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1. There is so much great information on school district funding in this piece—Howard Fleeter is one of the two most knowledgeable people on that topic in Ohio after all. Thus it is a shame that all that understanding is ultimately tossed into the rhetorical Disposall to produce…for lack of a more publishable term…so much “not understanding”. First and foremost is the ridiculous notion that all this information supports the contention that “a lot of money in Ohio is currently being redirected towards charter and private schools.” Wrong! All of this is about districts only and you obfuscate that point simply to misdirect and deceive. And second is the idea that “levy fatigue” is why folks vote down district tax issues on the ballot multiple times. That blinkered vision assumes that if voters “just understood” how the property tax system “disadvantages” districts, we’d vote Yes the first time any district levy came up and would thus save ourselves the “fatigue” that results from telling them No over and over again only to have them ask again and again and again. (WOSU-FM, Columbus, 5/13/24)
   
   

2. Similar vibes in this opinion piece, in which the editorial board of the Toledo Blade argues that a lack of measurable improvement in fourth grade reading achievement is proof positive that the Third Grade Reading Guarantee needs to be repealed in its entirety. Supporters of repeal are “the public school establishment, including elementary and high school administrators, school board members, and school business officials.” The opponents? “Business-based”. A rigorous study showing that retention works to improve outcomes? Dismissed as “but one snapshot”. There you have it! (Toledo Blade, 5/13/24)
   
   

3. Ditto for this one. In it we learn that some high-powered data gurus from the Ohio Education Research Center recently visited Eaton Community City Schools in far western Ohio to investigate the academic outcomes of two of their elementary school buildings. They were identified by DEW as “literacy positive outliers” in which students demonstrated significant growth in literacy between Kindergarten and third grade. Great recognition for a job well done, right? Their kids are bucking the disheartening trends statewide and showing academic growth. It’s a good idea to let the boffins figure out what went right and share it with the world. But school officials seem amazed to be under the microscope and the assistant superintendent doesn’t actually seem to have any clue as to what they did to make this happen. Something something missed kindergarten due to the pandemic, blah blah masks, something something technology didn’t work, yada yada teachers are resilient, something something “change their philosophy”. I sure hope the researchers can figure it all out. If not, it sounds to me like their secret sauce is destined to remain a secret forever…even from themselves! (The Register-Herald, 5/10/24)

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New NAPCS CEO announced

Congratulations and welcome to newly-announced National Alliance for Public Charter Schools CEO Starlee Coleman. She comes to the job from the Lone Star State, where for the last six years she has been CEO of the Texas Public Charter Schools Association. “I am honored to lead the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and to work alongside our dedicated team and partners to ensure every child has access to an excellent public education,” Coleman said in a statement. “I look forward to building on the Alliance’s legacy of advocacy and collaboration, and to elevating the voices of the students, educators and families who choose charter schools.” You can read more about Starlee Coleman and the announcement here.

Looking at an important tutoring program

The policy director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank visited Summit Academy’s Akron Elementary a few weeks ago to take a look at the school’s high-dosage tutoring program. It’s unusual context (in a charter school focused on serving students with special needs) and robust format (aligned with the science of reading, utilizing a hybrid virtual and in-person model with lots of hands on help) are interesting factors to study. And test score data seem into indicate some notable success for participating students. Sounds like a great place to study and learn from.

Amazing graduation story

It’s graduation season across the country, with lots of great stories of impressive young people to be celebrated. Case in point: Meet Khaya Njumbe of Gary, Indiana. He will be receiving his high school diploma from 21st Century Charter School soon at the early age of 15. But thanks to his school’s intensive focus on college readiness and access for its students, Khaya had already earned three associate degrees before he hit his senior year. And this year he will also walk across the graduation stage at Indiana University Northwest to become what is believed to be the youngest ever bachelor’s degree holder in the state! Congratulations, incredible work, and look out world!

New sponsors, new schools

In the wake of a bill signed into law last year, two cities in Nevada are looking to become charter school sponsors for the first time. The City of North Las Vegas has already sent its application to the state department of education, with an eye toward opening its first school in fall 2025. The City of Henderson is finalizing their application to the state currently. The director of community services in North Las Vegas says, “This is an opportunity for us to really identify some [educational] deficits and fill those deficits with opportunity and options.” Nice!

Important new research

A pair of researchers from Stanford and USC have released the findings of new study on school segregation across the country. Its publication coincides with the 70th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the findings seem problematic. Over the last three decades, they report, school segregation has been increasing after a period of decline. It has done so even as neighborhoods have become more racially mixed and as economic inequality between racial groups has declined, and it has increased the most within the large school districts that many of the nation’s students of color attend. The expiration of most Brown-related desegregation orders in that timeframe is one big factor, but fingers are also pointing at the expansion of charter schools.

CSP grant applications open now

Applications for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) competitive grants are now open. These include Grants to State Entities, Grants to Charter School Developers and Charter Management Organizations for the opening of new schools and replication of high-quality existing schools, and the State Charter School Facilities Incentive Grants Program. Information, application details, and deadlines for all CPS grants can be found here.

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1. House Bill 250, which would, among other things, establish two additional pathways for students to earn the state’s Military Enlistment Seal require all public schools in the state to create a cellphone use policy for students during school hours, was passed unanimously in both House and Senate this week. It is on to Governor DeWine for signature. “We’re just discovering the harms that these smart phones and social media apps are doing to our kids, said Lt. Gov. John Husted told a Cincinnati TV news reporter by way of support for the bill’s tech-related amendment. “So we’re now just in the learning phase of what policies we need to build to improve things.” (WLWT-TV, Cincinnati, 5/9/24)
    
2. There are some great quotes in this Dispatch op-ed from former Columbus City Schools elected board member Carol Beckerle. Here are a few of the best. She is talking about the important work of the Community Facilities Task Force and responding specifically to criticism of the task force by union boss John Coneglio. “We can’t let decision paralysis — a very real ‘failed past practice’ — sideline this very first step of the process,” she writes. The task force will recommend closures, Beckerle adds, “not due to some pre-ordained objective, but because improving education dictates it.” She concludes, “Once the new district footprint is established, district leaders can begin the process of preserving and replicating successful programs, implementing and expanding career education and determining what upgrades are required.” Exactly right. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/8/24)
   
   

3. Finally this week, safely on solid ground: A popular summer reading camp for K-2 students in Findlay, Ohio, is looking for more tutors to serve its expanding roster of future literacy laureates. The camp is run by the local library, with funding from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, and will be expanding into two local community center locations. School’s out, but vital learning continues. (Findlay Courier, 5/9/24)

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Tim Daly has done the field a great service with his walk down memory lane about the flawed Obama-era effort to reform teacher evaluations. It’s all the more impressive because Tim himself was a central figure in the movement (along with Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Tom Kane, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others). It’s never easy to acknowledge the failure of something you played a big role in creating. For instance, I still refuse to accept that Common Core was a failure. (Note: It wasn’t.)

As Tim explains, the impulse behind fixing teacher evaluations was a sound one. A key goal was to finally make it feasible to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. Unfortunately, broken teacher evaluation systems were just one tiny part of the problem rather than the problem itself. The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it.

Indeed, if we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once: low teacher pay, which creates the appearance, if not the reality, of teacher shortages; state laws and collective bargaining agreements that mandate extreme due-process rights for tenured teachers; pension systems that raise the stakes dramatically for the removal of teachers near the end of their careers; and yes, the teacher evaluations themselves.

In my view, we should have recognized early-on that reforming all of this was politically impossible, at least via federal policy. (Washington, D.C. and Dallas came closest—two exceptions out of 14,000 districts that prove the rule.) Therefore we should have focused on the much more achievable aim of improving the feedback teachers receive about their instructional practice, rather than trying to build high-stakes, formal evaluation systems that would inevitably do little good. After all, why would a principal give a negative review to a teacher she knew she was stuck with? It was no surprise, then, when after all the efforts and all the fights, almost every teacher in the country still receives positive evaluations from their principals. Little changed, except that attitudes against testing became even more negative and widespread.

So the bad-teacher problem hasn’t gone away. The question for today is whether that’s fated to be our permanent lot, or whether another run at the issue could be more successful. My view is that the Gordian Knot remains unbreakable, at least for experienced teachers. But I believe we could make significant progress on weeding out bad teachers in their first few years of service, before they get tenure protections or come anywhere close to a pension payout.

Are bad teachers really a problem?

Before proceeding further, it’s worth pausing to ponder whether bad teachers really are a problem. The unions would certainly argue that the vast majority of teachers are committed professionals who chose a public-spirited but poorly-paid career because of their interest in helping kids. I agree entirely! But any field is going to have high performers and low performers, probably in the rough shape of a bell curve. Any decent organization frets about how to move that curve to the right, including by asking the lowest-performers to find another line of work. It’s hardly teacher-bashing to try to do so in K–12 education.

Not that it’s easy in any sector. Few managers enjoy firing people, especially people they work alongside and have come to know well. In the for-profit world, there are strong organizational incentives not to let bad performance fester. But even then, managers need structures and nudges to get them to pull the trigger or an economic downturn to force the issue. Firing people is hard.

Yet it’s really important that we do so, especially in schools. Partly that’s because of the evidence demonstrating that our lowest-performing teachers cause significant deterioration for the students unlucky enough to be assigned to them. Especially since such students are more likely to be low-income kids and kids of color, given the inequitable distribution of effective teachers in many of our schools.

It’s also the case that low performers are a huge morale problem for high performers. That’s surely true in any line of work, but especially in schools. If I teach fourth grade, the quality of my school’s third-grade teachers has a direct impact on how well-prepared my students will be, and thus on what I can accomplish with them. So it is from K through 12.

Bad teachers with tenure: We’re pretty much stuck with them

The bad news about bad teachers is that it’s probably politically impossible to remove them from the profession, at least if they already have tenure and many years of experience. Here’s why.

First, it would mean rolling back due-process protections in place in all but a handful of states so that it does not take years and thousands of dollars to remove a teacher from the classroom. Needless to say, the unions are going to fight such changes tooth and nail. But perhaps in red states, and especially red districts within red states, progress on this front is doable.

But next on the list of challenges is the teacher pension system. Almost every teacher in America still participates in an old-fashioned defined benefit plan, meaning that they get a big payoff if they stick it out for twenty-five or thirty years, and almost nothing if they leave before retirement age. That creates a very strong incentive to be a lifer even if you are burned out and miserable. And for principals, that means knowing that, if you fire burned-out and miserable veteran teachers, not only must they find new livelihoods, but they will also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in pension wealth.

Given that most principals are nice people who don’t like to fire colleagues they’ve worked with for years, you can imagine that this is going to be hard for them to do. You can also understand why the unions will protect these pension policies to the death. Indeed, Michigan was one of the few states that had switched a generation ago to a defined contribution plan, akin to a 401(k), and one of the first things the teachers unions fought for once the Democrats gained trifecta control in the state in 2022 was to go back to a defined benefit plan as the default. (They won that fight just a few months ago.)

Finally, there’s the challenge of teacher shortages or at least the perception thereof. Principals are loath to let go of bad teachers because they aren’t sure they’ll be able to replace them with someone better. A bird in the hand and all that.

Any labor economist will tell you that the best way to address a shortage is to pay people more. And in a sane world, we would indeed have a system where we paid teachers dramatically higher salaries and found the money by dramatically reducing the number of non-instructional staff and administrators in our school systems. But that is another Gordian Knot of its own!

Briefly: One reason we have so many non-teaching adults in our schools is to compensate for the middling quality of our teachers. We have embraced a system whereby we pay teachers relatively low salaries, which attracts mediocre candidates (on average), and then we hire coaches, instructional aides, and myriad other personnel to try to help those mediocre teachers do a better job with their students.

A completely different approach, one that is more common overseas, is to pay teachers well but keep the rest of the staffing system lean and mean. That means larger class sizes, yes, but also fewer non-instructional personnel, fewer administrators, and in general fewer teacher-helpers.

So how do we get from here to there? Honestly, I have no idea.

Bad rookie teachers, on the other hand, are a solvable problem

So if it’s impossible to do much about ineffective teachers with tenure and lots of experience, what about weeding out bad teachers before they get such protections and come anywhere close to a pension payoff? Here is where there is some good news, which is that every school district in America could make good use of its tenure approval process today, and it would face far less opposition from the teachers unions or anyone else. After all, Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein were able to institute the practice of denying tenure to a majority of teachers on their first try, and that was in New York City with the United Federation of Teachers! If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Denying someone tenure still needs to be done fairly and objectively. That would be a good place to use the kind of teacher evaluation systems that we see in leading states and cities, such as Tennessee and the District of Columbia—the type that Tim Daly and his compatriots spent so many years building.

And you still must deal with the “nice principal” problem. Perhaps tenure approval should be something managed at the district level, with a committee of sorts, more like how it works in higher education.

Maybe it would also help if the number of tenured positions were limited. You make it so that principals or district administrators have no choice but to deny tenure to the least effective rookie teachers. Make it a forced choice. And perhaps you could then distribute tenured positions equitably to schools throughout a district, with high-poverty schools getting more than low-poverty ones. Make it an equity play, too.

Yes, we will still face the teacher shortage problem, though the end of ESSER funding—which temporarily allowed districts to hire lots more teachers—and the sharp decline in student enrollment in most districts will take care of that, at least in the short term. We won’t need, and won’t have the money for, as many teachers as we have in recent years.

No doubt, some teachers would receive tenure who would later become burned out and be relatively ineffective. But the research evidence indicates that we can usually tell within the first few years if someone is likely to be a strong teacher. We won’t get this perfect every time, but we should have many fewer ineffectual teachers if we take this approach.

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So there you have it. Unless you are willing to try unraveling the entire Gordian Knot—and have the political will and political strategy to succeed—forget about bad veteran teachers and focus on weeding out the bad rookie ones before they get too much experience in the classroom. It won’t solve everything, but it will make our schools better. Take the win!

It seems every day that yet another story hits the headlines about a school banning phones. Of course, the large majority of schools had nominal prohibitions previously, but they left enforcement up to teachers, which meant most students still slipped them out during class, at lunch, and in the halls. Now more schools are opting towards magnetically sealed bags or locking phones away in closets before the first bell rings.

Countless districts, states, and even entire countries have announced and tried to implement such bans. After a few semesters with these policies, researchers have had sufficient time to study their effects, and results from those studies are starting to roll in.

Most recently, researcher Sara Abrahamsson surveyed Norwegian schools to determine if and when they implemented a phone ban and linked that to Norwegian Registry data, which includes “information on each individual’s educational institution, health care take-up at specialist care, including psychologists, and general practitioners (GPs), middle-school grades set by students’ teachers and externally corrected exams, student’s overall GPA, and individuals’ choices of academic or vocational high schools.”

Schools implemented restrictions at different times, and Abrahamsson demonstrates that the implementation of smartphone bans was uncorrelated with either school characteristics such as teacher gender ratios or prior achievement, and uncorrelated with prior trends such as declining mental health or GPAs. These factors allowed for a quasi-experimental design, analyzing 477 middle schools between 2010 and 2018. From this analysis, she comes to five conclusions:

• Banning smartphones reduces the number of consultations for psychological symptoms by about 2–3 visits per child, per year.
• Banning smartphones lowers the incidence of bullying for both girls and boys.
• Banning smartphones results in girls making gains in both their GPA and externally graded mathematics exams, on the order of 0.22 standard deviations. For comparison, Abrahamsson notes that reducing class size by one student correlates to an improvement of about 0.00–0.05 standard deviations.
• These benefits are particularly strong for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
• The effects are particularly strong at schools with the strictest bans, requiring students to hand in or lock away their phones, not just place them on silent mode. Abrahamsson notes that, even on silent mode, phones can still pull at a student’s attention, distracting them as they wonder if someone messaged them, liked their status, or whatever else.

This study comes as researchers debate the broader effects of social media on teenagers. In previous years, it’s become more and more evident that social media is, in fact, a major cause of declining adolescent mental health. Even so, there’s still much debate over how significant of a driver they are and what’s to be done about them.

Just because something is bad doesn’t necessarily justify a strict prohibition. History is riddled with examples wherein prohibitions backfired (the temperance movement) or created unsustainable negative externalities (the war on drugs). Similarly, some school-level campaigns such as the D.A.R.E. program have only increased the rate of the behavior they tried to combat.

In the case of phone bans, however, this latest study is just one more entry to an expanding literature on the benefits of such policies. It’s worth noting that the p-values in this study are small—signifying a uncertainty in its conclusions—but as I’ve written about here before, several earlier analyses showed that limiting phone usage during class increases performance on both standardized test scores and end-of-course exams. As for non-academic benefits, researchers have found that, without phones, students exercise far more at recess, burning off energy, fostering physical health, and promoting later attention in class. In short, phone bans work.

From a personal perspective, I’ve seen the benefits. For a number of years, I volunteered at a summer camp that confiscated phones on day one. Students grudgingly handed them over, complaining that they’d “lose their streaks” (it has something to do with Snapchat). But in short order they were voicing appreciation for the time they could spend sitting in circles chatting with friends, without all eyes staring down. Few had experienced the simple pleasure of getting lost in thought because boredom had always prompted them to grab their phone. By week’s end, every single student—every single one—expressed some hesitation to check their phones when we handed them back. They’d learned to love being phone free.

Something of a pessimist as I am, I find this turnaround on phones a heartening trend. We’ve seen society-wide transformations before, movements that greatly improved the lives of young people. Campaigns against smoking that spread the message of its negative health effects and prompted bans in countless public space, for example, have led to a drastic decrease in smoking rates. A similar decline happened for teen pregnancy after policy initiatives, public messaging campaigns, and rhetoric from various political bully pulpits sought to combat the societal malady.

We can and should see a similar shift for teens and social media. Amid debates about highly technocratic, complex ed-policy initiatives with unclear benefits—mass testing, curricular overhauls, and others—banning phones is a simple, easily implemented, and clear win-win for our students, teachers, and society writ large.

November’s all-but-settled presidential rematch bears many of the trappings of 2020, except that Donald Trump will pick a new running mate. Who will it be? There are dozens of possibilities, though he has sometimes signaled an interest in selecting a woman. Let’s take that as a given, then match it with the Washington Post’s top prospects, and look at five that might fit the bill to speculate on what each might mean for education.

Sure, it’s a parlor game, as policy comes from the Oval Office. But it’s never pointless to scrutinize the VP selection, as it can have considerable effects on the election (think Sarah Palin in 2008). Such scrutiny is further warranted because of both Trump’s and Biden’s ages (Trump will be seventy-eight years old on January 20, 2025). Now to the shortlist:

1. Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY): Few embody the complete transformation from moderate to MAGA as completely as Stefanik does. She went viral for her contentious exchanges with three prominent university presidents during December’s congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. On K–12, Stefanik takes credit for helping to get ESSA signed into law, and has been supportive of a parents’ bill of rights and critical of Democrats who oppose it, berating them as “domestic terrorists.” In her home state of New York, she sounded off on the decision to ban the use of Native American mascots or logos in schools, calling it the result of the state’s “woke” department of education.

2. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AR): Of all the women in the GOP veepstakes, none has a more public—if recent—record on education. Trump’s former White House press secretary, Governor Sanders spearheaded the passage of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, an omnibus piece of legislation that covers everything from expanding school choice and improving literacy to using test scores to drive interventions and restructuring teacher compensation. Adjusted for cost of living, Arkansas now has the highest starting teacher salary in the nation. For her part, Sanders described the law as “the largest overhaul of the state's education system in Arkansas history.” At the same time, the act’s “indoctrination ban” continues to stir up litigation and controversy.

3. Former Gov. Nikki Haley (SC): Even after dropping out, Haley nonetheless won a decent chunk of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary last month. While she was in the race, her education platform called for shrinking (rather than eliminating) the U.S. Department of Education and establishing a national voucher program. Somewhat bizarrely, she also called for schools to be run more like airports. When she was governor of South Carolina, Haley was an outspoken opponent of the Common Core, while pushing through a reform package to improve reading and technology access.

Haley seems the least likely among this group to get The Donald’s nod, but adding her to the ticket could keep some of her voters from pulling the lever for Biden in an election that’s expected to be tight.

4. Gov. Kristi Noem (SD): If federal education policy is to undergo a MAGA makeover, the governor of the Mount Rushmore State would be right out of central casting. She has vowed to defeat “ascendant anti-Americanism” in schools and signed an executive order to restrict “political indoctrination” in classrooms. Noem has also won praise (and intense controversy) for revamping the state’s (previously very meager) social studies standards, and has reportedly increased K–12 funding by more than 26 percent since taking office in 2019.

5. Kari Lake (AZ): A native of Iowa, Lake is the youngest of nine children and daughter of a public school teacher. Arizona’s GOP senate candidate has an education platform with three planks: (1) eliminating annual state testing, (2) national vouchers for high school graduates to pursue CTE training, and (3) reducing federal bureaucracy. During her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 2022, Lake said she wanted to put cameras in classrooms to monitor teachers—likening the idea to police body cams—and for schools to adopt a “patriotic curriculum” consistent with Trump’s call for “patriotic education.”

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To the extent ed policy was even on his radar, the former president largely focused on school choice and some reining in of the federal Office for Civil Rights during his first term, but showed little interest in student achievement. The Heritage Foundation has provided a more detailed look at what the ed agenda might entail this time around. Predictably, this includes abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and creating multiple forms of school choice, but it also calls for new policy priorities like “prohibiting compelled speech” and adding “family structure” to the categories by which NAEP data are disaggregated. The question is if any of these women appears likely to do anything different if they were to find themselves in the hot seat.

There’s also the question of whether any of them adds to the ticket anything that is apt to appeal to voters on education grounds. Sanders might be suitable here, but it’s slim pickings. While she brings more to the table on schooling, everyone on this list is more motivated by politics than by pedagogy. What’s more, with obeisance as the primary selection criteria, Trump isn’t looking for a heady policy partner. Indeed, if he returns, Trump’s VP will be charged with genuflection, not education. 

Cheers

• A Louisiana school district agreed to close two failing schools and implement reforms or face a state takeover. —KTBS
• After a new law in Nevada allows city and county governments to sponsor charter schools, two municipalities are set to open such institutions. —KTNV Las Vegas
• Houston ISD will begin auto-enrolling high achieving students into advanced classes. —Houston Chronicle

Jeers

• Kindergarten instruction is too often focused on low-level skills like counting and identifying basic shapes. —Hechinger Report
• A lawsuit challenging racial segregation in New York City schools could force the elimination of advanced education programming. —New York Times

• A columnist recommends a reading list for ambitious teenagers to counter group think. —Ross Douthat, New York Times
• The El Paso School District plans to close and consolidate several schools due to declining enrollment. —The 74
• Students in low-rated schools in Hillsborough County face inexperienced teachers, administrative turnover, and behavioral chaos. —Tampa Bay Times
• The case that smartphones are causing an adolescent mental health crisis isn’t quite as strong as the media makes it out to be. —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times
• Biden is pushing to foster the chip industry in America, but training workers and staffing factories is proving difficult. —Washington Post
• A number of recent, high-profile studies find that school-based mental health interventions either have no effects or make matters worse. —New York Times

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1. Scoffing and tears met the Columbus City Schools’ facilities task force recommendations presented for the first time last night. Hopefully some actual analysis will follow soon before any actual decisions are made. (Columbus Dispatch, 5/7/24)
    
2. Here’s a great look at a new and interesting-sounding national PBS math education program created and hosted by a former Worthington teacher. “Math is everywhere, and I aim to highlight its relevance in our daily lives.” Sounds great to me—math chicken and all! (Columbus Dispatch, 5/7/24)

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One of the hallmarks of Governor DeWine’s administration has been its emphasis on expanding and improving career pathways for students. Thus, it came as no surprise that the governor focused on this critical issue in his recent state of the state address. After noting that state law currently requires schools to help every student develop a plan for how they will meet graduation requirements, DeWine called on the legislature to “make a very simple fix in statute to insert career planning into existing graduation plan requirements.”

The state law the governor is referring to mandates that every student in grades nine through twelve have a graduation plan that maps their academic pathway to a diploma. Each pathway includes meeting course requirements, specified by both the state and district, and graduation requirements, which are the purview of the state. Plans are developed by the student and a school representative and must be updated each year until the student graduates.

The Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) has created a template for graduation plans. Districts aren’t required to use it, but it does serve as a model for what the state expects plans to contain. It’s worth noting that although the template asks students to identify their career field interests and their post-high school goals, neither section requires much in the way of engagement or in-depth thought from students. Likewise, other than a blank space to fill in “supports needed to achieve this goal,” nothing much is asked of schools, either.

This is likely where the governor sees an opportunity. If graduation plans are going to be truly beneficial for students, then surface-level, fill-in-the-blank career planning needs to be replaced with in-depth and impactful career advising. The solution to this problem seems simple. Just require districts to offer career advising to students. But here’s the twist: Ohio already requires districts to provide students in grades 6–12 with career advising. In fact, the statutory requirements for graduation plans explicitly state that they must “supplement a school district’s policy on career advising.” Even more surprising is the fact that career advising policies have been required under state law since the 2015–16 school year.

So what is the governor asking the legislature to do? It seems that he’s asking them to more clearly align the graduation plan statute with the one governing career advising. Rather than requiring graduation plans to “supplement and enhance the school or district’s policy on career advising,” he seems to be suggesting that state law should mandate that a student’s graduation plan incorporate and include the results of career advising experiences.

That’s a good start. But lawmakers should consider going further and update the career advising law, as well. Nearly a decade after first requiring districts to adopt a career advising policy, there still appears to be far too many students whose experiences are limited to box-checking exercises rather than in-depth exploration and consistent support. Whatever schools are currently doing, it’s not working for too many kids.

Although there are plenty of ways to improve the status quo, lawmakers should consider adding the following requirements to state law.

1. Require students to complete a career exploration course in middle school.

It’s critical that students be given the opportunity to explore each of Ohio’s career fields and the educational pathways that lead into those fields. It’s equally important that they are provided with this opportunity in middle school, so that they have a better idea of which courses—traditional academic, career-technical, or both—they want to take in high school. For example, students who know that they’re interested in cybersecurity or manufacturing prior to their freshman year will have far more time to complete the pathway courses identified by the state, participate in work-based learning, and earn industry-recognized credentials than students who don’t discover their interests until later in high school.

As for the career exploration courses themselves, they should be co-planned by the district and representatives from the district’s CTPD and Business Advisory Council. Course content should cover each of Ohio’s career fields, including available jobs within each field; the training (and training costs) required to obtain those jobs; salary ranges; Ohio regions where each field or job is most in demand; and projected job growth. Students should also be required to complete at least one aptitude or interest survey/assessment during the course. Districts should be free to decide whether to take advantage of state-provided tools to meet this requirement, or choose to utilize other options, like YouScience.

2. Require students to develop a career pathways plan at the conclusion of their career exploration course.

Using what they’ve learned over the duration of the course, students should complete a career pathways plan. As part of this plan, students should select at least one career field they intend to pursue, list specific jobs they’re interested in, and identify the courses or credentials they will need to complete in high school (or beyond) to be prepared for those jobs. Family engagement is crucial, so a parent or guardian should have to sign off on the plan before it can be considered complete. To ensure that students get a robust planning experience, legislators could set aside funds and create an RFP that allows nonprofits and other organizations with expertise and experience in the career planning space to take on the responsibility of helping students craft their plans. This would give students access to professionals with a broad knowledge base and could lighten the load for districts.

3. Require districts to incorporate students’ career pathways plans into their graduation plans.

With the above changes in place, every ninth-grade student would walk into their high school with a career plan. This opens the door for lawmakers to put the governor’s idea into action by mandating that districts use those career plans to help students draft their graduation plan. The most important thing is that students would be able to make informed decisions about which courses and programs to pursue in high school. But this could also lighten the load for school counselors, who would go from working with students who have little to no knowledge of their options and interests, to working with students who already have a solid plan in place.

To ensure that students aren’t stuck following a career plan that no longer matches their interests, districts should be required to assist students with formally updating their career plans twice during high school—once at the conclusion of freshman year, and again at the conclusion of junior year. This update requirement shouldn’t be an additional burden on districts, as they are already required to update graduation plans yearly. Updating career plans could be included in that process. However, districts should also be required to permit students to alter their plans whenever they request to do so.

4. Audit districts’ career planning efforts.

Quality career planning is essential to the success of the state’s career pathways efforts and hugely important for students’ futures. As such, lawmakers should make the creation of robust career plans for middle school students, as well as the biannual updates mentioned above, a condition for districts to receive career-focused funding. Furthermore, either the auditor of state or DEW should be charged with annually reviewing a random sample of career plans from randomly-selected districts. If plans aren’t up to the state’s standards, funding for their career education programs could be reduced or—in extreme cases—taken back entirely. Taken together, these measures should help ensure that districts take their career planning responsibilities seriously.

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Governor DeWine is right that career planning should be a bigger part of students’ graduation plans. But in order for that planning to be beneficial, students need an opportunity to explore all their options so they can make informed decisions. Districts, meanwhile, need to up their game. Despite the fact that career advising policies have been required for nearly a decade, there are still far too many students who graduate with no clue how to pursue their interests or even what they’re interested in. It’s time for Ohio to boldly rethink career advising and graduation planning. The recommendations outlined above offer a path to do so.