Aaccountability is all well and good, but at the end of the day school systems live or die based on middle class buy-in.
Big urban systems need to work to make neighborhood schools into places where middle and professional class families want to send their kids even though they’re not as new as private alternatives and even though the children of their poorer neighbors will be there too.
As a starting point that means getting public safety and discipline/classroom disruption under control, and it means tracking. None of these are popular with teachers’ unions and they’ll need to be run over with a truck to implement them, but there’s no particular need to do any more than keep them out of decision making about policy and pedagogy. They’ve not negotiated an insane sweetheart deal for themselves, they’re not longshoremen.
I generally agree with this but the problem with school discipline is that it often turns into anarcho-tyranny. The kids that are conscientious become terrified of getting into trouble for random kid BS while genuine bullies can’t be controlled because they aren’t afraid of any consequences the school could do. I’ll still traumatized from things like this in the urban public schools to went to, like when someone stole a favorite toy and didn’t get punished but I was punished for bringing it to school. It’s a hard problem but as an urban parent I’d see tough discipline policies as a negative based on my experiences going to these schools.
"i got punished unfairly for bringing a toy to school" is not the kind of discipline issue at issue here
the discipline problem is kids who are so disruptive or violent that they make learning impossible when they're in a classroom at all. the "normal" kids don't worry about being confused with disruptive kids, because they could not on their worst day even pretend to be as bad.
Yea, several of our neighbors do send their kids to our catchment elementary school, and one of the improvements which has taken root since it was handed to a charter to run was that deep-seated disciplinary problems were taken in hand. This isn't a lottery charter, it's a catchment school, so they have no control over enrollment except expulsion in incredibly severe cases, but our neighbors say they seem to have broken the back of all but the worst couple offenders that were making it impossible for peers to learn. Every grade used to have multiple kids disrupting almost every class, and there were actual issues with violence (in a goddamned elementary school, FFS!)
Matt didn’t mention that the Obama administration put out guidance that said that a racial disparity in disciplinary actions was presumptive evidence/proof of racism. It was and is a recipe for chaos. Taking any disciplinary action became problematic. Rather than clear standards that a child can understand, it has resulted in an environment wherein only an extraordinary child can learn.
I’ll add another anecdote then. In my public middle school we were frequently not allowed to talk during lunch time because when allowed to talk it got “too noisy”. The rule was in theory that we would be able to talk as long as the overall volume didn’t get too loud but there’s an obvious coordination problem there - also we were just kids on our lunch break, come on. So most days, no talking. Same story in the hallways. I have to believe this resulted in more issues with discipline (enforcing the no talking policy, kids acting out in class because they haven’t had an outlet all day) without providing any benefit to security or honestly anything.
A "no talking" policy in the public spaces of a school is... quite divorced from the sort of disciplinary needs I'm talking about in my big city school district, haha.
Again, I believe that it happened, it's just that we cannot possibly allow the idiocy of one school to discredit the idea that classrooms need to be quiet and safe or basically no students learn.
Was the principal just an anti-social weirdo or something? Were they against kids having friends? This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Did parents revolt?
I think the general pattern of anarchotyranny is just what he described. Basically, normal people fear the consequences for breaking rules (getting in trouble in school matters a lot if you are a good student or your parents will be mad at you for it, an arrest and a criminal record would make my life immensely worse), but the folks causing most of the trouble have already priced that in (someone getting his tenth detention, a guy with five previous arrests getting a sixth one). The result is a system where deterrence works on the well-behaved people but not the badly-behaved ones.
I do agree with your overall points though and don’t dispute those (re :limiting true disruptions), it just sometimes does go sideways in practice which is something to be aware of in executing.
The problem with this is that it turns effective teachers into less effective teachers. I taught in an urban high school for many years, and I can tell you that there is a big difference between a class with two disruptive kids and one with three. Not to mention one in which three students need individual help and one in which six students do.* The only way this is going to work is to simultaneously reduce class sizes, at least in the classes with the less gifted students. But the students of the more gifted students are not going to stand for that.
I would also question your implicit assumption that disruptive students are intrinsically "bad" as opposed to being immature. The latter is much more often the case -- I can attest to many students who were disruptive in 9th or 10th grade but perfectly fine in 12th grade.
*It is simple math: At only five minutes per student, six students = 30 minutes of a 55 min high school period.
This seems like it's just an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing, which is fine in the suburbs I guess, but in the city where I live it means abandoning a bunch of poor kids of average or above average intelligence to a lifetime of poor outcomes because we cannot be bothered to put them in a classroom where there'll be peace and quiet and teach them in a manner conducive to their abilities.
If we implement tracking, and effectively curtail disruptive behaviors, and find it's not enough for the low track, then fine, we can continue to iterate on methods and reallocate resources, but is there really any doubt that doing both these things would be very good for the middle and high tracks, from the jump?
And they'd make it a lot easier for educated urban parents to look at the catchment school down the block and say, "yea, we can send our kids there, they'll do well, we don't need to pay for private school or run them across the city every morning to a charter." The buy-in of those parents is known to improve outcomes for all.
The better we do at increasing attainment for the median poor kid, the fewer poor kids there are next time around, and the more resources we can devote to the ones who need help. Unless we're positing that we've already "sorted" every family into the proper socioeconomic class for the genetic underpinnings of their intelligence, which... clearly not the case.
Tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn initial low-performing students to the underclass in perpetuity. It is the opposite of no child left behind-- the explicit statement that we are going to leave some children behind and devil take the hindmost.
Tracking advocates are persistently unwilling, maybe even unable, to be honest about this. Instead we get dissembling about "iterating on methods" that will never happen and resources that will never, ever, in a million years be "reallocated" to what everyone will perceive as a Breakfast Club of hooligans and dumbasses. That's how it works in tracked systems.
It would be much more forthright to simply admit that you think a large percentage of students are unfit for learning and that society is better off without them clogging the school system. That's an empirical claim; it's either true or it's not true.
Not tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn kids who didn't get the material they needed to understand what's being taught in this classroom to spend the entire year lost, while also condemning the kids who already know this material to spend the entire year bored, so that you don't ever have to make anyone sad by telling them that their kid is not in the advanced math class.
Tracking opponents are persistently unwilling, maybe even unable, to be honest about this.
>Not tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn kids who didn't get the material they needed to understand what's being taught in this classroom to spend the entire year lost,
As someone who taught untracked Economics for many years, I can tell you that that simply is not the case. As I have noted, I had time to assist the most struggling students. And, they could ask for help from more advanced students, if they wanted to do so. But if I had had a class of all struggling students, I would have had to dumb things WAY down.
As others have said, it is tracking that condemns the least capable students to substandard learning.
Tracking is the only possible way to get kids whose aptitude is in the bottom third the basic building blocks they need. Without it, we *demonstrably and inevitably* will tailor pedagogy to the top third, which fucks the bottom third entirely.
With it, yes, maybe some of them prove, once they're over initial hurdles, that they aren't actually in the bottom third, and I would absolutely not support German-level rigidity in tracking for that reason.
But by and large, the current system utterly fails not just the bottom third of poor students but the top two as well. Virtually none of the bottom third of a typical urban public school will leave poverty in their lifetime, and probably a bare majority of the remaining two-thirds won't either.
It's on you to actually prove the claim that tailoring pedagogy to three cohorts, and isolating a small fourth cohort, is an excuse to abandon one of the three when basically all poor urban students are already totally and utterly abandoned by the status quo.
I can and must admit that we're basically proposing to abandon the "rubber room" cohort, or at least to get them the fuck out of the way of the others.
It won't, though. And you know damned well it won't. In tracked schools the Breakfast Club is glorified babysitting at best and Lord of the Flies at worst. No one is teaching anyone "basic building blocks," unless it's how to aim them to hit the other kids when throwing them.
That's what gets me about this-- the hypocritical dishonesty of framing tracking as trying to benefit the bottom tier when in fact you are explicitly sacrificing the interests of the bottom tier in order to achieve a perceived greater good for the top tier. Have the courage of your convictions and argue that that's a good thing! Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
You may believe what you wish regarding my motives, but you still fail quite consistently to express a positive vision, an alternative, a defense of the status quo, anything.
When one is sufficiently committed to a simple, ideological understanding of the world, policy detail starts to look like spinelessness.
>Tracking is the only possible way to get kids whose aptitude is in the bottom third the basic building blocks they need. Without it, we *demonstrably and inevitably* will tailor pedagogy to the top third, which fucks the bottom third entirely.
This is the opposite of your initial claim, which was: "Putting them all in a single class proceeding at a single pace serves none of them well; the top ones get bored and disgruntled"
Edit:
>Virtually none of the bottom third of a typical urban public school will leave poverty in their lifetime, and probably a bare majority of the remaining two-thirds won't either.
You're literally cutting off quotes mid-sentence, wherever is convenient to misconstrue an argument. This is the second or third time you've done so.
Until parents more or less forced the issue, reading and math pedagogy had shifted in exactly the direction I describe, towards complex but more interesting-seeming techniques. Nonetheless, putting everyone in the same classroom often works badly. That's why we already have a ton of tracking-adjacent tools like honors classes, AP classes, advanced independent work...
Both of these things are true, they are not contradictory, and I'm gonna call it a day on this topic because I don't think this mode of rehashing things we've already said is edifying or enlightening.
>This seems like it's just an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing
???? No, my comment was addressed solely to your suggested solution.
>but is there really any doubt that doing both these things would be very good for the middle and high tracks, from the jump?
But it would be a complete disaster for anyone below the middle. Most low-skilled students behave just fine, after all. Why do they have to be stuck in classes with a disproportionate number of disruptive performers?
>The better we do at increasing attainment for the median poor kid, the fewer poor kids there are next time around
Not if your system is doing a poor job of educating the people below the middle track. Again, your proposal will work for those students only if their class sizes are greatly reduced. Would you support that?
"Most low-skilled students behave just fine, after all. Why do they have to be stuck in classes with a disproportionate number of disruptive performers?"
They don't. Disciplining these kids often means putting them in a room alone with a teacher for half a day. Back when we tracked, we also suspended kids, gave them detention, sent them to write drills on the blackboard during the day, or sent them off to a "military school."
"Not if your system is doing a poor job of educating the people below the middle track."
In urban systems today the majority of the top 65% are also failing to get an education sufficient to get them out of poverty. Simply salvaging *their* outcomes and bringing them up to something closer to par with suburban outcomes would, within a generation, have made a huge difference in the trajectory of intergenerational poverty and urban demographics. This would definitionally still hold true even if tracking makes the bottom 35%, who are currently still being utterly failed, even worse off as you contend.
"Would you support that?"
If it proves necessary, yes, as I just said. I am less convinced of the necessity than you, if we are actually committed to providing a non-disruptive environment in all three tracks.
I actually think you two are largely on the same page. You're basically saying there should be tracking, including a rubber room track for the most disruptive students. Gdanning is concerned about the low-performing, but non-disruptive students which they view as distinct from disruptive students. They're just saying tracking like this will require additional segmentation (and thus lower class sizes/more teachers), which I'm guessing you'd be fine with even if it results in a rubber/low/mid/high tracking system.
Absolutely. Never heard the term before, but it makes sense. At some point, helping that 2-4% of kids would be good, but simply getting them out of the way of the other 95%+ is a necessary precondition for improving outcomes in the latter group. There is a ton of room for improvement, and even marginal gains would be transformative for the nature of urban poverty and the livability of our cities over time.
>Disciplining these kids often means putting them in a room alone with a teacher for half a day.
Then there is no need to engage in tracking. And, as mentioned, in a non-tracked classroom, there will be less need for this because there will be less chance of a critical mass of disruptive students. Note that in my experience, the presence of disruptive students brings out the disruptive tendencies of students who are closer to the norm.
>This would definitionally still hold true even if tracking makes the bottom 35%, who are currently still being utterly failed, even worse off as you contend..
You can't simply wave away this outcome. A policy that makes the bottom 35% less well off bears a heavy burden of proof.
> I am less convinced of the necessity than you
You are very much mistaken, based on my years of experience in teaching in urban schools. Like I said, there is a huge difference between a class with 2 disruptive students and one with 3 disruptive students.
Why? It's incredibly clear that the specific pedagogical needs of middling students differ from those of both the "bright" ones at the top and the poor but nondisruptive ones at the bottom.
Putting them all in a single class proceeding at a single pace serves none of them well; the top ones get bored and disgruntled, the bottom are hurried along and gain too little understanding of the basics to be able to do them reliably, and the middle gets washed over. When you do this, you almost *inevitably* wind up tailoring material, time, and method to the needs of the brighter kids because they and their parents are usually best-equipped to get the schools to do what they want.
It is precisely because we no longer track that unempirical pedagogy like the whole language approach has been inflicted on average students, to whom it's a moderate irritant, and poor ones, for whom it's crippling.
It just seems inherently very hard to teach a roomful of kids at very different levels at the same time. I can see how to teach algebra to a kid who's prepared for it, but a kid who can't multiply two-digit numbers is not going to get much out of it, and neither is a kid who started learning calculus from Khan Academy because it seemed interesting to him. Those kids belong in three different classrooms, with education appropriate for their needs. Putting them in the same classroom makes everything work worse. Adding in a couple kids who can't or won't control themselves and keep disrupting the class just shuts down education in that classroom for the year.
Also, what about the highly intelligent disrupters, which while a minority, are not a negligible minority? I don’t think we can immediately conflate disruptive = average or below average
I was one such in grade school, and it was made clear to me that I was allowed to be as smart as I could be and finish everything in front of me as quickly as I could manage, and then I was to not be a disruptive asshole and prevent others from doing so, or gloat about it and demoralize them, or shout over their answers to questions when not called on.
The miracle of discipline is that it instills virtue, if applied consistently for a time.
My brother taught 5th grade. He related a conversation he had in a meeting with parents. He said that their son was a very nice boy who wasn’t going to learn much during the school year because almost all of his teaching time was wasted keeping a few other boys from creating total disruption. A system that punishes the many in favor of the few is nuts.
>A system that punishes the many in favor of the few is nuts.
And what if their very nice son is low skilled and not very bright, and is placed in the lowest track, along with most of the disruptive students?
Honestly, this has little to do with what we are talking about. No one is arguing that disruptive students should not be addressed. And the issue is not the many versus the few. It is which "many" is going to be disadvantaged. Why should it be the low-skilled students?
Why do you assume that a low skilled child will be placed with the disrupters? I believe that the low skilled are harmed most by disrupters. High skilled children are better able to learn and adapt outside the classroom. The systems that keep the disrupters in place with no effective discipline system does harm the many in favor of the worst consuming most of a teacher’s time, energy and attention.
>Why do you assume that a low skilled child will be placed with the disrupters?
There is a high correlation between disruptive behavior and low skills. Hence, disrupters would tend to be low-skilled, and hence be in the low track
>The systems that keep the disrupters in place with no effective discipline system does harm the many in favor of the worst consuming most of a teacher’s time, energy and attention.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the topic under discussion, which is tracking.
I apologize for failing to respond to your point that the issue is tracking. The disruptive child needs intensive work on socialization, assuming that question is not one of insanity which is outside a school’s capacity and mission. Tracking which moves the disrupters to a program that focuses on their primary need for a successful, adult life makes sense to me, whether the child is high or low skilled. To me, the education of the many should never be sacrificed to the problems of the very few, with the problems of the few not being also sacrificed.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Viewing the same reality we arrived at different conclusions which is not surprising with such a complex, difficult question
The elementary schools in my area have a “home room” that kids are assigned to with three home rooms in a “Pod.” About half of teaching takes place in the home room, but for reading and math, each teacher in the pod takes a group of students from the whole pod at each level - one for those behind grade level, one for those ahead, and one for those at grade level.
There's often a gap between what actual teachers want and what the union as a political organization pushes for.
For example, during COVID a poll of our local teachers had a plurality for returning to full time in school in the fall of 2020, with hybrid next and full remote last. But the state union was full throated for remote.
I believe tracking is mostly the same, where teachers on the ground are more for than against, but the union political leadership is much more radical and bad.
It makes sense that teachers on the ground are more into tracking. You don’t want kids in your class who are not sufficiently challenged by the material, it’s bad for them and the other students.
I mean, it seems kind of rough if you're a 5th grade teacher, get students in class who can't read at all, and people say you're bad at your job because students are reading below grade level at the end of year.
Union leadership having different priorities from members is a universal problem. Leadership is always more leftwing but they usually avoid opposing things that are good for their members pay or conditions.
Tracking to me is really hard because it fundamentally means some people are working several times harder jobs for no benefit.
I teach in a school that tracks and the difference between the top and the bottom is insane. It should be paid a lot more to have a bottom class than a top form one. It’s insane to me that anyone is fine with this.
I work in an accelerated program this year and it is truly 500 percent easier and less stressful than the prison ship that is low classes. But we’re paid the same.
Don’t worry, if your students do well they’ll stick you with the shit classes forever!
This is the worst aspect of high-stakes testing. At least when tests don’t have any stakes, schools can assign the good and passionate teachers to the honors tracks and dump the lazy coaches on the future underclass, which is proper. Anything less chases out the good and passionate teachers quick.
My impression is that unions are pro-teacher safety, but have in many cases concluded that the easiest way to protect teachers is go lighter on discipline. (Teachers are rarely just randomly attacked by students, instead the danger comes from trying to discipline students.)
This is not the union! Teachers would love to have more discipline. One thing schools are rated and ranked on are the number of suspensions (low is good). Teachers are also under a lot of pressure from administration to take care of things in the classroom with little back up from administration. I am not sure if this is due to parental pressure or other demands.
I think many of the teachers reading this would be surprised to learn their union (if they have one) has control over discipline, curriculum choices, whether their school district uses tracking or not, etc.
Oh, the teachers are fine, most of them anyway. But Philly union leadership was for a long time all-in on the EdD kool-aid regarding complex instruction methods and avoiding discipline due to equity concerns, and the administration generally measures success by minimizing disciplinary incidents on paper, i.e. ignoring real problems.
It basically guarantees that the only way for middle-income or better parents to ensure their kids have a decent, safe, nondisruptive environment is to put them into the right dozen-odd lottery-admit charters or move into the 15-20 catchments that have both gentrified and where parent education decisions have caught up to that reality and they send their kids to the neighborhood school, because few catchment schools with poor student bodies are enforcing discipline or following best practice for median-achieving students.
Which is at the core of my comment: poor kids do better when they have middle class and professional class peers, and the measures that schools undertake to attract the latter also hugely help poor kids. We can do better in ways which are reasonably simple and well-understood.
Kind of interesting how the unions seem to typically be massive problem at predominantly poorer schools in urban areas, where there are also lots of behavioral issues among students, but then the unions are no longer a problem when the student/parent mix changes.
This seems pretty self-explanatory and exactly in line with my original point and the amplification above: when you have selection effects that hugely reduce the need for discipline and bring in a bunch of students who benefit from complex instruction on interesting topics, the (unempirical) EdD dislike for discipline and drill-based/phonics-based basic instruction matters less.
I genuinely think a lot of the issue here is that teachers and educated parents hate the rote nature of the education that poor-to-mediocre students need and it's much more attractive to pretend that everyone benefits from whole-word reading instruction and applied math problems without ever having done multiplication drills or phonics.
Tracking. Let the bright kids get through the boring bits fast, the broad middle spend the time they need before moving on, and the bottom third get the basics hammered in mercilessly until they can do the math on credit card debt, balancing a budget, understanding red flags in contracts, etc.
My wife took a well paying job at a low income district nearby when none were available in our town. She lasted one week. Horrible disruptive students, phones, bad or no parenting, etc. At 63 years old she said even if she had the energy to deal with this mess of humanity it was a no win scenario as it was too late to change high schooler's behavior. She felt bad for the few students who were really trying but ended up taking early retirement.
Yes, I live in a big city where teacher pay is generally: public schools > charters > private schools. It’s very clearly a tradeoff between how easy the job is and how much you get paid.
I’m a PMC parent currently torn over whether to send my oldest to public school in an urban system, and I 100% endorse this.
I strongly believe in public education, and am willing to pay relatively high property taxes to fund it. But I care more about my kids’ safety, and that learning is a fun, joyful, and challenging experience for them
For us, we live in a pretty secluded neighborhood so our catchment school isn't walkable (4ish miles away) or particularly tightly tied to our area, and it's a decade plus away from being a good place to educate our kids, all of which made the decision to seek out-of-catchment and charter placements easy. We never wanted to go private; Philly is large enough that there are good public options, enough of them for it to be fairly likely we'd get our kid in somewhere reasonably accessible to us and good for her.
It just so happened that we got a slot in our fourth choice school before kindergarten started, and then a notice from our first choice that they had a late-opening slot in October for which we were the first waitlisted slot, and we jumped on it.
The tragedy of progressives’ fetish for gap reduction is that it turns measurement into a vice. It’s easier to narrow gaps by slowing high performers than by lifting low ones. If reducing gaps is your primary focus, measuring things will, at a minimum, push towards neglecting top achievers.
The short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut portrays a dystopian future where society tries to achieve equality by handicapping the gifted. It's an excellent read and can be found for free online.
Is it really that hard though? I've followed this topic closely and it seems we can boost scores by doing the following (note none of this stuff requires spending a ton of money)
1. You need to start with phonics based instruction for reading. Ideally at home, you can do this with 15-20 mins a day. And it’s WAY WAY WAY more effective if done in a one on one environment. Kids must learn how to sound out words.
2. But phonics is just the start, then you need to move to a content rich curriculum. One that doesn’t just have a bunch of short excerpts on subjects but actually covers stuff like history, social studies, science etc. A lot of kids simply aren’t learning a lot of content. They aren’t reading full books, just short paragraphs. This doesn’t work. Trying to divorce reading from content is foolish and wrong. Natalie Wexler has done some great work on this. Her book “The Knowledge Gap” is excellent and well worth a read.
3. Having multiple different curriculums is bad. We need one curriculum per state. That actually covers what is taught in that grade. Not one that covers 50 things where you only have time for 10 during the school year. This is necessary because how can you test the content that should have been learned if the content varies from class to class or from school to school. We need to decide what kids need to learn, teach them that stuff then test them on that stuff. But this requires ONE curriculum.
4. There needs to be frequent low stakes testing (every 3 to 4 weeks). If a couple of kids are falling behind then get those kids small group tutoring. If most of the class fails then you need to cover the material again.
5. All kids should have to pass a standardized test at the end of each year to move on to the next grade. Of course this goes back to the need for one curriculum. So that you can test on what should have actually been learned. As we learned from Mississippi this doesn’t actually result in that many new kids failing. What it does is it changes the way adults and parents act which results in enhanced learning for the kids.
6. Ban all phones and other smart devices from schools from bell to bell. Kids shouldn’t be looking at phones during class. They also shouldn’t be on them during lunch. Go play with other kids get real social interaction.
If you do all this you would see HUGE improvement. That being said, I believe the following is also needed. But I realize this will be harder.
7. Lengthen the school year. Right now kids are only in school for about 180ish days. That’s only HALF the year. Kids should really be in school for somewhere between 220 and 240 days a year. Long breaks are horrible for learning.
8. Lengthen the school day and get rid of most homework excepting reading. For example, if kids are working on paper they should be doing it on school computers with no AI access (or paper, but I hate paper). Also make sure kids are getting the boring practice repletion needed for things like multiplication tables. How do you make sure. You make sure they actually do it at school.
I'm with you on 1-3 and 5-7, and 4 seems harmless at least, but a hard no to 8.
There's other stuff kids need to do, learn, experience, outside of school hours, and homework is immensely useful to parents in keeping track of what is going on with their kids and their understanding of the material.
If I weren't helping my child with homework (for a 2nd grader it's 15 minutes a night plus some joint reading time and soon multiplication flash cards), I wouldn't know what she's working on or how well it's going basically at all.
There is good research that 4 can be VERY important - this has been shown to be very helpful to teachers and a very cost effective use of resources getting help to those who need it most seems to work- see work by Fryer et. al.
Yes that's the idea - quick easy assessment. Called formative assessment . There is also reading software ( measuring lexiles) that can automate this that looks very promising.
I generally agree, but...there is some indicating that some kids will learn to read with any instruction, or no instruction, most benefit from phonics, that is how we are wired, but some kids - across the population all classes groups etc., need special kinds of instruction to acquire reading skills. Class and parent education increases the likelihood that that some will get that instruction. My take.. That is probably why the added reading instruction and follow up teachers are getting in the "miracle" states is paying off.
Sure, but how much of an extension are we talking here? It's already pretty well established than a 7:30-8 am start for middle and high schoolers drags them out of bed way too early for their health and performance, if we adjust that it doesn't leave a ton of wiggle room.
And for younger grades this seems contraindicated.
I'm open for debate on this. How much homework should kids be doing at what grades?
It would probably also require coordination between classes. But I don't see any other way you get around this for paper writing, and probably math as well.
Maybe you could get by with an hour a day?, but the way you spend that hour would probably vary over the course of the year.
Don’t you have a giant ass paper trail of what they’re learning?
I mean I send home grades and a newsletter every week. My graphic organizers are on Google classroom even if I didn’t give homework just reviewing anything they didn’t get an A on would get you there.
We are much less bureaucratic than that, I guess? We have an app that they push out a few sentences of summary about the week's lesson plan in each subject, occasional instructions for parents, photos of hands-on work or excursions, and other than that my updates come at PTC time or via looking at the homework.
The improvements in Mississippi et al are focused at the elementary school level and don’t really endure til graduation. Mississippi has miserable ACT scores. Intensive interventions can make a much bigger difference earlier than later. As kids get older their own IQs and peer group effects dominate educational tweaks.
Yes, which is why Louisiana would be the better model after 4th grade. They have a content rich curriculum, and are seeing those gains in the 8th grade as well.
The "problem" with better teaching methods is that, when they work at all (which is far from a given) they tend to improve scores across the board. If your view of school is that it should be teaching everyone to the best of their ability that's a great success, but if your goal is to close achievement gaps, it's a failure.
Agreed - While improving the performance of low income learners does not always lead to a reduction in learning gaps. This isn't a zero sum issue. Improving instruction will help all kids advance. Low income learners may advance at a faster rate, but the achievement gaps remain, However this does enable more young people to thrive later in life. Our obsession with equity should n't get in the way of helping the least well off, but it often does
As a high school English teacher in Tennessee for nearly 25 years (started full time in fall of 01) this was interesting to read. Personally, I trace the decline of our schools back to NCLB and its failed theory that you could improve reading skills by increasing time for reading instruction at the expense of science and social studies. Kids come to me now knowing so much less about the world. I started the new semester last week with a Langston Hughes poem and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture. Testing culture isn’t the only cause of decline - Tik tok has single-handedly changed schools in a real way, and so much has changed societally since 2000- but I think 8th and 12th grade reading scores refuse to budge because we have a flawed theory of accountability. For 20 years districts have been screaming at teachers to try harder- so teachers are stressed and demoralized, and yet instruction has gotten worse bc now we forgot to focus on the big picture, which is teaching kids about the world, making them read, making them write, repeat forever. Instead we have been trying to remediate skills standards which aren’t real (reading skills aren’t transferable when divorced from background knowledge and vocab). Tennessee has done some things right, but these Southern surge stories are infuriating to read when I’m trying to teach 25 nice kids who seemingly don’t KNOW anything.
I suspect TT has had a big influence on shorter attention spans and the decline in reading for pleasure, but I can’t really prove that.
What I know for sure is TT has seeded various conspiracy theories (Helen Keller isn’t real), memes (6-7), and behavioral trends (devious licks-which spurred a lot of vandalism and theft a few years back) that have a real impact on the school day. Even 6-7, which is harmless enough, has probably stolen a minute of class every day all year. That’s 90 minutes of instruction lost to pure nonsense. And the crazy thing is that it’s universal. Once something starts circulating on TT it’s like every single kid knows about it. It’s the most zombie virus-like phenomenon I’ve ever experienced.
I want every person who defends TikTok to have to defend that devious licks stuff. If you've created a product that leads to kids stealing the doors off of their teachers' cars and recording themselves doing it, you've made the world a worse place.
It is incredibly telling to compare TikTok's algorithmic video feed and Douyin's.
The latter is still brain-rot from an attention span perspective but it is sanitized into something basically wholesome in terms of the content put in front of you.
I was always a great student, ahead of grade level in everything, took almost literally *all* of the AP courses that were relevant to clearing my freshman year requirements, and I... don't think I knew anything about the role of Harlem in black culture prior to junior year AP US History. Not a lick.
I think this comment and many of the ones downstream of it reflect the same reality that drives some of our problems: bright, academically-inclined people find the drill-based instruction methods that the bottom third need to durably learn the basics to be terribly fucking boring, whether as students being subjected to them, teachers using them in the classroom, or parents hearing about them.
Tracking is, quite simply, a must. Drill the brightest third or quarter early and move on to fun and interesting stuff quickly. The broad middle needs more time on the basics but will eventually move beyond them. The bottom third needs to be drilled mercilessly on the basics of math and reading they need for life and then helped to find interests that will lead to good-paying blue collar work. Alongside this, almost everyone needs to be taught things that we used to put under the umbrella of home economics, like balancing a household budget, basic savings/credit literacy, cooking, maybe some home maintenance.
I was thinking the same thing. I went to a fancy private school (albeit in Hawaii, as far away from Harlem as you can get), and even post-AP US History would only be able to give you a very surface-level description of the Harlem Renaissance, if that.
I take Jillian's point, though, that "accountability" can't just mean "screaming at teachers to try harder."
The only reason I know anything about "Harlem Renaissance" is because I was helping my own kid with their studies. He may well know more about it than I do.
This is all surprising to me, but I must say that living in the Memphis area, even in my lily white school, we read a LOT of black literature. I couldn’t have told you where Harlem was, but I knew in middle school that the Harlem Renaissance was black poetry like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks
NCLB had some good ideas (e.g., making all states test, keeping track of learning), but it also turned accountability 100% on teachers and schools and punished schools for having poorer students. We need to balance accountability and HOLD kids for extra hours if they’re not learning. Magically, I think most kids will start learning more during regular hours if they find that their free screen time is taken away.
Progressives like to talk about how schools need to be given the resources to substitute for bad, absent, or overwhelmed parents (to this I would add just plain useless/stupid ones).
The corollary of this, which is a less popular sentiment, is that schools need to be empowered to take on the disciplinary role that all good parents also play.
I have had kids in public schools for the last 20+ years, and I have viewed this change in real time. 100% agree.
My oldest kid, who was caught up in the middle of this complained that school and the things they were reading had gotten a lot more boring. I was shocked when she barely made grade level on the standardized test for reading one year while doing well on math when in real life her skills are the opposite. She said it was because the passages on the test were so boring she could barely pay attention to them, ha.
She had two majors in college, both of which were reading and writing intensive, and got a full ride to her Masters program, so I think my assessment of her skills was correct. As I type this, I am wondering if the change in approach is why my younger kids don't like to read for pleasure nearly as much as she does.
I have also read (maybe even in this substack) about the increasing focus on using snips and excerpts rather than reading full texts, which I think probably also contributes to less joy in reading.
Nobody wants to admit the tests are bad! They're boring, unrelatable, and don't remotely resemble the kind of reading and writing we actually want humans to do.
I fell out of love with English academically due to poor *teachers*, but the material itself was mostly fine. Even bushwhacking through ponderous doorstoppers like Anna Karenina in 10th grade taught valuable lessons about persistence and how other times and cultures were vastly different to our own. Cutting teeth on that sort of material made the test passages trivial by comparison. (Confound: always loved to read, continue doing it for pleasure as an adult, encouraged at home by family. They didn't need to read to me much cause I was happy to do it on my own. When you get disciplined as a kid for reading newspapers during family mealtimes, that's...different from how most grow up.)
Not sure what they're making kids read these days, although it does seem to be increasingly atomized into passages and excerpts rather than whole works. Smart kids a decade younger than me nonetheless end up hating reading, because "school made it not fun", which...is both a criminal shame, and also if they had an intrinsic love like mine then I don't know how you'd actually stamp that out. Seems not a coincidence too that after eliminating the essay portion of the SAT, kids increasingly can't write either. Same with analogies and grokking clever wordplay...if it's not tested, it's not worth teaching, I guess.
> I started the new semester last week with a Langston Hughes poem and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture.
I don’t have a strong opinion about “more reading time at the expense of science and social studies,” though it does seem to me that “maybe try better pedagogical methods and use the time efficiently” seems like it should have been tried first (also “more time on reading” has some logic at younger ages but only if _it actually results in more kids learning to read early_, enabling more time later.
That said, i started high school in CA in 2003 (so my pre-hs curriculum would have basically been unaffected by NCLB. I was assigned a book of Langston Hughes poems for summer reading and I had no idea about the Harlem Renaissance at the time. But that’s fine! That’s why I was assigned reading from the era! I really don’t think “high schooler doesn’t know about the Harlem Renaissance prior to being assigned poetry by a participant” is the specific knock on modern pedagogy you seem to be implying?
Greetings from not too far from you. I've heard from teachers around here that the push for vouchers and charter schools and whatnot means that the only schools left that cannot be selective are public schools. The result is that high-needs kids concentrate in public schools, so they are left with fewer resources to teach a disproportionate number of kids that need more resources. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
My kids do fine in our public school, but they come home with some pretty wild stories about some of their schoolmates that suggest some pretty serious behavior problems. On the other hand, our neighbor had to sue the district to get their kid into elementary school because they said they weren't equipped to handle his needs --- and the only non-public schools available were very expensive because they are equipped to meet them and more. If I had to guess, I'd say a little less than half the kids in our neighborhood attend the local public schools.
It would probably be better if public schools could expel misbehaving students, enforce discipline, track by ability, etc. But if it is politically or socially unworkable for them to do so, then it is at least good that parents can move their kids to private or charter schools that are allowed to do those things.
"I've heard from teachers around here that the push for vouchers and charter schools and whatnot means that the only schools left that cannot be selective are public schools."
I'd be interested to understand where you live. Percentage of students in private schools varies dramatically across the country withe the NE and Midwest having much larger percentages.
Yah, that map indeed looks like they're headed South. Private schools (very broadly speaking) used to have three barriers: some kind of academic requirements, money for tuition, and a parent who could do pickup and drop-off. Vouchers were created and championed (again very broadly speaking) as a way for poor black kids to escape failing schools. But Republican-controlled states have been pushing to remove the financial barrier by making vouchers universal, and increasingly trashing public schools and teachers unions to justify it.
Due to the sudden interest in living in the Sunbelt, it feels like you could toss a golf ball in any direction and it'd hit a realtor who is a former teacher. (Seriously, housing developments grow faster than kudzu.) Anecdote that may be, there is also a huge shortage of public school teachers. The ones I know have all quit teaching, so I imagine they are biased, but they more-or-less say that public schools are filling up with high-needs kids, setting up a spiral: more teachers get fed up and quit (often going to a private school), more parents get upset at the falling teacher-to-student ratios and use vouchers to move their kids to private schools; private schools turn away low-performing and high-needs kids; and that leaves public schools with less money, fewer teachers and more kids that need more attention.
What’s interesting is that private schools also appear to be able to lean on the resources of the public school system if they do keep those kids. So a private school kid on something like an IEP can access the public school system’s tutoring.
In Ohio, some private schools hire outside companies to manage their IEP/special needs work; others hire full-time staff to work with kids on IEPs. There is a scholarship here in Ohio called the Jon Peterson scholarship for kids with autism and other learning disabilities. For private schools with in-house intervention teams, a percentage of that money can be used to cover private school tuition, acting as a sort-of defacto voucher for private school for those families (if you use the Peterson money, though, you can't access other voucher programs). The general voucher system here in Ohio has expanded considerably from one targeted at families in low-performing school districts, to low-income families in any school district, and now to any family (regardless of income) in any district, with benefits decreasing as family income increases. Nearly all the private schools that used to NOT take vouchers now take them as a result. In some cases, though, the private schools raised tuition by an amount roughly equivalent to the vouchers either to increase income or lock-out lower income families.
"Personally, I trace the decline of our schools back to NCLB and its failed theory that you could improve reading skills by increasing time for reading instruction at the expense of science and social studies"
That might have been how many states implemented it, but that's not actually what NCLB said or required.
In fact Natalie Wexler's excellent book "The Knowledge Gap" has pretty well convinced me that a content rich curriculum that includes plenty of science and social studies is a critical part of reading comprehension (but of course it needs to be built on a phonics foundation, kids comprehend what they read if they can't decode the words in the first place).
The problem is states curriculum. They need to have one curriculum that everyone is teaching so they can actually do standardized testing on it. Including the social studies and science parts. Then that stuff will actually be taught.
Thanks for your work in schools. 🙏 I was the first person to write about the Southern Surge, and I have traveled to more than a dozen TN districts to see the efforts to bring knowledge-building curricula into use. That work is inspiring to see, and it’s too soon for you to see those students in your classrooms, but they are coming!
I have read your work! Unfortunately, my district uses StudySync for middle and high school ELA and I think it's really terrible. I'm not sure what our elementary schools use. I'm definitely curious to see what unfolds in the coming years.
Yeah, StudySync isn’t fabulous. I hope the elementary program is better. Elementary was the bigger focus in the last adoption (2020-21), so district admins were probably much more savvy. And the options were better.
I'm with David on this being a fairly niche thing. I do wish more history was taught, and that would be one of 50 topics I'd include (probably as an element of the Great Migration to Civil Rights arc in Black History), but there's an awful lot of American History that could be covered!
I think people are getting too hung up on the "did schools historically teach people specific facts about Harlem?" point rather than a more general claim that schools are devoting less time to teaching facts or content knowledge more generally. The Harlem example is just a specific anecdote.
I think a lot of this might be regional. I don’t remember when I learned about Harlem - maybe it was in school, maybe it wasn’t. But in the 70’s/80’s in Colorado we did learn all the basics of our state and regional history - stuff that’s important but probably received a lot less coverage - if any - in east coast schools.
We're talking about juniors in high school here. Did you know that Harlem was the beating heart of black culture in the early 20th century before finishing a bunch of US history courses in junior and senior year?
Yes, I did. We read the "Autobiography of Malcom X" in American Lit, which was a sophomore class back in the day. And this was in my half-ass high school, which wasn't particularly rigorous.
I didn't. That was never on a reading list and I never had any particular interest in that facet of history so I learned the bare bones about the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the impact of WWII industrial work and economic opportunities on NE/Upper Midwest urban demographics in my junior year AP US History course, and that was it. I couldn't tell you much more than a paragraph descriptor of each of those today.
And again, to set the stage, I was high school valedictorian and basically skipped freshman year of college on the basis of AP coursework.
It just does not surprise me that virtually no high school junior who doesn't have a specific interest in this topic would know much about it, not in the least.
Maybe half-ass high schools in the seventies, full of half-ass stoned students, weren't as bad as I thought.
We weren't particularly bright people (the high school I went to didn't rank students, so we had no valedictorian) and we weren't particularly interested in academic achievement, but we did have assigned readings, and oddly, people either read them or skimmed them enough - with Cliff Notes, usually - to know what they were about.
I read my assigned books and a lot more beyond, even including a substantial chunk of non-fiction... this just was never on the list.
I've never read it to this day, and I have less than zero interest in doing so. I've got a bookshelf of economics, history, and policy books that I have no time to read as-is, I think I read a total of like 5 of my backlog last year lol.
I’m with David on this one, alas. My gaps in history were pretty egregious even with AP classes across the board. I got there, but not in early high school.
I dunno, I would argue that unless your sole interest is in history, which mine isn't at all, there's no way not to have gaps in your knowledge thereof.
I know a ton about North Atlantic Basin economic history, US and some European political/sociological history, a bit of "great man" names and dates, some wars, and a fairly decent understanding of the Song, early Ming, late Qing, and Republican-to-People's Republic China.
You want me to talk about specific American religious movements and revivals, black history other than the Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement, the history of specific immigrant groups? Nah, I know the concept but the details are long gone.
Latin American history beyond the most basic stuff and some 20th century economics in the Southern Cone, Brazil, and Mexico? Nope.
Middle East aside from the post-colonial period and a bit about the early Umayyads and another bit about their time in Cordoba? No clue.
Africa in general other than the triangle trade and a bit about decolonization? No.
SE Asia other than the endless conflict between China and Vietnam? Nothing.
I...might have learned that as far back as 6th grade, in "Social Studies"? But this was a shitty public middle/high from 2001-2008, in a town with only one of each, so even if the bases of my knowledge ended up being broad...we definitely didn't reach the same heights you would have gotten at Fancy Prep. Often felt like the curriculum was more about throwing lots of potentially interesting tidbits at the wall, and hoping, praying that the kids got halfway interested in any of it. I guess in that sense it succeeded in training me for a winning-at-Jeopardy! mindset, but surface-layman knowledge increasingly doesn't get one very far in life. Specialization of intellectual labour is where it's at.
Everyone's got their own God of the Education Gaps though. I didn't know long division until 7th grade (taught to me by a Christian Scientist!), and didn't know the Parts of Speech until 8th. Which I then refused to learn properly anyway, earning me a B for the year, and I'm still kinda mad about that. Clearly those fundamentals weren't so important if I got a 5 on AP Lit anyway, without taking AP English...
We had a couple of honors classes, but they were reserved for the 10 "best students" - I never knew what criteria was used to determine best, because we weren't tested for them. We did not have AP classes. Only about 1/2 the public high schools had them prior to 1997, and like I said, my school was half ass.
All my knowledge came from the General Studies that all students shuffled through back then. My big gap was in languages. I took four years of French in high school, received As, and in my first French class at college was told by the professor that he couldn't believe I'd ever spent a day studying the language. I was that bad at it.
but I'm pretty sure we read one or two Langston Hughes poems in junior high (7th/8th grade, late 1970s) English, and you know teachers would say stuff that probably most of the class didn't pay attention to...
my mom had taught HS English so we had a lot of books around - I read stuff like O. Henry & Ring Lardner, and those helped maybe set the scene (I also remember my mom exclaiming when Philip Guston died)
and I'm pretty sure (again) that our big thick history/civics book had some kind of sidebar on the prominence of Harlem in early 20th C (it also had photos of Pollock and Warhol paintings, and they were just...ART)
I mean, history is deep and wide. It's not shocking to me that most 16 year olds don't know about a bunch of important bits of it, whether that's the Harlem Renaissance or the 30 Years War or rise of Genghis Khan.
What's shocking to me is that my godawful school system managed to impart this knowledge somehow. But I didn't learn it in history classes, I learned it through English classes.
Public high school social studies teacher here. My take on Matt’s take that “we should go back to NCLB” is 1)True, not trying doesn’t work. Duh. 2) NCLB failed (at least from a teacher’s POV) because, re: Dana Goldstein et.al., the expectations, at least as communicated to us teachers, weren’t “We want you to improve student performance” so much as “solve all social problems through your godlike teaching powers or we’re going to fire you and shut down your school and take away your state’s federal education dollars” Not sure how such consequences count as “minor” in Matt’s book.
I really have no problem being held accountable for _that which is under my control_, but suppose we had a similar approach to evaluating doctors as NCLB had toward teachers? Doctors A and B both go to top med schools, graduate top of their class, are dedicated and caring. Doc A ends up practicing in a community of young vegetarians who exercise regularly, practice safe sex, abstain from drugs and alcohol, etc. and has great results as measured by morbidity/mortality. Doc B, equal in every meaningful way to Doc A, ends up practicing in a community riddled with violence, populated with heavy smokers/drinkers/drug users, whose denizens frequently engage in promiscuous unprotected sex. NCLB would look at Doc B’s morbidity/mortality stats and demand they be fired, while giving Doc A a Doctor of the Year award dinner.
Which isn’t to say there are no bad teachers, that there are no excesses carried out by teacher’s unions, that bad practices don’t still cling (see the excellent APM “Sold a Story” on how reading instruction has been off the rails for a long time-hopefully changing now) but if we’re gonna do NCLB 2.0, guys like Matt need to seriously address NCLB 1.0’s failings, and try harder to understand the “why” behind the (teacher) backlash rather than lazily adopt the NCLB 1.0 assumption that “Education bad because teachers bad.”
So I did a bit of Google Fu (not a lot, to be sure-too busy grading student papers to read a lot of research papers) and Google came up with somewhere around 6,000 schools undergoing "major restructuring" as a direct result of NCLB. This frequently involved shutting down the school at least for a while, firing everybody and making them reapply for their jobs, then reopening. As you said, around 99,000 schools at the time, so roughly 0.06% of them, not far off from your figure. About 300,000 teachers lost their jobs, a fair number, no doubt, justifiably so, but most I wager were at least average teachers somewhere between Nick Nolte's drunken and frequently AWOL lout in the movie _Teachers_ and Edward James Olmos's Jaime Escalante in _Stand and Deliver_.
But that's due to _direct_ action as a result of NCLB. When the federal government yeeted back its funding if a state's schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, state cuts had to cut..._somewhere_... I have no idea how many schools closed as an _indirect_ result of NCLB sanctions, but I bet the "not that many schools" figures have been juked somehow.
I think to some extent "minor consquences" are in the eye of the beholder. Anecdata, to be sure, but I can tell you as a guy sitting through a weekly staff meeting in the NCLB era-in which we pored over AYP data that just wasn't getting there despite our best efforts-we were threatened, _weekly_, with "restructuring." The consequences, especially more difficult-to-measure ones like teacher morale, were hardly minor.
I'm sure this is true, but it's also the reaction to every system of accountability I've ever seen rolled out in the private sector (and health care! ask docs about the unfairness of HEDIS!) No one is ever fully in control of their metrics - there's an element of luck.
But as far as I can tell, the options are usually either, a. no accountability, or b. imperfect accountability, and the latter is always better.
Doesn't absolve anyone for not trying to get fairer, just that you'll never fully solve the problem, and even if improved, you'll still feel some of what you're describing here.
Okay but what about stupid accountability? Like, what if we held all physicians accountable for the work done by OBGYNs? Well, Mr. Cardiologist, I'm sorry but you don't get fully paid out for our hospital's RVUs because we didn't reduce C-sections below 25%. That's the accountability system we had with NCLB and kind of still have depending on what each state did with accountability post-RTTT.
For example, under NCLB only math and English Language Arts were tested but the science and social studies teachers were still fired if enough kids at a school underperformed in math and ELA. Another example, and this was my experience, I worked tirelessly to bring my school's ELA scores up and succeeded but received zero incentive pay because my intervention course to improve reading was considered an elective. My work got the ELA teachers a bonus, I got nothing. That's fine so far as the big picture is concerned because presumably kids scoring higher on the test indicates they can read and write better (debatable) but it sucks as a practitioner.
In England, what we did was required testing at entry into each school and required testing at the end of the time in each school and then did a value-added comparison.
This has some serious problems too, the biggest being that the maximum and minimum scores on the tests aren't high enough and low enough, so the equivalent of magnet schools (there are so many terms in different parts of England that it's easier to just say "equivalent of") have nearly all their intake hitting the maximum and then their outtake also hitting the maximum, which meant they all are middling in terms of value-added, and problem at the other end affects schools for children with severe learning difficulties - they are all scoring the minimum on both entry and exit.
We can measure outputs from secondary education with a fine enough measure (using GCSE and A Level results; these are sufficiently challenging that the best schools get about 90% straight-A students: last year there were literally two that did that in the country), but not inputs so there's no useful value-added measure to be had.
And primary education is even worse - their exit measure is the secondary entry measure and about a third of schools get every single student to the maximum grade, and also have every single student at the maximum entry grade (which is "Working at the Expected Level"). This has got worse over time, as there used to be grades above this and they were removed.
The UK has a completely different approach to testing than the US.
The NCLB state tests in the US are annual, aimed at the lowest common denominator, mean nothing at all for most students, and are multiple choice. These are the only ones schools are seriously evaluated on, and they're largely evaluated on differences between ethnic groups.
We don't have anything like GCSE's or A Levels. SAT/ACT and AP/IB exams are the closest, but they're used in very different ways than the UK equivalents. The SAT is easier than GCSEs and is part of college admissions, but doesn't override activites/grades. AP/IB exams are about as difficult as A Levels, but are not used for college admissions in the US, and many kids are admitted to college without passing any. Schools are sometimes evaluated on the percentage of kids who take APs, but not on whether they pass them.
Grades in the US are completely different than anything that exists in the UK system. They're effectively a measure of conscientiousness, and many students will have an A in a class they don't actually know the material from. One of the best examples of this is that many freshmen at UCSD were assessed as not knowing middle school math by a placement exam, but had supposedly gotten A's in AP calculus. On the other side, bright kids with low conscientiousness will have 5's on an AP exam, but a B in the class because they forgot to turn in their homework.
I think teachers would be delighted if conversations about teacher performance moved to something like HEDIS rather than efforts to tie unadjusted student performance on tests to teacher evaluations. At least HEDIS is mostly process measures under the direct influence of providers. Evaluating whether teachers use evidence-based practices like phonics? Sure, I think most teachers could probably live with that.
Because all the accountability methods are enforced form high-on by education reformers whose view of the median teacher seemingly ranges from utter disgust to petty superiority. Even with Matt, every article on education has the typical 'we all support teachers and want them blah blah' followed by six paragraphs on why they're all wrong and deserve zero extra labor protections and should be as easy to fire as a fry cook.
Isn't there ways to get around this problem? For example, instead of just looking at total test scores, you can look at improvement from the prior year.
Collective bargaining isn’t everything. North Carolina is also a right to work state. The public school teachers’ lobbying organization is still the most influential lobbying group. Our Republican legislature doesn’t roll out teacher bonuses every election cycle for nothing. It helps that in most rural areas, public schools are the main employer.
Our education system is hurting thanks to poorly regulated charters and unregulated private schools that are able to get a lot more tax payer dollars now that there is no need requirement for private school vouchers anymore.
So is Virginia. North Carolina has some of the lowest paid teachers nationally, and this is after a concerted effort to raise teacher pay substantially over the past half decade, even if you factor in the bonuses. Sounds like the lobbying is going great.
What’s with the rudeness? Anyways, we have a Republican legislature that would like to abolish public schools and is doing its best to break them. Things could be worse absent the efforts of the NCAE and the power that comes from being the main employer across the state.
If we had collective bargaining, it would reflect something fundamentally different about the makeup of the legislature. Collective bargaining is not the only source of power for change.
Sorry, wasn't trying to be rude. Just tired of people going "the unions are the problem with X" before even checking whether the union that people are positing is responsible for the bad thing even exists.
Again, I have never seen nor experienced ANY pressure to coddle kids from my union. The only pressure comes from administration, who is pressured by the public school leadership. They are still trying to lower certain metrics like suspensions and failures instead of doing the hard work of making STUDENTS actually accountable for learning. Students leave at the end of the day regardless of how many Fs or As they have. Teachers and unions did not ask for this.
All of this is directly and easily refuted, and I will do so soon - your core understanding of the reality is wrong.
1. The supposed gains you're associating with NCLB we're dubious in the first place and there is no responsible way to assign them to that particular intervention; you're taking the notoriously complex and difficult to assign question of culpability for test score changes and assigning it to the supposed cause that fits your political priors. And your narrative simply does not fit with the actual complicated staged rollout of nclb, nor would the fact that so many exemptions and waivers were issued for NCLB (because what the law called for was not possible) that it's meaningless to say that there is an NCLB era.
2. The reduction in scores, if we take them at face value, did not start after we moved on from the immense failure of the "accountability" era; they started falling in 2010 or 2012 or so, in other words, at the absolute height of the accountability era. At its very height.
3. That reduction is observed across the entire OECD and is in fact remarkably uniform; of course, there was no broad international accountability movement that took place across the OECD, nor was there an abandonment of such a movement. There was in fact no uniform pedagogical or policy changes that afflicted the many, many rich nations that have seen this reduction, which means that it's nonsensical to blame it on local American educational policy. I understand that you're desperate to believe in the accountability narrative and you're looking for any ability to do so, but the fact that the score reductions that you decry happened across a vast number of countries with extraordinarily different educational policy and pedagogy backgrounds, none of which moved in a coordinated way at either the beginning of this trend or the end of it, utterly undermines the idea that this has anything to do with American pedagogical or policy changes. Which is what we should suspect, because pedagogical and policy changes have never been proven to have any meaningful impact on test scores at all, and what I find so frustrating about this is that I know you're aware of that.
What happened around 2010 or 2011 or 2012 across the rich world that could have a direct and major impact on learning outcomes? Everybody got iPhones.
"because pedagogical and policy changes have never been proven to have any meaningful impact on test scores at all"
This is a wild statement. You could send you kids to school where they stare at a wall all day and this wouldn't impact test scores? Even narrowed a bit, there is no difference between someone trained as a teacher and someone who walks in off the street and just starts talking...
Yeah, really cuts to Freddie's initial statement "your core reality understanding of reality is wrong", Freddie and Matt really are kind of existing in different realities as it were LOL (I guess Matt is Woody Allen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3NWzLzaek)
Your point #2 is not consistent with the plots shown in this post — in those, the national decline starts around 2017. Are you referring some other data set?
The chart in this post shows score increases through 2013, and a downward turn after 2013. I can appreciate your point about the likely role of smartphones. But it’s odd when you make claims about data that are so dissonant with… the actual data.
Maybe you can answer this since you write so much about education. Why do commentators only focus on 4th grade NAEP scores? Presumably scores from 8th grade or 12th grade are also important. Why do journalists and policymakers care more about scores in elementary school than they do when kids exit the school system and go on to college or work?
If you actually dig in, you can see that's it's not a miracle. It's over a 15 year slow and steady improvement in 4th grade reading scores based on schools actually employing many of the principles of the science of reading combined with actual accountability measures (holding kids back for not meeting them).
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What would be a surprise is if it didn't work.
I'm honestly not clear that this article shows it disappeared by 8th grade? In particular, the criticism leveled in that article is that the 2024 8th grade score is low. We will have to wait the obvious 4 years to know if the increase in 4th grade scoring holds. No?
Was that the same 8th graders, is my question? Because that article does show that their 8th grade is still not doing well. But the article doesn't show that gains are lost. Quite the contrary, MS is still improving in recent years. A trend which is sadly opposite many other states.
And I get it, any measurements on cohorts that went through the pandemic are going to be troubling. No amount of amazing schooling around 4th grade is going to make up for that.
The linked article does not show that, was my point. If you have some that do show it, I'm game to see it.
Cards on the table, I certainly had the idea going in that reading skills largely normalize themselves given time. Direct experience with kids has been slowly removing that idea from me.
Sure, with Mississippi that's potentially the case but it goes beyond Mississippi. All the time and effort we spend in the media and in discussions of policy seems to revolve solely around these 4th grade scores even though we also measure 8th and 12th grade.
I recommend Gelman's Dec 4 follow up where he kind of walks that back and just says there's not enough data to say definitively what's causing the "miracle". "- Mississippi’s average test scores have been going up. How much is this due to selection of who takes the test and when they take it, how much is due to changes in accommodations for disabilities (as discussed by Kelsey Piper in comments), and how much is due to targeted test preparation, I don’t know." He also has two more follow-up posts on schools in New Orleans and some comments from Noah Spencer.
If you're looking for the effects of a given policy change, it's easier/faster to see treatment effects in a younger cohort vs waiting a longer time for kids to filter through k-12.
Sure, but if they don't filter through isn't that also important? Like, yeah, maybe your 4th graders are among the best readers in the nation but if, by the time they are 8th graders, they are below average, what good are these reforms? Does an employer or college care about anyone's 4th grade NAEP scores? It seems like our focus is on an area that is minimally related to the outcomes we actually care about.
Because higher scores in 4th grade, even if there is fade-out by 8th grade is good. And heres why:
1. Life outcomes are better nevertheless -- higher GPAs and fewer remedial courses in high school
2. What is the counterfactual for children who are retained in 3rd grade instead of promoted to 4th grade automatically? Note that even after fade-out they fall back into average. But what about without retention? They are more likely to drop out. So you get a C instead of dropping out, for example.
Separately, this counters the "social promotion" problem. Children who need an additional year of instruction ought to get it, rather than being continuously unprepared upon promotion to successive grades.
Far be it from me to impugn the integrity of the commenters (though it is very tempting!) but should we get higher 8th grade test scores in the future they will complain about college enrollment rates. Should that improve, they will complain about college graduation rates. Should that improve, they will complain that people don't really understand quantum mechanics at age 23.
Lets help kids do better. Lets hold those in charge of educating kids accountable.
The thing we care about is life outcomes. The intermediate result we can measure is a set of test scores. But if it turned out that some intervention made everyone's reading test scores look better in the 4th grade, but didn't result in any more of them being able to read at age 20, I'd think the intervention had not been worth much.
It's like the difference between measuring a medicine on actual outcome (say, all-cause mortality after five years) vs some intermediate thing like blood cholesterol levels or something. The intermediate thing is easier to measure, but is only meaningful of the actual outcome ends up being better.
I think this is all well and good and I don't necessarily disagree. More 4th graders reading at or above grade level is in and of itself a good, regardless of outcomes. That said, I'm always surprised media coverage and policy discussion is so narrowly focused. Surely, we can also think about, try, and evaluate policies to boost 8th grade reading and math scores? I'd hope that the media would care about and cover those policies, but it seems like miracles only occur in 4th grade and only in ELA?
I think what's missing in this discussion is that red states have a totally different view of the purpose of education than they did in the 2000s or even 2010s. Matt is fighting the last war. Conservatives flat out say that the purpose of education is to teach values. Toward that end, they are unconcerned with school performance. You don't have to take my word for it, just look at what the people who are running the department of education say. Just look at how people running education in Texas, Florida, and Arizona talk about schooling. Look at how leading conservative law professors write about the transition from school choice to parent choice or how the heritage foundation says charter schools are too woke - more woke than standard public schools, apparently. They don't want accountability, they want out. They want taxpayer funded vouchers to pay for their kids' church-school and they don't want anyone looking over their shoulder to see if it's money well spent.
The terrain has changed. Conservatives aren't waiting for technocratic centrist liberals to come back into power and reestablish a more technically sound version of No Child Left Behind. Matt (and others) are busy fighting the last war where republicans were their allies against the left but that's not today's situation, especially in states where, unlike Virginia, conservative republicans hold basically unchallenged control over state government.
You'll get no argument from me on the principles in your comment, but I think we've seen a sea-change among the more conservative elements of society against the very idea of public education. They're out. No amount of tinkering with curriculum or re-implementing strict test-based accountability is bringing them back. I think this matters in states like Texas and Florida where Matt focused his criticism today because we're really looking at two wholly separate education systems. There's the traditional public schools and there's the taxpayer-funded microschools, homeschoolers, and private schools. Both receive money from the people of Texas/Florida, but they operate on totally separate policies. Public schools in Texas continue to operate under some pretty strong accountability systems, see HISD's recent takeover, for example. The voucher system seems to operate under a "buyer beware" principle where it's effectively on the parents to determine if they like what they're getting for the public's dime and watch out for ripoffs or scams. I think that's significant and not just something that can be waived away with the right liberal-technocratic policy mix.
I think there is a very easy way to square that circle. Require mandatory end of year testing for all students no matter where they go to school. With potential loss of funding (for both public and private schools) for not meeting benchmarks.
So we'll go from the end of the year tests saying 'the slaves liked slavery' to 'George Washington was evil' from admin to admin? I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but the idea there'd be one set of end of the year testing California and Texas would ever agree on is silly.
No, you do state wide testing, not national testing. I agree that there is no way you would get a national curriculum, and it's probably not a good idea.
But you could certainly get robust state ones. At least if people cared about educating kids more than teacher unions OR enriching textbook publishers
That's a pretty broad statement. The reason the vast majority of people support vouchers is because public schools aren't doing a vary good job educating kids.
If Dems actually threw their votes behind the measures, I bet you could get enough republicans to go along for a majority in most (all?) states.
As Matt pointed out, when people flee public schools and use vouchers, they don’t choose schools based on their academic profile but on other non-academic factors. While I don’t doubt that you want your kids to learn those core subjects, what we see conservatives doing is saying “you, mom and dad, are now the party responsible for whether your kids learn reading, math, science, and history.” Under this new view, academic outcomes are secondary (at best) to the principle that parents should be the responsible party, not the state. So they cut you a check and cut you loose and you’d better hope you do a good job. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what conservative legal scholars have been promoting for years:
“However, the compelling case for universal parental choice is not about improving academic achievement or spurring competition. It is about empowering parents—all parents—to take control of their children’s education. The battle over universal ESAs, in other words, is “a fight for broad societal change,” centered on the argument that parents should be entrusted with decisions about the education of their children.”
John Coons’ The Case For Parental Choice is helpful in explaining where the conservative movement is going. These are the people organizing voucher programs now, and they are very clear about their purposes. This is, I think, a pretty big change from what conservatives were doing only a few years ago in the education space. If anything, it looks more like what was being proposed in the 60s and 70s in the wake of the civil rights movement (and was when Coons got his start). As Nicole and Stephen Garnett (who edited that book) wrote in City Journal not too long ago, “ESAs represent a definitive and principled move beyond school choice to parental choice. While these terms have been used interchangeably for decades, education reformers historically have focused on giving parents choices among different types of schools (district, charter, and private) rather than between schools and other educational options.” Notably, they also said that “Parental choice should be embraced not because it will improve test scores but because empowering parents is the right thing to do.”
If you look at what used to be the conservative option, Charter schools, you can also see that conservatives are abandoning them. Heritage Foundation now argues that they’re too woke and too strictly overseen by charter authorizers to offer conservatives a choice that matches their values. They promote, as you might expect, universal vouchers instead so parents can homeschool or religiously school their kids with public subsidy.
I think it’s pretty clear that the terrain around public education has changed and that liberals like Matt or the people at The Argument aren’t quite acknowledging that change. Conservatives used to be partners in reforms, supporting market based ideas like school choice, urging schools to be held accountable for scores on standardized tests, and that kids’ outcomes are malleable enough to warrant interventions in their learning (especially for minorities, girls, the disabled).
I’ll close with what John Ward, the head of Arizona’s ESA program, and Tom Horne, AZ’s state superintendent told a Harpers reporter last summer because I think it encapsulates what’s changed:
“John Ward, the head of Arizona’s ESA program, told me that the state hasn’t authorized any mandatory assessments for its ESA students; he doesn’t even necessarily know where they go to school. Horne, his boss, put the matter to me squarely: “The philosophy of the legislature when they passed universal ESAs was that the accountability will come from parents.” There are no enforceable curriculum standards—and this, Ward told me, is part of the appeal. Parents of children in microschools tend to see standardized tests as reflecting “a curriculum that has been chosen and essentially developed by public school systems,” he explained. “Because [these schools] are doing something different than what the public schools are doing, those tests wouldn’t measure what they’re doing in their curriculum. It would be a poor metric applied to what they actually do.” ”
I don’t doubt such people exist. My point is that you are severely over generalizing (and caricaturing) conservatives.
In fact, while I have not done polling on the subject, my informal impression from interacting with my peers is that most people want their kids to go to schools that have nice facility, good test, scores, and a student population they think will be congenial to their children.
Woke instruction is of concern, particularly for religious people, but “I am going to send my kid to a materially worse school (in a school rating sense), because it teaches more traditional values” is a nonstandard choice. Most people I know who send their kids private do so because they believe those schools are “better” and lead to superior college options.
I suppose one way to rectify what we're both saying is to note that I am primarily talking about conservatives in positions of power. State legislators, think tank thinkers, federal or state DOEs - in other words, the conservatives making policy and enacting reforms. Whether that is what the average conservative-identifying population wants with schools is perhaps different but these are the people you elected so I am operating on the assumption that you're getting the change you voted for.
Depends on where. Mississippi repeatedly rejected more radical reforms such as school vouchers and is pretty laser focused on school improvement. They're not making the same choices as texas, florida, or arizona where more radical conservatives are driving policy and where those states have implemented very broad voucher programs with little oversight built-in. It's not enough to characterize a state as purely red or blue. We have to look at where they set priorities and in the more conservative leaning red states, they're de-prioritizing public schools (including charters) and putting more focus on getting people to leave the public system.
My heart is with this view of education. I’m a slightly disappointed reformer.
One of the principle failures of the reform era in my view is underestimating the non-educational parts of school. The neighborhood social network is an important part of school for a lot of people. There’s this school I hate visiting as a coach it’s in a shit neighborhood and frankly the non-athletes there have treated our runners terribly. But they draw a huge crowd in a way that our school—ranked in the top couple in the city can’t. The local high school sells shirts at Target in decent numbers and I’m sure it’s not because they deliver highly differentiated reading instruction it’s because it’s a community institution.
Nclb consequences were absorbed mostly on this level as outsiders breaking this up. And frankly it wasn’t replaced uniformly with excellent schools but it just shuffled most of the same shit into more balkanized situations. Charters and non-church privates don’t have the kind of networks, facilities etc. and it’s almost never discussed in education policy.
Yeah one of the big issues I have as an urban resident with kids is that all of the kids in my neighborhood go to different schools (charters, privates, public magnets, the neighborhood public…), so there isn’t really any kind of neighborhood social network for kids. That’s probably one of the strongest appeals of suburbia where everyone goes to the local public school but maybe it’s like that too…
"That’s probably one of the strongest appeals of suburbia where everyone goes to the local public school but maybe it’s like that too"
It's completely fragmented in my Southern state, suburban neighborhood. We have enough kids that it's basically impossible that mine won't have at least one other neighborhood family at the same school regardless of which charter or magnet or whatever we go to. But it's definitely not going to be like my neighborhood growing up, where we all went to the same place, shared classes, all the parents in the PTA, etc.
For suburbia, this is actually an issue where housing and transportation make a difference. I went to local public elementary and middle schools, yet I barely lived near any of my friends or classmates. It wasn't even possible to bike to the neighborhood where the largest share of my friends lived since it wasn't safe, was too far away, and was snowy or icy a lot of the year. I was completely dependent on my parents or my friends' parents driving me to hang out with friends.
Our experience with our kids attending neighborhood schools, vs the option of private or parochial, really supports this idea for me. Their elementary school in particular has been around since the late 1800s and the institutional culture there, and support from the neighborhood, really makes it a special place. I say this without hesitation even though I sometimes had serious concerns about the academics. Maybe it’s a luxury for us because our kids are blessed with advantages that not all their classmates have, and I’m just not that worried about their academic future. But at least for us, the sense of community and spirit they experienced outweighed the sense that they were never taught to their potential. That being said, the
school matriculates fifth grade classes where like 25% of the kids are multiple grade levels behind, so I acknowledge there are totally legitimate difference experiences.
I’m wrestling with this dilemma right now so good to hear your perspective. We have an eh neighborhood school, but great neighborhood culture, and an outstanding magnet school, but kids are from all over, and weighing the pros/cons is really tough.
So I was actually pushing for my son (second child) to go to parochial school for middle school because I was so dissatisfied with the academics when his older sister attended the same school. I got outvoted by him and my wife and I’m really glad that happened because I think the positives of being free range with his friends in the neighborhood have really outweighed any opportunity cost in academics. We have supplemented his school academics with extra math and other out of school stuff and that has been important, not so much from the content but because it’s held him to a high standard that he actually has to work to achieve. The irony of this is that the reason we are given that school isn’t challenging is because of “equity”, but what this drives is extra educational opportunities being limited to those who can afford them, but that’s a separate topic!
Lastly I’ll say I think the key thing is that there is a critical mass of smart kids from families that emphasize education so your kid has a positive peer group. Their friends influence them more than the teachers ever will. Hope this helps.
I don't have kids and my personal experience of primary (ie elementary) school is so unusual that there's no policy arguments that can arise from it, so I really can't contribute at all to this.
Aside: My father was on the county council and switched parties from the locally-dominant Labour Party to the Liberals (now the Liberal Democrats) while I was in primary school. Local parents encouraged their children to bully me at school for political reasons and my parents transferred me to another school. This didn't help for long as the new school soon found out.
This sucks, but it was also 40 years ago and is very firmly water under the bridge...
This is actually something I legitimately have mixed feelings on because most of the positive aspects of charters could likely be done by consolidating suburban and urban school districts and then making all schools lotteries for entry with some thumbs on the scale for local residents.
OTOH, I do think like you mention, neighborhood schools are an important part of communities.
There is a very cohernet narrative of how teachers' unions oppose educaital reform and lead to worse outcomes. But this is negated by the results -- assuming they are properly measured -- by the fact that charters do no better, especially if they are able to subtly select students. There ought to be some lessons in this.
IIRC "charters don't do better" is an artifact of the fact that, roughly speaking, blue state charters (e.g. NYC, DC) do well and red state charters (e.g. New Orleans) do poorly. The two effects average out in the national data.
Basically, people saying "we need more charters" are blue state ed reform people who are seeing a real positive effect. That effect may not be scalable, and/or it might just not work in states with very different political priorities, but it is real.
Yeah, the question of "do charters do better or worse" seem really location specific. IIRC a writer at the old Vox found that local housing markets seem to play a major role in charter outcomes.
"charter" schools are not a monolith; it's a catch-all term for state-funded schools that aren't regular public schools. They're governed by a mess of jurisdiction-specific regulations, and their performance varies accordingly.
You can google "do charter schools vary in quality by state" and the AI overview and the search hits will point you to lots of additional info. See also GuyInPlace's reply.
I agree. But the point is that charter shools not just automticaly being (statistically) better means that teacher unions may be a problem for reform but are not the only problem.
It seems to me that the worse your bad performing public schools are, the stronger the argument is for either vouchers or charters. Los Angeles infamously had really terrible inner city schools-- dilapidated facilities, overworked teachers, and plenty of violence. When we lifted limits on charter schools, they showed up all over the inner cities. Of course they did. So many parents just wanted a way out of some really terrible neighborhood schools.
Did that solve all the problems? No. But just on a moral level, if our policymakers insist on policies that make the local schools terrible, you have to give parents a choice. If you don't like school choice policies, well, you need to make inner city schools into good educational options for poor and working class people's kids.
if selection effects are as important as they seem, then the only advantage on giving vouchers is those students get to be with other students whose parents care enough to want a voucher.
I think it's important to understand this through the frame of individual freedom and part of the problem here may be that parental freedom arguments aren't popular on the Left.
The point isn't to be a smarty pants and say "your kid won't actually get a better education at the school you choose". Maybe that's true. But that actually doesn't matter to the political argument.
You have to imagine yourself a poor parent. You can only afford to live in the worst parts of the city. The schools are terrible, because of course they are. And then some liberal educational wonk says "we're going to deny you the choice of moving your kid away from that dilapidation, violence, and terrible teaching to a different school because our pointy-head studies show your kid's education won't improve". Do you see why that's not going to be very persuasive to the parent?
If we want kids to go to their local public schools, it's our bleeping responsibility to make their local public schools good. If we don't do that, poor and working class voters, and voters of color, are going to demand vouchers and charters, because they want the option of choosing a different school for their kid. It doesn't have to do with outcome studies. It has to do with the basic rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
>the only advantage on giving vouchers is those students get to be with other students whose parents care enough to want a voucher.<
Your use of "only" implies you think this is a trivial advantage. But the ability spring your child free from the prison of a terrible school is a gigantic improvement even if, inevitably, there exist some kids who won't be able benefit from such a system because they have shitty parents.
The thing is, in any sort of democratic system that isn't going to matter very much. You have people poor and living in low income neighborhoods, the local school is bad, and the liberals, the Democrats, and the teachers' unions say "you can't choose a different school because our expert statistics say that school choice doesn't improve students". And then some of them get very mad and vote for the other guys who will let them choose another school.
When charters became a thing here in LA, South Central LA, where I had lived for 3 years, blossomed with charters. They popped up everywhere. They popped up all over East LA too, and Compton, and Inglewood. I still see charter schools when I go to LAX airport or to games at SoFi Stadium or concerts at the Forum. A thousand flowers bloomed, because when parents see their kids having to go to some craphole school, they want out.
And at that point, it really doesn't matter what expert statistical data you want to show them. It doesn't matter because it isn't your kid. It's theirs. And their parental freedoms are simply more important than whatever coalitional desires the Democrats might have about not offending the labor movement.
"D.C.’s fourth-grade reading achievements are not as impressive as Mississippi’s, but on the flip side our eighth-grade reading scores have improved more than theirs, indicating that we have perhaps done something right."
Perhaps you did. Perhaps you got a lot more high income people to move to town.
On Florida and Texas, one empirical question I am curious whether anyone has studied is about the effect of the massive inward domestic migration both states have seen recently, on their education results. While I guess the effect could go either way, my intuition is that the families who actually moved out of big blue states during the covid lockdown era were slightly more selected to be ones whose kids just *especially* couldn't handle the extended school closures. Plus there is probably some practical impact from just the rate of growth (buildings and districts not ready for the class sizes etc.) And finally just a basic "reversion to the mean" type effect from having so many transplants from all over. Not arguing either state has seen incredible results but I wonder whether there might be some mitigating factors to the "lag"i
I mean my small sample is small but my New York transplants were quite a bit better than the usual New York transplants to suburban Florida. They had more means and activist parents who were willing to pull up stakes in a pandemic and do something to help their kids. And I was a Covid hawk until the vaccine.
Obviously the plural of anecdote isn’t data but that was my experience in Kissimmee Florida where from new York is often code for behind it wasn’t in this case.
I can see that and yeah that is why I said the effect could go either way; it is possible the transplants were selected *positively* for education outcomes and that makes the Fl and TX performance even worse if so. But then I also wonder whether the most positively selected transplants just put their kids in private schools. Someone ought to look into it!
A grim fact about the pandemic is nobody checked on much. There’s so much we don’t know about what happened and the way we’ve just ran away from it all makes me think we won’t ever learn.
I would imagine in migration to Florida is still disproportionately retirees. In fact my experience during COVID (anecdotal for sure) that a pretty decent number of people "fleeing" to Florida were people close to retirement who decided to essentially bring forward their retirement. Add in the big run up in home prices (this cohort is definitely in the sweet spot of buying their houses cheap 30+ years ago and seeing the value of their house skyrocket) and it was a perfect mix for people around 60-62 years old to say adios to Florida (definitely part of the story why some of the businesses that closed in March, 2020 ended up closing permanently).
But upshot is, even if my anecdote is just that anecdote, in migration to FL is definitely weighted towards people over 65 or people very unlikely to have school age children.
all over the country, are internally diverse and are probably 10-15% of students. When an effect pushes in both directions and only applies to maybe 1 in 7 students, it won’t move the median very much.
The problem with all of Matt's writing on education reform is that it stems from the belief that measuring educational outcomes (and identifying their causes) is straightforward and easy: "the simple step of measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance." The critiques of ed reform in the NCLB era were never that accountability itself was bad, but rather that the methods used to measure performance were both flawed in and of themselves and actively harmful to other areas of education that fell outside the narrowly defined areas of literacy and math. Even in those two areas, "improvements" could be the result of teaching to the test, to the detriment of other things most teachers felt to be important. And believe it or not, it is not motivating to most teachers to tell them that things they care about and want to share with their students aren't "real" education.
Would you be in favor of strict accountability in a system where you could be among the very best teachers one year, and the very worst the next, not having changed your approach to teaching in any substantial way? Those kinds of perverse outcomes happened all the time, because human learning is not amenable to precise measurement of the kind you find in, say, experimental physics, and the statistical methods used to try to isolate teacher performance as a variable were ineffective.
Don't think I've ever scrolled this far down to find my objection in the comments, but I thought maybe I was misunderstanding American school systems... The problem of accurately measuring teacher performance seems to me to be the most important and difficult issue here. I teach humanities in a public middle school, and I find it incredibly difficult to measure my own performance and the efficacy of my teaching practices, even though I'm pretty motivated to do so. And that's just with curriculum, whereas measuring my ability to instill norms and values seems nearly impossible to measure.
All teachers (I'm in higher education) have the experience of having a classroom exercise go great in one class, then terribly the next time. Each student is different, each group of students (i.e., classroom dynamics) is different, and there are always so many things going on in students' lives outside of the classroom -- there are just so many variables that can't be controlled. I think that workshops and professional development can be very helpful, as well as things like peer observation, but these are largely qualitative/anecdotal measures. The good news is that most teachers I know are in fact trying to do a good job, and are therefore thoughtful and diligent when it comes to trying to improve.
I lived in Chicago where my wife was a public school teacher on the south side and now live in Iowa. Public schools in Chicago are completely dysfunctional. There aren’t enough paraprofessionals to handle all the kids with IEPs, there are no consequences for bad behavior, and the teachers aren’t supported by admin.
Districts like CPS have taken autonomy away from both admin and teachers because consultants and researchers think they know how operate schools when they don’t. I’m sure consultants are already pitching to schools the Mississippi miracle program just they did with Michelle Rhee in DC.
Aaccountability is all well and good, but at the end of the day school systems live or die based on middle class buy-in.
Big urban systems need to work to make neighborhood schools into places where middle and professional class families want to send their kids even though they’re not as new as private alternatives and even though the children of their poorer neighbors will be there too.
As a starting point that means getting public safety and discipline/classroom disruption under control, and it means tracking. None of these are popular with teachers’ unions and they’ll need to be run over with a truck to implement them, but there’s no particular need to do any more than keep them out of decision making about policy and pedagogy. They’ve not negotiated an insane sweetheart deal for themselves, they’re not longshoremen.
I generally agree with this but the problem with school discipline is that it often turns into anarcho-tyranny. The kids that are conscientious become terrified of getting into trouble for random kid BS while genuine bullies can’t be controlled because they aren’t afraid of any consequences the school could do. I’ll still traumatized from things like this in the urban public schools to went to, like when someone stole a favorite toy and didn’t get punished but I was punished for bringing it to school. It’s a hard problem but as an urban parent I’d see tough discipline policies as a negative based on my experiences going to these schools.
"i got punished unfairly for bringing a toy to school" is not the kind of discipline issue at issue here
the discipline problem is kids who are so disruptive or violent that they make learning impossible when they're in a classroom at all. the "normal" kids don't worry about being confused with disruptive kids, because they could not on their worst day even pretend to be as bad.
Yea, several of our neighbors do send their kids to our catchment elementary school, and one of the improvements which has taken root since it was handed to a charter to run was that deep-seated disciplinary problems were taken in hand. This isn't a lottery charter, it's a catchment school, so they have no control over enrollment except expulsion in incredibly severe cases, but our neighbors say they seem to have broken the back of all but the worst couple offenders that were making it impossible for peers to learn. Every grade used to have multiple kids disrupting almost every class, and there were actual issues with violence (in a goddamned elementary school, FFS!)
Curious, are your kids public, parochial, or home schooled?
Public, citywide lottery-admit charter.
Effectively somewhere between public and parochial in practical terms, lol.
Matt didn’t mention that the Obama administration put out guidance that said that a racial disparity in disciplinary actions was presumptive evidence/proof of racism. It was and is a recipe for chaos. Taking any disciplinary action became problematic. Rather than clear standards that a child can understand, it has resulted in an environment wherein only an extraordinary child can learn.
I, frankly, don’t believe this. Your anecdote, sure. That it happens often, no.
I’ll add another anecdote then. In my public middle school we were frequently not allowed to talk during lunch time because when allowed to talk it got “too noisy”. The rule was in theory that we would be able to talk as long as the overall volume didn’t get too loud but there’s an obvious coordination problem there - also we were just kids on our lunch break, come on. So most days, no talking. Same story in the hallways. I have to believe this resulted in more issues with discipline (enforcing the no talking policy, kids acting out in class because they haven’t had an outlet all day) without providing any benefit to security or honestly anything.
A "no talking" policy in the public spaces of a school is... quite divorced from the sort of disciplinary needs I'm talking about in my big city school district, haha.
Again, I believe that it happened, it's just that we cannot possibly allow the idiocy of one school to discredit the idea that classrooms need to be quiet and safe or basically no students learn.
Was the principal just an anti-social weirdo or something? Were they against kids having friends? This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Did parents revolt?
Not to mention that arbitrary rules don't exactly engender respect for authority.
I think the general pattern of anarchotyranny is just what he described. Basically, normal people fear the consequences for breaking rules (getting in trouble in school matters a lot if you are a good student or your parents will be mad at you for it, an arrest and a criminal record would make my life immensely worse), but the folks causing most of the trouble have already priced that in (someone getting his tenth detention, a guy with five previous arrests getting a sixth one). The result is a system where deterrence works on the well-behaved people but not the badly-behaved ones.
I am completely familiar with the concept, thank you. My quibbles are around the prevalence, especially in this specific situation.
I do agree with your overall points though and don’t dispute those (re :limiting true disruptions), it just sometimes does go sideways in practice which is something to be aware of in executing.
What were you doing bringing a toy to school? You should have been in a dungeon doing algebra problems!
>and it means tracking
The problem with this is that it turns effective teachers into less effective teachers. I taught in an urban high school for many years, and I can tell you that there is a big difference between a class with two disruptive kids and one with three. Not to mention one in which three students need individual help and one in which six students do.* The only way this is going to work is to simultaneously reduce class sizes, at least in the classes with the less gifted students. But the students of the more gifted students are not going to stand for that.
I would also question your implicit assumption that disruptive students are intrinsically "bad" as opposed to being immature. The latter is much more often the case -- I can attest to many students who were disruptive in 9th or 10th grade but perfectly fine in 12th grade.
*It is simple math: At only five minutes per student, six students = 30 minutes of a 55 min high school period.
This seems like it's just an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing, which is fine in the suburbs I guess, but in the city where I live it means abandoning a bunch of poor kids of average or above average intelligence to a lifetime of poor outcomes because we cannot be bothered to put them in a classroom where there'll be peace and quiet and teach them in a manner conducive to their abilities.
If we implement tracking, and effectively curtail disruptive behaviors, and find it's not enough for the low track, then fine, we can continue to iterate on methods and reallocate resources, but is there really any doubt that doing both these things would be very good for the middle and high tracks, from the jump?
And they'd make it a lot easier for educated urban parents to look at the catchment school down the block and say, "yea, we can send our kids there, they'll do well, we don't need to pay for private school or run them across the city every morning to a charter." The buy-in of those parents is known to improve outcomes for all.
The better we do at increasing attainment for the median poor kid, the fewer poor kids there are next time around, and the more resources we can devote to the ones who need help. Unless we're positing that we've already "sorted" every family into the proper socioeconomic class for the genetic underpinnings of their intelligence, which... clearly not the case.
Tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn initial low-performing students to the underclass in perpetuity. It is the opposite of no child left behind-- the explicit statement that we are going to leave some children behind and devil take the hindmost.
Tracking advocates are persistently unwilling, maybe even unable, to be honest about this. Instead we get dissembling about "iterating on methods" that will never happen and resources that will never, ever, in a million years be "reallocated" to what everyone will perceive as a Breakfast Club of hooligans and dumbasses. That's how it works in tracked systems.
It would be much more forthright to simply admit that you think a large percentage of students are unfit for learning and that society is better off without them clogging the school system. That's an empirical claim; it's either true or it's not true.
Not tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn kids who didn't get the material they needed to understand what's being taught in this classroom to spend the entire year lost, while also condemning the kids who already know this material to spend the entire year bored, so that you don't ever have to make anyone sad by telling them that their kid is not in the advanced math class.
Tracking opponents are persistently unwilling, maybe even unable, to be honest about this.
>Not tracking is very explicitly a social decision to condemn kids who didn't get the material they needed to understand what's being taught in this classroom to spend the entire year lost,
As someone who taught untracked Economics for many years, I can tell you that that simply is not the case. As I have noted, I had time to assist the most struggling students. And, they could ask for help from more advanced students, if they wanted to do so. But if I had had a class of all struggling students, I would have had to dumb things WAY down.
As others have said, it is tracking that condemns the least capable students to substandard learning.
Tracking is the only possible way to get kids whose aptitude is in the bottom third the basic building blocks they need. Without it, we *demonstrably and inevitably* will tailor pedagogy to the top third, which fucks the bottom third entirely.
With it, yes, maybe some of them prove, once they're over initial hurdles, that they aren't actually in the bottom third, and I would absolutely not support German-level rigidity in tracking for that reason.
But by and large, the current system utterly fails not just the bottom third of poor students but the top two as well. Virtually none of the bottom third of a typical urban public school will leave poverty in their lifetime, and probably a bare majority of the remaining two-thirds won't either.
It's on you to actually prove the claim that tailoring pedagogy to three cohorts, and isolating a small fourth cohort, is an excuse to abandon one of the three when basically all poor urban students are already totally and utterly abandoned by the status quo.
I can and must admit that we're basically proposing to abandon the "rubber room" cohort, or at least to get them the fuck out of the way of the others.
It won't, though. And you know damned well it won't. In tracked schools the Breakfast Club is glorified babysitting at best and Lord of the Flies at worst. No one is teaching anyone "basic building blocks," unless it's how to aim them to hit the other kids when throwing them.
That's what gets me about this-- the hypocritical dishonesty of framing tracking as trying to benefit the bottom tier when in fact you are explicitly sacrificing the interests of the bottom tier in order to achieve a perceived greater good for the top tier. Have the courage of your convictions and argue that that's a good thing! Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
You may believe what you wish regarding my motives, but you still fail quite consistently to express a positive vision, an alternative, a defense of the status quo, anything.
When one is sufficiently committed to a simple, ideological understanding of the world, policy detail starts to look like spinelessness.
>Tracking is the only possible way to get kids whose aptitude is in the bottom third the basic building blocks they need. Without it, we *demonstrably and inevitably* will tailor pedagogy to the top third, which fucks the bottom third entirely.
This is the opposite of your initial claim, which was: "Putting them all in a single class proceeding at a single pace serves none of them well; the top ones get bored and disgruntled"
Edit:
>Virtually none of the bottom third of a typical urban public school will leave poverty in their lifetime, and probably a bare majority of the remaining two-thirds won't either.
And you have empirical evidence for that claim?
You're literally cutting off quotes mid-sentence, wherever is convenient to misconstrue an argument. This is the second or third time you've done so.
Until parents more or less forced the issue, reading and math pedagogy had shifted in exactly the direction I describe, towards complex but more interesting-seeming techniques. Nonetheless, putting everyone in the same classroom often works badly. That's why we already have a ton of tracking-adjacent tools like honors classes, AP classes, advanced independent work...
Both of these things are true, they are not contradictory, and I'm gonna call it a day on this topic because I don't think this mode of rehashing things we've already said is edifying or enlightening.
>This seems like it's just an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing
???? No, my comment was addressed solely to your suggested solution.
>but is there really any doubt that doing both these things would be very good for the middle and high tracks, from the jump?
But it would be a complete disaster for anyone below the middle. Most low-skilled students behave just fine, after all. Why do they have to be stuck in classes with a disproportionate number of disruptive performers?
>The better we do at increasing attainment for the median poor kid, the fewer poor kids there are next time around
Not if your system is doing a poor job of educating the people below the middle track. Again, your proposal will work for those students only if their class sizes are greatly reduced. Would you support that?
"Most low-skilled students behave just fine, after all. Why do they have to be stuck in classes with a disproportionate number of disruptive performers?"
They don't. Disciplining these kids often means putting them in a room alone with a teacher for half a day. Back when we tracked, we also suspended kids, gave them detention, sent them to write drills on the blackboard during the day, or sent them off to a "military school."
"Not if your system is doing a poor job of educating the people below the middle track."
In urban systems today the majority of the top 65% are also failing to get an education sufficient to get them out of poverty. Simply salvaging *their* outcomes and bringing them up to something closer to par with suburban outcomes would, within a generation, have made a huge difference in the trajectory of intergenerational poverty and urban demographics. This would definitionally still hold true even if tracking makes the bottom 35%, who are currently still being utterly failed, even worse off as you contend.
"Would you support that?"
If it proves necessary, yes, as I just said. I am less convinced of the necessity than you, if we are actually committed to providing a non-disruptive environment in all three tracks.
I actually think you two are largely on the same page. You're basically saying there should be tracking, including a rubber room track for the most disruptive students. Gdanning is concerned about the low-performing, but non-disruptive students which they view as distinct from disruptive students. They're just saying tracking like this will require additional segmentation (and thus lower class sizes/more teachers), which I'm guessing you'd be fine with even if it results in a rubber/low/mid/high tracking system.
Absolutely. Never heard the term before, but it makes sense. At some point, helping that 2-4% of kids would be good, but simply getting them out of the way of the other 95%+ is a necessary precondition for improving outcomes in the latter group. There is a ton of room for improvement, and even marginal gains would be transformative for the nature of urban poverty and the livability of our cities over time.
I actually do not necessarily support tracking, unless, maybe, the top track is available to all who wish to attempt it.
>Disciplining these kids often means putting them in a room alone with a teacher for half a day.
Then there is no need to engage in tracking. And, as mentioned, in a non-tracked classroom, there will be less need for this because there will be less chance of a critical mass of disruptive students. Note that in my experience, the presence of disruptive students brings out the disruptive tendencies of students who are closer to the norm.
>This would definitionally still hold true even if tracking makes the bottom 35%, who are currently still being utterly failed, even worse off as you contend..
You can't simply wave away this outcome. A policy that makes the bottom 35% less well off bears a heavy burden of proof.
> I am less convinced of the necessity than you
You are very much mistaken, based on my years of experience in teaching in urban schools. Like I said, there is a huge difference between a class with 2 disruptive students and one with 3 disruptive students.
"Then there is no need to engage in tracking."
Why? It's incredibly clear that the specific pedagogical needs of middling students differ from those of both the "bright" ones at the top and the poor but nondisruptive ones at the bottom.
Putting them all in a single class proceeding at a single pace serves none of them well; the top ones get bored and disgruntled, the bottom are hurried along and gain too little understanding of the basics to be able to do them reliably, and the middle gets washed over. When you do this, you almost *inevitably* wind up tailoring material, time, and method to the needs of the brighter kids because they and their parents are usually best-equipped to get the schools to do what they want.
It is precisely because we no longer track that unempirical pedagogy like the whole language approach has been inflicted on average students, to whom it's a moderate irritant, and poor ones, for whom it's crippling.
It just seems inherently very hard to teach a roomful of kids at very different levels at the same time. I can see how to teach algebra to a kid who's prepared for it, but a kid who can't multiply two-digit numbers is not going to get much out of it, and neither is a kid who started learning calculus from Khan Academy because it seemed interesting to him. Those kids belong in three different classrooms, with education appropriate for their needs. Putting them in the same classroom makes everything work worse. Adding in a couple kids who can't or won't control themselves and keep disrupting the class just shuts down education in that classroom for the year.
Also, what about the highly intelligent disrupters, which while a minority, are not a negligible minority? I don’t think we can immediately conflate disruptive = average or below average
I was one such in grade school, and it was made clear to me that I was allowed to be as smart as I could be and finish everything in front of me as quickly as I could manage, and then I was to not be a disruptive asshole and prevent others from doing so, or gloat about it and demoralize them, or shout over their answers to questions when not called on.
The miracle of discipline is that it instills virtue, if applied consistently for a time.
Being too smart for your own good? That's a paddlin'.
Good answer :)
My brother taught 5th grade. He related a conversation he had in a meeting with parents. He said that their son was a very nice boy who wasn’t going to learn much during the school year because almost all of his teaching time was wasted keeping a few other boys from creating total disruption. A system that punishes the many in favor of the few is nuts.
>A system that punishes the many in favor of the few is nuts.
And what if their very nice son is low skilled and not very bright, and is placed in the lowest track, along with most of the disruptive students?
Honestly, this has little to do with what we are talking about. No one is arguing that disruptive students should not be addressed. And the issue is not the many versus the few. It is which "many" is going to be disadvantaged. Why should it be the low-skilled students?
Why do you assume that a low skilled child will be placed with the disrupters? I believe that the low skilled are harmed most by disrupters. High skilled children are better able to learn and adapt outside the classroom. The systems that keep the disrupters in place with no effective discipline system does harm the many in favor of the worst consuming most of a teacher’s time, energy and attention.
>Why do you assume that a low skilled child will be placed with the disrupters?
There is a high correlation between disruptive behavior and low skills. Hence, disrupters would tend to be low-skilled, and hence be in the low track
>The systems that keep the disrupters in place with no effective discipline system does harm the many in favor of the worst consuming most of a teacher’s time, energy and attention.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the topic under discussion, which is tracking.
I apologize for failing to respond to your point that the issue is tracking. The disruptive child needs intensive work on socialization, assuming that question is not one of insanity which is outside a school’s capacity and mission. Tracking which moves the disrupters to a program that focuses on their primary need for a successful, adult life makes sense to me, whether the child is high or low skilled. To me, the education of the many should never be sacrificed to the problems of the very few, with the problems of the few not being also sacrificed.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Viewing the same reality we arrived at different conclusions which is not surprising with such a complex, difficult question
The elementary schools in my area have a “home room” that kids are assigned to with three home rooms in a “Pod.” About half of teaching takes place in the home room, but for reading and math, each teacher in the pod takes a group of students from the whole pod at each level - one for those behind grade level, one for those ahead, and one for those at grade level.
This seemed to work really well.
Aren't unions pro-teacher safety and discipline?
There's often a gap between what actual teachers want and what the union as a political organization pushes for.
For example, during COVID a poll of our local teachers had a plurality for returning to full time in school in the fall of 2020, with hybrid next and full remote last. But the state union was full throated for remote.
I believe tracking is mostly the same, where teachers on the ground are more for than against, but the union political leadership is much more radical and bad.
It makes sense that teachers on the ground are more into tracking. You don’t want kids in your class who are not sufficiently challenged by the material, it’s bad for them and the other students.
I mean, it seems kind of rough if you're a 5th grade teacher, get students in class who can't read at all, and people say you're bad at your job because students are reading below grade level at the end of year.
Union leadership having different priorities from members is a universal problem. Leadership is always more leftwing but they usually avoid opposing things that are good for their members pay or conditions.
Tracking to me is really hard because it fundamentally means some people are working several times harder jobs for no benefit.
I teach in a school that tracks and the difference between the top and the bottom is insane. It should be paid a lot more to have a bottom class than a top form one. It’s insane to me that anyone is fine with this.
I work in an accelerated program this year and it is truly 500 percent easier and less stressful than the prison ship that is low classes. But we’re paid the same.
Don’t worry, if your students do well they’ll stick you with the shit classes forever!
This is the worst aspect of high-stakes testing. At least when tests don’t have any stakes, schools can assign the good and passionate teachers to the honors tracks and dump the lazy coaches on the future underclass, which is proper. Anything less chases out the good and passionate teachers quick.
My impression is that unions are pro-teacher safety, but have in many cases concluded that the easiest way to protect teachers is go lighter on discipline. (Teachers are rarely just randomly attacked by students, instead the danger comes from trying to discipline students.)
This is not the union! Teachers would love to have more discipline. One thing schools are rated and ranked on are the number of suspensions (low is good). Teachers are also under a lot of pressure from administration to take care of things in the classroom with little back up from administration. I am not sure if this is due to parental pressure or other demands.
I think many of the teachers reading this would be surprised to learn their union (if they have one) has control over discipline, curriculum choices, whether their school district uses tracking or not, etc.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Unfortunately I think that in Seattle the teachers union does have influence.
OK, I guess my impression was wrong! Thank you for the added information.
Teachers will often take pay cuts to work in safer schools.
Oh, the teachers are fine, most of them anyway. But Philly union leadership was for a long time all-in on the EdD kool-aid regarding complex instruction methods and avoiding discipline due to equity concerns, and the administration generally measures success by minimizing disciplinary incidents on paper, i.e. ignoring real problems.
It basically guarantees that the only way for middle-income or better parents to ensure their kids have a decent, safe, nondisruptive environment is to put them into the right dozen-odd lottery-admit charters or move into the 15-20 catchments that have both gentrified and where parent education decisions have caught up to that reality and they send their kids to the neighborhood school, because few catchment schools with poor student bodies are enforcing discipline or following best practice for median-achieving students.
Which is at the core of my comment: poor kids do better when they have middle class and professional class peers, and the measures that schools undertake to attract the latter also hugely help poor kids. We can do better in ways which are reasonably simple and well-understood.
Kind of interesting how the unions seem to typically be massive problem at predominantly poorer schools in urban areas, where there are also lots of behavioral issues among students, but then the unions are no longer a problem when the student/parent mix changes.
This seems pretty self-explanatory and exactly in line with my original point and the amplification above: when you have selection effects that hugely reduce the need for discipline and bring in a bunch of students who benefit from complex instruction on interesting topics, the (unempirical) EdD dislike for discipline and drill-based/phonics-based basic instruction matters less.
I genuinely think a lot of the issue here is that teachers and educated parents hate the rote nature of the education that poor-to-mediocre students need and it's much more attractive to pretend that everyone benefits from whole-word reading instruction and applied math problems without ever having done multiplication drills or phonics.
Tracking. Let the bright kids get through the boring bits fast, the broad middle spend the time they need before moving on, and the bottom third get the basics hammered in mercilessly until they can do the math on credit card debt, balancing a budget, understanding red flags in contracts, etc.
My wife took a well paying job at a low income district nearby when none were available in our town. She lasted one week. Horrible disruptive students, phones, bad or no parenting, etc. At 63 years old she said even if she had the energy to deal with this mess of humanity it was a no win scenario as it was too late to change high schooler's behavior. She felt bad for the few students who were really trying but ended up taking early retirement.
Yes, I live in a big city where teacher pay is generally: public schools > charters > private schools. It’s very clearly a tradeoff between how easy the job is and how much you get paid.
I’m a PMC parent currently torn over whether to send my oldest to public school in an urban system, and I 100% endorse this.
I strongly believe in public education, and am willing to pay relatively high property taxes to fund it. But I care more about my kids’ safety, and that learning is a fun, joyful, and challenging experience for them
For us, we live in a pretty secluded neighborhood so our catchment school isn't walkable (4ish miles away) or particularly tightly tied to our area, and it's a decade plus away from being a good place to educate our kids, all of which made the decision to seek out-of-catchment and charter placements easy. We never wanted to go private; Philly is large enough that there are good public options, enough of them for it to be fairly likely we'd get our kid in somewhere reasonably accessible to us and good for her.
It just so happened that we got a slot in our fourth choice school before kindergarten started, and then a notice from our first choice that they had a late-opening slot in October for which we were the first waitlisted slot, and we jumped on it.
Nah, middle class parents should just teach their kids about honor culture and how and when to fight, and then they'll be fine /sarc.
Hey, honor culture worked out for Galois, didn't it?
The tragedy of progressives’ fetish for gap reduction is that it turns measurement into a vice. It’s easier to narrow gaps by slowing high performers than by lifting low ones. If reducing gaps is your primary focus, measuring things will, at a minimum, push towards neglecting top achievers.
The short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut portrays a dystopian future where society tries to achieve equality by handicapping the gifted. It's an excellent read and can be found for free online.
Is it really that hard though? I've followed this topic closely and it seems we can boost scores by doing the following (note none of this stuff requires spending a ton of money)
1. You need to start with phonics based instruction for reading. Ideally at home, you can do this with 15-20 mins a day. And it’s WAY WAY WAY more effective if done in a one on one environment. Kids must learn how to sound out words.
2. But phonics is just the start, then you need to move to a content rich curriculum. One that doesn’t just have a bunch of short excerpts on subjects but actually covers stuff like history, social studies, science etc. A lot of kids simply aren’t learning a lot of content. They aren’t reading full books, just short paragraphs. This doesn’t work. Trying to divorce reading from content is foolish and wrong. Natalie Wexler has done some great work on this. Her book “The Knowledge Gap” is excellent and well worth a read.
3. Having multiple different curriculums is bad. We need one curriculum per state. That actually covers what is taught in that grade. Not one that covers 50 things where you only have time for 10 during the school year. This is necessary because how can you test the content that should have been learned if the content varies from class to class or from school to school. We need to decide what kids need to learn, teach them that stuff then test them on that stuff. But this requires ONE curriculum.
4. There needs to be frequent low stakes testing (every 3 to 4 weeks). If a couple of kids are falling behind then get those kids small group tutoring. If most of the class fails then you need to cover the material again.
5. All kids should have to pass a standardized test at the end of each year to move on to the next grade. Of course this goes back to the need for one curriculum. So that you can test on what should have actually been learned. As we learned from Mississippi this doesn’t actually result in that many new kids failing. What it does is it changes the way adults and parents act which results in enhanced learning for the kids.
6. Ban all phones and other smart devices from schools from bell to bell. Kids shouldn’t be looking at phones during class. They also shouldn’t be on them during lunch. Go play with other kids get real social interaction.
If you do all this you would see HUGE improvement. That being said, I believe the following is also needed. But I realize this will be harder.
7. Lengthen the school year. Right now kids are only in school for about 180ish days. That’s only HALF the year. Kids should really be in school for somewhere between 220 and 240 days a year. Long breaks are horrible for learning.
8. Lengthen the school day and get rid of most homework excepting reading. For example, if kids are working on paper they should be doing it on school computers with no AI access (or paper, but I hate paper). Also make sure kids are getting the boring practice repletion needed for things like multiplication tables. How do you make sure. You make sure they actually do it at school.
I'm with you on 1-3 and 5-7, and 4 seems harmless at least, but a hard no to 8.
There's other stuff kids need to do, learn, experience, outside of school hours, and homework is immensely useful to parents in keeping track of what is going on with their kids and their understanding of the material.
If I weren't helping my child with homework (for a 2nd grader it's 15 minutes a night plus some joint reading time and soon multiplication flash cards), I wouldn't know what she's working on or how well it's going basically at all.
There is good research that 4 can be VERY important - this has been shown to be very helpful to teachers and a very cost effective use of resources getting help to those who need it most seems to work- see work by Fryer et. al.
Fair, I buy that, so long as they're a fairly slim investment in time and are genuinely low-stakes.
Yes that's the idea - quick easy assessment. Called formative assessment . There is also reading software ( measuring lexiles) that can automate this that looks very promising.
yep that's who I actually got it from. He made me a big believer in it.
I don't think this would apply much to 2nd graders. They don't and shouldn't have much home work.
But as we get into middle school and high school (when you actually get homework). I think this becomes a real thing.
We don't want kids using Chat GPT instead of doing the work.
you'd be surprised at how interventions in early grades seem to impact long term outcomes
I certainly think early grades are important.
But early grades don't need a ton of homework, nor do I think that lengthening the school day would be that important for early grades.
6 hours is more than enough time for early grades.
And we're not worrying about a second grader coming home and using chatgpt
All true. I was talking about basic skills learned in classrooms. So phonics, special help etc
The research on homework doesn’t tell us much
I generally agree, but...there is some indicating that some kids will learn to read with any instruction, or no instruction, most benefit from phonics, that is how we are wired, but some kids - across the population all classes groups etc., need special kinds of instruction to acquire reading skills. Class and parent education increases the likelihood that that some will get that instruction. My take.. That is probably why the added reading instruction and follow up teachers are getting in the "miracle" states is paying off.
Sure, but how much of an extension are we talking here? It's already pretty well established than a 7:30-8 am start for middle and high schoolers drags them out of bed way too early for their health and performance, if we adjust that it doesn't leave a ton of wiggle room.
And for younger grades this seems contraindicated.
I'm open for debate on this. How much homework should kids be doing at what grades?
It would probably also require coordination between classes. But I don't see any other way you get around this for paper writing, and probably math as well.
Maybe you could get by with an hour a day?, but the way you spend that hour would probably vary over the course of the year.
Don’t you have a giant ass paper trail of what they’re learning?
I mean I send home grades and a newsletter every week. My graphic organizers are on Google classroom even if I didn’t give homework just reviewing anything they didn’t get an A on would get you there.
Why are you using Google Classroom, that stuff is evil
We are much less bureaucratic than that, I guess? We have an app that they push out a few sentences of summary about the week's lesson plan in each subject, occasional instructions for parents, photos of hands-on work or excursions, and other than that my updates come at PTC time or via looking at the homework.
The improvements in Mississippi et al are focused at the elementary school level and don’t really endure til graduation. Mississippi has miserable ACT scores. Intensive interventions can make a much bigger difference earlier than later. As kids get older their own IQs and peer group effects dominate educational tweaks.
Yes, which is why Louisiana would be the better model after 4th grade. They have a content rich curriculum, and are seeing those gains in the 8th grade as well.
The "problem" with better teaching methods is that, when they work at all (which is far from a given) they tend to improve scores across the board. If your view of school is that it should be teaching everyone to the best of their ability that's a great success, but if your goal is to close achievement gaps, it's a failure.
I don't think you can ever close all the achievement gaps.
Blank slateism is bullshit.
For example, I spend many hours each week. Trying to get my kids ahead in life.
Why should we expect kids that parents don't spend that time to outcompete them.
Agreed - While improving the performance of low income learners does not always lead to a reduction in learning gaps. This isn't a zero sum issue. Improving instruction will help all kids advance. Low income learners may advance at a faster rate, but the achievement gaps remain, However this does enable more young people to thrive later in life. Our obsession with equity should n't get in the way of helping the least well off, but it often does
Have top achievers done better recently?
Not a general answer to your question, but IIRC the decline in test scores discussed in the main post was mostly concentrated amongst weaker students.
Yes, see https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/reading/scores-percentiles/?age=9
As a high school English teacher in Tennessee for nearly 25 years (started full time in fall of 01) this was interesting to read. Personally, I trace the decline of our schools back to NCLB and its failed theory that you could improve reading skills by increasing time for reading instruction at the expense of science and social studies. Kids come to me now knowing so much less about the world. I started the new semester last week with a Langston Hughes poem and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture. Testing culture isn’t the only cause of decline - Tik tok has single-handedly changed schools in a real way, and so much has changed societally since 2000- but I think 8th and 12th grade reading scores refuse to budge because we have a flawed theory of accountability. For 20 years districts have been screaming at teachers to try harder- so teachers are stressed and demoralized, and yet instruction has gotten worse bc now we forgot to focus on the big picture, which is teaching kids about the world, making them read, making them write, repeat forever. Instead we have been trying to remediate skills standards which aren’t real (reading skills aren’t transferable when divorced from background knowledge and vocab). Tennessee has done some things right, but these Southern surge stories are infuriating to read when I’m trying to teach 25 nice kids who seemingly don’t KNOW anything.
Curious to hear you elaborate on how tik tok has single-handedly changed schools. Is it mainly that it made kids worst readers and critical thinkers?
I suspect TT has had a big influence on shorter attention spans and the decline in reading for pleasure, but I can’t really prove that.
What I know for sure is TT has seeded various conspiracy theories (Helen Keller isn’t real), memes (6-7), and behavioral trends (devious licks-which spurred a lot of vandalism and theft a few years back) that have a real impact on the school day. Even 6-7, which is harmless enough, has probably stolen a minute of class every day all year. That’s 90 minutes of instruction lost to pure nonsense. And the crazy thing is that it’s universal. Once something starts circulating on TT it’s like every single kid knows about it. It’s the most zombie virus-like phenomenon I’ve ever experienced.
I want every person who defends TikTok to have to defend that devious licks stuff. If you've created a product that leads to kids stealing the doors off of their teachers' cars and recording themselves doing it, you've made the world a worse place.
It is incredibly telling to compare TikTok's algorithmic video feed and Douyin's.
The latter is still brain-rot from an attention span perspective but it is sanitized into something basically wholesome in terms of the content put in front of you.
I was always a great student, ahead of grade level in everything, took almost literally *all* of the AP courses that were relevant to clearing my freshman year requirements, and I... don't think I knew anything about the role of Harlem in black culture prior to junior year AP US History. Not a lick.
I think this comment and many of the ones downstream of it reflect the same reality that drives some of our problems: bright, academically-inclined people find the drill-based instruction methods that the bottom third need to durably learn the basics to be terribly fucking boring, whether as students being subjected to them, teachers using them in the classroom, or parents hearing about them.
Tracking is, quite simply, a must. Drill the brightest third or quarter early and move on to fun and interesting stuff quickly. The broad middle needs more time on the basics but will eventually move beyond them. The bottom third needs to be drilled mercilessly on the basics of math and reading they need for life and then helped to find interests that will lead to good-paying blue collar work. Alongside this, almost everyone needs to be taught things that we used to put under the umbrella of home economics, like balancing a household budget, basic savings/credit literacy, cooking, maybe some home maintenance.
I was thinking the same thing. I went to a fancy private school (albeit in Hawaii, as far away from Harlem as you can get), and even post-AP US History would only be able to give you a very surface-level description of the Harlem Renaissance, if that.
I take Jillian's point, though, that "accountability" can't just mean "screaming at teachers to try harder."
The only reason I know anything about "Harlem Renaissance" is because I was helping my own kid with their studies. He may well know more about it than I do.
Fancy-ass college prep school here, just outside Philly, and yep, same.
This is all surprising to me, but I must say that living in the Memphis area, even in my lily white school, we read a LOT of black literature. I couldn’t have told you where Harlem was, but I knew in middle school that the Harlem Renaissance was black poetry like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks
NCLB had some good ideas (e.g., making all states test, keeping track of learning), but it also turned accountability 100% on teachers and schools and punished schools for having poorer students. We need to balance accountability and HOLD kids for extra hours if they’re not learning. Magically, I think most kids will start learning more during regular hours if they find that their free screen time is taken away.
Progressives like to talk about how schools need to be given the resources to substitute for bad, absent, or overwhelmed parents (to this I would add just plain useless/stupid ones).
The corollary of this, which is a less popular sentiment, is that schools need to be empowered to take on the disciplinary role that all good parents also play.
Secret third rail.
I have had kids in public schools for the last 20+ years, and I have viewed this change in real time. 100% agree.
My oldest kid, who was caught up in the middle of this complained that school and the things they were reading had gotten a lot more boring. I was shocked when she barely made grade level on the standardized test for reading one year while doing well on math when in real life her skills are the opposite. She said it was because the passages on the test were so boring she could barely pay attention to them, ha.
She had two majors in college, both of which were reading and writing intensive, and got a full ride to her Masters program, so I think my assessment of her skills was correct. As I type this, I am wondering if the change in approach is why my younger kids don't like to read for pleasure nearly as much as she does.
I have also read (maybe even in this substack) about the increasing focus on using snips and excerpts rather than reading full texts, which I think probably also contributes to less joy in reading.
Nobody wants to admit the tests are bad! They're boring, unrelatable, and don't remotely resemble the kind of reading and writing we actually want humans to do.
I fell out of love with English academically due to poor *teachers*, but the material itself was mostly fine. Even bushwhacking through ponderous doorstoppers like Anna Karenina in 10th grade taught valuable lessons about persistence and how other times and cultures were vastly different to our own. Cutting teeth on that sort of material made the test passages trivial by comparison. (Confound: always loved to read, continue doing it for pleasure as an adult, encouraged at home by family. They didn't need to read to me much cause I was happy to do it on my own. When you get disciplined as a kid for reading newspapers during family mealtimes, that's...different from how most grow up.)
Not sure what they're making kids read these days, although it does seem to be increasingly atomized into passages and excerpts rather than whole works. Smart kids a decade younger than me nonetheless end up hating reading, because "school made it not fun", which...is both a criminal shame, and also if they had an intrinsic love like mine then I don't know how you'd actually stamp that out. Seems not a coincidence too that after eliminating the essay portion of the SAT, kids increasingly can't write either. Same with analogies and grokking clever wordplay...if it's not tested, it's not worth teaching, I guess.
> I started the new semester last week with a Langston Hughes poem and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture.
I don’t have a strong opinion about “more reading time at the expense of science and social studies,” though it does seem to me that “maybe try better pedagogical methods and use the time efficiently” seems like it should have been tried first (also “more time on reading” has some logic at younger ages but only if _it actually results in more kids learning to read early_, enabling more time later.
That said, i started high school in CA in 2003 (so my pre-hs curriculum would have basically been unaffected by NCLB. I was assigned a book of Langston Hughes poems for summer reading and I had no idea about the Harlem Renaissance at the time. But that’s fine! That’s why I was assigned reading from the era! I really don’t think “high schooler doesn’t know about the Harlem Renaissance prior to being assigned poetry by a participant” is the specific knock on modern pedagogy you seem to be implying?
Greetings from not too far from you. I've heard from teachers around here that the push for vouchers and charter schools and whatnot means that the only schools left that cannot be selective are public schools. The result is that high-needs kids concentrate in public schools, so they are left with fewer resources to teach a disproportionate number of kids that need more resources. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
My kids do fine in our public school, but they come home with some pretty wild stories about some of their schoolmates that suggest some pretty serious behavior problems. On the other hand, our neighbor had to sue the district to get their kid into elementary school because they said they weren't equipped to handle his needs --- and the only non-public schools available were very expensive because they are equipped to meet them and more. If I had to guess, I'd say a little less than half the kids in our neighborhood attend the local public schools.
It would probably be better if public schools could expel misbehaving students, enforce discipline, track by ability, etc. But if it is politically or socially unworkable for them to do so, then it is at least good that parents can move their kids to private or charter schools that are allowed to do those things.
"I've heard from teachers around here that the push for vouchers and charter schools and whatnot means that the only schools left that cannot be selective are public schools."
I'd be interested to understand where you live. Percentage of students in private schools varies dramatically across the country withe the NE and Midwest having much larger percentages.
This map is fascinating:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-school-enrollment?utm_source=coe_share&utm_medium=figure_tool&utm_campaign=copied_url#2
Yah, that map indeed looks like they're headed South. Private schools (very broadly speaking) used to have three barriers: some kind of academic requirements, money for tuition, and a parent who could do pickup and drop-off. Vouchers were created and championed (again very broadly speaking) as a way for poor black kids to escape failing schools. But Republican-controlled states have been pushing to remove the financial barrier by making vouchers universal, and increasingly trashing public schools and teachers unions to justify it.
Due to the sudden interest in living in the Sunbelt, it feels like you could toss a golf ball in any direction and it'd hit a realtor who is a former teacher. (Seriously, housing developments grow faster than kudzu.) Anecdote that may be, there is also a huge shortage of public school teachers. The ones I know have all quit teaching, so I imagine they are biased, but they more-or-less say that public schools are filling up with high-needs kids, setting up a spiral: more teachers get fed up and quit (often going to a private school), more parents get upset at the falling teacher-to-student ratios and use vouchers to move their kids to private schools; private schools turn away low-performing and high-needs kids; and that leaves public schools with less money, fewer teachers and more kids that need more attention.
It is noticeable that nobody here has really talked about the incentives for potentially good teachers to actually become teachers.
That is basically a map of White Catholics, who I think are probably by far the biggest users of private education in the US.
The second biggest private school system belongs to Lutherans, who are heavily concentrated in the Midwest, as well.
What’s interesting is that private schools also appear to be able to lean on the resources of the public school system if they do keep those kids. So a private school kid on something like an IEP can access the public school system’s tutoring.
In Ohio, some private schools hire outside companies to manage their IEP/special needs work; others hire full-time staff to work with kids on IEPs. There is a scholarship here in Ohio called the Jon Peterson scholarship for kids with autism and other learning disabilities. For private schools with in-house intervention teams, a percentage of that money can be used to cover private school tuition, acting as a sort-of defacto voucher for private school for those families (if you use the Peterson money, though, you can't access other voucher programs). The general voucher system here in Ohio has expanded considerably from one targeted at families in low-performing school districts, to low-income families in any school district, and now to any family (regardless of income) in any district, with benefits decreasing as family income increases. Nearly all the private schools that used to NOT take vouchers now take them as a result. In some cases, though, the private schools raised tuition by an amount roughly equivalent to the vouchers either to increase income or lock-out lower income families.
"Personally, I trace the decline of our schools back to NCLB and its failed theory that you could improve reading skills by increasing time for reading instruction at the expense of science and social studies"
That might have been how many states implemented it, but that's not actually what NCLB said or required.
In fact Natalie Wexler's excellent book "The Knowledge Gap" has pretty well convinced me that a content rich curriculum that includes plenty of science and social studies is a critical part of reading comprehension (but of course it needs to be built on a phonics foundation, kids comprehend what they read if they can't decode the words in the first place).
The problem is states curriculum. They need to have one curriculum that everyone is teaching so they can actually do standardized testing on it. Including the social studies and science parts. Then that stuff will actually be taught.
Thanks for your work in schools. 🙏 I was the first person to write about the Southern Surge, and I have traveled to more than a dozen TN districts to see the efforts to bring knowledge-building curricula into use. That work is inspiring to see, and it’s too soon for you to see those students in your classrooms, but they are coming!
More in this piece and some of my others. https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding
I have read your work! Unfortunately, my district uses StudySync for middle and high school ELA and I think it's really terrible. I'm not sure what our elementary schools use. I'm definitely curious to see what unfolds in the coming years.
Yeah, StudySync isn’t fabulous. I hope the elementary program is better. Elementary was the bigger focus in the last adoption (2020-21), so district admins were probably much more savvy. And the options were better.
Knowing about the Harlem Renaissance just isn’t that important, though.
This...
"...and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture."
...is so very depressing.
I'm with David on this being a fairly niche thing. I do wish more history was taught, and that would be one of 50 topics I'd include (probably as an element of the Great Migration to Civil Rights arc in Black History), but there's an awful lot of American History that could be covered!
I think people are getting too hung up on the "did schools historically teach people specific facts about Harlem?" point rather than a more general claim that schools are devoting less time to teaching facts or content knowledge more generally. The Harlem example is just a specific anecdote.
I didn't learn about it in a history class, though. I learned about it through literature, and it was emphasized in later history classes.
I think a lot of this might be regional. I don’t remember when I learned about Harlem - maybe it was in school, maybe it wasn’t. But in the 70’s/80’s in Colorado we did learn all the basics of our state and regional history - stuff that’s important but probably received a lot less coverage - if any - in east coast schools.
We're talking about juniors in high school here. Did you know that Harlem was the beating heart of black culture in the early 20th century before finishing a bunch of US history courses in junior and senior year?
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Yes, I did. We read the "Autobiography of Malcom X" in American Lit, which was a sophomore class back in the day. And this was in my half-ass high school, which wasn't particularly rigorous.
I didn't. That was never on a reading list and I never had any particular interest in that facet of history so I learned the bare bones about the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the impact of WWII industrial work and economic opportunities on NE/Upper Midwest urban demographics in my junior year AP US History course, and that was it. I couldn't tell you much more than a paragraph descriptor of each of those today.
And again, to set the stage, I was high school valedictorian and basically skipped freshman year of college on the basis of AP coursework.
It just does not surprise me that virtually no high school junior who doesn't have a specific interest in this topic would know much about it, not in the least.
Maybe half-ass high schools in the seventies, full of half-ass stoned students, weren't as bad as I thought.
We weren't particularly bright people (the high school I went to didn't rank students, so we had no valedictorian) and we weren't particularly interested in academic achievement, but we did have assigned readings, and oddly, people either read them or skimmed them enough - with Cliff Notes, usually - to know what they were about.
I read my assigned books and a lot more beyond, even including a substantial chunk of non-fiction... this just was never on the list.
I've never read it to this day, and I have less than zero interest in doing so. I've got a bookshelf of economics, history, and policy books that I have no time to read as-is, I think I read a total of like 5 of my backlog last year lol.
I’m with David on this one, alas. My gaps in history were pretty egregious even with AP classes across the board. I got there, but not in early high school.
I dunno, I would argue that unless your sole interest is in history, which mine isn't at all, there's no way not to have gaps in your knowledge thereof.
I know a ton about North Atlantic Basin economic history, US and some European political/sociological history, a bit of "great man" names and dates, some wars, and a fairly decent understanding of the Song, early Ming, late Qing, and Republican-to-People's Republic China.
You want me to talk about specific American religious movements and revivals, black history other than the Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement, the history of specific immigrant groups? Nah, I know the concept but the details are long gone.
Latin American history beyond the most basic stuff and some 20th century economics in the Southern Cone, Brazil, and Mexico? Nope.
Middle East aside from the post-colonial period and a bit about the early Umayyads and another bit about their time in Cordoba? No clue.
Africa in general other than the triangle trade and a bit about decolonization? No.
SE Asia other than the endless conflict between China and Vietnam? Nothing.
I am beginning to appreciate my half-ass seventies education.
I...might have learned that as far back as 6th grade, in "Social Studies"? But this was a shitty public middle/high from 2001-2008, in a town with only one of each, so even if the bases of my knowledge ended up being broad...we definitely didn't reach the same heights you would have gotten at Fancy Prep. Often felt like the curriculum was more about throwing lots of potentially interesting tidbits at the wall, and hoping, praying that the kids got halfway interested in any of it. I guess in that sense it succeeded in training me for a winning-at-Jeopardy! mindset, but surface-layman knowledge increasingly doesn't get one very far in life. Specialization of intellectual labour is where it's at.
Everyone's got their own God of the Education Gaps though. I didn't know long division until 7th grade (taught to me by a Christian Scientist!), and didn't know the Parts of Speech until 8th. Which I then refused to learn properly anyway, earning me a B for the year, and I'm still kinda mad about that. Clearly those fundamentals weren't so important if I got a 5 on AP Lit anyway, without taking AP English...
We had a couple of honors classes, but they were reserved for the 10 "best students" - I never knew what criteria was used to determine best, because we weren't tested for them. We did not have AP classes. Only about 1/2 the public high schools had them prior to 1997, and like I said, my school was half ass.
All my knowledge came from the General Studies that all students shuffled through back then. My big gap was in languages. I took four years of French in high school, received As, and in my first French class at college was told by the professor that he couldn't believe I'd ever spent a day studying the language. I was that bad at it.
yes, and I thought everybody else did, too
How did you become acquainted with it, and when?
memory is so tricky...
but I'm pretty sure we read one or two Langston Hughes poems in junior high (7th/8th grade, late 1970s) English, and you know teachers would say stuff that probably most of the class didn't pay attention to...
my mom had taught HS English so we had a lot of books around - I read stuff like O. Henry & Ring Lardner, and those helped maybe set the scene (I also remember my mom exclaiming when Philip Guston died)
and I'm pretty sure (again) that our big thick history/civics book had some kind of sidebar on the prominence of Harlem in early 20th C (it also had photos of Pollock and Warhol paintings, and they were just...ART)
sorry for all the blather
I mean, history is deep and wide. It's not shocking to me that most 16 year olds don't know about a bunch of important bits of it, whether that's the Harlem Renaissance or the 30 Years War or rise of Genghis Khan.
What's shocking to me is that my godawful school system managed to impart this knowledge somehow. But I didn't learn it in history classes, I learned it through English classes.
Public high school social studies teacher here. My take on Matt’s take that “we should go back to NCLB” is 1)True, not trying doesn’t work. Duh. 2) NCLB failed (at least from a teacher’s POV) because, re: Dana Goldstein et.al., the expectations, at least as communicated to us teachers, weren’t “We want you to improve student performance” so much as “solve all social problems through your godlike teaching powers or we’re going to fire you and shut down your school and take away your state’s federal education dollars” Not sure how such consequences count as “minor” in Matt’s book.
I really have no problem being held accountable for _that which is under my control_, but suppose we had a similar approach to evaluating doctors as NCLB had toward teachers? Doctors A and B both go to top med schools, graduate top of their class, are dedicated and caring. Doc A ends up practicing in a community of young vegetarians who exercise regularly, practice safe sex, abstain from drugs and alcohol, etc. and has great results as measured by morbidity/mortality. Doc B, equal in every meaningful way to Doc A, ends up practicing in a community riddled with violence, populated with heavy smokers/drinkers/drug users, whose denizens frequently engage in promiscuous unprotected sex. NCLB would look at Doc B’s morbidity/mortality stats and demand they be fired, while giving Doc A a Doctor of the Year award dinner.
Which isn’t to say there are no bad teachers, that there are no excesses carried out by teacher’s unions, that bad practices don’t still cling (see the excellent APM “Sold a Story” on how reading instruction has been off the rails for a long time-hopefully changing now) but if we’re gonna do NCLB 2.0, guys like Matt need to seriously address NCLB 1.0’s failings, and try harder to understand the “why” behind the (teacher) backlash rather than lazily adopt the NCLB 1.0 assumption that “Education bad because teachers bad.”
> we’re going to fire you and shut down your school and take away your state’s federal education dollars
There are close to 100K public schools and around 50 were shut down due to direct federal NCLB mandate. (0.05%)
And a similar fraction for teachers let go.
Most schools chose other options - curriculum changes, calling in an external advisor, etc.
It's fair to say consequences were minor!
Actually most of the schools that were at risk of shutting down engaged in test score fraud, which is the inevitable and natural result of NCLB
How many were taken over by states with everyone fired and required to reapply for their jobs? Closures were only one of NCLB's "sticks".
So I did a bit of Google Fu (not a lot, to be sure-too busy grading student papers to read a lot of research papers) and Google came up with somewhere around 6,000 schools undergoing "major restructuring" as a direct result of NCLB. This frequently involved shutting down the school at least for a while, firing everybody and making them reapply for their jobs, then reopening. As you said, around 99,000 schools at the time, so roughly 0.06% of them, not far off from your figure. About 300,000 teachers lost their jobs, a fair number, no doubt, justifiably so, but most I wager were at least average teachers somewhere between Nick Nolte's drunken and frequently AWOL lout in the movie _Teachers_ and Edward James Olmos's Jaime Escalante in _Stand and Deliver_.
But that's due to _direct_ action as a result of NCLB. When the federal government yeeted back its funding if a state's schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, state cuts had to cut..._somewhere_... I have no idea how many schools closed as an _indirect_ result of NCLB sanctions, but I bet the "not that many schools" figures have been juked somehow.
I think to some extent "minor consquences" are in the eye of the beholder. Anecdata, to be sure, but I can tell you as a guy sitting through a weekly staff meeting in the NCLB era-in which we pored over AYP data that just wasn't getting there despite our best efforts-we were threatened, _weekly_, with "restructuring." The consequences, especially more difficult-to-measure ones like teacher morale, were hardly minor.
Thank you for the info and additional context.
I'm sure this is true, but it's also the reaction to every system of accountability I've ever seen rolled out in the private sector (and health care! ask docs about the unfairness of HEDIS!) No one is ever fully in control of their metrics - there's an element of luck.
But as far as I can tell, the options are usually either, a. no accountability, or b. imperfect accountability, and the latter is always better.
Doesn't absolve anyone for not trying to get fairer, just that you'll never fully solve the problem, and even if improved, you'll still feel some of what you're describing here.
Okay but what about stupid accountability? Like, what if we held all physicians accountable for the work done by OBGYNs? Well, Mr. Cardiologist, I'm sorry but you don't get fully paid out for our hospital's RVUs because we didn't reduce C-sections below 25%. That's the accountability system we had with NCLB and kind of still have depending on what each state did with accountability post-RTTT.
For example, under NCLB only math and English Language Arts were tested but the science and social studies teachers were still fired if enough kids at a school underperformed in math and ELA. Another example, and this was my experience, I worked tirelessly to bring my school's ELA scores up and succeeded but received zero incentive pay because my intervention course to improve reading was considered an elective. My work got the ELA teachers a bonus, I got nothing. That's fine so far as the big picture is concerned because presumably kids scoring higher on the test indicates they can read and write better (debatable) but it sucks as a practitioner.
In England, what we did was required testing at entry into each school and required testing at the end of the time in each school and then did a value-added comparison.
This has some serious problems too, the biggest being that the maximum and minimum scores on the tests aren't high enough and low enough, so the equivalent of magnet schools (there are so many terms in different parts of England that it's easier to just say "equivalent of") have nearly all their intake hitting the maximum and then their outtake also hitting the maximum, which meant they all are middling in terms of value-added, and problem at the other end affects schools for children with severe learning difficulties - they are all scoring the minimum on both entry and exit.
We can measure outputs from secondary education with a fine enough measure (using GCSE and A Level results; these are sufficiently challenging that the best schools get about 90% straight-A students: last year there were literally two that did that in the country), but not inputs so there's no useful value-added measure to be had.
And primary education is even worse - their exit measure is the secondary entry measure and about a third of schools get every single student to the maximum grade, and also have every single student at the maximum entry grade (which is "Working at the Expected Level"). This has got worse over time, as there used to be grades above this and they were removed.
The UK has a completely different approach to testing than the US.
The NCLB state tests in the US are annual, aimed at the lowest common denominator, mean nothing at all for most students, and are multiple choice. These are the only ones schools are seriously evaluated on, and they're largely evaluated on differences between ethnic groups.
We don't have anything like GCSE's or A Levels. SAT/ACT and AP/IB exams are the closest, but they're used in very different ways than the UK equivalents. The SAT is easier than GCSEs and is part of college admissions, but doesn't override activites/grades. AP/IB exams are about as difficult as A Levels, but are not used for college admissions in the US, and many kids are admitted to college without passing any. Schools are sometimes evaluated on the percentage of kids who take APs, but not on whether they pass them.
Grades in the US are completely different than anything that exists in the UK system. They're effectively a measure of conscientiousness, and many students will have an A in a class they don't actually know the material from. One of the best examples of this is that many freshmen at UCSD were assessed as not knowing middle school math by a placement exam, but had supposedly gotten A's in AP calculus. On the other side, bright kids with low conscientiousness will have 5's on an AP exam, but a B in the class because they forgot to turn in their homework.
I think teachers would be delighted if conversations about teacher performance moved to something like HEDIS rather than efforts to tie unadjusted student performance on tests to teacher evaluations. At least HEDIS is mostly process measures under the direct influence of providers. Evaluating whether teachers use evidence-based practices like phonics? Sure, I think most teachers could probably live with that.
Because all the accountability methods are enforced form high-on by education reformers whose view of the median teacher seemingly ranges from utter disgust to petty superiority. Even with Matt, every article on education has the typical 'we all support teachers and want them blah blah' followed by six paragraphs on why they're all wrong and deserve zero extra labor protections and should be as easy to fire as a fry cook.
What do you have against fry cooks?
Isn't there ways to get around this problem? For example, instead of just looking at total test scores, you can look at improvement from the prior year.
I hope that a lot of people in Virginia, especially in Richmond, are reading this strategically unpaywalled post.
What's makes this extra funny is Virginia has historically not allowed teachers to collectively bargain.
Collective bargaining isn’t everything. North Carolina is also a right to work state. The public school teachers’ lobbying organization is still the most influential lobbying group. Our Republican legislature doesn’t roll out teacher bonuses every election cycle for nothing. It helps that in most rural areas, public schools are the main employer.
Our education system is hurting thanks to poorly regulated charters and unregulated private schools that are able to get a lot more tax payer dollars now that there is no need requirement for private school vouchers anymore.
So is Virginia. North Carolina has some of the lowest paid teachers nationally, and this is after a concerted effort to raise teacher pay substantially over the past half decade, even if you factor in the bonuses. Sounds like the lobbying is going great.
What’s with the rudeness? Anyways, we have a Republican legislature that would like to abolish public schools and is doing its best to break them. Things could be worse absent the efforts of the NCAE and the power that comes from being the main employer across the state.
If we had collective bargaining, it would reflect something fundamentally different about the makeup of the legislature. Collective bargaining is not the only source of power for change.
Sorry, wasn't trying to be rude. Just tired of people going "the unions are the problem with X" before even checking whether the union that people are positing is responsible for the bad thing even exists.
Complete understandable. Unions are easy to vilify. It’s also unfair to expect them to save public education. That’s not the purpose of the union.
Again, I have never seen nor experienced ANY pressure to coddle kids from my union. The only pressure comes from administration, who is pressured by the public school leadership. They are still trying to lower certain metrics like suspensions and failures instead of doing the hard work of making STUDENTS actually accountable for learning. Students leave at the end of the day regardless of how many Fs or As they have. Teachers and unions did not ask for this.
All of this is directly and easily refuted, and I will do so soon - your core understanding of the reality is wrong.
1. The supposed gains you're associating with NCLB we're dubious in the first place and there is no responsible way to assign them to that particular intervention; you're taking the notoriously complex and difficult to assign question of culpability for test score changes and assigning it to the supposed cause that fits your political priors. And your narrative simply does not fit with the actual complicated staged rollout of nclb, nor would the fact that so many exemptions and waivers were issued for NCLB (because what the law called for was not possible) that it's meaningless to say that there is an NCLB era.
2. The reduction in scores, if we take them at face value, did not start after we moved on from the immense failure of the "accountability" era; they started falling in 2010 or 2012 or so, in other words, at the absolute height of the accountability era. At its very height.
3. That reduction is observed across the entire OECD and is in fact remarkably uniform; of course, there was no broad international accountability movement that took place across the OECD, nor was there an abandonment of such a movement. There was in fact no uniform pedagogical or policy changes that afflicted the many, many rich nations that have seen this reduction, which means that it's nonsensical to blame it on local American educational policy. I understand that you're desperate to believe in the accountability narrative and you're looking for any ability to do so, but the fact that the score reductions that you decry happened across a vast number of countries with extraordinarily different educational policy and pedagogy backgrounds, none of which moved in a coordinated way at either the beginning of this trend or the end of it, utterly undermines the idea that this has anything to do with American pedagogical or policy changes. Which is what we should suspect, because pedagogical and policy changes have never been proven to have any meaningful impact on test scores at all, and what I find so frustrating about this is that I know you're aware of that.
What happened around 2010 or 2011 or 2012 across the rich world that could have a direct and major impact on learning outcomes? Everybody got iPhones.
"because pedagogical and policy changes have never been proven to have any meaningful impact on test scores at all"
This is a wild statement. You could send you kids to school where they stare at a wall all day and this wouldn't impact test scores? Even narrowed a bit, there is no difference between someone trained as a teacher and someone who walks in off the street and just starts talking...
Yeah, really cuts to Freddie's initial statement "your core reality understanding of reality is wrong", Freddie and Matt really are kind of existing in different realities as it were LOL (I guess Matt is Woody Allen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3NWzLzaek)
There is no such thing as school quality
You went to school, you never had teachers/professors that were better than others? Ever?
Next you'll be telling me there is no different in writing quality. Some random person off the street can write as well as you do.
I think you just lost all credibility with this one
Your point #2 is not consistent with the plots shown in this post — in those, the national decline starts around 2017. Are you referring some other data set?
The chart in this post shows score increases through 2013, and a downward turn after 2013. I can appreciate your point about the likely role of smartphones. But it’s odd when you make claims about data that are so dissonant with… the actual data.
Hey Freddie,
Maybe you can answer this since you write so much about education. Why do commentators only focus on 4th grade NAEP scores? Presumably scores from 8th grade or 12th grade are also important. Why do journalists and policymakers care more about scores in elementary school than they do when kids exit the school system and go on to college or work?
Because the MS miracle disappears by grade 8 because the 4th grade scores are the result of a statistical aberration.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/how-much-of-mississippis-education-miracle-is-an-artifact-of-selection-bias/
No it's not. See The Arguments excellent reporting on the subject.
Also, louisiana is raising h grade test scores as well.
Because they focused on a knowledge building curriculum
https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Or like all the other education miracles over the last 50 years we're going to find out it's fake.
If you actually dig in, you can see that's it's not a miracle. It's over a 15 year slow and steady improvement in 4th grade reading scores based on schools actually employing many of the principles of the science of reading combined with actual accountability measures (holding kids back for not meeting them).
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What would be a surprise is if it didn't work.
Those differences absolutely, 100% do not show up in the eighth grade numbers
I'm honestly not clear that this article shows it disappeared by 8th grade? In particular, the criticism leveled in that article is that the 2024 8th grade score is low. We will have to wait the obvious 4 years to know if the increase in 4th grade scoring holds. No?
This article doesn't, but if you look at Mississippi 8th grade reading scores they aren't nearly as impressive.
Louisiana on the other hand is showing impressive gains there because they are using a better knowledge building curriculum after 4th grade.
Was that the same 8th graders, is my question? Because that article does show that their 8th grade is still not doing well. But the article doesn't show that gains are lost. Quite the contrary, MS is still improving in recent years. A trend which is sadly opposite many other states.
And I get it, any measurements on cohorts that went through the pandemic are going to be troubling. No amount of amazing schooling around 4th grade is going to make up for that.
It does disappear in eighth grade
The linked article does not show that, was my point. If you have some that do show it, I'm game to see it.
Cards on the table, I certainly had the idea going in that reading skills largely normalize themselves given time. Direct experience with kids has been slowly removing that idea from me.
Not in Louisiana they don't
Sure, with Mississippi that's potentially the case but it goes beyond Mississippi. All the time and effort we spend in the media and in discussions of policy seems to revolve solely around these 4th grade scores even though we also measure 8th and 12th grade.
I recommend Gelman's Dec 4 follow up where he kind of walks that back and just says there's not enough data to say definitively what's causing the "miracle". "- Mississippi’s average test scores have been going up. How much is this due to selection of who takes the test and when they take it, how much is due to changes in accommodations for disabilities (as discussed by Kelsey Piper in comments), and how much is due to targeted test preparation, I don’t know." He also has two more follow-up posts on schools in New Orleans and some comments from Noah Spencer.
If you're looking for the effects of a given policy change, it's easier/faster to see treatment effects in a younger cohort vs waiting a longer time for kids to filter through k-12.
Sure, but if they don't filter through isn't that also important? Like, yeah, maybe your 4th graders are among the best readers in the nation but if, by the time they are 8th graders, they are below average, what good are these reforms? Does an employer or college care about anyone's 4th grade NAEP scores? It seems like our focus is on an area that is minimally related to the outcomes we actually care about.
Exactly so
Because higher scores in 4th grade, even if there is fade-out by 8th grade is good. And heres why:
1. Life outcomes are better nevertheless -- higher GPAs and fewer remedial courses in high school
2. What is the counterfactual for children who are retained in 3rd grade instead of promoted to 4th grade automatically? Note that even after fade-out they fall back into average. But what about without retention? They are more likely to drop out. So you get a C instead of dropping out, for example.
Separately, this counters the "social promotion" problem. Children who need an additional year of instruction ought to get it, rather than being continuously unprepared upon promotion to successive grades.
Far be it from me to impugn the integrity of the commenters (though it is very tempting!) but should we get higher 8th grade test scores in the future they will complain about college enrollment rates. Should that improve, they will complain about college graduation rates. Should that improve, they will complain that people don't really understand quantum mechanics at age 23.
Lets help kids do better. Lets hold those in charge of educating kids accountable.
The thing we care about is life outcomes. The intermediate result we can measure is a set of test scores. But if it turned out that some intervention made everyone's reading test scores look better in the 4th grade, but didn't result in any more of them being able to read at age 20, I'd think the intervention had not been worth much.
It's like the difference between measuring a medicine on actual outcome (say, all-cause mortality after five years) vs some intermediate thing like blood cholesterol levels or something. The intermediate thing is easier to measure, but is only meaningful of the actual outcome ends up being better.
I think this is all well and good and I don't necessarily disagree. More 4th graders reading at or above grade level is in and of itself a good, regardless of outcomes. That said, I'm always surprised media coverage and policy discussion is so narrowly focused. Surely, we can also think about, try, and evaluate policies to boost 8th grade reading and math scores? I'd hope that the media would care about and cover those policies, but it seems like miracles only occur in 4th grade and only in ELA?
Geez, was it just phones?
I think what's missing in this discussion is that red states have a totally different view of the purpose of education than they did in the 2000s or even 2010s. Matt is fighting the last war. Conservatives flat out say that the purpose of education is to teach values. Toward that end, they are unconcerned with school performance. You don't have to take my word for it, just look at what the people who are running the department of education say. Just look at how people running education in Texas, Florida, and Arizona talk about schooling. Look at how leading conservative law professors write about the transition from school choice to parent choice or how the heritage foundation says charter schools are too woke - more woke than standard public schools, apparently. They don't want accountability, they want out. They want taxpayer funded vouchers to pay for their kids' church-school and they don't want anyone looking over their shoulder to see if it's money well spent.
The terrain has changed. Conservatives aren't waiting for technocratic centrist liberals to come back into power and reestablish a more technically sound version of No Child Left Behind. Matt (and others) are busy fighting the last war where republicans were their allies against the left but that's not today's situation, especially in states where, unlike Virginia, conservative republicans hold basically unchallenged control over state government.
It's actually both. A proper education should be teaching reading writing and math
What should also be teaching the values we need to be good citizens.
As well, I would add a basic understanding of economics, constitutional law and history
You'll get no argument from me on the principles in your comment, but I think we've seen a sea-change among the more conservative elements of society against the very idea of public education. They're out. No amount of tinkering with curriculum or re-implementing strict test-based accountability is bringing them back. I think this matters in states like Texas and Florida where Matt focused his criticism today because we're really looking at two wholly separate education systems. There's the traditional public schools and there's the taxpayer-funded microschools, homeschoolers, and private schools. Both receive money from the people of Texas/Florida, but they operate on totally separate policies. Public schools in Texas continue to operate under some pretty strong accountability systems, see HISD's recent takeover, for example. The voucher system seems to operate under a "buyer beware" principle where it's effectively on the parents to determine if they like what they're getting for the public's dime and watch out for ripoffs or scams. I think that's significant and not just something that can be waived away with the right liberal-technocratic policy mix.
I think there is a very easy way to square that circle. Require mandatory end of year testing for all students no matter where they go to school. With potential loss of funding (for both public and private schools) for not meeting benchmarks.
So we'll go from the end of the year tests saying 'the slaves liked slavery' to 'George Washington was evil' from admin to admin? I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but the idea there'd be one set of end of the year testing California and Texas would ever agree on is silly.
No, you do state wide testing, not national testing. I agree that there is no way you would get a national curriculum, and it's probably not a good idea.
But you could certainly get robust state ones. At least if people cared about educating kids more than teacher unions OR enriching textbook publishers
But there's no political will to make that a requirement. The entire point of these vouchers is to escape accountability requirements.
That's a pretty broad statement. The reason the vast majority of people support vouchers is because public schools aren't doing a vary good job educating kids.
If Dems actually threw their votes behind the measures, I bet you could get enough republicans to go along for a majority in most (all?) states.
I’m pretty conservative and I want my kids to learn reading, math, science, and history, actually.
As Matt pointed out, when people flee public schools and use vouchers, they don’t choose schools based on their academic profile but on other non-academic factors. While I don’t doubt that you want your kids to learn those core subjects, what we see conservatives doing is saying “you, mom and dad, are now the party responsible for whether your kids learn reading, math, science, and history.” Under this new view, academic outcomes are secondary (at best) to the principle that parents should be the responsible party, not the state. So they cut you a check and cut you loose and you’d better hope you do a good job. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what conservative legal scholars have been promoting for years:
“However, the compelling case for universal parental choice is not about improving academic achievement or spurring competition. It is about empowering parents—all parents—to take control of their children’s education. The battle over universal ESAs, in other words, is “a fight for broad societal change,” centered on the argument that parents should be entrusted with decisions about the education of their children.”
John Coons’ The Case For Parental Choice is helpful in explaining where the conservative movement is going. These are the people organizing voucher programs now, and they are very clear about their purposes. This is, I think, a pretty big change from what conservatives were doing only a few years ago in the education space. If anything, it looks more like what was being proposed in the 60s and 70s in the wake of the civil rights movement (and was when Coons got his start). As Nicole and Stephen Garnett (who edited that book) wrote in City Journal not too long ago, “ESAs represent a definitive and principled move beyond school choice to parental choice. While these terms have been used interchangeably for decades, education reformers historically have focused on giving parents choices among different types of schools (district, charter, and private) rather than between schools and other educational options.” Notably, they also said that “Parental choice should be embraced not because it will improve test scores but because empowering parents is the right thing to do.”
If you look at what used to be the conservative option, Charter schools, you can also see that conservatives are abandoning them. Heritage Foundation now argues that they’re too woke and too strictly overseen by charter authorizers to offer conservatives a choice that matches their values. They promote, as you might expect, universal vouchers instead so parents can homeschool or religiously school their kids with public subsidy.
I think it’s pretty clear that the terrain around public education has changed and that liberals like Matt or the people at The Argument aren’t quite acknowledging that change. Conservatives used to be partners in reforms, supporting market based ideas like school choice, urging schools to be held accountable for scores on standardized tests, and that kids’ outcomes are malleable enough to warrant interventions in their learning (especially for minorities, girls, the disabled).
I’ll close with what John Ward, the head of Arizona’s ESA program, and Tom Horne, AZ’s state superintendent told a Harpers reporter last summer because I think it encapsulates what’s changed:
“John Ward, the head of Arizona’s ESA program, told me that the state hasn’t authorized any mandatory assessments for its ESA students; he doesn’t even necessarily know where they go to school. Horne, his boss, put the matter to me squarely: “The philosophy of the legislature when they passed universal ESAs was that the accountability will come from parents.” There are no enforceable curriculum standards—and this, Ward told me, is part of the appeal. Parents of children in microschools tend to see standardized tests as reflecting “a curriculum that has been chosen and essentially developed by public school systems,” he explained. “Because [these schools] are doing something different than what the public schools are doing, those tests wouldn’t measure what they’re doing in their curriculum. It would be a poor metric applied to what they actually do.” ”
I don’t doubt such people exist. My point is that you are severely over generalizing (and caricaturing) conservatives.
In fact, while I have not done polling on the subject, my informal impression from interacting with my peers is that most people want their kids to go to schools that have nice facility, good test, scores, and a student population they think will be congenial to their children.
Woke instruction is of concern, particularly for religious people, but “I am going to send my kid to a materially worse school (in a school rating sense), because it teaches more traditional values” is a nonstandard choice. Most people I know who send their kids private do so because they believe those schools are “better” and lead to superior college options.
I suppose one way to rectify what we're both saying is to note that I am primarily talking about conservatives in positions of power. State legislators, think tank thinkers, federal or state DOEs - in other words, the conservatives making policy and enacting reforms. Whether that is what the average conservative-identifying population wants with schools is perhaps different but these are the people you elected so I am operating on the assumption that you're getting the change you voted for.
This view seems inconsistent with the fact that the only states with improving academic performance are all deep red (as discussed in today’s post)
Depends on where. Mississippi repeatedly rejected more radical reforms such as school vouchers and is pretty laser focused on school improvement. They're not making the same choices as texas, florida, or arizona where more radical conservatives are driving policy and where those states have implemented very broad voucher programs with little oversight built-in. It's not enough to characterize a state as purely red or blue. We have to look at where they set priorities and in the more conservative leaning red states, they're de-prioritizing public schools (including charters) and putting more focus on getting people to leave the public system.
My heart is with this view of education. I’m a slightly disappointed reformer.
One of the principle failures of the reform era in my view is underestimating the non-educational parts of school. The neighborhood social network is an important part of school for a lot of people. There’s this school I hate visiting as a coach it’s in a shit neighborhood and frankly the non-athletes there have treated our runners terribly. But they draw a huge crowd in a way that our school—ranked in the top couple in the city can’t. The local high school sells shirts at Target in decent numbers and I’m sure it’s not because they deliver highly differentiated reading instruction it’s because it’s a community institution.
Nclb consequences were absorbed mostly on this level as outsiders breaking this up. And frankly it wasn’t replaced uniformly with excellent schools but it just shuffled most of the same shit into more balkanized situations. Charters and non-church privates don’t have the kind of networks, facilities etc. and it’s almost never discussed in education policy.
Yeah one of the big issues I have as an urban resident with kids is that all of the kids in my neighborhood go to different schools (charters, privates, public magnets, the neighborhood public…), so there isn’t really any kind of neighborhood social network for kids. That’s probably one of the strongest appeals of suburbia where everyone goes to the local public school but maybe it’s like that too…
"That’s probably one of the strongest appeals of suburbia where everyone goes to the local public school but maybe it’s like that too"
It's completely fragmented in my Southern state, suburban neighborhood. We have enough kids that it's basically impossible that mine won't have at least one other neighborhood family at the same school regardless of which charter or magnet or whatever we go to. But it's definitely not going to be like my neighborhood growing up, where we all went to the same place, shared classes, all the parents in the PTA, etc.
For suburbia, this is actually an issue where housing and transportation make a difference. I went to local public elementary and middle schools, yet I barely lived near any of my friends or classmates. It wasn't even possible to bike to the neighborhood where the largest share of my friends lived since it wasn't safe, was too far away, and was snowy or icy a lot of the year. I was completely dependent on my parents or my friends' parents driving me to hang out with friends.
Our experience with our kids attending neighborhood schools, vs the option of private or parochial, really supports this idea for me. Their elementary school in particular has been around since the late 1800s and the institutional culture there, and support from the neighborhood, really makes it a special place. I say this without hesitation even though I sometimes had serious concerns about the academics. Maybe it’s a luxury for us because our kids are blessed with advantages that not all their classmates have, and I’m just not that worried about their academic future. But at least for us, the sense of community and spirit they experienced outweighed the sense that they were never taught to their potential. That being said, the
school matriculates fifth grade classes where like 25% of the kids are multiple grade levels behind, so I acknowledge there are totally legitimate difference experiences.
I’m wrestling with this dilemma right now so good to hear your perspective. We have an eh neighborhood school, but great neighborhood culture, and an outstanding magnet school, but kids are from all over, and weighing the pros/cons is really tough.
So I was actually pushing for my son (second child) to go to parochial school for middle school because I was so dissatisfied with the academics when his older sister attended the same school. I got outvoted by him and my wife and I’m really glad that happened because I think the positives of being free range with his friends in the neighborhood have really outweighed any opportunity cost in academics. We have supplemented his school academics with extra math and other out of school stuff and that has been important, not so much from the content but because it’s held him to a high standard that he actually has to work to achieve. The irony of this is that the reason we are given that school isn’t challenging is because of “equity”, but what this drives is extra educational opportunities being limited to those who can afford them, but that’s a separate topic!
Lastly I’ll say I think the key thing is that there is a critical mass of smart kids from families that emphasize education so your kid has a positive peer group. Their friends influence them more than the teachers ever will. Hope this helps.
I don't have kids and my personal experience of primary (ie elementary) school is so unusual that there's no policy arguments that can arise from it, so I really can't contribute at all to this.
Aside: My father was on the county council and switched parties from the locally-dominant Labour Party to the Liberals (now the Liberal Democrats) while I was in primary school. Local parents encouraged their children to bully me at school for political reasons and my parents transferred me to another school. This didn't help for long as the new school soon found out.
This sucks, but it was also 40 years ago and is very firmly water under the bridge...
This is actually something I legitimately have mixed feelings on because most of the positive aspects of charters could likely be done by consolidating suburban and urban school districts and then making all schools lotteries for entry with some thumbs on the scale for local residents.
OTOH, I do think like you mention, neighborhood schools are an important part of communities.
It is always fun to read to the end of one of Matt's columns and then discover who the 5 people it's actually for are.
There is a very cohernet narrative of how teachers' unions oppose educaital reform and lead to worse outcomes. But this is negated by the results -- assuming they are properly measured -- by the fact that charters do no better, especially if they are able to subtly select students. There ought to be some lessons in this.
IIRC "charters don't do better" is an artifact of the fact that, roughly speaking, blue state charters (e.g. NYC, DC) do well and red state charters (e.g. New Orleans) do poorly. The two effects average out in the national data.
Basically, people saying "we need more charters" are blue state ed reform people who are seeing a real positive effect. That effect may not be scalable, and/or it might just not work in states with very different political priorities, but it is real.
Yeah, the question of "do charters do better or worse" seem really location specific. IIRC a writer at the old Vox found that local housing markets seem to play a major role in charter outcomes.
Is that regional effect generally known? It’s certainly news to me.
"charter" schools are not a monolith; it's a catch-all term for state-funded schools that aren't regular public schools. They're governed by a mess of jurisdiction-specific regulations, and their performance varies accordingly.
You can google "do charter schools vary in quality by state" and the AI overview and the search hits will point you to lots of additional info. See also GuyInPlace's reply.
I agree. But the point is that charter shools not just automticaly being (statistically) better means that teacher unions may be a problem for reform but are not the only problem.
It seems to me that the worse your bad performing public schools are, the stronger the argument is for either vouchers or charters. Los Angeles infamously had really terrible inner city schools-- dilapidated facilities, overworked teachers, and plenty of violence. When we lifted limits on charter schools, they showed up all over the inner cities. Of course they did. So many parents just wanted a way out of some really terrible neighborhood schools.
Did that solve all the problems? No. But just on a moral level, if our policymakers insist on policies that make the local schools terrible, you have to give parents a choice. If you don't like school choice policies, well, you need to make inner city schools into good educational options for poor and working class people's kids.
if selection effects are as important as they seem, then the only advantage on giving vouchers is those students get to be with other students whose parents care enough to want a voucher.
I think it's important to understand this through the frame of individual freedom and part of the problem here may be that parental freedom arguments aren't popular on the Left.
The point isn't to be a smarty pants and say "your kid won't actually get a better education at the school you choose". Maybe that's true. But that actually doesn't matter to the political argument.
You have to imagine yourself a poor parent. You can only afford to live in the worst parts of the city. The schools are terrible, because of course they are. And then some liberal educational wonk says "we're going to deny you the choice of moving your kid away from that dilapidation, violence, and terrible teaching to a different school because our pointy-head studies show your kid's education won't improve". Do you see why that's not going to be very persuasive to the parent?
If we want kids to go to their local public schools, it's our bleeping responsibility to make their local public schools good. If we don't do that, poor and working class voters, and voters of color, are going to demand vouchers and charters, because they want the option of choosing a different school for their kid. It doesn't have to do with outcome studies. It has to do with the basic rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
oh totally I agree with you. I guess the uncomfortable truth is the only proven way to make schools better is to get better students.
>the only advantage on giving vouchers is those students get to be with other students whose parents care enough to want a voucher.<
Your use of "only" implies you think this is a trivial advantage. But the ability spring your child free from the prison of a terrible school is a gigantic improvement even if, inevitably, there exist some kids who won't be able benefit from such a system because they have shitty parents.
This was the #1 reason I went to a private school for high school even though on paper our local public school was good.
They didn't just not solve all problems, they did not improve the performance of the median student
The thing is, in any sort of democratic system that isn't going to matter very much. You have people poor and living in low income neighborhoods, the local school is bad, and the liberals, the Democrats, and the teachers' unions say "you can't choose a different school because our expert statistics say that school choice doesn't improve students". And then some of them get very mad and vote for the other guys who will let them choose another school.
When charters became a thing here in LA, South Central LA, where I had lived for 3 years, blossomed with charters. They popped up everywhere. They popped up all over East LA too, and Compton, and Inglewood. I still see charter schools when I go to LAX airport or to games at SoFi Stadium or concerts at the Forum. A thousand flowers bloomed, because when parents see their kids having to go to some craphole school, they want out.
And at that point, it really doesn't matter what expert statistical data you want to show them. It doesn't matter because it isn't your kid. It's theirs. And their parental freedoms are simply more important than whatever coalitional desires the Democrats might have about not offending the labor movement.
"D.C.’s fourth-grade reading achievements are not as impressive as Mississippi’s, but on the flip side our eighth-grade reading scores have improved more than theirs, indicating that we have perhaps done something right."
Perhaps you did. Perhaps you got a lot more high income people to move to town.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSDCA672N
On Florida and Texas, one empirical question I am curious whether anyone has studied is about the effect of the massive inward domestic migration both states have seen recently, on their education results. While I guess the effect could go either way, my intuition is that the families who actually moved out of big blue states during the covid lockdown era were slightly more selected to be ones whose kids just *especially* couldn't handle the extended school closures. Plus there is probably some practical impact from just the rate of growth (buildings and districts not ready for the class sizes etc.) And finally just a basic "reversion to the mean" type effect from having so many transplants from all over. Not arguing either state has seen incredible results but I wonder whether there might be some mitigating factors to the "lag"i
I mean my small sample is small but my New York transplants were quite a bit better than the usual New York transplants to suburban Florida. They had more means and activist parents who were willing to pull up stakes in a pandemic and do something to help their kids. And I was a Covid hawk until the vaccine.
Obviously the plural of anecdote isn’t data but that was my experience in Kissimmee Florida where from new York is often code for behind it wasn’t in this case.
I can see that and yeah that is why I said the effect could go either way; it is possible the transplants were selected *positively* for education outcomes and that makes the Fl and TX performance even worse if so. But then I also wonder whether the most positively selected transplants just put their kids in private schools. Someone ought to look into it!
A grim fact about the pandemic is nobody checked on much. There’s so much we don’t know about what happened and the way we’ve just ran away from it all makes me think we won’t ever learn.
“…massive inward domestic migration…”
Why not look instead to the massive immigrant surge?
I would imagine in migration to Florida is still disproportionately retirees. In fact my experience during COVID (anecdotal for sure) that a pretty decent number of people "fleeing" to Florida were people close to retirement who decided to essentially bring forward their retirement. Add in the big run up in home prices (this cohort is definitely in the sweet spot of buying their houses cheap 30+ years ago and seeing the value of their house skyrocket) and it was a perfect mix for people around 60-62 years old to say adios to Florida (definitely part of the story why some of the businesses that closed in March, 2020 ended up closing permanently).
But upshot is, even if my anecdote is just that anecdote, in migration to FL is definitely weighted towards people over 65 or people very unlikely to have school age children.
Transplants come from
all over the country, are internally diverse and are probably 10-15% of students. When an effect pushes in both directions and only applies to maybe 1 in 7 students, it won’t move the median very much.
The problem with all of Matt's writing on education reform is that it stems from the belief that measuring educational outcomes (and identifying their causes) is straightforward and easy: "the simple step of measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance." The critiques of ed reform in the NCLB era were never that accountability itself was bad, but rather that the methods used to measure performance were both flawed in and of themselves and actively harmful to other areas of education that fell outside the narrowly defined areas of literacy and math. Even in those two areas, "improvements" could be the result of teaching to the test, to the detriment of other things most teachers felt to be important. And believe it or not, it is not motivating to most teachers to tell them that things they care about and want to share with their students aren't "real" education.
Would you be in favor of strict accountability in a system where you could be among the very best teachers one year, and the very worst the next, not having changed your approach to teaching in any substantial way? Those kinds of perverse outcomes happened all the time, because human learning is not amenable to precise measurement of the kind you find in, say, experimental physics, and the statistical methods used to try to isolate teacher performance as a variable were ineffective.
I think his point is more along the lines of “we should TRY to achieve good things”, rather than giving up because measurement is hard
Don't think I've ever scrolled this far down to find my objection in the comments, but I thought maybe I was misunderstanding American school systems... The problem of accurately measuring teacher performance seems to me to be the most important and difficult issue here. I teach humanities in a public middle school, and I find it incredibly difficult to measure my own performance and the efficacy of my teaching practices, even though I'm pretty motivated to do so. And that's just with curriculum, whereas measuring my ability to instill norms and values seems nearly impossible to measure.
All teachers (I'm in higher education) have the experience of having a classroom exercise go great in one class, then terribly the next time. Each student is different, each group of students (i.e., classroom dynamics) is different, and there are always so many things going on in students' lives outside of the classroom -- there are just so many variables that can't be controlled. I think that workshops and professional development can be very helpful, as well as things like peer observation, but these are largely qualitative/anecdotal measures. The good news is that most teachers I know are in fact trying to do a good job, and are therefore thoughtful and diligent when it comes to trying to improve.
I lived in Chicago where my wife was a public school teacher on the south side and now live in Iowa. Public schools in Chicago are completely dysfunctional. There aren’t enough paraprofessionals to handle all the kids with IEPs, there are no consequences for bad behavior, and the teachers aren’t supported by admin.
Districts like CPS have taken autonomy away from both admin and teachers because consultants and researchers think they know how operate schools when they don’t. I’m sure consultants are already pitching to schools the Mississippi miracle program just they did with Michelle Rhee in DC.