Los Angeles Unified School District’s Zones of Choice (ZOC) program began in 2010 as an effort to provide more high school options for a large swath of district eighth graders, combining historical catchment areas in lower-income and lower-performing neighborhoods into larger choice zones and eliminating the default feeder system from middle to high school. ZOC has proven to be an excellent model for researching the positive academic impact of choice. But as a new report published by MIT’s Blueprint Labs shows us, it is also good for examining how parental preferences are shaped.

University of Chicago researcher Christopher Campos conducts a detailed, multi-stage analysis to go beyond the simple “revealed preferences” model typical of school choice research and really tease out what—and who—parents are responding to when they rank their preferred schools. The initial data come from ZOC information and application periods in fall 2019 and fall 2021. (LAUSD spent most of the 2020–21 school year in either full or partial virtual learning; ZOC was functional but highly disrupted.) Approximately 13,000 eighth graders attended a ZOC middle school in each application year under study. Fully 90 percent of ZOC-eligible students were Hispanic (compared to 64 percent in the district as a whole), and 94 percent were classified as low income. The typical ZOC student was entering high school performing roughly 22 percent of a standard deviation behind their typical non-ZOC peer on both math and reading tests. In short, these are exactly the students who stand to benefit most from having access to better options through ZOC.

Campos’s methodology is dense and multi-faceted and defies easy summary. On the school side, he constructs measures of school quality (based on numerous academic factors) and peer quality (that is, the composition of students in receiving high schools according to their individual academic achievement). On the family side, he surveys parents of eighth grade ZOC students prior to them submitting their ranked choice lists for high school in order to determine their beliefs about school and peer quality compared to the actual rankings he devises. On the information side—the real innovation here—Campos constructs a protocol to vary the type and amount of direct information that families receive about school and peer quality for all the schools from which they can choose. This is compared to information received from other families and through other informal sources. Finally, he compares all that pre-choice information to the final options selected, the high schools ultimately attended, and (icing on the cake) the outcomes for ZOC students based on the new understanding of the choices and how they are made.

The results of all these layers of interrelated analyses are also very detailed. Pre-choice survey data show that families tended to underestimate schools’ academic quality, overestimate their peer quality, and that their estimates were least accurate regarding schools they preferred the least. All of these tendencies combined to induce what the report calls “mistakes” on ZOC applications. That is, in a scenario without these biases—pure information about school and peer quality—his models show that parents would rank schools differently. However, families are motivated to choose by the information they receive, right or wrong. Families who received more information, especially those who received it directly from Campos, chose higher-quality schools; those who did not receive direct information but heard about school quality from their Campos-informed neighbors also chose higher-quality schools. It’s not as simple as a quick summary makes it sound, but overall, Campos writes, “the experiment provides robust evidence that when properly informed, families make choices in a way that is consistent with rewarding effective schools and that social interactions are important mediators governing changes in demand.” In previous research, he has noted that ZOC is nearly ideal at offering enough options without overwhelming parents and at providing them with the highest-quality information possible.

While the ultimate aim of this research project is to determine whether ZOC students fare better in their chosen high school, outcome data are limited at this time. Only the 2019 cohort had reached eleventh grade state testing when this analysis was being done, and Campos believes pandemic-mitigation school closures “severely interfered with [their] educational experience.” As a result, no impact of ZOC choices on their test scores was observed. However, survey data showed significant improvements in students’ reported happiness in school, interpersonal skills, school connectedness, and academic effort for the 2019 cohort. Incidents of bullying were also down. These same improvements were reported—at even higher levels—for the 2021 cohort. Campos specifically notes that the academic effort index he constructed from survey responses is more than ten times higher for the 2021 ZOC cohort than the boost reported by the earlier group. He feels it bodes well for an observable test score increase when those students reach eleventh grade, but only time will tell for sure.

Overall, this research—as in-depth and pathbreaking as it is—is not conclusive except to say that parental school preferences are influenced by the information they receive, both from official and unofficial sources. Schools (and indeed policymakers) who are serious about helping families make the best possible educational choices must provide thorough, clear, and digestible information directly to families prior to any application or ranking of schools.

SOURCE: Christopher Campos, “Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles,” MIT Blueprint Labs (April 2024).

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1. 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. And why wouldn’t she? It’s a charter school, the curriculum is focused on serving students with special needs, the tutoring is aligned with the science of reading, programming utilizes a hybrid virtual and in-person model, and (last but definitely not least) test score data show the tutoring is working to boost student achievement. Hope the research can find out what’s going so right up there and share it widely. (Akron.com, 5/2/24)
   
   

2. I’m hearing stories like this more and more lately and I love it anew each time: Bianca Patrone is graduating high school in the next few weeks, but she’s already earned her bachelor’s degree from Youngstown State University. How awesome! These stories are bound to increase in number (Bianca tells us her younger brother is on track to do the same thing) as more and more years of access to the state’s College Credit Plus program elapse. But let us also point out what the stories mean in the larger context today: The first is that there are students all across Ohio like Bianca who are ready to take college classes by the end of seventh grade. The second is that she and others like her managed to breeze through high school while still taking multiple college courses in most semesters. The third is that every kid who manages this feat over the next few years accomplished it despite three years of pandemic-disrupted schooling at both the high school and the college level. Bianca herself understands it all clearly: “I had so many opportunities through this program. I gained some much needed experience in networking and it really molded me into the person I am today,” she says. “I really wanted to build a story and create something memorable for other people like me, who just want a different approach to education.” Do the adults understand it though? Are they looking for the next Biancas already in their midst? Are they working to build up others who just need a little push? Are they hearing these success stories and trying to create more of them? (Vindy.com, 5/6/24)

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Covering competitive effects

Some important media coverage via Spectrum News 1 this week for Fordham Ohio’s recent paper on charter school competition in the state. Report author Stéphane Lavertu and Fordham research guru Aaron Churchill are both quoted in the piece talking about the positive effects of charter expansion on traditional districts. The full report is here in case you missed it.

Careful what you wish for

School choice is one of the culprits cited for transportation troubles in various northeast Ohio school districts. Specifically, districts needing to provide bus service to growing numbers of resident students opting for charter, private, and STEM schools. Traci Hostetler, Superintendent of the ESC of Eastern Ohio, has a solution. She told Vindy.com this week that, “Every school receiving public funds should be transporting their own students and that would help tremendously with public school busing.” What she’s advocating for is “private and charter schools to provide their own transportation and for public schools to transport their own students.” Don’t know who she’s talking to, but I sure hope they listen! I also hope there’s enough truck drivers available to start shipping all that per-student bus money to the schools where kids actually attend.

Award-winning book

Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools, a book written by John A. Dues, Chief Learning Officer of the United Schools Network in Columbus, was recently awarded the 2024 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Awardees are books that “assist readers in understanding the relationship between education and the social complexities in which schools are contextualized and in fostering inquiry into the history, current status, and future alternatives of teaching, learning, and education.” Kudos on a well-deserved honor.

West Virginia charters go national

The growth of the charter school sector in West Virginia—from no schools less than two years ago to a burgeoning roster of brick-and-mortar and virtual schools serving thousands of students across the state—is nothing short of astounding. Another big step forward this week as the U.S. Department of Education gave the green light for the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board to begin accepting Charter School Program (CSP) grant applications from Mountain State schools. Hopefully this means additional funding will soon be on hand to help start new schools in underserved areas and to expand existing schools already in danger of bursting at the seams.

Court battle in Missouri

Genesis School is a charter school for at-risk students in Kansas City, Missouri, since 2010. It has been threatened with closure by the State Board of Education and the Missouri Charter Public School Commission due to poor academic performance. School leaders chose to fight and this week won a second victory in court when an appeals court judge ruled that charters have the right to judicial review if the state attempts to shut them down. The school has remained open throughout the battle but will end the school year without knowing whether the results of the review will allow it reopen in the fall.

*****

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Editor’s note: This is the third and final part in a series on teacher evaluation reform. Part one recalled how teacher evaluation became a thing, and part two recounted the movement’s heyday and downfall. This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly.

Teacher evaluation was underpinned by heaps of research and championed by evangelical reformers who believed it would improve schools and elevate teaching to its rightful status. Nonetheless, it fizzled quickly.

Why?

After talking with a few dozen people for this series, I know there are too many factors to lasso them all in here. I’ll share the five that I see as most critical.[1]

Then, we’ll consider the unexpected parallels between teacher evaluation and the ongoing effort to repair damage done to schools by Covid.

The five biggest mistakes of the teacher evaluation movement

1. Using value-added scores to evaluate teachers was a mess. This was the biggie. Our technocratic tendencies did us in. We believed that considering growth in student test scores—controlling for a host of factors—would anchor the whole evaluation process and offset the tendency of principals to be lenient. But the methodology was intelligible only to those with advanced training in math—and half of them were pretending. Results could be calculated only for teachers in tested grades and subjects, leaving out a majority of faculty. That felt unfair. Even for teachers who believed the information in their score, they had no idea how to improve it. Value added was a political liability because it played into pre-existing fears about NCLB prizing test scores above good instruction. We should have left it as a research tool and not brought it into the assessment of individual teachers.

2. We pushed teacher evaluation on districts and schools that had no interest. Rather than start with a coalition of the willing—which would have been a small slice of districts—we went whole hog, espousing state laws that mandated evaluation changes in every school. This overreach created a built-in opposition force of superintendents, boards, and school leaders who resented the burden of rolling out new systems they didn’t believe in. Many of them went through the motions. The same was true of states.

3. We scared the bejeebers out of veteran teachers. And underestimated the consequences thereof. As I wrote in part two, there was sense that a small number of bad teachers were harming outcomes—especially for low-income students—and these folks were passed around from school to school rather than dismissed. Send them packing, the thinking went, and schools could finally reach their instructional potential. Nothing, however, triggers a panic response in teachers like the threat of firing. Teaching offers few perks. Doesn’t pay that well, doesn’t have the prestige of some other white-collar professions. But it’s secure. By making dismissal of low-performing veterans a central focus of evaluation reform—especially when ratings could be based substantially on the black box of value-added scores—we sent teachers (and unions) into a frenzy and suggested that reform wasn’t about elevating the teaching profession, it was about making it more precarious. Not our intent, but it’s what we did. The alternative, which was certainly discussed at the time, was to start with novices. Those teachers could already be dismissed at will. Develop the protocols, show that evaluations could help teachers get better, and demonstrate that outplacement would be reserved for clear, common-sense cases. It would have softened the introduction of newfangled systems.

4. We put too much faith in the idea of objectivity. Teachers know that not every class is the same. Those in particularly challenging placements—the ones with students far below grade level, behavior issues omnipresent, resources non-existent—didn’t buy that their work could be fairly evaluated using the same standards, tools, and protocols that were used in cushier schools. They suspected that “easier to teach” students would lead to higher observation scores for teachers. And they were absolutely correct.[2] Had we acknowledged from the start that a teacher’s context should be taken into account—and that perfect objectivity is impossible in the real world of schools—we would not have ended up penalizing some teachers for accepting mission-driven, high-priority assignments.

5. We believed principals would act to dismiss low performers if given the chance. For years, principals said they didn’t bother assigning low ratings to weak teachers because the dismissal process was onerous and doomed to fail. Why pick a fight you can’t win? Reformers accepted this wholeheartedly. We set out to create evaluations that would collect credible evidence about teacher performance. We pushed states to streamline remediation processes so they would exit low performers fairly but with less fuss. Much to our surprise, most principals went right on assigning high ratings to their teachers and granting all of them tenure. Regardless of how principals are portrayed by unions—as vindictive despots—they are mostly the opposite. They are non-confrontational, hesitant to upset or divide their teams, and not that confident in their ability to evaluate teachers in specialty subjects. They are keen to avoid inclusion on their local union’s list of despots.

In sum, we pushed a policy that was more aggressive than the market would bear and guaranteed that opponents would have sensible arguments to make against it.

What were the consequences of our mistakes?

Addressing differences among teachers became toxic. The first wave of attempts to reform teacher evaluation failed. Then what? The natural next step would have been taking another run at the problem having learned from our errors. Maybe swallow some humility and patience. Instead, evaluation reform vaporized. Work on the problem ceased almost altogether.[3] That’s collateral damage from its high profile. It’s also a shame. The variation in the teaching force is the same today as it was twenty years ago. We know that teachers influence even more outcomes like student absenteeism, suspensions, and future course grades. We just choose to ignore it.

Backlash to testing grew. Families—particularly in affluent communities—refused to allow their children to participate in state testing, partly to ensure the results could not be used to evaluate teachers. It was also NCLB fatigue. When Congress replaced NCLB with a new law in 2015, it dialed down the federal emphasis on test scores, paving the way for states to do the same. This shift in policy faced little opposition until the pandemic arrived and we faced a massive crisis in student learning. More to come below.

Teacher prep programs got a reprieve. In the early 2000s, a single consensus united warring factions across the education sector: Colleges of education were doing a horrible job. They cranked out elementary teachers when schools were desperate to fill special education positions, they focused on obscure theoretical frameworks when candidates needed to learn how to teach phonics, and they proudly thumbed their noses at any attempts to have them do otherwise. The rise of new teacher evaluations raised the prospect that they would be accountable for the quality of their graduates. Its demise meant they weren’t. A genuine opportunity was missed.

In many ways, the whole idea of broad change in education was tainted.

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Along came Covid

Teacher evaluation’s demise turned out to be foreshadowing. Here was this movement blessed with decades of research, deep pocketed backers, and bipartisan political consensus. While many of its failures can be chalked up to self-sabotage, one can’t help but notice that the system writ large swatted it away like a housefly and continued about its business. There were no repercussions for lacking a quality control system to support the teaching profession. Schools didn’t have a parent uprising or face more pressure from the federal government to come up with a plan. The solution had tanked—but the problem remained, just as pressing as before, now without any effort to address it.

What does this have to do with pandemic recovery? Faced with nationwide closures beginning in March 2020, we needed widespread mobilization to reopen schools safely. Focus. Clarity. Teamwork. Instead, we got a chaotic, contentious debacle that kept some students out of their school buildings for more than a year. The New York Times recently reported “broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.” Yet, many school districts were stuck. Inert.

As students returned, it was immediately evident that they had suffered academic and developmental setbacks. Again, the situation called for an urgent response. And again, we have been embarrassingly slow. More than a few think pieces criticized the very use of the term “learning loss,” minimizing what was the largest expansion of education inequality on record.[4] Too many districts relied on “opt-in” tutoring platforms that received scant usage from students—particularly those who had fallen furthest behind. Others made their academic policies more lenient out of empathy for students, allowing unlimited retakes of tests and assigning higher grades, despite evidence that this may lead to unintended negative consequences. Messaging to parents has been so tepid that they aren’t worried. Recently, researchers from our most prestigious universities have sounded the alarm that “some children may never catch up and could enter adulthood without the full set of skills they need to succeed in the work force and life.”

That’s not all. Student absenteeism ballooned. But it was not until the current school year—which is the fourth since the onset of the pandemic—that it received national media attention and a robust public response. At first, many dismissed the problem as short-term and related directly to health issues like quarantining with Covid or facing elevated risks of exposure. Only belatedly has there been consideration that perhaps we are witnessing a broader change in habits of attendance.

Time and again, our systems have struggled to manage change. Maybe it’s because we are so decentralized, or because we ask too much of schools without providing enough resources and support. I don’t mean to imply that any of this is easy. My point is that even when the mission is essential and the evidence is clear, you won’t go broke betting that our systems will react with less vigor, not more.

That, I submit, is the dual lesson of teacher evaluation. We should have done a far better job designing and implementing it. We made so many mistakes. And also, we need our school systems to be more adaptable. We can’t be content for them to go through the motions of change, biding time until those reforms can be discarded in the junk pile with the rest. Sometimes we need them to get the job done.

Why?

Because our schools are not in a good place. Decades of hard-won progress on student learning and achievement gaps has been lost.

In researching this series, I asked almost everyone whether there was an alternative history where evaluation was pursued with greater wisdom, and instead of flaming out, the reforms succeeded—where we ended up with better ways of distinguishing levels of teacher performance that helped us retain our best and set a clear minimum standard that led to outplacement of the worst.

Many—actually, most—said no. They felt the movement could have lasted longer and taken hold in more places, but ultimately, as long as low-performing teachers were going to lose their jobs more often, pushback within systems would eventually have eroded the programs until they crumbled.

I also asked them if they believe we will eventually make up the academic ground that was lost during Covid. Most of them said no. Again, that skepticism of systems.

I want to believe that our schools are capable of meaningful improvement that lasts. The cynicism reformers felt toward systems in the early 2000s, which I described in part two, was excessive. It was counterproductive. But I would also like to see more signs that our systems can deliver when it matters. I hope that’s what the next decade brings—fresh approaches that learn from past failures and a renewed focus on insisting that our schools keep their promises to families and the public.

Author’s note: I’ll end with a huge thank you. Folks were very generous with their time when I reached out about this topic. Readers have been exceptionally engaged, too. I’m grateful for all the messages, even if I haven’t been able to use everything you sent. I hope others will share their own reflections in other outlets. I know I will learn a ton from it. There’s so much more to unpack. Until then…

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1. Today features only news from traditional school districts—an unusual occurrence here in the Bites. But, as ever with these unusual editions, we can focus in a bit more closely on the topic. First up, here’s a look at a Columbus City Schools senior who was awarded a Gates Scholarship. Michael Hoch from Independence High School was one of just 300 students from across the country to win the scholarship to attend college in the fall. The award includes additional mentoring and support to help him and all awardees persist and finish their degrees. Good for him, of course, but dude was already crankin’ out the credits with College Credit Plus, to the tune of at least 75 at both Columbus State Community College and Ohio State University over the last three years. Thinking about it a bit more deeply, that means Michael was able to make short work of high school, keep pace with actual college freshmen and sophomores (it’s unclear whether he traveled to the college campuses from the east side for classes, but obviously an even bigger kudo if so), and to do all of this through pandemic education disruptions. There was clearly much to laud about him even before the Gates folks noticed. (NBC4i, Columbus, 5/1/24)
   
   

2. Next, meet Cleveland Metropolitan School District senior Chardon Black, from whom our title quote today comes. He, also, is a Gates Scholar and is headed to Princeton in the fall. However, what we have here is not his resumé but his own words. Specifically, he explains how having to take public transit to school for the last three years has influenced his mind, his life, and his perspective. Interesting and insightful. No matter how he travels in the future, I think Chardon is going to go far. (Signal Cleveland, 5/2/24)
   
   

3. Finally this week, staying on the roads in CMSD, we learn that the district transportation system has a costly problem. (“Quelle surprise,” I hear you murmur. “Only the one costly problem then?”) They are haunted by “ghost riders”. That is, kids who are signed up for transportation but don’t end up riding. “I can route a bus and it will have 48 students on it. But in actuality, the ridership is usually around 20 to 25 [students].” And that’s an expensive lack of efficiency, says the transportation director. To solve the problem, the district is surveying families now to see who is and isn’t really going to use the yellow bus service they previously signed up for. Now, I’m no transportation planner, and perhaps I’m missing something not covered in this piece that shows the ghosts somehow manifesting at school without riding the bus, but isn’t this really just the definition of “chronic absenteeism” rather than some vexing lack of efficiency? (Signal Cleveland, 5/3/24)

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1998 was a rambunctious year, as both Google and iMac arrived, Bill and Monica made headlines, and Seinfeld ended with a widely-panned finale. It was also the year that we at Fordham published our very first report on advanced education (née “gifted & talented”). It dealt with tracking and ability grouping and was authored by the estimable Tom Loveless.

Since then, we’ve published fourteen other reports or books on how to improve education for America’s high achievers. Suffice to say, we’ve been among a wee group of reformers interested in that topic over the last twenty-five years. Wee because too many assume that advanced education is about increasing privileges for the already advantaged, rather than identifying and maximizing the strengths of every student—including poor kids and kids of color with potential for high academic achievement.

This disregard has resulted in serious neglect of a vital student subgroup, with future national repercussions for weakened, less diverse leadership and less innovation, progress, and economic growth. More pragmatically, it has also resulted in a lack of informative research for the field of advanced education.

Fordham’s latest report, The Broken Pipeline: Advanced Education Policies at the Local Level—our sweet sixteenth in this realm, if you will—aims to address just one of many unknowns: whether districts across the nation have adopted policies and programs to identify, support, and cultivate the talents of all students capable of tackling advanced-level work.

Our National Research Director, Adam Tyner, was keen to conduct this investigation, having previously completed research on gifted education in high-poverty schools. Adam also participated in The National Working Group on Advanced Education, leading to last year’s release of dozens of recommendations to aid state and local officials in developing a continuum of advanced learning opportunities across K–12.

The key aim of the current project was to determine whether districts have in place policies that align to the National Working Group’s recommendations. Thus, from May through October 2023, we surveyed a random sample of district and charter school administrators in charge of advanced education. Nearly 600 responded, and using stratified weighting, we adjusted the results to be representative of large and medium districts and charter school organizations, which together educate 90 percent of public-school students. So to what extent have districts adopted smart approaches to advanced education? To some extent, we discovered, but not nearly enough.

Adam aggregated the policies recommended by the Working Group such that a district (or charter network) could earn a total of 1,000 points. The results showed that the typical (median) district earned less than half of the possible points (485 out of 1,000), a majority earned 350 to 600 points, and only one-fourth of districts earned more than 600 points. Were the rubric translated into a traditional A–F scale, three-fourths of the districts and charter networks would flunk. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Still, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s quite common for districts to universally screen students for advanced education services based on their performance on standardized assessments. Specifically, more than three-fourths of districts with advanced programs in K–8 reported screening all students using a standardized assessment, at least in one grade. Given the strong research backing for “universal screening,” that’s reassuring.

Yet other worthy identification policies are scarce—in particular, screening students for advanced programming based on their “local” peers’ academic performance. In fact, only one-fifth of respondents say that their districts compare students’ performance to peers within the same district or school for identification purposes (a.k.a. “local norms”)—rather than a state or national benchmark. Applying local norms—such as identifying students performing in the top 10 percent of their school, district, or state—helps to detect a wider swath of advanced and potentially advanced children, especially those in high-poverty schools, and deserves more consideration.

We also found some encouraging evidence in elementary schools of the popularity of part-time pull-out classes for high achievers, giving those students an opportunity to engage with peers of similar abilities on advanced curriculum (45 percent of districts offer this). On the other hand, districts rarely accelerate young students by grade level or content area (no more than 4 percent of them), which enables children to “skip a grade”—either in all subject areas or one, say, math. This despite voluminous research evidence supporting the practice.

As for admission into advanced services, over half of districts do not allow early entry into kindergarten based on children’s readiness. But nearly the same percentage allow those who participate in advanced education in elementary school to be automatically enrolled in advanced courses in middle school and beyond.

So it’s quite a mixed bag, containing ample room for improvement. We see two overarching takeaways.

First, the identification side of advanced education is in better shape than the programmatic side. As indicated, a majority of districts use various assessments to screen elementary and middle school students for advanced programming, including performance on cognitive tests, diagnostic assessments, and state-mandated or other end-of-grade tests. Over three-quarters of districts (77 percent) use a standardized test to screen all students in one or more grades.

But there is so much more that districts should and could be doing for advanced learners once they are identified, especially in the early grades. Nearly half report that one of the most common types of advanced programming in elementary and middle schools is “in-class differentiation in general classrooms with no clustering of gifted students.” It’s not hard to see the drawbacks to that approach—as Loveless pointed out so many years ago. Likewise, 44 percent report using the same curriculum for advanced students as for other students, albeit with some modification. Barely 11 percent of districts report offering distance or online learning opportunities for advanced learners in the elementary and middle grades. Come on—clearly, we can do better!

Second, the difficulties associated with providing advanced education are most keenly felt in the elementary grades (after students are identified) and in the middle grades, when advanced courses are often limited to math. Once students get to high school, they typically have more opportunities to be challenged. In fact, 58 to 80 percent of districts offer high school honors classes in one or more core subjects, and two-thirds of districts—according to federal data—offer AP Math or AP Science classes (though with clear variation among schools within districts). About half of districts also expand access to advanced courses by allowing high school students to take AP or IB courses online.

To our eyes, then, there’s a sizable leak in the pipeline after early elementary school, when students are identified for advanced services, and before the high school grades, when they gain more exposure to advanced courses, both in person and online. But not nearly enough is happening in between. Hence the title of this report, The Broken Pipeline.

Still, leaks or not, we aren’t glass-half-empty types. Our glass-half-full view is that broken pipes can be fixed. So let’s get out those toolboxes!

More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning and “Zoom school” made attendance optional, which is a hard habit to break.

A letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to chief state school officers a few weeks ago cited “multiple, often interconnected factors” for chronic absenteeism. High school students, he wrote, might face “competing demands such as staying home to be caregivers to younger siblings or a sick family member or working outside the home to support themselves or their families.” While that may be true for some number of students, I fear there’s a larger and even more troubling trend at work. A New York Times report, circling but not quite landing, came closer than Cardona when it suggested that “something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school in ways that may be long lasting.” 

Since the start of the school year, I’ve been visiting schools and talking to educators about faltering school attendance and learning loss associated with the pandemic, which vaporized twenty years of achievement gains at a stroke. I’m left with a nagging sense that we’re misreading chronic absenteeism almost entirely. It fits a larger pattern of young people absenting themselves not just from school, but from life.

Alarm bells ring when young people leave the rails, make poor decisions, and live recklessly, driven by unchecked appetites for pleasure, wealth, or status. But as my AEI colleague Yuval Levin observed in a disquieting essay for The Dispatch a few years ago, disorderly lives now seem “less like exorbitant human desires driving people’s lives out of control and more like an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing and enervated.” Worse, this lassitude is masked by data that can make it appear things are actually improving. Teen pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births might be down, for example, but that’s because marriage and birth rates are declining overall. Fewer teenagers die in car accidents because fewer of them are getting drivers licenses. “There is less social disorder,” Levin concluded, “because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together.”

The thing young people “do together” is go to school. At least they used to. The phrase Levin coined, “disordered passivity,” or simply a “failure to launch,” fits more comprehensively the rise in chronic absenteeism, which was a problem even before Covid; the pandemic merely legitimized it. Nearly one in six U.S. students missed fifteen or more days in 2018–19, the last full school year before the pandemic. Seen through this lens, school is just one more activity from which young people are becoming estranged, one more opportunity to stay on the sidelines, but the easiest to quantify: we take attendance.

In the past, even bored or indifferent students might have dragged themselves to school to escape their parents, to avoid the drudgery of being housebound, or to socialize. But as David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York State education commissioner, points out, smartphones and social media have made leaving the house unnecessary. Worse, they feed this poisonous passivity. “You think you are enjoying the experience, but it’s cementing you into a cognitive and emotional coma,” he told me. “Others are living ‘for you’ in ways you know you never will, so why try to take any baby steps? Just keep scrolling.”

Schools seem increasingly inclined to yield to the forces of enervation rather than resist them. A survey conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences found that 72 percent of public schools have higher teacher absenteeism rates since the pandemic. At least 900 school districts have now adopted four-day weeks, as if to normalize declining attendance of students and staff alike. “We gave a lot of grace” during the pandemic, one middle school teacher and administrator told me. Students didn’t just get passing marks, they got good grades for minimal effort. Now there’s a lack of perseverance. “When things get hard, kids tend to just shut down. They don't have the problem-solving skills or the will to go through something hard because, during Covid, not all of them really had to,” she said. Parent behavior has also changed. “It’s way more likely now for parents to say, ‘My kids are having a hard time, so I’m letting them stay home for a little while,’” she added.

The passivity and enervation are evident and even more dispiriting when they afflict individuals and institutions—specifically schools—nominally charged with reversing it. Arthur Kirk, who founded and runs a community recreation center in West Baltimore, describes visiting a local principal last fall with a list of kids who routinely come to his center but not to school. “Oh, they come to school,” he was told. “They just don’t come like they should.” The response infuriated him. “It’s November!” he sputtered. “Why aren’t they following up? Is anyone going to put a foot in those parents’ ass? You feel what I’m saying? It’s that bad.”

On another recent trip to Baltimore, I spent an evening with a staffer from Concentric Education, which has contracted with Baltimore City Schools to visit the homes of chronically absent students, not to threaten or cajole, but to listen, connect with parents, and offer to help them break down whatever barriers are keeping their kids from attending school regularly. At one home, the mother of a ten-year-old girl first cited transportation problems for her daughter’s absences. Then she explained her child would always miss at least three days a month because of her daughter’s uncomfortable menstrual cycle. Next, she cited bullying. The longer we stood on the porch, the longer the list grew. I never laid eyes on the child, but it was hard not to think her school career was already drawing to a close in fifth grade. Her mother attached no discernible urgency to her daughter attending.

The conventional wisdom is that Covid broke school and the habits associated with it. Attendance is now optional, a “new normal.” A young man who graduated from high school in upstate New York last June described how the pandemic “delegitimized” school even among the academically inclined like him and his friends. “What’s the point in putting more effort into it when I’m just gonna pass all my tests anyway, and I can get out of online class by telling the teacher my computer glitched out?” he asked. “That attitude definitely shifted over to post-Covid learning, as well.”

There’s a vexing, blind-men-and-the-elephant feeling to all this. School district officials and education policymakers will tell you the post-pandemic lesson is that schools need to adapt and be more flexible, appealing, and relevant to students’ lives and needs. Counselors, mental health professionals, and even teachers talk about the need to make “social and emotional learning” co-equal to academics. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, worries about “the radical transformation of childhood into a phone-based existence.” But it’s none of those things, it’s all of them plus disorderly homes, inattentive parents, directionless lives, and moral exhaustion.

It's a bromide now among teachers, administrators, and education policymakers to say chronic absenteeism is a canary in a coal mine. The implication is that schools as we have known and run them for generations need to change. I pray that’s so because the other possibility is nearly overwhelming to consider: that the canary is a large and growing cadre of disengaged and disaffected young people, and the coal mine is much, much bigger than just school.

It may seem tone-deaf to focus on layoffs when the news is fraught with reports of teacher shortages, but much as pandemic recovery funds helped drive these shortages by opening new positions to staff, so too will the end of those funds bring about a painful wave of layoffs. For years, districts across the country have employed a seniority-based layoff approach when making tough decisions to reduce the teaching force. This practice, known as “last-in-first-out” (LIFO), in which the last teachers hired are the first to be fired, is harmful. Not only do LIFO practices threaten the dual goals of diversifying the workforce and ensuring teacher effectiveness, but they also hurt students of color and students living in poverty the most.

Given that districts will face (or are already facing) these challenging decisions, there is no time like the present to eliminate LIFO policies.

Early signs of impending layoffs

Chad Aldeman’s recent analysis of new data from the National Center on Education Statistics in 9,500 districts across the country shows that on a per-student basis, “staffing levels hit an all-time high” in the 2022–2023 school year. Unfortunately, as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds run out, many districts won’t be able to maintain current teacher staffing levels—meaning layoffs are looming. (Other analyses support this one, such as this deep dive into staffing in Washington state.) Districts simply won’t be able to afford to keep teachers on the payroll, especially in the face of significant student enrollment declines.

Why are LIFO policies so harmful?

Laying off teachers is wrenching, and when districts are not discerning about which teachers they lay off, the consequences are worse. LIFO policies harm teacher diversity and teacher quality and, in turn, negatively impact student learning.

Seniority-based layoff policies work against districts’ goals to increase teacher diversity–an essential goal given the positive impact of teachers of color on all students, especially students of color. Many states and districts have prioritized teacher diversity with positive results: The newest cohorts of teachers include more teachers of color than veteran cohorts do. But because teachers of color are more likely to be earlier in their careers, when districts use seniority as the sole criterion for layoffs, the newest group of teachers will be the first to get cut, undoing these efforts to diversify the workforce.

Besides the threat to teacher diversity, LIFO policies also put teacher quality at risk. It’s true that many first-year teachers struggle to match the higher performance of more seasoned teachers, but that difference virtually disappears by their second or third year as performance gains slow. Firing a highly effective third-year teacher over a poorly performing veteran of fifteen years leaves students at a major disadvantage. Further, researchers have found that even the threat of being fired—a “pink slip” issued during a reduction-in-force (even when a teacher is re-hired later)—has negative consequences on teacher performance. Students who attend high-poverty schools are more likely to experience weakened instruction when districts issue layoff warnings, since these schools tend to employ more novice teachers.

Ultimately, it is an equity issue for students: Seniority-based layoffs disproportionately affect students of color and students living in poverty, who are more often taught by novice teachers.

How widespread are LIFO policies?

In 2021, NCTQ analyzed state laws on the use of seniority in layoff decisions. We found that only ten states do not allow districts to consider seniority, and eighteen states either permit them to consider it among other factors or require it as the sole factor. In twenty-three states, districts have discretion regarding the inclusion (or exclusion) of seniority in layoff decisions.

Figure 1. Do states require teacher seniority to be considered when making layoff decisions?

Source: National Council on Teacher Quality. 

NCTQ also published a report on district layoff policies. We found that forty-six of the 148 districts in our sample (nearly a third) of the largest districts across the U.S. use seniority as the primary or sole criterion for teacher layoffs. This has remained relatively stable over the past five years. In twenty-eight of these districts, seniority is the only criterion considered when teacher layoffs need to happen. This is a troubling state of practices that will perpetuate inequities for students. We found one hopeful note: The data also showed that a more holistic approach to layoffs—using multiple criteria including performance and/or seniority—has become more prevalent; the number of districts using multiple criteria increased by roughly 10 percentage points compared to seven years ago.

What should state and district leaders do?

The writing is on the wall: Given impending budget cuts, declines in student enrollment, and the imbalance between new hires made in response to the pandemic and currently shrinking numbers of funded positions, teacher layoffs are imminent. District and state leaders need to stop focusing on teacher shortages writ large, and start focusing on policies and practices to strategically manage and staff schools.

States should begin by requiring that school districts consider classroom performance as a factor in determining which teachers are laid off when a reduction in force is necessary, and stop using seniority as the sole criterion. Where there is flexibility in state law, such as the twenty-three states mentioned above that give districts discretion in using or eliminating seniority, districts should seize the opportunity to eliminate seniority or at the very least, expand to additional criteria.

In addition to performance, states and districts have a variety of additional criteria to use when making tough layoff decisions:

• Specific consideration of student needs (e.g., reading specialists)
• School and district needs, such as whether a teacher has highly sought or shortage-subject qualifications (e.g., dual language speakers or special education teachers)
• School characteristics (e.g., a school designated for support because of low-performing status)
• Pathways to the classroom: whether a teacher has taken a specific, district-sponsored pathway to the classroom (e.g., Grow Your Own programs)
• Whether the teacher performs additional duties (e.g., department chair)
• The teacher’s attendance and discipline records

Many states and districts are already heeding these warnings and taking important steps. After the “Great Recession” of 2008, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (NC) gave their principals discretion over layoff decisions. The principals used performance as one of their criteria, targeting teachers who earned low evaluation ratings, along with other measures, including whether teachers had previously retired, were recently hired, unlicensed, non-tenured, or taught elective subjects. Evaluation of the approach found that on average, by using these additional criteria and giving principals more discretion, the district reduced total job losses and laid off fewer effective teachers than they would have following a last-in-first-out policy.

Additionally, a recent report by E4E highlighted two examples of alternative approaches. In Minneapolis (MN), following the passage of a 2019 state law that stopped requiring the use of seniority as the only criterion in layoffs, the district and union negotiated in the contract the use of additional criteria that prioritized teacher diversity, such as keeping licensed teachers from underrepresented groups, teachers who graduated from Grow Your Own programs, and teachers in schools designated as “racially isolated.” In Oregon, advocates successfully worked to change state law so teachers with cultural or linguistic expertise are prioritized over more senior teachers. These new policies will soon be used: Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MN) most recent budget proposal indicates that about 40 teacher positions will be cut. Similarly, just last week, Salem-Keizer Public Schools (OR) announced that more than 400 public school employees will lose their jobs at the end of the school year to balance district budget forecasts.

Also hearteningly, a number of districts (Brevard Public Schools (FL), Chicago Public Schools (IL), Clayton County Public Schools (GA), Cleveland Metropolitan School District (OH), and Cobb County School District (GA), among others) have named performance as the sole criterion or the preponderant criterion for teacher layoffs. More districts can be found in our Teacher Contract Database.

Where do we go from here?

Given the rapid shifts in the teacher labor market as well as current and impending teacher layoffs, state and district policymakers, along with their unions, under the watchful gaze of local advocacy organizations, must center student needs when defining the criteria and processes to use for teacher layoffs. To advance the companion goals of diversifying the teacher workforce and supporting teacher effectiveness, we must design and implement thoughtful means of reducing the teacher workforce that will benefit all students. If we stand aside and continue with the status quo, students will suffer the costs—especially our most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged students.

Editor’s note: This was first published by NCTQ.

While it seems likely that the end of ESSER funding in September will engender a(nother) seismic shift in the school staffing conversation, education leaders are—for the moment—still talking about teacher shortages, long-term vacancies, hard-to-staff specialties, burnout, dissatisfaction, and attrition. On top of that, they seem interested in talking about how they’ve staffed their schools in light of these realities. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) synthesizes lessons learned from dozens of interviews of school leaders practicing what is termed “strategic staffing.”

At its base, “strategic staffing” is about moving away from the traditional one teacher, one classroom model and implementing strategies like establishing new pathways into the teaching profession, creating new structures for differentiated professional development and pay scales, and rethinking the daily work of teachers and support staff.

CRPE analysts interviewed forty-two leaders (principals, superintendents, etc.) and technical assistance providers working in six different school systems. All the systems are anonymous in this write-up and little description or differentiation is provided, except to say that the list includes both traditional districts and charter management organizations, and that some systems are in right-to-work states, while others are in collective-bargaining states. Interviewees were already well-versed in the tenets of strategic staffing, and were able to answer researchers’ questions regarding the origins and growth of their models, their implementation efforts, stakeholder support and opposition, barriers and enabling factors, and outcomes.

The analysis does not say when the interviews were conducted, though most leaders report that they’d been implementing strategic staffing for “more than three years” at the time of the interview. Several leaders report using federal Covid-relief funds to support their strategic efforts, though that’s not the only funding source noted, and there is no specific discussion of pandemic-era staffing. The overwhelming sense is that these new protocols for recruiting, deploying, supporting, and retaining talent are responses to persistent staffing concerns that predate the pandemic.

The report identifies seven strategies that two or more of the systems have implemented. The most common are creating new teacher leadership roles (which enable teachers to advance in their careers without leaving instruction) and personalized teacher development (defined as providing opportunities that support leadership development as well as teachers’ daily work and personal growth). Other common strategies were redesigned schedules and workloads, broadened recruitment programs, and additional compensation for staffers who take on additional responsibilities or exhibit strong performance. Every system covered in the report was implementing at least three non-traditional staffing strategies, with one system reporting five simultaneous efforts. Leaders explained in their interviews that they believed no one strategy by itself would adequately move the needle on staffing concerns, and that they were working to implement everything they could.

The bulk of the CRPE report discusses challenges, both big and small, that leaders faced in their efforts to make changes. The most frequently-cited—and most difficult to overcome—emerge from the codified aspects of traditional education models. For example, teacher licensure requirements limit who can be recruited to teach and which classes/subjects can be covered by any given teacher; class size requirements complicate team teaching efforts; state-mandated pay scales often forbid bonuses to incentivize teachers to take on new/additional roles; and collective bargaining agreements contain myriad ironclad clauses and requirements based on the oldest of old-school teaching models.

Some leaders, however, offered anecdotes of hope. For example, one system found that union leaders were willing to be more flexible than expected in their interpretation of contract terms, and another discovered that a longstanding district “policy” regularly cited as the reason they couldn’t hire part-time paraprofessionals didn’t even exist! But these fortuitous outcomes weren’t the norm. Policies and prohibitions that looked like roadblocks to change generally were just that.

Leaders also reported another category of potential barriers that were ultimately more permeable. These include inflexible data systems that, in one example, only track student outcome data (attendance, test scores, discipline, etc.) for a single-teacher classroom structure; creating a master schedule for all teachers and support personnel to accommodate new forms of collaboration; HR and other central office staff resistant to changes in recruiting, hiring, and training of teachers; and school-level processes, such as how students are assigned to teachers at the beginning of the grading period, semester, or year. These, leaders say, can be overcome with enough effort and buy-in from staff.

In the end, this report is more about starting points than results. For example, the authors write: “Because of sampling limitations and our reliance on leaders’ recollections and self-reports, the findings do not represent the full breadth of leaders’ experiences, nor the chances that other leaders may encounter similar experiences.” Translation: School systems—while often bound by similar rules, traditions, and norms—are staffed by individuals whose devotion to those strictures can vary widely. “Further,” the authors add, “we do not claim a causal relationship between the strategic school staffing initiatives and the leaders’ reported efficacy.” This is an important caveat because there is really no efficacy information provided at all. Did these six school systems fully solve their staffing issues with what often sound like Herculean (and sometimes Sisyphean) efforts? No idea. And even if they did, how are their students faring in the wake of the changes they were able to make? Again, no clue. It makes sense to think that schools and their students in 2024 might benefit from a refresh of the staffing style of the previous hundred years. But this report is more about compiling a roster of possible ideas than proving their effectiveness.

SOURCE: Lisa Chu, Lydia Rainey, and Steven Weiner, “‘So hard, but so rewarding’: How school system leaders are scaling up strategic school staffing models,” Center on Reinventing Public Education (March 2024).

Cheers

• The Maryland state board of education appointed interim superintendent Carey Wright to a permanent role. —Washington Post
• Indianapolis Public Schools plans to transfer ownership of a district building to a KIPP charter school and help finance a renovation at the site. —Chalkbeat
• A Connecticut school found success banning phones with Yondr bags, and even many students came to appreciate it. —Washington Post

Jeers

• Equity grading grows in popularity, a part of a larger trend of education consultants selling dubious theories to schools at a high price. —RealClearInvestigations
• A combination of records numbers of applications and FAFSA issues made this year’s college enrollment season uniquely chaotic. —New York Times
• A new book addresses the very real problem of Black students’ underrepresentation in advanced education programs, but the author seems to encourage the idea that the programs are racist and should be ended rather than mended. —Teen Vogue