1. Here are two variations of how Lorain City Schools CEO’s first Town Hall meeting of 2019 went. They are somewhat different in tone and content. The Journal’s coverage is here. (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 1/11/19) The Chronicle’s coverage is here. (Elyria Chronicle, 1/11/19) Did the Journal reporter just leave early – say, at the scheduled conclusion of the event – or is there more to it than that?

2. Not much else to cover today, so we end the week back on the editorial page of the Steubenville Herald-Star where editors opine on changes to topic of federal school discipline policy. (Steubenville Herald-Star, 1/11/19)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox (in case you want to learn all you can about Steubenville by signing up for such a newsletter)? Subscribe by clicking here.

In Ohio and across the nation, policymakers are contemplating sizeable increases to public outlays for early childhood programs, including expanded preschool, childcare, and other support services. Polls indicate that early childhood programs enjoy broad support, and proponents of early childhood programs often cite as evidence for expansion the positive, long-run effects of the boutique Perry Preschool program (it served just fifty-eight low-income children during the 1960s). But will greater expenditures in early childhood programs generate big returns? Or could they backfire?

A new study by university researchers Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan offers a cautionary tale. They examine the short- and longer-run outcomes of children participating in North America’s largest universal childcare program. Starting in fall 1997, Quebec began offering large public subsidies, open to all parents, for center- or home-based childcare programs serving youngsters up to four years old. As of 2011–12, the program cost $2 billion per year and subsidized roughly 80 percent of a family’s child care costs. Quebec has been the only province to adopt such an expansive childcare policy. For example, from the mid-1990s to 2008, Quebec children in center-based childcare jumped from 10 to 60 percent; during that same period, the rise was just 10 to 20 percent in the rest of Canada.

The study examines both the immediate effects of the program on two- and three-year olds, as well as longer-run impacts for those exposed to the Quebec childcare program. Baker and colleagues examine a range of outcomes, including non-cognitive indicators based on surveys gauging parent perceptions about their child’s behavior; standardized exam results; health outcomes (self-reported in surveys by twelve- to twenty-year-olds); and criminal activity. To conduct the evaluation, they compare the outcomes of children exposed to the Quebec program to Canadian children who were not, while using statistical methods to control for various demographic differences.

First, the short-run findings on children in Quebec’s childcare program. Consistent with a prior analysis in 2005 from this research team, they find significant negative effects of universal childcare on young children’s non-cognitive outcomes in areas such as anxiety and aggression; they also uncover negative impacts on the only cognitive measure available, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Though not analyzed in this paper, Baker and colleagues cite other work showing that the negative results are driven by children from two-parent families who, on average, fare worse in the childcare program (disadvantaged children from single-parent families see improved outcomes). 

Second, the study examines the longer-run outcomes. On non-cognitive measures, the analysts find persistent, negative effects. At ages five through nine, children exposed to the childcare program exhibited more aggression, anxiety, and hyperactivity and they were less likely to get along with their teacher. Meanwhile, on cognitive measures—national math, reading, and science exams given to thirteen- and sixteen-year-olds—the analysts find no clear impacts on test scores (the estimates are negative in all subjects but not statistically significant). However, the analysts do report a positive effect on the international PISA math exam, but no impacts in reading and science. The researchers conclude, “Overall the evidence on the long-run impact of the Quebec Family Plan on test scores is mixed.” As for health and criminal activity outcomes at ages twelve to twenty, the study uncovers negative results. In surveys, those exposed to the Quebec program reported worse physical health and life satisfaction, and an analysis of national crime data concludes that the program led to higher rates of criminal activity (both accusations and convictions).

All told, this research paints a sobering picture about how Quebec’s universal early childhood program has affected children, save perhaps for its least advantaged children who seem to have benefitted. The authors don’t speculate in this report on mechanisms driving the results, though in their previous evaluation they write, “We also find suggestive evidence that families we study became more strained with the introduction of the program. This is manifested in increased aggressiveness and anxiety for the children.”

Early childhood programs that target the neediest children likely make sense—such as Head Start or Ohio’s income-based Early Childhood Education Grant. Yet as this study suggests, policymakers and advocates of universal early childhood programs should also beware of the potential impacts to children when broad-based public subsidies shift the care of our youngest kids away from parents and more to professionals.

Source: Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan, “The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (forthcoming). An open-access version is available here.

Over the past thirty years, I’ve witnessed one education reform effort after another. We’ve had standards-testing-accountability, school choice in innumerable forms, curriculum reform, teacher reform, and much more. All have been worthwhile and should continue. However, while we persist on these paths, I suggest we also look at reforming where our students are educated in the first place. To take a lyric from the hit show “Hamilton”: Are our kids “in the room where it happens”? They should be.

In Gary, Indiana, we started a school in 2005. We started with the same methods as other college-prep schools—counsel kids about the importance of college, show them the varying incomes of those who attain different levels of degrees (high school, associate, bachelor’s, master’s, etc.), take them on college tours, help them with FAFSA and scholarship applications, provide support on ACT and SAT, and more. In the end, however, our efforts fell short of our goal. Many students were still not going to college or succeeding there.

So I started researching the issue. Many of our students told me they didn’t believe they were college material and that they were in high school for the social scene or athletics. Few told me about their college and career aspirations. And if you look deeper, you can see why. Most of the students we serve come from homes devoid of any college degrees, often lacking any college experience of any sort. But don’t stop there with your analysis. Go deeper. If students don’t see themselves as going to the next level—college—they don’t really have a reason to take high school studies and tests too seriously, do they?

We took this challenge head on and changed what we do from top to bottom. We adopted an aggressive “early college” model and told students that we believe they are college material and that they can do college work—and to prove it, we took them to the local college campus, Ivy Tech Community College, and administered the Accuplacer test to them, a College Board admissions test most community colleges across the country use. Many of our students proved they were worthy and passed the test (to their surprise, not ours). We then enrolled them in college classes, paid the tuition, bought the textbooks, and provided the transportation to the college campus.

Our plan believes in the power of the “room where it happens.” Students need to experience real college classes on a real college campus with a real college professor teaching the course. They need to sit next to people who don’t look like them and are not the same age; learn to manage their time, to work with others, and to work at a more rigorous level of study; and demonstrate to themselves that they can pull it off. And they do!

When we started this effort, many thought it was just fancy talk. Today, 21st Century Charter School is the talk of Gary. More than one third of our high school students are taking college-level classes on real college campuses including Ivy Tech, Indiana University NW, Purdue University Northwest, and Vincennes University. We started with Ivy Tech but now have several college partners. Our 2019 senior class of sixty-three students will earn more than 1,000 college credits this year alone. They are taking more than forty different college level classes. In May, nine of our students will graduate from our high school having earned full associate degrees. We actually have five students working to earn their bachelor’s degrees while in our high school. Fancy talk? Not at all. One of our students already did that in 2017 with a bachelor’s from Purdue. She earned her associate degree from Ivy Tech before becoming a junior in high school and asked if she could continue taking college classes while in our high school. After researching this request, we approved it and she enrolled at Purdue as a college transfer student; Purdue didn’t ask for her high school transcript. Yes, we paid the full cost of her college career. She graduated at age eighteen from our high school with her associate and bachelor’s degrees. She is now in her second year as a reading interventionist in our school making a full-time salary with full health and retirement benefits. She’s twenty and debt free.

Indiana rates schools on their college and career readiness efforts and reports that 21st Century Charter School has the highest such rating in the state’s northwest region: 80.5 percent, surpassing elite private schools in the area and beating the state average of 67 percent. We even compete with one of Indiana’s wealthiest communities, Carmel, whose rate is 83.6 percent.

We also continue to improve our program. We now schedule our school year around college schedules, both daily and annual. This helps students not miss any college or high school classes. We provide a summer college prep course to help our incoming ninth graders understand the rigors of college. We start students in college courses as early as ninth grade (no, they’re not too young). And our board passed a resolution requiring our students to earn at least twenty-four college credits (six per year) while in our high school to earn a high school diploma. That’s a big hairy audacious goal, isn’t it? But we can do this because we do everything possible, starting in kindergarten, to make it happen—schedule it, plan it, support it, pay for it. We receive many students who are way below grade level when they enroll, but over time, our accelerated model (which includes summer school) helps students catch up and indeed exceed the accomplishments of their peers (Close the achievement gap? You bet!) and graduate on time. Our audited graduation rate for 2018 was just released by Indiana and our 93.9 percent graduation rate beat the state’s 88 percent graduation rate. And now families are flocking to us. Though we don’t advertise, we have more than 500 students on our wait list. They want to be in the room where it happens.

There are national implications here. We’ve been accomplishing this with general per-pupil K–12 dollars. No additional philanthropy (other than startup). Though the state and federal governments do offer scholarships to students who graduate high school and go on to college, none of these funds are available to our students because our students are still in high school and are considered high school students. We receive no additional state or federal dollars. No college student aid. We pay our college partners full-freight tuition. We don’t negotiate any discounts. It requires a great deal of discipline on our part—staffing, budgeting, facility management—but the perpetual annual return on investment is evident: We are achieving K–14, and in one case K–16, results with K–12 dollars. Imagine that on a national basis.

Our school can be viewed as a petri dish. Our experiment is showing promise in one of the nation's most challenged cities. The promise of our school attracted leaders in the Louisiana Department of Education to invite us to launch our model in Baton Rouge in 2019. With start-up support from New Schools Baton Rouge, our new school will benefit from all the lessons we've learned in Gary. Our intent is to perfect our model and go national. The initial results are promising, the need is great, and there are lots of rooms where it happens every day on college campuses that could be providing more benefit to the public than they are currently.

I started writing this piece with a laundry list of reform efforts. Our effort is often lumped in with the “early college” reforms across the nation. And yes, there may be more than a million high school kids nationwide doing at least some form of “dual credit” according to OCR, and there are hundreds of “early college high schools.” However, I’ve yet to read or hear about an open-enrollment school accomplishing similar results on similar dollars with a similar demographic. We are not perfect, and we still have much to learn and to improve. We are constantly seeking high quality college-level courses taught by high quality professors (these issues don’t go away simply because you are on a college campus and not a high school campus).

So while other worthy reform efforts continue, let’s recognize that we have students who need assistance today. Let’s make sure they are in the room where it happens today. We will be glad we did.

Kevin Teasley is president and founder of the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation, a non-profit educational organization headquartered in Indianapolis.

Just before Christmas (or about ten thousand news cycles ago) the Trump administration took the widely anticipated step of reversing the Obama administration’s much-debated guidance on school discipline, the essential goal of which was to pressure school districts to address the well-documented and longstanding racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions.

The context for that decision—and in particular, the spurious link between federal policy and the tragic Parkland massacre—put yours truly in an unusually tight spot, even for a guy who splits his time between liberal politics and a conservative education think tank. Yet despite the nightmarish politics, I agree with the decision more than I disagree with it. At best, pressuring districts to equalize their suspension rates is a recipe for gamed data and an overly politicized debate. And at worst, it could have unintended and potentially serious consequences for students (though the latter are speculative).

Regardless, the decision is a setback for discipline reformers, a group I would be happy to join if it would get its act together. So where should reformers go from here? What strategy should they pursue in a country that somehow elected both Barack Obama and Donald Trump?

Herewith is my unsolicited advice for the folks who ought to be winning me over.

1. Be honest about the problem

In my personal experience, almost nobody really believes that African American, Hispanic, and low-income students, or students with disabilities, exhibit the same rates of misbehavior as wealthy, white, or Asian students, or students without disabilities. However, a significant number of well-meaning people do believe that publicly acknowledging such differences does more harm than good.

Doubtless that belief is well-founded when it comes to cable TV and print media, which routinely traffic in problematically reductive imagery. But it’s a dubious foundation for public policy, where reality bites.

Is it really so hard to admit that—thanks to our nation’s tragic history and an extraordinarily complex set of risk factors—including but not limited to poverty, family structure, mass incarceration, lead paint, teen culture, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth—black students are on average more likely to misbehave than white students? Would America really be more broken if discipline reformers admitted as much?

The term “politically incorrect” has gotten a bad rap in recent years, thanks to its increasingly close association with bona fide examples of the various “isms.” But the debate over school discipline shows why it’s worth reclaiming: Politically correct problems lead to politically correct solutions, which are nearly always suboptimal.

2. Don’t make it about racism

Like many observers, I suspect that some portion of the disparities in observed suspension rates reflects the implicit or explicit biases of America’s teachers and administrators. But unfortunately, proving as much is basically impossible. And of course, actually correcting such bias is extraordinarily difficult, since the mental heuristics underlying it are essentially hardwired.

Obviously, the Office of Civil Rights has a duty to vigorously investigate complaints. But we can’t use “big data” to systematically identify—and then eliminate—suspensions that are the result of bias. Hence, the by-now-well-oiled pivot to the “disparate impact" theory of discrimination enforcement—under which administrators could be subject to a civil rights investigation if their data showed significant racial disparities in the use of suspensions or expulsions, and could theoretically be found guilty of violating federal law even if they had race-neutral discipline policies that were being applied even-handedly.

Although I’m sympathetic to the logic of disparate impact in other circumstances, I don’t think it’s a very useful way of thinking about school discipline. For example, there’s a huge difference between voter fraud (which is incredibly rare) and student misbehavior, which is an invisible crisis. Furthermore, because our education system is highly segregated, well-meaning teachers in predominantly black schools must often balance the interests of their most challenging students against those of the black majority. So a disparate impact approach to school discipline just doesn’t have the same moral implications as it does for housing, where the economic “benefits” of discrimination flow to mostly white homeowners.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that at least some black students receive unnecessary suspensions due to individual or institutional biases, and that suspensions have at least some negative impact on suspended students (as seems likely). Clearly it follows that “too many” black kids are suspended. But it doesn’t follow that we should equalize suspension rates unless we believe racism explains most or all of the suspension gap, or we think suspensions are unambiguously bad—meaning there are no potential benefits or unintended consequences to consider.

And of course, if we really think suspensions are unambiguously bad, we should eliminate them entirely.

3. Don’t be utopian

Why not eliminate suspensions entirely? After all, we know that kids need stability, that most suspended students don’t spend their time away from school reflecting on their misbehavior, and that such students are very likely to misbehave again when they return to the classroom—and then get suspended again. All of which suggests that suspensions are an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of serious misbehavior.

One common response is that we need to get disruptive students out of classrooms. But that’s an argument for “in school suspensions,” or perhaps for more “Alternative Learning Centers,” or expulsions for chronic offenders. Similarly, many defenders argue that suspensions send a message to parents and other students that certain behavior is unacceptable. And there’s something to that, according to teachers. But suspensions aren’t the only way to send such a message either. So why use them?

One fundamental problem is that it’s hard to construct a legal framework that appropriately prioritizes the majority’s right to an education without sacrificing the rights of individual students. So we tend to err on the side of individuals, leaving despairing teachers and principals with little alternative to kicking the can down the road in the absence of a long-term solution.

Another fundamental problem is that public resources are limited, and adequately supervising the most disruptive students is expensive. So in practice, some schools just don’t have the resources to make “in-school suspension” or “ALC” a tenable destination for every occasional or serial disruptor, much less a meaningful form of rehabilitation.

In short, the average low-income school’s discipline policy is a classic kludge—part workaround, part triage, and about as “effective” as each of those labels implies.

4. Fund that mandate—or better yet, don’t have one

Unsurprisingly, rates of in-school suspension (ISS) have spiked in many districts that have reduced their rates of out-of-school suspension (OSS). However, because of the aforementioned utopianism, we don’t seem to talk about it very much. (Where are the detailed explanations of how ISS should be organized and staffed?)

Even more taboo are the more unsavory “alternatives” that keep popping up in major urban districts where reform has been attempted. So sure, revise district policy to reduce the number of suspensions. But don’t be surprised if, absent additional resources commensurate with that ambition, they are subsequently underreported or reclassified, or if the length of the average suspension increases, or if there’s a mysterious spike in serious incidents or expulsions.

Better yet, given the difficulty of determining how much funding is “enough,” and the very real possibility that no amount will be enough in the toughest schools, just use all that new money voters have entrusted you with to hire a bunch of teaching assistants, or ISS or ALC coordinators, or mental health counselors in the most underserved or underfunded schools without mandating that they lower their suspension rates—and then see how much those rates decline organically, when the teachers in those schools are given a fighting chance.

I know that last paragraph will rub some die-hard reformers the wrong way. But if you’re concerned about equity, the thing to do is soak the rich, not implicitly tax the almost-as-poor. So given the choice between another unfunded and arguably unenforceable mandate and just throwing some more money at the problem, I choose the latter—at least for higher grade levels.

5. Stop free-associating, get specific, and proceed with caution in grades six through twelve.

As experienced readers know, most real progress is incremental. Most active policy debates revolve around painful trade-offs. And most new ideas don’t work. So in general, we should resist the urge to do “something” because if feels like we’re not doing enough.

Consider the standard list of “restorative” practices, which includes both “proactive circles” that let students “share their feelings and build trust” and “reactive circles” that aim to piece things back together, neither of which are to be confused with “restorative conferences” that may or may not include friends and family, in addition to the affected students.

That’s at least three different somethings by my count, the preferred combination of which doesn’t seem to work very well, according to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, which found that Pittsburgh’s restorative practices initiative had no discernible effect on arrest rates or suspensions for violent offenses, and a negative impact on students’ perceptions of school climate, as well as the academic achievement of middle school students, black students, and students in mostly black schools. (But hey, at least we did something.)

Similarly, consider the nebulousness of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), the only “alternative to suspension” for which there is reasonably strong evidence of effectiveness. But only at the elementary level. Spend some quality time with the PBIS website, and you will quickly realize that it’s at least twenty-seven different somethings—from positive reinforcement, to “pre-correction,” to daily behavioral report cards, to mental health and family support counseling. Resources permitting, some of those sound promising. But which are genuinely effective at scale? And at what opportunity cost?

Honestly, I have no idea. And the PBIS website has zero interest in enlightening me, much less the thousands of overburdened principals and teachers who are even now trying to make “it” work.

***

As a self-identified liberal and a two-time Obama voter, I hate what’s happening to America right now. But between the surplus of wishful thinking and the widespread refusal to confront the obvious tradeoffs, y’all are in real danger of losing me on this one.

Obviously, discipline reform is good. But it’s also bad. And perhaps most importantly, with a little more patience and realism, it could be better.

Before the holiday break, I wrote a series of posts discussing how we might turn the “End of Education Policy” (as I see it) into a Golden Age of Educational Practice. It’s time to pick up where I left off.

To be honest, much of what I published in late 2018 amounted to throat-clearing, a warm-up before the main event. My basic (and hardly brilliant) argument was this:

• It’s possible to identify instructional practices and materials that are more effective than others at improving student outcomes, tapping the tools of science.
• To do so, we need to collect lots more information about what’s going on in America’s classrooms, and be willing to experiment with new approaches.
• Then smart people with credibility with educators need to separate the wheat from the chaff, developing practitioner guidance based on the best currently available evidence.

Not that any of this is simple, as it takes serious investment in R&D, tackling tough student privacy issues, and dealing with the inherent complexity and heterogeneity of our schools. But it’s way more doable than the next phase of the research-to-practice cycle: getting schools to actually use the stuff that works.

This of course has been the point of more than three decades of education reform. We accountability hawks, hoped that by holding schools and their leaders accountable—with school ratings, threats of painful interventions, and so forth—they would work harder and smarter to find evidence-based solutions to their problems. That’s also been an important goal of the school-choice movement—to pressure traditional public schools via competition to get better, or at least better at serving their customers.

There’s some evidence that it worked, at least a little. The test-based accountability reforms of the late 90s and early 2000s appear to have boosted the math scores of low-income and low-performing students significantly; NAEP scores also show a bump in reading for the same students in the early grades. Meanwhile, many school-choice studies show positive findings with respect to “competitive effects.”

But as everyone knows, how schools achieved those better results has raised a lot of questions. Did they actually improve teaching and learning, adopt proven curricula, and provide better training and support to teachers? Or did they just narrow the curriculum, focus on test-prep in its several guises, and tighten the screws on overburdened teachers? The honest answer is probably “both” or “it depends on the school”—but I sure can’t spot any signs that schools nationwide suddenly got religion about finding proven curricula and evidence-based practices and implementing them faithfully in large numbers of their classrooms.

Back to today and the main event. How might we do better going forward? Let’s assume that our lighter-touch accountability systems and slow-growing choice sectors are here to stay. And that there are at least a few examples of “evidence based practices” that could make a significant difference in improving student outcomes if implemented well in our schools. (Though let’s also be humble—there may not be more than just a few.) How might we dramatically increase the chances that our schools scale up the most effective practices, resulting in significantly better outcomes for students?

There are a few actions that would make sense in a sane world—but seem unlikely to happen in the world we actually inhabit. At the top of the list would be convincing schools of education to teach evidence-based practices and a respect for the science of learning. Maybe various efforts to reform ed schools will succeed where others have failed, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m also not expecting the ESSA requirements for schools to use “evidence-based practices” to add up to much. That term is plenty elastic, so our institutions can do pretty much anything they want and still claim to be in compliance with the law.

So what might actually work? I see six plausible approaches that might be embraced by local communities, state education agencies, and/or philanthropists, under two categories:

In coming weeks I’ll unpack these various options, but it’s worth acknowledging up front that most of them can work well in tandem. Several high-quality charter school networks, for example, embrace the “improvement science” approach popularized by Tony Bryk and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation. And of course, new school models are often easiest to implement in the charter sector, given their opportunity to start fresh. Likewise, we’re learning that instructional coaching can be a powerful improvement lever—but especially if connected to a well-designed, standards-aligned, and teacher-friendly curriculum.

***

Am I forgetting some other ways to scale up evidence-based practices? And do you think that some of these approaches are clearly superior to others? Let me know, and stay tuned for more discussion about their various pros and cons.

Late December brought not one but two excellent disquisitions on moral education, both the importance of rekindling an emphasis on it in American schools and some thoughtful advice as to how to go about it. Each does a nice job of explaining why such rekindling is needed at this time—though unless you’re completely off the grid you already know why: not so much because of troubles with private morality (teenage pregnancy rates are down, etc.) but because of manifest failures in the public and semi-public squares: with honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness, both on the part of elected officials and in the small venues where we observe an excess of selfishness, cheating, laziness, and willingness to be a burden on others.

The moral and ethical renewal that American society needs, and that our schools have an obligation to do their best to infuse into their pupils, is the Aristotelian kind, nicely defined by Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson as human beings “exercising their reason and habituating certain virtues, such as courage, temperance, honor, equanimity, truthfulness, justice and friendship.” Gerson deplores—correctly in my view—today’s tendency among our public officials and many others to disregard Aristotle and instead embrace the version derived from Rousseau, which prizes authenticity and self-expression rather than virtue. As he writes:

At the root of the Aristotelian approach is the premise that the human person is originally in need of formation. At the root of the other approach is the premise that the human person is only in need of liberation. This has marked a long-standing difference between right and left, with conservatism often on the side of character building and progressivism often on the side of personal expression. But with Trump, something remarkable has happened: The right is increasingly on Rousseau’s side as well.

It's high time we—and our schools—refocus on character building, and the two December articles suggest ways of doing that. I’ll get to them in a moment, but first want to flag what an important opportunity—and perhaps obligation—this is for schools of choice, both public and private. Compulsory-attendance public schools, especially when operated by large political bureaucracies, are pretty much obligated to seek a broadly acceptable “common denominator” when it comes to values, ethics, character, even civic education. They can do a fine job (though few do) of teaching the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and such universal values as tolerance. But they don’t dare fly too close to the sun of “habituating certain virtues” lest they offend some part of their constituency, get their wax melted, and fall into the sea.

Schools of choice are different. Because nobody is forced to attend them, their curricula and pedagogy can be distinctive, even idiosyncratic, and specially designed to appeal to particular constituencies.

Parochial schools have done this forever—not just the Roman Catholic kind, but also Jewish schools, evangelical Christian schools, Lutheran schools, Islamic schools, and more. They openly and eagerly embrace virtue and morality, often in the context of religious formation, and the values, mores, and practices associated therewith. This, of course, causes some people to fret that such schools may not provide their students with a broad-enough education and may not be teaching kids to accept others who are different. These are legitimate concerns, somewhat ameliorated by state licensure requirements for private schools, accreditation norms, and the parent marketplace—as well as additional obligations that bear on schools taking publicly-funded voucher recipients in various places.

Charter schools and other public schools of choice also have considerable latitude in this realm, save for religion. Due to First Amendment considerations and the “Blaine Amendments” in many states, they mustn’t engage in direct religious instruction (though there can be work-arounds) and must satisfy applicable state academic standards and subject their pupils to statewide assessments. Within those limits, however, they can be very distinctive indeed, which leads to the remarkable diversity we see in today’s charter-school sector: from Montessori to “no excuses,” from classical academies to agricultural education, from great books curricula to discovery learning—and from sit-in-rows-and-wear-uniforms-and-speak-only-when-spoken-to to online learning and the most casual classroom atmosphere imaginable.

So long as they’re careful about the church-state barrier, public schools of choice also have wide-ranging freedom to engage in character education, values-centric education, civic education, and more. Many have built this into their “brands.” All are most certainly free to embrace Aristotle! Which brings me back (at last) to the dual essays of December 28, both of which end up recommending much the same approach to moral education, and both of which are easily adapted and applied to all schools of choice, both public and private.

Writing for the relatively low-profile History News Network, Eastern Michigan University emeritus history professor Walter Moss recalls the founders’ conviction that education in morality and virtue are indispensable elements of a proper curriculum, touches on key developments in the ensuing centuries, underscores the urgency in today’s America of developing citizens who take virtue seriously, and warns against the utilitarian impulse that leads many to focus only on preparing young people for remunerative careers. Then, citing psychologist Robert Sternberg’s article, “It's Not What You Know, but How You Use It: Teaching for Wisdom,” he goes on to advocate an approach to K–12 education that “teach[es] students to see ‘things from others' perspectives as well as one's own,’ [and] to tolerate ‘other people's points of view, whether or not one agrees with such views.’”

Hear, hear, say I.

In the second article, this one in the high-profile Wall Street Journal, Drexel English professor Paula Marantz Cohen invokes the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant—and ends up with almost exactly the same advice for educators. Kant’s celebrated “Categorical Imperative” has “three formulations, two of which are relevant here.” The first resembles the Golden Rule: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But that alone, Cohen explains, doesn’t get us out of “our current moral morass.” Taken alone, in fact, she views it as part of the problem, for “[I]t suggests that how you want to be treated should be generalized for everyone,” which is “precisely what the right and the left are attempting to do now: Each side has its own concept of moral righteousness and no ability to find common ground.”

That problem is solved, at least in part, by invoking Kant’s second formulation: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, which in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end but always at the same time as an end.” In other words, “never treat people as objects” and never treat “others as the means to impose our own ideals on the world.”

It’s not simple, but what Cohen calls “Kant in kindergarten” as a “litmus test for good behavior seems the only way back to sanity and civility.” Kant himself offered a path in an 1803 treatise (not previously known to me): “On Education.” As Cohen summarizes it:

What he termed “negative education” is associated with a child’s earliest training. It involves teaching that there is an authority beyond the self. This idea—which could, but need not, dovetail with religious instruction—lays the groundwork for a later “positive education,” which employs reason to examine and judge difficult situations in life….Parents would begin this process of moral training, and teachers would continue it from kindergarten onward, following a curriculum that inculcates the Categorical Imperative and analyzes situations in light of its two formulations. This would require teacher education programs to develop case studies, geared to different age groups, in which students would practice and hone moral judgment. It would mean inserting moral education into the training of teachers at all grade levels. This would help promote ideas traditionally covered by religion in a society in which religious exposure has diminished.

That would be a big challenge for compulsory-education schools, yes. But whether you get there via Sternberg or Kant, it’s something that schools of choice could do—and in my view should take very seriously. As Cohen says, “a society that abandons moral education…will be a debased and untrustworthy one.” Which sounds painfully akin to the one we’re seeing emerge in today’s America.

“Restorative practices” are an increasingly popular alternative to suspensions. To examine the effectiveness such practices, researchers at the RAND Corporation studied Pittsburgh’s new restorative justice program. It’s the largest study of its kind, and the first randomized control trial of this disciplinary strategy—and unfortunately, the results are decidedly mixed.

RAND worked with Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) and the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) to evaluate a new restorative justice program, Pursuing Equitable and Restorative Communities (PERC), over two years. The program aims to help students build better relationships with their peers and teachers and understand how their actions affect others. This should, researchers posit, lead to fewer punishable behaviors, more instructional time, and improved academic outcomes. PERC includes eleven restorative practices staff can implement, for example:

• Affective Statements: “Personal expressions of feeling in response to specific positive or negative behaviors of others.”
• Proactive Circles: “Meetings with participants seated in a circle…for students to share feelings, ideas, and experiences in order to build trust.”
• Responsive Circles: “Meetings with participants seated in a circle…[for] the management of conflict and tension.”

Restorative practices are not meant to replace more serious consequences like suspension for serious offenses, but to remind the student that their punishment does not imply permanent exclusion from the community.

Of Pittsburgh’s forty-four eligible schools, half were randomly selected as “treatment schools,” where staff received training and ongoing professional development on how to implement restorative practices in the classroom. The other twenty-two did not participate in the program, but researchers did not look into what disciplinary strategies they do use. RAND experts monitored implementation efforts through classroom observation and teacher surveys and interviews. They tracked PERC’s effects using administrative data on student performance and behavior from schools and county law enforcement. After two years of data collection, they found mixed results from the program.

PERC did decrease the number and duration of suspensions, particularly in elementary schools and for nonviolent infractions. However, researchers note that it is unclear whether students committed fewer infractions or teachers simply favored non-exclusionary discipline options. They note elsewhere in the study that teachers reported no change in overall student behavior. PERC also decreased the gap in suspension rates between races, and overall school climate improved according to teacher surveys (the researchers did not survey students on this question). Behavioral results were most positive at the elementary school level.

PERC had no impact on student arrest rates, which were already low, and had almost no impact on daily attendance.

But alarmingly, test scores in PERC schools dropped for both middle schoolers and African American students. Even overall, academic performance in PERC schools remained flat.

The study has some limitations that may affect its findings. First, RAND only studied implementation over two years. It is possible that stronger results will take longer to show. Second, they do not have any direct measures of student experiences with PERC, such as student interviews or the number of student referrals to the office. And finally, researchers had little insight into how each restorative practice was used daily at the classroom level.

Despite these limitations, the results of PERC are underwhelming. A drop in suspensions is good as far as it goes, but researchers could not identify a cause for the change, and teachers expressed confusion as to whether restorative practices were supposed to take the place of other disciplinary actions. Additionally, to see no effect on arrest rates and potentially negative academic effects is concerning, especially since RAND does not include any information about the cost of the program. We can’t shake a stick at wanting struggling students to feel like part of the community, but as a comprehensive approach to discipline reform, restorative justice does not seem promising.

SOURCE: Catherine H. Augustine et. al., “Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District.” RAND Corporation, 2018.

In December 2003, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Golden interviewed me about the identification and admissions policies of our district’s gifted program. I served as the gifted coordinator of a district with fifteen thousand students in pre-K through twelfth grade. I was instrumental in the movement to create the district’s first gifted magnet school for students in first through fifth grade, that opened in the year 2000. Our team had done extensive research on developing an identification process that would closely reflect the demographics of the entire district. The conversation with Mr. Golden was focused on admissions of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and the impact of No Child Left Behind. The conversation began with the mechanics of our district’s identification system and federal mandates and ended with forever changing the course of one family.

I described to Mr. Golden our district’s identification process of administering the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test to all kindergarten students at the end of January each year. In March, students receiving a score of 1.5 standard deviations above the group norm were then invited to learn more about the gifted magnet school. Teachers and parents could also nominate students who demonstrated achievement at one grade level above their age peers to attend the gifted magnet school. I was able to share supporting data with Mr. Golden showing that the diversity of the students being invited to the gifted magnet school reflected the diversity of the district. I was not, however, able to share supporting data with Mr. Golden that the actual enrollment numbers reflected the diversity of the district. Why did qualifying students of poverty not enroll in the gifted magnet school?

In trying to respond to Mr. Golden’s question, I immediately thought of a first-grade African American student who I had worked with once a week in a gifted pull-out program and who was bused to a school on the affluent side of town. This little guy scored at the ninety-ninth percentile on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test and was a very eager and creative problem-solver. I remember having to have some uncomfortable conversations with his first-grade teacher. There were some disciplinary issues and he had to “be good” in order to see Mrs. Rhodes on Wednesdays. I tried to explain that you would not take away special education services from a student and perhaps other alternatives should be explored.

As I talked about this student Mr. Golden asked more questions, “What services was he receiving in second grade?” Nothing really. Our district no longer provides weekly pull-out programs. With limited resources and the emphasis on No Child Left Behind, the solution was that bright students who wanted specialized services could attend the gifted magnet school. Mr. Golden became increasingly more interested in this child and wanted to meet him. I felt obligated to arrange for Mr. Golden to interview this child. I began to feel increasingly guilty that I may have let this child fall through the cracks.

When I looked up this child’s home address, it was literally four blocks directly west of my office within the gifted magnet school. I had never met the parents. I called and asked if I could stop by and introduce them to Mr. Golden. They opened up their home to us and we were able to learn much more about their son.

As a result of this home visit, the parents agreed to enroll their son in second grade at the gifted magnet school in January. As a second-grade student there, his curriculum was accelerated to the third-grade level. One of the second-grade projects was to write about a hero. He wrote that his dad was a hero because he was able to purchase their home for his family to be together.

This “little guy” went on to enjoy middle school and was the first person in their family to graduate from high school. He joined the Marines, earned a Bachelor’s Degree and works with computers. The parents have told me that having their son at the gifted magnet school changed their lives too. When they interacted with the other parents at school events at the gifted magnet school, they wanted their son to be proud of them. His mother had dropped out of Chicago Public Schools at the age of sixteen. She told me that she thought that she might have been kind of smart. She went on to earn her GED, a certificate for becoming a licensed cosmetologist and now works as a tax preparer. Her husband looked within his place of employment for opportunities and is now a member of the management team. The father told me that once their child was at the gifted magnet school, the discipline phone calls came to a stop and he and his wife had more time to focus on their own careers. A few years ago I received a text from the parents to let me know that they had purchased a different home in a more affluent neighborhood.

So, why didn’t these parents accept the invitation for their child to start first grade at the gifted magnet school? I still don’t know for sure. I haven’t felt comfortable enough to ask the question. The parents were in their early to mid-twenties when they would have received the invitation. They had two other children living in the home. The two boys were attending a “nice” school in a “nice” neighborhood. The little girl was still at home. I was informed that the older brother was having serious discipline issues at the time the invitation would have arrived.

I think that those of us who care so deeply about providing gifted education programs sometimes forget that there is a huge world of issues for families to deal with outside of how to get into the gifted programs that we work so hard to create. I learned that simply sending an invitation isn’t enough. The importance of providing opportunities for all children to be properly identified is crucial, but our jobs are not finished at that point. We must continue to advocate for providing the necessary social and emotional supports to students and families in order for true success to be attained.

The views expressed herein represent the opinion of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Editor’s note: A version of this blog will appear in an upcoming issue of Teaching for High Potential.

1. There is a new player looking to influence education outcomes in Toledo City Schools and he’s got a lot of green stuff to blaze his trail, he says. Pete Kadens is a graduate of a suburban high school near Toledo who is, apparently, a filthy rich retired entrepreneur currently living in Chicago and looking at a prescription for positive change. To me, if I may put it bluntly, his five-point plan features only two points that directly impact K-12 classrooms, and one of those is peripheral at best. Kadens is providing seed money to a nascent non-profit called HOPE Toledo that looks to grow more capital from other donors and seems to have 420 percent support from the new Toledo mayor. (Toledo Blade, 1/8/19)

2. Seniors in Lakota Local Schools were excluded from the “universal” distribution of laptops to high schoolers, which occurred on Monday, due to the fact that they only have one semester left of school. Proof positive that none of this was very well thought out if I do say so myself. Everyone else seems pretty excited to have reached the 20^th Century. (Middletown Journal-News, 1/8/19)

3. The headline of this piece looking at the first 2019 meeting of Lorain City Schools’ elected board, says that the district “feels the pressure of academic distress”. It was probably too complicated for the paper to say that that the adults with an entrenched interest in status quo are feeling the pressure of the efforts to change that status quo. Which is what’s happening. But maybe that actually means those efforts are working. (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 1/7/19)

4. Back in the real world, tiny Newbury Township Local Schools will be seeking a merger with another neighboring district, having determined that 340 kids is too small a student body to be efficiently served going forward. Some very interesting numbers are provided in this piece explaining the decision. Other small districts across the state should take notice. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1/8/19)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox (in case you want to clear out the smoke by signing up for such a newsletter)? Subscribe by clicking here.

A month ago, a prominent philanthropist described today’s education reform climate to me as “The Empire Strikes Back.” I had to acknowledge that 2018 capped off an extraordinary run for opponents of education reform. If only the American public understood how high the stakes are as we enter 2019.

Let’s recap some history. After A Nation at Risk appeared in 1983, America entered a three-decade era of initiatives aimed at boosting the effectiveness of our K–12 schools:

• In the 1980s and 1990s, many states put grade-level standards and criterion-referenced tests in place to boost and monitor student learning, especially in the primary grades.
• In the 1990s, the passage of charter, open enrollment, and voucher laws began to bring choices, innovation, and competition to the education mainstream. The charter movement in particular fostered diverse approaches to teaching and learning by empowering educators to assume direct responsibility for creating and leading autonomous public schools. 
• In the 2000s, the focus turned to holding schools accountable. The Federal No Child Left Behind Act raised awareness of stark, enduring inequities by revealing large, persistent achievement gaps between different subpopulations. NCLB also sought to drive school improvement via a prescribed series of interventions.  
• Between 2008 and 2015, that drive took new forms with the enactment of state teacher evaluation laws, the Race to the Top program, and greater emphasis on early childhood education.

This sequence of energetic reforms lost steam as controversy arose over the Common Core State Standards and their accompanying tests. There was broad, spirited grassroots push back against “nationalizing” education, which the U.S. Constitution has entrusted to the states. The pendulum had swung too far.   

Thirty-six years after A Nation at Risk, the country has come a long way. In the primary grades, American students have made significant strides in reading and math as documented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP data also show some narrowing of achievement gaps between white, black, and Hispanic students. High school graduation rates have reached much higher levels—and the six-year college graduation rate has risen as well.

Today, education reform is turning away from nationalization and back towards greater state and community ownership of education. That’s mostly healthy—so long as we don’t discard the baby along with the bathwater. That’s the current battle.  

Over the past few years, the teachers unions and their allies have assembled a broad coalition, stoked by such people as Jitu Brown with the Journey for Justice Alliance, Diane Ravitch with the Network for Public Education, and Greg Jobin-Leeds with the Schott Foundation for Public Education. For instance, in Jobin-Leeds’s 2016 book, When We Fight, We Win!, he glorifies Karen Lewis, long-time head of the Chicago Teachers Union, for her take-no-prisoners war with that city’s mayor, its board of education, and the charter schools that the district authorizes. Though Chicago has sustained impressive system-wide gains, that hasn’t deterred defenders of the ancient regime from attacking reforms.

If the anti-reform coalition has its way, America will stop using test scores to evaluate performance, halt interventions into failing schools, and roll back the emphasis on performance and accountability. We will throw far more funding at schools that serve low-income neighborhoods without any means of making sure that it’s spent effectively. Such a rollback threatens to return America to where it was in 1983, even as we try to adjust to serving a greater diversity of students than ever before.

The stakes are high. In 2016, there were 72.4 million children under the age of eighteen growing up in America. Almost thirty million of them were living in low-income homes. On every measure, the achievement gaps between low-income students and their middle- to upper-income peers remain stark. That same year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 31 percent of children under age eighteen were growing up in homes with a single parent.  

In 2014, Education Week reported that the under-eighteen population became “majority minority” for the first time. Since then, most births have been among families of color. Add continued immigration and we see that American communities of all kinds are being reshaped by families of many different ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds.

As these statistics indicate, America’s school-age population has become incredibly heterogeneous. We have a more sophisticated, authoritative body of science and knowledge than ever before on which to design and deliver breakthrough teaching-and-learning options. To meet twenty-first-century realities, our public education systems must continue to transform themselves in ways that support a variety of distinctive, high-quality options for all students. But they must do so in ways that strengthen community ownership, embolden educators to lead, and equip parents to make informed choices.

In a December commentary entitled “Reform on the horizon,” Andy Smarick asked reformers to celebrate the beginning of a new era of education change, which will be led by “bright, enthused and civic-minded citizens.” As we start the new year, I share Smarick’s optimism for the future, but sincerely hope that we won’t forget all the progress that we have made and the lessons that we have learned. We simply can’t afford to remake the wheel right now.

With the right focus and priorities, 2019 can be the year that education reformers double down in our efforts to reinvent public education for the twenty-first century, not the year that we allow the clock to be turned back thirty-five years. But counteracting the forces seeking to set us back will require tough-minded advocacy, courage, and the conviction that we must steer a deliberate course towards continued improvement that gives central priority to expanding public school choice.

Benjamin J. Lindquist is president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools, a non-profit membership organization that serves 255 public charter schools with 123,000 students statewide.