I absolutely love the school reform/education issue. I've put 9 kids through public schools all over the country and overseas, and I'm talking everything from city to rural schools.
I am very much looking forward to this series. There isn't much to comment on right now, but here are some of my observations:
1. whatever happened to TFA (Teach for America)... it was the cool thing... but totally off the radar now.
2. Spending is overrated as a solution.
3. What works for high achievers isn't the same as what works for low achievers. Or... more specifically, high achieving upper middle-class kids will succeed regardless. It's struggling kids where pedagogy is more important.
4. Because of #3, school reformers get things wrong. My daughter is very high achieving... very self-motivated. She was able to do two years of HS math in 8th grade online, with almost zero instruction. But her younger sister would absolutely fail if put in that situation. She needs quality in-person rigorous instruction.
5. Teachers in low achieving inner-city schools have so much to deal with. It's hard enough to just teach when everything is on your side... (parents), but when you add all the poverty and crime and general life disruption that kids are faced with in some schools, it's practically impossible.
6. Brazil is hot. Working outside of Rio De Janeiro all week. At least I am a time zone ahead so I can reply early.
The dirty little secret of education reform is that we don't actually know how to permanently change low achieving students into high achieving ones. There's no shortage of Lake Wobegon ideas to make all kids above average but none of them show durable results, scale etc.
The Great Awokening is a kind of surrender. It basically says "we can't get black kids to do as well as whites and Asians, so the problem must be that the standards themselves are systemically racist. We need to teach new a new anti-racist curriculum where black kids can score as well."
Why does everyone think Chicago is "a city experiencing hard times"? My family has been living here for about 150 years and I think it's never been nicer. Crime is on a long-term downward curve, there's a crane on every street corner and old neighborhoods are gentrifying all the time. Seriously, where I live you wouldn't have gotten out of the car twenty years ago. Hasn't anyone in the media every visited Chicago or do they just get all their news from Fox?
I’m hoping we get something on phonics and other boring issues that were missed by the education reform movement - if it focused on less sexy things that worked instead of being an excuse to fight with unions, it might have shown more concrete evidence of effectiveness and it could have been more successful
I teach at an elite university, and I guarantee that our teaching skills are not superior. We understand how to teach students like ourselves. Putting us in a remedial math classroom, or even an average math classroom, would be a disaster.
The "education reform movement" is/was more of a loose constellation of ideas than one particular set of reforms that were agreed upon. As someone who worked alternatively in the center and left-of-center of the movement, here's how I would grade them out:
Standards - it's basically become fashionable to say that Common Core "failed," and I'd agree that the impact was overpromised. However, if you read state standards now - even states that showily "rejected" CCSS, you'll see that the large majority of states now have similar standards in English and math, and that these are more coherent than what came previously. The downside was that instructional materials/curricula were not in place when standards were adopted, which created a mismatch for several years. It's getting better, but not all the way there yet.
Assessments - The Obama administration put a lot of $ into developing better student assessments and funded the two multi-state consortia - PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Sad to say that this did not work out as hoped, partly because the whole multi-state agreement structure began to break down almost at the outset, and party (mostly?) because of the "anti-testing" backlash that was really pronounced in blue states and certainly fed by the teachers' unions (due to testing's link to teacher evaluations). And in general, support for assessment is an elite-driven phenomenon - most people don't love testing! The only upside is that some states adopted the SAT or ACT as their high school assessment, which meant all kids had access to taking a college-readiness assessment.
School accountability - oh man, what a mess. Public reporting of school quality based on assessments: pretty good, there's now much better and more granular data on performance at a school/district level. School-level accountability to lead to "turnaround" of low-performing schools: the metrics do a pretty good job of identifying poor-performing schools, but ultimately school turnaround is really really hard, and the remedies in Race to the Top were either too weak (lots of $, everyone keeps their job, pick a turnaround strategy) to the unpopular-with-the-unions (let go of 50% of the staff and rehire) to the politically very unpopular-if-maybe-for-the-best (school closure).
Teacher accountability - best-of-intentions but a lot of the measures here were not-ready-for-prime-time. That plus massive resistance from teachers unions made this the reform that ultimately broke the movement uniting the center-left to center-right.
Last thing, but important: The timing of Race to the Top at the outset of the Great Recession, coupled with big $$ for states that adopted reforms as a precondition for applying for RTTT, really supercharged the reform movement, but it was always elite-driven and very thinly supported on the ground. I worked on a state's RTTT application, and this state frankly had no business applying for the funding given its policies and history. But the state applied and in the process adopted many of the reforms listed above. After RTTT $ ran out (or states who applied didn't win) there was not a lot of momentum to keep the reforms going.
My understanding is that the reform movement lost steam because we failed to discover highly impactful reforms. Looking forward to future articles in this series to validate that intuition.
Fredrik deBoer has written extensively on the topic of educational interventions, and how none of them are found to have long term effects on student performance and life outcomes. He’s summarized his argument in the Jul 2022 article, “Education Doesn't Work 2.0”, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
> The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society.
This is a good summary of the basic contours of the ed-reform "movement," spoken by someone who's entire career was in the heart of it (first in CA government under Schwarzenegger, then as policy director for major nonprofit funding charter schools, finally as founder of an ed-reform adjacent nonprofit organization to improve teacher training). Two points that may be worth exploring in future columns:
1. It's hard to have a movement if the majority of adults directly affected by it are hostile to your agenda. Ed reformers saw "unions" as the enemy but what they meant by that were the political representatives of unions at the federal and state level; rarely did they stop to think about the membership of said unions -- teachers -- and whether teachers were on board with the reforms they were promoting. (Narrator: They were not.)
2. Looking back, the almost surreal collapse of bipartisan support for something called "the Common Core" was a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment for our national political discussion. From 2010-2012, you had President Obama and Governor Jeb Bush, back when people thought he would be President, working together to create shared academic standards (what kids are supposed to learn). But in 2013, that coalition collapsed when -- seemingly out of nowhere -- Glenn Beck and Michele Malkin decided that the Common Core was the product of George Soros, the Rothchilds, and the Trilateral Commission. It foreshadowed QAnon and today's "Moms for Liberty" efforts in ways that haunt me still. What I still don't know is...how did it happen? Was it purely organic or was there some conference session at a Koch brothers event that led to the unraveling?
America has over 3,000 counties, most of which have their own school systems. If there were a highly effective reform agenda that produced great, quantifiable results, some system would have stumbled on it. The absence of any outstanding model of excellence in such a vast country suggests reform isn’t that helpful.
The reformers were and are fundamentally correct. School should be more than just jumped up daycare and that means meaningfully assessing both students and teachers. As far as I can tell we mostly don't do either of those things. It's a system that, as constituted, functions largely to funnel funding to Dem affiliated cultural institutions and special interests.
Where a high school diploma ought to be a thing of real economic value and signifier of meaningful competence, it has instead been almost entirely marginalized in the name of selling more student loans.
Very much not well versed in American education reforms, but it has been a live issue in the UK, with the transformation of English school management* being probably the most far ranging institutional change that this Conservative government has made over the last decade.
To grossly oversimplify, they hugely advanced a push to make schools independent of Local Educational Authorities [LEA], either as independent Academies or as part of 'Trusts'. The result is distinctly mixed, with some improvements but also associated scandals (the head of an Academy Trust managing six schools can earn much more than the head of a LEA school managing 400 etc). They have also allowed parents to set up 'free schools' completely independent of any authority but central government. Results have generally improved but again difficult to distangle from cohort effects etc. The UK Education Secretary also has vast powers to reshape English education at will, down to the curriculum, so is not directly comparable to anywhere in the US.
*education is devolved, so the Scottish Welsh and Northern Irish governments have their own systems
I disagree with the education nihilists (i.e. nothing works or is any better than any other thing). Kids learn a lot in school and there must be things that work and things that don’t work, it is just that the effect sizes are small and hard to measure. Difficulty in measurement should not convince us that the thing we are studying does not exist. Looking forward to the next installment!
It is interesting from this vantage point how fundamentally "neoliberal" the education reform was, in that it really focused on using competition and markets for the purpose of improving government services. I think part of its death is that this approach no longer seems so attractive.
The problem is that the obvious other model, which is that US education should be high quality the way the US army is high quality, is difficult or impossible because of decentralization of education in the US. That's in addition to the problems that beset any project of improving how the government is run as we see in the "how do we make transit function well" space.
I think there’s a connection between the education reform movement’s defining belief that K-12 management is very important, and the fact that the movement was characterized by vast overpromising. The vast overpromising resulted from a vast overestimation about how much educational outcomes could be improved by fundamental, scaleable, policy-level changes in K-12 management. In other words, the overpromising wasn’t primarily cynical, though it certainly was in part. I think many reformers sincerely believed they could achieve more than they did, which was why they were so evangelical and loud. Once it became clear that although certain education reform ideas were helpful the agenda as a whole was not as game-changing as their advocates said, the question of education management reverted to a more local, technical sphere, where specific reform ideas are used and debated in particular contexts, but grandiose Manichaean claims are largely discredited.
I absolutely love the school reform/education issue. I've put 9 kids through public schools all over the country and overseas, and I'm talking everything from city to rural schools.
I am very much looking forward to this series. There isn't much to comment on right now, but here are some of my observations:
1. whatever happened to TFA (Teach for America)... it was the cool thing... but totally off the radar now.
2. Spending is overrated as a solution.
3. What works for high achievers isn't the same as what works for low achievers. Or... more specifically, high achieving upper middle-class kids will succeed regardless. It's struggling kids where pedagogy is more important.
4. Because of #3, school reformers get things wrong. My daughter is very high achieving... very self-motivated. She was able to do two years of HS math in 8th grade online, with almost zero instruction. But her younger sister would absolutely fail if put in that situation. She needs quality in-person rigorous instruction.
5. Teachers in low achieving inner-city schools have so much to deal with. It's hard enough to just teach when everything is on your side... (parents), but when you add all the poverty and crime and general life disruption that kids are faced with in some schools, it's practically impossible.
6. Brazil is hot. Working outside of Rio De Janeiro all week. At least I am a time zone ahead so I can reply early.
The overpromising take is correct.
The dirty little secret of education reform is that we don't actually know how to permanently change low achieving students into high achieving ones. There's no shortage of Lake Wobegon ideas to make all kids above average but none of them show durable results, scale etc.
The Great Awokening is a kind of surrender. It basically says "we can't get black kids to do as well as whites and Asians, so the problem must be that the standards themselves are systemically racist. We need to teach new a new anti-racist curriculum where black kids can score as well."
Yes, kind of insane but that is where we're at..
Why does everyone think Chicago is "a city experiencing hard times"? My family has been living here for about 150 years and I think it's never been nicer. Crime is on a long-term downward curve, there's a crane on every street corner and old neighborhoods are gentrifying all the time. Seriously, where I live you wouldn't have gotten out of the car twenty years ago. Hasn't anyone in the media every visited Chicago or do they just get all their news from Fox?
I’m hoping we get something on phonics and other boring issues that were missed by the education reform movement - if it focused on less sexy things that worked instead of being an excuse to fight with unions, it might have shown more concrete evidence of effectiveness and it could have been more successful
I look back on how well-received Waiting for Superman was when it was released compared to how it would be received now. It’s very striking!
I teach at an elite university, and I guarantee that our teaching skills are not superior. We understand how to teach students like ourselves. Putting us in a remedial math classroom, or even an average math classroom, would be a disaster.
The "education reform movement" is/was more of a loose constellation of ideas than one particular set of reforms that were agreed upon. As someone who worked alternatively in the center and left-of-center of the movement, here's how I would grade them out:
Standards - it's basically become fashionable to say that Common Core "failed," and I'd agree that the impact was overpromised. However, if you read state standards now - even states that showily "rejected" CCSS, you'll see that the large majority of states now have similar standards in English and math, and that these are more coherent than what came previously. The downside was that instructional materials/curricula were not in place when standards were adopted, which created a mismatch for several years. It's getting better, but not all the way there yet.
Assessments - The Obama administration put a lot of $ into developing better student assessments and funded the two multi-state consortia - PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Sad to say that this did not work out as hoped, partly because the whole multi-state agreement structure began to break down almost at the outset, and party (mostly?) because of the "anti-testing" backlash that was really pronounced in blue states and certainly fed by the teachers' unions (due to testing's link to teacher evaluations). And in general, support for assessment is an elite-driven phenomenon - most people don't love testing! The only upside is that some states adopted the SAT or ACT as their high school assessment, which meant all kids had access to taking a college-readiness assessment.
School accountability - oh man, what a mess. Public reporting of school quality based on assessments: pretty good, there's now much better and more granular data on performance at a school/district level. School-level accountability to lead to "turnaround" of low-performing schools: the metrics do a pretty good job of identifying poor-performing schools, but ultimately school turnaround is really really hard, and the remedies in Race to the Top were either too weak (lots of $, everyone keeps their job, pick a turnaround strategy) to the unpopular-with-the-unions (let go of 50% of the staff and rehire) to the politically very unpopular-if-maybe-for-the-best (school closure).
Teacher accountability - best-of-intentions but a lot of the measures here were not-ready-for-prime-time. That plus massive resistance from teachers unions made this the reform that ultimately broke the movement uniting the center-left to center-right.
Last thing, but important: The timing of Race to the Top at the outset of the Great Recession, coupled with big $$ for states that adopted reforms as a precondition for applying for RTTT, really supercharged the reform movement, but it was always elite-driven and very thinly supported on the ground. I worked on a state's RTTT application, and this state frankly had no business applying for the funding given its policies and history. But the state applied and in the process adopted many of the reforms listed above. After RTTT $ ran out (or states who applied didn't win) there was not a lot of momentum to keep the reforms going.
My understanding is that the reform movement lost steam because we failed to discover highly impactful reforms. Looking forward to future articles in this series to validate that intuition.
Fredrik deBoer has written extensively on the topic of educational interventions, and how none of them are found to have long term effects on student performance and life outcomes. He’s summarized his argument in the Jul 2022 article, “Education Doesn't Work 2.0”, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
> The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society.
This is a good summary of the basic contours of the ed-reform "movement," spoken by someone who's entire career was in the heart of it (first in CA government under Schwarzenegger, then as policy director for major nonprofit funding charter schools, finally as founder of an ed-reform adjacent nonprofit organization to improve teacher training). Two points that may be worth exploring in future columns:
1. It's hard to have a movement if the majority of adults directly affected by it are hostile to your agenda. Ed reformers saw "unions" as the enemy but what they meant by that were the political representatives of unions at the federal and state level; rarely did they stop to think about the membership of said unions -- teachers -- and whether teachers were on board with the reforms they were promoting. (Narrator: They were not.)
2. Looking back, the almost surreal collapse of bipartisan support for something called "the Common Core" was a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment for our national political discussion. From 2010-2012, you had President Obama and Governor Jeb Bush, back when people thought he would be President, working together to create shared academic standards (what kids are supposed to learn). But in 2013, that coalition collapsed when -- seemingly out of nowhere -- Glenn Beck and Michele Malkin decided that the Common Core was the product of George Soros, the Rothchilds, and the Trilateral Commission. It foreshadowed QAnon and today's "Moms for Liberty" efforts in ways that haunt me still. What I still don't know is...how did it happen? Was it purely organic or was there some conference session at a Koch brothers event that led to the unraveling?
America has over 3,000 counties, most of which have their own school systems. If there were a highly effective reform agenda that produced great, quantifiable results, some system would have stumbled on it. The absence of any outstanding model of excellence in such a vast country suggests reform isn’t that helpful.
Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?
The reformers were and are fundamentally correct. School should be more than just jumped up daycare and that means meaningfully assessing both students and teachers. As far as I can tell we mostly don't do either of those things. It's a system that, as constituted, functions largely to funnel funding to Dem affiliated cultural institutions and special interests.
Where a high school diploma ought to be a thing of real economic value and signifier of meaningful competence, it has instead been almost entirely marginalized in the name of selling more student loans.
Very much not well versed in American education reforms, but it has been a live issue in the UK, with the transformation of English school management* being probably the most far ranging institutional change that this Conservative government has made over the last decade.
To grossly oversimplify, they hugely advanced a push to make schools independent of Local Educational Authorities [LEA], either as independent Academies or as part of 'Trusts'. The result is distinctly mixed, with some improvements but also associated scandals (the head of an Academy Trust managing six schools can earn much more than the head of a LEA school managing 400 etc). They have also allowed parents to set up 'free schools' completely independent of any authority but central government. Results have generally improved but again difficult to distangle from cohort effects etc. The UK Education Secretary also has vast powers to reshape English education at will, down to the curriculum, so is not directly comparable to anywhere in the US.
*education is devolved, so the Scottish Welsh and Northern Irish governments have their own systems
I disagree with the education nihilists (i.e. nothing works or is any better than any other thing). Kids learn a lot in school and there must be things that work and things that don’t work, it is just that the effect sizes are small and hard to measure. Difficulty in measurement should not convince us that the thing we are studying does not exist. Looking forward to the next installment!
It is interesting from this vantage point how fundamentally "neoliberal" the education reform was, in that it really focused on using competition and markets for the purpose of improving government services. I think part of its death is that this approach no longer seems so attractive.
The problem is that the obvious other model, which is that US education should be high quality the way the US army is high quality, is difficult or impossible because of decentralization of education in the US. That's in addition to the problems that beset any project of improving how the government is run as we see in the "how do we make transit function well" space.
I think there’s a connection between the education reform movement’s defining belief that K-12 management is very important, and the fact that the movement was characterized by vast overpromising. The vast overpromising resulted from a vast overestimation about how much educational outcomes could be improved by fundamental, scaleable, policy-level changes in K-12 management. In other words, the overpromising wasn’t primarily cynical, though it certainly was in part. I think many reformers sincerely believed they could achieve more than they did, which was why they were so evangelical and loud. Once it became clear that although certain education reform ideas were helpful the agenda as a whole was not as game-changing as their advocates said, the question of education management reverted to a more local, technical sphere, where specific reform ideas are used and debated in particular contexts, but grandiose Manichaean claims are largely discredited.