The Education Gadfly Weekly

In a recent piece, I examined how recommendations from the Let Teachers Teach workgroup in Louisiana could be applied in Ohio to help improve teacher retention. One recommendation stood out as something worthy of a closer look: addressing chronic absenteeism.

Absenteeism has long been a problem in schools. But in Ohio and across the nation, the pandemic turned it into a crisis. Figure 1 below shows Ohio’s statewide chronic absenteeism rate for the five most recent years with available data. In 2018–19, the rate was just under 17 percent, meaning one in six students were missing at least 10 percent of instructional time. By 2021–22, that number had jumped to 30 percent. It ticked down the following year, but 26 percent—more than one fourth of students—is still way too high.

Figure 1. Statewide chronic absenteeism rate, 2018–2023

This is bad for kids. Chronic absenteeism negatively impacts both academic and social-emotional development, and it’s made pandemic recovery even more difficult. But as the Louisiana workgroup suggests, sky-high absenteeism rates are bad for teachers, too. Trying to keep chronically absent students on-track can be an exercise in frustration. Planning, overseeing group projects, and grading all become more challenging. Meanwhile, the pressure to catch kids up from learning loss can seem unfair. How can teachers boost learning when students aren’t in class?

In short, chronic absenteeism is a problem that needs to be solved for the sake of both students and teachers. But what can Ohio leaders do?

First, they need to maintain the state’s current system for collecting and reporting attendance data. This might not seem like a teacher-focused solution, but the only way state leaders will know where to direct funding and how to support schools is if they have an accurate picture of the problem. Efforts to water down data accuracy and transparency—like last year’s attempt to prohibit the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) from including so-called “legitimate” absences in the state’s calculation for the chronic absenteeism indicator—must be avoided. If enacted, such policies will make it appear that chronic absenteeism rates have improved when they actually haven’t. This will compound negative impacts for students and further frustrate teachers.

Second, state leaders need to take advantage of the bully pulpit to address pandemic-caused attitude shifts regarding attendance. According to Brookings, less than half of caretakers with children at risk of being chronically absent report being concerned about it. Students report that remote learning made them comfortable with missing school and that expectations are lower post-pandemic. State leaders have an obligation to address these worrisome attitudes. Mounting an awareness campaign that hammers home the positive impacts of regular attendance, as well as the dangers of chronic absenteeism, would lend schools—and teachers—some much-needed support.

Third, lawmakers should re-examine Ohio’s attendance policies. When they passed House Bill 410 in 2016, they did so to stop schools from “passing on” truancy problems to the courts rather than working with families to address root causes. To be clear, expecting more from districts is important and shouldn’t change. But a report published last fall by the Ohio Attendance Taskforce suggests that House Bill 410 may be going too far by setting “a prescriptive, legalistic, and reactive response to students missing school” and leaving district and school leaders with “no ability to enforce consequences.” If that’s true, chronic absenteeism rates will remain stubbornly high and teachers will remain frustrated. Going forward, lawmakers should seek to thread the needle: Districts should be required to work with families, but they also need to be able to enforce consequences.

Lastly, district administrators must ensure they’re taking ownership of attendance efforts. DEW offers plenty of guidance on effective intervention strategies, but if district officials aren’t implementing them—or if they’re pushing implementation onto the already full plates of teachers—then nothing will change. Many of the recommendations offered by the Ohio Attendance Taskforce are solutions that should be executed by administrators: implementing “robust, authentic, and frequent” engagement experiences; educating families on the impact of missed instruction; improving transportation; and sending nudges via text. Teachers can and should be helping. But it should be up to administrators to initiate and sustain big picture interventions.

Addressing chronic absenteeism requires a collective effort. Teachers play an important role by establishing strong relationships with students, making classrooms engaging and safe, and communicating with parents. But teachers can’t solve this problem on their own. The longer it persists, the more likely it is that teacher retention will suffer alongside student outcomes. For the sake of Ohio’s students and teachers, it’s time for state and local leaders to get serious about absenteeism.

Just over a year has passed since Ohio’s science of reading initiative was signed into law. Under these new provisions, all public elementary schools must align their literacy instruction to the science of reading. This evidence-based approach emphasizes phonics along with vocabulary- and knowledge-rich content to support students’ reading comprehension. Schools that weren’t already doing this must transition to the science of reading during the upcoming school year, and $168 million in state funding is being spent to support these changes.

Putting these reforms into law was a necessary first step. But as we at Fordham have stressed, it won’t work without faithful and rigorous implementation, both at the state level (through the work of state agencies) and local level (under district and school leadership). How these key players handle the Science of Reading provisions will determine how effectively they are put into practice.

As detailed in my recent report, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) has done a fine job with a critical early implementation step—creating a solid list of fifteen core reading curricula from which elementary schools may choose. But that’s just a start. Several other important aspects of implementation are also underway, so as to get the literacy initiative off to a strong start. Here are three.

Approving reading intervention programs

Promoting high-quality core curricula is crucial, as these programs guide the reading instruction that all students receive. But another vital element of the initiative is ensuring that interventions intended to help struggling readers are also aligned to the science of reading. To this end, the legislature wisely tasked DEW with vetting and approving intervention programs, much as it did for core curricula.

By the end of July, the department had approved sixty intervention programs. This is far more than the fifteen approved core curricula, but the lengthier list likely reflects the greater number of intervention programs available, as well as the fact that scientifically-based interventions apply to all grade levels, not just the early elementary grades. Among the approved interventions are two endorsed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in a Fordham report last year (UFLI Foundations and SIPPS). Wisely, DEW did not approve interventions that use disproven, non-scientific methods (e.g., Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention).

Launching a professional development (PD) course

In addition to overhauling curricula, lawmakers recognized the need to bolster educators’ capacity to apply the science of reading. By July 2025, all school administrators and teachers (grades K–12), as well as specific support staff, must complete a state-designed course in the science of reading unless they have already received comparable training (e.g., LETRS or Wilson Language Training). To help develop the course, DEW partnered with Keys to Literacy, a respected national group with experience providing literacy guidance for educators in Colorado and Massachusetts.

The new online course, which is already available and consists of roughly twenty hours of training,[1] includes a broad overview of the science of reading, along with targeted modules that cover areas like instruction in phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Course completion requires passing a post-test, which should encourage closer attention to and engagement with the content. Teachers and support staff receive state-funded stipends when they finish the course.

The new statewide course should serve as an excellent introduction to the science of reading, but some educators will want or need more. Many Ohio schools—perhaps supported by additional state investments—will need to further boost their efforts to strengthen educators’ proficiency in this realm via curriculum-specific support or promoting effective teacher collaboration.

Increasing funding for teacher-prep audits

Another essential piece of the literacy puzzle is ensuring that the state’s colleges of education thoroughly prepare prospective teachers in the science of reading. As analyses from NCTQ indicate, many teacher-prep programs—in Ohio and nationally—have not been doing this well. To improve teacher preparation, lawmakers required colleges to align their programs with the science of reading. They assigned the Ohio Department of Higher Education the job of auditing the alignment of those programs, with reviews slated to begin in January 2025. But the legislature did not initially set aside sufficient funding for the task—just $150,000 to review more than fifty programs—but recently-passed legislation added $2 million to support this effort.

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All these steps—from vetting core literacy curricula to supporting teacher-prep audits—lay the groundwork for strong classroom implementation, while also signaling that state leaders are taking these reforms seriously and striving to ensure that the science of reading takes root across Ohio. Rigorous implementation is a heavy lift, but the payoff has the potential to be great: a more literate and well-prepared next generation of Ohio students.

Earlier this summer, the Akron Public Schools (APS) board voted to become part of the statewide lawsuit seeking to dismantle Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship program. Coverage of their decision by the Akron Beacon Journal provides a variety of reasons for spending taxpayer dollars to join a fight aimed at limiting educational opportunities for students and families.

Many of these reasons are questionable. Board member Barbara Sykes, for example, notes that EdChoice “was supposed to be for disadvantaged students and schools that were not meeting the state standards in educating children…now it has just grown to everyone, regardless of what’s happening in their system.” 

Perhaps that argument would make sense coming from a school board member of a high-performing district. But for anyone familiar with “what’s happening” in the Akron system, Ms. Sykes’s reasoning should be hard to swallow. For those who aren’t, consider the district’s 2022–23 state report card, which shows that 65 percent of the district’s students failed to meet proficiency standards on state exams. APS moved only 19 percent of K–3 students who were not on track in reading during the prior school year to on-track. And despite praise for the district’s college and career academies, roughly 73 percent of the 1,612 credentials earned by the class of 2022 aren’t in demand by employers or are unlikely to lead to a stable, well-paying job.

Given that APS is doing this poor of a job educating students, the last thing board members should be concerned about is voucher litigation. In fact, the recent voucher expansion will have very little impact on the district, as the majority of APS students would have been eligible for vouchers anyway; forty-four of the district’s forty-seven schools were poor-performing enough to be included on the state’s EdChoice designated list for the upcoming school year. That’s 93 percent of the district’s schools.

Why are board members so intent on limiting options for families when the district’s own schools are so severely lacking? The Beacon Journal coverage offers several reasons. Many are financial, as the board will be asking citizens to vote for a levy this fall despite spending an eye-popping $21,475 of taxpayer funds per pupil during FY23. This new funding request comes in the wake of not only the dismal (and persistent) academic results outlined above, but also a district-commissioned performance audit that contains horrifying statements like “expectations for students are low” and “it is an understatement to say the culture is not one of accountability.” In APS, the audit continues, “consequences are nonexistent” and “poor performance is tolerated.”

However, the most eyebrow-raising reason for actively trying to prevent families from doing what’s best for their kids is the claim that it’s all for the sake of the greater good. According to board president Diana Autry, dismantling EdChoice aligns with the district’s goal of “getting people to understand the importance of public education” because it’s “a public good for all of us that is at risk.”

Autry isn’t wrong when she says that public education is important. But she is wrong when she implies that choosing an alternative to a district school means people don’t value or understand the importance of public education. I can’t speak for all Akron families in this regard. But I can certainly speak for my own.

I spent most of my formative years in a creaky old house with forest green carpet that was located just a few blocks from the Summit County Juvenile Court building and a mere two and a half miles from the current location of LeBron James’s I Promise school. A few months after my sixth birthday, during the summer of 1995, my parents moved my sisters and me to a different home in a nearby suburb. Education was their primary motivation for the move. They wanted their children to attend great public schools, and the APS buildings in our neighborhood didn’t fit the bill.

Up until then, my parents had dealt with the city’s lackluster schools by sending my older sister and me to a nearby private school. Doing so was expensive; EdChoice didn’t exist back then, and the only way my parents could afford tuition was by tucking away their annual tax return. It was unsustainable; my younger sister was set to enter kindergarten in the fall of 1996, and there was no way they could afford to send all three of us to private schools. It also wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted us in public schools. My mom, who not only graduated from a public school, but spent decades working in them, was especially bullish about public education.

But valuing public education—actively wanting to enroll in district schools—didn’t mean it was the right choice. The schools available to us were chronically underperforming and weren’t expected to improve any time soon. They weren’t safe, either, at least not in my neighborhood. Like millions of other families, if my parents wanted us to have access to high-performing and safe public schools, they had no choice but to move to a new district. But also like millions of others, we couldn’t afford to move, given our family income. The only reason our 1995 move was possible was because of an unexpected insurance settlement that gave my parents the funds to relocate to a suburb specifically chosen for its excellent public schools. 

It’s been nearly thirty years since my family moved out of the city. A lot has changed since then. Archie the Snowman has moved (but isn’t gone, thank goodness). The empty lot where my sisters and I used to ride our bikes is no longer empty. But the quality of the schools in my old neighborhood—and the rest of the district, too—hasn’t improved. Thousands of families in Akron are just like mine. They want better for their kids but can’t afford to move to find it. They rely on EdChoice scholarships to brighten their kids’ futures.

Meanwhile, board members at APS—those who are partly responsible for the abysmal academic outcomes in my hometown—seem unconcerned with what families want or need. Rather than focusing on improving the schools they oversee so that families actually want to enroll their children, they seek to eliminate other options and force them to attend their “assigned” school, without any regard to whether that school is high quality, safe, or the right fit.

If EdChoice ceases to exist and APS continues to underperform, those who can afford to go elsewhere will. As for everyone else? Well, they’ll just have to settle for low-performing schools. You know, for the greater good.

Dual enrollment (DE) is a catch-all term for the means by which students earn college credit while still in high school (or middle school). But that singular term covers a number of pathways with varying structures and delivery models. Do those differences impact student outcomes? And can program structure help ensure quality? A new report sought to find out.

A trio of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin examined data from the Lone Star State, which leads the nation in DE participation. Specifically, they identified over 108,250 high school students who entered ninth grade at traditional districts in 2015 or 2016 and who took at least one DE course within four years. The analysis focuses solely on DE delivered by a community college, thereby excluding any four-year institutions, and does not include students attending charter schools or any district school that integrated early college curricula with high school coursework. Although this results in an incomplete picture of the DE landscape, the findings are numerous and interesting. Here are a handful of important nuggets:

• The vast majority of students in the sample (81 percent) took only academic courses (the researchers’ term, covering things like English, biology, and psychology), while another 12 percent chose only career and technical education (CTE) courses like construction management and HVAC technology. The remaining 7 percent took a mix of both types of courses.

• Higher-achieving high schoolers (identified based on average State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness scores) favored academic-only college courses.

• The vast majority of DE students began taking college courses in eleventh and twelfth grade, but a larger proportion of CTE-only students (17 percent) started in ninth or tenth grade. The researchers note that this is likely due to the lower readiness requirements for CTE courses at the community college level.

• A large majority of both academic and CTE courses were taken solely in-person, versus online or hybrid. Only 10 percent of CTE and 34 percent of academic DE sections were offered solely online.

• Fifty-six percent of the in-person CTE courses taken by students were delivered on college campuses, 32 percent on high school campuses, and 12 percent at other locations. Approximately 46 percent of in-person academic DE courses were delivered on college campuses, 32 percent at high schools, and 22 percent at other locations.

• For both course types, the majority of DE sections were comprised exclusively of high school students. Academic courses, however, were more likely to include both high schoolers and college students.

• Forty-five percent of academic course sections were taught by non-tenure-track (NTT) community college faculty, 37 percent were taught by high school teachers, and 12 percent were taught by tenure-track (TT) or already-tenured faculty. For CTE courses, 46 percent were taught by high school teachers, with 43 percent taught by NTT college faculty and just 8 percent by TT/tenured faculty.

As for student learning, taking courses too early, mixing college undergrads with high school DE students, and taking courses fully online are all negatively associated with course passage and final grade. For example, regression models show that taking a DE course in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades are all negatively associated with course completion and course grades compared to waiting to take the same DE class in twelfth grade. This holds true for both academic and CTE courses. Interestingly, the researchers hypothesize that stronger course outcomes among high school seniors may be related to better programmatic support for them (from both their high school and college teachers/counselors) at that point in time—closer to actual college-going—than to issues of student readiness. However, lack of student preparation and readiness for college courses cannot be ruled out for any of the negative outcomes.

For academic DE courses, taking the course somewhere other than the student’s high school (like on a college campus) is negatively associated with passing the course and with their final grade. For students in CTE DE courses, taking the course at the college rather than at the high school is also negatively correlated with final grade, but taking the CTE course at another location—not the high school or a college—positively predicts both course passage and final grade.

Having a college instructor rather than a high school teacher is generally associated with a lower probability of passing the course and a lower final grade. Students in academic course sections with full-time NTT instructors experienced a 1.6-percentage-point decrease in their probability of passing the course and a 0.04-unit decrease in final grade, compared with students in sections with high school teachers. The only exception is that, for academic courses, taking DE with a part-time NTT faculty member instead of a high school teacher is positively associated with course grade, although it negatively predicts passing the course.

As to future college-going, passing a DE course is associated with an 11.9-percentage-point increase in the probability of a student enrolling in any Texas postsecondary institution after high school for students taking academic DE courses, and a 10.0-percentage-point increase for those taking CTE DE courses. Academic DE students enrolling in college tend to opt for four-year institutions, while their CTE counterparts tend to opt for community colleges. Taking DE courses early in high school (before 12th grade) is negatively correlated with enrolling in any Texas college, but the relationship is only significant for CTE DE students.

Limitations of the research include the absence of charter school students and early-college high school students—to say nothing of four-year colleges—as well as a focus on final grades and course passage to the exclusion of all other possible measures of quality. There is some analysis of differentiation of outcomes per various instructor types, but no data to indicate whether DE provided at high schools by high school teachers might have lower standards than DE courses taken on college campuses and taught by professors. More research is needed to get the true picture of the value of DE in all its forms. But some takeaways might be worth the attention of high schools and postsecondary institutions: Students appear to need a lot of support to excel in tough classes, class location and teachers can impact outcomes, and that online-only classes are not the ideal means for launching most high schoolers successfully into the college world, even if they do expand DE access.

SOURCE: Wonsun Ryu, Lauren Schudde, and Kimberly Pack-Cosme, “Dually Noted: Examining the Implications of Dual Enrollment Course Structure for Students’ Course and College Enrollment Outcomes,” American Educational Research Journal (July 2024).

The specific connection between increased school funding and student outcomes remains unclear—regardless of whether the added dollars are blanket or targeted—and the mechanisms at work remain elusive. Perhaps the historical record could shed some light on modern times. A new working paper offers a window into the past that might just show us the way for the future.

A quartet of researchers from the United States and Finland dig into data from Mississippi between 1940 and 2000, attempting to trace the impact of a school funding tweak implemented there in 1920. The so-called “equalization fund” was intended to provide more state dollars to districts whose expenses outpaced the combination of their base state revenue and their local tax revenue. Prior to 1920, districts with a majority-Black student population received higher funding than those with majority-White populations, largely because Black schools were fewer in number and geographically clustered, resulting in crowded buildings. Having more students meant receiving more money via the state’s base per capita formula. However, individual schools could be advantaged or disadvantaged as a result of allocation decisions made at the central office by White leaders who generally favored schools with more White students. That also meant that equalization funds ended up going to districts with a significant population of White students because, on paper, they received less from the state formula. Thus the unwritten rules of the Jim Crow South allowed almost-completely-separate and almost-completely-unequal school funding via every possible mechanism.

What changed when the equalization funds started flowing? The researchers fast-forward to 1940 and find that Mississippi schools were spending, on average, $5 per year per Black student versus $26 per White student (which translates to $107 versus $557 in today’s currency). For schools with a high concentration of Black students, this represents a decrease of about 4 to 6 cents for every percentage point increase in Black population share between 1920 and 1940.

They also zoom in to a subsample of school districts that did or did not receive equalization funding in 1940. Since there were instances of schools with a mix of Black and White students in both categories, they were able to create thirty-six district pairs for direct comparison. These districts were all relatively rural, with three-quarters of both their Black and their White students living on farms. Families were somewhat more disadvantaged relative to the broader population (for example, only 16 percent of Black families in the subsample owned their homes versus 24 percent in the larger group of districts). These districts included about 20 percent of all Black fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds from the larger group and roughly 9 percent of Whites.

Estimates indicate that higher levels of spending, where they occurred, had a positive effect on Black students’ educational attainment. Specifically, a $1 increase in annual instructional spending per Black student from the base average of $5 per year increased the fraction of fourteen- to sixteen-year-old Black students who completed at least sixth grade by around 1.5 percentage points (from a base of 45 percent) and increased mean completed years of schooling by around a tenth of a year (from a base of 5.28 years). Interestingly, the impact of increased marginal spending on White students was essentially null, but both outcome statistics were far higher for White students to begin with.

The researchers also go on to extrapolate these impacts over sixty years, using Census data to identify a sample of nearly 6,000 Black individuals who were between the ages of four and sixteen in Mississippi in 1940 and were still alive in 2000. Their analysis confirms that each dollar of additional instructional spending (as of 1940) was associated with a 0.09 year increase in completed education. This echoes the single-year estimate from 1940. Additionally, they find that higher school resources in 1940 were associated with significantly higher household and family income in 2000—an increase in $1 in school funding was associated with a 3 percent increase in income. This is a large effect relative to the size of the effect on completed schooling, suggesting that higher spending increased both the years of schooling of Black Mississippians and their returns per year of schooling. It’s worth noting that there were many other influences on the economic trajectory of all individuals between 1940 and 2000, including cycles of economic boom and bust, family migration, civil rights victories (along with unrealized goals), and numerous efforts to connect educational inputs and outcomes directly with a dedicated goal of fixing past injustices. Any or all could have influenced the economic outcomes of individuals in the study to greater or lesser degree, even if the researchers’ main point still stands.

The research team goes on to highlight the other side of the coin revealed by their initial analysis: what Black students who did not receive extra funding lost out on over the intervening years and how much better life might have been for them at the dawn of the twenty-first century if Black student funding in the state had equaled that of White students from 1940 onward. They (and others) discuss that long term analysis here.

Jim Crow–era Southern White leaders used every possible lever to keep Black people down and to raise up their own White sons and daughters. But data and analysis from recent years indicate that those sorry days are largely gone, although there is still work to be done. As my colleague Adam Tyner discusses in depth in his 2023 “Think Again” publication on school funding, research shows that, nationally, as of 2022, Black and Hispanic students were receiving $514 and $115 more per pupil, on average, than White students, respectively. “It is true, however, that funding gaps based on race/ethnicity are more common than those based on SES,” he writes. “Whereas Lee et al. find only a handful of states where total school-level funding is even slightly regressive, they identify more than twenty states where Black or Hispanic students are funded at lower levels than their White counterparts, although only a few of those differences are statistically significant.” One of those states is Texas, another place whose Black residents suffered under Jim Crow regimes for decades after the Civil War. “Although equity advocates shouldn’t exaggerate the problem,” Tyner concludes, “the persistence of racial disparities should prompt action in the places where they still exist.” This window on Mississippi’s past—especially the multi-decade impacts of a single school funding decision—provides a light by which to clearly see the consequences of inequity and gives us incentive to end those inequities wherever they may still exist once and for all.

SOURCE: David Card et. al, “School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi circa 1940,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers (June 2024).