| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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Jeff Murray

2.27.2026

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News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. Just sayin’.

Columbus-based Nationwide Children’s Hospital is featured in this AP story, touting the literacy screenings they have added to their standard pediatric development checkup roster, starting around age 3, in a number of NCH facilities around the state. Based on the results, hospital-based literacy coordinators follow up with a literacy plan personalized to each child, highlighting areas that need more practice and providing tips and tools to help parents boost reading skills ahead of kindergarten. Interesting stuff. (Associated Press, 2/25/26)
State Senator Kyle Koehler published an op-ed in the Dayton Daily News yesterday touting the benefits of Senate Bill 328, of which he is the primary sponsor. Among other things, he writes, the bill will “require the Department of Education and Workforce to develop professional skills standards aligned to the essential workplace skills needed by employers” and will make sure that schools are working to inform and prepare students for pathways into the workforce starting as early as middle school. (Dayton Daily News, 2/26/26) Philanthropic organizations are also working to help Ohio students get on the pathway to a profitable career. Here’s a look at our friends from Learn to Earn Dayton, currently celebrating a $1.5 million grant from the Pathways Impact Fund to expand their career-connected-learning efforts to schools in Springfield and Middletown. “This isn’t about adding another program to schools,” said Learn to Earn CEO Stacy Schweikhart. “It’s about realigning how schools, employers, and higher education work together to ensure that students have the skills — and connections — that they need to thrive as adults.” Love it! (Dayton Daily News, 2/26/26)

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Policy Priority:

School Funding

Topics:

Jessica Baghian

2.27.2026

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Earlier this month, I was having a conversation with a state leader I respect about why adoption of high-quality curriculum materials has been slow in their state. “Why not use the muscle of the state agency to speed things up?” I asked.

“Because my state isn’t like Louisiana,” they said. “We’re a local-control state. I can’t just tell districts what to do.”

I’ve heard versions of that sentence many times over the years, and it comes from a very real place. Our education system is structured around local control. School boards run their districts; they decide how they spend their money, and they make decisions about curriculum and staffing.

But somewhere along the way, “local control” has become shorthand for “there’s not much the state can do.” And when that happens, it can unintentionally limit a state’s ability to drive change at the classroom level.

So today, let’s debunk the myth of local control.

States need to set a clear vision for kids

Many state agencies do not believe it is their role to have an instructional opinion. They see themselves as administrators of programs, distributors of funds, and writers of memos.

State leaders are policymakers, not just administrators of programs. The truth is that state leaders can respect local control and believe it’s their job to change the classroom experience.

Setting a clear vision at the state level means getting specific about the classroom experience you want for students. It means being able to answer questions like:

When you walk into a third grade English language arts classroom, what should be happening? Are students engaging with grade-level texts and writing about them in ways that build knowledge over time?
Are districts using strong, coherent instructional materials? Do teachers have the training and support to teach those materials well?

It’s not the state’s role to dictate which novel gets read on a Tuesday morning; that’s where local control comes in. But the state absolutely has a responsibility to define what strong instruction looks like, ensure materials meet that bar, and build the support systems that help teachers deliver it well.

Once you can articulate your vision, you repeat it. Over and over again. A colleague of mine used to say that you have to say something 17 times before it really sticks. Clarity, simplicity, and repetition are powerful and deeply underestimated in system leadership. If you want districts to align, they have to hear the same message in every speech, every grant application, every guidance document, every accountability conversation.

When you know where you are going, you can begin aligning your levers around that vision.

Levers, not mandates

Every state is a local control state. And still, every state has levers they can pull to improve outcomes for kids.

Those who fall victim to the myth of local control assume that the only way for states to influence districts is to tell them what to do, which local control bans. But mandates aren’t the only way to lead.

States have access to a powerful arsenal of tools they can use to assert a point of view—from funding and accountability systems to guidance, professional learning, and communications—that shape what districts prioritize and what students ultimately experience. If you want to go deeper on what we mean by “levers,” we at Watershed Advisors have broken them down in a previous issue of our Delta newsletter.

The vast majority of people I’ve met who work in public education are doing it because they want to help kids learn. States don’t need to force districts to make the right choice; they need to make the right choice, the easy choice.

Louisiana wasn’t special. We had no magical power over districts—we had to convince everyone to get on board with our vision, just like everyone else does.

Our accountability system was one of the levers we used to do that. Federal law requires states to identify the bottom 5 percent of schools for intervention. But we knew that far more schools were underperforming than just the lowest-ranking ones. So instead, we identified the bottom 40 percent and built a clear, statewide plan around what strong instruction should look like.

We called that plan Louisiana Believes, and we repeated it—over and over and over again (at least 17 times!). If you worked in Louisiana education, you knew what we believed.

Then we aligned our systems around that vision. We created teacher leader roles in every school, launched a School Support Institute that met three times a year for schools needing the most support, and hosted a summer Teacher Leader Summit that eventually grew to 7,000 educators, building a shared language around high-quality materials. We aligned professional learning, support, and—maybe most importantly—funding through Super App.

None of those efforts overrode local control. Districts still made decisions, principals still led their buildings, and teachers still taught their classrooms. We did not have authority other state leaders don’t have. We had a clear vision, and we leaned on all the levers of the state.

Editor’s note: This was first published in the Watershed Advisors’ “Delta” newsletter.

Policy Priority:

Topics:

Robert Pondiscio

2.26.2026

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In my last post, responding to Holly Korbey’s call to study successful schools more closely, I argued that education’s deeper problem isn’t discovering success. It’s sustaining it. Again and again, we celebrate high-performing schools at their peak, only to watch—or more pertinently fail to notice—when they drift, decline, or disappear altogether within a decade. This raises a significant and uncomfortable question: If the high-fliers we celebrate and seek to emulate don’t stay aloft, were they really that good to begin with?

When successful schools lose their momentum, the usual suspects are leadership turnover, staff churn, demographic change, political conflict, or the quiet assumption that the success was fragile all along. But many of these factors, particularly staff and leadership changes, are not flaws in our system, they’re features. The average superintendent typically lasts little more than a single contract cycle. Principals tend to remain only about four years in a given school, with even shorter stints in high-poverty settings. Roughly a third of teachers leave the classroom within five years. Any school improvement model that only works if the adults stay in place isn’t a model—it’s catching lighting in a bottle. What ultimately distinguishes the schools that endure is not whether turnover happens, but whether effective practices have been institutionalized strongly enough to survive it.

Some analysts have begun to demonstrate this durability problem empirically. Chad Alderman recently asked a deceptively simple question: Do “good” schools stay good over time? He found that in Virginia, only half of the schools that were in the state’s top quartile of schools in 2004 remained there in 2024.

This suggests a thought exercise: If we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for? Not test scores. Not a charismatic principal. Not a compelling origin story. Those things can tell us a school is working now but clearly don’t predict if it will still be working years from now.

Let’s start by acknowledging that schools are not stable organizations occasionally disrupted by turnover. They are—or ought to be—organizations built to function despite turnover.

Before sketching what such a framework might look like, a note of humility is in order. What follows is best understood as a working hypothesis based on my observations and experience: an attempt to identify the institutional features that seem to appear, again and again, in the schools and systems whose results persist while others fade. If readers disagree, see omissions, or know of schools or districts that deserve closer study, I hope they’ll say so.

Durable schools tend to share a clearly defined instructional core. Not a “philosophy.” Not a mission statement. An operating system. They use common materials, sequence content deliberately, and define effective instruction in observable terms. New teachers are acculturated and trained into an existing model rather than invited to invent their own. Durability begins with instructional clarity.

If instructional clarity is the foundation, consistency is the structure. Schools that sustain results minimize variation in the things that matter most, particularly foundational literacy and numeracy instruction. They monitor whether the curriculum is actually delivered. They coach toward specific practices. When drift appears, they correct it.

Fragile systems rely on great teachers. Durable systems assume ordinary teachers and build routines strong enough to support them. Durable systems assume turnover and design accordingly.

One of the more revealing lessons I took from my reporting on Success Academy is that its results cannot plausibly be explained by stable staffing. Neither are they recruiting from elite colleges and universities. Teacher turnover in the network has long been substantial, in part because the demands placed on staff are unusually intense. Yet the network continued to produce unusually strong academic outcomes, even as it rapidly grew from a single school to more than fifty.

As I wrote in How the Other Half Learns:

The de facto model that has evolved is more like the U.S. Army or the Marines: a small and talented officer corps surrounded by enlisted men and women who do a tour, maybe two, then muster out, with new recruits reporting for duty. Teacher turnover, lack of experience and continuity, is widely assumed to be a problem, particularly in urban schools. But it’s never suggested that our military would be better if only soldiers stayed in uniform longer. So far, the relative inexperience of Success Academy teachers hasn’t seemed to compromise their effectiveness.

The lesson isn’t simply that this model works, but that its effectiveness depends on turning instructional expectations into organizational routines rather than individual discretion. In practice, this meant that first-year teachers were not improvising their own curriculum or instructional routines. Lessons were tightly sequenced, materials were standardized across the network, and instructional leaders conducted frequent classroom walkthroughs to ensure the model was being executed as designed. Consistency was not aspirational. It was operational.

Nearly a decade after my reporting, Success Academy’s academic results remain consistently strong, suggesting the model was not a temporary reform-era peak but an institutional system capable of sustaining performance despite high staff turnover. That said, its founder, architect, and culture-keeper, Eva Moskowitz, is still in place, meaning the ultimate test of its durability is still to come.

Moreover, I don’t think Success Academy’s model is universally portable. New York City is a magnet for ambitious young people willing to endure an intense professional environment for a few years. It’s far from certain that the same dynamic would obtain in smaller or less attractive labor markets—Memphis, Buffalo, or Youngstown, for example. Staff churn would likely be fatal in such places.

Looking back, education reform spent decades searching for the miracle school—the visionary leader, the transformative model, the “It’s Being Done” proof point that dramatic improvement was possible. We found many such schools. What we rarely built were institutions designed to sustain their promising results. Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary.

If you know of a school or district that has quietly sustained strong results for a decade or more—not just a brief surge, but genuine institutional consistency, particularly school or districts like Steubenville and Success Academy that are succeeding with students who are statistically less likely to be successful—I’d like to hear about them. Durable success, not temporary breakthroughs, is what the field most needs to find, study, and emulate. In her initial Substack piece, my pal Holly Korbey noted that Kobe Bryant studied Michael Jordan to raise his game, so educators should do the same. I agree, but give me John Stockton, Vince Carter, Cal Ripken, or Lou Gehrig as models: guys who were not just good but who managed to stay that way for a long, long time.

Policy Priority:

Topics:

Accountability & Testing

Evidence-Based Learning

Dale Chu

2.26.2026

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If the medieval period was the age of faith, and the Enlightenment qualifies as the age of reason, what era are we living in now? Princeton’s Robbie George has an answer: the age of feeling. Education is no exception, where instinct, ideology, and emotion increasingly outweigh standards, measurement, and outcomes. It’s an era where, as Seinfeld’s George Costanza once put it, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Conviction has become a substitute for truth, creating a permission structure for policy driven more by narrative, followership, and vibe than evidence.

Consider graduation rates. They have climbed steadily in many states, even as national assessments show students struggling with basic reading and math. Rather than treat that divergence as a warning sign, policymakers often redefine success, dilute standards, or shift attention to less exacting measures. The appeal is not to what students demonstrably know, but to measures that support what feels good.

George frames the dilemma this way:

In the age of feeling, people will identify what’s right and therefore to be done or permissible to do with their wants, desires, feelings… So the truth, how conveniently, lines up with what they want. For figures like Plato and Aristotle, you don’t figure out whether something is worth doing or should be done or even may be done by figuring out whether you want to do it… The whole point of inquiry is to subject one’s feelings to rational scrutiny so that you can determine whether an impulse or a feeling or a passion that you have is one that should be acted on because it’s in line with human flourishing, or ultimately out of whack with it.

That distinction—between aligning truth with desire and subjecting desire to scrutiny—exposes a persistent tension in education: What we feel is right can override what we know is effective. The pattern appears again and again—in how we teach children to read, how we interpret test scores, and how we judge school models that generate strong academic outcomes but defy our assumptions and ideological preferences.

A few years ago, the New Yorker chronicled the rise of “vibes-based literacy,” an approach that emphasizes student interest and guessing at unfamiliar words over systematic phonics instruction:

It’s startling to realize that panels of experts had to argue the case that teaching children to read involves careful attention to the relationships between sounds and letters, or enhancing their vocabulary and knowledge of various subjects. It’s stranger still that, in many school systems and for many years, this was the losing argument.

Decades of research have identified reading models that consistently raise student achievement. Programs such as Direct Instruction and Success for All have produced strong results in rigorous studies, particularly for disadvantaged students. Yet scripted curricula frequently meet resistance because they constrain adult discretion and challenge long-held assumptions about how classrooms should feel. In an age that prizes autonomy and intuition, even a strong record of success can be discounted if it conflicts with what feels right.

If something as foundational as how children learn to read can be guided more by philosophical convictions about “natural” learning and professional orthodoxies than by evidence, it should prompt deeper reflection about the teaching profession itself. Carl Hendrick, a veteran educator and researcher, describes how he spent five years teaching without understanding how learning actually happens—a gap shared by many educators. And yet, as the adage goes, many refuse to let the facts get in the way of their opinions, no matter how wrong those opinions might be.

That same dynamic pollutes the debate around standardized testing. When results disappoint, they are often softened, reframed, or dismissed rather than confronted. Diane Ravitch once remarked, “The most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.” It’s a specious sentiment—superficially appealing but substantively meaningless, offering no data and no insight. To be sure, no exam is perfect, and there are many ways to gauge student learning, but in the age of feeling, the mere belief that a test is unfair or flawed becomes sufficient justification to turn a blind eye to measurable outcomes.

Even when a school model consistently delivers demonstrable results, “feelings”—broadly understood—can still override objectivity. Take Success Academy. In the latest round of state exams, students had pass rates of 92.5 percent in English language arts and 96.2 percent in math—nearly double the proficiency rates of their public school peers. Black and Hispanic students at Success outpaced their city counterparts by similarly wide margins, with proficiency rates exceeding 90 percent, while citywide rates hovered near the mid‑50s. Their students also excel on AP exams and the SAT. Yet the network’s success has not quelled its naysayers, whose objections are often rooted in perception or ideological unease—even when the most cited concern, student selection and attrition, does little to diminish academic outcomes. Success Academy’s planned expansion to Florida has raised these critics’ hackles, underscoring how strongly feeling can override everything else.

There is something seductive about equating what we feel with what is right. But it undermines the pursuit of truth, which, as Robbie George says, must be achieved through scrutiny and inquiry. When a culture normalizes the idea that conviction equals truth, schooling becomes uniquely vulnerable. If education is to serve its purpose, we must recover that commitment to truth because reality, however inconvenient, eventually asserts itself in what students know, what they can do, and the world they must face.

Policy Priority:

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction

Grade inflation is having a bit of a moment. The most recent round of recriminations came via the scandal at the University of California-San Diego, when the math department reported that one in eight incoming students needed remediation—sometimes at the grade school level—even though those students got A’s in their high school math classes.

Then, a few weeks ago, Jeff Denning published a new study, featured in the Hechinger Report, showing the negative long-term consequences of low grading standards. As grading got easier, students learned less, they graduated at lower rates, and even earned less as adults.

None of this is news to those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, as grade inflation is a topic with which we’ve been obsessed for many years. Way back in the pre-Covid days, we commissioned a couple of great studies from academic superstar Seth Gershenson. One looked at high school grade inflation trends over a ten-year period, and another looked at the relationship between teachers’ grading standards and student achievement.

What Seth found, in line with other studies, is that grading is indeed getting easier over time, and that teachers who are tougher graders help their students learn more—not just in their own classes, but even when those students move on to the next grade level.

(This, by the way, points to two different definitions of grade inflation. Once is about changes over time—how it’s gotten easier to get, say, an A than before. The other is about low grading standards in general—that it’s simply too easy to get an A.)

And Seth’s studies were before the Covid-era craze around “grading reform,” a.k.a. “grading for equity,” which brought some bonkers practices to thousands of American schools, like the “no zeros” policy (giving students 50 out of 100 even if they didn’t turn in an assignment or show up for a test), or eliminating points for homework or class discussion, or giving kids unlimited exam retakes. All of which can easily lead to inflated grades unless implemented with (rare) countervailing reforms to keep grading standards high.

None of this is good for kids. If it’s super easy to get an A, most students won’t put in much effort (despite what the ridiculously naïve “intrinsic motivation” people might tell you). And if it’s too easy to get at least a D, some students won’t put in any effort at all. And effort is most of the ball game when it comes to student learning. During class, when doing homework, and when studying for tests, kids have to actually try and exert intellectual muscle. It’s a cliché to say that learning doesn’t happen by osmosis, but it happens to be true.

Nor is this a happy situation for teachers. Those who become known as tough graders are rarely rewarded for it. If anything, they will hear complaints from students and parents, which might lead to complaints from administrators. We don’t want to hurt our snowflakes’ chances at getting into top colleges! Or, at the other end of the academic spectrum, we don’t want to keep marginal students from graduating from high school at all. “Just go ahead and give the kid an A, just go ahead and pass the kid”—so teachers say they hear too often from their principals.

Is this a solvable problem?

We know from Seth’s analyses that the big variation in grading standards is not school to school, but teacher to teacher. It’s akin to variations in teacher effectiveness writ large, with the greatest disparities happening in classrooms right next to each other, rather than across schools or across the state.

What that means, then, is that school and district leaders are well positioned to do something about this issue. They can set very clear standards for how grading should work schoolwide and districtwide. They can have teachers grade papers and tests and assignments of their peers’ students, and vice versa, to encourage more honest, accurate, and tougher grading. They could look at data from teacher to teacher and school to school to see if grading standards are being applied evenly and consistently (by comparing student scores on external test with student grades).

But if you are a governor, a state superintendent, or a legislator and you want to do something about this problem, what levers do YOU tug?

This gets harder.

Of course, there’s testing. Many of us reformers believe that test scores are the antidote to grade inflation because at least those scores can be trusted and are less susceptible to inflation. (Unless states decide to make their own tests easier or give most schools an A or B in their accountability system, which, unfortunately, is also becoming common. So states should start by not doing that!)

But test scores are not as effective as we’d like to believe when it comes to communicating to parents how well their children are learning. Years of research by Learning Heroes demonstrates that parents simply trust grades more than test scores. So even if the state reports that their child is not proficient, parents tend to think their son or daughter is doing fine as long as they are getting good grades from teachers. And most parents don’t know that, because of grade inflation, a B is no longer all that high a grade—or a sign that their kid is on grade level or on track.

So what else might states do about grade inflation?

One idea is to get rid of any incentives in state policy that might encourage inflated grades. I’m thinking about college scholarships that are based primarily on student GPAs, as happens in Florida and Georgia. Or direct admission policies that admit students directly into state universities based only on their high school GPAs. These are undoubtedly well intended, but they create clear disincentives for schools and teachers to be tough graders.
Another idea would be to ensure that teacher evaluation systems, where they still exist, credit teachers for being tough graders.
There’s also transparency. Cincinnati Public Schools recently adopted a policy, for example, that will show students’ test scores next to their grades on their report cards. Maybe this will at least help parents know about and notice discrepancies. Perhaps states could mandate that all districts do this or offer incentives to systems to try it.
States might do the same thing for teachers, sending them data showing how tough a grader they are compared to other teachers teaching at the same level or teaching the same courses at the school, district, and state level. I bet a lot of teachers aren’t even aware that they are easy graders.
And states could try to ban “no zeros” policies and the like, though I’m not really sure how that would work. But at minimum, they could put out guidance to schools districts about the importance of high grading standards. And when intervening in chronically-low-performing schools, such as the bottom 5 percent of schools identified under ESSA, they could make sure that the school’s grading standards are something their teams look at.

Grade inflation is a large and growing problem, one that’s readily understandable by parents and the public but needs attention and effort if we’re going to turn it around.

Editor’s note: This was first published on Mike's Substack, SCHOOLED.

Policy Priority:

Topics:

Curriculum & Instruction