioning the public comments given at previous meetings. (ABC6 News, Columbus, 6/6/24)

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Ever since the one-room schoolhouse faded from the American prairie, some reformers have argued that clumping students by age is ill-advised. After all, where a child’s birthday falls on the calendar is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness. Some students enter kindergarten with emerging literacy and robust knowledge, while others can’t count to ten. And any teacher will tell you of the difficulty trying to teach a class with multiple grades-worth of differences in academic readiness.

Yet calls to disrupt age-based grouping altogether—such as by allowing everyone to literally proceed through grade levels at their own pace, as some mastery-based schooling advocates want—sounds too radical and unfamiliar to gain widespread support. Parents recoil at the idea of seven- and ten-year-olds sitting side-by-side in the same class.

There is less resistance to this practice when kids are older. For instance, at my son’s high school in suburban Maryland, most classes are open to students in any grade. His pre-calculus class serves precocious sophomores but also (less precocious) juniors and seniors. So it is with most courses. It seems that once we are talking about teenagers, a mishmash of students of various ages is more acceptable to parents and to teachers.

Back in elementary school, imagine if we took small steps in the same direction. Picture, for example, a fourth-grade class made up of mostly nine-year-olds but also a few eight-year-olds and a few ten-year-olds—more age variety but a greater consistency in academic abilities. That doesn’t sound so crazy.

And indeed, there are already two well-known ways for schools to move closer to that model. The first, of course, is via grade retention. In the context of “third grade reading guarantees,” students who have not yet mastered the basics of reading are made to repeat third grade, and schools are required to provide intensive interventions to help them get up to speed.

On the other end of the achievement spectrum is the long-standing (if too rare) practice of letting high achievers accelerate, also known as skipping a grade. This can be done either in a single subject, such as math, or for the whole enchilada.

In many respects, grade retention and grade acceleration are two sides of the same coin.

(Then there’s the Richard Reeves idea of redshirting all boys, given that they tend to be more immature and less prepared for school at age five than girls are. Though that merely replaces one weak proxy for readiness—age—with another—gender.)

Grade retention and acceleration face fierce resistance from the status quo, however. Educators seem to hate both ideas. When it comes to retention, the worry is that we will make kids feel bad. And with acceleration, the concerns are similar: Some kids might be ready academically to learn with older peers, but they will suffer socially or emotionally if removed from their agemates. Thus we see even red states like Ohio and Tennessee backing away from mandatory grade retention and observe very few districts embracing grade acceleration for high achievers.

That’s a shame because there’s lots of research evidence about both practices, and overwhelmingly the findings indicate that retaining low achievers and accelerating high achievers is what’s usually best for their educations. It certainly helps them learn more than they otherwise would. And to the extent that the issue has been examined, there is little evidence to suggest that the concerns about social and emotional well-being are well-founded. Kids who can’t read don’t tend to feel great about themselves, and kids who are bored tend to act out, tune out, or drop out.

Yet resistance to mixing schoolkids across ages remains sturdy. I’ve suggested a few times that we could add a little more flexibility by creating a “grade 2.5” as way of making “third grade reading retention” into more of a default option and therefore carry less of a stigma. But, so far, that idea doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.

Another baby step via TK–5

So here’s another one. Let’s borrow the language of “transitional kindergarten” from California, where it refers to programs for four-year-olds within public elementary schools, but instead use it as an option for five-year-olds who enter school without the prerequisite readiness skills to succeed in kindergarten. We might call it TK–5.

Let’s say you are a typical elementary school with four kindergarten classrooms. Every summer you assess entering five-year-olds via a battery of readiness assessments, looking both at academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, and then place students into either transitional kindergarten (TK–5) or kindergarten (K) classrooms. (One might hope that communities with strong pre-K options might not need to send too many kids to transitional kindergarten.) Some advanced kids might be ready to start in first grade.

Depending on the results of those assessments, you might turn one, two, or even three of your classrooms into transitional kindergarten rooms. These classrooms would focus on kindergarten readiness skills—both academic and social-emotional—and then would start making progress through the beginning of the kindergarten curriculum.

The following year, the transitional kindergarten kids would matriculate into kindergarten, though some students might be back on track and ready to go all the way into first grade. (You might also make some adjustments mid-year.)

Now you have created grade cohorts that have a little more diversity in terms of students’ ages but a lot less diversity in terms of their academic achievement and, thus, readiness for learning new material. And that’s really what this is all about: making it more likely that every student will get the appropriate level of challenge by giving teachers a smaller target to hit in terms of the variation in students’ readiness. For example, all students in kindergarten would know their letters and numbers on day one, allowing the class to dive right into reading and math. And no kindergarten students would already have mastered all of the skills covered in the kindergarten curriculum. These would be enormous changes from what happens now.

The big question is how parents would react when told that their five-year-old is not ready for regular kindergarten. As a dad who redshirted his own son back in the day, I personally don’t think that’s going to be too big a deal, especially if schools are using good data and judgment about who is ready for today’s elementary school curriculum and who is not—and if TK–5 becomes a well-trod entry route into the education system.

Economists and budget hawks may complain that we are adding a year of school to taxpayers’ bill, given that some children will now attend public schools for fourteen years instead of thirteen. That also means less time earning money in the labor market for the kids who are held back, thus creating opportunity costs, as well as the budgetary kind. But if this change serves to boost achievement for the late bloomers, the payoff will be well worth it, both to students individually and to society. Plus, by also accelerating advanced students—letting them skip kindergarten—we will be recouping some of those same costs by shrinking some kids’ K–12 experience from thirteen years to twelve.

—

There are lots of ideas in education that make good sense but also seem to be politically impossible—for example, getting rid of elected school boards, merging districts within the same metro area, or eliminating school boundaries. If we were dreaming up an education system from scratch, we could put these notions into practice. But we’re not. We’re largely stuck with the system we inherited from our forebears.

The best we can do is find workarounds. Launching the charter school sector, for example, has allowed us to create new schools that themselves do not have elected boards or attendance boundaries. Developing alternative certification routes for aspiring teachers has loosened the ed-school monopoly.

Similarly, we’re probably stuck with grade levels, from K–12, tied to children’s ages. The best we can do is to try some workarounds. Embracing transitional kindergarten for some five-year-olds and accelerated placement into first grade for others would be steps in the right direction. We just need some schools or districts willing to try it. Any volunteers?

For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself. For “no excuses” charter schools in particular, this was until recently their raison d'être. Now, with the rapid spread of education savings accounts and other private choice vehicles, the salience of parents “voting with their feet” has—along with a shift in the political zeitgeist—pushed test-based accountability further and further into the background. 

This tension around accountability has brewed within the reform community for years. By way of table-setting, my colleague Mike Petrilli once described this as a tribal feud among three distinct camps: (1) choice purists, (2) choice nannies, and (3) choice realists. In a nutshell, all three support parental choice, but part ways on the extent to which they can get behind test-based accountability. Robert Pondiscio characterized the internecine dynamic as a schism between “those whose preferred flavor of school choice emphasizes charter schools, strong authorizers and performance-based accountability versus those who think the ultimate control should rest with parents—[with] private schools very much part of the mix.”

In reality, this duality—test-based accountability versus accountability entrusted to the parent marketplace—is not binary; empirical proof of achievement and parent preference are distant locations on a spectrum rather than two sides of a coin. Indeed, I find much to like about the libertarian view of parent power and school autonomy and nod in agreement with many of their criticisms of test-based accountability, especially the ways it can distort and narrow the curriculum. But I also find the forceful pushback against using tests to measure and evaluate schools to be problematic if it undermines the broader goal of improving life outcomes for our most marginalized kids.

Consider what’s now happening in Houston ISD, the eighth largest district in the nation and the largest in Texas. For choice enthusiasts, the Lone Star State is the biggest prize on the map, being one of only four states controlled by Republicans that do not yet have private school choice. At the same time that choice boosters seem to be on the cusp of a big victory statewide, Houston and its embattled superintendent, Mike Miles, are taking fire from all sides as they attempt to raise the city’s abysmally low floor on academic instruction and student performance.

Just last month, Miles and his team faced hours of grueling public comment from a procession of parents protesting budget and personnel cuts—with the decision to terminate some teachers and principals based in part on student and school performance data. Their grievances were familiar (one person on X called the protesters the “Moms for Mediocre Schools”), but lost in the noise and rancor was the district’s woeful academic performance and the role that test-based accountability has played, and is playing, in starting to turn things around. If Miles were to defer completely to the will of the parents in the room (who represented only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands in the district), it’s difficult to see how that would help close Houston's yawning achievement gaps.

The episode calls to mind an apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Along the same lines, Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Miles has described Houston ISD as a tale of two districts: Its high performing schools are some of the best in the nation, while the struggling ones have languished for decades. Accountability to parents is unquestionably needed, but it’s often insufficient—especially in circumstances where parents have been denied an ambitious vision of what’s possible.

At the same time, test-based accountability has its fair share of problems. Heritage’s Jason Bedrick has written persuasively about its limitations and the double standard often applied to education savings account spending versus public school spending. While the research on the academic efficacy of programs like ESAs is to date inconclusive, there’s a lot to be said about developing delivery models beyond conventional K–12 classrooms and creating the conditions for more agency among students and families.

Simply put, whether you agree with it or not, the following assertion from my colleague Checker Finn gets to the heart of the accountability tension:

We can’t assume that every child is going to be well educated if the parents are put in charge, because not every child has parents who can responsibly take charge.

Or this one from the New York City Parents Union’s Mona Davids:

Parents don't care about politics, we just want our babies educated. And, we are capable of deciding which school will do that.

Can these two ostensibly disparate perspectives be reconciled?

Maybe. Maybe not.

In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms. Tim recounted, accurately and candidly, why teacher evaluation reform seemed liked a slam-dunk no-brainer when a major push began circa 2008 and how, ultimately, such efforts mostly fell apart in the face of harsh political headwinds and thorny policy challenges.

Then, in May, Kevin Huffman wrote a reply emphasizing where things went right: in Tennessee, where Huffman was state commissioner and oversaw the implementation of its educator and school leader evaluation system, and in Washington, D.C., where former Chancellor Michelle Rhee led the development of a robust teacher evaluation system known as “IMPACT.” Both Tennessee and D.C. subsequently went on to become national leaders in student achievement gains.

Both are useful additions to the discourse, but both left out how the pre-service system of teacher preparation in university-based programs establishes a culture of mediocrity that makes it difficult for those seeking more accurate and differentiated educator evaluations in schools.

Simply put, when people like Tim Daly, Kevin Huffman, or I come along and say to teachers “we want to evaluate you and such ratings will be meaningful and will differentiate across a spectrum from bad to excellent,” that’s not what they signed up for. Those aren’t the rules they were told they would have to play by. It’s no wonder we all faced so much blowback on test and non-test forms of evaluation alike.

From their earliest experience, those enrolled in traditional teacher prep programs are sent the same message that we lament sending classroom teachers. No matter how they perform, the vast majority of them, and nearly all of the programs in which they are enrolled, will get high grades and glowing reviews. In other words, the same “Widget Effect” that Daly and his peers observed in K–12 schools actually starts years earlier, back when aspiring teachers are in their formative years.

Case in point: In a report titled “Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them,” the National Council on Teacher Quality has documented how teachers-in-training receive significantly higher grades in coursework and are much more likely to graduate with honors than their peers in other university majors. Noted then-NCTQ President Kate Walsh: “Teaching is one of the most difficult and demanding jobs there is. Yet for reasons that are hard to fathom, it appears to be one of the easiest majors both to get into and then to complete.”

I had my own experience with teacher prep’s aversion to differentiation and rigor during the time I served on Capitol Hill. My boss, then-second ranking Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee George Miller, put forth a set of proposals aimed improving teacher preparation. His vehicle was the 1998 reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA).

The proposal that met the most blowback would require publication, for graduates of each teacher prep program, of program-wide pass rates on state licensing and certification exams. This is standard practice in other fields such as law and medicine. Also under consideration was requiring a minimum pass rate for each program as a condition for receiving federal funds, a parallel version of which some states were then pursuing.^[1]

The proposal took everyone by surprise, especially on the left. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article with the headline “Liberal Democrat Is an Unlikely Foe of Teacher-Education Programs.” Miller was quoted: “They are perpetrating a fraud on the public because they are graduating teachers who aren't prepared to teach. And they are also, in some instances, perpetrating a fraud on the people they are enrolling. Because they are suggesting that if you come here, and you graduate, you will be prepared to teach. And the evidence is that is not always true.”

Now-ranking, then-more-junior member of the Education Committee, Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), expressed a legitimate concern that the provision might disincentivize schools enrolling more lower-achieving candidates, including students of color, but as we pointed out, we were only interested in counting those who had actually been handed a diploma, not everyone enrolled. Schools of education advanced specious arguments about student privacy and faulted the quality of licensing and certification exams without producing any evidence that they were doing anything to improve or replace those same tests.

The requirement that teacher prep programs publish the pass rates of their graduates was ultimately included in the HEA reauthorization bill, minus any provision that tied those pass rates to eligibility for federal funds. The provision was in no way detrimental to the passage of the overall bill. The conference report passed unanimously in the Senate and only got four “no’s” in the House (all Republican).

We thought we were home free. But under heavy pressure, not just from schools of education but from the entire higher education lobby—which didn’t want to set a precedent for postsecondary accountability and had been accused of using teacher prep programs as cash cows that subsidize more prestigious departments on campus—the Clinton Administration completely eviscerated the pass-rate reporting requirement. And they did it in a way that can only be called shameless.

Even though the statute specified that pass rates were to be reported for graduates of teacher preparation programs, the regulations developed by the administration said that pass rates had to be reported only for “program completers,” an entirely new concept in both federal law and higher education practice. And who were these program completers? Only those graduates who had passed the licensing and certification tests. Voilà, virtually every program had a 100 percent pass rate regardless of how many students to whom they had awarded a diploma went on to fail those same exams.

Admittedly, simply looking at pass rates is a limited way of evaluating teacher preparation—hey, we were just trying to break the ice, we just didn’t bring a big enough mallet—so a decade later Congressman Miller, now House Education Committee Chair, via the next HEA reauthorization, helped put into law some more elaborate requirements. Long story short, the Obama Administration spent its entire two terms trying to develop regulations and ultimately failed, leaving it to NCTQ to collect and report—through shoe leather, legal action, and public humiliation—institutional pass rates, at least for those for which it could acquire data. Both of those are stories for another day.

The point here is that aspiring teachers are constantly shown, by those whose responsibility it is to prepare and mentor them, that any process that differentiates knowledge, skills, or performance among individuals or institutions is inherently undesirable. Everyone is doing just great. Anybody can do the job well. No one need be given a bad grade or denied a diploma.

In hindsight, I think it would have been better if we had started with trying to reform teacher preparation before embarking on teacher evaluation. Not that it would have been easy. But it might have made more systemic sense. (For some ideas, see Education Reform Now’s report “Breaking the Cycle of Mediocrity.”) The wins on the science of reading in recent years are encouraging, but there is a lot more fertile ground to be plowed if we can somehow get ourselves up for it.

Cheers

• The New Hampshire state senate passed a bill that would allow high schools to hire part-time teachers without a state license. —New Hampshire Bulletin
• Louisiana passed an Education Savings Account bill that prioritizes low-income kids, uses a sliding scale, and has a testing requirement. —Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN
• Harvard emeritus professor Harvey Mansfield: “One of the things grade inflation does is to rob students of knowledge of what they’re good at, and not so good at.” —Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

Jeers

• “Milwaukee schools superintendent resigns amid potential loss of millions in funding.” —Associated Press

• The nation’s graduation rate rebounded after a Covid-era slump. —K12 Dive
• Major reforms make for splashy headlines, but small, incremental policies win achieve lasting improvements. —Bridgespan

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’. 

1. Expansion plans for the Dayton Regional STEM school, in size and down into elementary grades, faced a planning commission hearing on Wednesday night. No word yet as to how it went, but my fingers are definitely crossed for good news! (Dayton Daily News, 6/3/24) Here’s some very good news that has evaded my radar until now: A new all-boys Catholic school will open its doors in Cincinnati this fall. Xavier Jesuit Academy will begin with grades 3-5, expanding year-by-year into the lower grades until it reaches the full K-5 elementary band. Even better: We learn that Cincinnati’s corporate community, including Procter & Gamble and the Cincinnati Reds, have embraced the new school by donating labor and financial support for the renovations being made to breathe new life into a previously-closed Catholic school. Still better: The report says that XJA will indeed accept students using vouchers. Best part: We didn’t even have to ask! (National Catholic Reporter, 6/4/24)
   
   

2. But the news can’t be good all the time, can it? Representatives of Springfield Sports Academy filed an emergency suit this week against Northeastern Local School District, alleging that they did not properly follow Ohio law giving charters right of first refusal over unused district properties before any other sale or disposal plan. Imminent demolition of the decommissioned Rolling Hills Elementary School building has been halted while the case is heard. Fingers crossed here as well for good news in the end. (Springfield News Sun, 6/4/24)
   
   

3. Lots of graduation/year end stories out there. Most of them good but typical. This one…is just stupid to me. I suppose these principals have got everything else handled in their schools and the entire community thus has plenty of time for silliness like this at the end of the year. (Cleveland.com, 6/3/24)
   
   

4. This, however, is very nice. So nice, in fact, that it made national news. Anthony Claytor became the first student connected to LeBron James’ I Promise effort in Akron to graduate from college, picking up a bachelor’s degree in criminology and justice studies with a minor in sociology from Kent State University late last month. Claytor was part of the earliest group of Akron City Schools students to participate back when I Promise was mainly an after-school program. But he was a junior in high school in 2020 when the LeBron James Family Foundation offered full tuition and a year of free room and board at Kent State for I Promise students and Claytor took full advantage, completing his degree early and receiving personal congratulations from King James himself via X upon the accomplishment. Claytor is looking toward a career in the Secret Service from here. Feels like he’ll achieve whatever he sets out to do at this point. Awesome! (CNN, 6/4/24)

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