Blog – Education Next

“It’s just safer to avoid current events”

Frederick Hess — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:00:40 +0000

As regular readers know, I’ve a passionate interest in how educators model and teach the norms of healthy, civil disagreement. Heck, Pedro Noguera and I wrote a whole book on this and spent the better part of two years discussing this topic with leaders and groups around the nation. That’s why I’m such a fan of the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI), founded by Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl in 2017 to develop tools, resources, and frameworks to support this work. Well, CDI has conducted a series of teacher interviews that offer some insight into how polarization impacts classrooms. I thought readers might be interested in the takeaways, and Jake Fay, CDI’s director of education, was kind enough to share some thoughts. Here’s what he had to say.

—Rick Hess

Over the past few years, schools have been the site of fierce political conflict. While the U.S. has a long history of conflict in and about schools, things seem exceptionally intense and not in a good way. It feels like everybody is butting heads with everybody else. Parents, teachers, school leaders, teacher unions, community members, students, state legislators—this entire post could easily be just a list of conflicts among different stakeholders in schools. Everyone is certain they are on the side of the angels … and that the other side is most definitely not. And the volume is turned up to 11.

Compounding typical disagreement about schools is the rise of polarization across the social and political spheres of our country. Echo chambers reinforce singular perspectives, quash dissent, and make it nearly impossible to hear reason from an opposing viewpoint. Even worse, our attention-based media ecosystem prioritizes the loudest voices and the hottest takes. So, when you do hear the opposing side, you tend to get the version that gets the most clicks.

It all adds up to a sobering reality for schools. Polarization is distracting our schools from their most fundamental purpose: educating children.

A new series of interviews prepared by my organization, the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI), provides some insights into how educators see polarization affecting the work of schools. We conducted interviews with 14 public school teachers from diverse regions and grade levels, and they offer snapshots of classrooms, school board meetings, teacher interactions, and communications with parents.

One teacher, for example, noticed how the calculus behind a routine decision to choose a textbook has changed as America has become more politically divided. The first questions the district considered weren’t about student learning but rather about the politics of the decision. “How can this be viewed through the lens of polarization? How’s the community going to receive this? Who could potentially look at this textbook? What state did it come from?”

It’s not just textbook choices, either. We found that educators are increasingly experiencing a chilling effect on classroom dialogue. On the one hand, they feel a sense of increased scrutiny over their work that leads them to pull back from leading classroom discussions out of fear of reprisal. This can come from multiple sources—state legislators, community members, or parents—and from both the right and the left. On the other hand, when educators do engage in discussions, their attempts feel more and more likely to devolve into name-calling among students. “It just became safer to just avoid current events altogether, even if it was something major,” one educator reported.

Pulling back from discussion stings for educators. Another educator we spoke to expressed feelings of guilt for avoiding classroom dialogue. “I hate to admit this, but I’ve been starting to walk away from discussion in my classroom. I’ve been doing more and more ‘Watch the video, read the book, answer the questions, wait for the bell, leave my classroom.’” For the teachers, avoidance lowers the pressure. But if the alternative is disengagement, the cost is steep.

We need to ask ourselves: Is this the direction we want to go?

The bad news is that polarization is not going away anytime soon. It’s a complex problem that needs to be addressed at many levels. Educators will increasingly feel the pressure as we further sort, align, and consequently distance ourselves by ideology. Still, all is not lost. There are ways educators can address how polarization reaches into their schools and classrooms.

The trick is to tackle the part of the problem educators can control. Things like social media, political campaigns, and news media drive polarization at a scale no single educator can truly address. But in their classrooms, schools, and communities, educators can begin to repair fractured trust and develop understanding across differences. They don’t have to avoid discussion and miss out on opportunities to develop students’ critical-thinking skills. They can help their students develop the mindsets and skills they need to navigate differences of opinion and belief. One real way forward is for educators to teach students how to engage in constructive dialogue.

Later this week, in another letter, I’ll explain why constructive dialogue is a viable solution. I’m not going to claim that building practices of constructive dialogue in classrooms and schools will make all disagreements and conflicts related to polarization disappear, as there are real differences of opinion about schools that we aren’t going to resolve overnight. But we shouldn’t be afraid of those disagreements or avoid them. We can intentionally build capacity for discussion and disagreement and we can change how we navigate ideological tensions. Doing so will help us all get back to making the best educational decisions for all our children.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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The Progressive Case for K–12 Open Enrollment

Aaron Smith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:00:36 +0000

School choice victories made waves this year, with states like Arkansas, Utah, and Iowa adopting expansive choice programs that pay for private-school tuition and other educational expenses.

But what flew under many people’s radar is another form of choice that also achieved impressive gains, with four states adopting open enrollment policies that enshrine the right for students to attend any public school that has an available seat.

Unlike legislation to create private school choice programs, which faced stiff opposition from Democrats, these open enrollment bills garnered noteworthy bipartisan support. In total, nearly 95% of Republican and 82% of Democratic votes across four red states—Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—were cast in favor of public school choice. West Virginia’s House Bill 2596 passed unanimously in both of the state’s legislative chambers. Only in North Dakota did a majority of Democrats in either chamber vote against the measure.

Open Enrollment Vote Count by Political Affiliation

State	Republicans				Democrats
	House		Senate		House		Senate
	Yea	Nay	Yea	Nay	Yea	Nay	Yea	Nay
Idaho (SB 1125)	57	0	28	0	6	5	7	0
Montana (HB 203)	68	0	34	0	31	1	16	0
North Dakota (HB 1376)	77	4	24	19	3	9	1	3
West Virginia (HB 2596)	87	0	29	0	12	0	5	0
Total	289	4	115	19	52	15	29	3

Note: Arkansas also improved its open enrollment law, but its bill was part of an extensive package of reforms including private school choice and teacher pay. All tallies reflect initial votes in each respective legislative chamber.

But most of the recent momentum for open enrollment has been in red states with Republican governors and legislatures. For all kids to have unfettered access to public schools—34 states still allow school districts to discriminate against students based solely on where they live—Democratic policymakers in blue and purple states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina must lead the way. There’s a strong case to be made for Democrats to do exactly that.

First, open enrollment is a key step toward making public schools available to all-comers, a progressive value that most states fail to uphold. Research shows that many schools remain racially segregated decades after Brown v. Board of Education. For instance, a Government Accountability Office report found that in 2020–21, more than one-third of students attended schools where at least 75% of students were a single race or ethnicity. The biggest driver of persistent segregation is school-district boundaries, including demographic trends shaped by racist government policies like redlining and segregated public housing.

As a result, Black and Hispanic students are often concentrated in high-poverty schools, which studies have found to be less effective in raising student achievement than lower-poverty schools on average. “Every moderately or highly segregated district has large racial achievement gaps,” according to Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University.

School district policies often make it difficult for these students to transfer to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Whether it’s public schools refusing to accept transfer students entirely or charging families transfer tuition—New York’s Rye Brook School District charges up to $21,500 per transfer student for its public schools—the system leaves many students without options. While open enrollment alone can neither eliminate segregation nor achievement gaps, it’s an immediate remedy for students who are zoned to underperforming public schools.

Open enrollment can also help strengthen public schools, another key aim for progressives. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, public-school enrollment nationwide has fallen by more than 1.2 million students compared to pre-pandemic levels. Research shows that parents want more agency over their children’s K–12 experiences and are increasingly choosing private schools or homeschooling. Giving families significantly more options within the public education system could help mitigate enrollment declines across many school districts.

Some districts will lose students to open enrollment, but this can be a good thing: A study by California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that school districts that lost students to open enrollment responded by engaging their communities and taking steps to improve their instructional offerings, with some achieving “significant drops in the number of students transferring out.” The study also reported that school districts with the greatest enrollment declines improved at a faster pace than a comparison group of districts with similar demographics, but without any students transferring out through the program. These results aren’t causal, but they should allay fears that public school choice will leave some students behind.

Finally, progressives should embrace open enrollment because it’s good for students. Studies of states like Colorado, Wisconsin, and Minnesota show that students tend to transfer to higher-performing school districts when given the opportunity. Research also suggests that they use open enrollment for diverse reasons, such as to escape bullying or to access specialized instructional approaches. Some studies show that disadvantaged students use open enrollment at lower rates, suggesting that they may face barriers to doing so. Yet other studies find that Black students are more likely than their peers to participate and that good policies such as transparency requirements and free transportation, can improve access for low-income students.

At a time of deep political divisions, open enrollment holds immense promise as a bipartisan policy to improve public education that lawmakers should rally behind. With a Morning Consult opinion poll showing 70% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats supporting open enrollment, all states should move swiftly to adopt public school choice. Although Democrats and teachers’ unions often fear that school choice will undermine public schools, open enrollment can clearly make public schools stronger. Democrats in a few red states have shown that it’s possible to do what’s best for kids. Those in blue and purple states should step up next.

Aaron Smith is the director of education policy at Reason Foundation.

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Absenteeism Mires Recovery from Pandemic Learning Losses

Phyllis W. Jordan — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 09:00:56 +0000

With the latest national test results showing a dispiriting lack of progress in catching students up academically in the wake of the pandemic, one potential explanation stands out: stubbornly high rates of student absenteeism. Vast numbers of students haven’t returned to class regularly since schools reopened.

In California, Florida, and several other states, more than 30 percent of students missed nearly a month of class in the 2021–22 school year, and preliminary numbers for the year that just ended don’t look much better. What’s more, chronic absenteeism has been highest among students with the greatest needs: those living in poverty, learning English, or dealing with disabilities—the same populations that lost the most ground academically during the pandemic.

These trends threaten to undo the federal government’s massive investment in tutoring and other strategies to help students recover academically. But educators and policymakers can take a range of steps to bring students back to school, both by addressing the barriers that keep students from attending class regularly and by making schools more welcoming and engaging for students.

Not surprisingly, teachers play a big role in encouraging students to attend school and stay there. Studies by such scholars as Northwestern University’s Kirabo Jackson, American University’s Seth Gershenson, and the University of Maryland’s Jing Liu, and by the American Institutes for Research’s CALDER Center have found that the way teachers deal with students, particularly their beliefs and biases about their students’ abilities, can have a profound impact on well-being and achievement. Students who feel respected and supported by their teachers demonstrate greater confidence in their ability to learn and are more motivated to tackle demanding classwork, several studies show. These bonds can also extend to mentors and tutors, whom research shows can have a positive impact on attendance.

Closely linked is the role of school climate. Pandemic-era closures and quarantines left many students disconnected, unsure where or whether they fit in when they returned. Simple steps, such as greeting students at the school entrance and as they enter classrooms and making sure every child is engaged with others at recess, can improve school climate, which makes a difference students’ desire to attend school.

Outreach to families when students are absent, whether something as easy as text messages saying they’re missed or postcards letting them know how many days students have been absent, can increase attendance. Families often have no idea how much school their children have missed.

An engaging curriculum and appealing extracurriculars also matter: Research on a STEM career track in Texas and an ethnic studies curriculum in California both showed improvements in student attendance. Attendance improved in Chicago schools where students believed that administrators listened and responded to suggestions on how to improve the school environment, a 2022 study showed. The same is true when parents feel welcome and engaged in their children’s school.

For some students, absenteeism is connected to anxiety and depression, leading to a condition known as “school refusal.” That can look like a teenager unwilling to get out of bed in the morning or a kindergartner complaining of a stomachache. The longer these students remain out of the school, the harder it becomes for them to return. The mental health support that many school districts added during the pandemic can help to address such cases.

Other barriers that have long kept students from attending schools—health, housing, and transportation challenges—have not gone away. But new tools have emerged to respond to them. One is telehealth. Many schools embraced the format during the Covid crisis and are increasingly using it for mental health and substance-abuse treatment post-pandemic. New York City is using its federal Covid aid to offer mental health services via telehealth to every high school student. And Los Angeles County is extending the virtual services to all students.

Studies by the CALDER Center and the Regional Education Laboratory at WestEd show that telehealth influences attendance not only by helping students get back to class more quickly after an appointment but also by identifying mental and physical health problems early, before they lead to more absences.

Improving attendance also involves discarding strategies that don’t work. That means shifting away from a punitive response to truancy and using legal action against students and parents only as a last resort. The last big crackdown on truancy in the mid-1990s was followed by a 69 percent jump in juvenile justice cases but no real change in the rate of unexcused absences. A report from the Council of State Governments Justice Center shows that efforts to impose jail terms and fines on truant students and their parents lead to weaker attendance and higher dropout rates.

Likewise, suspensions for truancy—essentially punishing missed instructional time with more missed instructional time—are counterproductive. What’s more, truancy rules tend to have a disparate impact on students living in poverty, a recent study by Policy Analysis for California Education shows. A student without regular access to health care, for instance, often can’t produce a doctor’s note to justify absences due to illness, leaving him unable to make up work or tests he missed.

Ultimately, positive incentives work best, research has found. The most successful way to get students to attend school regularly is to give them good reasons to want to show up.

Phyllis Jordan is associate director of FutureEd and author of Attendance Playbook: Smart Solutions for Reducing Student Absenteeism Post-Pandemic.

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An Unwavering Focus on Student Achievement

Frederick Hess — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:08:16 +0000

Penny Schwinn served as commissioner of the Tennessee education department from January 2019 to last month, when she stepped down. As she wrapped up her tenure as one of the nation’s more heralded and outspoken state chiefs, I thought it’d be a good time to ask her to reflect on her tenure and lessons learned leading through the pandemic. Penny started as a classroom teacher with Teach For America almost 20 years ago, served as an assistant supe in Sacramento, Calif., and served in senior roles in the Delaware education department and the Texas Education Agency before assuming her role in Tennessee. Here’s what she had to say.

Rick Hess: You’ve recently stepped down after serving four and a half years as Tennessee’s education commissioner. Looking back on your tenure, what would you regard as your biggest success? Was there anything that surprised you?

Penny Schwinn: Creating opportunities for more students to thrive—and having the data to back it up—will always be our biggest successes, and I have been surprised at how quickly change can happen at scale. In just four years in Tennessee, we’ve achieved the highest ELA scores since the standards were reset; we’ve made it financially viable to become a teacher; we’ve implemented the largest state tutoring program in the country; we’ve permanently funded summer programming for incoming kindergarten through 9th grade students; we’ve made 14 Advanced Placement courses free for every student in the state; we’ve made computer science a requirement for all K–12 students; we’ve invested $500M to redesign middle and high school; and we have a new school funding formula to increase transparency and hold ourselves accountable to outcomes for all students, which has increased state funding to public schools by over 22 percent—with accountability and return on investment structures in place. I would be proud of any of these, but for all of them to happen in one term and amid a global crisis is a case study of what happens when different groups of people work together with an unwavering focus on kids.

Hess: What about your biggest frustration?

Penny Schwinn

Schwinn: As a parent and an educator, I remain frustrated that approximately only 1 in 3 students in this country are proficient readers—and I truly believe this can be different. Ensuring our children are able to read on grade level must be a nonnegotiable goal we set for every single student in this country. The ability to change course is rooted in the science of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This requires strong and aligned training in our colleges of education, high-quality instructional materials, exceptional professional development and ongoing supports for teachers, and additional hours of targeted acceleration opportunities for students. I believe every educator wants to teach reading at the highest possible level, but not every educator has been given the tools, resources, and incentives to do so. I am proud of the work we’ve done in Tennessee through Reading 360 to raise our 3rd grade ELA proficiency by 8 points in two years, to have a 97 percent satisfaction rate from our teachers on professional development, and to support our educator-preparation providers in developing innovative courses aligned to the science of reading.

Hess: This is a time of pretty intense culture clashes. You referenced these when you announced you were stepping down. Can you say a bit more about your thinking?

Schwinn: We are at a time in education—and in our country—where there are a significant number of divisive issues. I have growing concerns about the lack of civility and common decency between neighbors and the inability of groups to have productive, difficult conversations. We do not have to agree, and, in fact, the foundations of our country demand that we do not. However, political and social grandstanding and a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of how our government works means that many education leaders are spending too much time explaining the basics and not on making the important decisions for kids. One of the many exceptional things about our country is that we were founded on the belief that healthy debate is instrumental in forming a more perfect union. In education, those debates are rooted in that which is the most precious to us—children. That is always going to be personal and emotional; however, we must find a way to engage in hard conversations without taking them personally. Let’s make sure our children are educated, safe, healthy, and immersed in school communities that reflect the values of our country and maintain an unwavering focus on opportunities and achievement for every student.

Hess: What did you see as your role in this kind of environment?

Schwinn: As educators, our ultimate responsibility is to ensure that we remain unwaveringly focused on making decisions in the best interest of students. One of the most challenging and important approaches I’ve used in this role is to ensure that I maintained a true North Star. My job was to make strategic decisions to improve and accelerate student achievement and to do so in one of the largest set of crises our country and my state has faced: a global pandemic, politics invading the classroom, floods, tornadoes, school shootings, bus accidents, fatigue. While the pandemic certainly slowed progress, it did not change our momentum. Tennessee’s rebound in the data and what I expect to see on NAEP in 2024 reflect our commitment to improving education.

Hess: You were a Republican state chief at a time of unprecedented action on school choice. What do you think explains this surge in enthusiasm? And what potential concerns do you have?

Schwinn: We have to come to a point where we don’t just concede—but actually believe—that families have a right to be a meaningful part of their child’s education. Coming out of the pandemic and school closures, we expected to see an increase in the demand for school choice based on what we had consistently heard from families. School was no longer the thing that happened outside of the home—it was in our homes, and that made it more personal. Some of the school choice surge reflects that paradigm shift. With that, implementation is always a significant stumbling block. For school choice to work, there needs to be understandable, accurate, and accessible information for parents. It requires exceptional customer service for families and tooling that streamlines the process. Fiscal accountability needs to be clear and enforced. Well-defined benchmarks for quality and outcomes must be publicly stated and honestly reported. Whether you are someone who advocates for choice for choice’s sake or for choice specifically to ensure better opportunities for students and families, the surest way to see the work fail is to believe that passing the law is the finish line.

Hess: What advice do you have for Lizette Reynolds, your successor, or for other state chiefs?

Schwinn: Being a state chief requires student-centered content expertise; a tough skin; a strategic mind; a warm heart; and an unapologetic, unwavering focus on doing what’s best for students. Tennessee has been blessed with consistent gubernatorial leadership that values education, a General Assembly that continues to prioritize education, district and school staff that work tirelessly every day on behalf of their students, incredible parent organizations, and dedicated community organizations and advocates. The legacy of consistency, hard work, and grit that embodies the Volunteer spirit is so special to Tennessee, and I am excited for Commissioner Reynolds to carry that legacy forward. That same approach can be shared in any state and the power of a strong and unwavering commitment to service—as I was so proud to have under Gov. Bill Lee’s leadership—is the best formula for success. And as always, it must be about kids—all kids, and at all times.

Hess: You’ve received attention for your efforts regarding teacher recruitment and retention. Could you say a bit about these efforts?

Schwinn: It should be a universal expectation in this country that every child is taught by a highly qualified teacher and that we remove as many barriers as possible to becoming an educator. If we believe that a strong education is one of the best ways to maintain a thriving economy, then we must ensure that we have the educator workforce to produce the outcomes we need and expect. During my time as state chief, Tennessee launched and significantly expanded a program called Grow Your Own, GYO, and the apprenticeship portion of that program allows the state to use U.S. Department of Labor dollars to pay for teachers to earn their bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as their professional credentials. This work expanded opportunities to meet critical shortages in the teaching profession, including paying for existing teachers to earn endorsements in high-need areas and to rethink educator preparation. Tennessee also passed legislation to increase the minimum teacher salary to $50,000 per year by 2026. To help retain the educators entering these pipelines, we must compensate and treat our teachers like the professionals they are and we should expect them to be.

Hess: How does the Grow Your Own program seek to expand opportunities for prospective teachers?

Schwinn: As the nation’s first state to have a federally recognized teaching apprenticeship, Tennessee now has nine educator-preparation providers offering apprentice seats through 19 educator pathways for degree or certification, adding 600 new teachers annually. In May 2022, the Tennessee department of education announced a $20M investment in the University of Tennessee system to create the Tennessee Grow Your Own Center to operate as the one-stop shop for programmatic support and technical assistance. The Tennessee department also supported grants with existing educator-preparation programs to continue offering no-cost endorsements to existing teachers to fill critical vacancies in the state like secondary math, ESL, and special education. Additionally, the state created the Diverse Leaders Network, which funds diverse candidates to earn their administrative credentials and master’s degrees. Finally, the Aspiring Assistant Principals Network launched a fourth cohort to provide existing educators the opportunity to earn their administrative credentials and master’s degrees at no cost, providing articulated pathways for teachers in their careers.

Hess: What’s next for you?

Schwinn: Anything I do moving forward will be in support of students and creating more opportunities for them to thrive. I started a new role in June with a more formal announcement later this summer, but I am looking forward to a few additional projects to support up-and-coming and current education leaders. I will also be advising education companies on how to strengthen their existing products, services, and strategies to improve the outcomes they intend to deliver for students and schools. Ultimately, the country continues to talk about “innovation” and “redesign,” but we are moving too slowly, and the proposed solutions are still rooted in traditional structures. I am excited to think more deeply about creating an education system that remains competitive, is aligned with current and future economic needs and conditions, and truly supports all students.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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A More Perfect Way to Teach U.S. History

Michael Poor — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 09:00:52 +0000

“We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution should be familiar to any student who has studied America’s origins in a history or civics classroom. It is short, easy to memorize, and was even good fodder for the musical stylings of School House Rock! in the 1970s.

Beyond the rah-rah patriotism and powdered-wig imagery evoked by those 52 words, the preamble is, in essence, the mission statement of the United States. Its six aspirations articulate the philosophical underpinnings for the structural legal document that follows. If the Constitution lays out the “what” of the United States government, the preamble explains the “why.”

The preamble was somewhat of an afterthought during the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Only when the Convention’s Committee of Detail began preparing a draft of the Constitution did Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph propose prefatory text, though “[n]ot for the purpose of designating the ends of government and human polities.”

In Randolph’s view, a theory of government had already been appropriately expressed in the establishment of states. A central government could ensure nothing if it did not yet exist (and forming such a government was the purpose of the Convention in the first place). Instead, he argued that any natural rights identified at the federal level should be “interwoven with what we call the rights of states. . . . [T]he object of our preamble ought to be briefly to declare, that the present foederal [sic] government is insufficient to the general happiness.”

Indeed, Randolph’s version of the preamble dryly roll-called all 13 extant states, banding together to establish the Constitution for the governance of themselves and those who would come after—a pure statement of fact.

Portrait of Gouverneur Morris, by Ezra Ames

However, the Convention’s Committee of Style, led by Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris, must have held a different view on the purpose of the preamble. After leaving the Committee of Detail, the preamble was taken up by the Committee of Style, and within a month, Morris had wordsmithed it to its present form. No notes survive of the committee’s deliberations about the revisions, but neither were there any objections raised when the preamble was presented to the whole Convention. (Those would come later during ratification by the states.)

Why does this matter? The preamble’s shift in focus from a declaration by a confederation of 13 states to a list of goals by one United States of America underscores not only the tension that has always existed around governance within a federal system but, more important, the aspirational nature of a nation that the framers themselves knew was not being delivered to the world fully formed and mature.

The first stated goal of the preamble, that the people of the United States should constantly strive to achieve “a more perfect union,” should be at the forefront of every U.S. history curriculum in every state in the land. The brilliance at the center of that phrasing is an acknowledgment that that work was incomplete at the time the Constitution was written and remains so to this day. Inherent in the goal of a more perfect union is an assurance that, yes, we can be better, along with an admission that, no, our experiment will never be perfect.

A national reckoning with both the achievements and shortcomings of the American promise, past and present, is essential for us citizens to rise above the divisive culture wars that have so recently defined our character and have crept into the classrooms of our children. The resultant tug-of-war that is being waged for hearts and minds can only be undertaken as a zero-sum game.

Meanwhile, American children are caught in the middle, used as political footballs in the ensuing rhetorical clashes. They have no vote, yet they must absorb the legislative fallout of their elders’ pet causes. They may be well protected from uncomfortable topics in their school curricula but not from the bumbling attempts of adults to help them recover from pandemic learning losses.

With hyper-partisanship as the most proximate model for students of what it means to be a citizen, it is small wonder that earlier this year, the Nation’s Report Card revealed that 8th grade scores on the NAEP civics test declined for the first time, matching those achieved on the inaugural test of 1998. The news was even worse for the NAEP U.S. history assessment: a five-point drop since 2018, when it was last administered.

The national conversation about our history needs to change, but we cannot expect this transformation to be initiated by those with such entrenched cultural positions. Instead, we return to the preamble. And the classroom.

Imagine a U.S. history class where the preamble is prominently displayed for all to see—not as a mark of patriotism but as a didactic referent for students to read and internalize the aspirational promises of the United States as identified by the founding generation. Imagine a teacher asking her students, “What does ‘a more perfect union’ look like? What did it look like in 1787? What wasn’t perfect about the United States then? What about today?”

Imagine a conversation in which students are made to feel neither proud nor guilty about the past but instead have an honest confrontation with how their country has been a force for good and how it has perpetuated wretched evils. And imagine students identifying the same characteristics in modern America and being asked, “What can you do to form a more perfect union today?”

The notes of the Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Style are lost to history, but one can infer how the committee arrived at a preamble that has become a national creed. Gouverneur Morris was the most outspoken opponent of slavery among the delegation. According to notes by James Madison, Morris “never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”

But Morris was also a pragmatist. He knew that almost half of the delegates (including Edmund Randolph) owned or had owned slaves. He did not have any hope of forcing the Convention to resolve the matter statutorily, but he recognized a back door when he saw one. The word “slavery” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, but the preamble reveals Gouverneur Morris’s faith that one day it would be eradicated.

We do a disservice to American students when we catastrophize or mythologize our past instead of guiding them through the complicated, contradictory, and incomplete story of the world’s oldest democracy. A better approach to teaching U.S. history recognizes the country’s challenges, past and present, and exhorts students to think deeply about the role they can play in achieving a more perfect union.

Michael Poor is the interim managing editor of Education Next.

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The Disruptive Evolution of School Improvement

Frederick Hess — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 09:00:19 +0000

A few months back, I reflected on the 40th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report. But there’s one important point that I didn’t really address: that the report was characterized by confidence in the DNA of Horace Mann’s familiar schoolhouse, whereas the momentum today is moving in a decidedly different direction.

This struck me a few weeks back, during a Reagan Institute panel commemorating the report. Arne Duncan, Bill Kristol, Geoff Canada, and I discussed what happened to the old bipartisan education reform coalition and whether a new version is possible.

In musing on the session, afterward, I realized we’d failed to touch on a fundamental, night-and-day difference between 1983 and 2023.

While it’s not widely remembered today, the apocalyptic language in “A Nation at Risk” was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse. What do I mean? Consider the report’s major recommendations:

Increase the number of Carnegie units that students complete in high school in core subjects.
Resist grade inflation, encourage colleges to raise admissions standards, and test students at key transition points.
Extend the school day and school year.
Raise teacher pay, make pay performance-based and market-sensitive, and require teachers to demonstrate content mastery.

All of these recommendations sought to make the traditional school systems more rigorous, time-consuming, and demanding. None of it envisioned any fundamental alterations to the schoolhouse as understood by Horace Mann or the architects of David Tyack’s One Best System. One consequence was that, especially in a less polarized era, leading figures on the left and right basically agreed on the merits of more courses, more testing, more minutes in school, and more pay for teachers. (Whether this agreement led to the kind of change they hoped for, or even any change at all, is another story.)

Today? For better or worse, the conversation about school improvement has fundamentally changed. Instead of more rigor, time, or testing, the most popular proposals tend to be more controversial and more disruptive to familiar routines.

The most popular initiatives today call for fundamentally changing the nature of the traditional schoolhouse:

Charter schooling, education savings accounts, and school vouchers
Calls to shift from traditional courses to mastery-based learning
The embrace of digital devices, remote learning, and AI
The push to overhaul career and technical education

In short, today’s reform agenda features proposals that would fundamentally change that old Horace Mann schoolhouse. It eschews the traditional building blocks of grades, Carnegie units, and time spent in favor of greater personalization, customization, and inventiveness. That makes for a very different and potentially much more contentious agenda.

The upshot is that, 40 years on, we’ve exited one era of school improvement defined by the attempt to bolster the “one best system” and entered one notable for attempts to dismantle it.

For good or ill, when we talk about the future of schooling, we need to do so with an understanding that today’s leading school improvement proposals are fundamentally different from those of the nation’s recent education past.

This has the potential to be a very healthy development, if pursued sensibly. That, of course, is no sure thing. As I write in The Great School Rethink, it’s time we reimagined the work of teaching and learning. It’s our task, though, to ensure that we do this in a fashion that honors the importance of rigor, knowledge, and mastery—and doesn’t dismiss them.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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More Evidence that the California Math Framework Cites Flawed Research

Tom Loveless — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:44:50 +0000

In Education Next I criticized the proposed California Math Framework for basing recommendations on bad evidence. The State of California now seems to agree that using a particular assessment going by the acronym of MARS (a collection of math tasks) to evaluate student achievement is unwarranted. In May, the California State Board of Education considered and rejected the test when issuing a list of valid and reliable assessments that authorizers may use to when deciding on charter school renewal petitions.

The Education Next article singled out a study of a summer Youcubed math camp that claimed to increase student achievement by 2.8 years after 18 days of instruction. Jack Dieckmann of YouCubed offered a rebuttal to my criticism and I responded, with both statements published in Education Next. Two paragraphs from my response summarize the argument.

I focused on outcomes measured by how students performed on four tasks created by the Mathematical Assessment Research Service (MARS). Based on MARS data, Youcubed claims that students gained 2.8 years of math learning by attending its first 18-day summer camp in 2015. Dieckmann defends MARS as being “well-respected” and having a “rich legacy,” but offers no psychometric data to support assessing students with the same four MARS tasks pre- and post-camp and converting gains into years of learning. Test-retest using the same instrument within such a short period of time is rarely good practice. And lacking a comparison or control group prevents the authors from making credible causal inferences from the scores.

Is there evidence that MARS tasks should not be used to measure the camps’ learning gains? Yes, quite a bit. The MARS website includes the following warning: “Note: please bear in mind that these materials are still in draft and unpolished form.” Later that point is reiterated, “Note: please bear in mind that these prototype materials need some further trialing before inclusion in a high-stakes test.” I searched the list of assessments covered in the latest edition of the Buros Center’s Mental Measurements Yearbook, regarded as the encyclopedia of cognitive tests, and could find no entry for MARS. Finally, Evidence for ESSA and What Works Clearinghouse are the two main repositories for high quality program evaluations and studies of education interventions. I searched both sites and found no studies using MARS.

In the latest version of the framework, released near the end of June, references to the summer camps have been removed. But references to another Youcubed study using MARS data remain. The framework cites a 2021 study to endorse heterogeneous grouping in middle school, reproducing two figures (see Figs. 9.1 and 9.2) to document the claim that students in detracked, heterogeneously grouped middle schools out-performed students grouped by ability, asserting a gain “equivalent to 2.03 years of middle school growth.” (Others have identified numerous flaws in this study beyond its use of MARS to assess achievement growth.)

On May 18, 2023, the California State Board of Education considered and rejected the assessment (also known as MAC/MARS from its use by the Silicon Valley Math Initiative) for assessing achievement in charter schools. Interestingly, the assessment review was conducted by WestEd, the same firm that edited the framework over the past year.

MAC/MARS failed the first step in the review, consideration of technical quality. The review considered four criteria, including validity and reliability (see page 17 of May Item 2 documentation). MARS did not meet state standards for technical quality.

Today, July 12, 2023, the board will vote on the math framework. The board is now in the strange position of voting on a framework that uses as supporting evidence results from an assessment that the board itself rejected in May.

Tom Loveless, a former 6th-grade teacher and Harvard public policy professor, is an expert on student achievement, education policy, and reform in K–12 schools. He also was a member of the National Math Advisory Panel and U.S. representative to the General Assembly, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2004–2012.

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Why Do Schools Cling to ‘Stupid’ Ideas?

Frederick Hess — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 09:01:16 +0000

Rick Ginsberg and Yong Zhao are out with an intriguing new book, Duck and Cover: Confronting and Correcting Dubious Practices in Education. The title refers to the mantra of 1950s-era school drills, back when a nation living under the threat of nuclear holocaust taught its children to “duck and cover” in the event of a Soviet attack.

As the authors explain in their introduction, “The practice was simple. If there was imminent fear of a bomb hitting a school or landing in its vicinity, students were trained to dive under their desks and cover their heads with their hands.” The implication, of course, was that kneeling under their desk would protect students from a nuclear blast. Spoiler: It wouldn’t. But the Federal Civil Defense Program produced the 1951 film “Duck and Cover,” anyway, in which Bert the cartoon turtle cheerfully taught a generation to “duck and cover.”

As Ginsberg and Zhao drolly observe, “This has to be one of the most stupid educational policies ever enacted.” Why did so many policymakers and educators go along with a policy that terrified young students while doing nothing to protect them? Ginsberg and Zhao argue that policymakers and educators felt obliged to do something—and, if something stupid was the only option, well, they’d do that. They offer this as a metaphor for many foolish, ineffectual policies in American schooling.

I’m a fan of both authors. Ginsberg is dean of education at the University of Kansas, former board chair of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, a savvy observer of school reform, and an old friend. Zhao is a distinguished professor at Kansas and a refugee from communist China, whose contempt for bureaucracy and quasi-authoritarian meddling has made him one of the nation’s more heterodox education thinkers.

In the course of the book’s brisk 156 pages, Ginsberg and Zhao skewer a lot of sacred cows. The 19 chapters cover the educational waterfront: social-emotional learning (SEL), educational technology, college and career readiness, class size, dress codes, professional development, teacher evaluation, gifted education, testing, school board governance, and much more.

The breadth of topics hints at both the strengths and the weaknesses of this volume. Its great strength is its evenhanded willingness to say critical things about a lot of popular ideas. Readers of every ilk can rest assured that they’ll find some things to delight them and others that infuriate them. In our polarized world, this marks a welcome departure from the familiar groupthink. The authors deserve kudos for that alone.

Their approach also allows them to cover a lot of ground, making a number of provocative observations and offering a number of useful cautions. But the trade-off is that they don’t spend a lot of time or energy making the case that a given idea is stupid. Most of the chapters didn’t offer parallels to “duck and cover” or so much as thumbnail sketches of the good, bad, and ugly of how these ideas work in practice.

Thus, when it comes to SEL, Ginsberg and Zhao note the pressure school leaders face from “experts and researchers, do-gooders, and sometimes snake-oil salespersons shopping their wares.” They then sketch the rationale for SEL and a number of concerns about it, before offering some sensible advice about the need to move deliberately and clarify goals. This is all fine. But none of it really makes the case that SEL is a “dubious practice” (and I say this as someone who’s been plenty skeptical of SEL). As a reader, given the promise of the book’s subtitle, central metaphor, and setup, this felt like less than I bargained for. This is pretty consistent throughout.

And I would’ve liked to see them push harder when explaining how dubious ideas catch on and why we can be so reluctant to confront them. After all, I’ve explored the frenzied pace of school reform and why some reforms might appeal more than others. Given that, I hoped for more than the broad reminder that “schools actually implement a lot of different things” and the observation that “duck-and-cover policies persist because they aren’t questioned.” At the outset, the book promises a bold exploration of folly; on this count, it delivers something less than that.

Ultimately, though, this is a timely and valuable contribution. Ginsberg and Zhao have penned a fair-minded survey of education policy, with a healthy emphasis on the need to think more deliberately about how things actually work. And that’s a worthwhile exercise and a much-needed reminder, one that educators, policymakers, and advocates should take to heart.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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High Court Decision in College Admissions Case Has K-12 Implications

Joshua Dunn — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 20:43:31 +0000

A man holds a sign saying “Fix K–12 do not scapegoat Asians” at a rally against affirmative action and racial discrimination against Asian American students in college admissions. The rally was held one day before arguments were heard at the Supreme Court about a related case.

In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts famously declared in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court moves much closer to Roberts’s position on racial discrimination. The court’s ruling, announced June 29, 2023, will have significant effects on college admissions policies and on K–12 education.

SFFA, an organization created by Edward Blum, had contended that Harvard’s use of race in college admissions violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination by any entity receiving federal money. UNC, SFFA argued, violated not only Title VI but also, as a state institution, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed with both claims. The court combined both cases under SFFA v. Harvard but focused its analysis solely on the 14th Amendment. Previously it had held that a violation of the Equal Protection Clause would also constitute a violation of Title VI for institutions receiving federal funds; hence, the court’s equal protection analysis was sufficient to decide both cases.

Echoing his opinion in Parents Involved, Roberts concluded in his majority opinion that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, he offered three primary reasons for ruling against Harvard and UNC: their programs 1) “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race,” 2) “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping,” and 3) “lack meaningful end points.”

With the first, since racial classifications are inherently suspect and must be given strict scrutiny, the compelling interest claimed by the institutions and the means of accomplishing them must be measurable. Harvard’s and UNC’s goals, Roberts said, were “commendable” but inherently “elusive” and “imprecise.”

On the second, Roberts said that the court had previously ruled that race could never be used as a negative factor in evaluating a student for admission. Both Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs did so, according to the court, effectively penalizing students who were not Black or Hispanic. Perhaps most important, though, it’s difficult to see how any use of race in admissions could survive, as admissions is, as Roberts pointed out, a “zero-sum” game. If it’s used as a plus factor that leads to one student being admitted, someone else who is not admitted because they do not have that plus factor inevitably suffers. Even though the court did not explicitly declare that it was overturning 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, which said that diversity was, temporarily, a compelling interest justifying the use of race in admissions, that opinion seems to be overturned in fact.

The court’s third reason, though, might have been the most important. Roberts pointed out that the court had clearly indicated in Grutter that affirmative action must have an end point. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in fact, said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Even if for some reason that 25-year mark could not have been met, it would have been smart for Harvard and UNC to at least offer a tentative date. Their refusal to do so at any point in the litigation looks like a catastrophic miscalculation. At oral argument a couple of the conservative justices appeared sympathetic to the idea that universities should have some flexibility to bring the use of racial preferences to a close on their own if they could point to reasonable time frame for doing so. But the message the majority took from Harvard and UNC’s obstinance was that universities could not be trusted to work toward eliminating racial preferences on their own. “There is no reason to believe,” Roberts said, “that respondents will—even acting in good faith—comply with the Equal Protection Clause any time soon.”

The majority also appeared concerned that colleges and universities deeply committed to racial preferences would try to evade their ruling by adopting facially neutral admissions policies that nevertheless had a discriminatory effect. Much of the court’s reasoning seemed designed to warn universities that engaging in various evasions would only put them in more legal jeopardy. Roberts said, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.” He said further that the ruling does not prohibit “universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life” but then gave specific examples of how that must be done. For instance, “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.”

For universities, this likely means that admissions programs tightly constructed to increase socioeconomic diversity would survive legal scrutiny. However, if socioeconomic plans ended up leading to consistent percentages across racial groups across multiple admissions cycles, the court would be inclined to rule against them. In short, anything that looks like it is giving a systematic advantage based on race would be suspect. As well, if a school were to announce publicly that it was switching to a socioeconomic plan for the purpose of maintaining racial diversity, that would also be unconstitutional under today’s decision. Facially neutral programs that nevertheless have a discriminatory effect or were intended to have a discriminatory effect have long been considered unlawful.

The three members of the court’s current liberal bloc, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Jackson offered a separate dissent since she had recused herself from the Harvard case in light of her recent service on Harvard’s board of overseers. Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, accused the majority of “roll[in]g back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” In a biting dissent, Jackson said the majority’s opinion suffered from a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” that disregarded the ways race still matters in American life.

For K–12 education, the court’s rulings should settle once and for all whether school districts can use race in policies assigning students to schools. In Parents Involved, the majority had ruled that race could not be used. However, in a famously inscrutable controlling concurring opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy had said that while the policies struck down by the court were unconstitutional, he was unwilling to foreclose the possibility of a school district fashioning a constitutionally acceptable policy. This led some, including the Obama administration’s Department of Education, to treat the four dissenters in the case along with Kennedy’s concurrence as a majority opinion. Today’s opinion clearly eliminates that as a possibility.

The opinion will also affect ongoing litigation around magnet schools such as Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the school district changed the admissions plan for the school. The previous admissions policy required students to take a rigorous entrance exam to gain admission to the school, which has been consistently ranked as one of the best high schools in the country. However, the board desired to racially balance the school to make it more closely reflect the demographics of the school district. To do so, it adopted a facially neutral “holistic” admissions policy. In the last year under the old system based on grades and a standardized test, Asian-American students comprised 73 percent of the admitted students. Under the first year under the new system, that percentage dropped to 54 percent.

The new policy was challenged in federal court by the Coalition for TJ, a group of district parents. The district court ruled in their favor, but that decision was overturned by a Fourth Circuit panel this May.

The author of the appellate decision, Judge Robert King, had ruled that the new policy did not harm Asian students and “visits no racially disparate impact on Asian American students. Indeed, those students have had greater success in securing admission to TJ under the policy than students from any other racial or ethnic group.” The assertion that a drop of 19 percentage points doesn’t have a disparate impact on you because there are still more of you than others is not something that will survive in light of today’s ruling.

Moving forward, this certainly does not mean the end of litigation either at the college or K–12 level. However, if a university wants to adopt a “holistic” admissions policy, it would be well-advised to make sure that no one in its administration or admissions department ever said anything that could remotely sound like their intent is to achieve goals related to racial representation. And should a school district want to adopt an admissions policy similar to Fairfax’s, it would be well-advised to make sure that members of its board or administration had never made comments about the need to engage in anything resembling racial balancing.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.

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When “Stakeholders” and Status Quo Outweigh Student Outcomes

Frederick Hess — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 09:00:02 +0000

Spain’s former Secretary of State for Education Montse Gomendio is out with a book drawing on her experience, titled Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence. Montse, the former head of the OECD’s Centre for Skills and director of Spain’s Natural History Museum and currently a visiting professor at University College London, offers sharp-elbowed takes on school reform in Spain and around the globe. For those who worry that school improvement in the U.S. is too political, it may be reassuring to see that this is hardly exceptional. She discusses the challenges of education politics, the naiveté of international reformers, and hard lessons learned. Given the timeliness of the subject, it seemed well worth a conversation. Here’s what Montse had to say.

Montse Gomendio

Rick: First off, can you share something of your background?

Montse: In 2012, I became Secretary of State for Education in the Spanish government after a career in academia. Afterward, I joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, first as deputy director of education and then as head of the Skills Centre. It was a fascinating experience because as a policymaker, I was regarded as the “adversary,” while as an OECD representative, I was regarded as an honest broker—which gave me the chance to have many open and frank conversations with ministers and stakeholders. On the whole, I spent almost 10 years observing the huge differences between countries both in the quality of their education systems and in the nature and magnitude of the barriers that education reforms face.

Rick: Earlier this year, you came out with your book Dire Straits–Education Reforms. Could you say a bit about what motivated you to write it?

Montse: When I became secretary of education in Spain, politics was not an environment I was familiar with, so it was a steep learning curve for me to apply my knowledge of analyzing and interpreting data to designing evidence-based policies with real-world implications. After having many meetings with different stakeholders, I realized that my “evidence-based approach” was not popular with other actors. My experience in education leadership opened my eyes to the ways in which we use or discard data when making policy. I felt it necessary to reflect on my experience both working in government and advising other governments. This new e-book is the result of that reflection.

Rick: There’s a lot of talk about the impact of political polarization and how it’s made educational leadership more challenging in the U.S. How much appetite for consensus did you find in Spain?

Montse: In my experience, there was no room for consensus or even negotiations about the most basic aspects of education policy reform. During my first meeting with the representative of the main opposition party, he told me that his party would not accept any changes to the existing education law. I asked how he could know, since I myself did not know at the time what changes we would propose and since it was just a few days after I started. His reply was that the existing law had been approved by a government from his political party, so they would defend the status quo no matter what. As I met with other stakeholders, I gradually began to understand the true nature and magnitude of the political conflicts. My conversations with most stakeholders—even in parliament—were not about what leads to improvements in student outcomes. This issue was rarely discussed. Instead, decisions about reforms depended largely on whether different stakeholders felt threatened. I may be naïve, but I was surprised by the huge disconnect between the demands that most stakeholders made in exchange for support and the narrative that they expressed in public.

Rick: In an Education Next essay earlier this year, you argued, “After almost two decades of PISA testing, student outcomes have not improved overall in OECD nations or most other participating countries.” How does this provocative argument relate to what you say in the book?

Montse: The book covers a much broader range of factors which have a big influence on education reforms, such as ideology and governance arrangements, and also looks at the evidence in much more detail. In the piece, I decided to focus on the role of the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, and address the question of why the generation of tons of comparative evidence has not led to improvements in most education systems. To understand this conundrum, I had to question some policy recommendations as well as challenge the idea that evidence is in itself powerful enough to overcome political obstacles. I find this an incredibly naïve perspective.

Rick: In your EdNext essay, you also suggested that PISA “seems to misunderstand the nature of the political costs that reformers face.” Can you say a bit more about PISA and the problems you see with its efforts?

Montse: PISA is an international survey developed by the OECD—an organization that provides advice to governments based on the available evidence. Thus, OECD representatives have direct communication channels with governments. This makes PISA recommendations very influential among policymakers. As a consequence, any misleading recommendations made by PISA often translate into poor decisions by policymakers, who must then take full responsibility for the disappointing outcomes that follow. The alternative is also difficult for policymakers: If they do not follow PISA’s recommendations because they are looking at their specific context and draw a different conclusion, they are vulnerable to criticism for not following the OECD advice and they are assumed to have a hidden ideological agenda. Thus, a mistake by PISA has profound consequences, but it is not held accountable for them.

Rick: In the U.S., there’s been a lot of debate about whether school choice blurs the boundaries of public education. From your perspective, what do you make of this debate?

Montse: As societies become more diverse, a public system which funds both privately and publicly managed schools offers great advantages, since it gives parents the possibility of exerting their right to choose. Also, privately run schools tend to use public resources more efficiently as long as they are held accountable for their results.

Rick: In your experience, what are the strategies that make for successful education reform?

Montse: I wish I had a simple formula, but I’m afraid there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all prescription. I think it is very important to take into account that education systems evolve through different stages as they mature and that policy recommendations need to be very sensitive to these changes. For the sake of brevity, I will try to simplify an incredibly complex matter: In countries where the population as a whole has low levels of education and skills, it is crucial to have high-quality curricula adapted to the levels of student performance, as well as evaluations to clearly define the goals at the end of educational stages. At this early stage, students tend to have very heterogeneous levels of performance, so different tracks should be available to avoid high rates of early school leaving. Along this journey, the focus should be on improving teacher quality. Once teachers and principals are prepared, granting them more autonomy will improve student outcomes. As education systems approach excellence, they can afford to delay tracking since students will have higher levels of skills and will constitute a more homogeneous population, while curricula, evaluations, and teacher-training and -selection processes should become more demanding to ensure that improvements in quality continue.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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