Michael J. Petrilli – Education Next

Building Diverse College Campuses Starts in Kindergarten

Michael J. Petrilli — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:03:10 +0000

United States Supreme Court

Immediately following the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the use of race in college admissions (see “High Court Decision in College Admissions Case Has K-12 Implications”), the Biden Administration released a U.S. Department of Education plan to “promote educational opportunity and diversity in colleges and universities.” It includes forthcoming guidance to higher education institutions on how to use still-lawful practices to promote diversity, particularly new “measures of adversity” that consider what applicants may have had to overcome. The department also will consider expanding data collections and transparency around admissions factors and convene an “educational opportunity” summit to bring colleges and universities together with students, advocates, and researchers to discuss a way forward.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth noting what was left off the department’s laundry list: anything having to do with k-12 education. That’s a huge missed opportunity and one that the administration should urgently work to address. One of the most effective ways to boost college diversity is by building broader, more inclusive paths to educational excellence. And that work starts in kindergarten.

Imagine if, instead of or in addition to looking at adversity and other proxies for race, our nation dedicated itself to creating a more diverse pipeline of high-school graduates with the ability to do advanced-level work. Imagine a world where college admissions offices didn’t rely on loopholes and complicated backdoor policies to create diverse student populations. Imagine that the top high-school students in the United States were already racially and socioeconomically representative of our great nation—without the need for affirmative action of any kind.

A Stubborn Gap in “Excellence”

Sadly, we are a long way from that today. On virtually any measure, there’s an “excellence gap” among students coming out of 12th grade. Students reaching the highest levels of performance—whether measured by test scores, grade-point average, or the number of Advanced Placement courses—are more likely to be Asian or white than Latino or Black. This excellence gap means that white and Asian teenagers are disproportionately represented among the top 10 percent of U.S. students, while Latino and Black students are significantly underrepresented.

Closing this gap will not be easy. It is related to a complex mix of social and historical conditions, including the impact of centuries of systemic racism, sharp socioeconomic divides between racial groups, and big differences in school experiences, family structures, and parenting practices. But frankly, as a nation, we’ve never really given it the “old college try.” If we focused on what schools can do to recognize and nurture excellence in all students, instead of just trying to work around the gaps at the end of their high-school careers, we could make significant progress toward the inclusive college campuses we all want to see.

That’s the message from an important new report from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, an ideologically and racially diverse set of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners convened by the think tank that I lead. Its most important message: Rather than wait until kids are leaving high school to try to even the playing field, we must start in kindergarten to identify the most academically talented students of all races and backgrounds and give them the support they need to excel.

The working group makes three dozen recommendations for states, schools, districts, and charter networks, with specific opportunity-building actions that start in the earliest grades and continue through high school. It is a clear roadmap for building this wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced students.

The first step is called “frontloading,” a type of enrichment provided to young children before they are old enough to be assessed for advanced learning opportunities like gifted and talented programs. Because poor children tend to come to school with limited vocabulary and less knowledge about the world compared to their more affluent peers, they typically earn lower scores on most traditional academic assessments—even if they have the intellectual horsepower to take on rigorous academic work. High-quality enrichment programs can help young students build knowledge and vocabulary to improve their reading skills and get them on the path to success.

The next step is to use “universal screening” to find every single child who could benefit from enrichment, acceleration, and other advanced learning opportunities. Schools and districts can use valid and reliable assessments—such as IQ tests, diagnostic exams, or state achievement tests—to identify all kids with the potential to do advanced-level work. That’s a big change from how many school districts do things today, which is to ask parents or teachers to nominate children for their gifted programs (or later, Advanced Placement courses). It’s not hard to see how that approach can bring with it racial and socioeconomic biases. Affluent, college-educated parents tend to be more aware of these programs and know how to advocate for their kids. And classroom teachers, however fair-minded, might overlook some talented students because they don’t fit a stereotype of a high achiever.

Opportunity Starts in Elementary School

Once students are identified as highly capable, they need the programs and opportunities that can help them realize their potential. School-based programs that do this can take many forms, but most share several key features: They allow students to study and engage with academic materials more broadly and deeply than the typical class, including doing above-grade-level work. They allow students to skip an entire grade if that’s what a child needs and can handle. And once students get to middle and high school, they automatically are enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes. In other words, no more gatekeeping that tends to dissuade kids on the bubble from giving these tougher classes a shot.

Doing this work and doing it well will take leadership and commitment from district and charter network leaders. Educators will have to view greater equity in education as crucial—and not just for their lowest-achieving students, but also for their highest-achieving ones. They will have to reexamine how a student’s potential is measured, and when. And they will have to focus on supporting more students to excel, including by looking closely at how students are identified to participate in advanced coursework and enrichment programs. The absolute worst thing schools could do is to eliminate advanced learning opportunities, like gifted and talented programs or honors classes, which have disproportionate white and Asian enrollments that mirror the “excellence gap.” True equity demands that we mend, rather than end, such programs—and extend these opportunities to many more kids.

Universities might object that there’s not much they can do about k–12 educational practices. But that’s simply not true. Institutions of higher education can make sure that their schools of education prepare future teachers and school leaders to recognize and serve every student who can do advanced-level work, especially students from low-income families. And universities can lend their expertise and money to local school districts and charter networks that need assistance in putting these kinds of initiatives in place.

The Biden Administration should widen its action plan to include the k-12 system. Starting in kindergarten isn’t the fastest way to college diversity, but it is probably the sturdiest.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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Why I’m Rooting for Success of ESAs, Even Though They’re Not My Cup of Tea

Michael J. Petrilli — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 14:50:53 +0000

School choice is not a life-boat, but a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Let me state at the outset that universal education savings accounts (ESAs) are not my cup of tea. I don’t love handing over taxpayer money to rich people who don’t need it. Like my colleague Chester Finn, I’m skeptical that states will exert effective quality control over the schools and vendors that participate in such programs. I suspect that “hybrid homeschooling” and the like will remain a niche sector in American education, given how much work it creates for us (already overworked) parents. And I doubt the lowball amounts states are spending on these available-for-everyone ESAs will be enough to create a robust supply of high-quality options in the disadvantaged communities that need them most (and which I worry most about).

In my dream world, we’d instead take the school choice movement’s mojo and focus it on expanding high quality charter schools, bringing religious charter schools into the mix, and creating enrichment savings accounts with new money to help low-income and working-class families access afterschool and weekend opportunities for their kids, including intensive tutoring (along the lines of this federally-funded Ohio initiative).

Yet I’m still rooting for the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation. And that’s because I believe the odds are good that these initiatives will lead traditional public schools to improve.

If that logic sounds off, it’s because the “public school argument” is usually made to oppose such programs. The worry—and this is nothing new—is that such policies will enable the most advantaged students with the most clued-in parents to escape public schools, taking their tax dollars with them and leaving a more disadvantaged population of students behind in schools with fewer resources (financial and otherwise) than ever.

All of us should take such concerns seriously. Education is not a simple commodity, like a widget traded in the free market. What makes it complex, first and foremost, is the importance of students’ peers. Scholars have long found that “peer effects” matter—that kids learn more when certain types of students are in their classrooms and others are not. We all understand this intuitively, too. It’s why we worry about segregation, celebrate “mainstreaming” students with disabilities whenever possible, and debate endlessly about various forms of grouping and tracking in our schools.

Nor is this theoretical. When middle class families left the cities in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, it no doubt left urban school systems with fewer resources and a higher concentration of disadvantaged kids. The same thing happened in many rural areas and small towns over the last few decades, as prosperous metro areas pulled the cognitive elite away from home, leaving a poorer, more disadvantaged population behind.

Enter the evidence

We should empathize, then, with public school advocates who worry that school choice could repeat the damage done by white flight and brain drain. The good news, however, is that we now have decades of experience and evidence about whether they are right to be concerned. And the verdict is in: School choice is associated with improvements in traditional public schools.

School choice is not a life-boat, but a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Patrick Wolf at the University of Arkansas has painstakingly aggregated all of the relevant studies on the “competitive effects” of private school choice programs. At last count, twenty-five of twenty-seven studies find positive effects on public schools, with the other two finding null effects. (See Table 5 here.) As Wolf writes, “no empirical study of the competitive effects of private school choice programs concludes that the effects are negative.”

It’s worth noting that several of these studies, including recent ones from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana, find disappointing results for the students participating in the school choice programs—while at the same time finding benefits for the public school students “left behind.” It’s hard to argue that the authors of such studies are putting their thumbs on the scale.

One of the most compelling recent studies, by David Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik, examined Florida’s massive tax-credit scholarship program over the course of fifteen years, and found positive competitive effects on both academic outcomes and student behavior. The more competition that schools faced, the greater the impacts. Though the impacts overall were still rather small: less than 1 percent of a standard deviation each year. But year after year, those impacts added up, especially for the most disadvantaged students in the schools facing the most competitive pressure.

* * *

Both sides of this debate argue that universal education savings accounts will be a game-changer. Advocates think they will revolutionize schooling. Opponents think they will destroy public schools. I think both groups are wrong. Mostly they will subsidize families that have already chosen private schooling or home schooling, will encourage a small number of families on the bubble to choose Catholic or other private schools, and along the way, will put helpful (if limited) pressure on school districts to improve.

For me, that’s enough.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

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The Biggest Enemy of Equity Isn’t Excellence. It’s Mediocrity.

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 16:53:40 +0000

Students at Stuyvesant High School leave after classes end for the week, March 13, 2020, in New York.

Last fall, Stephen Sawchuk published an Education Week article exploring why “educational equity” had become a “trigger word”—even though the notion has been baked into federal policy for decades. “Equity may be the law,” he wrote, “but we don’t agree on what it means.”

I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from Americans across the ideological spectrum. A potentially unifying argument might go something like this:

In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blemish on human dignity and flourishing.

Schools have a particular role to play in helping children achieve their full academic potential, and supporting roles in helping children develop socially, emotionally, artistically, and athletically, as well.

Yet we know that our country is failing to live up to this aspiration because millions of boys and girls are failing to live up to their full potential. And we know that most of the reasons have to do with what happens between conception and kindergarten—that the strains of poverty, family instability, parental substance abuse, and other social ills mean that many children enter schools far behind what their cognitive trajectory otherwise could have been.

We know this in part because of the evidence of achievement gaps that can be measured at school entry, if not before. If we reject the notion that genetic differences drive racial achievement gaps as morally and empirically dubious—which we absolutely should—then the explanation for their existence as early as age five must be differing life circumstances, including the gaping chasms in socioeconomic status and its associated opportunities.

A major focus of “equity work,” then, is to close these gaps in the zero-to-five years—both because it’s the right thing to do, and so that all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential—cognitively, academically, and otherwise.

This project has tended to be the domain of the political left, with its calls for better pre- and post-natal healthcare; the eradication of environmental pollutants like lead paint; direct financial supports for families with young children, like 2021’s expanded and fully refundable child tax credits; and expanded public support for high quality childcare. Yet the political right has contributions to make, as well, with its calls for greater personal responsibility; greater family stability, especially via married, two-parent families; and for welfare programs that encourage—rather than discourage—marriage and work, which have been shown to lead to better outcomes for kids.

Schools also have a critical role to play, especially at the elementary level, where students are still young enough for a great education to make a significant difference in their academic trajectories. Schools may not be able to overcome all of the damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot, as we know from the markedly different achievement trajectories of children in the highest-performing high-poverty schools—many of them public charter schools—compared to kids in more typical school settings.

Educational equity, then, means providing children, and especially poor children, with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public dollars on the students who need it most.

The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity. It’s the everyday bureaucratic dysfunction that remains all too common in American education. It’s the decisions that public officials take that block excellent schools, including excellent public charter schools, from growing or replicating. It’s the inertia that keeps traditional public schools from retaining many of their best young teachers. It’s the refusal to intervene when a principal is not up to the task of creating a culture of excellence.

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excellence is the antidote to inequity.

* * *

And yet—back to the puzzle that Sawchuk presented in his article—some “equity advocates” have turned the notion into a “trigger word” by arguing that excellence is indeed the enemy. By their line of thinking, anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or National Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a zero-sum game. Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.

Needless to say, this conception of equity is highly unpopular, and not just on the political right. As well it should be because it’s also morally bankrupt. It is simply wrong to embrace policies and practices and seek to put a ceiling on any child’s achievement—just as it is wrong to block efforts to get all students to a floor of basic literacy and numeracy.

John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need to live up to their full potential. And for high-potential children from underrepresented groups in particular, it means identifying their talent early, cultivating it through gifted-and-talented programs and the like, and keeping them on a trajectory of high achievement all the way through high school and beyond.

It bears repeating: Excellence is not the enemy of equity, it is the antidote to inequity. Equity advocates would do well to keep that in mind.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). The Biggest Enemy of Equity Isn’t Excellence. Education Next, 23(2), 5.

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Fiscal Cliff Could Force Layoffs of the Best Teachers

Michael J. Petrilli — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 10:00:35 +0000

A fiscal cliff now looms before schools. Economists and CEOs expect a recession. Most federal funds from Covid-era relief bills—which are currently adding about 8 percent to districts’ annual per-pupil spending, on average—will run dry by 2024. Enrollments will likely decline in most places, given the smaller birth cohorts that are now making their way through our schools. All of that is almost surely going to add up to real drops in overall revenue for many school systems by mid-decade.

This happened before, not so long ago. During the Great Recession, Democrats in Congress and the Obama White House in 2009 enacted a relief package that pumped $100 billion into U.S. schools to hold them harmless from expected state and local budget cuts—but only over two years. When Republicans won the midterms in 2010, the writing was on the wall: a fiscal cliff was coming. Many of us warned districts to prepare, but such pleas were unheeded. School districts did what they always do when funds are low—they laid off the youngest teachers first, cut tutoring and other “extras,” and eliminated teacher coaches and the like. And as a result, according to scholars such as Kirabo Jackson, student achievement took a major hit (see “The Costs of Cutting School Spending: Lessons from the Great Recession,” research, Fall 2020).

We find ourselves here once again. The question now is whether the situation will have a happier ending this time around.

True, there are important differences. In the wake of the Great Recession, the U.S. unemployment rate soared to 10 percent, and schools could be very choosy, teacher-wise. As Martin West and his colleagues illustrated, teachers hired during such downturns have tended to be more effective (see “How the Coronavirus Crisis May Improve Teacher Quality,” research, Fall 2020). That made it all the more tragic when districts were forced by state laws and local teacher union contracts to use “last in, first out” policies when handing out pink slips.

The labor market is in a very different place today, with the unemployment rate at around 3.5 percent—the lowest rate in 50 years. Schools might be helping keep it that way. Districts are trying to hire vast numbers of teachers and staff to address the twin post-pandemic burdens of students’ learning loss and mental-health challenges—and to spend the federal largesse that they find sitting in their bank accounts. This hiring spree is encouraging some states and districts to lower their standards and onboard candidates who don’t meet basic requirements, while others are offering generous signing bonuses to help fill vacancies. So rather than getting to be more selective when choosing teachers, as was the case after the Great Recession, districts nowadays are practically begging people to take jobs.

Here’s what isn’t different: the federally funded spending spree won’t last. Combined with reductions in state revenue from a likely recession, districts are staring at the possibility of big funding drops after a short-term increase—the feared fiscal cliff.

So, how should schools prepare? Smart education economists like Marguerite Roza have urged districts to avoid putting lots of new people on the payroll (especially given the sharp drops in enrollment we expect to see in many districts, which will make higher staffing loads even less sustainable). Yet that advice is mostly being ignored, with schools going on a hiring bonanza.

Which means school districts will have no choice but to lay off a bunch of people when districts go over the fiscal cliff. That’s never easy, but it could yield some positive effects if schools are willing to differentiate between effective and ineffective teachers and other staff—and do what it takes to keep effective teachers on the job and lay off the ineffective ones before they get tenure and before budget troubles trigger “last in, first out” layoffs. That might be the biggest “if” in all of education.

Note that I’m not arguing that “last in, first out” must be eliminated. Sure, such a change would be great. But fights over quality-blind teacher layoffs have been raging for decades. This was the central issue in the unsuccessful Vergara v. State of California case, in which nine students charged that state laws prioritizing teacher seniority over job performance violated students’ rights to instruction by effective teachers. Yet the primary power of seniority to shape layoff decisions is a point on which powerful teachers unions (in California and elsewhere) are unyielding. Eighteen states still enshrine “last in, first out” in state policy, including seven where seniority is the sole factor in determining layoffs. Another 23 (plus Washington, D.C.) allow unions to bargain for it in local contracts. Only 10 disallow seniority to be a consideration. There’s been some progress at the district level in moving toward performance as the primary factor in layoff decisions, but over the past decade only two states have eliminated “last in, first out” rules. Changing all of this is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

Thankfully, there’s another strategy that should be much more possible. For the next two or three years, districts should look carefully at the effectiveness of their new teachers and other staff and let go of their weaker ones immediately. That is allowable under every union contract in the country, though districts can’t dilly-dally, since tenure protections generally kick in after three or four years on the job.

If the school districts do wait and keep most of their new teachers on the payroll until they are forced to engage in layoffs in the mid-2020s, the practical effect will be to give ineffective teachers hired in 2021, 2022, or 2023 priority over more effective teachers hired in, say, 2024 or 2025. That will be bad for students, who will likely still be recovering from pandemic-era learning losses. And it threatens teacher-diversity efforts, given that many districts are getting better, over time, at recruiting teachers of color.

Schools can’t do much to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, but if they act now to prepare, they can make sure they keep their best teachers in the classrooms.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). Fiscal Cliff Could Force Layoffs of the Best Teachers: Possible recession and end of pandemic aid loom, demanding fast action on ineffective teachers. Education Next, 23(2), 60-61.

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Teachers Should Replace “the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations” with “the Suspension of Disbelief”

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:00:45 +0000

The “soft bigotry of low expectations” is back in the news, due to the recent passing of the great Mike Gerson, the speechwriter who is credited with crafting that phrase for then-presidential candidate George W. Bush. Here’s the heart of the address where those words made their debut, from September 1999:

The movement I am talking about requires more than sound goals.

It requires a mindset that all children can learn, and no child should be left behind. It does not matter where they live, or how much their parents earn. It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. These circumstances are challenges, but they are not excuses. I believe that every child can learn the basic skills on which the rest of their life depends.

Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some say that schools can’t be expected to teach, because there are too many broken families, too many immigrants, too much diversity. I say that pigment and poverty need not determine performance. That myth is disproved by good schools every day. Excuse-making must end before learning can begin.

At the time, this call to hold all students to high standards was an assertion of common sense that had the benefit of ringing true. But since then, it has become an evidence-based practice, thanks to several studies looking at the relationship between teacher expectations and student outcomes. For example, one recent study found that high expectations boosted test scores of students in grade 4 through grade 8, and a recent Fordham-commissioned study detected lasting benefits for students whose teachers were tougher graders. Another one found that Black teachers hold higher expectations for Black students than white teachers do. That is especially the case for Black male students, and for math.

American University’s Seth Gershenson led several of those studies, including a recent one published by Fordham, The Power of Expectations in District and Charter Schools. Tapping federal surveys of teachers and students from fifteen to twenty years ago, he found that, in general, teachers in charter high schools were more likely to believe that their students will complete four-year college degrees than were their counterparts in traditional public schools, even after controlling for student background and achievement. Students in charter schools were also more likely to believe that their teachers think “all students can be successful.” And regardless of sector, teacher expectations had a positive impact on long-run student outcomes, including boosting the odds of college completion and reducing the chances of teen childbearing and going on welfare.

On its face, this story makes sense: Students do better when their teachers believe in them. Black students in particular do better when their teachers believe in them, which tends to be more the case when their teachers are themselves Black. This also happens more often in charter schools, both because most charters focus intentionally on high expectations, and perhaps because they tend to hire more Black teachers too.

But if we probe deeper into the studies, it gets more complicated. After all, we don’t have any direct measures of “teacher expectations.” What we have are a few survey questions, which are linked to nationally representative samples of students, as well as tons of information about kids’ personal characteristics, backgrounds, and eventual outcomes in college and the real world.

And what sorts of questions do researchers ask teachers? The main one used for the latest analysis was, “How far in school do you expect this student to get?” To simplify the analysis, Gershenson collapsed responses into a binary indicator for “expects at least a four-year college degree.”

I am sure that this measure captures something about teachers’ views of their students. But we shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not about college completion per se, but, as Gershenson told me on my podcast recently, it’s a stand-in for lots of things we care about:

I think that being optimistic about what a 10th grader might be able to do is different from pushing someone into college as a senior who is clearly not ready for it at that time. In that sense, the expectation of, “Do you expect so and so to go to college” as of the 10th grade, I view that more as a proxy for the teacher’s general attitude towards thinking optimistically; thinking the best of students; thinking that students can learn and overcome obstacles; and a proxy for a general belief that everybody is capable of succeeding.

That’s a relief, because since the question was asked (in the early 2000s), many of us have rethought our underlying assumptions about college. Is completing college necessarily “better” than not? To be sure, Americans earn more money with a college degree than without one. But as the cost of college has risen and the college wage premium has leveled off, especially in certain fields and certain geographic areas, the cost-benefit analysis has grown more complicated. For some kids, depending on their strengths and interests and where they want to live, a different sort of credential might be “better” than a college degree.

Furthermore, note that in Gershenson’s latest study—the one comparing charter and traditional public school teachers—charter school teachers were found to be more optimistic about their students’ chances of completing college—but public school teachers were more likely to be right. In other words, they were much better at predicting which of their 10th grade students would and wouldn’t actually go on to graduate from college.

Maybe that’s because the traditional public school teachers were older and had a better sense of just how hard it would be for their students to climb the mountain to college completion. To be sure, some of them might have succumbed to the soft bigotry of low expectations, but perhaps they were simply more realistic than those young, starry-eyed charter school teachers.

What’s remarkable, though, is that even with all of these caveats about the survey questions and the rest, Gershenson and others continue to find significant relationships between teachers’ answers and their students’ long-term outcomes, on average. So perhaps students really do fare better when placed with teachers who are optimistic, even naïve, about their prospects.

Why should that be?

I don’t have any definitive answers. But on the podcast, my colleague David Griffith—himself a former charter school teacher—offered an explanation that made sense to me:

One takeaway is that a little irrational optimism is a good thing. But the word “proxy” is really important here regardless of what questions you ask. Expectations is a complicated word that could mean a lot of different things. We’re just not going to get a survey question that’s going to ask teachers exactly what their brain state is while they are teaching at-risk kids. You’ve got to ask these crude questions about college-going prospects or “does your teacher believe in you.” These are all things that are probably correlated with what we’re trying to get at, which is this unwillingness to accept failure on the part of the teacher—dare I say, a “no-excuses” mindset—that all good teachers have, that is, frankly, a little irrational.

… What matters is you willingly suspending disbelief. It’s almost double-think, in all honesty. There’s the part of your brain that knows what’s probably going to happen, and then there’s the part of your brain that teaches. I think it’s really healthy and important for teachers to turn one side of their brain off when they go through the classroom door and think with the other part of their brain.

Based on my own experiences with this sort of thing, this sounds about right. Irrationally suspending disbelief is not always the right approach for those making policy. (Setting wildly unrealistic goals can lead to all sorts of problems, as those of us who remember the No Child Left Behind era can attest.) But for teachers—and in particular, those working with traditionally disadvantaged students—suspending disbelief is almost certainly better than succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Simply put, we want educators to look at the kids in front of them and believe that they can know and do more tomorrow than they did yesterday, and that it will matter for their future for years to come.

David says it’s “almost double-think.” But not quite.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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The Evolving Education Reform Agenda

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 14:01:23 +0000

Earlier this month, I argued that “education reform is alive and well, even if the Washington Consensus is dead for now.” What’s more, I wrote that we should stay the course on the current reform strategy:

Keep growing charter schools. Keep expanding parental choice. Keep adopting high-quality instructional materials, and keep getting teachers trained up on them. Keep testing students regularly, and keep reporting the results. Keep being honest with parents and taxpayers about their students and schools are performing.

That was the too-simple version. Let me flesh out three key points:

This agenda will of course continue to evolve as reformers debate what’s in and what’s out, informed by research and experience.
This is an agenda focused almost entirely on policy, not practice.
Remaining agnostic about classroom-level practices—and the culture wars and other controversies wrapped up in them—helps keep the reform coalition together, but it limits our impact, since that’s where much of the action is.

The education reform agenda continues to evolve

I heard from a friend that my call to “stay the course” on the current reform agenda sounded “nostalgic in a way that feels like it might be clinging to something we have to rethink.” I can see why it might feel that way. So to clarify: The current ed reform agenda is not the same as thirty or twenty or even ten years ago. In the 1990s, for example, we were very focused on boosting the percentage of students scoring proficient on state tests—and, eventually, on seeing the “disaggregated data” move in the right direction. The focus on disaggregated results remains, but thankfully we have largely moved passed a single-minded focus on proficiency—a “snapshot in time”—and toward greater attention to individual student growth.

By the early 2010s, much of the conversation was about holding individual teachers accountable via test-informed teacher evaluations. Ham-handed implementation and poisonous politics led us to leave that misguided reform behind. On the other hand, an embrace of “high quality instructional materials” is rather new, enabled by the common set of standards for English language arts and mathematics still in place in most states.

No doubt, the agenda will continue to evolve, as well it should, informed by hard-earned, real-world experience, plus what we’re learning from rigorous research studies. We see, for example, a growing interest in school funding reform—including among those of us on the center-right. As the evidence continues to build that increases in spending do in fact relate to improvements in student outcomes, even the fiscal conservatives within the reform coalition are increasingly open to engaging on the issue. That’s especially the case if funding reform means that schools of choice—including charter schools, and maybe private schools, too—receive more equitable resources as well.

Parental choice is another fluid policy area. There’s always been a debate among reformers about how wide the range of choices should be, with conservatives and libertarians more comfortable with including private and religious schools in the mix. That debate is not going away, but new issues are joining the mix, most notably about options (and public funding) for out-of-school time, and various approaches to “unbundling” school services. Equity-minded reformers on the left may never reconcile themselves to public funding for religious schools—especially if they are allowed to exclude LGBTQ students or teachers of different faiths—but they may be more open to various forms of à la carte education. (Granted, some on the left aren’t even open to charter schools these days.)

On the testing and transparency fronts, there’s growing interest in new models for assessment—and plenty of enthusiasm for measuring student and school success with measures in addition to test scores. But this high-level agreement breaks down when digging into the details. How would assessments be different? If schools do well on “alternative measures” but not on test-score growth, then what? Should we ever consider such schools “good”? Not to mention whether we should try to return to NCLB-style accountability measures, like threatening to close chronically low-performing schools.

Reinventing high schools is another frontier for the ed reform agenda. (Though high schools have been a problem ever since A Nation at Risk, they’ve remained largely untouched by reform.) As with the country as a whole, I sense that enthusiasm for career and technical education is growing among reformers—with the usual caveats that it must be high-quality and equitable. But so far, this is mostly hypothetical; a tiny percentage of students spend significant time in high school doing serious career prep. And we haven’t yet reckoned with the major changes to high school graduation requirements that would allow students to spend most of their junior and senior years doing apprenticeships and the like instead of taking traditional academic coursework. Likewise, enthusiasm for “mastery-based learning” and the like—either in the context of traditional college-preparation or CTE—is mostly talk and little action, at least so far.

The reform agenda is mostly about policy, not practice

Ever since A Nation at Risk, the reform movement has been animated by calls for policy change. That’s understandable, given that the energy for reform has mostly come from outside the system, and thus outside the schools. And that’s still where the heart of the reform agenda lies.

To be sure, a few areas of practice have come to garner widespread support in reform-land. The best current example is around the Science of Reading, an issue that is often driven by laws (according to Education Week, thirty states have enacted reading reforms in recent years), but nothing real can happen without changing classroom practice. So, too, with the effort to get schools to adopt high-quality instructional materials, and provide effective support to teachers to ensure their faithful and effective implementation.

But on the whole, the classroom is where consensus goes to die. That’s obviously the case with the raging education culture wars around “woke” curricula, CRT, gender identity, and the like. But it’s not just these divisive social issues. It also erupts over fundamental questions about how schools do their work. Should we embrace personalized learning—even if that means that not every student covers all the academic content we think is important for them to learn? Should we ensure that all students can learn at their own pace, including advanced learners, via gifted and talented education, ability grouping, tracking, and gated access to accelerated courses? What should school discipline look like, and how worried should schools be about apparent racial disparities?

None of these issues is easy; they all feature trade-offs and competing priorities. How do we balance the needs of the lowest-performing students with those of their high-achieving peers? Or balance the needs and interests of students with behavior challenges against those of their well-behaved peers? Does it matter if both groups of students are poor and Black or Brown? We shouldn’t be surprised that liberals and conservatives hold very different views on these matters—and thus that such questions strain the bipartisan reform coalition.

The question is whether we can agree to disagree on such matters—and still be effective at driving improvements in our schools. Let’s turn to that question next.

A focus on policy, not practice, is good politics. But does it work?

It’s no small thing that reformers on the left and right can still agree on major system reforms—on issues like ensuring adequate and equal funding; measuring school effectiveness by test scores and other reliable indicators; and empowering parents with a wide range of education options, at least within the public school universe.

But the endpoint of these reforms is to improve what actually happens in the classroom, and thus boost educational outcomes—and, one would hope, life outcomes for students as well. Stopping at the schoolhouse door, then, is far from satisfactory.

That’s especially the case for what we used to call standards-based reform. The whole theory is to bring alignment and coherence to standards, assessments, instructional materials, and teacher training and support in order to improve instruction and outcomes. But it’s impossible to do any of that without facing questions about content. What exactly should students learn? How should they be taught? Perhaps in a narrow range of subjects—like early reading and math—the discussion can remain fairly technical and non-ideological. But eventually, this bumps into pedagogical and culture war debates. Which books should kids read in eighth grade English? (And which belong in the school library?) How should schools present difficult topics in U.S. history? How should schools handle the vast differences in student readiness at any given time?

School choice has it easier. There, agnosticism about classroom-level practice is a feature, not a bug—if advocates can get policymakers and the public to embrace pluralism as a guiding principle. Let schools come to different decisions about all of the sensitive questions, and empower parents to choose the school that best fits their values. Yet that’s harder than it sounds; pluralism is all well and good until a school promotes a view that someone finds offensive, or sets admissions rules that some consider discriminatory.

But there’s an even more fundamental, almost existential problem with reformers sticking with policies instead of practice: Policy alone doesn’t move the needle on student outcomes all that much. To be sure, the evidence is clear that reforms such as testing and accountability, smart funding increases, and carefully expanded parental choice can all boost achievement. But the gains tend to be incremental. If we are committed to addressing the massive learning loss experienced by millions of students during the pandemic, incremental gains won’t be enough. We simply must improve classroom instruction. We have to make a marked impact on what students are doing all day long, whether their teachers are challenging them, supporting them, using instructional materials that are well-aligned to what works, pushing them to work harder and smarter.

So we reformers face a choice: Stay in the relative comfort zone of public policy—or engage in the messy world of classroom practice, too. If we want to make a real difference for kids, and our country, I vote for the latter. But we are going to have to be thoughtful to find ways of doing so while keeping our coalition together.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The post The Evolving Education Reform Agenda appeared first on Education Next.

First, Know Thyself. Then, Pick a Career Path

Michael J. Petrilli — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:00:01 +0000

At the end of high school, most graduating seniors are given their diplomas with a heaping side of platitudes, many of them patently preposterous. Such as, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Or “You can be anything you want to be.” And especially, “With grit and determination, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

The problem isn’t encouraging young people to aim high or dream big. It’s pretending that each of us is a blank canvas. I can dream all I want of becoming the next Michael Jordan, but my five-foot-seven frame and general lack of coordination say otherwise. Better advice came from the Greeks almost 2,500 years ago: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better. These computer-based assessments, such as YouScience Discovery and the updated Ball Aptitude Battery, are designed to identify strengths and talents and point to how those might map onto promising careers. Such personal inventories could help accelerate the shift away from the “college for all” mania that has gripped American education for the past 30 years, toward a system more balanced between college and career.

An Activities Buffet

To be sure, most parents already expose their kids to lots of different activities to figure out what sparks an interest. Is my kid more of a team sports person, or someone who might prefer an individual pursuit, like playing the piano? Is their idea of a perfect day getting to hang out with friends, or sitting on the couch reading a book? When they are immersed in the world of screens, what kinds of games and activities most light a fire?

Similarly, American high schools offer a smorgasbord of sports, clubs, and other extracurricular activities to encourage experimentation and help students find a good fit. These also can help them gain some real-world skills and perhaps kickstart thinking about how they might apply their strengths and interests to a vocation. Still, the default assumed goal for teenagers is college, with or without a specific career in mind.

There are also more direct ways to help students explore career possibilities. I recall taking a diagnostic assessment in high school, more than 30 years ago, that was designed to help us figure out our job interests; such assessments were ubiquitous at the time. This particular questionnaire tried to ferret out whether we were more drawn to people, ideas, data, or physical objects. Would we prefer to spend our time in lots of brainstorming sessions, it would ask, or taking apart an engine? Then, based on our answers, it spit out a list of jobs that might be a good fit.

It was better than nothing, but it’s not hard to identify myriad problems with such an approach. First, we humans are great at deluding ourselves, all the more so when we are young. In my case, the results indicated a strong interest in ideas and people, and a clear disinterest in data and things. That wasn’t entirely off the ball—as the president of a think tank, I produce ideas for a living. Meanwhile, I can’t put together a piece of IKEA furniture to save my life. Truth be told, however, I’m more introverted than I wanted to admit to myself back then, and can only handle a certain amount of time around other people on any given day. And while I thought it was nerdy back then, I do enjoy a good spreadsheet.

Because of these self-delusions, that old diagnostic tool encouraged me to become a high-school history teacher—which I actually tried as a student teacher, and mostly failed. I enjoyed creating lesson plans, but I found it exhausting to be around kids all day and longed for some time alone. I hadn’t been honest with myself, or the test, about my interests or even my traits, and it showed. Personality inventories, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, exhibit some of the same problems. Maybe you really are an introverted intuitive or an extroverted judger—or maybe that’s just a reflection of the person you wish you were.

Then there’s the problem of bias. It’s hard for kids to project a potential interest onto a career with which they have no experience. If you don’t know anyone who’s an engineer, engineering isn’t going to spark much interest. It’s like asking a kid if they might enjoy playing lacrosse when they’ve never even heard of it, much less seen someone playing it. Not surprisingly, then, the old-style interest inventories can steer poor kids away from certain high-paying jobs. They also tend to exhibit gender biases.

Aptitudes Versus Interests

A new generation of assessments promises a better approach. Instead of assuming that individuals already know themselves, it puts them through a series of exercises to gauge what they’re actually good at. Many are based on the work of the Ball Foundation, founded by Carl and Vivian Elledge Ball. In 1981, the couple published a set of 16 ability tests designed to identify aptitudes across a range of domains, such as analytical reasoning, short-term memory, eye-hand coordination, and vocabulary. Aptitudes, in the Balls’ way of thinking, can be thought of as an individual’s unique potential—“how quickly and easily a person will be able to acquire particular skills” and “the level of proficiency that the person can expect to reach, given comparable opportunities for training and practice.”

Now a new set of organizations is building on the Ball Foundation work, often with the help of artificial intelligence, to design assessments that they claim are highly effective at pinpointing people’s aptitudes and matching them to potential careers. Most are focused on employers, offering assessments that can be given to applicants to see if they are a good fit for a particular opening. But a few are targeting the K-12 world.

One such assessment is by YouScience, in use in 7,000 schools nationwide. Founded by serial entrepreneur Edson Barton, the company offers aptitude assessments for middle- and high-school students. The “snapshot” assessment for 7th- and 8th-grade students is designed to be more exploratory, while the “discovery” assessment for high-school students is more in depth.

My 14-year-old son and I both took the YouScience 90-minute “discovery” assessment, which the company prefers to call a series of “brain games.” Almost all of the items were nonverbal and designed to tease out “inherent talents,” as Barton put it—strengths that are independent from traditional measures of academic achievement. Right-or-left-handedness is a good analogy. As he explained:

We all have a dominant hand that we use. Whatever your dominant hand is, you end up being able to do things more naturally with it. It comes more naturally to write my name with my right hand. As I pick up painting, try to play the piano, that natural ability makes it easier for me to pick up on certain things using my right hand. That’s not to say I can’t use my left hand. I do it all the time. If I really focus myself, I could write just as well with my left hand as my right hand, but it’s painful, it hurts, it takes mental exertion. It’s a beautiful spot when aptitudes and interests and skills evolve into something wonderful.

Whether it’s possible to untangle aptitudes from achievements goes over the head of this particular columnist, but it’s an intriguing possibility.

The activities in the brain games varied. In one that supposedly tested my spatial visualization prowess, I was given a series of pictures of folded papers with holes punched into corners or other locations and asked where those holes would appear if the paper were unfolded. In a test of my idea-generation abilities, I was presented with a scenario out of science fiction (think alien landing) and asked to come up with as many ideas as possible for what it would mean for our society.

Another test measured my “visual comparison speed,” or whether I could spot discrepancies in pairs of digits, while others assessed my inductive reasoning abilities and sequential and numerical reasoning. Within minutes of finishing the exercises, the system generated a 35-page “strengths profile,” plus a list of well-matched careers.

The promise, according to Barton, is that students will see career paths for themselves that line up with their aptitudes and are free of the race, class, and gender biases that tended to plague old-style interest inventories. Because the assessment focuses on potential, rather than achievement, the results often tell kids about strengths in areas the children had thought were weaknesses.

The YouScience results, in particular, tend to identify lots of people who would have potential in STEM fields and other high-paying careers. For example, in a sample of 3,000 Tennessee students, just 9 percent of females expressed interest in technology careers like engineering and computer programming—but 64 percent have the aptitudes associated with those careers, at least according to YouScience’s assessment.

Indeed, my son and I were both surprised that several jobs popped up for us that were quite techy, even though we view ourselves as more history professor types. But maybe there’s something to it. I must have done OK on the sequential and numerical reasoning questions, at least in comparison to the typical high schooler, and as a result jobs like “economist” popped up for me. Though my teenage self may not have imagined it, it’s true that there are days when I like nothing more than to immerse myself in test-score data, looking for patterns that others might have missed. More important: The results have given my 14-year-old son some new possibilities to consider for himself.

The Problem With Potential

Understandably, YouScience strives to make the experience and the resulting “strengths profile” as positive as possible. The post-assessment report doesn’t harp on what kids are not good at and also doesn’t tell anybody that the best fit for them is an unskilled, low-wage job. The 500 careers in its database all require at least some post-high school training. The hope is that focusing on students’ strengths will motivate them to put in the hard work it will take to fulfill their potential, said Lesley Vosenkemper, the company’s vice president of strategic initiatives. “We know that motivation is a big part of achievement,” she told me. “If students see they have the ability, they may put in the effort.”

That’s all well and good, but I worry that this is yet another example of us in education not wanting to level with kids about what’s feasible for them based on their level of academic achievement. Aptitudes show potential, but people can only realize their potential if given the opportunity for training and practice.

Sadly, we know that many young Americans today do not have the opportunity to reach their potential. Difficult early-childhood experiences and poor instruction in elementary and middle school cause many students to arrive at high school desperately behind in basic skills. I worry that giving underprepared students a report about their aptitudes and career potential without shoring up the basics could amount to false hope. A student might be told, for example, that they have the aptitude to make a great computer engineer. What they won’t be told is that a failure to master math facts in elementary school, or a weak foundation in algebra, or inability to pass calculus amount to high barriers that will be difficult to overcome.

The lesson, as is often the case, may be that we need to start earlier. So let me offer a suggestion for anyone preparing to congratulate a kindergarten graduate. Please tell those little tykes’ parents that one of their most important jobs is to help their children figure out who they are and what they are good at. And that another critical job is to watch like a hawk for any signs that their children are struggling academically and, if so, to do something about it—the sooner the better. That’s the kind of message that might actually allow kids to reach for the stars.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2022). First, Know Thyself. Then, Pick a Career Path: The potential of helping students see their potential. Education Next, 22(4), 84-87

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Work Instead of School: A Better Approach for Our Lowest-Performing Students?

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:40:53 +0000

Several weeks ago, I asked whether America’s present strategy for serving our lowest performing high school students is really the best we can do. This wasn’t a rhetorical question; possibly the answer is yes. That strategy is to try much harder than in years past to keep such students from dropping out, while also allowing them to earn course credit through online credit recovery if they fail to pass their classes the traditional way. It’s a combination of doing more to encourage and support struggling students (hooray!) while also—let’s be honest—lowering the bar for what it takes to graduate (boo!).

The last half of that equation is regrettable. But it’s almost surely the case that most students are better off staying in school than dropping out, even if it means deflating the diploma’s value along the way—especially if dropping out means turning kids into “disconnected youth” with no involvement in the education system or the labor market. That generally leads to nothing good. So maybe we should simply celebrate the fact that our high school graduation rate was at an all-time high before the pandemic struck, and redouble our efforts on every strategy that was working to make it so.

But allow me to make the case for trying something very different for high school-age Americans who struggle mightily with academics—say, those in the bottom 10 percent of the national distribution—one that might provide a much better experience for them during their adolescent years and lead to better long-term outcomes. Put simply: Let these young people take jobs while still in high school—during the school day, during both their junior and senior years, full pay included, no strings attached—akin to Jobcorps or Jobstart, but before kids drop out.

I’m not talking about fancy apprenticeships or internships. That’s the European model, and it’s a great option for kids with relatively high levels of academic skills, generally leading to further education in technical institutes or community colleges and to bona fide certifications in well-paying careers. No, here I’m talking about teenagers who have been failed by the system, haven’t learned much in elementary or middle school, and are struggling in high school, too. And I’m talking about $10–$15-an-hour jobs, the kind that these students, for better or worse, have a realistic chance of attaining, in industries like food service, hospitality, caregiving, or construction. Let them get started on these jobs as soon as they turn sixteen, but under the guidance of a school-provided career coach/mentor/therapist, and with the hope that they build valuable real-world skills that will quickly lead to greater pay and more opportunities.

In effect, this is a compromise between dropping out and staying in school. It allows these teenagers to move forward into the world of work, while still remaining connected to the school system in a real way.

I know this idea will strike some as fatalistic and defeatist, if not classist or racist. It amounts to giving up on young people, they will say. I respectfully disagree. In my mind, it means freeing some young people from a prison of our own creation, from “credit recovery jail” that boosts schools’ graduation rates without doing much good for the kids stuck inside.

The time we make these kids spend in bogus academics carries real opportunity costs. Because, in today’s system, what we don’t spend time doing is actually preparing young adults to succeed on the day after high school graduation. We don’t help them find a job that is a good fit with their strengths and interests—a job that is actually available where they live or want to move. Once these kids are in the real world, they must try to figure out how to show up on time every day, manage through workplace challenges, deal with a difficult boss, figure out how to ask for a raise, and decide whether they should look elsewhere for better opportunities. But by then we’ve kicked them out of the school system. They are on their own in the jungle.

And many don’t survive. As AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt has chronicled so effectively, the number of men, in particular, who are neither in school nor working has skyrocketed in recent years. The labor force participation rate for never-married American-born men who dropped out of high school now hovers around 50 percent.

The kind of “job study” program I have in mind would be appropriate only for a limited population, to be sure. It would be nuts to encourage most students to take this path, students who are great, good, or even just decent at school, and have the academic skills to succeed in high-quality college prep or career and technical education programs. For them, more formal education is well worth the time and effort.

Yet however much we wish it weren’t so, millions of teenagers in America do not fit this description. After suffering from years of low expectations in K–8, they entered high school three or four grade levels behind in reading, writing, and math, struggle to pass classes, and generally hate school and everything about it. It is these students who might relish, and benefit from, a ticket out.

I won’t sugarcoat it: The career prospects for such students in a knowledge economy are not great. High-tech sectors are out of bounds for them. Most professional settings will be a reach. Yet the American economy continues to create millions of job opportunities for people with limited academic skills. They don’t pay great. Though thanks to a hot labor market and rising minimum wages in many states and localities, they pay better than they used to. Our (more generous than most people think) social safety net further boosts the value of such jobs. And as low-wage workers gain on-the-job skills, they typically see their wages grow. Orderlies can become nursing assistants, and upward and onward from there. Dishwashers can move onto food preparation, eventually line cooking, and so forth. These aren’t easy paths, but they sure beat poverty or prison.

So the right question to ask, in my opinion, is how to help our lowest-performing students successfully make the transition into the world of work and get launched in a way that will help them make their way in the adult world.

Why not start the process while still under the tough-love care of high school educators? Isn’t that at least worth trying?

Imagine if we spent the $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 that we currently plow into their education every junior and senior year, and invest that instead in adults, working for the school system, whose job it is to help these students successfully transition into the workplace. We might even subsidize local employers for taking on the students as workers or for supplementing their pay. The students would spend most of their week at work—say, thirty hours or so—and would also meet a few times a week one on one and in small groups with their mentor/counselor/career coach. If they want to participate in school sports and extracurricular activities, that could be worked into their schedules. Think of summer jobs programs, but during the school year instead.

No doubt, we would need to work out a ton of programmatic details. Which students should be eligible to participate? Should we start with a pilot? Should we give these students a standard diploma, a GED, or something else?

By embracing such an approach, we wouldn’t be giving up on kids’ college dreams. College was never in the cards for high school students who are reading, writing, and doing math at the 10th percentile. The real question is whether a job is a better alternative for these junior and seniors than simply dropping out or painfully trying to follow the “credit recovery track” so many are on today. It’s a question worth answering.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

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The Upside of the Downward Trend in College Enrollment

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 16:18:32 +0000

The media have been full of reports of college students, almost a million strong, who have gone missing during the pandemic. Virtually every article quotes experts expressing alarm and dismay.

“A sharp and persistent decline in the number of Americans going to college…could alter American society for the worse, even as economic rival nations such as China vastly increase university enrollment,” wrote Jon Marcus in the Washington Post.

“It is a crisis, and I don’t think it’s widely recognized yet that it is,” Jason Lane, dean of Miami University’s College of Education, told Marcus. “Society is going to be less healthy,” he continued. “It’s going to be less economically successful. It’s going to be harder to find folks to fill the jobs of the future, and there will be lower tax revenues because there won’t be as many people in high-paying jobs.”

Monty Sullivan, president of Louisiana’s community college system, piled on: “We have a million adults in this country that have stepped off the path to the middle class. That’s the real headline.”

But these sky-is-falling arguments, intuitive though they may be, are entirely too pessimistic. In fact, we should see these enrollment trends as encouraging, for three reasons. First, there’s a good chance that the young men and women making the decision not to go to college right now are doing what’s in their own best interest, rather than making a mistake they will come to regret. Second, these trends may indicate that America’s education culture is changing in positive ways—most notably, that the “college-for-all” fever is breaking. And third, if these trends continue, they will force the higher education establishment, and especially community colleges, to make long overdue changes that will benefit students and taxpayers alike.

Let’s start with the most important question, which is whether these young people’s decisions are smart or misguided. Yes, it’s true that college educated workers make more money on average than their degree-less peers. There are also many correlations between higher education and positive life outcomes, from higher marriage rates to lower divorce rates, better health, and so on.

But it’s essential to note that these benefits generally only accrue to people who complete degrees. We call it the “college wage premium,” but we should really call it the “college completion premium.” There doesn’t appear to be much of a “going to college but dropping out without a degree premium,” and that’s an incredibly important distinction.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much if most young people who went to college finished a degree. But in today’s America that’s not what’s happening. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the six-year completion rate for any degree or certificate is currently 62.2 percent. That means that 37.8 percent of college students drop out with no credential to their name. Considering that, pre-pandemic, between 65 and 70 percent of high school graduates matriculated straight to college, that’s a lot of kids giving higher ed the old college try yet leaving with nothing but debt and regret. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, it works out to about 900,000 young adults leaving college with no degree or certificate—each and every year.

And why is that? Overwhelmingly, the evidence indicates that most students fail to complete college because they were not prepared to succeed in the first place. They lacked the reading, writing, and/or math skills to do college-level academic work, and they probably struggled with other related skills and attributes, too, like knowing how to take notes or study for a test, or the perseverance required to read a book that frankly isn’t all that interesting.

To put it succinctly, many young people don’t do well in college because they aren’t very good students in an academic setting, they haven’t done very well in school, and they don’t like it all that much. Which may make us wonder why we encouraged them to go to college in the first place.

So here’s the question: are the nearly one million students who today are not enrolling in college the same million or so students that likely would not have completed a degree anyway? If so, we should be celebrating the fact that they are choosing to do something else with their time and money.

Especially in a hot labor market, choosing to work means they are contributing to our society and their families, and almost surely gaining real-world skills as well. After all, a classroom is not the only place to learn how to do new things. The workplace can be a great venue for “postsecondary education,” too.

No doubt, there may be some students opting out of college who would have done well there and may someday regret not getting a degree. But one good thing about the American education system is that it allows for second, third, and fourth chances. It’s never too late to head back to school, and individuals who are committed to education will surely find a way to make it happen.

Hence, the second positive development, which is our society’s attitudes toward college. In recent years, as American Compass has demonstrated, boosting college-going and college-completion rates has become something of an obsession among many within the education system and beyond. These impulses are understandable, given education’s potential to raise incomes and reduce inequality, and given our concerns about stagnating upward mobility. But there’s little doubt that it has gone too far. The message many Americans were receiving was that college was not just a ticket to the middle class, but the only ticket. And furthermore, they were told that the only people who deserve full respect in our society, economy, and democracy are those holding college degrees.

This was clearly one factor that contributed to the past decade’s populist backlash, culminating with the election of Donald Trump, a man who famously once declared his love for “the uneducated.”

Thankfully, and partly because of these events, even cultural elites have started to acknowledge that college is not the be-all and end-all and that we should celebrate the dignity of work, including work that does not require a fancy piece of paper.

If today’s young people are getting the message the college is just one option among many (and recent surveys indicate that they are), we should celebrate that. Perhaps this is one culture war with an end in sight.

Third, these trends might put pressure on the higher education system to change. No doubt the dramatic drop in enrollment is causing pain for institutions of higher education, especially community colleges, where most of the students have gone missing. But—frankly—these institutions had it coming. These are the very places that for years have gladly taken students’ tuition checks and Pell Grants, only to watch them fail courses and drift away. And the main reason is that they were admitting students who were not well prepared to succeed in the first place.

When for-profit colleges engaged in this type of behavior, folks on the left were outraged, calling for them to be shut down and dismembered. But because community colleges hide behind their so-called “open access mission,” everyone looks the other way.

Here’s hoping that, in the aftermath of the pandemic and its associated enrollment declines, community colleges might finally get honest with students about their chances of success, as well as the value that their training will add to career prospects.

Perhaps they will stop admitting students who lack basic reading, writing, and math skills, or who demonstrated in their high school years that they simply don’t like school and aren’t very good at it.

The next time you see a news story about the lamentable drop in college enrollment, don’t feel the need to reach for a box of Kleenex. The higher education industry might like to see some crocodile tears, but there are reasons to believe that, during a very dark time, these declining college enrollment trends might actually have a silver lining.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog. First published by American Compass.

The post The Upside of the Downward Trend in College Enrollment appeared first on Education Next.

Of Course There’s Tracking in High Schools. Get Over It.

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 15:05:54 +0000

Recently, I wrote about the vast distance between our rhetoric and reality on career and technical education. Despite our oft-voiced enthusiasm for “multiple pathways,” we force almost all high school students through what’s essentially a college-prep track. Instead, I argued, we should reserve that route for students “who like school and are good at it,” and let kids with other strengths focus on career preparation. Yet in virtually every state, numerous and exacting academic course requirements (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) make it virtually impossible for high school students to spend much time doing real work-based training.

As expected, I was attacked for calling for a return to 1950’s-style tracking. To my surprise, however, even my colleague and mentor Checker Finn criticized me on those grounds! In last week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, he charged me with taking a “Back to the Future” approach.

And you know what? I’m guilty as charged, at least on some counts.

No, I don’t want to go back to the old way, whereby The System decided who could take college-prep courses, and who should “work with their hands.”

And hell no, I don’t want The System making those decisions based on the color of students’ skin or their zip code.

But do I think there should be tracking in American high schools? Yes. More to the point, tracking in our high schools is simply a fact and we would do well to stop pretending otherwise or believing that it could be any other way. At the very least, we should allow for diverging paths after the tenth grade. We also need to completely rethink our approach for our lowest-performing kids.

Consider this: According to the latest (pre-pandemic) data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between the 10th and 90th percentiles of public school students in eighth grade reading was 96 points (on a 0–500 scale). In rough numbers, that equates to six grade levels. Math is even worse, at 101 points. So some kids enter high school at a fifth-grade level, others at an eleventh-grade level. Does anyone think we can effectively teach students with such extreme degrees of academic preparation (or lack thereof) in the same classroom and serve them well? Or that we can’t predict which group is likely heading for success in college and which is going to need to get a job after high school, whether immediately or when they flame out of college?

So, yes, high schools track students. It’s a practice, by the way, that a recent American Compass survey found is overwhelmingly popular with parents of all socioeconomic groups—which helps explains the fierce political reaction when policymakers go on the warpath against the advanced track, as we saw recently in Virginia.

* * *

In the 50s-era “James Bryant Conant High School,” as Checker called it, there were four tracks: “It had Honors, for those who thought they might want to go to Duke or Wellesley,” Checker explained. “It had College Prep for those who wanted to go to the state school nearby. It had Voc-Ed for those who were heading for a trade. And then it had something called the General Track…and frankly [those students] weren’t prepared for anything when they came out of high school.” (Of course, back then, many of the General Track students never made it to high school graduation, since they dropped out long before, and often found an acceptable job anyway.)

All these years later, after decades of “de-tracking” policies and the like, we’ve really just collapsed those four tracks into three:

The Honors Track. This one remains, largely untouched, though in many high schools it now features a heavy load of AP and IB course-taking, and happily serves a larger number of students. That’s because of reforms to encourage more schools to create AP programs, efforts to reduce the gatekeeping to those courses, and the growth of the American upper-middle class, which is who’s most obsessed with getting their kids into (and able to afford) selective and highly selective colleges, even those far from home. High school course requirements are generally not a problem for the students in this track because they would take four years of most academic courses anyway. Let’s estimate that this track now serves about 20 percent of all students.
The College and Career Ready Track. Here’s where the big change has happened. In essence, we’ve tried to collapse the old College Prep track and the old Voc-Ed track into one. And in some respects that’s for good reason, since we’ve learned that the technical jobs of today generally require at least some postsecondary education, and that means getting students to a relatively high level of preparation in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as various social and emotional skills that are valued in the modern workplace. As I wrote two weeks ago, though, we’ve loaded up students’ schedules with so many academic course requirements that we’ve squeezed out most of the time that could be spent doing technical training. So the students in this track really do mostly college prep, sometimes including a handful of AP, IB, or dual-enrollment courses, while perhaps also taking a few CTE courses as electives. This track serves the mass of students—probably about half—generally those from the 30th to the 80th percentile of achievement nationally.
The Credit Recovery Track. Of course we don’t call it that, but we should. Students in this track are often enrolled in “on level” courses, but that’s a ruse. These are the kids entering high school with very low levels of academic preparation, who struggle through their academic course requirements, racking up a lot of failure along the way. Unlike the old General Track, most of these students stay in school—a success of sorts, and the result of state policies that hold schools and districts accountable for boosting graduation rates. But since many of these students were so ill-prepared to start with, we’ve had to invent workarounds, especially credit recovery programs of dubious value (except perhaps to the for-profit companies reaping juicy financial rewards, and administrators who used it to boost their graduation numbers), plus grading “reforms” that make it easier for students to earn passing grades. None of which helps these students, and it probably devalues the high school diploma to boot. I’d estimate that 30 percent of American high schoolers are in this track; that’s about the number that NAEP deems to be “below basic” in math (32 percent) and reading (28 percent) coming out of the eighth grade.

To be sure, today’s system is in some ways an improvement over yesterday’s. Collapsing the College Prep and Voc-Ed tracks means that more students are pushed toward high-level work, surely a good thing. Dual enrollment, at least when properly done, seems to show particular promise in getting more kids onto a pathway toward college. Efforts to help kids earn technical credentials while still in high school are also encouraging.

But there are trade-offs, too. It means we don’t give students the time to do bona fide career training while still in high school, the kind we see in Austria and Germany, where their equivalent of juniors and seniors might spend virtually all day in apprenticeships or technical courses. Are we so sure that career-minded students are better off spending their time taking Spanish, Fine Arts, and English IV than, say, interning at a hospital center or first-rate restaurant kitchen or electronics plant? A better approach is the one embraced by Maryland’s Kirwan commission, whereby students who demonstrate mastery of key college and career ready skills at the end of the tenth grade are allowed to proceed to either true college prep or real career training. That would split the College and Career Ready track into two again—but after tenth grade.

My biggest concern, though, is with what I’m calling the Credit Recovery track. Yes, it’s good that most of these kids aren’t dropping out. They are safe and warm and fed and cared for in high school, and are off the streets. That’s no small thing. But I wonder whether the approach we’ve backed into is the best we can do—which is to have students experience a lot of failure, then make them click through a bunch of boring computer-based make-up programs, and finally hand them a diploma they can hardly read, with no plan or training for what happens the day after graduation.

I’ll explore other options in a future post.

What’s undeniable is that we continue to track kids, and until and unless we send many more kids into high school at much higher levels of achievement, we’re going to continue to track kids until the end of time, whether or not we admit that that’s what we’re doing. The only real question is what the tracks look like, and where they head. The sooner we’re honest about that, the better.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The post Of Course There’s Tracking in High Schools. Get Over It. appeared first on Education Next.