As a center-right think tank president, there are certain things I’m supposed to adore. Among them: donations from billionaires (yes), smoking a pipe (no), and turning prescriptive federal programs into block grants (hell yes!).

That’s right, I love me some block grants, and I’m not afraid to say it. That romance goes back almost twenty years, to when I joined my Fordham colleagues (including pre-reformation Diane Ravitch!) to recommend that “ESEA’s sixty-plus programs be consolidated into six separate state grants.”

The beauty of such consolidation is that it eliminates duplicative and pork-barrel-laden programs, and sends spending authority closer to actual schools, where it belongs. Eliminating the programs outright has the same effect, but is often less politically palatable.

Serving at the U.S. Department of Education (2001–05) did nothing to dampen my interest in this sort of approach; if anything, it made me even more enthusiastic. That’s because the bureau that I helped to create and lead, the Office of Innovation and Improvement, had responsibility for many of the little competitive grant programs that conservatives have long eyed for elimination. And it became clear to me that, despite the positive intent of their legislative parents, these programs were never going to add up to a hill of beans. Many were found to be ineffective, others were the equivalent of earmarks for favored organizations, and even when one or another of them worked in a random school district here or there, they were far too small to have anything close to a national impact.

So, like others in the conservative wonkosphere, I welcome the Trump Administration’s proposal to consolidate more than two dozen programs into a block grant.

But there’s an important caveat because one of these things is not like the others. When it comes to the “Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged Block Grant,” the federal Charter Schools Program just doesn’t belong.

Here are the top five reasons why Congress should un-block the charter grant program.

1. Urban charter schools are boosting outcomes for poor kids and kids of color. Given Washington’s historic and limited role, it makes sense for it to invest in programs that (a) have strong research to back them up and (b) are focused on the neediest kids. Charter schools check both boxes. For example, in a 2015 analysis of charter performance in forty-one urban locations, CREDO estimated that black students in poverty gained forty-four days of English language arts (ELA) learning and fifty-nine days of math learning if they attended charters in those places. Similarly, Hispanic students in poverty gained forty-eight days of additional learning in math and twenty-five days in ELA. Finally, Hispanic students with English-language-learner status gained seventy-nine days of learning in ELA and seventy-two days of learning in math. Overall, urban students who enrolled in urban charters for at least four years gained a total of seventy-two days of learning in ELA and 108 days—or more than half a year of learning—in math. And it’s not just test scores. Rigorous studies have also found positive impacts of charter schools on high school graduation, teenage pregnancy, college enrollment, crime, voting, and even earnings.

2. Charter schools are also helping traditional public schools to improve. The charter-versus-district dichotomy is often cast as a zero-sum game, with one sector’s gain viewed as the other’s loss. Yet that is not actually the case. The healthy pressure charter schools put on districts is helping to lift all boats. A recent Mathematica review of the literature on this question identified nine studies that found positive effects from charter competition, three that found negative effects, two that found mixed effects, and ten that found null effects. Furthermore, when Fordham looked at the relationship between local charter market share—that is, the percentage of publicly enrolled students in a “geographic school district” who attend charters—and the average reading and math achievement of all students (including those in traditional public schools), we found that an increase in charter market share was associated with an increase in achievement, especially in black and Hispanic communities and in the largest urban areas.

3. Millions more poor kids and kids of color could benefit from new charter schools. It’s heartening that 7,000 charter schools today serve over 3 million children, 59 percent of whom are black or Hispanic. Yet even if we just focus on the communities where charters have proven to be most effective, that leaves millions of young people without these lifesaving options. Let’s say we want to get the “charter market share” of every high-poverty, majority-minority urban district to 25 percent—in cities big and small, and in inner-ring suburbs to boot. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that we would need at least another 3,000 high quality charter schools, serving an additional 1.5 million students. But that will take a sizable investment. Speaking of which…

4. Federal start-up funds are essential to the growth of new charters. It’s well-known that charter schools are severely underfunded, getting 60, 70, or 80 cents on the dollar compared to traditional public schools in many cities. But charter advocates aren’t asking the federal government to fix that problem. No, they just want Uncle Sam to continue to play Johnny Appleseed, as it has since the early 1990s, and fund the creation of new schools so they can serve more kids. In this way, they aren’t anything “like the lobbyists for all of the other competitive grant programs,” as Trump official Jim Blew told Chalkbeat. The traditional education groups usually want more money to do the same old thing. Not so with charters; they just want one-time funds to cover start-up expenses. And it’s naïve or worse to think that local school districts, which would receive the vast majority of the block grant funds under the administration’s proposal, would spend the dollars on creating more charter schools themselves.

5. The federal Charter Schools Program is better than ever. Tweaks included in ESSA mean that its $440 million in annual funding is focused on quality, not just quantity. Dollars now flow to the replication of high-performing schools (rather than just the creation of new ones) and can go around obstinate state education bureaucracies that aren’t willing to champion these innovations. And there are more safeguards than in the past that the money is spent on essential needs.

—

No federal program deserves to live forever, even though most seem to. But the Trump administration is wrong to pull the plug on the Charter Schools Program. It still has too much to accomplish, and its time has not yet come. Congress, now’s your chance to give it the lifeline that it deserves.

With Iowa and New Hampshire in the rearview mirror, the original field of nearly thirty Democratic presidential candidates has now been winnowed down to eight. Six of them will face off on the debate stage this evening in Las Vegas. On the de minimis issue of K–12 education, there appears to be more similarities than differences among those left standing. From the banal (eliminating testing and charters) to the nonsensical (“fire” Betsy DeVos!), the remaining contestants continue to puff out their chest feathers as part of a performative dance to woo the coveted endorsement of the teachers unions. It’s a shameless spectacle that promises to persist as we race toward Super Tuesday.

In light of Joe Biden’s dismal, possibly fatal, showing in the first two states, one can’t help but think what might have been had the former vice president sat out this campaign, leaving some oxygen in the room for other mainstream candidates like Cory Booker or Michael Bennet who deserved a closer look in no small part because of their strong education records. In an exasperated, expletive-laden rant about the party’s prospects, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville described both as “serious and professional” people who could have delivered a winning message if Biden hadn’t blocked their ascent.

Along with Andrew Yang, Booker and Bennet were in my mind the most interesting education candidates. I didn’t agree with many of Yang’s policy prescriptions, but his analysis of the challenges facing our country today felt spot on. His statement that he was “pro-good school” was a breath of fresh air in its pragmatism, as were his idea for a civics-focused exchange program—through which high school seniors would have been exposed to different parts of the country—and his attention to the needs of students with disabilities, driven in part by his eldest son, who is on the autism spectrum. Immediately after Yang dropped out, conservative pundit David French tweeted, “A voice of kindness and tolerance in American politics. A true happy warrior. I’m sorry he’s leaving the race.”

Booker’s foray into the election had the potential of electrifying many within the education reform community. The successful reforms he pushed for in Newark should have been a tentpole for his effort. Instead, Booker largely campaigned as if they never happened, no doubt because the levers he pulled to engender improvement—closing bad schools, expanding high-performing charters, and renegotiating teacher contracts to include merit pay—were anathema to the unions. He thus became a contortionist—memorably so with his statement in Iowa about “offensive” charter laws—who grew harder and harder to watch. Near the end, with his campaign flailing, Booker tried to tack back toward the center, but by then it was too little too late.

Here in Colorado, I was rooting for Bennet despite his longer than long shot prospects. After hearing him speak in Denver, it didn’t take long to recognize the senator and former superintendent’s gift as a thought leader and his knack for tough, detail-oriented policy analysis. It would have been interesting to see how the centerpiece of his education platform—500 “Regional Opportunity Compacts”—took shape. Swimming upstream, Bennet chose to lean into his reform roots and the power of good policymaking, unlike his erstwhile rivals, who would lead us to believe that the solution to our nation’s stubborn and stark educational inequities lies in blindly trusting the altruism and benevolence of America’s teachers.

Among the new putative frontrunners (i.e., Sanders and Buttigieg, as measured by current delegate count), there’s little to get excited about vis-à-vis education policy. Sanders’s giveaway to college borrowers is intellectually unserious, to say nothing of his views on standardized testing and school choice (he’s against both). As for Mayor Pete, we can only hope that Diane Ravitch is correct that he’s a “stealth corporate reformer,” but it would be reassuring if he were less clandestine about it. As for Klobuchar and Warren, it’s hard to see either having the money or the backing to go the distance.

If neither Bernie nor Buttigieg wins the Democratic nomination, it’s increasingly not unimaginable that another B (i.e., Bloomberg) will. While the previous three-term mayor did some great things for students in the Big Apple, his record on education is far from unblemished (Cathie Black, anyone?), and it remains unclear how his approach would translate to the national stage. At least he can afford not to be a union sock puppet. Depending on how the former hizzoner fares, I might dig deeper into Bloomberg in a future post. Regardless, the education accomplishments under a hypothetical President Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, or Mike Bloomberg will be largely identical. Which is to say that, absent an unlikely congressional sweep, gridlock and inertia will overpower any ambitious policy proposal.

Of course, none of this might matter at all come November. A recent Gallup poll shows that 61 percent of Americans say they are better off than they were three years ago when the current president took office. No other incumbent in the past thirty years has enjoyed such a high percentage. Although nothing is for certain at this juncture, one thing does seem clear: The next education president is nowhere in our midst.

A new report published in the journal The Annals of the Unsurprising reports that a child’s performance relative to other students on their third grade state tests in reading and math predicts where he or she will rank in tenth grade.

I’m only half joking. The report is from the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER). But the finding largely confirms what previous analyses have found, that “academic mobility,” the ability of a student to escape the lowest quartile of achievement, for example, is quite limited. This new report confirms that lack of mobility does not appear to vary very much across a large and diverse number of states and school districts.

The report tracks mobility and graduation rates of 2.5 million public school students across fourteen years of school district data in six states: Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. The big question: “Do initially low-achieving students gain in the schools districts’ performance distribution compared to initially high-achieving students during the K–12 career?” Do they gain in the statewide comparisons?

No. They do not. Third grade tests predict where a child will be in tenth grade with 80 percent certainty.

The authors note there is already a “robust literature” demonstrating that “large gaps in student achievement (as measured on standardized tests) at the elementary school level between advantaged and disadvantaged students continue to persist to the end of students’ K–12 educational careers.” However, they note, the literature on the ability of individual districts to move students is “surprisingly thin.”

The states in the study are significant, with substantial differences in the percentage of black and Hispanic students (from very few to nearly half of the sample size) in a given state. There are also substantial differences in the percentage of students in those states’ school districts who are receiving free or reduced-price lunch, have IEPs, or are geographically mobile. “While our sample is not designed to be representative of the United States as a whole, the six states we examine are diverse along many dimensions and provide substantively different evaluation contexts,” the authors note.

Different contexts, same results. “There is this lore out there that there are some districts that are doing much better jobs than other districts at addressing the needs of, say, disadvantaged students,” Dan Goldhaber, one of more than a dozen credited authors of the report told Education Week, which was the first to report the findings. But the study turned up little evidence of it. “I find that to be kind of a depressing finding,” he said.

The report shows a weaker correlation with high school graduation rates; students who remain at lower achievement levels mostly graduate. That’s good news, but with a caveat. “It could be interpreted as showing that school systems are doing a good job of helping most students graduate, or as showing that states have low standards for graduation,” the report concludes. One “novel and troubling finding” is that low-income students (those on free and reduced-price lunch) show much lower academic mobility that kids who are better off financially. Given that the weight of much education prioritizes outcomes among high-poverty students, it’s particularly concerning that they show much lower academic mobility than “non-FRL” students. Differences in academic mobility among urban students are smaller than their suburban and rural counterparts, “although a notable result is that low-performing students who attend urban schools in third grade are much less likely to graduate from high school than their suburban or rural counterparts,” the authors note.

In sum, the analysis of differences in academic mobility by student race and ethnicity, FRL status, and school setting “replicate largely familiar patterns in the literature—white students, and especially Asian students, have relatively high academic mobility, whereas Hispanic students, and especially black students, have lower academic mobility,” the authors conclude.

But you knew that.

SOURCE: Wes Austin et al., “Where are Initially Low-performing Students the Most Likely to Succeed? A Multi-state Analysis of Academic Mobility (Preliminary Draft),” CALDER (2020).

The college admissions process comprises a number of moving parts that must be negotiated by high school students with varying degrees of assistance from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors. Gone are the days when the local “State U” was good enough for each generation of college-goers.

Over a decade ago, Caroline Hoxby showed that the percentage of students attending in-state institutions fell consistently from 1949 to 1994, and that the role of distance in explaining college choice decreased in that time, as well. In the middle of this timeframe, a small group of elite institutions banded together in 1975 to create the Common Application (CA), a centralized process by which prospective students could apply to a large number of participating colleges with a single application. It’s expanded exponentially since then, with more than 750 institutions now participating. Today, CA institutions together receive roughly 4 million applications from 1 million students annually. A recent working paper from NBER, written by Brown University economist Brian Knight, looks at the effects of CA on both university and student behaviors.

Positing that the Common Application would reduce various time and information costs for both students applying and for schools accepting applications, Knight and co-author Nathan Schiff use multiple models to examine CA’s impacts on this “friction.” Their primary model is a two-ways fixed effects specification that includes college fixed effects and year fixed effects. They are essentially comparing outcomes for schools before and after joining CA and also investigating—through what is known as “event studies”—the timing of any effects associated with entry into CA. They use panel data from the College Board from 1990 to 2016, specifically from College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges and the federal IPEDS data base—the latter of which includes information on state-to-state student migration patterns from 1986 to 2014.

The first key finding is that the introduction of CA increased applications and reduced admission rates. Specifically, applications were 12 percent higher after a college joined CA. Moreover, that figure grew over time, rising to a roughly 25 percent increase one decade after CA, which is attributed in part to the improved online platform that eventually supplanted the initial paper application. Second, they find a 9 percent reduction on the yield of acceptances (that is, kids taking schools up on their offer of a seat) post CA entry, which is consistent with increasing students’ choice. In other words, students submitting more applications get more acceptances, but they can still only make one choice. Third, given this reduction in acceptances, colleges responded by increasing the number of admitted students in order to satisfy their capacity; specifically, Knight and Schiff find a 12-percentage-point increase in the number of admitted students after joining CA and continued but smaller increases in enrollments subsequently.

In looking at “geographic integration,” Knight and Schiff find that the fraction of out-of-state students rose by 1.4 percentage points in the years after joining the Common Application, and also that the fraction of foreign students enrolled rose by 0.3 percentage points in the years after joining. Further, after joining CA, universities see a significant increase in the average distance students travel to attend—around a 10 percent increase.

And since the Common Application disproportionately comprises more selective institutions, they examine whether CA participation has contributed to a widening of the gap between more and less selective institutions and find some evidence that CA entry is indeed associated with an increase in freshman SAT scores. In other words, the introduction of the Common Application enhances the likelihood that high ability students are disproportionately sorting into CA schools.

For the most part, the findings seem to indicate that the reduced friction introduced by CA participation benefits both students and institutions as far as application and acceptance goes. Students have easier access to more and more varied schools—ones they may never have considered previously—and colleges have access to wider pools of applicants, including those growing up far from their campuses. But of course myriad other factors can alter enrollment and admissions decisions, like the financial cost of applying to college (regardless of CA participation), changing admission criteria among schools, and various public and private incentives to keep high school graduates in college close to home. In the end, entertaining where you might go to school and where you actually end up are subject to far more complex mechanics than an application alone.

SOURCE: Brian G. Knight and Nathan M. Schiff, “Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application,” National Bureau of Economic Research (August 2019).

On March 18, 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama began an oration that Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic called a “searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech” and “the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime.”

“‘We the people, in order to form a more perfect union,’” Obama began, quoting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. “Two hundred twenty-one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.”

Standing in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Obama argued that, despite America’s original sin, the abomination of slavery, he was optimistic that future generations would continue to make progress toward “a more perfect union,” precisely because our nation was founded on the principles enacted in the Constitution in 1789.

Obama’s speech is relevant amid today’s fierce debate as to what to teach young Americans about the nation’s origin story and true birthdate. Like Obama, some posit that it is 1789, the year the Constitution went into effect, establishing the American form of government. Most Americans believe it was 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the enumeration of the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Some historians say it is technically 1507, when a map, known as “America’s Birth Certificate,” first bore the name “America.”

Against this backdrop enters the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that commemorates “the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, and aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Suffice it to say that the some of the country’s most well-respected American historians disagree with the 1619 Project “re-framing” and have provided withering critiques of the project’s re-writing of American history. Here is one: “The 1619 Project and the falsification of history: An analysis of the New York Times’s reply to five historians.” Here is another: The 1619 Project “provides a fundamentally distorted narrative whose effect is to radically discredit the Founding.” Clearly, the legacy of slavery is abominable enough without false embellishment.

In addition to convincing New York Times magazine readers that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” the 1619 Project is making a concerted effort to warp the next generation’s view of America, as well. Random House Group has acquired the rights to the 1619 Project and will develop a graphic novel and a series of four publications for young people. The Pulitzer Center has become the project’s education partner. According to its annual report, the Pulitzer Center has provided free reading guides, extension activities, lesson plans, and physical copies of the magazine to hundreds of schools and teachers across all fifty states, who have brought curricular resources into some 3,500 classrooms.

Indeed, some of the poorest school districts in the country, with the lowest performance levels in reading and math, have adopted the 1619 Project as mandatory curriculum for their high school students. In cities such as Chicago, Newark, and Buffalo, with high concentrations of minority students, what will these young minds now be learning?

Central to the thesis of the project is that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a “slavocracy,” that white racist supremacy is irrevocably intertwined in the country’s DNA, that plantation slave-labor camps were the catalyst for an enduring system of brutal American capitalism, and as Nikole Hannah-Jones, the person who spearheaded the 1619 Project, asserted in this video, that it is “time for this country to pay what is owed.” She explains that reparations, in the form of cash payments, would be due to anyone who can “trace a descendant back to American slavery” and who can “prove that ten years prior to the discussion of the reparations bill, you actually lived as a black person.”

Since 2010, I have run a network of public charter schools that now educates more than 2,000 predominantly black and Hispanic students in the heart of low-income communities in the South Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan. Because of frustration with their zoned schools, parents must enter a random lottery to gain entry to our open enrollment schools.

Although parents themselves have faced structural barriers around race and fear that their children will as well, they know that a great education can make all the difference. They do not believe that their children are doomed to be shackled by the horrors of America’s legacy of slavery. On the contrary, they want our teachers to provide the kind of quality education that equips children with the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind to thrive in America.

That is what is so disturbing and dangerous about the 1619 Project’s aspiration for children: to create in the minds of students and teachers of all races a vision of America that is imbued with a permanent malignancy that is hostile to the dreams of students of color.

As one of the blistering reviews of 1619 wisely questions: “Can a liberal democracy function when it starts teaching its children that its founding was not simply flawed but made up as a cynical excuse for white men to hold on to their slaves?” It’s time to put aside all of the virtue-signalling and faux “wokeness” to answer this fundamental question.

As educators, we must reject these tired ideas, which lead to the soft bigotry of low expectations. We do our scholars no favors by treating them as victims because of a group identity or teaching them to become dependent on a government system such as reparations to succeed in their lives.

As Burgess Owens once wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “At the core of the reparation movement is a divisive and demeaning view of both races. It grants to the white race a wicked superiority, treating them as an oppressive people too powerful for black Americans to overcome. It brands blacks as hapless victims devoid of the ability, which every other culture possesses, to assimilate and progress. Neither label is earned.”

Black students growing up in low-income communities are inundated with messages from many adults in their lives that they will be preyed upon because of their race. Rather than reinforce this false idea of powerlessness in the face of a system rigged against them, why not educate young people of color about the forces within their control that are most likely to put them on a path to power and economic success?

For example, in 2014, a team of researchers led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty investigated the intergenerational mobility of more than 40 million children and their parents. What factors led to communities having high rates of economic mobility across generations and others in which few children escape poverty? The Land of Opportunity study they produced found that “the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the area.”

A growing body of research underscores the transcendent role that individual decisions about the timing of family formation can play in achieving the American dream. Indeed, a staggering 97 percent of millennials who followed the “success sequence” (getting at least a high school degree, working full time, and marrying before having any children, in that order) avoided poverty. And “Black Men, Making It in America: The Engines of Economic Success for Black Men in America,” reveals that a number of factors, including education, work, marriage, church participation, military service, and a sense of personal agency, are all highly correlated to black male economic success in America.

Shouldn’t our young people be taught to understand the pathways more likely to have them flourish financially, rather than perpetuate the noxious notion that black children are owed something and that their path to success must be paved by a massive government handout?

It is ironic that Hannah-Jones created opportunity for her children simply by sticking to this middle-class script in her life. In the autobiographic New York Times story, “Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city,” and in discussion about busing and desegregation, Hannah-Jones courageously shares the fears that she and her husband had about enrolling 4-year-old Najya in a segregated, low-income school in Brooklyn.

After describing all of the machinations that went into their decision, Hannah-Jones makes a revealing statement: “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.”

Consider the confidence and privilege that Hannah-Jones expressed in her and her husband’s ability to ensure their daughter succeeds. No amount of anti-black racism and no amount of poverty or lack of diversity in her daughter’s school could overcome the power of the stable, two-parent home that she and her husband provide.

Ultimately, I know that the black and brown children from the schools I lead are entering a world in which factors related to race, class, and gender will force them to confront extraordinary challenges while simultaneously being exposed to extraordinary opportunities. The question is, what will make the difference in whether these young scholars succumb to challenge or thrive on opportunity—whether they develop a mindset of enslavement or of empowerment?

We cannot deprive young black children, or children of any race, of the knowledge of the series of decisions that Hannah-Jones, millions of black Americans, and I have pursued on our pathway to economic prosperity and the American dream.

Many of us in the black community must preach what we have practiced to achieve our own levels of professional success—and, more importantly, share what we are teaching our children to help them have the greatest likelihood to achieve their chosen path of fulfillment. For many of us, this goes well beyond just having “The Talk” with our black sons about avoiding police brutality.

It also means communicating to our sons and daughters that they have power in their individual choices, and that those decisions can shape their destiny despite structural barriers associated with race, class, and poverty.

As the 1619 Project correctly points out, America’s history will forever be scarred by the horrific stories of chattel enslavement. But where are the empowering stories of progress? What the project completely misses is the peculiar duality of America. As Hendrik Hertzberg and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote in the 1996 New Yorker special edition, Black in America, “For African Americans, the country of oppression and the country of liberation are the same country.”

In closing his 2008 speech on race, Obama described the path toward a more perfect union:

For the African American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances, for better healthcare and better schools and better jobs, to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives—by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that, while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism. They must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Regardless of where the pushpin falls on America’s timeline of discovery, what really matters is its future and the power of black Americans, and all Americans, to shape this shared destiny.

Editor’s note: This essay was first published by The Washington Examiner.

Over the weekend the New York Times published an article on the front page about the teaching of reading. A friend posted in on Facebook saying “I won't know what to think about this until Dan comments on it.” I thought some background for people like my friend might be useful.

How is the teaching of reading still controversial? Surely they’ve sorted it out by now.

The relationship between a teacher’s actions and a child’s success is murky.

Psychologists love to point out that “complex behavior is multiply determined.” Reading is complex, therefore many factors contribute to success or failure. Phonics instruction supports children learning to decode, but some kids figure out decoding with less support. The degree to which kids need more or less phonics instruction depends on their oral language skills (vocabulary, the complexity of syntax they can unravel), their knowledge of letters and print, and their ability to hear individual speech sounds, at the least. In addition, a teacher may be fully on board with phonics instruction, but either not be great at it (lack of knowledge or skill due to poor training) or may be hobbled by the school or district having adopted a mediocre reading program.

And once you get past measuring decoding (i.e., you're measuring comprehension) things get still murkier because other factors contribute to comprehension.

So with all those factors, how much does all this really matter? If every teacher taught decoding via phonics instruction tomorrow, how much would reading improve?

It’s hard to say precisely, but you can predict the general pattern.

First, as I noted, some kids need less phonics instruction, so they get by with the bits and pieces they are getting now, although they’d learn to decode faster and more easily with more systematic instruction. It’s the kids with weak oral language skills, and those who have a hard time hearing individual speech sounds, those are the kids that will benefit most. There’s absolutely some percentage of kids floating into mid- and upper-elementary grades with really poor decoding skills who could be doing better.

Second, “decoding” is not synonymous with “reading.” It’s necessary but not sufficient. Once a child is a fairly fluent decoder, her comprehension is heavily influenced by her vocabulary, as well as the breadth and richness of background information in memory.

So it’s not that phonics instruction would make every child a great reader. It’s that without it, some kids won’t learn to read at all.

Isn’t phonics instruction boring for the kids who don’t need it?

There’s limited data on the matter, but a nationally representative sample from 1995 showed that reading attitudes weren’t affected by decoding instruction. Although phonics instruction may seem boring it may be that: (1) decoding itself is rewarding; (2) phonics is boring, but there are still read-alouds and other stuff that support positive reading attitudes; or (3) other types of instruction aren’t as interesting as we might have thought.

Perhaps most important, in most classrooms, teachers accept that there are some things children must learn or experience that aren’t fun but are too important to skip. You make it as fun as you can, you make a show of enthusiasm, and hope the kids are swept along.

What happened that prompted the New York Times to put a story about this on the front page?

The article made it sound like new data from eye-tracking and brain imaging “now show” that phonics is crucial (and that exposure to appealing books isn’t enough). I don’t think that’s true. The behavioral data were plenty convincing twenty years ago, although our understanding of how the mind reads is, of course, always advancing. (Also, brain-imaging and eye-tracking data aren’t that new.)

This issue—how much phonics instruction is really necessary—has been visited and revisited since the 1920s. It quieted down in the early aughts with what was supposed to be a compromise position called “balanced literacy.” This position said “look, both sides are right. You need phonics, and you need great children’s literature and read-alouds.” This position is correct, of course, but people have been worried that phonics is getting short shrift, that teachers (and those who teach them) who don’t think phonics matters much just kept doing what they’d been doing, but now called it “balanced literacy.”

I’ve never met a US reading teacher who said “Kids don’t need any phonics instruction.” The concern is that teachers are underestimating how much kids need (edit: and, as Twitter user @MiriamFein pointed out to me, the quality-of-instruction issue is not necessarily more, but better). Exactly because reading is multiply determined, it’s easy to think of reasons the child might not seem to get it very quickly…and to think that maybe he’ll get it in a few months.

Meanwhile, the instructional supports teachers get often encourage this sort of thinking. A recent review of one of the most-used reading programs in early grades concluded that support for phonics instruction was weak. In 2015, I noted in one of my books that the K–2 literacy guide for New York City Schools listed sixteen activities, only one of which was phonics instruction. Yet I don’t think I was concerned enough.

The impetus behind the new controversy has been the work of Emily Hanford, a reporter who has done a thorough job of describing what’s known about how children learn to read, and she called schools of education to task for not teaching future teachers the best way to teach kids to read. Who knows, maybe the time was just right, but certainly the depth of her reporting made the moment possible.

So schools of education are to blame?

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in this country, so it’s hard to generalize. But the weekly education newspaper, Education Week, did a survey of professors regarding how they prepare future teachers to teach reading, and yeah, the results indicated that a lot of teachers are not getting very good instruction in teaching reading.

The most common misalignment I hear is this: When people think about reading, they think about it the way an already-skilled reader does it. For example, they say that readers use meaning-based cues to help figure out a word. That’s true, and there are two ways it happens. One is an unconscious process that is only in place if you are a fluent decoder who understands the rest of the text to that point; this process only nudges you towards the right interpretation, it doesn’t magically make you read it. The second is a conscious process, puzzling out what an unfamiliar word means, and ample data show readers are willing to do a little of that work, but not much. It’s frustrating and effortful. So the idea that we should teach beginning readers to use meaning-based cues has a certain logic to it—it’s what really good readers do—but it’s not a good strategy for beginners.

So what happens next?

Ideally, current and future teachers will get better instruction in how people read (I actually wrote The Reading Mind as auxiliary textbook for schools of education with this purpose in mind) and then too in how to teach reading. There’s much more to reading than phonics instruction and we actually know much less about how to teach those elements—fluency, for example, or how to raise reading motivation. Decoding is the most thoroughly researched aspect of reading, and it’s the one we know the most about teaching. We really ought to take advantage of that work.

Editor’s note: This post was first published on the author’s Science and Education Blog.

For the past several years, there has been a steady push by traditional education groups in Ohio to weaken state accountability and school report cards in particular. In 2018, there was a concerted effort to ditch Ohio’s A–F grading system in favor of a dashboard model that would display academic data in raw numbers rather than letter grades. In 2019, debates over academic distress commissions routinely focused on report cards and whether they adequately take into account demographics. This year, the ongoing kerfuffle over vouchers and the significantly larger list of EdChoice eligible schools for the 2020–21 school year has generated similar criticism.

Without a doubt, Ohio’s accountability system could use some adjustments. (Here at Fordham, we’ve made several common sense recommendations.) But if lawmakers are serious about revamping report cards this year, it will be vital for them to heed not only the viewpoints of school officials, but also parents. After all, one of the primary and most important functions of state report cards is to provide families with clear, accurate, and easily understandable information about their local schools.

But what, exactly, do parents think about state report cards? Ohio Excels, a nonprofit coalition of business leaders dedicated to improving education, recently commissioned a survey of Ohio parents to find out. The survey, conducted by Saperstein Associates, collected responses from a representative sample of 655 Ohio parents with at least one child enrolled in a public school. Let’s take a look at three big takeaways.

1. Parents value report cards

Results indicate that a majority of Ohio parents recall having seen either district or school report cards, though only 24 percent said they’ve seen both the district and school version. 89 percent found school report cards to be very or somewhat important, and 91 percent registered similar support for the district version. These results should be a clear sign to lawmakers that a vast majority of their constituents value report cards and are paying attention to what they say.

The survey also asked about specific measures. Nearly all parents—a whopping 95 percent—reported that they value having a measure of reading proficiency on report cards for districts and elementary schools. A similarly high number, 91 percent, said they value having a rated indicator on district and high school report cards that measures student success after graduation. It’s not surprising that parents are interested in reading and postsecondary success—most moms and dads will tell you that they care deeply about whether their child can read and is prepared for life after graduation. But it is worth noting that elementary reading proficiency and postsecondary readiness have traditionally been two of the most controversial topics in Ohio education policy. Based on the results of this survey, it seems as though recent and heated debates about the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and graduation requirements haven’t altered what parents want from state report cards—clear and accurate information about what their kids have learned and what they are prepared to do. 

2. Parents prefer big picture summaries before data deep-dives

To determine the preferred type of format for online report cards, parents were asked to select between two options. Option 1 provides a letter grade for overall performance and for each measure. It then offers detailed information on each indicator. Option 2, on the other hand, provides all the details upfront without first providing a summary. Of those parents with a preference, 66 percent preferred a format that started with a summary, compared to 23 percent who preferred the opposite. These numbers indicate that clarity is important to parents and that they prefer to have a simple and easily understandable rating rather than a chunk of information they need to decipher and interpret.

3. Parents think letter grades are a clear and appropriate way to express school performance

In previous years, Ohio used descriptors like “effective” and “continuous improvement” that were vague and hard to parse. The state made the switch to using an A–F scale during the 2012–13 school year. Based on survey results, it appears parents approve of that decision—91 percent agree that as a measure of performance, letter grades are clear and easy to understand. Eighty-seven percent also agree that letter grades are an appropriate way to express the overall performance of a school district.

Despite strong parental support, several alternatives to A–F grades have been suggested by education groups and could soon be proposed by lawmakers. To determine which option parents might prefer, the survey asks respondents to identify whether three alternative options were “more appropriate” than letter grades. The alternatives include a 0–100 numerical score, a description in words (such as “below expectations”), and a scale of one to five stars. None of the alternatives was identified as more appropriate, though a good chunk of parents identified each of the three alternatives as “about the same” as letter grades. When asked to identify the best measure of performance out of the four options, letter grades proved to be the most popular, with 38 percent of parents identifying them as the best option. The numerical score earned 30 percent of the vote, word descriptors earned 24 percent, and the star system earned 8 percent. The upshot? Letter grades are pretty popular, but parents are open to other options.

***

There’s no way of knowing whether 2020 will be the year that lawmakers revamp state report cards. But if they’re serious about making changes, they would be wise to read the results of this survey carefully. Parents aren’t just voting constituents. They are the primary audience for report card measures, and they use school performance information to make serious decisions that will have long-term impacts on their children. The state has a responsibility to provide families with clear, accurate, and easily understandable information so that every parent can make the choice that’s best for their child.

Technology good!

In Northeast Ohio, important folks (teachers, parents, administrators, psychologists) went out of their way to explain the value of technology in boosting student learning at all ages. Kudos are due to the folks at Northeast Ohio Parent for the inclusion of perspective from urban and suburban districts as well as from the Menlo Park Academy charter school.

More technology is even better

Here’s a great look at how Cleveland’s Entrepreneurship Preparatory School has utilized its technology upgrade grant from Verizon Wireless. Lots of great input from students here, explaining all the amazing STEM projects that their school’s tech lab makeover has allowed them to pursue.

Baby steps

The state board of education in West Virginia this week took the initial step toward creation of the first charter schools in the Mountain State. Only one board member voted in the negative. Next stop: county school boards.

A “painful blow”?

The Trump Administration recently released its proposed budget, which included some major changes in education funding process and levels. A new block grant plan has charter supporters, including the Fordham Institute’s Checker Finn, fearful for the future of federal support for charter schools.

Dueling takes

In response to the federal budget proposal, the good folks at CRPE launched a debate among their organization to determine the long term outlook for charter school growth. CRPE’s newest Senior Fellow, Steven Wilson, argued from a position of positivity. Robin Lake, the organization’s Director, provided a more downbeat assessment.

Next School Performance Institute workshop happening soon

Bring your team to a high-performing urban charter school to learn how to build a culture of academic and operational excellence. Join School Performance Institute at their upcoming Study the Network workshop. This workshop combines interactive sessions with live-classroom observations and conversations with key staff to help build your team’s capacity to create and implement change. Register today for the next workshop on March 17th, 2020! For more information, contact John A. Dues.

1. Updating the voucher groucher saga, the other shoe finally dropped earlier this week when the Senate at last refused to concur in the House’s Christmas stocking full of groucher-friendly amendments to a previous Senate bill about whose original purpose no one cares at all. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/12/20) The next logical step for those amendments that bill would seemingly be a Senate-led conference committee, but since the House is already running a rather exhausting exhaustive set of joint hearings on their own bill, maybe not? The chair of the Senate Education Committee says there are “essential sticking points” still to be worked out between the chambers. That’s probably code for something. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/13/20) Those hearings are ongoing—including over the weekend and on President’s Day—and are attracting a lot of testimony. House Democrats held a little press conference the other day in which they reiterated their stance on voucher issues. The headline of this brief piece says the Dems want to “maintain choice”. I wasn’t there, but I really don’t think Rep. Sykes said that at all based on the quotes. (Statehouse News Bureau, 2/13/20) A more detailed version of that presser indicates that the voucher issue really is just an irksome sideshow to the House Democrats, and an impediment to what they really would like to be getting on with. Especially since, as Rep. Sykes put it, the voucher impasse is really just the House and Senate Republican leadership squabbling with one another like children. Charming. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/13/20)
    
2. Speaking of House and Senate Republicans, the Mannings (Sen. Nathan and his mother, Rep. Gayle) are out here complaining that they haven’t yet managed to end Academic Distress Commissions, even after multiple attempts to amend the heck out of a bunch bills. Almost like they are trying to do it all by themselves with no other support. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/12/20)
   
   

3. Another day, another school district finding something to do with their new student wellness money other than building an empty room. And by productive, I mean funding a counselor to help their students in need. (Record-Courier, 2/12/20) Instead of doing that, the Voucher Grouchers extraordinaire in Washington Local Schools chose to send their student wellness money to their general fund, and to blame EdChoice—not their ongoing deficit spending—for it. (Toledo Blade, 2/13/20) It is passed over quickly in the previous story, but Washington Local’s treasurer noted there is a specific and pressing need for using that wellness money to shore up the general fund. It is that the district is imminently set to borrow $50 million dollars and a depleted general fund (due to ongoing deficit spending) would negatively impact their credit rating. In this companion piece, we are reminded that the good people of Washington Local just voted Yes on a combined 3-mill bond levy and 3.9-mill operating levy in November to finance a huge project to build two new school buildings. “The bond is for 37 years and is projected to raise about $50 million to qualify the district for $178 million in state funding.” I wonder if the district’s dire financial situation was made clear to those good-hearted voters back in November? I also wonder if this construction project, which among other things consolidates two existing elementary schools into one, is planning for less students or more? If I were a taxpayer in the Washington Local district, I would have questions. Or I’d just hope to get a voucher and leave. (Toledo Blade, 2/13/20) I assume the taxpayers in Waterloo Local School District in Portage County must have all the information they need, because they have been rejecting district property and income tax levies on nearly every ballot for the last four years. And despite protestations of lots of substantive (and damaging, they say) budget cuts already made, the district is still in such dire straits that the state has placed them under fiscal caution. The superintendent is quick to say that this is not a “state takeover,” but it does mean that “we’ll have more hoops we’ll have to jump through and more things to answer to the state to make sure we’re being fiscally responsible, as we would be doing anyways, but any decisions we make will be with ODE in mind. They’ll say this is a local decision, but I would say they’re allowing it to be a local decision, but we’re making it together.” Hmmm… Another income tax attempt is on the ballot for March. If the levy fails, then supe says more cuts will come…along with more state oversight. And I’m sure you’re thinking that if it passes, the district will kiss its four leaf clover, thank its lucky stars, and then be super prudent with the new money. Right? Nope! “…[If] it passes, we’ll bring a lot of it [the previously-cut stuff] back.” Cha-CHING! (Record Courier, 2/13/20)
    
4. Speaking of bringing things back, Jennifer Adair, the new president of the Columbus City Schools’ board of education, says she wants to prioritize efforts to regain public trust in the district. There’s only a small amount of discussion here as to where that trust might have gone, and that focuses on the previous board prez who was quoted as having said that the district had taken a beating from the local media and had to contend with “misinformation, disinformation and outright lies”. So, perhaps the public was just induced to misplace their trust rather than having actually lost it. Who knows? Luckily, Adair said it is time for the school board to take a different approach. “It’s about being a grown up and saying we have things to work on.” Unfortunately, the thing she mentions most prominently is getting more money. Every other “fix” must follow after that, it seems. (ABC6, Columbus, 2/13/20)
   
   

5. Meanwhile, the Youngstown branch of the NAACP has some serious concerns about the number of fights occurring in Youngstown City Schools, and about the district’s response to them. Various school board members have varying responses to the NAACP’s concerns. (Vindy.com, 2/13/20)
    
6. Meanwhile, in Cuyahoga Falls City Schools, the party’s over. ALL of the parties. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 2/14/20)

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It’s a hard week—harder even than usual—to be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, or her chief policy advisor, assistant secretary Jim Blew. Both are longtime, outspoken, and sophisticated supporters of charter schools. Indeed, DeVos’s (and, implicitly, Donald Trump’s) support for charters has loomed large in the attacks on her that have been coming from prominent Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, and in the fracturing of the bipartisan coalition that has enabled the charter sector to grow dramatically over the past two decades.

So it’s got to be deeply awkward for DeVos and her team to see her Department’s $440 million program of financial assistance to that sector melded (along with twenty-eight other categorical programs) into the big new K–12 block grant that figures prominently in the administration’s FY 2021 budget proposal. Although there’s scant political likelihood that Congress will adopt this plan, DeVos and Blew understand perfectly well that the proposal itself will be interpreted (and welcomed) by charter foes as a sign that even the Trump-ettes have lost their enthusiasm for these independent public schools of choice. One can easily picture Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, for example, phoning Randi Weingarten to strategize about how best to capitalize on this rug being pulled out from under charters by the administration. And the House Democrats who were already on the warpath over charter school aid will have juicy new talking points in the Senate-House appropriations conference.

Viewed from 30,000 feet, this is a Lilliputian issue alongside the Brobdingnagian changes in federal spending priorities that would be wrought by the new Trump budget, and in truth the Education Department wasn’t whacked nearly as hard as many other agencies. But the changes that would ensue in the structure of federal funding for K–12 education would be momentous indeed. As the Department put it, “The budget calls for consolidating nearly all existing K–12 formula and competitive grant programs into one block grant to States, called the Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged (ESED) Block Grant. Funds would be allocated using the same formulas as the Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies program.” While IDEA funding (for the schooling of children with disabilities) remains separate, just about everything else in the K–12 space, including the giant Title I program, would either be folded into the block grant or eliminated altogether. For aficionados and beneficiaries of the twenty-nine categorical programs thus folded, and at a funding level less than the sum of their parts, it’s a painful blow indeed.

In principle, let it be noted, block grants are not a bad thing. Faithful to the Tenth Amendment and, in the education space, to the spirit of ESSA, they empower states and districts to spend federal dollars as they think best. Block grants unclutter the budgetary and bureaucratic attic that’s jammed with little categorical programs, some of which—I admit—have outlived their public value and live on mainly because of interest groups that have come to depend on them.

Yet when something is or should be a national priority, entrusting states and districts to faithfully advance it is pure folly, and the aforementioned interest groups, more than a few of them both worthy and needy, cannot assume that their district or state will give them the time of day. Maryland, for example, where I live, famously has the weakest charter school law in the land, and it’s unimaginable that the union-dominated majority in the state legislature would ever apportion—or allow the executive branch to spend—federal block grant dollars to grow the charter sector. That Maryland has federal charter dollars today is because the categorical nature of the program enabled charter-friendly executives and state board members to submit the requisite application without legislative approval.

Should the proposed block grant ever come to pass, one assumes—surely hopes—that extant charters would continue, even in Maryland, to get the Title I funding that presently comes to many of them. But it’s possible that charter-averse districts would try to starve them even of that. And it’s all but unthinkable that such districts would allocate a dime from their share of the block grant to cover the start-up costs of new charters, which is the principal function of the existing federal program.

As it happens, the administration’s proposed block grant also contains several small competitive grant programs that I value, including the little Javits Gifted and Talented Program (the sole source of federal help for that pupil population) and a wee program of assistance to history and civics education. Considering their value to the nation, plus that of the growing and fast-improving charter sector, I end up torn. I don’t think Uncle Sam should micromanage American education. On the other hand, when it comes to the relatively small portion of K–12 spending derived from Washington, I don’t see any justification for just putting it on a stump and letting states and districts spend it as they see fit. Federal spending programs should advance national priorities, and—in my view—one of those should be more and better charter schools, precisely because they create quality alternatives for needy kids otherwise swindled out of a decent education by the schools run by their districts and states. To turn charter dollars over to districts and states in most places is akin to placing foxes in charge of hens.

No, this block grant isn’t going to be enacted by Congress in the form that the administration has proposed. But the long-term political damage to the charter movement may prove substantial—as DeVos and Blew surely understand. I have to assume they lost a fight with the Office of Management and Budget over this—and I think it’s a damn shame.

NB: Also shameful is the budget’s proposed increase in what can only be termed Education Department “overhead” funding, even as the programs run by the agency are slashed and consolidated, which logically should shrink the “central office,” too. Kudos, though, for a modest but much needed funding boost for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.