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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every few years it seems like there is some big, urban teachers union that makes it known their main priority is essentially to decrease the amount of work and accountability for their teachers while also making more money (and that educating the kids are way down on their priority list). A few years ago it was LA and Chicago. Now it is Minneapolis. If your goal is to persuade normies to send their kids to public schools, this behavior is counterproductive. The federal government isn't going force every child in America to go to public school at gunpoint. Public schools then have to actually be attractive to families with options, and making it known that actually educating the students is a major priority goes a long way toward doing that.
"The federal government isn't going force every child in America to go to public school at gunpoint."
It isn't (and especially not in the next three years!), but that's a lowkey moderately popular view in progressive quarters if you follow discussions about education policy. (Not necessarily specifically "at gunpoint," but in some manner engineering the demise of private education at the K-12 level, whether via tax policy, other coercive policy measures, or, ultimately, SCOTUS packing or a constitutional amendment overturning Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925) so as to permit banning private schooling.)
"Their main priority is essentially to decrease the amount of work and accountability for their teachers while also making more money (and that educating the kids are way down on their priority list). A few years ago it was LA and Chicago. Now it is Minneapolis."
Minneapolis is giving their teachers a 2% raise and aiming to reduce class sizes to 22 students per class. The national average is currently about 17-21 students per class. The horror.
Chicago seems to be sui generis, a uniquely horrible outlier; I'm not overly impressed by Philly's union but it's more a case of leadership having drank the EdD kool-aid on pedagogy and discipline than the union attempting to loot the city blind.
What about Minneapolis specifically gives you the impression that it's as bad as Chicago?
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.
NCLB started as a widely celebrated bipartisan achievement. It went on to produce measurable improvements in exactly the way it intended.
But through some foul mix of the public not liking the taste of accountability medicine, and political actors on both sides seeing this as an opportunity to score points, it’s now utterly discredited.
I do wonder what we can learn from this cautionary tale for future reform efforts in policy areas like housing, regulation, and education (again).
It always struck me that one of the biggest blows against the NCLB era was when parents got confused when early math ed started trying to teach math sense instead of how to churn through algorithms. This confused parents, which made them feel stupid, which made them hate whatever program was causing their kids to learn math in this weird way that they couldn't help with.
"measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance was good. "
Was there a good model for "consequences" that didn't also hurt the school?
It makes sense to fire teachers/admins if they are doing a "bad" job(if they are able to measure that), but if schools are struggling, do we have a good way to hold them "accountable" without hurting the students even more?
What has worked for me running teams, and what I feel like I saw work for a bit with schools I knew:
Step 1. Evaluate and label top and bottom 25% performers, based on clear data combined with strong leadership judgment.
Step 2. Effusively praise high performers, gently let the low performers be known, and promote or fire a very small number of outliers.
#1 is really, really hard! It takes smarts, hard work, and patience to establish credibility. #2 takes judgment, finesse, and fortitude against backlash. But if leadership has credibility, then pride really kicks in and actual punishment can be rare. Now... when evaluating and labeling schools, I've seen it work only (and briefly) in urban environments, where people were very informed about many schools around them. I'd worry that it wouldn't work at all in the suburbs where I grew up, where parents and teachers knew their own school but not much else (but that was 50 yrs ago so maybe things have changed). And even in urban settings I never saw it sustained for long. It's just really hard to do well, even in the private sector when incentives are aligned.
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!)
I, frankly, don’t believe this. Your anecdote, sure. That it happens often, no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
This...
"...and none of my 25 juniors knew the significance of Harlem as a place of black culture."
...is so very depressing.
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.”
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.
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. 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.
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.
> 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!
I hope that a lot of people in Virginia, especially in Richmond, are reading this strategically unpaywalled post.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every few years it seems like there is some big, urban teachers union that makes it known their main priority is essentially to decrease the amount of work and accountability for their teachers while also making more money (and that educating the kids are way down on their priority list). A few years ago it was LA and Chicago. Now it is Minneapolis. If your goal is to persuade normies to send their kids to public schools, this behavior is counterproductive. The federal government isn't going force every child in America to go to public school at gunpoint. Public schools then have to actually be attractive to families with options, and making it known that actually educating the students is a major priority goes a long way toward doing that.
"The federal government isn't going force every child in America to go to public school at gunpoint."
It isn't (and especially not in the next three years!), but that's a lowkey moderately popular view in progressive quarters if you follow discussions about education policy. (Not necessarily specifically "at gunpoint," but in some manner engineering the demise of private education at the K-12 level, whether via tax policy, other coercive policy measures, or, ultimately, SCOTUS packing or a constitutional amendment overturning Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925) so as to permit banning private schooling.)
"Their main priority is essentially to decrease the amount of work and accountability for their teachers while also making more money (and that educating the kids are way down on their priority list). A few years ago it was LA and Chicago. Now it is Minneapolis."
Minneapolis is giving their teachers a 2% raise and aiming to reduce class sizes to 22 students per class. The national average is currently about 17-21 students per class. The horror.
Chicago seems to be sui generis, a uniquely horrible outlier; I'm not overly impressed by Philly's union but it's more a case of leadership having drank the EdD kool-aid on pedagogy and discipline than the union attempting to loot the city blind.
What about Minneapolis specifically gives you the impression that it's as bad as Chicago?
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.
NCLB started as a widely celebrated bipartisan achievement. It went on to produce measurable improvements in exactly the way it intended.
But through some foul mix of the public not liking the taste of accountability medicine, and political actors on both sides seeing this as an opportunity to score points, it’s now utterly discredited.
I do wonder what we can learn from this cautionary tale for future reform efforts in policy areas like housing, regulation, and education (again).
It always struck me that one of the biggest blows against the NCLB era was when parents got confused when early math ed started trying to teach math sense instead of how to churn through algorithms. This confused parents, which made them feel stupid, which made them hate whatever program was causing their kids to learn math in this weird way that they couldn't help with.
"measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance was good. "
Was there a good model for "consequences" that didn't also hurt the school?
It makes sense to fire teachers/admins if they are doing a "bad" job(if they are able to measure that), but if schools are struggling, do we have a good way to hold them "accountable" without hurting the students even more?
What has worked for me running teams, and what I feel like I saw work for a bit with schools I knew:
Step 1. Evaluate and label top and bottom 25% performers, based on clear data combined with strong leadership judgment.
Step 2. Effusively praise high performers, gently let the low performers be known, and promote or fire a very small number of outliers.
#1 is really, really hard! It takes smarts, hard work, and patience to establish credibility. #2 takes judgment, finesse, and fortitude against backlash. But if leadership has credibility, then pride really kicks in and actual punishment can be rare. Now... when evaluating and labeling schools, I've seen it work only (and briefly) in urban environments, where people were very informed about many schools around them. I'd worry that it wouldn't work at all in the suburbs where I grew up, where parents and teachers knew their own school but not much else (but that was 50 yrs ago so maybe things have changed). And even in urban settings I never saw it sustained for long. It's just really hard to do well, even in the private sector when incentives are aligned.