Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.

The best part about writing an essay on the TV series “Young Sheldon” was that it gave me the excuse to say “I’m working!” whenever anyone walked into the family room. It’s a dream assignment for an academic who is also a huge pop-culture junkie. “Bazinga” indeed!

However, the worst part was that the show ran for seven seasons and 141 episodes when the finale aired on May 16, a longevity of which I was blissfully unaware when accepting the invitation. That made for a lot of streaming over the past couple months, about sixty-five hours’ worth. (To prove I watched them all: Roadhouse, “He has a learner’s permit and his own phone line,” Joy of Painting, “Wow, this 27-inch TV is huge,” 90210). Our Young Sheldon would never have made such a miscalculation.

The boy genius

The main character is Sheldon Cooper, a character first introduced during the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” (2007–19). As an adult, Sheldon is a theoretical physicist at Caltech. The actor Jim Parsons plays Sheldon on “TBBT” and narrates “Young Sheldon” (often unreliably). Iain Armitage plays the younger Sheldon.

As an adult, Sheldon often mockingly jokes about his family’s (and everyone else’s) lack of intellect. But “TBBT” ends with him expressing genuine appreciation for his family and friends’ support. “Young Sheldon” attempts to present how that appreciation developed.

The show takes us back to his childhood in the small town of Medford in East Texas, a few hours outside of Dallas. Sheldon lives with his dad, George, a high school football coach; his mom, Mary, a homemaker who initially works part-time at her church; Georgie, Sheldon’s older brother; and Missy, Sheldon’s twin sister. Sheldon’s maternal grandmother, Meemaw (played masterfully by Annie Potts), lives a couple houses down the street.

As the series opens in 1989, Sheldon is starting high school as a nine-year-old, which is awkward for Georgie, who is also starting ninth grade. Over the course of the series, Sheldon graduates early from high school, graduates early from a local university, and by the end is about to depart for graduate school at the age of fourteen.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the popularity of both shows, which were among the ten highest-rated programs for most of their combined nineteen seasons. It’s not hard to see why: sharp writing, good character development, first-rate acting, and clever use of celebrity cameos and featured players all make for a fun viewing experience. The major themes are also highly relatable, ranging from family dynamics and friendships to the tensions between science and religion and between academics and athletics.

I had not been a regular viewer of “Young Sheldon” or “The Big Bang Theory.” I enjoyed “TBBT” but only dipped in and out during its last seasons. I surely missed lots of inside jokes that regular viewers of both shows appreciated. And although I have pages and pages of notes, I will stick to my assigned task: exploring whether “Young Sheldon” accurately portrays the issues faced by advanced students and their families.

What the show gets right

“Young Sheldon” captures many of the characteristics and experiences of highly advanced children. Sheldon has very high expectations for his academic performance and struggles with failure (getting a “poor grade,” a spectacularly unsuccessful college project, ignoring sage advice from his professors on applying to summer programs). He tends to be full of himself and doesn’t react well to perceived slights. He abhors group work (as do his college classmates!), and he goes out of his way to avoid boredom. He is more than a little obsessive-compulsive. Sheldon loves his family, if often struggling to show it. His frenemy Paige, another young genius, rebels against the high expectations of others, struggles with her parents’ divorce, and admits to pretending not to be smart in order to be more popular. These are not atypical traits of many smart people—among both children and adults!

I loved that the writers resisted pathologizing Sheldon’s weirdness. Other shows with genius characters tend to succumb to the temptation to depict them as being on the spectrum or having debilitating personality disorders. But that is not Sheldon Lee Cooper. Sure, he is odd and different, but how could someone highly intelligent not appear weird to most other people? I’m reminded of a reception at an academic conference where I noticed a friend standing off by himself. I asked if he was OK. He replied that he was doing great, noting with a sweep of his hand, “It’s great to be in a room where I’m not the quirkiest person.”

A good example of how the writers treat his weirdness is an exchange with Mr. Lundy, the drama teacher. Sheldon declares a passion for acting, despite never having attempted it. The teacher says, “Well, I like that confidence,” to which Sheldon replies, “Thanks, most people find it off-putting.”

That exchange takes on added importance when it becomes clear that Sheldon actually is a good singer and dancer, requiring little practice. But as he prepares to star in the school musical, his anxiety prevents him from taking the stage. That doesn’t make him a freak; it makes him human. He knows what he’s like and how people view him. He just doesn’t care most of the time. Mr. Lundy observes, “You’re an odd little boy, but you make it work” (S1, Ep16). It’s worth noting that Sheldon reacts by nodding in appreciation.

Over time Sheldon becomes humbler in different contexts and gradually more self-aware. He’s helped along by his family, like when Meemaw notes, “It’s great to have knowledge, but you don’t have to show it off all the time” (S4, Ep2). In those situations, Sheldon is mildly taken aback but tends to learn from them. Especially in later seasons, he is often shown to be adaptable, shivering in revulsion during—but tolerating—situations that would have made him flee screaming (literally!) at the beginning of the series. The older Sheldon cares more and adjusts to each person’s expectations—not always successfully, but he makes the effort.

One of my favorite scenes in the series is when he asks one of his professors, the perpetually annoyed Dr. Linkletter, to help him understand sarcasm (S6, Ep15). It plays like a modern version of “Who’s on first?”, with Sheldon struggling to figure out which comments are sincere and which are sarcastic. (Everything Dr. Linkletter says is dripping with sarcasm.) Sheldon gets that sarcasm exists, he knows he struggles to pick up on it, and he tries to learn how to be sarcastic. He’s just not good at it. And that’s OK! We all have our struggles, and I enjoyed seeing the portrayal of a super-smart child that resists making him into either a superhero or super-weirdo.

One thing that didn’t work...and one that hit close to home

One unrealistic development was the school district’s willingness to accelerate Sheldon from elementary school to high school, then to let him graduate early to enter college. Such grade skipping is a radical, if sometimes necessary, intervention. I liked how the decisions at various points reflected reasonable parent concerns (Is he emotionally ready for this? Are we?). But let’s be frank: How many districts are willing to entertain such big steps and to openly facilitate them? Very few, in my experience.

The show actually reinforces this point throughout its run. In each season, there is at least one situation in which Sheldon’s parents wrestle with a major decision about their son’s future. The entire first season is about whether Sheldon can adjust to high school as a nine-year-old, with Mary especially concerned about him making friends and being safe. The family struggles with the decision to graduate high school early, start college early, and go overseas for a summer physics program. In real life, the lack of public-school or low-cost services for advanced students forces families to make difficult decisions with little preparation and few resources. If Sheldon’s K–12 educators had not been so oddly willing to radically accelerate him, the family’s education struggles would have been even more severe. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American families?

An aspect of Sheldon’s schooling that feels very accurate is the reaction of his high school teachers to both his presence and early departure for college. The teachers’ feelings are exaggerated and played for laughs—and Sheldon’s behavior toward them is highly offensive—but those scenes didn’t sit well with me. When I was an elementary school teacher, we had a couple extremely smart students, and the comments in the teachers’ lounge about them were often mocking and lacking in empathy. The students were not that weird; compared to Sheldon and Paige, they were quite normal! But they were just different enough—and just smart enough—that sometimes they were treated like aliens. The exasperated attitude of Sheldon’s teachers (both in high school and at college!) was a sharp reminder that most educators have little to no training in advanced education or the needs of advanced students. This lack of preparation often leads to confusion and miscommunication among educators, students, and parents. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American educators?

Hot take: The show should be called “The Cooper Family”

In full disclosure, I didn’t like the show initially. Working through the first few episodes, the repetitive plots and stereotypical characters felt like caricatures. A lot of the “insights” in those early episodes started to feel like “laugh at the nerd” or “pity the awkward genius” tropes that make it hard for me to sit through other shows with very smart characters.

But something changes in the middle of that first season. The focus shifts from the travails of an annoying genius to the adventures of a family with lots of quirky members, one of whom happens to be quite smart. That’s when the series starts to click and become both multidimensional and more entertaining.

Parenting a highly precocious child is rarely easy, and the show does a good job noting the many frustrations faced by the children themselves, their parents, their siblings, their educators, and even members of their community (like Pastor Jeff). Sibling jealousy! Protecting your child from being exploited! The sacrifices a family makes for the benefit of one child! These are all common concerns in families with advanced students.

With the shift to family dynamics, fully realized by the middle of season four, the standard sitcom formula (this thing happens, and here’s how people react) becomes more complex. Scenarios still occasionally center on Sheldon, but plot lines increasingly address how Sheldon reacts to the problems of others. That is, it becomes a fuller portrait of how families actually work. Missy’s teenage struggles bother Sheldon, and he and the other family members struggle to be supportive. His parents’ relationship issues bug him and his siblings, but they can’t figure out how to react, or if they should react at all. Sheldon’s superior intelligence does not give him special insights into these common problems because he has never experienced them before. That feels accurate to me, too.

Not that Sheldon’s parents always get it right. They often hold him to lower standards than he holds for himself. An early attempt to send him to a boarding school for advanced students falls apart far too soon, yet he shows that he can handle attending college. He has opportunities to attend Caltech and other top-tier universities on free rides, yet his parents prefer that he study at the fictional East Texas Tech. In part because they don’t understand his abilities, and in part because they overestimate his social and emotional fragility, they make several important decisions that are rather ill-advised. As a parent of bright children, this resonates. The academic in me always advises people to “let them fly!” while the parent in me is thinking, “but not too far, too fast!” This essential tension is depicted with compassion throughout the series.

In the end, it’s all about wisdom

Much of the show can be summarized by this comment about Sheldon in Season 2: “How can he be so smart and so clueless at the same time?” This is a common observation about highly talented children, and it reflects the difference between intelligence and wisdom. A child may be intellectually brilliant, but their lack of experience often slaps them on the head as they barrel through life.

From a psychological perspective, this is to be expected. Parents have decades of hard-earned wisdom that children simply do not have. As the series progresses, Sheldon’s family, friends, and mentors help him gain the context and experiences that gradually make one wise. They also do it for Georgie and Missy—and Meemaw often does it for George and Mary—which makes sense.

I am going to miss the Cooper family, and not just because I spent nearly every day with them over the past two months. “Young Sheldon” provides an accurate depiction of the struggles of a bright child and the family dynamics that impact and are impacted by that child. It also reminds us that a key goal of parenting and families is to help each other become wiser about interacting with the world. It’s hard to imagine a television show that depicts this more accurately, and with such heart.

This is third in a series in which I examine issues in K–12 education that Ohio leaders should tackle in the next biennial state budget. Previous pieces covered the science of reading and funding for low-income pupils. This essay looks at the way Ohio funds interdistrict open enrollment students.

Since 1989, Ohio has allowed students to attend public schools outside of their home district through interdistrict open enrollment. Under this policy, a student living in Columbus, for instance, can enroll in the neighboring Reynoldsburg school district (and vice-versa). Over the years, a growing number of families have availed themselves of this opportunity and roughly 77,000 students select this option today. Students may be using the program to access schools that offer special programs or courses not offered by their home district. In rural areas, open enrollment may be the only alternative available. And no matter where a student lives, it allows them to attend a different school without needing to call the U-Haul and change homes. As for impacts on learning, a 2017 Fordham study indicates that students, particularly those from less advantaged groups, make academic gains when they open enroll.

Ohio has always allowed districts to choose whether to accept open enrollees, and about four in five do voluntarily participate. Yet in a non-mandatory system, funding is crucial as the dollars tied to open enrollment students serve to incentivize district participation. Unfortunately, as discussed below and previously on this blog, state lawmakers made a misstep in open enrollment funding under the recently enacted Fair School Funding Plan. As data and media accounts suggest, the policy change is putting the program in jeopardy. In the next biennial budget, state lawmakers should restore Ohio’s traditional approach to funding open enrollment.

How open enrollment was previously funded

Under the former version of the state funding formula, open enrollment students were funded at a simple, flat amount. In the last year the old formula was used (FY21), districts across the board received $6,020 per open enrollment student in state funds. This straightforward approach made clear to districts the financial incentive to accept an open enrollee, and the per-pupil amounts were large enough that they likely exceeded the costs of serving additional students (especially in districts not at full capacity). The former approach to funding was clear, straightforward, and helped ensure that districts were covered financially when they decided to permit open enrollment and serve more students.

Recent changes via Fair School Funding Plan

First implemented in FY22, Ohio’s new funding model now treats open enrollees as if they were resident students of the district. Though there is some logic to that approach, the change has significantly cut the funding tied to most open enrollees. The reason: While open enrollment students were previously funded at the full base amount (e.g., $6,020 in FY21), they are now funded at a certain percentage of the base amount. That resulted in particularly sharp declines for more affluent districts—arguably the ones both most in demand, and most in need of convincing to take students from outside their boundaries. But it also reduced funding in average wealth districts, as well, many of which serve Ohio’s rural and small town communities where open enrollment has been relatively common. The new system is also more complicated, making it hard to determine with certainty the precise amounts that open enrollees will bring with them.

To illustrate, consider table 1, which shows five districts of varying wealth, with Chagrin Falls being the wealthiest and New Boston the poorest. The column shaded in green is key, as it approximates the per-pupil funding of general-education[1] open enrollees attending these districts. In Chagrin Falls, the district receives just $806 per open enrollee—well below what it would have received under the old formula. In Three Rivers, an open enrollee would be funded at just $2,017. Only in higher-poverty districts such as North College Hill does open enrollment funding reach amounts more comparable to the prior formula. In total, just 95 districts—roughly 15 percent—received base amounts this year for open enrollees that exceed $6,020 per pupil.[2]

Table 1: Illustration of open enrollment funding in selected districts, FY24

Downturn in open enrollment participation

Prior to FY22, participation in open enrollment had been rising at a steady clip each year. Under the new formula, that pattern has reversed. As shown in figure 1, a noticeable decline in participation has occurred over the past three years. Compared to FY21, open enrollment numbers this year are down 7.1 percent (-5,941 students). It is possible that some of the decline from FY21 to FY22 is due to a change in reporting methods.[3] Yet even then, there’s has still been a noticeable slide in enrollments under the Fair School Funding Plan after years of consistent growth.

Figure 1: Open enrollment participation statewide, FYs 2015–24

It may be a coincidence that participation in open enrollment has dipped as the state implemented its new funding formula. Correlation isn’t causation, and perhaps other factors explain these declines (e.g., less parental interest in the program or the expansion of private-school choice).

Or maybe it’s no accident at all. In Northeast Ohio, West Branch school district announced last summer that it would be scaling back open enrollment, pointing specifically to changes in the funding formula. West Clermont, a Southwest Ohio district that open enrolled more than 100 students in 2021, reports just 24 open enrollees this year. A notice on its website confirms that it recently “decreased the number of open enrollment acceptances.” Similarly, Riverside school district says that it’s no longer accepting new open enrollment applications. This spring, Lakota school district near Cincinnati announced that (save for employee children) it’s no longer going to accept open enrollees in grades K–6, period. Impacted open enrollees will be forced to trek back to their home district or seek another educational alternative this fall. All of this is happening at a time when public school enrollment overall is dropping, which would typically lead districts to want to take more students from outside their boundaries.

The path forward on open enrollment funding

Funding policy should encourage rather than discourage districts to meet the needs of more Ohio families and students. The state’s new funding method misses that mark, and without change, we may see even more districts closing off open enrollment opportunities. The best way forward for state lawmakers is to restore the traditional approach to funding open enrollment by setting a simple, flat per-pupil amount that all districts receive when they open enroll.[4] This would once again make clear the financial incentive for districts to accept non-resident students. It would also provide amounts sufficient for districts to maintain or expand their open enrollment program. With any luck, it might even nudge some of the last remaining non-participating districts toward opening their doors.

* * *

For more than two decades, state leaders have crafted choice-friendly policies that put parents and students’ needs first. One part of this push has been to encourage more public-school options within the traditional district system via open enrollment. But recent changes in school funding policy have put this valuable program at-risk. In the next budget cycle, state lawmakers should fix open enrollment funding to ensure that it continues to benefit Ohio families and students.

In 2023, Sarah Stitzlein—professor of education at the University of Cincinnati—asserted that “the health of our democracy in the United States depends directly on our public schools.” Her assessment summed up decades of thought and scholarship on the subject. But what about private schools, attended by about one in every ten young Americans? Surely they are crucial to democracy as well. A new meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review aims to find out.

The research team is a stellar one, including Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham in England, and a crew from the University of Arkansas that includes professor Patrick Wolf and researchers Mattie Harris, Alison Heape Johnson, and Sarah Morris (the latter two former Fordham EEP Scholars). Together, they dig into the measurable impacts of civics instruction on students. The initial literature search identified a whopping 13,000 quantitative studies. The vast majority, however, duplicated or replicated each other, weeding out the majority and leaving just over 1,500 unique studies. The researchers screened these based on appropriateness and quality—specifically, they were looking for those that showed the impacts of civics education on public and private school students’ political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, as well as their voluntarism and social capital.

Their final meta-analysis draws from 40 different databases and includes 57 studies, yielding 531 effects studied across the four outcomes of interest. (More on this methodology later.) The majority of studies came from the United States, with a handful from other countries in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. Thirty-one studies utilized nationally representative samples. Data ranged from 1982 to 2020. The private schools studied included those with specific religious identities (Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, and other religions), several non-specific religious schools, as well as secular private schools. The analysts used robust variance estimate (RVE) regression and meta-regression to identify the average association between civics education and the four civic outcomes of interest.

On average, they report, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling, showing statistically significant positive impacts on three of the four civic outcomes, with only political participation showing null effects. Religious private schooling shows an even stronger impact.

These findings come with methodological caveats that must be considered: Only seven of the 40 databases informing the studies were generated using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The average effect observed in the studies that use those databases, the authors write, “is positive 0.019 SD, but null.” And while the meta-analysis would likely have not been possible using only those gold-standard studies, the observational nature of the majority of the source data—and the reliance on those sources to generate statistically significant effects—should encourage readers to interpret the findings cautiously. The wide chronologic and geographic spread of the data also deserve consideration—Chile and Mexico are not the U.S.—and the America of 1982 is far removed from that of 2020. The fact that effects on parents are included in the overall outcomes—and are larger than the effects on students—is another concern. Additionally, as with meta-analyses in general, we can’t investigate the mechanisms that may be at work.

Still and all,  the analysts conclude that private schools appear better than public schools at building civically-engaged citizens and let the rhetorical chips fall where they may. There’s likely some truth to their assertion—and the corollary that public schools are not de facto better than private at building good citizens, despite a century of faith in that tenet, is likely true as well—but this evidence is surely not enough for anyone to declare it a settled question just yet.

SOURCE: M. Danish Shakeel, et al., “The Public Purposes of Private Education: A Civic Outcomes Meta‑Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review (April 2024).

The Education Freedom Institute (EFI) recently released the newest iteration of its charter ecosystem rankings, its third such effort to gauge the health of states’ charter-school sectors. The mission is still the same—shifting the focus of ranking schema to how a state’s schools are actually performing and serving students, rather than how conducive their laws are to charter establishment, support, and growth (which is what other national organizations’ rating systems have typically focused on). But how well have the authors achieved their goal and crafted an ideal ranking system?

The authors, Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne of Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, combine four statewide measures of charter school accessibility and academic success to craft their rankings: Accessibility comprises the percentage of a state’s students who attend charter schools and the percentage of students residing in a zip code that contains a charter school serving their grade. The former gauge is straightforward enough, but the latter tends to bias the rankings against states that limit charters to urban communities and/or low-performing districts. On the academic success front, the authors use the aggregate reading and math test score performance for all charter students as compared to how these students would have performed if they had instead attended a traditional district school.[1]

Accessibility measures come from publicly available data frome 2021–22 while achievement data are drawn from CREDO’s 2023 National Charter School Study III. The rankings include 29 states and the District of Columbia, and exclude states whose data are incomplete or too recent to be properly comparable. The components are scored individually, with the highest-performing state given 30 points and the lowest-performing one given 1 point—the others ranked in order in between. Then the point totals are added together, with the Academic Success measures comprising 60 percent and the Accessibility measures counting for 40 percent of each state’s total score.

According to EFI, the top five charter locales are Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. In line with the 60/40 split, their scores were driven by the relatively strong academic performance of those states’ charters versus their district peers. For example, Rhode Island’s accessibility rankings were average to just-above average, but charter students in the state gained a whopping 90.2 extra days of instruction in reading and 87.9 days in math compared to their district counterparts.

What does all this mean? Scafidi and Wearne emphasize the importance of considering student outcomes, which other national organizations don’t do in their rankings. “What experts consider well-written laws,” they opine, “do not always produce actual charter schools, and those schools do not always result in increased achievement by students.” They are hopeful that state and national policymakers will eventually favor their more outcomes-driven analysis, especially in this third iteration. However, they note that any statewide snapshot of the charter sector—even theirs—should only be used as a “first-pass” when considering the performance of charter schools in a given state. These aggregated data “may not reflect what is happening in a specific community” at a specific point in time, and especially may lag behind where that state’s charter school ecosystem is currently at or may be headed in the near future. If lots more charters are scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, for example, 2023 accessibility scores will be far lower than they will be during the next review. And low charter performance on a statewide measure could mask the fact that any single charter school could be the very best-performing option near a given family’s home.

Another important issue is the inclusion of online charter schools in CREDO’s data, which has a big impact on the EFI ratings. Consider Fordham’s home state of Ohio, ranked 27th, rising above only Oregon, Indiana, and South Carolina. Ohio ranks low in the accessibility categories (in part because its plentiful charters are limited to urban locales), but does especially poorly in academic outcomes, with charter students actually losing days of instruction in both reading and math to their traditional district peers, according to CREDO. Yet such analyses fail to control for the well-documented academic struggles of online schools, which make up nearly 30 percent of the Buckeye State’s charter sector, and have often distorted CREDO’s Ohio charter analyses. Indeed, a 2020 Ohio State analysis commissioned by Fordham found that brick-and-mortar charter schools boosted math and ELA test scores for grades 4–8 above their district counterparts, with impacts especially pronounced among Black students.

Despite these methodological concerns, however, EFI’s analysis continues to add food for thought around what makes for a “good” charter school sector. And for that, it deserves to be taken seriously.

SOURCE: Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne, “EFI Charter School Ecosystem Rankings 2024,” Education Economics Center, Kennesaw State University (April 2024).

Registered apprenticeship programs offer workers paid, on-the-job learning experience under the supervision of an experienced mentor, job-related classroom training, and the chance to earn a portable industry-recognized credential. Most people assume that these opportunities are limited to certain types of careers, like electricians or plumbers. But over the last several years, apprenticeships have become an increasingly popular solution for school staffing shortages.

Ohio is looking to leverage that potential. Last summer, Governor DeWine followed in the footsteps of states like Tennessee and announced the creation of a Teacher Apprenticeship Program aimed at bolstering the teacher pipeline. During his most recent state of the state address, he also acknowledged the importance of having a strong pipeline of school leaders. He noted that a great principal “creates the conditions for students, teachers, and staff alike to thrive.” And research backs that up. Which is why it’s good news that he’s announced that the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce will also create a principal apprenticeship program.

Applications for districts and teacher preparation programs interested in establishing teacher apprenticeships are already open. But details on what the principal-based program will look like have not yet been released. That’s not surprising, given that the initiative was only recently announced. But as state officials get to work hammering out the details, they would be wise to look to North Dakota for guidance. Here’s a broad overview of what’s going on in the Peace Garden State with principal apprenticeships, and what Ohio leaders should attempt to replicate in the Buckeye State.

Background

In July 2023, North Dakota became the first state to receive approval from the U.S. Department of Labor to include K–12 principals among federally-supported registered apprenticeship programs. The approval was granted based on an application submitted by the North Dakota Department of Public instruction, written by the National Center for Grow Your Own, and sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers. The state is using Title II funds to support its work. Currently, there are three participating educator preparation programs.

Program requirements

Governor DeWine didn’t explicitly say that his proposed program would be a registered apprenticeship. But given his administration’s focus on registered apprenticeships, as well as the benefits they offer, it seems a wise path. To follow it, Ohio’s program will need to meet certain criteria. North Dakota offers a solid example of how to do so.

According to the state’s website and its application to the U.S. Department of Labor, North Dakota’s program requires apprentices to complete a minimum of one year of on-the-job training as a paid assistant principal working under the guidance of a mentor and lead principal. Apprentices must also complete “related instruction” from a state-approved preparation program. Their coursework totals thirty credit hours[1] and results in a master’s degree in education/school leadership.

The program is also considered competency-based. Before they can accept a full-time principal position, apprentices must have obtained a master’s degree, met all state certification and licensure requirements, and completed at least 2,000 hours of on-the-job training. They must also be evaluated as proficient by their mentor on a variety of standards, including curriculum, instruction, and assessment; professional capacity of school personnel; meaningful engagement of families and community; and operations and management.

Grant funding

North Dakota leaders didn’t stop at establishing a program. They went a step further and also created the Aspiring Principal Pipeline Grant. The state’s request for applications pledged to award up to $150,000 to one or two preparation providers willing to meet the requirements outlined above while also ensuring that participants don’t pay any programming costs. In short, the grant makes it possible for a program to help teachers become principals for free and earn money while doing so.

North Dakota State University was awarded the initial grant. The university will be required to provide the state with a written final report that includes participant progress data, an overall evaluation of program effectiveness, a district satisfaction survey regarding the effectiveness of participants’ preparation, and recommendations for program improvements. These findings could be instrumental in helping state leaders pinpoint and address areas for growth as the program expands.

Ohio leaders should follow suit, not only with DeWine’s proposed principal apprenticeship program, but also with teacher apprenticeships. Including grant funding for both these efforts in the upcoming state budget would go a long way toward encouraging preparation programs and districts to establish apprenticeship pathways. Even better, the evaluation component of a grant program could help Ohio fine tune its offerings and fully capitalize on the potential of school staffing apprenticeships.

***

Governor DeWine deserves kudos for recognizing the importance of school leadership. Pledging to establish a principal apprenticeship program was a good first step toward bolstering the state’s pipeline of school leaders. Moving forward, state officials should design a program and offer accompanying incentives that—much like North Dakota’s initiative—create an environment where school-based apprenticeships can truly have an impact.

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1. I didn’t find any local news worth clipping today, so how about a national story with lots of Ohio content instead? Cool. The Washington Post, to my ears, is sounding an alarm in this piece about a blurring of the line between church and state due to rapidly-expanding private school vouchers (and ESAs). Students using vouchers (and ESAs), as I know you already know, go primarily to religious-affiliated schools because…that’s who primarily opens and operates private schools. Been that way for a long time, as has Ohio’s commitment to supporting their educational missions with taxpayer funds for transportation, textbooks, and other student supports. But now it’s serious…I think. Honestly, there isn’t much in the way of harm to public schools enumerated here, especially in Ohio. Honestly, aside from a brief reference to the voucher groucher lawsuit here in the Buckeye State (which is only about the Benjamins), it seems only the journalists themselves are putting together the “families want private schools”, “most private schools are religious”, and “church and state” puzzle pieces and discussing it…with a side of “vibes” to complete their picture. (Washington Post, 6/3/24)

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Case dismissed

It’s hard to say why this particular bit of news has not made a bigger splash here in Ohio, but we definitely applaud Gongwer for covering it: A judge this week dismissed the lawsuit challenging the transfer of a majority of K-12 education governance from the State Board of Education to the Department of Education and Workforce. She did so not only because she determined the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit in the first place, but also “because the ability to define the powers and duties of the State Board of Education is expressly granted to the General Assembly by the plain language of Article VI, Section 4.” In other words, they would have lost anyway if the suit proceeded.

From graduation…

Let’s salute some members of the Class of 2024. First up, the valedictorian and salutatorian for Ohio Connections Academy this year are twin siblings from Cleveland, David and Delicia Pellot. They have high praise for OCA and all that it has helped them accomplish—including associate’s degrees for both of them via College Credit Plus—despite pandemic-era disruptions to education. “The changes we’ve experienced have made us strong and courageous,” said David. “Change is not only what makes us human, but it’s what makes us better people.” Awesome! Next, we applaud Ashley Ramos-Iglesias, who will soon graduate from Commonwealth High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ashley has overcome much hardship and uncertainty in her life, but credits Commonwealth for giving her a solid base of support, help in transferring credits from previous schools, providing access to the advanced courses she knew she could handle if given the chance, and much more. She tells her inspiring story in this piece as she prepares to get her high school diploma—the first in her family to do so—along with earning her certified nursing assistant certification. Look out, world!

…to college…

Indiana University Indianapolis last week announced it will expand its automatic admissions program to admit qualifying students in all charter high schools in the Indianapolis Public Schools Innovation Network. The initial program, which covered four district high schools only, was launched back in September and gives automatic admission to seniors with a grade point average of at least 3.0. The expansion includes eight charter high schools in Indy, meaning that all of their eligible grads will get immediate, no-application-required acceptance into the school. Freshmen admitted through the program will also receive access to career and advising services on campus.

…and into the working world

Tony Roberts, president and CEO of the Georgia Charter Schools Association, published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week where he lauds his home state for its strong business environment and looks forward to the future of fast-growing tech industry jobs. He also says that “public charter schools are playing a crucial role in preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow.” Not only are Georgia charters preparing students to acquire in-demand skills, they are also outperforming traditional district schools, and are experiencing high public popularity, according to survey data.

A boost for Texas teachers

Leaders of IDEA Public Schools in Texas this week announced that they are committing over $20 million to increase teacher and staff compensation. Not only will full-time staff see a boost in pay based on years of service, funds will go toward bolstering the network’s Teacher Career Pathway Program for new teachers as well.

Important webinar next week

You’re invited to join the National Charter Schools Institute for a webinar on Tuesday, June 4, at 2:00 pm ET. Educating the Whole Child: Transforming Educational Journeys at Every Level will discuss how the Colorado Charter School Institute and New Legacy Charter School are changing their students’ lives and education with wraparound support. More details and free registration can be found here.

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

1. The elected board of Columbus City Schools voted unanimously Wednesday night to censure board member Brandon Simmons for his part in creating a “strategy” memo that used bombastic, divisive, ridiculous, and childish (my words) language in discussing ways the board should/could/would respond to critics of the district’s Facilities Task Force. And by “unanimous”, I mean that Mr. Simmons voted to censure himself, as did everyone else. Now I’m no expert on Robert’s Rules, but surely the possible censuree should have been recused from both discussion and vote on this, shouldn’t he? And taken his punishment on the other side of his colleagues’ vote, rather than being involved in both of them and inflicting the penalty on himself as some sort of self-flagellation? It feels like theater on top of theater to me, especially when we learn that the dude later disputed the substance of the censure he voted for in a public email! (Columbus Dispatch, 5/30/24)
   
   

2. In light of the sideshow, as fully illuminated in the previous clip, the last thing we probably need here in Columbus is outside analysis of the district’s infrastructure situation. But here it is, anyway, courtesy of The 74. On the upside, the author does not mention the memo, the ongoing aftershocks thereof, or the possibility that it could derail the task force’s work. On the downside, the author conflates charter schools and voucher expansion and has too generous a take on the term “crumbling” for my liking. (The 74, 5/30/24)
   
   

3. So far, the work of Columbus City Schools’ facilities task force has not been derailed by the board-centric sideshow, only slowed to a crawl. Public meetings are still on hold for now, but it is interesting to learn that some student input on task force proposals was gathered this week. Elected school board president Christina Vera met with 25 students at Marion-Franklin High School on Tuesday. The building is on the list for potential closure due to underenrollment, its students, staff, and programs to be consolidated at the similarly-undersubscribed South High School less than four miles away. Not surprisingly, none of the kids who showed up for the convo wanted to see their school closed, mostly for personal reasons. But rather than being a stopper, their comments actually feel to me like a roadmap to show district officials how they can ease the impending transitions—and even make them positive, exciting, and educational—if they indeed go on to occur. (10 TV News, Columbus, 5/28/24)
   
   

4. Traditionally, 98 percent of students graduating from Dayton’s Archbishop Alter High School go on to college after graduation, which is awesome. (Why yes, they do accept EdChoice vouchers. How astute of you to ask! And no, I don’t mind checking any time the news outlets forget to mention it.) While school officials don’t say how many members of the Class of 2024 will do so, they are celebrating the fact that around 90 percent of this year’s seniors used a newly-available free service to help them get ready to apply. Class 101 is a nationwide company that provides support for high schoolers and their families as they navigate the college admissions process from testing to essays to transcripts to submitting paperwork, and beyond. This year, for the first time, Class 101 was available to Alter students for free, thanks to a generous donation by school alums. Definitely worth celebrating, if you ask me. (Dayton Daily News, 5/30/24)
   
   

5. We’ll stay on the topic of the Class of 2024 for our final clip this week, saluting the highly-accomplished valedictorian and salutatorian for Ohio Connections Academy. They are twin siblings—David and Delicia Pellot, respectively—from Cleveland. In this profile, the graduates have high praise for OCA and all that it has helped them accomplish. Delicia has earned her associate’s degree already; David has a summer practicum to complete for his. Their family chose the online school in the wake of pandemic school closures, looking for more regularity and predictability of instruction and finding academic acceleration and access to College Credit Plus courses into the bargain. Fantastic! (The Patch, 5/29/24)

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The drumbeat for a more nuanced treatment of the Science of Reading got louder last week with a hard-hitting new Fordham Institute monograph, Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension? In it, author Daniel Buck chronicles the recent history of efforts to teach reading comprehension, concluding—and here I’m using distinguished researcher Hugh Catts’ words, not Buck’s—“Reading comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts. It is one of the most complex activities that we engage in on a regular basis.”

Many have worried that the SoR movement could disappoint if it too narrowly focuses on phonics alone. The famous image of Scarborough’s Rope weaves together both word recognition (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding) with language comprehension (e.g., background knowledge, vocabulary, verbal reasoning), arguing that “skilled reading” requires both in equal measure. The problem is that the “top of the rope” can’t be taught in the same way word recognition is. I am grateful to have Buck’s piece that so efficiently lays out all we’ve learned about why that is so.

Natalie Wexler notes that the brief breaks no new ground. I find this encouraging. Thirty-seven years ago, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy ignited much controversy with his argument about the importance of knowledge to reading, writing, and thinking. That those arguments are now largely understood is reason for hope. It’s evidence that the importance of knowledge is reaching a greater number of teachers, administrators, and policymakers, and that we can shift our focus from persuasion to how all this gets put into practice.    

And even on this front there’s reason to be optimistic. For example, Meredith and David Liben, who—together with Susan Pimentel—led much of Student Achievement Partners’ work to advance the field’s understanding of college/career-ready ELA standards and the instructional shifts involved in implementing them—have recently written a new book: Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension—Fueling the Reading Brain With Knowledge, Vocabulary, and Rich Language. Part of Scholastic’s Science of Reading in Practice series, the book is replete with ways in which teachers can create the conditions for students to become successful reading comprehenders. Shameless plug: the Libens are hosting Season 2 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast later this summer to discuss this work!

In terms of how the importance of knowledge can make its way into policy, Buck offers four recommendations, the common thread among them being the importance of high-quality curriculum across the disciplines to support improved literacy results.

The timing of Buck’s paper couldn’t have been more prescient, for it dropped a day after reading researcher Tim Shanahan penned a rather perplexing piece expressing his concerns about review tools currently being used to define ELA curricular quality. Shanahan’s article left many of us scratching our heads and, in my opinion, has done a disservice to the field by suggesting there isn’t an individual or an organization out there independent enough to make judgments about curricular quality.

Shanahan misses the point, which is that review tools can serve an arguably more important role than passing judgement; they can actually help to advance the field’s understanding about issues and even begin to build consensus around what’s important. When we released the Knowledge Matters Review Tool last fall, I told Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz, “It’s much less important to us that there would be some sort of numeric or calculable outcome. What I’m hopeful of is that this can create a conversation and cause people to be curious.” I called it an “invitation to discernment.” I suspect that EdReports and the Reading League join me in ruing any state's or district’s desire to make their tool the Holy Grail. 

The Knowledge Matters tool attempts to organize for the field the complexity that is reading comprehension and suggest that this complexity cannot be ignored in efforts to review ELA curricula for quality. Reading comprehension is highly nuanced, fostered by multiple skills and competencies. We have attempted to bring order to that complexity, and to suggest that all of these layers must be considered in efforts to review curriculum for quality.

Rather than authoring formal curriculum reviews, the Knowledge Matters Campaign holds up the strongest curricula as exemplars, because experience tells us that educators can most easily understand how to bring the essential components together when they are offered a model for doing so. We seek not to pick winners and losers, rather to “find the good and praise it.” The warm response from district leaders across the country confirms our sense that this sort of curation is helpful.

Amidst the sometimes-distracting noise about which review tool is better and why one curriculum or another didn’t make it on this or that list, Buck’s piece provides a welcome opportunity for those of us inclined toward optimism to reflect on how very far the field has, in fact, come. Perhaps it even represents an opportunity to pause and celebrate.

I remember 15 years ago, when StandardsWork—the organization I run that sponsors the Knowledge Matters Campaign and supports the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network (PLN)—put itself into fallow in part because we had a hard time finding people interested in supporting the kind of work we wanted to do. As one influential thought leader and funder said, “Barbara, no one cares about curriculum.”

Well, we’ve come a long way, baby!

Balanced literacy and readers/writers’ workshop are on the wane. Three-cueing is out. Phonics is in. And we see ever-growing awareness of the important role of content knowledge to literacy success.

The hours and hours that teachers were made to believe they had to spend creating curriculum are being repurposed for collaboration and better understanding how to use high-quality curriculum. These represent monumental shifts in how teaching and learning is happening across public education.

As I talk to educators across the country—many of whom I’ve met in the nearly 50 school districts we’ve toured over the last five-plus years—they share with me their enthusiasm for how curriculum-based reform is transforming their schools, about how it’s all “coming together.”  As we close out SY 2023-24, let’s take some time to celebrate how very far we’ve come and the positive direction in which we’re headed!

School is nearly out, thank goodness.

We had the usual ups and downs. But on balance, our orbit seemed to bend toward normal, didn’t it?

Here’s what we learned:

Lesson #1: We owe the high school class of 2024 an apology.

You got a raw deal. You were born in 2006. We gave you a smartphone for your seventh birthday and made you captive to big tech’s finest algorithms. Your eighth-grade field trip to Six Flags was canceled due to COVID. Ditto for your middle school graduation ceremony. You spent the first half of your freshman year of high school—already a festival of awkwardness—staring at your new classmates on Zoom while we argued amongst ourselves about whether it was safe to re-open buildings. And now, as you are dealing with the stress of applying to college, we messed up the FAFSA. Described in a single New York Times article as “a bureaucratic mess,” “a nightmare,” “convoluted” and “a debacle,” the new application for college aid was so buggy and late, you might have given up completing it altogether. Speaking for the rest of the American adult population, I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive us because we are counting on you to support us when we are old and infirm. Your childhood—our bad on that one. We will do better.

Lesson #2: We can’t ignore demographic realities forever, but we’re going to try.

School enrollments are down. It’s not an illusion of the pandemic. Some students are never coming back to public schools. Birth rates are sharply lower, too, which guarantees future declines.

Chad Aldeman did a great piece on this for The 74. He shows that just a few years ago, federal agencies were predicting that the number of students would grow modestly over the next decade. Now? Just 13 states are expected to increase enrollment by 2031. The other thirty-seven states (plus D.C.) are slated to shrink.

We might expect that fewer students means fewer schools. Nope.

Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum of the Wall Street Journal wrote recently that although urban schools have seen a 5.5 percent drop in students since 2019-20, the number of schools is “virtually unchanged.”

Chicago is a prime example. After the closure of fifty schools in 2013 sparked widespread political blowback, city leaders more or less swore off the issue. A coalition of organizations advocated successfully for a state law preventing any more closures. Just this spring, the Illinois House passed an extension of that moratorium until 2027.

In the meantime, Chicago has lost eighty thousand students since 2013.

The city now has dozens of massive buildings that are largely empty. Once-proud Manley High School on the west side has just seventy-eight students this year from grades 9–12. Marshall High School, familiar to fans of the famous Hoop Dreams documentary as the school one of the film’s subjects attended, has 174.

Under the current school funding plan, every school will have “a principal, an assistant principal, a clerk, at least one counselor, and at least one part-time school assistant.” That’s an expensive proposition for schools with fewer than 200 students. And Chicago has about fifty such schools.

The politics of shrinking schools are about to become a big deal. As I’ve written before, doing right by families requires planning ahead and prioritizing transition supports. Pretending closures won’t be necessary makes the eventual harm to vulnerable communities worse.

Now’s the time to ask districts if they are taking appropriate steps.

Lesson #3: If the Adidas Samba can come back into style, so can standardized tests.

For the first two decades of the millennium, there was a slow drip of colleges going test-optional or test-free. It was a thing. COVID forced the cancellation of several SAT/ACT administrations. Every college waived the requirement to submit scores, at least temporarily. A few months into the pandemic, the Times was asking whether the University of California’s plan to end consideration of exams “will spell the beginning of the end for college admissions testing.”

Proponents of dropping the tests argued that it would advance equity because tests are biased instruments and wealthy students can earn higher scores by paying for expensive tutors.

This year, momentum shifted abruptly in the opposite direction. A host of elite universities—MIT, Harvard, Yale, Caltech, Dartmouth, etc.—announced that they will now require submission of test scores from applicants.

Once again, the argument centered around advancing equity. Confusing, right?

This time, researchers pointed to data showing that tests help identify lower-income and underrepresented students who can thrive at selective colleges—kids who would otherwise be overlooked.

A second problem is grade inflation at the high school level. In the past, course grades tended to predict college performance at least as well as test scores, if not better. That has changed. At the University of California—the same system that doesn’t use tests—a study of its own students across nine campuses found that tests were a much better predictor of success than grades.

At a practical level, colleges are struggling to make good decisions without the tests. They are flooded with applicants who have perfect or near-perfect GPAs. How can they tell them apart? Besides giving preference to crew rowers, of course.

Tests are playing a key role at the K–12 level in monitoring our recovery (or lack thereof) from COVID learning setbacks. When surveyed, parents have consistently reported that their kids never lost any ground or have already made it up. Grades, as we just noted, have been rising. If we didn’t have test data, we would think everything’s peachy. But that’s far from the case. In fact, national tests show that the steady progress we made over the course of decades was wiped out.

In Massachusetts, a ballot initiative to eliminate state tests as a graduation requirement has attracted public opposition from the Governor and key legislative leaders—all of them Democrats who are typically allies of the state teachers union, which has spent millions backing the initiative.

Tests had a good year. Until grades improve as a signal, they will probably continue their resurgence.

Lesson #4: The quest to curb student absenteeism isn’t hopeless.

I’ll spare you the background. If you are a newer subscriber to this newsletter, we did a series on absenteeism in the fall.

What’s happened since September?

There’s been a notable shift in news coverage. Past stories tended to frame absenteeism in terms of barriers that prevented students from getting to school (e.g., transportation, chronic health conditions) or a lack of belonging. This year, reporters began to focus on how “our relationship with school has become optional,” as a Duke psychologist put it recently. We got some fantastic reporting from Alec MacGillis, among others, that helped us understand ground-level efforts to get students back in class.

The Biden administration has prioritized absenteeism through analysis by the Council of Economic Advisors and a recent summit.

And guess what? We seem to be making progress. Back in September, I profiled the Oakland Unified School District, where 61 percent of students were chronically absent last year. Ouch. This year, as of May 19, it’s about 31 percent. With a strong finish, Oakland might be back to pre-pandemic levels. That’s truly worth celebrating.

How about New Trier? I can’t tell you how many emails I received when I flagged that one of America’s most affluent high schools had a chronic absenteeism problem. Lots of schadenfreude. Well, get the laughs out of your system because New Trier cut absenteeism by two-thirds, from 24 to 8.5 percent, after shifting to tougher policies.

Massachusetts, which has been reporting school-level attendance each March since 2021, announced that the share of students chronically absent dropped from 24.5 percent last year to 19.6 percent this year.

Yes, still a long way to go. But this is important progress. It is not preordained that kids will miss more school forever. Big thanks to all the parents, educators and students out there who have been fighting the good fight.

Lesson #5: The science of reading won.

Emily Hanford’s podcast, Sold a Story, was an immediate hit when it arrived in fall 2022. With investigative flair, Hanford and her collaborators retraced how flawed literacy strategies were adopted by approximately one in four U.S. elementary classrooms—generating piles of profits for textbook publishers.

The central figure in the podcast is Lucy Calkins, a renowned professor at Teachers College. She evangelized for techniques that many researchers consider discredited.

In what was clearly a response to Sold a Story and the rising “science of reading” movement, Calkins announced in a May 2023 Times profile that she was overhauling her curriculum.

The reboot wasn’t enough. The Friday afternoon before Labor Day—a classic spot for dumping bad news—Teachers College pushed Calkins and her reading center out the door—ending forty years of her being one of its most visible stars.

This spring, Hanford released a follow-up episode reporting that the whole affair had taken a wrecking ball to Heinemann, the company that publishes Calkins’ books. Its revenues were down seventy-five percent in 2023 compared to 2019. Pretty stunning.

Now, what? Without Lucy Calkins to kick around anymore, districts are on the clock to show that their new reading strategies can deliver. As we know, nothing can go wrong with a research-informed, politically popular attempt to implement sweeping change nationwide.

We won’t hurry to adopt new curricula with an “EVIDENCE-BASED” stamp and rush the materials into classrooms, leading to a sloppy overcorrection toward all-phonics, all-the-time, will we? Who? Us?

Happy summer vacation to all

There’s a reason we close schools each summer, and it’s not because kids used to work in the fields. Enjoy the break—get some sun and relaxation. You’ve earned it.

This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly.