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1. Look, I’m trying very hard not to succumb to the “crisis” narrative some folks are pushing in regard to the elected board of Columbus City Schools. There are, in my estimation, many opportunists among them whose agenda is anything but the improvement of academic outcomes for students. And indeed some of these folks are responsible for creating the issues the board is trying (admittedly not very effectively right now) to address. But man, the evidence in their defense is really thin. To wit: We are told in this piece that Columbus City Schools would like to expand what is termed one of its “greatest academic successes” to more students. It’s CTE-related, but that’s not the point. The point is that this “great success” is achieved by a mere 28 students (out of two giant urban high school senior classes) each year. Expanding is a good thing, obvs, but if that tiny positive outcome ranks as one of your best efforts, dear leaders, you have very little ammunition to fight those haters with. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/25/24)
   
   

2. Speaking of which, Columbus City Schools officials have not, says Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, complied with the requirement to bus charter, private, and STEM school students who were previously declared impractical to transport while everyone awaits the resolution the state’s lawsuit against the district. “Every day of inaction from Columbus Schools puts parents between a rock and a hard place,” he says. Thus, Yost filed an emergency motion in the Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday to force that transportation to begin immediately. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/25/24) Fordham’s Aaron Churchill, interviewed in the OCJ, is not buying the argument that there are appreciably more private school students this year needing transportation due to the expansion of EdChoice vouchers to near-universal status. “They’ve been required to bus students to private schools” for a long time, he says, “whether they’ve been on a voucher or not.” So “there hasn’t been a change from a busing perspective.” That Aaron—so practical. You can always count on him to debunk the false narratives with the utmost in logical economy. (Ohio Capital Journal, 9/27/24) The Supreme Court gave Columbus City Schools until Monday to formally respond to Yost’s motion. The district released an informal response late yesterday, saying they are “working to identify routes” on which to transport approximately 120 specific students and are “trying to minimize the negative impact” that doing so “will have on other students.” (CW Columbus, 9/26/24)
   
   

3. There’s transportation trouble of a different stripe in Cincinnati City Schools right now. Officials from the city police department and the city transit authority spoke up at an elected school board meeting this week, listing a series of recent incidents in and around transit hubs that these officials say are the direct result of too many high school students using their district-issued bus passes to congregate, get out of control, and cause trouble after school. This beef between unions agencies over transporting high schoolers goes back a few years, as the piece points out, and does not seem likely to be sorted out by the adults in charge any time soon. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/26/24)
    
4. And staying in the Queen City area for our final clip of the week: Leaders of Seven Hills School, a popular and well-regarded private school in the bucolic Cincinnati suburbs (so bougie it doesn’t take EdChoice Scholarships at the moment), have decided to close one of their two decades-old campuses and consolidate operations in one to-be-expanded campus. In this piece, they explain how they came to this conclusion and how the transition will be done over the next three years. Will every family love it? Probably not. But they’ve all got plenty of time to either get used to the change or find another option, and the school’s leaders have been thoughtful and deliberate about communicating the need for the change and providing information and clarity for families through the process. Sounds like the ideal way to do a school closure/consolidation to me…even if you can’t win everybody over in the end. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/26/24)

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“Demography is destiny” is a cliché, but that doesn’t make it untrue. In a world filled with uncertainty, one thing that America’s schools can bank on is fewer students to go around. As a Bellwether analysis released earlier this month explained, birth rates are down 14 percent over the past decade, and that already means shrinking enrollment in America’s elementary and middle schools, with declines coming soon in high schools, too.

Yes, the Covid-era shift to homeschools and other options is a factor, but that’s dwarfed by America’s baby bust, which has been particularly dramatic in many of our big cities. For instance, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles have had roughly a quarter of schools show declines of 20 percent or more between the 2019–20 and 2021–22 years.

Traditionally, when confronted with difficult challenges such as these, district leaders have dragged their feet. There’s an obvious course of action, but like the rest of us, they know that closing schools is unpopular and divisive. Yet, in some communities, the status quo has become increasingly untenable—costly, inefficient, and educationally ineffective.

In Chicago, where 35 percent of seats are now unfilled, nearly three in five school buildings are underutilized.

In Milwaukee, at least forty schools are “significantly underenrolled” (though that hasn’t stopped the district from requesting a 30 percent increase in property taxes).

In Broward County, Florida, sixty-seven schools are now operating at less than 70 percent capacity.

The same can be said for forty-eight schools in Fort Worth.

And so on and so forth.

Ample research makes clear that forcing students to switch schools can be traumatic and even harmful, especially if they end up attending lower-performing campuses. Yet closing an underenrolled school is beneficial when displaced students land in better alternatives. And of course, the primary purpose of most closures isn’t just to help this generation of students. It’s to ensure that innumerable children in future generations are also well-served.

That’s because keeping underenrolled schools on life support is expensive in both dollar and educational terms. For example, Chicago Public Schools now spends nearly $70,000 on each student who attends Douglass High School, which is currently operating at an astonishing 4 percent of its intended capacity. Districts operate on a fixed pool of funds, so maintaining underenrolled buildings drains dollars from all of a district’s schools, not just those with low student counts.

Ultimately, waiting to close a school doesn’t make pulling off the Band-Aid any less painful. It just means more wasted resources, less to go around, and more kids in desolate schools.

In the face of enrollment declines that won’t reverse for decades—if ever—common sense suggests that schools that are both underenrolled and underperforming should be the first to close.

We wondered how many such schools might exist. And we suspected that local policymakers and district officials could use a bit of cover to jumpstart these tough conversations. So, to that end, we partnered with Brookings Institution fellow Sofoklis Goulas (whose prior work on enrollment decline is well-known) to identify public schools that were both underperforming and increasingly underenrolled. The result is our latest study, Underachieving and Underenrolled: Chronically Low-Performing Schools in the Post-Pandemic Era.

To identify low-performing schools, Dr. Goulas relied on states’ own judgments, using Comprehensive Support and Improvement designations (CSI), a provision in federal law requiring states to identify:

• The lowest-performing 5 percent of their Title I schools using a set of state-defined indicators.


• High schools with graduation rates below 67 percent.


• Title I schools with very low-performing subgroups of students that did not improve after being previously identified for “additional targeted support and improvement.”

States differ vastly in how they interpret these requirements, so it doesn’t work to make cross-state comparisons. Those differences also suggest caution in interpreting the quality of these schools, as we discuss further below.

To identify schools where enrollment had declined, Dr. Goulas looked at enrollment changes between 2019–20 and 2022–23, building on his previous work. For the purposes of the study, a decline of 20 percent or greater is considered “substantial.”

So what did the analysis reveal?

1. Nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States—or roughly 5,100 schools—has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline in the wake of Covid-19 (i.e., between 2019 and 2023).


2. Schools that were identified by their states as chronically low performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.


3. Nationally, close to 500 schools that states have identified as chronically low performing have experienced a substantial enrollment decline in the wake of the pandemic.

Readers can find in the report’s appendix a list identifying the 500 chronically underperforming schools where enrollment has declined substantially. But keep in mind a couple of caveats.

First, it isn’t a “bad schools list.” Frankly, we’re not fans of how some states designate their CSI schools, relying heavily on proficiency rates rather than year-over-year student-level growth. There might be some schools on the list with very low test scores but strong year-to-year growth. We would consider those good schools, not bad schools.

Second, we don’t know whether students in these communities have high-quality alternatives. Nor do we have any real insight into the condition of their facilities or the myriad logistical questions that would necessarily inform a decision regarding closure.

For these reasons and more, these 500 schools may or may not be strong candidates for closure (though in some cases, closure is likely to be the best course of action).

So if you are a parent, involved citizen/taxpayer, or local reporter looking into how closure decisions are (or aren’t) getting made, here's what we suggest that you do. Use the list to raise the following questions with district and state leaders:

1. When the time comes, what criteria will policymakers use to decide which schools will be closed?


2. What criteria do our state use to identify elementary and high schools for CSI? Do they include a measure of growth, in addition to proficiency? Do the criteria for high schools include anything other than graduation rates?


3. How does our state or district determine which schools are “underenrolled”?


4. What educational options exist for the students who currently attend these schools?

These are painful, politically fraught decisions, and we understand why district officials and local leaders often kick the school-closure can down the road for as long as they can. But many of them will eventually be forced to decide the fate of their half-empty buildings. What should inform that decision? To us, it’s clear: The foremost consideration is—within the resources available to us—what’s best for educating the students of this community?

Of the school choice options available to many U.S. families today, few embody the spirit of “power to the parents” quite like education savings accounts (ESAs). ESAs allow parents who opt out of public schools to use taxpayer funds to purchase the educational resources of their choice for their children, ranging from private school tuition to homeschooling supplies to after-school tutoring and beyond. Advocates insist that ESAs represent a “new frontier in education,” where parents can handcraft their child’s academic journey à la carte, without navigating the constraints of the public school system—opening the door to hybrid homeschooling, microschools, and other versions of “unbundled learning.”

It sounds promising in theory, but there’s a big hitch: It is impossible to tie à la carte services to whether kids are actually learning anything. Some may try to deem this a non-issue issue, contending that “accountability to parents” is enough. But when taxpayer funds are involved, that can’t be the only answer. The reason we pitch in to pay for public education is that all of us benefit when all children—not just our own kids—are well-schooled and can access the knowledge needed to make their way successfully through life, ultimately ensuring the prosperity and security of the larger society.

To be clear, it’s quite possible, and in our view essential, to hold private schools accountable when parents use ESAs to pay tuition (which so far is how most of the money is, in fact, used). In a future post, we will tackle how such accountability can and should work for these schools. State lawmakers can also insist on an evaluation of an ESA program as a whole—which should include testing a sample of participating students and comparing their progress with similar peers.

But what sorts of quality control measures might prove feasible for à la carte services—in other words, everything ESAs can fund besides private school tuition? To begin to address this question, let’s examine the regulatory measures that some of these programs use to ensure basic accountability, such as protecting against waste, fraud, and abuse.

A look at financial protections

Like any taxpayer-funded initiative, ESAs can’t operate successfully without some guardrails. Of course, any facility serving children must ensure their physical safety, adhering to fire and health codes. But programs must also take steps to prevent vendors from defrauding families or wasting public money on services with no educational value—and they must ensure that parents can’t misuse their allotted funding.

Receipt submissions

States can help prevent fraud by designating an office to which participating families must submit receipts for their ESA purchases. This can take two forms: The state can ask parents to pay for their educational expenditures upfront, then provide reimbursements—or the state can distribute prepaid debit cards for families to use. Both have pluses and minuses. For example, asking parents to front the costs for their ESA purchases discourages wasteful spending, but it may also inhibit families with minimal disposable income from fully participating in the program.

In practice, however, this oversight system has led to major problems. One such example can be found in Arizona, where the department reviewing these receipts became so severely backlogged that wasted funds went unnoticed for months.

Limits on prepaid debit cards

Along with a requirement to submit receipts, Arizona and other states have tried restricting families’ prepaid debit cards so they can only be used with certain vendors or on particular products. (This is akin to health savings account cards that only work at pharmacies or similar establishments.) These limits help prevent parents from spending ESA money on non-educational expenses, which might otherwise remain undetected for months.

Yet this version, too, has shortcomings. Parents may find the list of vendors too restrictive, ESA offices may struggle to keep the provider list up-to-date, and vendors may inflate their prices knowing that families are limited in the sellers from which they can choose.

Online marketplaces

The most popular method to promote accountability in ESA programs is maintaining Amazon-style platforms to connect parents with vendors. Approved providers can list their goods and services on these online marketplaces, and families can peruse and purchase the products of their choice. Typically, these platforms are developed and managed by third parties, like ClassWallet in New Hampshire or MyScholarShop in Florida.

This approach offers distinct benefits. It eliminates the need for state staff to manually review receipts, and because parents can leave reviews of the products they have purchased, these platforms offer another layer of transparency for families.

But what about results?

These measures help to prevent waste and fraud, but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter: holding providers accountable for improving student learning and other important outcomes. So far, unfortunately, it appears that this form of accountability may simply be out of reach for à la carte services.

That’s because of what we might call the “à la carte accountability conundrum.” It is all but impossible to measure the true effectiveness of products from ESA vendors (again, save for private schools) because of the varied and fragmented nature of these offerings. With every child using a unique set of tools, it’s extraordinarily difficult to determine which specific services directly impact students’ academic performance—and how effective they are. Variations in the quality, duration, and frequency of these services make attributing academic gains to any single factor even harder. As a result, trying to draw clear connections between specific ESA purchases and measurable outcomes like test scores feels like an exercise in futility.

We learned this lesson two decades ago, when the federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act included a Supplemental Educational Services initiative, affording parents voucher-style choices among tutoring programs. Though that program was limited to tutoring in reading and math, evaluators struggled to identify the impact of a few dozen hours of instruction from different vendors on students’ test scores. Now expand that problem to the ever-growing universe of expenses funded by ESAs, and results-based accountability becomes even tougher to gauge and harder to do anything about.

Is there a solution? Today, probably not. But there might be alternatives. One option is to consider offering low-income and working-class families enrichment savings accounts instead of education savings accounts. These funds would not be designed to replace schools but to supplement them—helping children take part in sports, the arts, summer camps, and more. Such a program wouldn’t be paid for from existing education budgets but could be a brand-new expense, perhaps funded at the federal level. These accounts might be kept small, maybe $500 or $1,000 per child. There would be no expectation that the funds would boost academic learning because their purpose would be to close the “enrichment gap,” not address core educational challenges. All low-income and working-class families would be eligible to receive this type of ESA, not just those opting out of their public schools.

The idea of à la carte education, supercharged by education savings accounts, has captured the imagination of school choice advocates far and wide. No doubt families (especially those already homeschooling) welcome the “free money,” and elected officials are happy to reap the electoral rewards. But as a sustainable strategy to promote choice and innovation, publicly funded “unbundled learning” is hard to justify. Especially if we’re talking about large ESAs, directing tens of thousands of dollars a year to families with two or three children, taxpayers will sooner or later demand to know what they are getting for the investment. The answer will inevitably be “we don’t know.” That’s just not good enough.

Houston’s local ABC news affiliate recently ran a report that the Houston Independent School District, Texas’s largest, has more than 2,000 uncertified teachers (out of a teaching force of approximately 10,000). The story implied that certified teachers in the district had been replaced by an unsavory crew that includes former paralegals, baristas, and fast-food workers—jobs that have “nothing to do with being in a classroom.” I found the suggestion to be offensive—not because I’m an erstwhile McDonald’s cashier, but as a former teacher and policymaker who’s long been skeptical of the historically tenuous link between certification and effectiveness. At the same time, it’s understandable for folks to ask questions about the spike in unlicensed teachers in Houston, which mirrors a shift that is happening statewide.

One reason for concern is that new research coming out of Texas Tech suggests teacher licensure does seem to matter. In a policy brief titled, “Amid Rising Number of Uncertified Teachers, Previous Classroom Experience Proves Vital in Texas,” Jacob Kirksey found that Texas students with new uncertified teachers lost up to four months of learning in reading and three months in math. (“New” is defined as “first few years of experience.”) The study also found significant disparities in the rates of dyslexia diagnoses for students with new uncertified teachers, as well as higher rates of absenteeism among students assigned to such teachers. However, the data also showed that if an uncertified teacher had classroom experience, say working as a paraprofessional or a substitute, students performed on par with those taught by certified teachers.

Notably, Kirksey’s study excluded charter schools, whose hiring practices have been imported into Houston by former Dallas and current HISD superintendent Mike Miles, himself a former charter leader (more on that below). Kirksey writes:

While the findings of this brief highlight significant challenges associated with uncertified teachers in traditional public schools, it is important to note that these trends do not hold for charter schools… Preliminary data suggest that absenteeism and underdiagnosis of dyslexia are less pronounced issues in charter schools. This contrast suggests that charter schools may be implementing additional supports or hiring practices that address some of the deficiencies associated with uncertified teachers.

The last sentence is worth underscoring, as charter schools often take an intentional approach to their selection and hiring processes. In Texas, charters are exempt from the requirement to hire certified teachers, but they post better academic results in Houston and nationally.

Districts would do well to emulate some of the best recruitment practices from charter schools to quickly screen out the worst unlicensed teachers and keep the best. Prime among these is the use of performance tasks—something Miles and his team took to heart in Dallas and now in Houston—that cut to the chase vis-à-vis the essential knowledge, skills, and mindsets required to lift student achievement. When I was principal of a high-performing charter school, a key feature of my teacher recruitment process was the presentation of a sample lesson—usually done in person, but sometimes remotely or as a pre-recorded video—that allowed me to see candidates interact with real students and to gauge their reflections on strengths and weaknesses. This step allowed me to expeditiously sort the wheat from the chaff.

While Miles had his hands on the tiller in Dallas, students there saw immediate and very large increases in student achievement after he installed a teacher appraisal system that clearly differentiated levels of performance by, in part, employing a “targeted distribution” screening to protect against inflation and non-rigorous evaluations. Miles prioritized keeping top-performing instructors and pushing out less-effective ones. Districts have traditionally not pursued this tack because of an absence of both will (i.e., establishment intransigence) and skill (i.e., robust teacher evaluation systems).

Not lacking for either, Miles now has his shoulder to the wheel in Houston and is borrowing heavily from the same winning playbook to ensure that every HISD classroom has an effective teacher, regardless of certification status. When I sat with him or other team members as they conducted interviews, I saw candidates put through a gauntlet of short and long scenarios, as well as performance tasks aligned with Miles’s vision of a “high-performance culture.” He minces no words in establishing an environment that attracts talent and, conversely, repels mediocrity. Not surprisingly, HISD’s recruitment and retention numbers suggest that his no-nonsense approach is working.

As an experienced educator and leader in both the traditional public and public charter systems, Miles’s record of raising student achievement is par excellence. Looking ahead, the media and others should trust but verify that Miles has a strategy in place to help all of the district’s teachers—certified or not, experienced or not—be effective or be swiftly shown the door.

Schools across the country spend billions of dollars each year on the construction and renovation of their facilities—everything from roof repairs to new science labs and from classroom expansions to whole new buildings. How do these expenditures impact students and the taxpaying community around schools? A recent report goes into fine-grained detail to try and answer those questions.

In most states, capital outlays for school construction and repair are primarily funded using bonds issued by each school district. Roughly three-fourths of those outlays are funded locally, with state aid kicking in less than 30 percent of funds for capital projects on average, and less than 5 percent in about half of states. Again, local funds are generally raised from bond sales, which must be approved by voters in local referenda usually held during a primary or general election. If passed, those bonds are eventually repaid with revenues from local property taxes. And while we know that state-level finance reforms have led to a more equal and progressive distribution of spending across districts, the distribution of capital outlays remains unequal. This study, by Barbara Biasi, Julien Lafortune, and David Schönholzer, identifies which investments in school facilities help students (via positive test score changes) and are valued by homeowners (via housing value increases).

To estimate the effect of bond passage, the analysts compile a dataset with information on school bond referenda (including the text of the ballot issue), student test scores, and house prices for twenty-nine states. Their dataset covers approximately 14,000 bond elections in those states and over 10,000 districts, which together enroll 71 percent of all students in the U.S. They use the SEDA database and information from state departments of education to gather district-level test score averages, ultimately developing a dataset with scores from 2003 to 2019 for nearly all states, and as early as 1994 for some states. They use House Price Index data at the Census tract level and map them to 2010 school district boundaries and then calculate the average house price index for each school district and year.

They set out to estimate the causal effect of bond authorization on scores and house prices. They aim to compare “treated” districts, meaning those that succeed in authorizing a bond, and “control” districts that propose a bond in the same year but fail to authorize it. But since school districts that succeed are different from those that don’t in unobservable ways, and since they want to avoid comparisons with districts that become treated at a later time, they exploit variation from close bond elections that had staggered timing. That is, they’re comparing districts that barely authorize a bond in a given year and cohort with districts that also propose a bond in the same cohort, but fail to authorize it, and in fact, never authorize any bonds in the future. They categorize spending into eight categories, including classroom construction and renovation, HVAC, technology/IT improvement or increases, athletic facilities, and more.

Results show that increased school capital spending raises both test scores and housing prices on average. Specifically, in districts that marginally approve a bond proposal (compared to those that marginally reject it), test scores are 0.04 standard deviation (SD) higher on average one to four years after a bond election; they are 0.08 SD higher five to eight years after; and 0.07 SD higher nine to twelve years after. Bond approval also generates increases in housing prices by 7 percent five to eight years after a bond election in the average district.

However, impacts vary widely across types of projects and types of districts. Spending on new basic infrastructure or upgrades to them (such as HVAC systems, plumbing, furnaces, or roofs) or on the removal of pollutants raises test scores but not house prices—possibly because these things are not “visible” to homeowners without school-age kids. Conversely, spending on athletic facilities or construction of new classroom space raises house prices but not test scores. (Smartly, the analysts also look at changes in student population following big, visible capital expenditures, ruling out the influence of gentrification.) Additionally, disadvantaged districts were found to completely drive the differences; they benefit much more from capital spending, in part because they’ve spent less on it in the past and typically request larger bond amounts. In wealthier districts, test scores remain unchanged post-bond election and the effect on house prices is non-significant.

All of this tracks with previous research and indeed with common sense. A leaky roof is a distraction from teaching and learning, and bad indoor air can impact numerous students with asthma and other ailments, but taxpayers without children in the district schools would have little awareness of such issues. The bottom line is that, while some capital improvements must be made, any discretionary improvements can and should be targeted to generate the highest potential achievement boosts for students.

SOURCE: Barbara Biasi, Julien M. Lafortune, and David Schönholzer, “What works and for whom: Effectiveness and efficiency of school capital investments across the U.S.,” National Bureau of Economic Research (January 2024).

Cheers

• Virginia’s new math acceleration indicator balances access and success, encouraging schools to enroll more students in advanced classes—but only if they’re ready to handle the material. —EduProgress
• The massive restructuring of Denver Public Schools in the 2010s to expand school choice, close low-performing schools, and intensify accountability dramatically improved student learning in math and English. —CPR News

Jeers

• “Responding to post-pandemic norms, more states are lowering test standards.” —The 74
• Many colleges across the country have eliminated remedial courses, in hopes of removing barriers to graduation. But a new analysis of Tennessee colleges suggests that doing so actually has not increased graduation rates.  —Hechinger Report
• Bloomberg Philanthropies invested $140 million to get more low-income students into top colleges—but they’re now saying the money has had little impact as recruitment efforts have largely failed to reach students. —Wall Street Journal

• “How Kamala Harris can build an ‘opportunity economy.’” —Raj Chetty, New York Times
• According to a new report, many social studies teachers are now turning to the internet to find primary sources for their lessons—but a small number are presenting students with ideologically skewed materials. —New York Times

Governor Glenn Youngkin is under fire again from Virginia’s education establishment, this time because a new school accountability system his administration is promoting refuses to put lipstick on a pig. More specifically, by measuring the effectiveness of the commonwealth’s schools according to whether students are meeting academic standards and learning enough from year to year, some preliminary forecasts estimate that the system is likely to find that 70% of campuses “need intensive support” or are “off track.” (The other, higher categories are “on track” and “distinguished.”)

This is not sitting well with the powers that be who run Virginia’s local school divisions. Scott Brabrand, executive director of the Virginia Association of School Superintendents (VASS), recently told the State Board of Education that he and his members don’t believe “the majority of our schools are in those two (lowest) categories.”

Which brings to mind the Richard Pryor line: “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” Is Brabrand right? Are Virginia officials being unfairly harsh?

Let’s consider, first and foremost, how many students in Virginia are “off track.” If most students are doing well, it would raise questions about labeling so many of their schools as “off track.”

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”), 31 percent of Virginia’s students scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading in 2022 (the most recently available data). The NAEP’s definition of “proficient” in reading is equivalent to “on track for college and career.” So we can confidently say that the majority of today’s high school juniors—the teens who took the eighth grade NAEP in 2022—are “off track.” In fact, 69 percent of them are “off track,” very close to the 70 percent of schools that may soon be classified as the same.

Or let’s look at math, the subject most affected by the long school closures of the Covid-19 era. According to NAEP, Virginia’s eighth graders’ average scores dropped 8 points from 2019 to 2022. By some estimates, that drop equates to approximately 80 percent of a school year. The result is that just 31 percent of students in the state (that number again!) are now proficient in math.

So yes, Virginia’s students are off track. And so are its schools.

Now let’s be clear: Virginia is no outlier. The pandemic was a disaster for students all over the country. But that doesn’t mean we should normalize what happened to our children. They suffered immensely from being out of school for so long, and while many of the scars from the pandemic have healed, we still have years of work ahead of us to do right by our kids.

Yet too many parents aren’t hearing that message, because schools and public officials are too eager to argue that everything’s OK. It reminds me of the parade scene in Animal House, with chaos coming from all sides, and Kevin Bacon’s character shouting, “Remain calm, remain calm, all is well!”

All is not well. Covid is not in the rearview mirror, at least as far as our children are concerned. Students suffered massive learning loss, and they are still moving backward in terms of student achievement. (One recent study found that kids made less progress last school year than their counterparts in 2019 did).

In the face of these realities, Virginia’s state superintendents believe that we shouldn’t worry because Virginia is ranked number one in the country for business, so how could its education system possibly be bad? That’s a dubious assertion for a rating that only counted education as 5 percent of the total—and is certainly at odds with The Nation’s Report Card. But it’s also beside the point. It’s like winning a race to jump off a sinking ship. You’re still going to find yourself floundering in the water.

Grade inflation is already a massive problem in our schools; kids are bringing home As and Bs on their report cards, even if they are one or two grade levels behind in reading and math. No doubt this is why so few parents in Virginia and elsewhere are aware of the post-Covid emergency in student achievement.

Let’s not make the problem worse by extending grade inflation to our school ratings. Let’s follow Governor Youngkin’s lead and tell parents the truth. Our kids are off track. Our schools are off track. Let’s stop saying otherwise and start figuring out how to fix it.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

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1. Only one clip to talk about today, but it’s all good news. There are many ways one can measure the ongoing growth and success of Northwest Ohio Classical Academy after six years of operation. Expanded campus? Check. More students? Almost tripled. Additional grade levels? Yep—it’s gone from K-8 at the start to K-12 today. But no indicator of a charter school’s maturation and growth gets you in the news like adding sports teams and competing with the legacies. NWOCA can check that off the list at last (eight times over!), and local TV news is taking notice. Awesome. Congrats. And Go Spartans! (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 9/24/24)

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