Last month, I examined nine of the top candidates for Democratic VP nominee and their views on education. The upshot was that there wasn’t much to get enthused about. Most of the candidates’ on-the-record comments on education hewed closely to the teachers union talking points in calling for more spending and less accountability. The best thing that could be said was that some of them hadn’t said much at all on the issue.

However, in the weeks that followed, the wave of mass demonstrations touched off by the heinous killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has elevated the prospects of several candidates once seen as long shots. Four women in particular—Keisha Lance Bottoms, Val Demings, Gina Raimondo, and Susan Rice—were not on the radar of the Washington Post analysis I used for my initial write up, but have since gained ground in the packed field according to both the New York Times and Politico.

The search is still somewhat fluid, but the vetting is well underway, and those close to the process confirm that the dynamics continue to change quickly. Jennifer Palmieri, who advised Hillary Clinton during her 2016 hunt for a running mate, said, “Somebody who does not make a lot of sense in June can make a great pick on August 1.” With her words in mind, let’s take a look at these four rising stars and their positions on education:

1. Keisha Lance Bottoms (GA): The mayor of Atlanta hit all the right notes in a widely lauded, unscripted speech she delivered in the wake of rioting and looting in her city. Simultaneously projecting strength, vulnerability, passion, and reason, Bottoms rose to the moment in a manner few leaders have. On education, however, her most consequential action in the public’s eye—fulfilling a campaign promise to hire a chief education officer—landed with an embarrassing thud.

About two years ago, Bottoms publicly announced the appointment of a thirty-year-old Teach For America and Boston Consulting Group alum to the newly created cabinet level post. Days later, the mayor inexplicably rescinded the offer, even though the new hire had reportedly moved back to Metro Atlanta to begin working for the city.

Although Bottoms offered no explanation for the sudden change of heart, conventional wisdom suggests the failure to launch was linked to fears from Atlanta Public Schools that the new role was a nose under the tent of eventual mayoral control. Bottoms vehemently denied the notion, saying, “I think that any elected official will tell you that school takeover is considered political suicide, so I can tell you now that I’m not interested in jumping off a bridge.” Since then, it appears the mayor has abandoned the effort, illustrating the primacy of politics over her convictions, at least when it comes to education reform.

2. Rep. Val Demings (FL): The recent unrest and focus on police misconduct has raised the profile of the black congresswoman and former police chief. While Demings’s law enforcement bona fides could prove problematic on the campaign trail, her ability to speak commandingly on the subject could also be a significant asset at a time when school districts across the country have started cutting ties with police departments.

Demings’s record on education is informed in part by her experience leading the Orlando Police Department, where she assigned officers to fixing playgrounds and helping residents earn their high school equivalency degrees. She is against arming teachers—calling the idea “preposterous”—and believes that doing so in fact complicates law enforcement’s ability to respond to active shooters on campus. On policy, Demings is a proponent of universal pre-K and supported the teacher strikes for higher pay and more school funding.

3. Gov. Gina Raimondo (RI): A leader of the Democratic party’s centrist wing, the governor of the smallest state in the union recently earned the praise of conservative columnist George Will, who wrote that a Biden-Raimondo ticket would “restore adult supervision” in Washington. My colleague Erika Sanzi has written extensively about her home state’s chief executive (both the good and the not so good), most recently with regard to Raimondo’s leadership in response to the pandemic and making the best of on-the-fly distance learning in the Ocean State.

Now in her second term, Raimondo has stated that education is her “number one priority.” Although her push on early childhood and affordable higher education will be worth watching, it’s the state takeover of Providence’s public schools that will garner ongoing scrutiny. To her credit, Raimondo recently announced that students in Rhode Island will return to in-person schooling on August 31. Her admirably sensible and even-keeled approach is a marked contrast from the prevailing circumspection about school reopening this fall.

4. Susan Rice (DC): President Obama’s former national security adviser and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, Rice’s bid may be the longest of the bunch given her remarks on the Benghazi attack, which Republicans would assuredly attempt to use as a giant distraction should she be tapped. Moreover, she has never held elected office, though her extensive foreign policy experience is par excellence. Rice has been an outspoken critic of the current administration, and once flirted with moving to Maine to challenge Susan Collins for her U.S. Senate seat.

Equipped with a gold standard Washington resume, Rice’s credentials on education and domestic affairs are relatively thin. Rice’s late mother, however, was a vice president at the College Board and considered an education policy expert. Indeed, Lois Dickson Rice was known as the “mother of the Pell Grant” because of her work lobbying for its creation. She was also a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, researching higher education policy. For her part, one could surmise from Rice’s elite education that some of her mother’s influence likely rubbed off.

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Compared to the first nine candidates I reviewed, there’s more to get excited about with these four in the veepstakes. Yes, Bottoms doesn’t seem to be strong on education, but there’s reason to be bullish (or at least not bearish) on the other three. Demings is right that arming teachers is a red herring in the heated school safety debate. Raimondo brings a ton of heft and credibility, especially in light of her willingness to take on the messiness of school turnaround. And although Rice doesn’t have much of an education record to speak of, her personal experience being raised by an accomplished education policy wonk is more than can be said about others jockeying for the nod. To be sure, I remain highly skeptical about the education views of the VP field, but there’s still enough time between now and August to become guardedly optimistic.

This spring’s school closures have challenged us to look at many things differently and to be open-minded, creative, and brave about moving toward necessary change. As we consider reopening schools in the fall, let’s hold on to that mindset and ask what should special education become? Does the forty-five-year-old federal law (IDEA) need a thorough redo? We believe it does.

There is much to celebrate about all that public schools now provide for students with disabilities. We’ve certainly come a long way since 1975, when the law was enacted. Yet, especially as this crisis has revealed, special ed’s plethora of services, costs, and procedures have produced unintended consequences and missed opportunities.

At the start of the closures, Philip Howard’s USA Today discussion of cumbersome regulations included this: “Schools are a hornet’s nest of legal rules. Soon after New Jersey closed its schools...a parent of a special education student complained that it violated his rights.”

The parent was surely right. The closure also violated the “rights” of innumerable other students, with and without disabilities. Yet this parent was onto a key feature of our current quandary: While other students may have a theoretical “right” to an education, his child has a statutorily enforceable and uncapped entitlement! The crisis lays bare this difference.

Nationally, about 14 percent of today’s students—identified as disabled—are entitled by federal law to a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE). Nobody else is. Having an entitlement is a big deal because it ensures that a government program will provide eligible recipients (here, students with disabilities and their parents) with a specific set of services, rights, and other benefits—no matter the circumstances, school budget constraints, or what their peers get.

Now more than ever, this entitlement challenges schools. The national coronavirus crisis turned upside down the education of more than 50 million public school students, including 7 million with disabilities. Educators, students, and parents have struggled on a steep learning curve relative to distance learning, virtual classrooms, etc. 

How can schools provide a FAPE for some while trying to innovate for all students? How are they supposed to implement burdensome special-ed regulations, including timelines and meetings, always working under the fear of litigation, during this trying period? Even before the crisis, special ed teachers spent much time on meeting bureaucratic requirements, leaving a reported 27 percent of their time for actual instruction. Many chose to leave the profession. One can only wonder what the crisis has been doing to teachers.

When schools reopen, we can expect that most students will have regressed in academics and other skills. (If they don’t, why have schools?) Schools will face this challenging reality as they work to support all students to catch them up and help them learn anew. Despite this reality, however, only special education students will be able to assert legal rights and file due process claims against their schools for compensatory services to make up for any regression, to say nothing of complaints for missed timelines, services, and other requirements. Schools expect a barrage of such claims.

Really? Yes, under current law.

Notably, special education is the only entitlement program in our public schools—rights that are enforceable through due process hearings and in court. Since 1975, Congress has wisely chosen not to create new entitlement programs in the K–12 realm.

Who are these students? The law was written to provide access to public education for students with severe and profound needs. Today, however, estimates are that those children make up only 10 to 20 percent of the students enrolled in special ed. The vast majority (estimated at 80 to 90 percent) of today’s students with disabilities have mild or moderate needs. They are educated mostly in general education classrooms. Yet the law, rights, and regulatory requirements for these two very different groups are the same.

In 2001, writing in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, Tyce Palmaffy posed a key question: “The question of why learning disabled children are more deserving of extra help than everyday low achievers is one that LD advocates have never quite answered.” Nor has it been answered nineteen years later.

It’s also time to ask: Do students with full access to public education still need “protections”? And what about the law’s opportunity costs? For example, how can America’s prosperity and leadership position continue when so many other students, including advanced students, are underserved? How can we get teachers to focus on instruction instead of compliance? How can schools better spend scarce resources?

Yet the special education beat goes on. Even during this crisis, school administrators and attorneys spend inordinate amounts of time and effort on how to provide for special education students and how to comply with legal mandates when other students get far less than they should. Parents of special education students spend effort, often with great anxiety, to “fight” for their child against their public school, which the current statutory arrangement reinforces. These dysfunctional responses cannot be what the good folks who wrote this law had in mind.

This civil rights law was designed to provide individually-planned access to public education for students with disabilities—not to create a semi-separate system serving one subset of students. Regarding compensatory services for students with mild or moderate needs, if their parents, advocates, and attorneys prevail in demands for special services while their classmates do not receive any, how is that fair, equitable, or wise? It is not—and it’s not what this law intended. If and when that happens, public support for special education will surely decline. Most people understand crisis, fairness, and its opposite. Be careful what you wish for.

When this crisis abates, our world will look very different. The crisis has shed a bright light on many failings of American education, including inequalities, one of which is the inequitable distribution of rights and entitlements to education.

What to do? For starters, we believe it’s time to divide the special education student body into two very different groups: the far larger group of students who have mild and moderate needs and are mostly educated in general education classrooms and the smaller group who have profound and severe needs. In so doing, we take guidance from the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District. The Court highlighted the reality of two different groups of students with disabilities—those who are pursuing general education goals and those, generally with severe or profound needs, whose education is individualized according to their circumstances. 

For the larger group, the entitlement has completed its mission of providing access to education and should end (or be capped or otherwise limited), especially as it has also become increasingly dysfunctional and has brought great opportunity costs. Instead, it is time to build appropriate systems for these students within one interconnecting mechanism referred to as “general education.” Students with mild or moderate needs should be served through quality, individualized regular education—as should all other students. Dispute-resolution avenues should be provided for all students.

Some may argue that, rather than extracting some students from an entitlement, all students should have one. We disagree. The last thing we need is more lawyers, lawsuits, regulations, and bureaucrats running our schools.

For the smaller group of students with more severe and complex needs, it’s time for a thoughtful taskforce to propose how to proceed. Should these students retain an entitlement, or is another approach to ensure services more appropriate? Should the law mandate that other social service agencies step up to serve students who often have complex and costly needs? Should their education remain a school district responsibility, or should the state, through other agencies, become a mandated partner?

In short, special education claims and rights that go beyond reasonableness and fairness, all exacerbated by this crisis, face us squarely. We can no longer ignore them. They present the opportunity to question the continuing need for the forty-five-year-old entitlement for millions of students with mild or moderate needs and to work to establish a better way forward for students with severe and profound needs.

When schools reopen, maybe, just maybe, we will finally confront the fact that it’s time to end or limit the entitlement for many students with disabilities and devise a system that is leaner, rational, equitable, and more effective for all students. It’s time to build anew.

As national unrest builds along with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others at the hands of police officers, people worldwide are responding with marches, protests, critical reflection, and grief. Right now, the Black Lives Matter movement rages on. But what lies in the long-term for those in Minneapolis and other cities where police have murdered one of their own residents? A new working paper by Harvard professor Desmond Ang gives insight into the potential ramifications of recent police killings, particularly on the educational and psychological well-being of youth in those areas.

To be sure, it’s difficult to find causal evidence of the social impact of police use of force on local communities because police killings aren’t random and are more likely to occur in disadvantaged areas with high poverty and crime rates and other correlated characteristics. Ang’s contribution to the literature, then, is his comparison of students within the same neighborhoods but who live either very close to a killing (treatment group) or slightly further away (control group). This analysis allows him to identify a causal relationship through examination of two groups who come from similar backgrounds and were likely exposed to similar local conditions other than the killing itself.

Ang obtains his data from two sources, one containing home addresses and individual-level panel data for all high school students enrolled from 2002–16 in a large urban school district in the Southwest U.S., and the other containing incident-level information on officer-involved killings in the surrounding county. With over 700,000 addresses and 627 incidents over fifteen years, he calculates each student’s precise geographic proximity to police violence and uses a difference-in-differences statistical design to compare changes in students’ academic outcomes and emotional well-being (measured by self-reported feelings of safety and the number of students designated as “emotionally disturbed”) from those who lived within 0.5 miles of a killing to those from the same neighborhood who lived between 0.5 and 3.0 miles away from the killing. (It’s worth noting that three miles goes a long way in a city, but the overall results still hold as the control group shrinks from students living within one or two miles from an incident.)

Ang finds that living closer to police killings leads to persistent drops in grade point averages, lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment, and increased incidence of emotional disturbance. For students within 0.5 miles of the incidents, GPAs significantly declined by 0.04 points in the semester of a shooting and between 0.07 and 0.08 points in the two subsequent semesters. These effects predict a roughly 1.7 percentage point decrease in graduation rate and 0.09 percentage point decrease in college enrollment among ninth and tenth graders. Nearby students are also twice as likely to report feeling unsafe outside of school the year after a killing, and are 15 percent more likely to be classified as emotionally disturbed in the following semesters.

Inserting race into the equation only corroborates what we’ve witnessed over and over. These harmful effects are driven entirely by Black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of Black and Hispanic individuals. That is, Ang saw no significant impact on White or Asian students and no effects for police killings of White or Asian suspects. This is consistent with large racial differences in concerns about police brutality, suggesting that the educational spillovers of police killings may derive in part from perceptions of discrimination and injustice.

The fight against institutional racism and police misconduct should be taking place not only in the streets, but also in our schools. This is a teaching moment about the United States’s longstanding sociopolitical history of racism and how it still permeates through every sector of society today. But this is also a critical period to support and validate our Black and Brown students. Police killings of underrepresented minorities evidently exacerbate the already-too-wide racial academic achievement gaps. We have to do whatever we can to keep them from falling further through the cracks.

SOURCE: Desmond Ang, “The effects of police violence on inner-city students,” Working Paper (2020).

The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this? One solution, proposed by Nicholas Munyan-Penney and Charles Barone at Education Reform Now, could be to administer diagnostic assessments to determine students’ learning level at the beginning of the school year.

Diagnostic assessment occurs before instruction begins so that schools can assess students’ achievement levels. They help inform choices of lessons and materials, how best to group students to provide targeted learning, and decisions related to any Covid-19-related budget cuts or reduced school hours.

Munyan-Penney and Barone have three main recommendations. One, administer assessments statewide so there’s a consistent measure for all districts to evaluate student learning. The pandemic has ruined schools’ plans for regular end-of-year assessments, so this would be the next opportunity to reliably determine where students are at. A statewide diagnostic assessment could also be useful for policymakers and education researchers, who would be able to use the data it generates to answer difficult questions about the effectiveness of different district responses to the pandemic, how varying levels of internet access affected learning, and what can be done to better prepare ourselves for emergency situations in the future, as well as any closures in the fall. However, the likelihood of this happening remains uncertain. While many states have recommended diagnostic assessments in their reopening plans, these plans are only suggestions for districts, and no state thus far has indicated that it’ll require them.

The authors’ second recommendation is to use the assessment to inform decision-making around next year’s curricula and instruction. They write that most of the assessments in the report are able to provide immediate results and should be administered in the fall. However, waiting until fall would leave little to no time for school leaders and teachers to adjust their curricula to target gaps in student learning. Some states, such as Mississippi, have recommended administering assessments as early as July—perhaps a better timeline than waiting until school has already started.

And lastly, the authors recommend that these diagnostic tools shouldn’t be administered as high-stakes assessments. Especially in the midst of such a crisis, the purpose of these tests shouldn’t be identifying subpar teachers or school leaders.

Munyan-Penney and Barone’s idea to implement a new statewide diagnostic assessment diverges from recent trends in education. In February, for example, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reduced the number of mandatory statewide tests. In March, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a waiver for this year’s mandatory testing. And a large swath of universities are dropping the requirement that applicants take the SAT or ACT. Most of these decisions are in response to the pandemic and may be temporary—but not all. The University of California notably announced last month that its move away from those entrance exams was permanent, and that it may not replace them.

Despite all of this political backlash, we shouldn’t be so quick to slash testing altogether. While standardized assessments are imperfect (and what isn’t?), they're nevertheless important tools for all those involved in education to measure levels of student learning and hold districts accountable for it. And that’s when schools are operating as usual. So especially now during such uncertain times—wherein all schools responded to distance learning in different ways, students had varying access to online learning materials, and when students and adults are experiencing heightened levels of stress and anxiety—we need to utilize consistent measures to gauge the damage caused by coronavirus and make plans to remedy it as efficiently as possible. And the type of diagnostic test for which Munyan-Penny and Barone advocates is just that: A measure. What the measure may expose is what we should be truly concerned about.

SOURCE: Nicholas Munyan-Penney and Charles Barone, “COVID-19 Response: Diagnostic Assessment,” Education Reform Now (May 2020).

1. A group of Horizon Science Academy schools across Ohio are suing the state over what they reckon to be an ex post facto change in the application rules for the state’s new Quality Community Schools Support Grant. (Cleveland.com, 6/15/20) Not to be outdone, the legal scholars that make up the elected school board of Canton City Schools voted this week on a resolution that says Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program is unconstitutional and committing money to join a putative lawsuit against the state to that effect. Should it materialize. (Massillon Independent, 6/15/20)
    
2. Jeff Graham must have held on to his passcard when he left Lorain City Schools a couple years ago. Because he’s back already, starting work as the district’s new “CEO” even earlier than originally planned. (Morning Journal, 6/15/20) Speaking of districts who are supposed to be run by Academic Distress Commissions but really aren’t, Youngstown City Schools has come up with a way to keep the elected school board from being replaced by the mayor (via what is here termed a “truce” agreement hammered out by those two parties alone). Not just for now, but, thanks to the ‘rona, likely not ever. But you knew that was how it was going to turn out, didn’t you? (Vindy.com, 6/16/20)
    
3. Tangentially related to the above, Dayton City Schools says that the results of its recent survey of district parents reflect a level of satisfaction with the district which is connected to its rise from a report card grade of “F” to “D” last year. With some caveats. (Dayton Daily News, 6/16/20)
    
4. Looking forward to next year, Dayton Christian Schools says it’s ready to conduct fully in-person classes—safely—when it reopens on August 19. Although the head of school says they’ll also be ready to pivot to a hybrid model if it becomes necessary. (Dayton Daily News, 6/16/20) Finally today, the elected board of tiny Fort Recovery Local Schools voted this week to hedge their bets and join a consortium of other districts launching a fully online school for families who want it next year. The details provided in this brief piece are fascinating: the curriculum is promised to be “more rigorous than the remote-learning” they participated in this spring; extracurricular participation = yes, co-curricular participation (think band, choir, voc ed) = no due to the in-person requirements; the district will provide laptops but makes sure to know that these home devices will have the same “filtering restrictions” as in-school ones do; principal and counselor approval will be required for moving in or out of the program; schedule flexibility will be available as long as participation requirements are met; and seniors can earn their Fort Recovery diplomas via the online school, but will be ineligible for valedictorian consideration due to “in-school class requirements”. Fascinating indeed. (The Daily Standard, 6/16/20)

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A few years ago, a close friend and colleague made a surprising confession. Even though we worked at a charter school network devoted to civic education, she admitted to me that she’d never voted and wasn’t even registered. She felt guilty and hypocritical. How could she promote the virtue of voting to children starting in kindergarten but not vote herself?

She expected me to be disappointed, even shocked, but I wasn’t. My friend is among the most civic-minded and public-spirited people I know, had touched the lives and shaped the education of hundreds, even thousands, of other people’s children in a leadership position in our network. Not only did she have nothing to apologize for, compared to her career in education, voting seemed insignificant, even trivial. She’s a model of civic virtue.

I’ve been thinking about my friend and our conversation against the backdrop of our annus horribilis: plague, disruption, social unrest, and economic despair, wending its way inexorably toward what is certain to be the most rage-fueled election in living memory. And that leads me to a confession of my own. Despite writing about and advocating for civic education and teaching a high school civics class, I’m not going to vote this year, at least not in the presidential election. This reflects a lack of enthusiasm for either party’s candidate (I’m a lifelong registered Independent), but it has more to do with my unease with politics’ all-consuming role in our lives, the passion and energy partisanship consumes, and its corrosive effects on our well-being. 

To state the obvious, we are a deeply divided nation and only becoming more so by the day. Hyper-partisanship is a spreading stain coloring everything it touches red or blue. Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, cites the public response to things like climate change and Covid-19, which in saner times might remain mostly outside the partisan sphere. “We’re seeing with this virus that people’s belief about a scientific phenomenon is enormously shaped by their political party,” he points out. Most ominously, partisanship colors our perceptions of each other. “It drives us to see people with different political perspectives as evil and inherently untrustworthy,” Kahne notes. That’s not merely deleterious to civil society, it’s toxic, and potentially fatal to it. If we’ve gotten to the point—and this happens to nearly all of us—where people want to know whose team you’re on in order to judge your character, work, and ideas, then a rebalancing is overdue.

Taking a broader view of civic education and revitalizing the civic mission of schools might help. Civics and citizenship is not just the forgotten purpose of education, it’s the forgotten subject. Fewer than one in four eighth graders score “proficient” or better on NAEP Civics, easily the poorest performance on any tested subject, and what little of it is offered tends to focus on teaching about government. But there is more to civics than government. And more to citizenship than voting. 

“Government is only one among many tools for shaping our common world, and voting is only one of many tools for influencing government,” observes Tufts University’s Peter Levine, who doesn’t agree with me about staying home in November but shares my view that it’s a mistake to reduce “civic engagement” to voting. “In my ideal of civic education, the nation-state and our relationship to it would be less important than it typically is, and civil society would be more important,” he tells me.

Civil society is one of those terms that is subject to interpretation and without a firmly established definition, but it generally refers to a broad range of activities and institutions that belong neither to the government or business sectors, including (but not limited to) churches and charities, social movements and advocacy organizations, community groups and associations. There is not a clear line separating political life and civil society, but one thing is obvious: Trust and cooperation are indispensible to these “third sector” activities and institutions. If we are hostile to people who don’t share our politics, it can only undermine our ability to work together with those folks in churches, on the PTA, or other activities that stitch communities together. Try this simple thought exercise: If you are among the 69 percent of Biden supporters or 61 percent of Trump’s supporters who described themselves to pollsters recently as “extremely motivated” to vote for your candidate, how would you feel about your child’s soccer coach if he drove to practice in a car festooned with bumper stickers for the candidate you oppose, and maybe even despise? How comfortable would you feel on the sidelines if you knew most of the other soccer moms and dads took a dim view of your politics?

Shortly after the tumultuous 2016 election, Michael Wear, the former director of Barack Obama’s faith-outreach efforts, observed in The Atlantic that politics was “causing a deep spiritual harm in our country. We’ve allowed politics to take up emotional space in our lives that it’s not meant to take up.” Wear’s insight, which has only sharpened with time, applies to those of us who are concerned with preparing our children not just to be voters but to become deeply invested in civil society and the range of institutions, public and private, that allow us to work together and solve problems and advance our shared interests. I want my students to become politically sophisticated voters capable of advocating for themselves. I also want them to be able to work well alongside people whose views they might not share.

To be clear—and emphatic—I’m not advocating for nonvoting at large, particularly for communities that have historically had too little say in government and politics. But I’m increasingly reminded of the ‘80s movie “War Games,” in which the world is pushed to the brink of nuclear holocaust by a computer-simulation exercise that careens out of control. The computer itself narrowly averts World War III and concludes in the film’s finale, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” I’ve come to feel much the same about our zero-sum game of presidential politics. So I’m sitting this one out.

As a coda, I reached out to my former colleague to tell her I was writing this post for Rick’s blog and to refresh my memory of our long-ago conversation. She’s still doing great work for kids, but she’s been a proudly registered voter since 2016, passionately engaged by politics, and adamantly anti-Trump. When I described my idea for this piece, she emailed back and chided me a little, even speculating that “making a nuanced point about how to be civic-minded by not voting makes me believe you are keeping your support [of Trump] veiled. But,” she added, “I tend to assume the worst in general.”

And that’s the point.

Editor’s note: This essay was first published on Education Week’s blog Rick Hess Straight Up.

In late March, state lawmakers gave local schools emergency authority to determine whether students in the class of 2020 satisfied graduation requirements. The reason was fairly straightforward: Due to the school closures, a number of seniors missed opportunities to meet standard graduation requirements, such as passing state end-of-course exams (likely primarily retakes), finishing an industry recognized credential, or completing a few other options. That legislation, however, was mum on requirements for future graduating classes—freshman, sophomores, and juniors, as well as some middle schoolers—whose state end-of-course exams (EOCs) were cancelled.

The just-passed House Bill 164 addresses this complication by allowing final course grades to substitute for scores on the EOCs students were unable to take. An A is equivalent to the top achievement mark on state exams (“advanced”), a B is equivalent to the next highest level (“accelerated”), and so forth. Earning a grade of C or above yields a “competency” designation on the ELA II and algebra I EOCs, the key assessments for meeting graduation requirements. To count toward graduation, the final grade must be earned in the course that is directly associated with the EOC exam. For instance, a pupil’s algebra I course grade substitutes for her state algebra I exam.

If I had my druthers, policymakers would have opted to administer missed EOCs this fall. Yes, much like AP exams, these tests are supposed to be taken shortly after course completion. But schools could have made efforts to review content prior to assessment—arguably time well spent, given the importance of mastery in subjects such as algebra and English. Alas, agreeing with recommendations from the Ohio Education Association and school administrator associations, legislators felt that defaulting to course grades was a better option given the trying circumstances.

While using course grades may be an acceptable Band-Aid for this year, using them in the place of exam scores should not become a permanent fixture in Ohio’s graduation policy. We at Fordham have previously warned against efforts to substitute course grades or grade point averages for state exams to determine graduation. Let’s review, once again, the formidable problems.

1. Grading practices vary, resulting in a multiplicity of standards. Grading policies and practices are determined locally, and rightfully so. Schools and teachers can and should have flexibility in how they evaluate student work. But this flexibility also results in significant variation from school to school, and even from teacher to teacher. Some schools may have more relaxed grading practices—handing out “easy A’s”—while others have stricter standards. When course grades substitute for exam scores, no uniform bar exists that all students have to clear to earn diplomas. In a violation of basic principles of equity and fairness, some students will meet requirements under laxer academic standards, while others will have to do more in order to graduate.
    
2. Double standards will hurt students over the long run. One could, of course, argue that all schools can be trusted to set rigorous expectations for student work. But various analyses cast doubt on whether each and every school maintains a high bar. Consider, for example, the findings from the recent curriculum audit of Columbus City Schools. The most common classroom activity in its high schools is “low-level worksheets.” One district administrator said this about the rigor of coursework: “I haven’t gone in one classroom where I have seen grade-level work yet.” Low expectations, likely also manifested in lenient grading, can only do harm to students. When they receive good grades—and are handed diplomas in turn—under soft standards, they’ll suffer the consequences of entering the “real world” without having gained the knowledge and skills needed for true success.
    
3. Course grades are vulnerable to “gaming” especially when tied to high-stakes decisions. While many educators take grading student work seriously, there have been cases in which course grades have been manipulated. In Washington, D.C., educators awarded passing grades to students who hardly ever showed up for class. Something similar happened almost a decade ago in Columbus, where school officials retroactively changed course grades. In both cases, tampering with grades was done to inflate graduation rates. Though not as blatantly scandalous, teachers may also be pressured, whether by administration, parents, or even students, to award higher grades than they otherwise would—a perverse incentive that is only heightened when diplomas are on the line. These inflated grades can only hurt students who are not only misled by these evaluations but also, as a recent Fordham study found, learn less when teachers soften their grading standards.
   

    

4. Course grades aren’t reliable indicators of academic competency. Much like a driver’s license test, Ohio’s exam requirements aim to ensure that students have the basic skills and abilities needed to navigate life after high school. For the reasons expressed above, course grades cannot provide the same assurances that students are competent in math and English. A study from North Carolina found that a significant number of students who scored poorly on algebra I exams received good course grades in the same subject. Unfortunately, Ohio does not collect course grades to check whether they agree with state exam scores. However, given the national trend in grade inflation, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a sizeable number of students receiving solid grades, but falling short of competency on state exams.

Course grades do, of course, have a place in educational practice. They reflect the evaluations of educators who observe students on a near-daily basis, and they may include other dimensions of a well-rounded education such as teamwork and class participation. But as a consistent yardstick of academic achievement, course grades are poor substitutes for Ohio’s end-of-course exams. As such, the emergency provisions granted to the classes of 2020 to 2023 shouldn’t become the “new normal.”

Today the Thomas B. Fordham institute and the Center for American Progress published Moonshot For Education: A Federal Policy Proposal to Spur Effective Research and Development for K-12 Education. This proposal calls on Congress to substantially increase investment in education research and development (R & D), and is the culmination of the Moonshot For Kids initiative—a joint effort to highlight bipartisan interest in education R & D and gather bold new research ideas. Over 150 contestants participated in the Moonshot For Kids competition over the summer of 2019, and in November, ten finalists presented their “moonshot ideas” that would benefit from a sustained R & D infrastructure.

Following this event, our teams discussed the many great ideas our contestants shared, what we learned from the competition, and our research about what an even larger R & D infrastructure could look like. We finalized this policy proposal in early March but decided to delay its release as educators, policymakers, and the country at large suddenly grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic is far from over, and its impact on education will endure long after schools re-open, we still wanted to move forward with this pre-pandemic policy proposal.

We have not updated the proposal, but we felt it was important to contextualize its release. If anything, the events in the past several months have highlighted the need for additional student supports and additional research investments. For example, how can we best serve English language learners and students with disabilities in a remote setting? What training and support do teachers need to practice effective teaching during distance learning? How should students prepare for postsecondary success in a time of so much uncertainty?

Education Opens Doors, one of the competition's two winners, proposed “a comprehensive college and career program that raises self-expectations, increases confidence, and builds skills in students who lack access to this critical information.” Helping students understand and prepare for college and career opportunities in a tumultuous economy is now more important than ever, but what might need to change in classroom-based models if schools operate differently next year?  

One finalist, Tyto Online, pitched a video game platform where students, especially those traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields, could get fun, hands-on experience using science to solve real-world problems. It’s no Animal Crossing, but the game’s collaborative platform could build belonging in these isolating times and help students see the value and relevance of their STEM courses. The organization has already partnered with several districts, but needs connections to content partners to continue creating new in-game scenarios.

Other finalists, like CommonLit, Bibliomatic, and The Modern Classrooms Project, already leveraged technology to support and improve traditional instruction. Having funding structures in place to advance the research supporting these initiatives could bolster remote learning efforts as schools try to recover from the trauma and learning losses during the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated already stark inequities and highlighted the need for increased flexibility and resiliency in American education systems. Recovering from it will take significant investment during this unprecedented moment, to say nothing of the emotional support, postsecondary preparation, and community rebuilding that will also need to occur in and out of K–12 schools in the years to come. A robust R & D infrastructure is no replacement for this investment, but it could complement those efforts and make more bold ideas a reality. And we need big, bold, moonshot ideas now more than ever.