• The Supreme Court appears likely to kill “Chevron deference.” What that would mean for the U.S. Department of Education. —Education Next
• Ed reform has done a poor job defining success, equality of opportunity, and equality of outcome. —Freddie deBoer
• A principal could face jail time after trying to break up a fight. —New York Times
• A college dropout reflects on the soaring costs of higher education, the discipline and social norms he learned, and whether it was all worth it. —Will Flannigan, Wall Street Journal

Ohio regularly creates and funds major education policies in a two-year biennial budget, so it’s never too early to start thinking about the 2025 cycle. This is the first of several posts where I’ll discuss issues that should be on lawmakers’ radars as they gear up. We open with one of the signature items from the last iteration: literacy reform.

Led by Governor DeWine, lawmakers passed landmark provisions that require Ohio schools to follow the science of reading—a research-based approach to reading instruction that emphasizes phonics and knowledge-rich curricula. Starting in 2024–25, elementary schools must use English language arts curricula aligned with the science of reading. They are also prohibited from using a debunked, though commonly used, method known as three-cueing, which encourages children to guess at words rather than sounding them out. The push for scientifically based instruction couldn’t come soon enough, as two in five Ohio students fall short of state reading standards.

Recognizing the heft of these reforms, legislators wisely appropriated $169 million to support the overhaul. As table 1 indicates, the bulk of these dollars subsidize the purchase of new instructional materials ($64 million) and professional development that helps educators better understand the science of reading ($86 million). Another $18 million supports literacy coaches who provide more hands-on, intensive training in the state’s lowest-performing schools. Finally, $1 million is allocated to help teacher preparation programs transitioning to the science of reading. Of that amount, the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) receives a paltry $150,000 to carry out audits of preparation programs to ensure they align their training to the science of reading.

Table 1: Funding amounts for Ohio’s literacy reforms, FY 2024 and 2025 (combined)

Given the importance of literacy for individual students—and to Ohio’s future, more generally—legislators should stay the course on these reforms in the next budget cycle. They should continue to commit significant dollars for literacy, though also consider ways that update the uses of these funding streams as implementation progresses and schools’ needs evolve. Here’s a look at several ways legislators could target literacy dollars in the next biennium (note, the following mostly covers funding for the initiative, with less discussion on policy).

• High-quality instructional materials: The last budget largely helped schools cover the costs of new “core” ELA curricula in grades K–5, with districts and charters that have been using non-approved curricula receiving more assistance. In the coming months, however, some schools may still be looking to upgrade their literacy curricula into middle schools (which aren’t part of the state mandate) or go further in overhauling their intervention programs. Dollars in the next budget could support a grant program for districts and charters seeking to implement literacy reform in areas beyond core ELA instruction in elementary schools. Funds could also be used to fully reimburse districts, if the current subsidy only partially covered their materials purchases in advance of the 2024–25 curriculum requirement.

• Professional development: Per requirements in the last budget, most teachers will be taking a general professional development course in the science of reading and receiving stipends upon completion. That’s a great start, but some teachers may still need additional support using the specific ELA curriculum their school has chosen or require extra help implementing it within their unique teaching context. Ohio should continue to encourage strong professional learning, perhaps again via grants that support schools seeking to provide curriculum-specific PD or adopt collaborative PD models that help educators learn from each other.

• Literacy coaches: High-quality teacher coaching has a compelling evidence base, and Ohio supported the deployment of coaches in the state’s lowest performing schools via the last budget. Lawmakers should preserve funding to support existing coaches and—assuming initial reports suggest it’s going well—bump up the allocation to expand their ranks. This would ensure that more teachers receive the extra support they need to implement the science of reading.

• Teacher preparation audits: As noted earlier, legislators provided a woefully inadequate sum to support ODHE’s nascent efforts to audit teacher preparation programs’ alignment with the science of reading. That may have reflected a timing issue, as these audits won’t start until January 2025. In the next budget, lawmakers should provide ODHE with the resources it needs to rigorously review preparation programs. These in-depth audits are crucial, as an NCTQ analysis from last year indicates that many of Ohio’s fifty-plus preparation programs do a poor job training prospective teachers in the science of reading. For the state’s literacy initiative to succeed over the long haul, preparation programs need to be on the same page as K–12 schools. These audits—with sufficient funding behind them—will help ensure that occurs.

• Research and evaluation: In the previous budget, lawmakers did not dedicate funding to evaluate literacy initiatives. That’s understandable, given that the reforms were just getting underway. But now that implementation is in full swing, legislators should fund studies that investigate questions such as which ELA curricula deliver the largest impacts, what types of PD give teachers the biggest boost, and whether the reform package as a whole is moving achievement in the right direction. Shedding light on questions such as these would help guide policymaking in future years and ensure the millions being spent on literacy deliver the strongest ROI possible. It would also assist districts as they seek to implement literacy programs that are most effective for students.

• Transparency and accountability: Also missing from the last budget are dollars for transparency and accountability measures. That should change. On the transparency side, state lawmakers should direct—and provide funds for—DEW to create a “dashboard” that displays the ELA curricula and intervention programs of each Ohio school (à la Colorado).[1] This would provide parents and citizens with easy-to-access information about which programs are being used in their local schools—information that isn’t always easy to find on district websites. As for accountability, the legislature should direct DEW—and, again, set-aside dollars—to conduct a random audit of 5 percent of Ohio schools each year to certify that they are indeed implementing a state-approved ELA curriculum.

Thanks to the bold leadership of Governor DeWine and the 135th General Assembly, Ohio is on its way toward improving reading instruction. Yet the last budget was just the start—a down payment of sorts—and literacy should remain a focal point in the coming months, as well. Ohio’s 1.6 million public school students will be counting on state policymakers to keep the push going for reading instruction that promises higher achievement and greater opportunity in life.

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1. OSU professor, Columbus gadfly, and Fordham friend Vlad Kogan has little confidence right now in Columbus City Schools’ latest facilities taskforce to do what is necessary to right size the district. Among other things, he points out in this opinion piece that the criteria being used by the taskforce to rank buildings for possible closure are seriously flawed, focusing highly on students transferring into the buildings from outside their attendance boundaries (opting in like that is somehow a bad thing that must be stopped) and ignoring a building’s academic outcomes entirely. He says it’s not too late for the taskforce to change tack and do the right thing, but that may be the one thing he’s wrong about. (Columbus Dispatch, 4/16/24)
   
   

2. Following up on Monday’s sole clip about the full-court press on Ohio’s teacher preparation programs, here’s a look at Governor Mike DeWine and DEW Director Steve Dackin’s reading rainbow road trip, taking their message directly to the hallowed halls of higher ed. They were at Youngstown State University on Monday, and everyone there does indeed seem fully bought in to the science of reading. “This plan is being taught at every level at YSU,” said future teacher Zoe Belcik. “In working with…students, including those with emotional and learning disabilities, I’ve seen students who came in at a (level) 2, they go after about two-and-a half-months to a 7 or 8.” (Vindy.com, 4/15/24)
   
   

3. Following up on the recent financial travails of Mt. Healthy City Schools that we’ve discussed here (come on guys, we’re only averaging three clips a week these days—keep up!): After successfully begging to be put under the most stringent state fiscal oversight, the district has been approved for a loan of $11 million from the state’s School District Solvency Assistance Fund. Putting aside the fact that there’s no such thing as a Charter School Solvency Assistance Fund (mainly because I’m the only one thinking of that), there’s still lots of important points to note in this brief piece. Including the fact that this is the largest such loan ever provided by the fund, that the district’s financial issues reportedly “stemmed from declining enrollment while adding staff and expenditures,” and that the district’s plan to lay off dozens of staff members is now on hold…because of that miraculous infusion of fine green “solvent”. (Fox 19 News, Cincinnati, 4/15/24)
   
   

4. And continuing on with our theme of perks that districts get which charters don’t (face it, subscribers, that theme is almost always under the surface with me even when I don’t point it out), here is a novelty for you: A mayor and a district superintendent presented a joint “state of…” event last week. Why? According to the director of the county’s chamber of commerce, it’s because “You can’t separate the city from the school district, their relationship to one another is vitally important to them both.” And indeed they sure sounded like they were joined at the coin purse hip as they rhetorically divvied up the putative spoils of projected future economic and population growth. 110 percent of it. (The Chronicle-Telegram, 4/17/24) Speaking of which, let us return to Washington Local Schools in Toledo for a moment, where another shoe has (perhaps predictably) dropped in their school construction saga. Immediately upon receiving approval for a permit to build a new middle school—approval which you will recall required considerable city and county assistance to overcome residents’ concerns—the elected school board voted unanimously to spend $1 million to buy additional land in the area to relocate their athletic fields. (Toledo Blade, 4/15/24)

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

Are teachers interchangeable parts?

In 2006, I was the newly minted Vice President for Policy and Research at TNTP and I was twenty-nine years old and obviously I knew everything, so that was nice.

TNTP had written a couple of reports about why urban school districts had so much trouble staffing high poverty schools with good teachers.[1] In addition to the standard issues like low pay and high stress, we found that schools were often burdened with ineffective teachers who were transferred from other schools.

If these teachers were bad, why weren’t they fired?

There were two competing explanations. The first—favored by teachers unions—put the blame on administrators. They were too lazy or inept to provide teachers the feedback and support that were prerequisite for seeking dismissal, and their documentation was so sloppy that it couldn’t survive the scrutiny of an honest arbitrator. The second—favored by school officials—was that the burden of proof to dismiss a tenured teacher was impossible to meet. A principal could follow every step perfectly for years, spending untold hours, only to have a hearing officer rule that a teacher’s shortcomings were not worthy of dismissal. Back to square one.

This argument was important. Neither group denied that schools had some teachers who were not good. No one could agree what to do about it. Districts were under pressure, during the height of NCLB accountability, to improve. These teachers made it harder.

My colleagues and I decided to launch a multi-year research project to get to the bottom of it. Our grand ambition was to study twelve districts across four states. We invited everyone to the table—district leaders, unions, policy organizations—and formed an advisory panel totaling eighty people. There were large districts, like Chicago and Denver, and smaller ones, like Springdale (AR) and Rockford (IL). We hoped that by getting all parties in the same room, looking at the same data, we could move past stalemate.

In June 2009, we published our findings as The Widget Effect.[2] Our conclusion? It didn’t matter whether the process for dismissing ineffective teachers was easy or impossible because it hardly ever started. Virtually zero teachers were assigned low ratings on official evaluations. Instead, almost all of them received the highest option available. These evaluations—which occurred less than annually for some teachers—were superficial box-checking observations that principals found burdensome and teachers found useless.

Our schools were unable to distinguish good teaching from bad. That’s why we used the term “widget.” Despite all the rhetoric about teachers being earthly saints, on a functional level they were treated as interchangeable. With that approach, how could systems possibly help teachers get better? Or help students learn more?

Time for a post-mortem

In this multi-part series, we’ll unpack how The Widget Effect, among many other factors, made teacher evaluation one of the hottest topics in education.[3] I’ll be using the first person more often than usual because I was an active participant in the whole shebang. When I refer to those who pushing for evaluation reforms, that’s me.

I have a lot of regrets.

My goal is to excavate the history of the movement with the benefit of a little hindsight. This post-mortem comes on the heels of my attempt, a few months ago, to explain our brief but intense obsession with Finland’s schools. At the time, I promised to give the same treatment to some topics nearer to my own heart.

Like Finland-mania, the timeline here is relatively short. After bursting onto the scene around 2009, evaluation reform more or less ran its course by 2015, when Congress passed a new law to replace NCLB that did not require districts to do anything with teacher evaluation. No one was surprised. The wave had rolled back.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: The movement to reform teacher evaluation did not achieve its goals. Teachers continue to receive superlative evaluation ratings. Those ratings are based almost entirely on perfunctory classroom observations conducted by administrators, just as was the case in 2006. Teachers are almost never fired for poor evaluations, and they rarely receive higher pay or recognition for good ones. Nearly every teacher who is considered for tenure is granted it.

To many, the teacher evaluation crusade is a cautionary tale—maybe the ultimate one—of hubristic confidence in a fad.

It’s all of that. And also more. It’s a window into how our schools truly operate and a great way to understand why we’ve stopped making academic progress in the last decade—and why our recovery from Covid-era learning loss is going so poorly.

Today, we’ll set the stage by understanding the elements that converged around 2009 to set the whole thing aflame. In future posts, I’ll cover what happened, how it went wrong, and what we learned.

Buckle up, friends. There’s a lot to digest.

Where did evaluation reform start?

• It became clear that traditional measures of teacher value were inaccurate. There were two ways to move up (and earn more) in teaching: 1) accumulate more years of seniority and 2) Obtain a master’s degree. By the early 2000s, research had shown that assuming a given teacher would be better at their job due to either of these traits was comically wrong. On average, teachers improve for the first few years of their careers, but they level off relatively quickly. Some teachers with ten years in the classroom are amazing...and some of them are awful. Same is true of master’s degrees. They are easy to earn and most teachers pursue them—because they come with a pay bump. But teachers who have advanced degrees aren’t any better instructionally than peers without them—and might be worse.


• Some teachers are much more effective than others. We always knew this. Every third grader knows this. But as an empirical research fact, it become inescapable as annual testing of students became more common. Researchers cranked out a wave of studies showing that, even when controlling for baseline student traits and achievement, some teachers consistently moved their students further each year. They added more learning value. But not only were they not being recognized for it, they weren’t told that their outcomes were exceptional. Nobody noticed.[4]


• Charter schools put heat on districts. In the early 2000s, networks like KIPP, Aspire, North Star, YES Prep. and Achievement First posted exceptional results with teachers who were non-unionized twenty-somethings willing to work long hours for school leaders who could dismiss them at will. These schools had flexibility to innovate and a passionate, mission-driven spirit. Folks started to wonder if districts needed to borrow a page from the charter playbook and give their principals more autonomy to select and re-shape their teams.

Crossover to the mainstream

• Big city superintendents began challenging employee unions. Many of them came from non-traditional backgrounds. Joel Klein had been prosecuting Microsoft for antitrust violations prior to being named Chancellor in New York City. Michael Bennet—now a U.S. Senator from Colorado—was a business lawyer and chief of staff to Denver’s mayor before running its school system. Michelle Rhee, the most famous of them all, was leading the relatively small non-profit that I worked for when, at thirty-seven, she took over D.C. Public Schools. They viewed large districts as broadly dysfunctional and shared a willingness to address third-rail issues that were generally career killers for traditional superintendents. Firing low-performing teachers was on that list.


• Philanthropy wrote big checks. A week after Obama’s historic election victory in November 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened a who’s-who of education players in Seattle to announce a shift in strategy. Bill Gates was disappointed in the lackluster results from his efforts to convert large schools into smaller, more personal configurations. Going forward, he would turn his attention where he believed the research was pointing: higher academic standards for students and more effective teachers. Over the next few years, the foundation poured hundreds of millions into grants for districts that promised to reform their evaluation systems, as well as research to test new methods of measuring teaching.


• Major press outlets took notice. In August 2009, The New Yorker ran a long feature by Steven Brill about so-called “rubber rooms” where the city warehoused approximately 600 teachers awaiting disposition of their cases for misconduct or incompetence. They had been collecting full salaries and benefits for an average of three years. Readers were aghast at some of the stories. Rubber room became an all-purpose term for teachers who should have been dismissed but were not.


• The federal government dangled a carrot. In 2008, the real estate market imploded and the economy teetered on the brink of insolvency. Congress quickly passed a rescue package along bipartisan lines. Tucked inside was significant funding to incent innovation in schools. While these funds were approved at the end of George W. Bush’s second term, they were administered by President Obama. As states competed for their share of the loot, they committed to overhaul their outdated drive-by evaluations with multi-measure systems that included consideration of student achievement. Later, waivers from NCLB accountability also required states to adopt new teacher evals. By 2016, forty-four states had passed legislation.


• Unions signaled openness. In January 2010, AFT President Randi Weingarten won headlines for a speech announcing her commitment to modernizing evaluations, which included the use of student test scores as one measure.[5] The AFT retained the services of renowned mediator Kenneth Feinberg, who had administered compensation for 9/11 victims, to oversee the development of a new model.

There’s more, but you get the idea. All roads converged. Acting on the differences in performance among teachers held the potential to improve student learning substantially and reduce the race- and class-based achievement gaps that had bedeviled U.S. schools for decades. The consensus was pretty strong.

One could envision a future where, over the course of a decade or so, this momentum led to a new generation of evaluations and the elevation of teaching as a higher-paying, more prestigious profession that held its members to shared standards of practice.

But that’s not what happened. So, where did it go wrong? Stay tuned.

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1. The clips drought continues. (Sorry, Professor. I won’t blame you if you rescind your subscription at this point.) But here’s what we have: Response to Governor DeWine’s State of the State address continued late last week, including some remarkably direct and fully aligned statements from both legislative chambers on the topic of Ohio’s teacher preparation programs. To wit: “I am calling on every college and university president in Ohio – every provost, every dean of a college of education – to immediately align their teacher training programs with what we know works – and…that is the science of reading,” said the Governor on Wednesday. The chair of the House Higher Education Committee affirmed afterward, “The pathway is in place to move Ohio forward, and we will work with the universities who decide to implement this effort. Those who do not will not be preparing teachers in Ohio.” Wowza. The chair of the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee piled on in a Gongwer interview, saying that “We need to get a bigger commitment from our colleges of education.” He also said he plans to bring the question to university leaders during upcoming hearings. “If they’re not producing the kind of policies and programs that are in line with the intent of the legislature,” he warns, there are “tools” that can be used to get things properly on track. Strong stuff indeed. (Gongwer Ohio, 4/12/24)

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Many underenrolled school buildings in Columbus

A recent news article has revealed stunningly low enrollment rates in a number of Columbus City Schools buildings across the city. The data indicate inefficient use of public resources (utilities, staffing, transportation, and more) and flies in the face of Ohio’s efforts to give charter schools access to exactly these types of underutilized facilities. Fordham’s Aaron Churchill lays out the problems made clear by these data and urges a solution to end waste and duplication for the benefit of students and families.

Going private

A charter school in Indiana recently petitioned the State Board of Education to convert to a private school when its charter expires at the end of this school year. Initial coverage of the effort focused on the “rocky history” of The Genius School, a K-6 charter in northeast Indianapolis, including a failed attempt to switch sponsors prior to exploring the possibility of conversion. The board, however, found no grounds to reject the petition and voted unanimously to accept the private-school conversion request on Wednesday.

Charter innovation pt. 1 – Louisiana

Learning pods, a pandemic-era innovation that arose among homeschool families to support (or supplement) extended virtual learning, are not only sticking around in the post-Covid education environment, they are even being embraced by more-typical schools. Louisiana’s University View Academy, a previously-virtual-only charter based in Baton Rouge, is launching place-based pods for small groups of its students to help personalize their educational experience. But even brick-and-mortar charter operators in the state are getting in on the act. Discovery Schools in Kenner are now operating “Discovery Fusion”, a mix of online and in-person instruction for its students in what they call the “first hybrid charter school” in the state.

Charter innovation pt. 2 – New York

The New York Times took a look at the extended day program at Brooklyn Charter School in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood. It’s an experiment that started this school year and seems very popular with parents. The story labels it a “12-hour school day”, but the details show that before- and after-care are separate (and optional) from the regular school schedule. However, parents and kids appreciate how the staff integrates all the activities—including homework, meals, and academic enrichment—with the curriculum.

Follow-ups

Two weeks ago, we covered Colorado House Bill 24-1363, which would, among other things, allow traditional districts the ability to revoke a charter if that district’s enrollment was decreasing, allow community members to appeal an approved charter, and end the no-cost allowance for charters to rent district facilities. That bill was heard in the state’s House Education Committee this week and failed to advance on a bi-partisan vote of 3-8. Last week, we talked about the lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) by the California Charter Schools Association, challenging the district’s new policy that aims to limit charter co-locations within hundreds of distict buildings. The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Daily News came out in favor of the legal action, calling it a “needed challenge” to LAUSD’s misguided overstep. “The plain fact is,” they write, “that the ability to access public school campuses by charter schools…is guaranteed by California law.” And they conclude by telling district leaders: “Instead of legislating away the competition, put the interests of students above all others. Craft budgets that are about student achievement, not just appeasing big-spending labor unions or protecting bloated bureaucracies. You know, do something other than what LAUSD has been doing for decades.”

*****

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1. Well, the unthinkable finally happened on Wednesday after more than 10 years: No clips, thus no Bites. Sadly, I don’t have much more of interest for you today. But let’s press on. First up: A technical problem connected to Ohio’s testing vendor—described as “brief”—has nonetheless led to numerous schools needing to reschedule the start of state testing. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 4/10/24)
   
   

2. And, in a shock to no one, Toledo City Council this week unanimously approved the special use permit for Washington Local Schools to build their new middle school. There still appear to be some neighborhood concerns unassuaged, but I reckon that the city/county full-court press on the district’s behalf (which won them the permit where other entities have previously failed) will continue in earnest until the flag is hoisted in that school’s driveway on day one. (Toledo Blade, 4/10/24)

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This is the final article in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as essays on school finance, student discipline, advanced education, school closures, homework, grading, and effective teachers.

For the past several months, I’ve been pumping out posts about “doing educational equity right.” Given that Eight is Enough, it’s time to wrap things up. Let’s conclude with a twist and look at three ways that schools are doing educational equity wrong:

1. By engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
2. By tying teachers’ hands without good reason.
3. By acting like equity isn’t just an important thing, but the only thing.

Equity as an excuse for the soft bigotry of low expectations

A recurring theme of this series is how misguided it is for schools to lower expectations for students “because equity.” Of course, the schools and the elected officials, advocates, and journalists who embrace these practices don’t say they are expecting less from students, but that’s precisely what’s happening.

It’s most obvious in the world of advanced education, such as when districts refuse to let anyone take Algebra in middle school because not everyone is ready for Algebra in middle school. The backlash to this mindset is growing, thank goodness.

But other examples abound and unfortunately continue to be lauded in polite company. For instance, the notion that it’s inequitable and unfair to grade, or even assign, homework because some kids don’t have a quiet place to complete assignments away from school. Just examine this idea for a moment. Do we really believe that lots of American families are so dysfunctional that they can’t figure out a way to clear a space for their kids to do their math problems? Or that teenagers can’t find a place—a community library, the school library, even a McDonald’s—where they could get homework done? Why are we infantilizing kids and their parents like this?

Same goes with policies that allow students to turn in assignments late without penalty. Are we trying to teach kids to procrastinate? To teach them that real life doesn’t deal in accountability and consequences?

Or take school discipline. Plenty of well-meaning people who would never say “we can’t expect poor kids and kids of color to learn fractions—it’s just too hard” are more than happy to argue that we must accept all manner of student misbehavior because of poverty or systemic racism. Journalists might be the worst at this. Just last week, a major article from the Hechinger Report decried the use of suspensions and the like for “subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct.” It’s one thing to be concerned about bias in meting out penalties for disruptive behavior. But as my colleague Daniel Buck wrote, in the real world of classrooms, this leads to paralysis from officials in the face of flagrant, over-the-top, disrespectful behavior by kids. And to misery for their teachers.

Permitting low-level defiance—defining deviancy down in this way—facilitates and fosters more severe misbehavior. If a student comes to learn that adults can be ignored and rules flaunted, behavior escalates. A balled piece of paper is thrown, a teacher asks the offender to move seats, but he refuses. The next day, he’s wandering around the classroom singing. The teacher asks him to sit, but he refuses. Eventually, he’s wandering the halls, telling teachers to “fuck off” if they ask him to return to class, so most don’t. Many other students have joined in the fun, and now there’s cacophony in the halls. Students in class question why they must listen to adults if they don’t want to when other kids get to flaunt the rules. Rowdy, unmonitored halls mean more chances for student conflict and fights.

Surely we can agree that all students, regardless of the challenges they face due to poverty or racism, should be expected to treat their teachers respectfully and comport themselves in a reasonable manner. Teachers in other nations would be aghast if told they had to accept this sort of treatment as part of the job. Indeed, I bet 99 percent of these kids’ parents would be alarmed, if not angry, to learn that their kids were being allowed to behave so atrociously in school.

“Defining deviancy down”—whether in academics, homework, grading, or behavior—will only let our students down. We should stop doing it.

Tying teachers’ hands

Another big mistake some equity advocates make is reducing teacher authority and autonomy for no good reason. To be sure, educators shouldn’t always have carte blanche to do whatever they like; bias is real and it’s one reason we’ve worked to get high, consistent academic standards in place and required teachers to follow them—ideally with the help of well-aligned, high-quality instructional materials. Again, to push back against the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But too often advocates force educators to teach with one or both hands tied behind their backs—refusing to let them use time-tested, effective practices because they conflict with recent preachings of the high church of educational equity.

For example, some districts don’t allow elementary teachers to group students by achievement levels when teaching reading or math, and many more have moved to “de-track” middle school and high school courses, getting rid of “on-level” courses and putting everyone into (wink-wink) “honors” ones. Now imagine you’re a seventh-grade teacher. If your class is typical, your students enter your classroom at achievement levels ranging from third through eleventh grades. So your helpful district-provided instructional coach suggests that you cope by “differentiating instruction.” You might as well ask them for some magic beans so you can grow a sky-high beanstalk while you’re at it. Certainly they’re guilty of magical thinking.

Most research finds that grouping students by achievement tends to help everyone learn more, especially if those groups are flexible and continuously re-mixed. But because progressive education dogma declares any form of grouping or “tracking” to be suspect, we make life dramatically harder for teachers and make learning dramatically less effective for kids.

There are plenty of other examples. Telling teachers they can’t send disruptive students to the office and making them engage in lengthy “restorative justice” circles instead. Mandating minimum grades of 50 percent even when kids don’t turn in research papers or show up for tests. Not letting teachers dock students for missed homework assignments or refusing to participate in class discussions.

Constrained teachers are disgruntled teachers—which is bad for everyone and bad for equity.

Is equity like winning—the only thing that counts?

Finally, some educators and advocates act as if equity were the one and only value in education worth pursuing. I think this comes from a good place; no doubt our system has a long and sordid history of mistreating poor kids and kids of color. A swing of the pendulum was long overdue, and erring in the direction of equity is no terrible crime. But policies and practices that ignore everything else—and everyone else—will prove harmful and unsustainable.

So what are the other values that matter—or should, in our universal public education system? I would put excellence at the top of the list. That means doing right by our high-achievers, who hold particularly great potential for solving our world’s problems and boosting our economy someday. But it also means striving for excellence in everything that schools do, from the basics of teaching and learning, to tutoring and counseling, to extra-curricular activities and more.

A commitment to excellence need not conflict with a drive for equity. Indeed, as I wrote last year, excellence is not the enemy of equity. It’s mediocrity that is the enemy of equity as well as excellence. So we must raise the alarm when “equitable practices” promote mediocrity instead.

Another important value is efficiency. Even America’s relatively well-funded public education system doesn’t have unlimited resources. Trade-offs are inescapable. But we’ll be more likely to land on effective approaches if we look for practices that promote equity and excellence and efficiency. When it comes to discipline and student behavior, for example, it’s not enough to come up with strategies that might be ideal for the disruptive kids. We also must protect the learning environment of their peers and consider the demands on teachers’ limited time.

So it is with the difficult issue of under-enrolled schools. Equity advocates may want districts to avoid closing schools with high proportions of poor kids and kids of color. But if those are the schools with dwindling student populations, such an outcome may be unavoidable—again, because excellence (getting kids into better schools) and efficiency (not wasting money on tiny campuses) matter, too.

Equity advocates shouldn’t be myopic. Balancing their impulse for fairness with concerns for excellence and efficiency will make it more, not less, likely that they will achieve their goals.

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I don’t want to end on a sour note. These many months (and words) spent digging into educational equity make me optimistic that common ground can be found, even on contentious issues. If we assume positive intent, look for practical answers, and avoid getting hung up on culture-war fights over language, we can move beyond the squabbles and toward solutions. Let’s do educational equity right—and let’s do it now!

Last weekend, I gave a talk at the U.S. ResearchEd conference in Greenwich, Connecticut, on “The Case for Curriculum,” based on a paper I wrote for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which was published this week at The 74. But truth in advertising forced me to come clean with my audience: The case for curriculum is in equal measure the case for making the classroom job doable by the teachers we have—not, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, the teachers we wish we had or hope to have someday.

It’s a simple fact that we’ve seemed determined to ignore for decades: We need nearly four million women and men to staff America’s classrooms. A number that large means teachers will be, by definition, people of average abilities. In no field of human endeavor from the performing arts and athletics to science and business do we look at the most gifted practitioners as proof points. Yet this is the mindset we apply, at least tacitly, to teachers. What the most talented and driven can accomplish with children is what we expect from all teachers. We expect them to both design and deliver lessons at an expert level when doing either is a challenge, while also “differentiating instruction” in classes with wildly divergent student skill levels. Increasingly we expect them to master the arcana of the “science of reading” and to play a quasi-therapeutic role under the banner of “social emotional learning”—if not also practitioners of mental health.

We have fresh data that speak to the impossibility of these demands. The vast majority of teachers surveyed in a new Pew Center report say there’s not enough time in the workday to accomplish all that’s expected of them. Eighty-four percent say they “don’t have enough time during their regular work hours to do tasks like grading, lesson planning, paperwork, and answering emails.”

Teachers cite a broad range of thing that bleed away their time, according to Pew, from noninstructional work such as hallway monitoring or lunch duty (24 percent); helping students outside class time (22 percent); and being asked to cover other teachers’ classes (16 percent). But the biggest one by far, cited by 81 percent of teachers as a “major reason” they can’t get all their work done (and a minor reason by nearly all the rest), is that they “just have too much work.” To be sure, many other issues compound teacher stress these days, including students distracted by cell phones, chronic absenteeism, behavior problems, and verbal abuse from students. But if you’re one of those who thinks teaching is easy because of summers off and school days that end in mid-afternoon, the Pew survey is a sobering read. The bottom line is that it’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the ever-spiraling demand we place upon teachers and talk seriously about taking things off their plate and making the job doable by the workforce we have.

To my mind, the most obvious target is curriculum. We know from various RAND surveys that nearly all teachers draw upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” to teach English language arts, for example. Those materials don’t create themselves. An MDR study shows that teachers spend seven hours per week searching for instructional resources and another five hours  creating their own classroom materials. That’s twelve hours not spent reviewing student work, giving feedback, building relationships with students and parents, and many other potentially higher value activities that a classroom teacher is literally the only person positioned to perform. Curriculum materials can be created or selected by someone else.

If the effort it takes to find and create materials could be shown to enhance student outcomes, it would be time well spent. But Fordham’s own report, The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar, showed “a major mismatch between what content experts think educators should (and shouldn’t) use in classrooms and what teachers, hungry for instructional resources, are choosing to download.”

On Twitter, Mike Petrilli took warm notice of my Hoover report, which is flattering, but noted “it’s too glum” to say curriculum reform is one approach to raising student achievement that hasn’t been tried. He cited the launch of the EngageNY website and “a huge uptick in adoption of [high-quality instructional materials,] especially in math.” Joanne Weiss also chided me for not citing the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network, which has worked since 2017 to get HQIM in the hands of teachers in more than a dozen states and ensure professional development grounded in their use.

These are fair criticisms from respected colleagues. The turn, however, will come when we see more crucial time devoted to diagnosis, intervention, and feedback; evidence—in what people do, not what they say—that curriculum is central to teaching; and a shift in the culture of teaching away from teacher-as-lesson-designer-and-deliverer. When Tom Kane of Harvard looked at math textbook adoptions in six states over three years, he found “little evidence of differences in average math achievement growth in schools using different elementary math curricula.” But he also found few teachers using official curricula exclusively and, more tellingly, only “modest” amounts of teacher professional development on the adopted textbooks and curriculum. This suggests either a naïve “magic bullet” faith in curriculum as a difference maker—just get it in teachers’ hands and they’ll do the rest!—or evidence of its second-class status: If curriculum was central to school improvement plans, implementing it well would be a primary focus of teacher training and professional development, not an afterthought.

It is unlikely and not even desirable that teachers will cease their efforts to customize lessons and even occasionally prepare them from scratch. But hard evidence of a shift in practice will look like teachers spending fewer hours creating or curating curricular materials and more hours wielding them. Until that evidence emerges, the “case for curriculum” still needs to be made as a means of making education coherent, raising student achievement—and making teachers’ jobs a little closer to manageable.

In the mid-1970s, Ference Marton and Roger Säljö of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden noticed that their students took different approaches to learning. Some focused on remembering information, others on understanding it: connecting it to other information, figuring out when it might be useful, and so on. Marton and Säljö christened the former surface learning and the latter deep learning.

Reading the last paragraph, you may have already formed the opinion that surface learning is bad and deep learning is good. But it’s not that simple. Not all content is deep. Knowing your multiplication facts, for example, does not require much conceptual depth, it’s all surface. And deep learning relies on knowledge of surface details. You can’t construct an argument integrating multiple causes of World War II if you can’t remember any of them.

So you need both; problems arise if surface learning is all you do. If math instruction consists of tips and tricks such as dividing fractions by flipping and multiplying, students will gain only a surface-level understanding. Conceptual understanding is harder to serve up, with the result that it may simply be absent for several grades. And so, if and when you at last arrive at calculus, the wheels come off.

This isn’t just a concern in mathematics. Whatever the topic, traveling beyond beginner levels and into the realm of experts requires depth. It has, though, proven difficult to induce students to take a deep approach. For instance, since the majority of assessments operate at a surface level, the prospect of being tested signals to students that they only need to memorize rather than to understand.

Changes, therefore, are needed. Deeper learning requires better teaching—and therefore better teacher training, better curriculum, and higher standards. But that’s a heavy and long lift, and in the meantime, tutoring may offer a solution.

We know tutoring works, but does it work for both surface- and deep-level understanding? Micki Chi, a professor at the Institute for the Science of Teaching and Learning who has studied tutoring closely, designed an experiment to find out. In particular, she wanted to know what kinds of tutor moves produced deep learning.

In her experiment, tutors taught the human circulatory system. Students then answered questions such as “What does the heart do?” which requires only surface learning, since the topic was explicitly covered by the tutor. But to answer “Why is your right ventricle less muscular than your left ventricle?” requires deep learning because students have to connect the question to information about where left and right ventricles pump blood. That information was covered by the tutor but not linked to ventricle size.

Chi found that there was far less deep learning than surface, and that what deep learning there was could be explained almost entirely by a student’s prior knowledge and reading ability. In other words, tutoring rarely produces deep learning for those who need it most.

Why? One answer may be that tutors often focus on stepping through a problem, so that the learner will be able to repeat the performance on a similar problem, but may gain little insight into what is actually going on. Another possibility is tutors’ tendency to jump, at the first sign of student missteps, into long, unsolicited explanations that, the literature shows, don’t reliably lead to learning. “Most tutors,” says Chi, “just won’t shut up.”

It’s also likely that tutors just don't know how to induce deep learning. Indeed, researchers have been unable to find a reliable method for inducing deep learning—until recently. It came from a surprising finding. When researchers tracked tutee emotional states during tutoring, the most common emotion displayed was confusion. Sidney D’Mello, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied people working on complex scientific concepts, says “confusion reigns supreme during deep learning activities.” And confusion was the only emotion that significantly predicted learning. Not even student engagement could match it.

This led to a deep tutoring method that would be familiar to any Hollywood screenplay writer. The secret to deep learning, like the secret to a good story, is (1) a conflict or impasse resulting in confusion, followed by (2) a resolution. In learning, as in a good story, you do not want to rush either of them. The impasse has to feel like a genuine impasse, which it won’t if it is not properly established or if, from an abundance of eagerness, it gets resolved too quickly. The resolution, when it comes, has to come from the actions of the main character. In learning, the main character is the student.

Here is an example. A student is trying to make sense of a graph of a bicycle journey on a chart of distance versus time. At one part of the chart, the line is horizontal before climbing again.

Tutor: What is going on in this flat part?

Student: I think it means the road flattened out a bit. Then they went up another hill.

The student is reading the line as an illustration, not a graph. This is a common misconception. Most tutors would launch into an explanation of the correct reading. That may lead to surface learning—“flat means no distance traveled”—but without deeper understanding, that approach will draw the student into trouble when they read other graphs, such as those that plot velocity versus time.

Stop reading for a moment and think what you might do instead if you were the tutor. How can you create an impasse here—a way for the student to realize their answer cannot be true.

Here’s one possibility:

T: Can you tell me from the graph how far they travel between those two points?

Even if the student needs help reading the distance axis to answer that, they will realize something is amiss with their earlier answer. The tutor will be tempted to jump in again with an explanation, but it’s far more powerful to let the student find their own resolution and congratulate them when they do.

S: OK… So from here to here…that’s zero distance.

T: (Silence)

S: So…they didn’t move.

T: Right. So what do you think is happening?

S: They stopped, I guess. Maybe they went to the bathroom?

T: Awesome! Who knew these charts could tell you about a bathroom visit?

You can feel the new insight scratching like a pet at the door. Do we have deep learning here? Not yet. The student doesn’t truly understand what the graph is telling them about this journey in a way that would allow them to read other graphs. They may stumble with the very next graph they see. But a new track has been etched in their brain, ready to be deepened.

Coming up with impasse-generating questions in the moment is challenging. A good fallback that works in almost every case is to say “Are you sure?” In fact, that’s a good move even when the student is correct.

Perhaps this approach—what D’Mello calls “intentionally perplexing learners”—feels uncomfortable. And tutors may find the resulting conversation takes them way off their plan for the session. But that would be to miss the true value of tutoring. The goal is not covering—moving diligently through a set course of material—but uncovering—creating moments that reveal a student’s thinking and where it can be advanced.

Editor's note: This article is based on The Science of Tutoring.