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1. Yesterday, the Senate Education Committee heard testimony on SB 295, which is aiming to change the closure requirements for poor-performing public schools across the state. This coverage is focused on the potential that chronically underperforming district school buildings could be “charterized” sometime in the future if the bill passes, but it also quotes the testimony of our own Chad Aldis, who is far more concerned about the possibility that some charter schools with a history of low performance will be allowed to escape consequences right now if the bill is enacted as it currently stands. (Cleveland.com, 12/10/24) And Chad’s full testimony is here if you’ve got a minute.
    
2. This piece is more of a curio than anything, but I was fascinated in the details provided about the process by which Orange City Schools in northeast Ohio has evaluated and selected a new literacy curriculum in response to Governor DeWine’s mandate to enshrine the science of reading in all public schools. Lucy Calkins is out and it took a team of 11 people to review all the new options. Looks like they’ve settled on a new one that will cost them a minimum of $315,000 to purchase, not including the cost of training teachers on using it. And that latter part could be expensive (and take a lot of time too), since the new curriculum has been deemed “more rigorous” and to contain “more [material] than they could actually implement in their language arts time” as it currently stands. The assessments, too, are “definitely more rigorous” than Calkins and “do resemble the Ohio state test”. Additionally, “they start preparing students for that test at a very young age.” While the assessments are said to be “time consuming”, they seem to be ideal because “the data that comes from those assessments” provides “a lot of information that helps teachers plan instruction for specific learners.” Fascinating. Sounds like just what I’d want in a literacy curriculum, but no one has asked (or will ever ask) me. (Cleveland.com, 12/10/24)

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NOTE: Today, the Ohio Senate Education Committee heard testimony on Substitute Senate Bill 295 which proposes substantive changes to the closure requirements for public schools across the state. Fordham’s Vice President for Ohio Policy presented opponent testimony to the bill. These are his written remarks.

The Fordham Institute is an education-focused nonprofit that conducts research, analysis, and policy advocacy with offices in Columbus, Dayton, and Washington, D.C. Given the subject matter of my testimony today, I also want to note that our Dayton office is a charter school sponsor. (This testimony will use the more common phrasing of “charter school” to refer to what in Ohio law is called a “community school”.)

Today’s testimony is based on Substitute SB 295 and couldn’t include any potential amendments that this committee has or will adopt.

Fordham plays an interesting role in the charter school ecosystem. We are proudly both an advocate for charter schools but also fiercely committed to the principle that all schools—including charter schools—be accountable for their academic performance. For that reason, we are opposed to the current language in Substitute Senate Bill 295.

Before explaining our concerns with the current bill language, I want to start with some things that the bill gets right. Charter schools have long had a provision in law requiring a school to be closed after three years of very low academic performance. There is a similar measure in law for traditional public schools, but there isn’t any evidence that it is enforced. This legislation would set the same standard for closure and/or intervention for both traditional and public charter schools. That’s a good thing. At some point, after years of low performance, the state has a moral obligation to push districts to improve schools.

Importantly, the identification measure proposed is an improvement over existing law and includes both achievement (Performance Index) and growth (Value-Added) components. Any school identified—traditional public or public charter—would be both very low performing and have very low levels of academic growth for three consecutive years. The law also proposes a host of thoughtful potential interventions—including but not limited to closure—for low performing district schools. This is a necessity as there are situations where a district school simply cannot close because it’s the only school in the district serving certain grade levels, and there is a constitutional responsibility to ensure that every student has access to a public school.

The substitute bill, in our view, gets those things right, and the chair deserves credit for tackling those issues. And yet, this is opponent testimony. Most of the areas of concern stem from the principle that public charter schools are and were designed to be different than district schools.

From the beginning of the charter school movement, advocates—including Fordham—have said that charters should be given more autonomy and freedom from regulation in exchange for accountability for results. We continue to believe that this exchange—autonomy for accountability—has the greatest potential to produce improved student learning outcomes. Across the nation, this model has allowed many high-performing charter networks to thrive and has driven achievement gains, particularly among low-income students.

While Ohio initially struggled with charter accountability, the state began to take this side of the bargain more seriously with the passage of an automatic charter-closure law in 2006 and the charter reforms of 2015, which put more pressure on charter-school sponsors to authorize quality schools. These accountability mechanisms have driven significant improvement in Ohio’s charter sector. Just prior to the pandemic, Fordham published a rigorous study using student-level data finding that brick and mortar charters, on average, outperformed local district schools in math and reading. Post-pandemic, we’ve continued to see evidence that site-based charters outperform district schools.

We believe that substitute SB 295 would weaken charter accountability by giving chronically low-performing schools a free pass from the state’s automatic closure law. Instead of being forced to close, low-performers would be allowed to stay in operation, though required to follow some restructuring protocols. This shouldn’t be an option for poor-performing charter schools. Unlike closing district-run schools, a charter school closure does not put at-risk the state’s constitutional responsibility to make a public school available for students anywhere in the state. Charter schools are options for families—and in many cases, extremely valuable ones—but the state does not have a duty to keep a low-performing charter school open. In fact, the state’s responsibility here is to remove a poor-performing public school alternative that is not serving children well.

While we believe there is merit to revisiting the identification criteria for poor performance, it’s worth noting that under current automatic closure law, just 14 charters (out of about 320) met the low performing criteria in either 2022-23 or 2023-24.[1] The schools on this list are having considerable challenges serving students academically, as indicated by their 1-star Achievement ratings last year[2] (meaning their students score far below the state average) and indicators that students are not making sufficient progress (low Progress and Gap Closing ratings). While none of these schools have actually been forced to close—that takes three consecutive years—the current system seems to be working as intended. It’s supposed to be a fail-safe that ensures closure, in what should be relatively rare cases when a school’s sponsor is unwilling to close a low-performing school. These numbers also track with how the automatic closure law worked in the past: Historically, about 4 charters closed per year when the automatic closure law was in effect.

As currently drafted, we have serious concerns about how the bill handles charter accountability. It can however be improved in ways that preserve and strengthen the charter accountability mechanism. We recommend the following be added to the bill.

1. Do not allow for a “restart” of the clock for charters that have met current closure provisions, as the substitute bill does. Any change in the performance criteria should apply prospectively, but it must not wipe out one or two years of poor performance. Those years mattered to the students who attended these schools, and the state shouldn’t pretend like their lack of progress didn’t happen. Any new identification criteria should acknowledge that schools on the current closure list have been struggling.

2. If a restructuring option is made available to charter schools, the following provisions should be added:

a. Require permanent closure, if a school identified for restructuring continues to meet the low-performing criteria three years after being so identified. Chronically low-performing charters should not be allowed to be in perpetual school-improvement status; at some point, the state needs to step in and close the school.

b. Base charter school sponsor evaluations half on academic performance. As noted above, the state’s automatic closure law should be a last resort. Sponsors are the entities that should actually be closing low-performing schools. However, since the 2015 charter reforms, the state has chipped away at charter sponsor accountability by allowing for an effective rating—through the paperwork-driven components of the evaluation system (quality practices and compliance elements)—even if the sponsor’s school portfolio are delivering very poor academic results. If there has to be some type of weakening of automatic closure, the state must at the same time restore and strengthen accountability for charter sponsors. This can be done by increasing the weight of the academic portion of their evaluation to 50 percent (up from 33 percent currently). The higher weight on academics would create a stronger incentive for sponsors to close low-performing schools in their portfolio.

The state’s automatic closure law and sponsor evaluations are key accountability mechanisms that ensure that the charter sector is fulfilling its promise of autonomy for accountability—and more importantly, fulfilling its promise of a high-quality education to Ohio families and students. While there are some positives in the substitute bill, as drafted, it would roll back charter accountability. In fact, it would put the sector at risk of returning to the pre-House Bill 2 charter landscape. The sector has improved greatly under a stronger accountability framework, and now is not the time to return to low expectations for Ohio’s charter schools.

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1. I am happy to see Fordham’s Aaron Churchill quoted extensively in this piece looking at where Ohio students stand nearly five years after the start of pandemic disruptions to their education. His advice focuses on research-based interventions; clear, timely, and actionable information to parents; and holding schools accountable for results, no matter whether the topic is academic outcomes, mental health concerns, or absenteeism. Important stuff. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/8/24)
    
2. Speaking of important information, Ohio is getting ready to add a college, career, workforce, and military readiness measure as a graded component on state report cards. The data are already being collected and, we learned in a legislative hearing last week, most schools would have gotten three stars out of five if the component were graded last year. Some tweaks will still be made, but legislators seemed happy with the progress toward full rollout so far. (Gongwer Ohio, 12/6/24)
   
   

3. I will admit that I don’t have too much experience with or knowledge of special education. But reading the story of 9-year-old Ryanne McMichael, who needed far better support than her local school district in Kentucky ever could (or, it seems from this story, ever wanted to) give her makes me ever more grateful for school choice. Even if that means a 30-mile drive across state lines to and from Ohio for school every day. Of course it should be far easier for this family and all the others like them to get what their children need, but even my limited experience of special education leads me to believe it happens far more rarely than it should. Honestly, who could read the phrase “She was starving for language” and not want to burn down whatever system resulted in that state of affairs? (Cincinnati Enquirer, 12/7/24)

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Virginia’s new accountability system incentivizes schools to provide valuable middle-school math pathways, resulting in more opportunities for Virginia students, especially the most underprivileged. It will also counter the non-evidence-based, anti-acceleration ideology of certain discredited thought leaders in K–12 math education who have had a corrosive effect on Virginia K–12 math education.

Why algebra in middle school is civil rights issue

Civil rights leader Bob Moses referred to the ability to accelerate in math (i.e., go above grade level) in order to take algebra in middle school as a civil right. It has been a longstanding goal of the U.S. Department of Education and civil rights organizations. Nationally, middle schools that are not offering algebra disproportionately serve lower income and underrepresented minority students.

As explained by Stanford University Math Professor, and Director of Undergraduate Math Studies, Brian Conrad:

A solid grounding in math from high school—which traditionally has included two years of algebra, a year of geometry, and then, for more advanced students, other coursework leading up to calculus [and beyond]—is a prerequisite for a four-year college degree in data science, computer science, economics, and other quantitative fields. Such a degree is, in turn, the price of entry for jobs not only in the sciences and Silicon Valley, but also in a number of seemingly distant fields....

The students who are most reliant upon public schools are the most harmed when districts embrace policies based on superficial appeals to equity or false promises about future job opportunities. When only the children of families with resources beyond the public schools are gaining preparation for the lucrative degrees and securing jobs of the future, public education is failing in a primary duty.

Accountability systems, advanced coursework and civil rights

The 2015 U.S. Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) governs state accountability systems and provides an advanced coursework factor as one of the few optional accountability factor examples. Notably, Virginia Democratic Representative Bobby Scott was one of four coauthors of ESSA, and every member of the Virginia Congressional delegation voted for ESSA except then-Republican Representative Dave Brat.

Accountability factors for advanced coursework are not meant to shame schools for failing to offer such classes, but to provide carrots to offer these crucial civil rights opportunities. And if a school is not able or willing to offer such classes, accountability systems elevate such a civil rights issue to a community-level discussion (instead of closed-door and/or coded language conversations by school administrators and school boards).

New middle school advanced coursework acceleration factor

As described by national accountability expert Chad Aldeman:

As part of its redesigned school performance and support framework, last month, Virginia adopted a new math acceleration indicator which will nudge schools to enroll more middle school students in advanced math courses....

It starts by looking at student performance. Which students are ready to succeed in advanced math courses? The ones who already do well on math tests.

This “ready students” measure uses a unique denominator to recognize students with the potential to succeed in advanced high school mathematics in grade eight. “Ready students” will include any middle school student in grades 6–8 who is already taking a high school-level math class, plus any grade eight student who scored advanced on the grade seven math test in the prior year. In this way, it only expects schools to accelerate students who have clearly demonstrated that they are ready for advanced math coursework....

To maximize their points on this new indicator, Virginia middle schools will have to make sure that students who are performing well—regardless of their race or income or gender—have access to advanced math opportunities.

Virginia’s 2021 proposal to eliminate algebra in middle school based on anti-acceleration ideology

As I previously covered, the Virginia Department of Education proposed the paradoxically-named Virginia Math Pathways Initiative (VMPI) in 2021 that would have, among other things, eliminated honors math courses and “drastically [reduced] the need for” or “eliminate[d]” math acceleration of Virginia public school students, thereby keeping them in the same math class until the eleventh grade (i.e., reducing pathways). VMPI’s detracking proposal was based on the ideas of the controversial Stanford Education Professor Jo Boaler and the “Algebra for None” program of San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

After major public pushback, Virginia “clarified” school districts would still be able to offer acceleration and honors classes (such clarification did not detail if that included Algebra I in seventh grade). Based on several factors, including evidence that certain Democratic voters switched to Glenn Youngkin to oppose VMPI (a prelude to the crushing 2024 algebra referendum vote in San Francisco), Youngkin killed VMPI upon taking office in early 2022.

A SFUSD parent group found in 2021 that SFUSD and Boaler significantly misrepresented SFUSD’s preliminary data on its “Algebra for None” program. In March 2023, a study by professors from Stanford University confirmed that SFUSD’s preliminary data had been misrepresented, and its program actually resulted in fewer students taking higher-level math in high school.

Incentivizing Virginia schools to offer algebra in seventh grade to counter anti-acceleration ideology

Algebra in seventh grade for kids who are ready is beneficial to not only provide them with the proper challenge, but also for broader access to opportunities. For instance, a Virginia child who takes seventh grade algebra is on a path to possibly earn fifteen credit hours in math at Virginia Tech or other public universities by high school graduation at nearly no financial cost. Still, only 59 percent of Virginia school districts had a seventh grader taking a state algebra or higher standardized exam, whereas 96 percent of Virginia middle schools had at least one eighth grader passing such an exam in the 2022–23 school year.

Anti-acceleration ideology advocates often cite Stanford Education Professor Boaler for why school districts should eliminate algebra in seventh grade. Boaler claims that many students who take algebra in seventh grade or earlier drop out of math by twelfth grade. But she in fact cites only her own opinion and the opinion of an ideologically aligned math professor. (Note: Boaler faced widespread public scrutiny for the use of countless false and misleading citations in the 2023 California Math Framework.)

Moreover, the largest organization of Virginia K–12 math leaders, the Virginia Council for Math Supervision (who vociferously supported VMPI), made anti-acceleration ideological claims similar to Boaler with similarly misleading citations in its letter opposing the pro-acceleration provisions in the 2023 Virginia Math Standards of Learning. For example, the paper cited actually supports appropriate acceleration while illogically claiming that the failure of accelerating every child into algebra by eighth grade (even if not ready) is the reason to not support seventh grade algebra for kids who are ready.

Conversely, civil rights leader Moses advocated against “put[ting] constraints or limits on what any group of children might learn” in math. And Stanford Math Professor Brian Conrad told me he’s seen the positive results firsthand when public schools do not limit such opportunities:

A student leader in the National Society of Black Engineers had access to Algebra 1 in seventh grade, and she attributed this early access to future opportunities such as more advanced internships during college and better preparation for her admission to top Ph.D. programs in engineering. That is real equity in public education for math.

In fact, Arlington Public Schools (APS) found that almost all APS kids who took algebra in seventh grade took math through twelfth grade. Furthermore, a secondary math supervisor for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) did a longitudinal study (presumably of FCPS) and found that kids who took algebra in seventh grade (a) took more high school math classes than those who took algebra in eighth grade, and (b) took math in the twelfth grade at a higher rate than those who took algebra in eighth grade.

Nonetheless, this FCPS supervisor, a leader of VMPI and citing Boaler, used a Boaler-esque double standard to disregard such positive results. For instance, those who took algebra in seventh grade were defined to have achieved at a lesser level in math for taking AP Calculus AB or AP Statistics versus those who took algebra in eighth grade for taking the same classes. And contrary to the results of her study, the same FCPS supervisor said in an FCPS video in March 2024 that kids accessing algebra before eighth grade often drop out of math by tenth or eleventh grade. Notably, the rate of FCPS seventh graders taking algebra for the 2023–24 school year was almost half of the rate of seventh graders in Loudoun County Public Schools.

And despite the lack of evidence, recently Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) quietly eliminated its pathway for algebra in seventh grade. Meanwhile, ACPS ironically claims the new accountability system should be delayed for additional testing (a three-year development and implementation period is supposedly “rushed”).

Democratic ACPS parent Willow Darsie stated:

The accountability framework is a lifeline for parents yearning for transparency and struggling with opaque and misguided decisions like ACPS’s abrupt elimination of its long-standing accelerated math pathway. It is not too late for ACPS to reintroduce and even expand algebra for seventh graders, and I am hopeful the middle school math incentive can help all Virginia districts see the merits of offering students varied math options while spotlighting the vital role public schools play in building onramps to challenging and rewarding careers in STEM.

Editor’s note: This was first published by Bacon's Rebellion.

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Charters serving students with special needs

A new research report from the Center for Learner Equity takes a systemic look at the provision of education for students with special needs. It focuses on the fact that charter schools, with their greater autonomy and relative freedom to innovate programming as compared to traditional district schools, could help fill service gaps evidenced by the data. An interesting read.

Maryland takes steps toward solving longstanding charter/district frictions

Speaking of which, the Maryland State Board of Education issued a decision earlier this week that charter schools in the state must share the cost of educating special needs students with traditional districts, but should also receive nearly the same level of per-pupil state funding for the purpose as districts do. Both statements are groundbreaking in themselves, but there’s even more to celebrate. This is the first of a series of promised decisions which are aimed at clarifying and codifying the standing of charters in Maryland’s public education ecosystem after decades of animosity and wrangling between them and districts. Sounds like an important plan and an excellent start!

Seeking more funding parity

The Indiana Charter Innovation Center is a brand new organization formed to advocate for charter schools in the Hoosier State. President and CEO Scott Bess chatted with the Indiana Capital Chronicle this week, talking about his group’s immediate agenda. Item One is trying to get per-pupil funding closer to parity with traditional district schools and includes a call for sharing local property tax revenue with charter schools. “We may not close the gap entirely,” he says, “and that may be impossible to do, but we have to at least close it some.” Go get ‘em!

Looking to the future of charter schools

Late last week, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools CEO Starlee Coleman, sat down for in in-depth interview with Micah Sagebiel of the Philanthropy Roundtable. She sums up the first 30 years of the charter movement and is excited about where that history will lead in the future. Interestingly, she cites increased capacity—and especially funding for new and expanded facilities—as one of the highest priorities of the sector.

Legal action against Columbus City Schools continues

Gongwer Ohio provided an interesting update on the transportation fiasco for hundreds of charter and private school students served by Columbus City Schools. Among all the other pending lawsuits for inadequate services in recent years is a building class action suit. This week we learned that there may be more 80 charter and private schools in the class when all is said and done. That’s a huge number of impacted families, a lot of material harm, and a big obstacle for district lawyers

Apply to be the Executive Director of the Mountaineer Charter School Alliance

West Virginia’s Mountaineer Charter School Alliance is looking for its inaugural Executive Director, tasked with leading the newly-formed organization to catalyze the development and sustainability of public charter schools in West Virginia. The ideal candidate will have a strong commitment to supporting charter schools and experience in issue advocacy, education reform, or public policy. The Executive Director will lead and manage the organization’s strategic initiatives, with a focus on legislative advocacy, fundraising, and providing technical assistance to member schools. The work will be based in a virtual office in West Virginia and require frequent travel to the state’s capital, Charleston. To learn more about this exciting opportunity, click here.

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1. A story that includes the delicious disclaimer “written with the assistance of AI” attempts to cover a couple of points from newly-released survey results on how cellphone limitation is going in public schools across Ohio. The headline is an outright fabrication with no basis in data (and likely not in reality either). How would we even measure “focus” exactly? If you’d like to read the survey results for yourself—which only cover policy implementation efforts so far—it is here. And you might want to do it before the machines rise up and destroy it. (Cleveland.com, 12/5/24)
   
   

2. The superintendent of Akron City Schools, who is in hot water with everyone these days it seems, has apparently also been using a feature of Gmail to send “confidential” emails to staff and board members. This makes emails impervious to saving, forwarding, copying, and printing and sets a time limit after which they will delete themselves with limited (perhaps no) ability to recover. The screen shot receipts are there, as you might have guessed, and were sent off to local media outlets pronto, prompting electronic howls of outrage. It is my fervent hope someone used old school Microsoft Paint to process their screenshots. Just sayin’. (Akron Beacon Journal, 12/4/24)
   
   

3. In case you missed it, northeast Ohio was hit with some pretty strong lake effect snow earlier this week. Lakeside High School in the Ashtabula Area City School District collected a ton of snow on its roof while school was out for the weather emergency, and it collapsed yesterday, likely closing the entire building for the rest of the school year. (Building is less than 20 years old, btw, and has experienced roof problems since Day One. They don’t build ‘em like they used to, amiright?) Ashtabula Schools was closed all this week and when classes (hopefully) resume on Monday, high school students will be doing good old Zoom school until Christmas break. Supe says she hates going back to remote classes, but assures folks they will be doing it “the right way” this time. Unclear what that means, but one only wonders what they would have done if they hadn’t had the previous experience of slogging on after a disruption that closed buildings. Come January, high school classes will likely be housed in other district buildings, while existing students are shuffled around to make room. Interestingly enough, I discovered that the district has reported enrollment declines of about 800 students since 2018-19…which happens to be the approximate population of Lakeside High right now. Could it be that the Dragons won’t even need the extra high school space for a good long while? (IdeaStream Public Media, 12/5/24)

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Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.

A leading cause of peripheral vision loss (a.k.a. tunnel vision) is attending an Ivy+ school.[i] Thankfully, not all Ivy+ graduates will be afflicted, but, for those who are, the symptoms, sadly, may be permanent. In such cases, they will, for the rest of their days, fixate on Ivy+ institutions.

A view from the world of Ivy+

If you want to read about Ivy+ schools, simply look for articles written by journalists who went to Ivy+ schools. If you want to hear from those who went to or teach at Ivy+ schools, just listen to a podcast hosted by an Ivy+ grad. If you want to know who will be hired for a job being selected by a committee of Ivy+ products, bet the farm on “an Ivy+ product.”

This creates a world similar to the one famously parodied by The New Yorker’s cartoon, “View of the World from 9th Ave.” Some folks act as though these schools and their graduates are at the center of the universe. Other schools (and their graduates) are somewhere out there in the savage hinterlands.

But as I demonstrated in my recent study, in most of America, Ivy+ schools cast an exceedingly small shadow. Leaders in most places instead come from public colleges, especially flagships, and an array of nearby, respected private schools. Only in a few places (like California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York) will you find a critical mass of Ivy+ grads in major positions. Nevertheless, some Ivy+ grads seem to believe (and want you to believe) that they dominate everywhere.

—

In my report, I described at length how a recent, otherwise excellent, research paper demonstrated this tunnel vision. Written by three Ivy+ graduates who teach at Ivy+ institutions, the study makes it seem as though the only elite positions in public life are those controlled by (and often selected by) Ivy+ graduates.[ii] I also discussed how three Ivy+ journalists who work for publications heavy with Ivy+ graduates wrote at length about the study’s pro-Ivy+ findings.

In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be writing more about this phenomenon and how it hurts higher education and American egalitarianism and how it energizes populism. More personally, it frustrates me because it inflates the value of institutions that privilege the rich and connected, denigrates the work of many great non-elite institutions, and limits the opportunities of countless talented people.

I’m curating evidence for all of this, but I’ve assumed that this research paper would always serve as the best example of Ivy+ tunnel vision.

Until I read David Brooks’ recent cover story in The Atlantic.

The ostensible social ideal

Brooks—a good man and talented writer whose previous work I’ve admired—explains early on, “I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities.” Yes, and therein begins the problem.

To him, those schools are at the center; America’s thousands of public colleges and universities and the accomplished people who’ve graduated from them seem to be somewhere out there in the hinterlands.

Though Brooks’ piece and the research paper mentioned above criticize aspects of Ivy+ schools, the authors repeatedly point out how very important these schools are. If you’ve not attended an Ivy+ school, both works will probably strike you as extended humblebrags. I found myself comparing them to the infamous “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” commercials.

—

This is how Brooks begins.

Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late nineteenth century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

Later he writes, “And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.”

This is a staggeringly limited, even elitist, vision of America. Maybe you’d believe this if you grew up in these small areas or went to these small schools. But I’m sure most people in Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, etc. did not consider such people the social ideal. The rest of America had its own schools, employers, institutions, and traditions. They didn’t need to look to Ivy grads for inspiration.

—

Brooks blames James Conant for ushering in an era where colleges prefer intelligence over wealth. Conant, the president of Harvard (so, obviously, an extraordinarily powerful person), wanted a more egalitarian America, one with more social mobility. He set out to change college admissions. This was, in my mind, a welcome social development.

But, somehow, Brooks leaps from this shift to an imaginary bifurcated world of the modestly educated who’ve been left behind and those who go to a few elite private schools and then become masters of the universe. This has never been the case. For most of our history, few people went to college. Today, it’s still well less than half. From the past up to today, public colleges have educated more public officials, community pillars, and private-sector leaders than this handful of elite privates.

Brooks seems to believe that America’s parents obsess over elite privates. Maybe the following vision of America obtains in certain tiny social circles. But this is not the experience of most Americans.

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Maybe if you are surrounded by people trying to “hone their kids into little avatars of success” you are likelier to believe that everything revolves around the Ivy+. But for every one family behaving that way there are hundreds enjoying healthy, content lives and who love the state’s public flagship and who never even think about Dartmouth.

And then there is this:

By eleventh grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like eighteenth-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.

Again, maybe this is true in some neighborhoods and at some social-club happy hours. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that most great parents of most great kids who will go on to do great things have no idea where Williams and Colby are and don’t much care. And they sure don’t care which has more prestige.

Ohio doesn’t need the Ivy+

Toward the end of the article, while listing the sins of meritocracy, Brooks writes, “The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.”

This sentiment is untethered from the real world of higher education. In most of America, most families of college-going students would be thrilled if their kids went to a good close-to-home school, especially the public flagship. Perhaps Brooks doesn’t know that the average SAT score of the Ohio State honors college is comparable to Ivy League schools.

Moreover, maybe Brooks doesn’t know that the governor of Ohio graduated from a public college in Ohio (Miami University). Or that Ohio’s attorney general went to Ohio State. Maybe he doesn’t know that five of Ohio’s seven supreme court justices went to an Ohio public college. Or that six of seven went to a college inside the state. Maybe he doesn’t know the board chair of the Cleveland Clinic, the state’s largest employer, is a public flagship grad or that the CEO and Chairman of Kroger, the second largest employer headquartered in the state, is a public flagship grad.

The elite bubble

How is it that Brooks, who genuinely cares about opportunity, could have such a 9th-Avenue view of higher education? How is it that no one around him suggested that he broaden his lens?

Here’s one possibility:

As a columnist for the NY Times, he’s surrounded by other columnists who have undergrad and/or grad degrees from Ivy+ schools: Douthat (Harvard), Dowd (Columbia), Edsall (Brown), French (Harvard Law), Kristoff ((Harvard), Krugman (Yale, MIT), Leonhardt (Yale), and Stephens (Chicago).

So does the Times’ opinion editor, Kingsbury (Columbia).

Moreover, the paper’s publisher (Brown), executive editor (Harvard), and managing editor (Cornell) all have Ivy+ degrees; 54 percent of the American degrees earned by members of the paper’s editorial board are from Ivy+ schools.

As for The Atlantic: its owner (Penn, Stanford), CEO (Stanford), and editor-in-chief (Penn) all went to Ivy+ schools.

In short, there is an Ivy+ bubble, and for those inside of it, Ivy+ schools loom very, very, very large. I appreciate that some of these folks are willing to criticize aspects of these schools. But they don’t need to feel that bad about it. Honestly. In fact, I bet they’d care much less what we thought of Ivy+ schools if they realized how seldom we did.

As expected, in last month’s election, voters in Massachusetts supported a union-backed ballot initiative to kill off the Bay State’s longstanding graduation exam. At around the same time, New York state officials released a timeline for eliminating the even-longer-standing Regents exams as a requirement for earning a high school diploma. With the number of states requiring students to pass exams in order to graduate now down to the single digits, this feels like the end of an era.

In that spirit, I recently dusted off a (digital) copy of Ready or Not : Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, published by Achieve, The Education Trust, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute exactly twenty years ago. How far we’ve come—or fallen—since then! At the time, standards-based reformers worried about the eroding value of the high school diploma and wanted to make sure that all students graduated “college and career ready.” (This was meant to supplement the No Child Left Behind act, which brought much-needed accountability to America’s schools, but left student accountability on the cutting room floor.)

At the heart of the “American Diploma Project” (ADP) strategy was a set of standards in English language arts and math that strongly influenced the Common Core, which came in 2010, along with the expectation that states would ensure that students met these standards by requiring them to pass exams to prove their mettle.

That was not to be. Soon after the release of the ADP recommendations, Bush Administration officials issued regulations requiring states to incorporate graduation rates, measured in a common way, into their No Child Left Behind accountability systems. The law of unintended consequences kicked in, with the focus shifting from “beefing up the value of the diploma” to “getting everyone across the finish line.” Our national graduation rate went from 79 percent in 2010–11 to 87 percent in 2021–22.

Sometimes that stemmed from positive practices, such as the adoption of early detection systems for students who were off-track. But just as often it resulted from school districts embracing dubious credit recovery programs and other schemes to inflate their graduation rates.

And speaking of inflation, grade inflation in high schools only grew worse during this period, too, before going bananas during the Covid era.

It’s probably never been easier to graduate from high school in America than it is today—the opposite of what the ADP folks imagined.

Any semblance of standards has collapsed at the higher education level, too. The ADP report worried greatly about high school graduates ending up in remedial education once they got to college. The solution that higher ed came up with: Just get rid of the “remedial” courses and place students in credit-bearing, so-called “corequisite” courses instead. That worked for some of the higher performing of the formerly remedial students but was a disaster for the lowest performing ones, who should never have been admitted to college in the first place.

Desperate for students, colleges and universities more recently started embracing “direct admissions” policies whereby students are welcomed to campus without even filling out traditional applications. The impulse makes sense—let’s remove some of the red tape that keeps qualified young people, especially first-generation college students, from applying to and matriculating to college. But alarmingly, most of the time students are admitted on the basis of grades (or their derivatives, like GPA or class rank), rather than objective measures like test scores. Which is a real problem in an age of grade inflation! Then there’s dual enrollment, which is also filling seats (especially in community colleges) and offering students college credit, but without any of the quality control mechanisms that make programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate so rigorous.

Where to go from here

On one level, none of this is surprising. Holding the line on standards is tough work for elected officials, who have not exactly been in an eat-your-broccoli mood lately. It’s all sugary cereal, all the time, as my friend Rick Hess wrote recently. And we’ve created incentives that encourage leaders in K–12 and higher ed to follow the path of least resistance. Superintendents and high school principals crave the positive accountability ratings that come from keeping students on the rolls, even if their engagement in school (or lack thereof) makes them look an awful lot like what we used to call dropouts. And college administrators are desperate to put butts in seats.

It’s also true that the previous paradigm—encapsulated nicely by the ADP—came awfully close to embracing a “college for all” mindset. The argument was that all kids needed the same reading, writing, and math skills in order to succeed in college or career, but that was interpreted as arguing that all students should do more or less the same thing all the way through twelfth grade. And in reality, that has meant almost everyone doing college-prep (if often a watered-down kind), with a dash of CTE sometimes thrown in on the side.

Now the pendulum has swung and policymakers, policy wonks, and the public are closer to agreement that high school students should get to spend more of their time on real career and technical training if that’s what they want. Yet our graduation requirements—especially our course requirements—haven’t yet changed to make this shift easily doable. States such as Indiana are trying to address this but remain mired in old debates about “college or career readiness” versus “college and career readiness.”

So here’s a modest proposal: Let’s get the gang back together again—I’m thinking of a bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs—and work on figuring out a rational set of high school “pathways” policies going forward, with a particular focus on graduation requirements, à la ADP. My own hope is that they would aim to:

• Ensure that all students master core academic knowledge and skills by the end of the tenth grade. Those who demonstrate such mastery (ideally via end-of-course exams) can then choose among a set of high-quality pathways (more on those below). Those who don’t would keep working on it—but wouldn’t be denied high school diplomas either.
• Allow juniors and seniors who have passed the exams to choose from several pathways, including preparing for selective colleges and universities; preparing for nonselective colleges and universities; preparing for technical programs at the higher education level; or preparing to enter the world of work immediately, including the military.
• Address rampant grade inflation in high schools and beyond.
• Ensure that all postsecondary options (including technical and community colleges) set and enforce admissions standards.
• Work toward closing the funding gap between career and technical education (at the high school and postsecondary levels) and traditional higher education.

This would look a lot like where Maryland’s Kirwan Commission landed, though whether the Old Line State actually succeeds in putting such a system in place remains to be determined.

This still might be too much broccoli eating for today’s political environment. Cynics will say that governors and state education chiefs won’t want to expend political capital trying to fix America’s broken high schools and devalued high school diplomas. So, I say to governors and chiefs, prove them wrong!

Recently my daughter asked me to describe my job. I had to think for a minute. Statistical interpreter? Results translator? None worked. I needed an elevator pitch, one my quasi-curious teen would understand easily, without too much side eye.

“Every two years, I tell people about how the nation’s school systems are educating America’s students,” I told her. She looked almost impressed, and I congratulated myself for omitting any mention of statistical significance or achievement levels.

Even better, I was able to say that another one of those every-two-years is right around the corner.

We’re preparing for the next release of results right now. Book your calendars for early 2025. In the meantime, I’ll share what I’ll look for in the results and what I’ll avoid when I talk about them. Namely, misNAEPery—a clever term to describe how the results can be misused and misinterpreted. Kudos to Morgan Polikoff for explaining generic variants of misNAEPery. My purpose here is to share specific pitfalls to avoid with this upcoming release.

As I see it, yes. NAEP is not a Magic 8-Ball for policy support or failure. However, the NAEP Reading results land, they will not serve as a referendum on whether, for example, the science of reading is real or on whether it works. States’ scores in 2024 will invariably differ from 2022 and from 2019, maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways. Regardless, that cannot be taken as proof or disproof of the science of reading.

BPE (Before Pandemic Era). It’s easy to attribute any score decline since 2019 to Covid. Scores fall; blame it on the pandemic. But we saw score declines on NAEP prior to pandemic-related school disruptions. Grade 8 NAEP Reading scores began trending downward in 2015. Think beyond the pandemic.

Stop this ride, please. NAEP assessments from 2024 should not dictate or derail any policy implementation in 2025. Trends require more than one or two data points. NAEP can’t be used to evaluate any given policy. Policy implementation takes time, persistence, consistent investment, and patience. A data point from 2024 should not signal a need to stop, drop, and run, nor a need to throw it all on one specific intervention. See science of reading issue above.

No to the nyah nyah. If one state’s average scores go up, and another state’s goes down, this does not justify “I told you so!” claims. What shapes a state’s or district’s average derives from myriad factors. And what rises now may fall in the future. Look to the scores to see who’s doing well. (Massachusetts inspired changes in education in the early 2000s; Mississippi most recently.) For sure, this is a smart way to identify and share promising practices. No gloating, just learning. Knowing that your experience may vary.

Proficient but not proficient. Remember: NAEP achievement levels indicate what percentage of students show “competency in challenging subject matter.” We call that NAEP Proficient (note the italics!) to distinguish that from what states call proficient on their state assessments. They’re not the same thing, despite using the same word. Our definition may seem vague, but we try to clarify that here. Different assessments, different purposes. Comparing proficiency cut-scores across states can be done, but only if you’re the state mapping study.

Be real. NAEP scores will differ from previous years’ scores, or maybe they won’t. That’s the nature of assessment. But will we suddenly see that 50 percent of students are NAEP Proficient in math? Probably not. That’s not a spoiler; that’s just realistic. And if results show less than 50 percent at NAEP Proficient, does that mean the education system should be nixed? No. The results just outline the scope of the challenge and underscore the P in NAEP: not performance, but progress.

So far, I’ve focused on what not to do, which is a bummer. Let me pivot to the positive.

No shortcuts. Progress comes from hard work, not miracles, silver bullets, or panaceas. Scores show us broad patterns; we began thinking about issues with reading instruction because of that initial downturn in the average scores nearly ten years ago. NAEP doesn’t point to any easy solution. It tells the story.

Doing their part. It bears repeating: Progress isn’t easy. School administrators, staff, teachers, and students are working hard every day. They know that, and we appreciate that. Nothing in any assessment score refutes that. Period.

A little competition. I warned about not gloating if your state or district appears great on the next report card. But I didn’t say not to engage in some healthy competition. Maryland State Superintendent Carey Wright, formerly state chief in Mississippi, galvanized efforts to improve education in the Magnolia State by refusing to allow the “at least we’re not Mississippi” adage to stand anymore when NAEP scores came out. She appears determined to make progress from her new perch, too, and will no doubt be eyeing how Maryland’s neighbor states are faring.

NAEP as backbone. Very savvy researchers use NAEP data as the backbone for pragmatic tools to understand how states and districts are helping their students progress academically. See, for example, the Education Recovery Scorecard and the New York Times’s school district tool.

Do your part. Prioritize school attendance. Read to your kids at home—even if they’re tweens and teens. Who doesn’t love a good story read to them? Check your audiobook history for proof of that. Encourage your kids to read books at home or wherever whenever.

One more don’t: Don’t forget. NAEP is due out in early 2025. Stay tuned.

Some days, when you’re rocking a seven-day-old infant to sleep at three in the morning, the only thing to do is pick away at instruction manuals in a bleary-eyed daze. So it was that I found myself reading two excellent (if seemingly unrelated) books, Zach Groshell’s Just Tell Them and E.D. Hirsch’s Ratchet Effect over the past few weeks. While tackling discrete elements of education—the former instruction and the latter curriculum—their topics depend upon each other, like the two chemicals of an epoxy resin that remain inert until mixed.

To Fordhamites, Hirsch needs no introduction. He’s a veritable patron saint of education reform, whose 1987 book Cultural Literacy advanced a paradigm-shifting argument: Factual knowledge, not transferable skills, determine academic competence. As such, a core curriculum is perhaps the most important lever for school improvement. Since then, he’s written a number of best-selling books that advance and build upon that fundamental argument.

His most recent offering may not be his strongest, but that’s akin to lamenting Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus as not his strongest film or that Lou Gehrig only hit a triple. It still outshines most education books.

Where much of the book retreads familiar ground about the importance of shared common knowledge to both individuals (allowing them to both read and think) and society more generally (binding us together through shared cultural touchpoints), this book’s unique contribution comes in the title: The Ratchet Effect.

A concept from developmental psychology, the ratchet effect references ratchet straps that cannot regress once advanced as an analogy to describe human progress. As a species, we discover new knowledge and processes, both simple and complex, ranging from how to build simple tools up to and exceeding nuclear fission, all of which we can then pass along to future generations. As such, year by year, century by century, humanity advances, whereas other species never advance, stuck with the same tools, never exceeding sticks for poking and stones for smashing.

This development and transmission of a cumulative cultural knowledge is unique to humanity. We ratchet forward, but monkeys, for example, slip back and must start from the beginning with every generation. Regarding education, this concept implies that schools are then responsible for handing along this body of learned knowledge, like an inherited stack of books.

Reading across Hirsch’s corpus, his various defenses of well-planned curricula remind me of a passage from a theologian discussing the multifarious benefits of civilization:

Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase...and the coals in the coal-scuttle...and pianos...and policemen.” The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things.

As for preferring centralized curriculum to teacher preference or student direction, one looks around and can only answer “well, there’s the literacy and common culture…and patriotism…and coherent educational plans.” Hirsch’s latest emphasis on human advancement is but one more proof in defense of knowledge-rich curriculum. It does so many things.

Interspersed in his discussions of curriculum, Hirsch makes reference to the instructional practices that teachers ought to use to transmit this cultural inheritance—well-structured classrooms, clear explanations, and assessments, for example—but the argument for curriculum doesn’t point to one form of instruction necessarily. Once we’ve identified a body of knowledge, what’s the best method for passing along this information to students? Should they all read it independently in books? Discover it in contrived scenarios? Learn it through projects? Download it onto their brains through a neural implant?

Such questions bring me to my second book, Just Tell Them. Its author, Zach Gorshell, an instructional coach, argues that explicit instruction—featuring examples, thorough explanations, modeling, and other structured, teacher-led techniques—is the most effective means of transmitting our collective knowledge from teacher to students.

Perhaps understandably, other books have spent hefty word counts defending direct instruction over and above project-based, student-directed, or inquiry learning without delving into how it’s actually done well. Such polemics are worthwhile as a so many faddish instructional books prattle on about glitzy instructional techniques that teach students nothing. But when it comes to application, teachers have Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and little else.

Groshell fills that dearth. He does open his book with a brief case for direct instruction but spends the majority of his word count discussing how to do it well. For example, explanations should remain concise and avoid vague terms. Teachers must include both examples and non-examples. While images are beneficial, text overlays alongside diagrams or pictures can overload a student’s working memory. Students learn best when teachers toggle between explanation and practice problems instead of an information dump and extended work time.

At a concise ninety-eight pages, Groshell follows his own advice. It’s a useful primer for either parents and policymakers interested in the aspects of research-based instruction, novice teachers struggling in their first years, or instructional coaches who need a text to lean on.

Returning to my central contention: Knowledge rich curriculum and direct instruction depend upon each other. A curriculum cannot teach itself. Unfortunately, too many teachers either learn ineffective theories of instruction or dither away their timing debating esoteric theorems in their teacher prep. Conversely, teachers need actual content to fill their instruction. Without a thoughtfully-planned, sequenced curriculum, students may encounter dinosaurs in three successive grades without ever learning about cellular biology; meanwhile, teachers waste countless hours crafting handmade curriculum and searching for online materials instead of planning effective instructional delivery, adjusting pacing, contacting parents, providing feedback, and other high-yield activities.

Often, we overcomplicate education reform, wiling away hours and ink considering and debating funding formulas, the psychometric validity of this or that assessment, what precisely ought to be the accountability measures for failing schools, and other wonkish debates. Such debates have some value but not much connection to the classroom.

But these two books together remind us to focus on two simple levers to improve schools: curriculum and instruction. That is what schools are about after all. Get those right and much else will fall into place as a result.