In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) released A Nation at Risk (ANAR), which issued a wake-up call, named the state of US education a crisis, and presented thirty recommendations for action. It bears noting that the Commission’s recommendations were targeted in focus and scope, leaving the prevailing “one best” district-based education model intact. We will never know whether larger-scaled interventions were considered or not. Whatever the genesis, the final recommendations left education policymakers with an organizational checklist, and as the essays in this series have demonstrated, they responded accordingly.

A Nation at Risk + 40 brought together twelve exceptional scholars and thought leaders to review the nation’s response to the Commission’s challenge. At the outset of this research collaboration, compiling the record of forty years of school improvement efforts and summarizing the available evidence of their respective impacts on student outcomes appeared straightforward, if even a bit tedious. It turned out to be anything but that.

Each of the twelve essays fulfilled its assignment. In each strand of investigation, the authors documented the evolution of improvement activity and —where it exists — described the degree to which the efforts paid off. On its own, every one of the essays makes an important contribution to our ongoing national conversation about the critical state of the public K–12 education sector. While we make no claim that the scope of inquiry was definitive, the separate reviews cover billions of dollars in major programs and initiatives pursued by districts, states, and philanthropy. Many of these initiatives were incentivized by Congress and span Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. Our authors offer their own recommendations that, if followed, hold promise to improve conditions in the spheres they examined.

The research collaborative delivered an even more valuable asset, as the result is far more than the sum of the parts. Until the essays were gathered into a collection, the aggregate record of attempts to improve the K–12 education system in the United States was uncharted and unrecognized. We know of no other compilation that illuminates the sheer breadth of reform activity.

For the first time, we can compare the impacts across different areas of investment. Beyond this, taking the full collection as a whole augments the strand-specific recommendations with several crosscutting observations to inform future action.

What did we do?

There can be no dispute that, as a nation, we certainly tried hard to fix the problem. Practically speaking, we addressed every node that was mentioned by the Commission and several that weren’t. It is remarkable how doggedly educators, policy leaders, advocates, and funders have augmented policy and practice with interventions. The sheer volume and spread of reform efforts are worth examining, as they begin to shed light on the situation we currently face in public K–12 education.

Other scholars (Hattie 2023) have used evaluations and other research to rank the impact on student performance of various reforms. The impact estimates are drawn from a vast collection of meta analyses, yielding a super-meta-analysis that rank-orders reported results across different interventions. The rankings are widely interpreted as the definitive, adjudicated, and authoritative guide to improving student performance. In statehouses, state education agencies, and school districts, the rankings have taken on mythic proportions in guiding policy decisions about school improvement.

It is easy to see the appeal. The aim is noble, and the appetite is intense. Sadly, deeper inquiry into the rankings shows significant problems with the work: the desire to be expansive sits in tension with the need to apply stringent criteria about which meta-analyses are fed into the rankings. We learned that the underlying quality of the reform interventions themselves and the rigor of the research about their effects varied widely. To illustrate with a hypothetical: in the rankings, one thousand low-quality interventions with medium-strength evidence receive higher weight than one hundred high-quality interventions with a high-quality evaluation.

The concerns go beyond the problem of the quality of evidence. The implication for policymaking and educator practice is that the rankings encourage devotion to one or two marginal adjustments to schooling at the expense of lower-ranked options. The greatest risk lies in overlooking emerging successes for years until the next update to the rankings occurs.

Wishing to avoid a similar result, we chose a different approach to exploring the body of evidence. Beyond the notable volume of reform efforts attempted over the past forty years, it is useful to consider the points of the system that the various reforms were designed to change. This is important because many of the checklist items from ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s recommendations aim at strengthening only one facet of the K–12 system, and the Commission did not offer recommendations on mixing, matching, or stacking multiple reform efforts.

The stability of the basic model of US K–12 public education over four decades is advantageous for our purposes because it supports a generalized theory of action, sometimes called a “logic model.” Theories of action specify the types of capital, staffing, and other resources that are needed to provide K–12 education. Theories of action also detail the policies and practices that are followed. Inputs and processes combine to produce a near-term result referred to as “outputs.” The eventual value of the results is identified as “outcomes.” With this lens, we classify the policies, programs, and initiatives discussed by the essay authors in order to learn about the targets and yields of reform activity. To be clear, some improvement efforts span our classification categories (e.g., some professional development includes input and process features); these are assigned by their most prevalent attributes.

Our authors are highly sensitive to the availability and caliber of research and evaluation. In many areas, such as public school choice and inclusion of master teachers in educator preparation programs, no evidence exists. In other areas, impact information is hindered by studies involving few examples, fuzzy specifications, or weak counterfactuals. Evaluative studies of school-based health centers and socio-emotional learning are examples where evidence of impact is lacking. The field of impact studies has evolved in constructive ways, but it still hinges critically on a weak commitment to objective assessment of impacts and the discipline to incorporate the insights into practice.

Inputs

A preponderance of the improvement efforts identified by the authors sought to adjust the inputs used by the education system. These include teacher-focused efforts such as alternative certification and incentive pay arrangements, adding school-based health centers, strengthening early childhood programs, and overhauling curriculum. System-focused input changes seek to expand the variety of inputs or the overall structure of the system, whereas marginal input reforms seek to improve the quality of the selective resources within the existing stock.

Taken together, these efforts aimed to enrich the ingredients in the “recipe” for K–12 education. Focusing reform attention on adjusting the quantity, quality, or intensity of a factor before it is used keeps the reform at arm’s length from the actual production of education. Think of upgrading tires on a race car — the improvement to the equipment takes place offline and then is brought online in the hopes of improved performance.

The evidence shows that the range of impacts for inputs-focused reforms run from zero to as much as three-quarters of a year of additional achievement for students. About half the input reforms have negligible or no effect on student academic achievement. The options that show no impact share the attribute of shallow or isolated treatment—a few hours of professional development or play-based preschool. For both system-focused and marginal input reforms, positive results point to interventions that have significant weight, scale, and duration to create and sustain the momentum for change. As examples, we see this in the small-schools movement (systems focused) and in laser-focused teacher professional development (marginal adjustments).

Input reforms assume that the rest of the system will respond organically to the change in the treated input. As the evidence shows, many efforts provided too little leverage to lift the rest of the operation. Worse, an exclusive input focus ignores the possible interactions with other components that may react in different ways than expected.

Processes

Process reforms aim to change the way education is created, delivered, and monitored by schools and their oversight bodies. To extend the recipe analogy, processes are the mixing and cooking instructions. Marginal process reforms attempt to mix inputs in new ways or interact inputs with new policies or protocols. Systemwide process changes try to ubiquitously reengineer old ways of doing things to produce better results, such as the experience of adopting the IMPACT teacher evaluation and compensation initiative in Washington, DC, or implementing a digital learning platform across all the middle schools in a district.

Given the challenges of designing and implementing new programs, it is little wonder that our authors found fewer process reform examples in their scans. Across the essays, the authors identified three general areas of process reforms.

Teacher professional development falls largely into the process category—selected areas of knowledge and skills are targeted to expand the capacity of teachers to perform their duties. This differs from input reforms, which are directed toward improving the number or quality of candidates at the point of hiring. The available evidence suggests that for much of the past forty years, there was little or no effect from a large proportion of professional development. Recent evidence, however, shows positive impacts when the programs are strictly focused, multifaceted, and sustained, producing between one and four months of extra achievement.

Incentive programs for higher teacher performance have strong impacts on student academic achievement for their duration, from about two months to an extra year of added achievement. However, these impacts are largely one sided; they did not induce low-performing teachers to move up or move out. Rather, they provided financial and work assignment flexibility incentives for teachers. Similar programs that trade extra compensation for teaching in the most challenging settings also produce strong student gains of similar magnitudes. Both types of reforms are highly vulnerable to political disruption at all points of the program, especially if teachers’ participation requires evaluation of their performance.

Technology adoptions can also be classified as process reforms. Once technology has been purchased and distributed, it serves a process function. The evidence of impact from the broad provision of education technologies has, for the most part, been disappointing, showing no impact and substantial stranding of investments. Despite that general trend, however, a number of significant and strongly positive examples of technology-supported education have emerged as promising proof points.

The third area of process reforms occurs at the governance level of the system. Since ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s release, states have changed the way they fill key positions on their boards of education and within the Council of Chief State School Officers. The change in appointment mechanisms is a process change whose influence is systemwide. Likewise, changes in district school boards to a portfolio management model also flow across the district system. The evidence on these governance changes has been mixed.

It is clear that important differences exist between systemwide process changes and those that are marginal in nature. Some process reforms can work only if introduced systemwide, such as adoption of student safety protocols or school-based disciplinary programs; a “half a loaf” approach won’t work. Alternatively, marginal process change can be narrow in scope, in terms of either the focus of the reform or the organizational level that is targeted. Pilot programs are a clear example. In marginal process reforms, the rest of the schooling equation remains untouched. The balance between systems and marginal processes can shift either way depending on the interplay of cost, the scope of the planned innovation, friction with adjacent policies or practices, and political resistance.

Moreover, estimating the effects of process changes is technically and practically more difficult than measuring the effects of input shifts. The interactions of new processes with other factors and their dynamic nature over time create complexity that is difficult to measure. The body of evidence is therefore smaller than exists for input-focused changes. New instructional models such as discovery or expeditionary learning are process changes. The evidence on these is thin, except for personalized learning modalities, which show strongly positive effects on learning gains and graduation rates.

Likewise, the expansion of technology — equipment, connectivity, and content—in schools is a process change that has altered the way curriculum and instruction are organized and deployed. The impacts are sobering: unused resources cannot advance learning, but where strong implementation occurs, we also see improved student academic achievement.

The final set of process changes can be grouped as “infusion” efforts. Extended school years appear not to improve student results, but additional time in focused instruction helps; the extra time matters only if it is used well. Similarly, teacher and leader professional learning programs are seen as a mixed bag. As with extra time in school, the evidence shows that focused and targeted experience can produce positive impacts on student learning, but those conditions do not appear to be the norm.

Although they have a smaller evidence base, process reforms deal with larger segments of the education enterprise than inputs. Those that work share the attribute of internal design coherence, even if they do not fit well into the rest of the system. Finally, the larger the process reform, the more of a political target it offers to opponents.

Outputs

When we consider the near-term results of elementary and secondary education or the milestones on the way to reach these results, we are discussing outputs. These are the immediate products that reflect the end state that inputs and processes have created. In K–12 education, common outputs include meeting learning benchmarks for grade promotion, satisfying graduation requirements, and implementing performance measures for teachers and leaders. It bears noting that outputs are agnostic to inputs and processes: many combinations are possible to create a particular output.

Systems-oriented improvement efforts have been judged by both outputs and outcomes. In Cami Anderson’s essay on the results of districtwide reform strategies in Newark, New Jersey (chapter 12), early childhood enrollment increases of 35 percentage points were one output. Another was the rise of 20 points in the percent of Black students enrolled in above-average schools, followed by significant early gains in reading achievement and eventual gains in math. Ironically, the impressive improvements in Newark were not tallied to be a successful outcome, largely because of friction in the community and with elected leaders. Similar efforts under the US Department of Education School Improvement Program did not create positive results.

There are other examples of reforms that aim to change outputs. Redirecting school board activity to prioritize academics and student learning has been shown to produce positive movement on outcome measures for schools and districts.

The largest efforts to move outputs of elementary and secondary schooling lie in the national adoption of accountability programs. The consequential approach to school-based accountability advanced by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) improved learning by one half per year of student achievement and narrowed achievement gaps between groups of students. High school graduation rates increased by 15 percentage points with concomitant increases in college enrollments. These improvement trends persisted through 2015, but they have all but reversed over the past eight years, with student learning falling dramatically over the course of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Other efforts to affect teacher preparation programs also looked at outputs, but to no avail: current teacher certification exams are unable to predict future variations in teachers’ performance once they are in the classroom. Other common indicators, such as academic credentials or years of experience (also inputs), are similarly disconnected from future teacher performance.

Finally, some reform activities deliberately circumvent mainstream institutions and channels in an attempt to create better outputs. Extra-system initiatives can take the form of inputs or processes, or they can combine the two. Some options that have shown positive impacts for student results include mayoral control (significant gains in achievement and better fiscal controls) and gubernatorial appointment of state board members (better performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments).

As noted by other scholars, school choice can arise within, across, or outside of school systems (Lake 2020). Intradistrict school choice redistributes seats in schools by changing the way students are assigned to schools; it aims to improve the outputs for the students who access better classrooms. As a process reform, it is associated with stronger achievement in math for minority students. Interdistrict choice is rare, and its effects are not well studied. Charter schools operate in a separate policy stream and deliver stronger growth and achievement in reading and math, especially in urban charter school networks (CREDO 2023). For vouchers, the impact for students on balance has not been positive; the evidence on vouchers shows weaker achievement for enrolled students even as they create positive spillover impacts on public schools. Other efforts that move outside the usual institutional arrangements are less understood. Newer options such as education savings accounts (ESAs) and microschools have yet to be examined in depth.

Outcomes

In an education theory of action, outcomes are the final results of the entire enterprise. Outcomes differ from outputs because they apply external standards and criteria to the nominal outputs to make judgments about what is “good enough.” So, while outputs may be expressed as test scores, CTE credentials, or course completions, when we apply evaluation standards such as postsecondary readiness, we are making judgments about the performance that was produced.

Since ANAR was released, we have gained clarity, if not conviction, about what we intend our schools to produce. Performance frameworks that illustrate the results that stakeholders deem desirable have grown in number and complexity. Across the country, charter school authorizers and state and local school boards use performance frameworks as central elements of school and district oversight and accountability. Newer examples of our collective expectations are seen in the work in some states to define the profile of a graduate, setting explicit criteria for what a high school diploma should represent.

By law, every state reports publicly on how its students and schools are performing. State-issued “report cards” for districts and schools generally include demographic information for teachers and students, operational and financial information, and student academic performance information. States set thresholds for student and school performance expectations, though these thresholds vary a lot. Whatever their aspirations, we are not in vastly different territory today than in 1983. Disappointing outcomes (e.g., high school math performance) have even prompted attempts to improve the optics by diluting some of the criteria (such as watering down the instructional frameworks or course requirements), but such maneuvers do nothing to alter the underlying reality.

Insights from the audience

As Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Indeed, the staggering array of treatments, interventions, redesigns, and innovations that our authors identified makes it a challenge to rationalize our collective experience into any semblance of order. If we had aimed for chaos at the outset, it is hard to imagine a better result.

Despite the cacophony, the catalog of activity amassed by the authors supports a few observations about our forty-year effort to reform that hold potential for illuminating future directions for elementary and secondary education in our country. After identification, we can characterize the record of reform efforts with six I’s: impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent, and ineffective, as discussed below.

Impulsive

Most of the reforms were adopted at full scale—across an entire state or the nation. Many efforts to push programs across states or regions had roots in advocacy pressure to move reforms quickly. Many state leaders were game to bring new policies to their state if they were perceived as having been successful elsewhere, as it reduced the perception of risk and provided an existing model to copy.

Doing the “here, too” dance hobbled the new adopters in two ways. It skipped over analysis of the “fit” of the reform in the local context—and the important variation in local contexts — on the receiving end. It is impossible in hindsight to determine how many of the “mixed result” outcomes stemmed from differences in the settings on the ground, but it seems safe to say local contours were likely overlooked as most of the programs or policies were advanced. It is also true that jurisdiction-wide adoption curtailed the ability to evaluate implementation and impacts in real time, so valuable learning was lost at the get-go.

Incremental

The most pervasive attribute is the incremental nature of the interventions. This stems in part from the original recommendations of the ANAR Commission, framed as commonsensical and achievable changes. The commitment to incrementalism continued even when earlier efforts proved ineffective. One might argue that it made sense to aim small to soften implementation friction. The record suggests otherwise. Because the interventions were mostly narrowly focused, not only did they lack the scope or initial scale necessary to drive needed system changes, but in their sheer volume—so many reforms in so many areas—they led to a reform fatigue that lasts to this day.

It is important to note that the essays identified examples of successful reform that did not involve incremental adjustments. Systemwide efforts as described for Newark and new systems building as seen with charter schools have larger blueprints and therefore greater areas for change.

Incoherent

A third observation is that most of the changes undertaken over the past decades were launched with no consideration for how the reform would interact with the rest of the K–12 system. Changes to piece parts were designed and adopted as autonomous endeavors. This partially explains why many innovations fail to scale effectively.

This does not mean that things were only tried one at a time. Many examples exist of multiple incremental reforms launched simultaneously without an understanding of the interplay between them or with the rest of the equation. Reforms were “bolted on,” one after another, without regard for how they fit together. And each one that was added “diluted” the impact of the others. The resulting lack of coherence often led to unintended consequences that were never even considered, much less planned for.

One important implication of incoherence is a lost opportunity to ensure that stakeholders — especially the ground-level personnel—function with an understanding of the way the system works and how they belong in it; a well-crafted plan of action can provide that. A second implication is that it is difficult to objectively learn from experience, especially from unsuccessful ventures. When the general model is unorganized, it is hard to assign causality, for example, between lack of implementation fidelity of a sound design and a design that does not fit the context it is meant to improve.

Impatient

A separate issue that permeates the essays is the (often unstated) expectation that improvement efforts produce large demonstrable results almost immediately and without regard to the time requirements of the change being made. Changes to organizational culture need to occur rapidly, but other changes take time. Shifts in instructional methods often require more than a single year to stabilize enough to know how well they work. Incorporating new systems such as new-teacher onboarding can take even longer to reveal their true value and impact.

The expectation of quick results creates multiple harms. It doesn’t give the good parts time to take root or provide the space to iterate toward success. Moreover, it seeds unrealistic expectations about the diligence needed to give new approaches their due. From a political vantage, it gives the doubters and pouters a head start on declaring new reforms a failure. It also contributes to the “carousel,” as one teacher described it: “I don’t have to do anything but wait—in three years there will be something new.”

Compounding the problem, the governance side of the equation needs strong and enduring leadership to be patient with complicated, multifaceted reform efforts and to plan and invest for the long term. Even if the enabling conditions are understood and a proven scaling strategy is in place—such as with charter management organizations—when the reform in question needs ten to twenty years to come to fruition, rapid turnover cycles of education leaders lose important institutional knowledge, and politicians are short on patience (or incentive) to see it through.

All too often, the time needed to see results is longer than the amount of time politicians have in their seats, and it does not line up with the cyclical campaign and election cycle. Shortrun wins are coveted by political actors seeking to establish a record of success on which to build advancement. The bias toward quick returns and the lack of political will or appetite to invest in long-run solutions have a serious trickle-down effect: (1) a constant churn of reform that does not give space or time to realize success and (2) systems that learn to wait out the current wave of reforms, as “this, too, shall pass.” When the need for improvement is glaring but the actors in legislatures and education agencies prioritize their own short-run interests, we face compound system failure.

Intransigent

The authors carefully identified examples of reforms that produced positive student learning impacts, but many were subject to political interference or failed to perform at scale. Still, the examples show what may be possible. What they do not show is the complementing picture of the myriad reforms that went nowhere and evaporated into history. There is no tally of their number.

But anecdotal reports have consistently told the story of reform churn. Charles Payne’s phrase, “So much reform, so little change,” seems to apply. Instead of forty years of sustained and coherent reform, we have forty short-run reforms that each last three years. School teams are introduced to new practices during the professional development days that accompany the start of school each fall, with short windows of time to prepare for deployment and little implementation support during the year. The school teams learn about impacts indirectly — and often too late to try modifications. Decisions about continuing or terminating the effort usually do not include input from those on the front line. More often than not, new initiatives are quietly abandoned, with the cycle left to repeat itself the following year.

It is notable that, despite this endless churn of reforms, the prevailing institutional structure of “SEA, LEA school board, district administration, school leadership, grade/class grouping, teacher” remains largely unchanged, despite repeated pressures on it to adapt. The possibility exists that the summative effect of all the efforts over the years has fostered a resiliency to any improvement efforts—an adaptive state of resistance to change of its core activities. It may help to explain the tendency to shift focus to other facets of students, teachers, or teaching where ground may be more fertile for positive experience. There is no way to test this idea empirically, but it fits the pattern of the evidence and explains the abundant cynicism and burnout.

Ineffective

The strongest case for learning from our experience lies in our national trends on student performance. Given the authors’ reports, it is little wonder that, even before the blow to student learning of COVID-19 school closures, the long-run reports noted that US student performance was stagnant or in decline.

Two considerations help to explain our current state. Part of the problem is that, apart from formal pilots, most reforms launch without considering how to learn from them. We are seriously underresourced across the sector in measuring local conditions and reform effectiveness.

In addition, even after forty years, the system has significant internal inconsistency—it lacks a “unified theory” of how reform should be done. This essay collection recounts how many reforms were launched without a sufficient discussion of which level of the system (e.g., state, district, school) might be the most effective to lead the transformation efforts.

Conclusion

We face an even more daunting challenge today, which is that forty years of reform have exhausted everyone involved. The one thing we may have conclusively proven is that the system, as presently constituted, has been resilient to reforms at scale. A modern ANAR report might not fall on deaf ears—the need for school reform is real—but it would fall on ears that are tired of hearing about it.

What is clear is that we have a thin collection of reforms that have been shown to work and that can scale. None of the proven reforms seek to integrate with other proven reforms to concentrate their success. The larger the scale of innovation/reform, the larger the political target it presents for opponents of change.

What we do have is an impressive record of what not to do. We can’t assume that ideas that have been proven effective in one setting will be effective in every setting. We can’t expect change at the margins (no matter how well they are done) to be able to leverage an entire school model. We can’t impose reforms that ignore how the change affects other parts of the enterprise. We should accept these lessons as a form of learning in itself and perhaps the best final message of this exercise. Drawing on the six I’ —impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent, and ineffective—may provide lodestars by which to assess new proposals toward more effective approaches to delivering strong education to our nation’s students.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

First, for chronically low-performing systems, policymakers can disrupt the “district as monopoly” education provider by pursuing a portfolio management model (PMM) strategy that takes districts out of the business of running schools and instead has them provide performance-based oversight in a diverse ecosystem of regulated, but still autonomous, schools of choice. While charter, magnet, and traditional district-run public schools would all be free to pursue their own strategies, they would only be permitted to continue operating in the ecosystem if they meet agreed-upon performance objectives.

Finally, all districts can and should adopt a series of commonsense governance reforms that more tightly link political accountability to student-centered outcomes: (1) establishing on-cycle and nonstaggered school board elections; (2) providing more transparency about student outcomes timed to coincide with election cycles; and (3) creating mechanisms to change district leadership when students perpetually fail to improve.

• America’s one-size-fits-all school governance system is outdated and ineffective.

• School districts should provide oversight for schools using a variety of strategies to reach agreed-upon educational objectives.

• Electoral success should be linked to student-centered outcomes.

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

Despite its bold rhetoric and urgent call for action, A Nation at Risk (ANAR) notably said nothing about reforming “education governance”—the institutions and actors empowered to decide which education policies will (and will not) be put into practice. Nonetheless, shortly after the landmark report ignited a wave of reforms across the states, it became clear to many observers that the nation’s governance system—known colloquially, if not derisively, as the one best system—makes it exceedingly difficult to enact reforms that improve student learning at scale.

For example, in their pathbreaking book Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe presaged their indictment of public education at the end of the 1980s by noting: “[The one best system] is so thoroughly taken for granted that it virtually defines what Americans mean by democratic governance of the public schools. At its heart are the school district and its institutions of democratic control: the school board, the superintendent, and the district office.” Thirty years later, America remains wedded to this same system, one in which the school district is a sacred cow that often serves the interests of adults more than students. Even the most committed and visionary reformer will make little headway when constrained by a political system that makes it easier for reform opponents to defeat bold ideas and uphold the status quo.

The simple truth is that the actors who occupy and benefit from our current political institutions have a vested interest in perpetuating the existence of those crusty institutions irrespective of their performance behind the wheel. “It is tempting to think that the public schools must be different somehow,” Moe explains. “Their purpose, after all, is to educate children. So it might seem that everyone would want what is best for kids and would agree to change the system . . . [to] make sure it is performing effectively. But this is a Pollyannaish view that has little to do with reality.”

Irrespective of their virtues in other contexts, federalism and localism in K–12 education have evolved to produce a governance system that, due to special-interest capture, is neither responsive to consumers (families and students) nor accountable for producing results. As Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli argue, this one best system offers the “worst of both worlds.” “On one hand, district-level power constrains individual schools; its standardizing, bureau- cratic, and political force ties the hands of principals, keeping them from doing what is best for their pupils with regard to budget, staffing, and curriculum. On the other, local control [as practiced in the united States] is not strong enough to clear the obstacles that state and federal governments place before reform-minded board members and superintendents in the relatively few situations where these can even be observed.”

Why is the united States saddled with this patchwork quilt system of school governance? With some simplification, it all boils down to a historical accident followed by a combination of what political scientists call policy diffusion and path dependence (a fancy term for institutional stickiness). Most notably, the key developments that brought and then locked the current system into place had everything to do with adult concerns and very little (if anything) to do with designing a coherent education system to best serve kids. Political scientist Vladimir Kogan outlines the “bottom-up” origins of the first key development — US education’s commitment to governance that is local and diffuse rather than centralized and coherent:

In much of the developed world, schools are typically overseen by centralized national agencies. [The uS] model is largely a historical artifact, dating back to the first public- education law adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. As evident from the law’s title, the Old Deluder Satan Act [1647], it was the moral concerns of adults, rather than a desire to address the holistic educational needs of children, that mainly drove the public-school effort The Massachusetts law, which charged local government with the responsibility for funding and operating local schools so kids would become literate enough to read the Bible, was copied across the country in one of the earliest examples of what political scientists now call policy diffusion.

Later, in the early twentieth century (1890–1930), the moral concerns that Kogan highlights here were superseded by more modern, secular ones: leaning on public schools to assimilate immi- grants and prepare workers for a second wave of industrialization. Governance experts Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim deftly summarize the most important changes that accompanied this latter development, the ones that ultimately gave us the one best system that we have today:

Progressive Era reformers sought to rationalize and centralize control of the system. . . . They hoped to create more capable schools—better than the fragmented one-room schoolhouses that dotted the rural landscape and less political than the patronage-driven system that dominated urban centers. Thus emerged the local education agency (lEA). The core of an lEA was an elected school board with power to make most [education] decisions and a bureaucracy largely staffed by professional educators. The lEA was insulated from normal local politics by off-cycle nonpartisan elections. . . . [This] rationalized system . . . gave way to a larger and politically fragmented system in the second half of the 20th century. laws to encourage and broaden the scope of collective bargaining among public sector employees . . . greatly strengthened teachers’ unions.

One final development warrants a brief mention: the district consolidation movement. As Christopher Berry and Martin West document, between 1930 and 1970, the nation’s tiny one- room schoolhouses were steadily supplanted by the age-graded schools we know today. This shift, Kogan explains, “necessitated consolidation into larger school systems, moving the locus of political control from boards overseeing individual schools to districtwide bodies [lEAs].” Ultimately, the nation eliminated one hundred thousand districts, and consolidated lEAs became larger bureaucracies. What did all this mean for students? Berry and West found that “although larger districts were associated with modestly [better student outcomes], any gains from the consolidation of districts . . . were far outweighed by the harmful effects of larger schools.”

The key point in all of this is that the forging of education governance in the united States was, as Kogan emphatically states, “not intentionally designed with student academic out- comes in mind and has become less local (and perhaps less democratic) over time.” In other words, largely through historical happenstance, today we are saddled with the worst of both worlds: a system that is neither especially responsive to community (and especially parental) concerns nor efficient at ensuring that system leaders prioritize student learning outcomes.

The aim of this chapter is straightforward: to assess what the education community has learned since ANAR about the challenges to good governance and the most promising solu- tions for reform. The chapter proceeds in four parts. I first summarize the major political obstacles that have kept a lid on education reform in the united States. After laying out these challenges, I discuss some of the governance reforms that have been tried and what the scholarly evidence says about how those efforts have fared. The third section of the chapter condenses the research into some lessons for policymakers who are considering different governance changes. Since America’s students cannot afford to wait for politicians to con- struct the perfect governance system from scratch (an impossible task), the chapter con- cludes with two types of recommendations for how state and local policymakers can move toward more student-centered governance systems: (1) an ambitious alt-governance frame- work well suited to troubled districts that need immediate and dramatic turnaround, followed by (2) a more modest set of reforms that are likely to do no harm and some reasonable amount of good in most any district. The guiding ethos in both sets of recommendations is the belief that enough lessons have been learned about governance in the intervening years since ANAR to identify a set of best practices for adopting political structures that incentivize the adults in districts and buildings to put student outcomes at the center of policymaking and day-to-day decision-making.

Before proceeding, the reader should be aware of two scope conditions. First, because of their relative fiscal contribution (large) and their central role in implementing policy on the ground, governance issues related to state and (especially) the local school district (rather than the federal government) are the primary concern addressed in the chapter. Second, when discussing problems and solutions, the chapter starts with the point that improving student academic outcomes is the central purpose of public education and that other values and “community interests” are of secondary importance. Focusing on how governance can enhance (or impede) reforms intended to bolster student learning outcomes is consistent with the spirit of the goals of ANAR (student achievement) and the public’s primary concern with their schools. With these two caveats out of the way, let us turn to discuss the many challenges of America’s traditional model of school governance, better known as the “one best system.”

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

The excellence movement that arose out of ANAR had two primary objectives: to raise stu- dent achievement and to close performance gaps between poor and advantaged students. As is well illustrated by the other chapters in this series, while the federal report helped drive education reforms in several different areas (often with mixed results), all these efforts faced a common hurdle: overcoming political resistance and governance challenges.

While all reforms faced these challenges, two proposals garnered outsized political resistance: school choice and consequential accountability. This is hardly surprising. As Terry Moe explains, “The two great education reform movements of the modern era, the movements for accountability and for school choice, are attempts to transform the traditional structure of the American education system—and the changes they pursue are threatening to the [teachers’] unions’ vested interests.” Since ANAR, the choice and accountability move- ments’ most significant political victories have been (1) the rapid expansion of charter schooling (1990–present) and (2) the consequential test-based federal accountability regime that endured during the Bush and Obama presidencies (2002–2015).

A complete assessment of the impact of these policies on student learning is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, research has shown that both choice and accountability reforms can improve student achievement and promote education opportunity for under- served kids but that success has often been uneven and difficult to sustain, especially at a statewide (let alone national) scale. For example, the demise of consequential test-based accountability and the difficulty of increasing the number of high-quality school choice options (e.g., charter schools) can both be traced to major shortcomings in the policies and practices of our traditional system of K–12 governance and politics. Three persistent challenges stand out.

ADULTS ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED TO PRIORITIZE STUDENT OUTCOMES

First, the current governance system does little to nothing to ensure that education profession- als are sufficiently incentivized to prioritize student learning above all else. In 2009, for example, just four in ten superintendents surveyed by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) said that student learning was an “extremely important” factor in how they were evaluated by their school board employers. These results mirror a more recent analysis of North Carolina superintendent contracts that showed fewer than 5 percent of these agreements contain provisions to hold leaders “accountable for student achievement and attainment [outcomes].”

The failure of too many school boards to prioritize and focus on student outcomes is a wide- spread problem with tangible consequences. For example, one analysis of the NSBA data uncovered a strong relationship between a school district’s academic performance and the extent to which board members prioritized student achievement outcomes in their board work. Alarmingly, though, while two-thirds of school boards agree that “the current state of student achievement is unacceptable,” nine out of ten boards said that “defining success only in terms of student achievement is narrow and short-sighted . . . and one-third are ner- vous about placing ‘unreasonable expectations for student achievement in our schools.’” School districts send the wrong message (and the wrong incentives) to the education pro- fessionals they employ (e.g., teachers, superintendents) when they make student outcomes a secondary concern. Indeed, elected board governance may not work at all if boards aren’t held accountable by voters for learning outcomes or they don’t expect to be held account- able at the ballot box.

COORDINATING MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE IS A CHALLENGE

Everyone seems to acknowledge that K–12 governance has too many cooks in the kitchen such that “if everybody is in charge then no one is.” This “tangled web” of school gov- ernance challenges the public to hold any single entity or public official accountable and encourages political buck-passing. Unfortunately, this problem is inherent in our federal political system. Political scientist Patrick McGuinn refers to it as the 50/15,000/100,000 problem, noting: “We have fifty different state education systems which collectively contain approximately 15,000 school districts and almost 100,000 schools. While the uS now has clear national goals in education, it lacks a national system of education within which to pursue these goals, and the federal government can only indirectly attempt to drive reform through the grant-in-aid system.”

Uncle Sam tried to step up to the plate in 2002 with the federal No Child left Behind (NClB) law. By requiring that student performance outcomes be made public, the law was intended to put pressure—including electoral pressure—on school boards to either improve or face consequences. unfortunately, the devil was in the details, and federal accountability man- dates failed for two primary reasons. First, the law prioritized student academic proficiency over student learning gains (growth), leading many schools where students were improving to be classified as failing. Second, as political scientist Paul Manna has documented, NClB erred by taking the sound logic of public administration (management) theory and turning it on its head. For example, rather than have the principal (the federal government) set rigorous standards and free up the agents (states and local districts) to innovate and meet these stan- dards in creative ways, the law let states set their own standards while Washington dictated weak and specific consequences for failure.

Perhaps the problem is not so much too many cooks in the kitchen, but rather that the kitchen lacks thoughtful coordination, and we have not placed each cook at the station where they have a “comparative advantage.” For example, NClB was born out of a real problem whereby localities gave insufficient attention to (and often hid) poor academic outcomes and achieve- ment gaps, but the federal foray into accountability also served to remind us that localities are functionally needed to implement reform from afar. Yet, as previously noted, those localities are easily captured by vested interests, and they themselves have incentives to focus on maintaining their institutional existence rather than holding themselves to account. For example, under both NClB and Race to the Top (RttT), states and districts “took the easy way out,” rarely opting to impose the toughest forms of restructuring on themselves.

VESTED INTERESTS DOMINATE EDUCATION POLITICS

The third major obstacle to effective governance is the fact that too many adults—be they union leaders, school employees, administrators, colleges of education, or vendors—either benefit from existing K–12 policies and procedures or are reluctant to consider any reforms that may bring about changes that leave them materially worse off. Such opposition ensues even if proposed reforms could be shown to benefit student learning. Because vested inter- ests pursue concentrated occupational benefits whose costs are widely distributed, these actors tend to be more politically organized and influential than groups like parents, whose own connection to their public schools is transitory in nature. What’s more, the widespread use of nonpartisan off-cycle school board elections often ensures low voter turnout and a lack of robust competition among competing interests. This anemic electoral environment enables teachers’ unions to win seven out of every ten school board elections when they make an endorsement. The consequence: rather than management (school boards) representing parents and taxpayers by serving as a “check” on labor, the relationship becomes reversed, with management owing its very election and political survival to the employees it is supposed to hold accountable. This well-documented dynamic has been shown to lead directly to pro-union school boards that (1) agree to more restrictive collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), (2) authorize fewer charter schools, and (3) spend more on salaries with little to no improvement (and often worse outcomes) in student achievement gains.

Although they arguably face greater political competition in federal and state politics, teachers’ unions are still rated the top education lobby in most statehouses, limiting experimentation with choice and accountability, especially on issues related to teacher accountability and pay reform. Finally, teachers’ unions are not alone in opposing new approaches to public edu- cation outside of the traditional district delivery model. School board members (regardless of party) are far less enthusiastic about school choice and charter schooling than are parents and the public. yet many states still have charter school laws that either make boards the sole authorizer or limit growth through caps that unions and board associations lobby for in state law. All in all, the politics of education reform remain constrained by governing structures (formal and informal) that empower the producers of education (e.g., teachers’ unions, district central offices) at the expense of the consumers of it (parents and students).

ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

Looking back on the history of education in the united States, one can’t help but notice the governance pendulum swinging back and forth between decentralization and centralization. The hyper-localism that originated in the mid-1600s held sway until the turn of the twenti- eth century before yielding to the Progressives’ centralized and professionalized lEA. A few decades later, that bureaucratic one best system became a focal point of contention between teachers’ unions and minority communities in New york City who wanted more of a say in their kids’ schools—what they called “community control.” While the unions, led by then united Federation of Teachers (uFT) leader Albert Shanker, mostly won that battle and the primacy of the central office endured, by the 1980s advocates of a new strategy they called “site-based management” (SBM) were pinning their hopes on giving schools, rather than dis- tricts, more autonomy. When student outcomes again failed to improve in any meaningful way, especially in large urban districts, reformers once again saw potential in recentralizing, pur- suing alternatives to school board control through mayoral control of the district or through state takeovers. At the federal level, after promising for decades to “end federal meddling in our schools,” in the 2000s a Republican president embraced more centralized account- ability with NClB, ushering in a decade of bipartisan support for a test-based accountability regime overseen by Washington. After political and practical considerations rendered NClB unworkable, a new breed of school reformers focused on building “parallel” school systems, abandoned trying to bring political reform to the one best system itself, and turned their attention to expanding local autonomy linked to greater school choice (charter schooling). In some cases, such efforts have even included trying to partner with or reconstitute districts under a “portfolio” management model (PMM) that combines district accountability/oversight with local school autonomy/choice. Have any of these governance reforms worked, and if so, where and under what conditions?

SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT

The earliest efforts to rethink K–12 governance after ANAR were a series of “site-” or “school- based” management reforms that spread across several states (e.g., Kentucky) and cities (e.g., Chicago). It is difficult to provide a coherent definition of SBM because the specific changes implemented across states and districts that all claimed to be using “SBM prin- ciples” varied significantly. However, some common SBM themes that emerged at various implementation sites included decision-making councils at the school level rather than the district level, formal representation for stakeholders like parents and educators, and direct involvement in hiring building leaders and instructional staff.

SBM’s “theory of action” is that taking power away from central-office bureaucrats and giving more autonomy to school leaders (with input from educators and families) promotes innovative and customized solutions that result in more effective teaching and learning in buildings and classrooms. According to one estimate, as many as 30 percent of all US school districts tried some variation of SBM by 1990. However, little systematic evidence emerged to show that the SBM model—at least as it was put into practice—widely improved student learning outcomes across implementation sites at scale.43 To be clear, this is not because the idea of having local councils or providing greater autonomy to building leaders is wrongheaded. To the con- trary, a recent study from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) found that “schools with high-quality principals and student populations requiring atypical policy decisions [benefit] from more autonomy.” However, that analysis showed that leader quality is often the linchpin to making governance reforms work in practice. As the author of that CPS study concluded, “[school] autonomy should be granted to effective and motivated school leaders [but it may] lead to worse outcomes in settings with agency problems or low principal capacity.” In other words, successful governance reforms cannot rely solely on building better institutions. Better people (human capital) is a prerequisite to reaping the rewards of well-designed institutions.

Finally, retrospective evaluations of SBM reform frequently mention another challenge that inhibited success: the lack of political will in following through on authentically devolving power and autonomy to building leaders. In practice, many state and district leaders talked a big game about handing over decision-making authority through SBM but were subsequently unwilling to yield on big-ticket items (e.g., budgeting, hiring) when push came to shove or vested interests resisted. As Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim explain:

School boards and state governments may promise to give schools a great deal of freedom, but over time they take it away This first became evident with SBM. In the early 1990s, many districts encouraged schools to use time and money in novel ways. . . . Superintendents encouraged principals and teachers to think big, but no rules were changed. Schools were encouraged to think of new ways to organize teaching, but they were still bound by the collective bargaining agreement. That meant school leaders had little control over who was assigned to teach in the school and the kinds of work they could do. Schools were encouraged to use time and materials differently, buttheydid not control their budgets or make purchasing decisions. And so on. In any clash between school autonomy and actual practice, school leaders soon learned that for every freedom they were promised [under SBM], a rule existed that effectively took it away.

ALT-GOVERNANCE (MAYORAL CONTROL, STATE TAKEOVERS)

Because they are keenly aware of the linkage between education and economic growth in their states and cities, political executives like governors and mayors were often in the van- guard of the excellence movement right from the outset of ANAR. Frustrated with the outright failure of their cities’ largest school systems to improve academically, in the 1990s several mayors sought more authority in especially long-troubled districts (e.g., Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New york). The two primary approaches to robust executive involvement became state takeovers and mayoral control/involvement. While these alternative or “alt- governance” arrangements often involve different mechanisms, they share the common feature of removing or demoting elected school boards, either replacing them with a mayor- appointed board or relegating the board itself to have mere “consultative” status in lieu of policymaking authority. Importantly, in such cases, the district superintendent is chosen by and serves at the pleasure of the mayor—or in the case of takeover, the state education agency (SEA).

Mayoral control’s “theory of action” arises from the belief that political executives are more likely to focus on their political legacies (what’s best for their city) than parochial-minded legislators (e.g., school board members) who are more prone to single-issue interest-group capture. “Mayors,” Terry Moe explains, “are constantly in the public eye; they have larger, more diverse constituencies than school board members do; they have far more resources for wielding power; and they may decide to make their mark by reforming the local schools.” Additionally, one benefit to vesting education authority in a mayor or governor is that it can streamline political accountability under a single actor, making it easier for the public to know whom to hold accountable. Indeed, some research has shown a linkage between greater state-level centralization and student performance: gubernatorial authority to appoint state boards/chiefs has been connected to better outcomes on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and reduced achievement gaps.

Admittedly, efforts to evaluate the impact of mayoral control or state-led takeovers are ham- pered by small sample sizes and obvious selection biases: districts that turn to mayors for help or those that are taken over by SEAs are difficult to compare to districts that do not have these governance reforms imposed on them. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the most comprehensive empirical assessment of mayoral control tends to show positive effects on both academic outcomes and fiscal efficiency. yet it is equally important to keep in mind that not all mayoral involvement is similar in nature. Mayoral involvement in education in cities like Cleveland and Boston operated very differently than it did in New york City and Washington, DC. In the latter two cases, the political executives of those cities were given complete autonomy to choose the district’s superintendent, and there was no policymaking school board with which the superintendent had to deal politically. Moreover, in the case of Washington, DC—arguably the most successful mayoral turnaround story—the mayor won additional governance changes that empowered the superintendent in hiring and evaluation, removing these policies from the collective bargaining process. Therefore, while research shows that mayoral control in Washington led to reforms that improved student achievement outcomes in the nation’s capital, it does not necessarily follow that more minor forms of mayoral involvement (e.g., appointing a few of a city school board’s members) will replicate this unique success story. Indeed, one factor stands out in helping to explain why mayoral control in Washington led actors to prioritize student, rather than adult, interests: centralized political accountability. One anecdote from that city is especially telling. years after depart- ing his post as president of the Washington, DC, teachers’ union, George Parker explained, in retrospect, why mayoral control forced his hand in accepting a student outcomes–focused teacher evaluation system:

One of the most important things is that we went from board governance to mayoral control   Previously I was able to use politics to block a lot of reforms. But once mayoral control came into place, and there was only one person who had all the control, I no longer could prevent a lot of the reforms, so I had to decide: do I take a good look at these reforms and how do these reforms impact students, or do I try to continue to fight?

In my previous contract [negotiations] when the Superintendent put things on the table that I didn’t like all I had to do was go to several of the board members that we supported financially and just say, ‘We helped get you elected’ And I come back to [the] negotiating table the next day and it’s off the table. When we had mayoral control there was only one person. And I tried it with Mayor Fenty. I remember I went down to his office, but he made it clear that he promised Michelle [Rhee] that he was going to support what it was she was going to do. So, for the first time, to be very honest, I had to take a different position for negotiations because I had no one to go to [to] block reform.

In a similar vein, advocates of state takeover can point to impressive turnarounds like New Orleans, where the bold post–Hurricane Katrina choice and accountability reforms overseen by that state’s “Recovery School District” (RSD) led to dramatic improvements in student outcomes in both achievement (test score gains) and attainment. To be sure, New Orleans does not represent the typical state takeover. As Terry Moe explains, the all-charter system that emerged in the aftermath of the storm was an extreme outlier that was made possible by the sudden elimination of vested interest opposition (united Teachers of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board). In fact, the most comprehensive empirical study of state take- overs to date found little systematic evidence that abolishing local control (elected boards) leads to higher student achievement at scale. Moreover, critics can and do point to a clear downside of state takeover: disempowering communities from having a direct hand in running their local public schools, with communities of color being disproportionately targeted for takeover.

On the other hand, the average effect of state takeover may not be the right quantity of interest to focus on given the theory of action for granting states temporary control. As with may- oral control, state takeover advocates rightly note that democratic accountability can become so broken in some school districts that boards can no longer be trusted to do right by their kids and that dramatic leadership change is needed. Of course, not all state takeovers are created equal; for example, some are driven by fiscal concerns and others are provoked by chronic student achievement failure. What seems to matter most is what policymakers (state leaders) do with their newfound authority when takeover occurs. For example, research shows that when states can use takeovers to close a district’s lowest-performing schools and replace them with higher-performing schools, student outcomes can and do improve substantially. But the key to an SEA succeeding in this endeavor is ensuring that students will, in fact, move to a higher-performing school. If students are instead relegated to another low-performing school (or even a middling school), then the instability associated with moving schools can be a net negative for student learning. It is not altogether surprising, then, that state takeovers have been a mixed bag. Takeovers in Camden (NJ), Newark (NJ), and especially New Orleans—where the close and replace strategy was pursued—stand out as successful. In contrast, both Michigan’s and Tennessee’s efforts to replicate Louisiana’s success in New Orleans fell short.

PORTFOLIO FRAMEWORK OR PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT MODEL

Frustrated by the lack of progress in turning around chronically low-performing schools in the late 1990s, political scientist Paul Hill began to advocate for a new governance framework for large city school districts: the portfolio management model. In one sense, PMM was partly an effort to fix a core failure of SBM—the unwillingness of states and districts to hand over the car keys of autonomy on key issues like budgeting and hiring to school leaders. But PMM pro- posed even more.

PMM reimagines the district’s role as the monopoly education provider (e.g., “district schools”) and instead sees its role as a chief incubation officer that simply oversees “schools.” In other words, PMM envisions getting districts (e.g., school boards, central offices) out of the business of running school buildings and into the business of gently overseeing an ecosystem of autonomous schools of choice. But PMM is not an unfettered school choice program. To the contrary, the framework melds autonomy and choice with a centralized accountability system for all schools (irrespective of type) and (often) a single districtwide application process. While charter schools, magnets, and traditional district-run schools are all free to innovate at the school building level under the PMM framework, all schools, irrespective of type, are only permitted to continue operating if they meet agreed-upon performance objectives. In part, the allure of the PMM approach is that it helps soften the unhelpful charter versus traditional public school debate because the district and charter sectors are incentivized to collaborate with all schools in the portfolio, as every school is seen as an equal member of the same citywide ecosystem.

Where has it been tried and how well has it worked? Standouts include New Orleans, Denver, Indianapolis, Washington, DC, and New York City. Notably, several of these cities pursued alt-governance models first or along the way, which helped provide (at least temporary) political cover for this choice ecosystem to blossom and gain constituents (families) whose favorable experience in this new system could create a new constituency that would protect the model from being undone by vested interest opposition. However, alt-governance clearly is not a prerequisite to embracing PMM, and there is no single definition of the approach in practice, perhaps other than sector agnosticism (charters and district-run schools are equal in the eyes of the system). In fact, in some cases, because traditional district-run schools have seen firsthand some of the advantages of site-based autonomy in personnel and school calendar/time use, for example, PMM has led to state legislation that spawned charter-like district schools, called “innovation schools,” in Indianapolis and Denver. On the other hand, progress has been uneven in many of the other systems that have incorporated PMM principles. In 2022, Hill and Jochim reported that “of the 52 districts that participated in CRPE’s portfolio network and nominally adopted the strategy at some time or another, few sustained it for more than a few years.” Moreover, the charter-district détente that PMM imagines has been far less successful in systems with strong teachers’ unions, such as Los Angeles.

One aspect of the theory of action behind PMM is that offering more options whets the appe- tites of and expectations among families for the district to provide them with a variety of learning models from which to choose. One of the most powerful levers of policy reform is the ability to create new constituencies who have a vested interest of their own in new school models and delivery systems. Creating value for education consumers (parents) and potential consumers will give more voters reason to defend the entire fleet of options in a district’s portfolio, and future board members who wish to go back to “the way things were” (with the district as sole provider) may find themselves facing political resistance that rivals the power of locking in a formal governance change in law or regulation. This matches the well-known (successful) mobilization effort among charter school parents to prevent New york City’s then incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, from diminishing the charter sector that they had a personal stake in continuing to use. In that way, PMM helps reshape the politics of education more generally.

LESSONS AND RECURRENT TENSIONS IN GOVERNANCE REFORM DEBATES

What broader lessons can policymakers, reform advocates, and educators take away from past and present efforts to use governance changes to spur school improvement? Relatedly, what are the key tensions in our governance reform debates that are likely to persist moving forward?

1: DEMOCRATIC PROCEDURES ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN DEMOCRATIC OUTCOMES

“Fundamentally, democracy is really about representing the interests of adults,” Vladimir Kogan explains. “Whether school board elections are democratic tells us absolutely noth- ing about whether public schools are doing a good job delivering on their core mission [of educating kids].” In other words, when policymakers sit down to evaluate K–12 governance models, they should recognize the difference between democratic procedures (important) and the substantive outcomes that public education is trying to achieve: creating an educated populace that is equipped to participate in self-governance (most important). Consider, for example, the tension between the right for students to go to school and learn without inter- ruption and the right of school employees to pursue their occupational self-interests through a labor action. This is not a hypothetical. Teachers’ unions often claim that the right to strike fundamentally promotes democracy for workers (their members), yet we know that keeping

children out of school for prolonged periods of time is not in their best interest. How should policymakers wrestle with these tensions, ones where democratic procedures collide with democratic outcomes? Consider the following thought experiment (again) from Kogan:

In many communities drinking water is delivered by public agencies. yet very few people ask if these agencies are democratic. They ask whether they deliver clean and safe water. I think few would be okay with these agencies delivering cholera contaminated water just because they were satisfied with voter turnout and other metrics of democratic process or procedure. In many parts of the uS, we also have publicly run hospitals. Again, when we’re evaluating their performance, I think most people care about how all these hospitals are serving patients, not about whether their board meetings follow Robert’s Rules and allow opportunity for community engagement.

As agencies of government (subject to the demands of interest groups and voters), public schools will always be in the political arena. And to be sure, many adults will have a vested interest in upholding school board governance and in maintaining the traditional district/lEA as the sole provider of public education. These actors have obvious incentives to oppose alt-governance arrangements or portfolio management approaches. Policymakers should expect nothing less. However, at the end of the day, policymakers will need to prioritize, while remembering, most of all, that public education systems exist to serve students, not adults.

2: THERE’S NO “FOOLPROOFING” A GOVERNANCE SYSTEM IN THE ABSENCE OF POLITICAL WILL AND BOLD, CAGE-BUSTING LEADERSHIP

Well-defined governance arrangements with clear lines of accountability are typically neces- sary to deliver improved outcomes for kids, but they are almost always insufficient to the task at hand. Well-designed governance systems are only as good as the leaders who make use of them. As the author of a recent book on the delivery of government services in our digital age put it, “culture eats policy’s lunch.”69 In the case of education reform moving the needle for kids, this means that governance reform can create new possibilities and provide political cover, but it takes bold leaders to step up to the plate and make use of those new institutional levers. For all their faults (noted below), the architects of the turnaround in Washington, DC— then chancellor Michelle Rhee and then mayor Adrian Fenty—were each willing to put it all on the line and make tough decisions to change the culture of the city’s school system (and its future trajectory) even when those decisions cost them their jobs. In a similar vein, recall the key finding about the importance of leadership from economist Kirabo Jackson’s study of school autonomy in Chicago that was discussed earlier in this chapter. Jackson found that providing more school-level autonomy to principals improved student learning outcomes in schools with high-quality leaders. In places where leaders had a poor or middling track record, providing greater autonomy predictably did not lead to better decision-making and did not improve student outcomes; it led to worse performance. In sum, strong district and school leadership both matter immensely.

3: LOCK IN GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL REFORMS TO INCENTIVIZE STUDENT-CENTERED DECISION-MAKING WHENEVER POSSIBLE, BUT REMEMBER THAT ETERNAL VIGILANCE WILL REMAIN ESSENTIAL

As we’ve seen with the history of both the SBM and PMM governance reform models, politics always has a way of undoing progress, and a reform-minded majority today is no assurance of one tomorrow. When in power, reformers should try to lock in governance reforms that will maximize the chances that future district leaders will remain student centered in their decision-making. For example, in New Orleans, state lawmakers ensured that even after RSD transferred authority back to the local Orleans Parish School Board, the superintendent would retain authority to hold schools accountable without meddling from individual board members. This was crucial, because the entire PMM framework functions only when school renewals are based on transparent and objective student performance criteria, not political criteria such as whether a school is in a board member’s electoral district. Similarly, as we saw in Washington, DC, the fact that some key decisions (around teacher evaluation) were taken out of collective bargaining enabled the system leader to make more efficient student- centered decisions when it came to managing human capital. This would not have been possible without changes in the governance protocols centralizing authority in the mayor’s office. In Indianapolis, empowering the mayor to authorize charters has helped ensure that the PMM framework can remain in place even if there is board turnover, as has happened in Denver in recent years, putting reforms that helped improve district performance in jeopardy.

4: IN EDUCATION REFORM, A MANTRA OF “MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS” OFTEN BACKFIRES

Bedside manner matters in education reform. On the one hand, Americans appear comfort- able with their state, rather than local government, addressing chronically failing schools. However, when it comes to formal takeover proposals, issues related to race and the loss of political power become salient in city school systems that were often important sites where racial minorities gained a foothold in politics or found a pathway to the middle class in a teaching career. For example, a survey commissioned by journalist Richard Whitmire found that while many Black Washingtonians believed Michelle Rhee’s tenure improved their schools, they also believed her reform methods (e.g., school closures, firings) were overly dra- conian and unnecessary. Irrespective of whether the critics are right or wrong on the merits, reformers will come up on the short end of the stick if they refuse to consider the timing, tem- perament, and input of local actors in an authentic manner. Rhee’s own tenure as chancellor was cut short because voters soured on her and Fenty’s “move fast and break things” ethos. In contrast, by being more intentionally “collaborative and accessible,” Rhee’s successor managed to maintain the very same reforms that put the city’s children first while keeping her post for three times as long. This isn’t a criticism of Rhee per se, but a warning to other reformers who have been turned out of power swiftly because community perception and a lack of engagement did them in (e.g., in Memphis and Detroit).

To avoid alienating potential allies in the local community, reformers should consider the timing and sequence of their actions. School closures are invariably controversial. When nec- essary, they should be done using a consistent and transparent set of metrics so that critics cannot claim bias in sites chosen. Additionally, some reformers have been able to put clo- sures off until goodwill has been established in the community, and, especially in the context of takeovers/alt-governance, local actors believe that reform efforts are well intended. This won’t please everyone, and opposition will surely remain, but acting capriciously and without any attention to bedside manner is both counterproductive and an unforced, self-inflicted error. In places like New Orleans, Memphis, and Detroit, where takeovers led to complaints about outsiders imposing closures without community input, it is essential for reformers to ensure demographic representation on charter boards and other bodies, for example, so that alt-governance is not interpreted as an effort to disempower local communities.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Given the immense size and scale of public education in the united States, it would be foolish and impractical to conclude this retrospective by recommending that a single governance model be applied everywhere. Instead, the broader lessons that have been outlined here rec- ommend two paths forward on governance reform, with careful attention to context.

In the first case, large school districts with poor academic outcomes that have remained unchanged under the constraints of the traditional “district as monopoly” education provider should give serious consideration to an alt-governance model that would allow for a portfolio framework to blossom. While formal governance changes are not a prerequisite to incorporating the portfolio framework, the author of that reform approach notes that in the absence of “a galvanizing event” or “the entrance of new [often nontraditional] leadership,” the “adoption of [the portfolio] strategy [is] often precipitated by a major shift in education governance via state takeover or mayoral control.” The reason is simple: “these events [help] to restructure local education politics such that traditional actors . . . [are] sidelined, creating a window of opportunity for new reform ideas to take root.”

Since these districts can and will rarely initiate alt-governance on their own (Washington, DC, being a rare exception), leaders who wish to pursue a portfolio framework may do well to begin their effort by working with their counterparts in state government. To avoid the nega- tive perceptions that invariably arise from “outsiders” ignoring local context and concerns, advocates could benefit by framing their effort to leverage state support as an exercise in “freeing” local schools to enjoy more autonomy or “innovation” opportunities even if they remain under traditional district governance. Alternative governance arrangements need not mean the formal elimination of an elected school board en route to a portfolio frame- work. As Indianapolis has shown, having an executive (mayor) with charter-authorizing power opens new possibilities. likewise, Denver Public Schools also remained under elected board control, but innovation schools there nevertheless provided autonomy and choice consistent with the portfolio framework.

The second path forward is probably more appropriate for the nation’s (smaller) suburban and rural school districts that maintain the traditional elected board-appointed superinten- dent structure. Although these districts (which are more numerous but enroll far fewer students) may not need to abandon traditional governance structures, states should nonetheless require (or at least encourage) them to adopt a series of more modest reforms aimed at promoting a political structure that creates stronger incentives for aligning democratic accountability with improved student academic achievement outcomes.

First, state governments should move to on-cycle school board elections. A political system that allows one special interest group to dominate low-turnout, low-information elections isn’t a model of robust democracy. A large research literature shows that off-cycle elections unfairly advantage unions over other stakeholders and decrease the representation of parents, the poor, and racial minorities in school board elections. Most importantly, shifting to on- cycle elections increases the likelihood that voters will reward/punish incumbent school board members based on student achievement growth in their district during their tenure. In sum, this is a small but important policy change that comes with few downsides and a big upside.

Relatedly, states might consider (or at least investigate) the benefits of using non-staggered school board elections. Currently, with staggered board elections, the ability for the public to make a wholesale change in district leadership is deferred across election cycles. If voters are constitutionally empowered to “throw the bums out” of Congress every two years, per- haps they should have that same opportunity in local school politics. This reform would, in theory, also simplify participation in school politics, encourage slate running, and make it easier for the public to identify whom to hold accountable at a given point in time (since all incumbents would run at the same time, there would be a de facto referendum on their performance).

Second, as A. J. Crabill has argued, state governments should require school board training or coaching that focuses specifically on student outcomes. Ideally, states could find ways to make this more than a compliance exercise. In fact, Crabill makes a good case that states could add to this the incentive for board candidates to get certified before running for office. One benefit might be dissuading candidates who do not want to do the serious work and who are running for reasons other than raising district achievement.

Third, states must ensure that their accountability systems provide useful and easy-to-understand information about the performance of each district’s public schools. Those metrics should include and emphasize information on student growth, not simply proficiency. letter grades, though imperfect, often make it easier on the public. Importantly, SEAs need to be prepared (and required under state law) to release report card data earlier on and preferably in the month prior to when school board elections are held, to maximize the likelihood that voters will prioritize student learning outcomes during board elections.

States should consider electoral reforms that provide information about student performance on the ballot, identifying any incumbents seeking reelection so that voters know how their board members have fared in raising achievement when they decide whether to rehire them for the job. As a gentler form of “takeover,” states could first have a policy whereby an automatic board recall election is held when a district’s academic improvement stagnates for a period under the same leadership. Relatedly, similar legislation could call for a superintendent’s replacement in the event of severe achievement failure or stagnation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A total governance failure is typically observed only in an ad hoc fashion. Examples might include a district embezzlement scheme or a school cheating scandal. This leads to the mistaken belief that K–12 governance problems are rare and isolated to specific districts or leaders. yet in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the broader dysfunction beneath the surface of America’s traditional system of K–12 board-based governance. While more centralized education systems in other parts of the world reopened far more quickly, in our highly decentralized system partisanship and the lack of political will to negotiate reopening agreements with teachers’ unions played no small role in keeping half of all students out of school for a full year. In fact, numerous studies revealed that in the absence of thoughtful state polit- ical leadership, too many local school boards made decisions to keep schools closed more because of adult politics than in response to thoughtful reflection about neutral public health criteria, including the cost-benefit calculation regarding what was best for students.

As the second epigraph of this chapter noted, the root of the K–12 governance problem, Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim explain, is that ever since the turn of the twentieth century, “[school] reformers have been busy trying to take politics out of schools rather than considering how politics—of which governance is a part—can be managed, constrained, and transformed to serve public purposes.” This failure of imagination is a key reason that our public schools are encumbered by bureaucratic structures and work routines that too readily prioritize the interests of adults rather than the students they serve. Ironically, then, one hundred years after progressive reformers dismantled the nation’s large and unwieldy urban school boards, America’s fourth-largest school district, CPS, is returning to this relic of the past. Despite making real strides under mayoral control, at the behest of the city’s powerful teachers’ union, CPS will soon be governed by a large (twenty-one members!) elected board begin- ning in 2024.87 Meanwhile, the SEA in Texas has decided to pursue takeover of the nation’s third-largest district, Houston Independent School District (ISD). The Texas Education Agency recently tapped former Dallas ISD superintendent Mike Miles to bring to Houston the muscu- lar human capital reform strategy previously pursued in Dallas. Miles has announced that he will use his authority to introduce pay incentives that induce top teachers to work in struggling schools, an approach that some research shows can make a positive impact on student learning. Despite the obvious similarities they share in size and demographic challenges, Chicago and Houston suddenly appear to be two ships passing in the night. They remind us once more that the decentralized nature of K–12 politics and governance too often influences a child’s chances of receiving a high-quality education and obtaining a shot at upward mobility in this patchwork quilt we call public education in the United States.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

“Common Core has failed teachers, parents and students,” he declared. But the buck didn’t stop there. Yes, the demoralizing teaching-to-the-test regime was dead and buried thanks to Executive Order 19-32. But that was just the beginning. Because real accountability involves results. 

Fast-forward to today, and Florida is ranked the No. 1 state in education, according to U.S. News and World Report. Florida is also ranked tops in education freedom and parent empowerment, according to separate reports, and we have undertaken the largest expansion of school choice in the nation’s history while breaking our own teacher pay records year after year. Not even the COVID-19 pandemic could slow down student progress, as Florida logged the highest NAEP results in state history in 2022.

What happened? When DeSantis eradicated Common Core, he also implemented a vision for success, coupled with high expectations. He immediately directed Florida’s commissioner of education to conduct a comprehensive review of the state’s K-12 academic standards and recommend revisions that would pave the way for students to receive a world-class education and prepare them for jobs of the future. The directive involved a focused return to reading, writing and arithmetic; innovative ways to streamline testing; dramatic increases in the quality of instructional curriculum; high-quality civics education; and a pathway to making Florida the most literate state in the nation. Essentially, the task was to answer the call of parents, families and educators by creating premier state academic standards and including parent and teacher feedback in the process.

What followed was an unprecedented outreach and revision effort that resulted in Florida’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or B.E.S.T., Standards. More than 100,000 reviews of current and draft standards were conducted; 1,510 combined years of experience from teacher experts were absorbed; 154 virtual and 11 in-person meetings with Florida educational groups were conducted; more than 80 Florida-based teacher and stakeholder groups participated; and 9 public listening meetings were held across the state to gather feedback directly from parents and residents. It was a massive undertaking that culminated in the Florida Board of Education’s adoption of the newly formed B.E.S.T. Standards, followed by generous budget funding and subsequent English Language Arts and mathematics curriculum updates.

“We’ve developed clear and concise expectations for students at every grade level and allow teachers the opportunity to do what they love most — inspire young Floridians to achieve their greatest potential,” said DeSantis, adding, “Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards were made by Florida teachers for Florida students, and I know they will be a model for the rest of the nation.”

With Florida’s new standards in place, the mission moved to assessing results — and to do so without creating a Common Core 2.0 scenario where teachers were once again doomed to teach to the test. We heard over and over again that onerous exam preparation had taken over classrooms, crowded out elective learning opportunities such as music and art, and reduced kids to test-takers rather than blossoming learners. Meanwhile, year-end test results were coming too late to do any good. Imagine discovering what your child needed to improve after — not during — the school year! It made no sense, and we were determined to do better for our 3 million public school students and nearly 200,000 teachers.

The solution was just as bold: the nation’s first full transition to a progress monitoring system known as the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST). It was an honor to sponsor this legislation in the Florida state Senate. Beginning in the 2022-23 school year, students had three short assessment check-ins at the beginning, middle and end of the year, in stark contrast to multi-day, end-of-year, high-stakes tests for English Language Arts and mathematics. Students, teachers and parents benefit from this design by gaining real-time, immediate and actionable data that allows teachers to monitor progress and tailor instruction to each student’s needs.

Year-one results showed substantial growth, including up to 42 percentage points in some subjects. They also demonstrated significant improvements throughout the year in student subgroups, with Hispanics, African Americans and those from economically disadvantaged families all showing double-digit increases in the percentage scoring at or above grade level. Progress monitoring proved a resounding success.

Florida’s improvement in student achievement is a testament to DeSantis’ leadership, and the Florida Department of Education remains committed to strengthening our state’s educational standards, assessing progress and always putting students first. It’s an accountability system that works.

Education thrives on innovation. While core practices in education have slowly and incrementally changed over time, the innovation and creativity of teachers and administrators have facilitated improvements by modifying the organization and delivery of education. In calling for solutions, A Nation at Risk (ANAR) repeatedly called on local “political and educational  leaders to search for solutions” and to use the “ingenuity of our policymakers, scientists, State and local educators, and scholars in formulating solutions.” Indeed, ANAR lauded the “local laboratory” model that decentralized schooling affords to test new models that could scale and disseminate throughout the country. This chapter takes aim at understanding how innovation in the organization and delivery of education both within and outside the classroom has affected the quality of education.  

I start by looking at large-scale initiatives that sought to modify the ways school districts orga nized themselves. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided significant funding for the small schools or the “school-within-a-school” initiative. The initiative sought to divide large high schools into smaller sub–high schools that might provide a greater cohort experience and allow for greater interaction between teachers and groups of students. After reviewing small schools and other out-of-the-classroom innovations, I turn my attention to innovation within the classroom. Since ANAR, major evidence on class size and the timing of schooling, among other innovations, has influenced policy and practice. This has affected how states and local districts organize and deliver education to students inside schools and classrooms. I review evidence on these and other innovative practices. 

It is impossible to really track forty years of innovation across thousands of school districts. Many innovations were never disseminated, scaled, or evaluated. Other innovations became so popular and widespread that the editors of this series chose to dedicate entire chapters to them. For example, the rapid changes in technology with computers and the integration of standards and accountability systems are two innovations that have altered every classroom across the United States. In this series, Tom Vander Ark’s chapter on technological innovations and Michael J. Petrilli’s chapter on standards and accountability review these innovations and how they have shaped school organization, classroom practice, and teacher and principal accountability. This chapter provides a useful companion to those chapters. 

In this chapter, I focus on four sources of system innovation and two sources of classroom innovation. For system innovation, I review evidence on small schools, magnet schools, superstar superintendents, and innovation zones. For classroom innovation, I discuss evidence on class size and the duration of schooling. In choosing the specific innovations, I have conveniently sampled practices that have expanded beyond a single district or school and have thereby shaped and influenced education policy and practice. I also try to focus on innovations where rigorous research has provided some hint as to the causal impacts of these policies.  

While many of the innovations seem to have strong evidentiary bases, they remain seemingly underutilized. In some cases, the costs of the interventions remain prohibitively large. In other cases, the modifications needed to establish the interventions at scale compromise the capacity of the interventions to affect outcomes. I discuss other impediments to expansion, and more generally I discuss obstacles that inhibit the use of the “school laboratory” model.

Systems innovations

“Systems innovation” refers to new policies and practices that modify governance and the structure of school systems. The specific innovations upon which I focus are those in school organization, creation of specialized schools, school leadership, and innovation zones, which provide schools and districts latitude to implement new practices and policies.

School size and organization

Perhaps the most notable of the systemwide changes was the small schools movement. In the early 2000s, nearly twenty-six hundred small schools were created nationwide. One of the major forces behind this investment was the Gates Foundation, which began in the early 2000s to fund the decomposition of large high schools. Based on its interpretation of existing literature, the Gates Foundation encouraged schools to maintain a size of four hundred students. As Tom Vander Ark, who at that time was executive director of education at the Gates Foundation, said, “Young people who attend smaller schools that provide a rigorous, personalized education and enable close relationships with adults are more likely to graduate and continue their education.” The basic theory was that personalized education and deeper relationships with teachers would improve the quality of education and provide better role models and coaching as students began considering and then pursued subsequent education. 

Unfortunately, the short-term results did not generate the anticipated results. Over nine years, the Gates Foundation invested more than $2 billion in creating small schools, and in 2009, it “refined” its strategy. As Bill Gates wrote: “[M]any schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.”

Indeed, the short-term evidence on small schools was a bit pessimistic. At the time that Gates was making allocative decisions, the evidence was not strong. However, the tide of positive evidence was soon to come. Studies by Bloom et al., Schwartz et al., Barrow et al., and Abdulkadiroğlu et al. found positive, long-run impacts. The study by Abdulkadiroğlu et al., the only one that took advantage of randomized admis sion lotteries, reported that college attendance rates in New York improved by seven per centage points, with additional improvements in math and English scores on the state’s High School Regents Examinations. Additional work by Schwartz et al. argued that small schools improved the performance of most New York high schools, including schools that were not small schools. 

Yet despite the positive, long-run evidence on small schools, they are no longer receiving the same public and philanthropic support they did in the past. Strong evidence has not revitalized the initiative or the funding streams. While existing small schools have remained, few additional small schools have been added. Why the lack of continued or renewed support? 

First, there was a perception that lessons could be applied and scaled up in other settings that did not require small schools. For example, one theory as to the success of small schools relied on the notion that students developed rich, meaningful, personalized relationships with faculty and counselors. However, such relationships may be possible in other settings as well. As Robert Hughes, director of K–12 Education at the Gates Foundation, explained, “[W]ith some work, you can really build structures that enable kids to be known and to get the kind of support they need to be successful [even] in larger schools.” Also, small schools cost more per student than traditional schools. If traditional schools can replicate the counseling and other relationship-based mechanisms, then expanding small schools, a far more expensive and involved intervention, may not be necessary. Indeed, the fact that all schools in a school district, including large schools, benefit from the presence of small schools suggests that small schools increase the visibility of some mechanisms that can be transferred to larger schools.  

Second, there have been concerns about the capacity of institutions to scale small schools. One concern is that the cost of staffing might be prohibitively large. Another concern is that small schools raise the demand for both teachers and principals, and it is unclear that the supply of new teachers and qualified principals can satisfy the demand.  

While small schools remain somewhat stalled, there are several aspects of the small schools movement that have had a lasting impact. For example, it was one of the largest, highest-profile experiments in innovating the structure and design of schools. This gave some momentum to districtwide interventions and experimentation, expanding the scope of the laboratories envisioned in ANAR. Also, as mentioned above, it provided significant information about reforming underperforming schools that could be applied in other settings. And there was also important heterogeneity in the impacts that provided additional policy lessons about the implications of certain types of schools — namely charter schools, which generated significant impacts. For example, the KIPP schools were cited by Gates in the 2009 announcement that the Gates Foundation was refining its investment strategy. Subsequent work such as Abdulkadiroğlu et al. demonstrated that there were specific strategies (e.g., high accountability) employed by charter schools that may have led to the greater impacts observed in some small schools as opposed to others. Each of these lessons reinforced the notion that school districts could be local laboratories for innovation.

Specialized schools

A second strategy that altered the ways districts organized schools had to do with school choice and the underlying supply of schools. In this series, the chapter by John D. Singleton focuses extensively on school choice, so I defer any discussion of charter schools and vouchers to that chapter. My discussion here centers on magnet schools. While many charter schools behave like magnet schools and vice versa, the administration of magnet schools typically continues under the direction of school district offices, whereas the administration of charter schools often moves outside the district’s purview.  

Magnet schools existed long before ANAR. As districts grappled with how to desegregate schools, many created specialist or alternative schools to give parents additional options. The first magnet schools began in the late 1960s. The first large-scale experiment occurred in 1970 in Minneapolis, and the first specialized high school, focused on career themes, opened in Dallas in 1971.  

As of 2016, there were 4,340 magnet schools across the United States, with the most common theming centered on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); fine and performing arts; international baccalaureate; career and technical education; and world languages. Whereas before ANAR, magnet schools were often considered as a way to encourage desegregation, the major expansion and specialization of magnet schools took place after ANAR with greater emphasis on school choice.  

The magnet school expansion happened for a variety of reasons. Some of it was driven by parents as they tried to find ways to improve their children’s educational performance by building on specific skills. Some of it came as magnet schools, particularly vocation-oriented magnet schools, demonstrated that they could have positive impacts on students who were struggling in mainstream classrooms. 

To date, the evidence on magnet schools is largely positive. Gamoran (1996) uses the National Education Longitudinal Study to compare test scores of students at magnet, public, and private schools. Gamoran found that students at magnet schools score higher in science, reading, and social sciences. Crain et al. (1998) use oversubscription lotteries to measure the impact of career-oriented magnet schools. The researchers provide mixed evidence. On the one hand, career magnet schools had lower graduation rates than comprehensive schools.  

This was the result of greater emphasis on career and vocational curricula. On the other hand, students who attended magnet schools reported fewer “reckless adolescence behavior” at age twenty. Kemple and Snipes provide evidence that career magnet schools are an effective way to reduce dropout rates among those at the highest risk not to graduate. A synthesis of the literature suggests that impacts are “generally positive.” 

Magnet schools were refined in the laboratory of public schooling, and new iterations of magnet schools build upon the principles of school choice discussed by Singleton and on principles of innovation. Career education in particular has become much more central to education policy. As the returns to high school education have stagnated, emphasis on employability and skills has fueled much of the advance in career education. This concern not only has been present in the United States but also has become increasingly popular as a policy tool in developing countries. The evidence from magnet schools provided significant lessons that shaped early attempts to strengthen vocational education.  

Magnet schools also raise the question as to whether education should be similar across students. In many ways, the traditional school model presents very little variety across the types of skills that students develop; however, magnets exist to allow some students to specialize beyond what a traditional school might allow. Heterogeneous students might need more heterogeneous offerings than traditional schools can provide. Magnet schools might be a way to improve the efficacy of education for a subset of students, and there may be limits to the degree of differentiation among students and schools that are possible. Hence, the gains could be large but diminishing as differentiation expands. 

In the short run, magnet schools’ enrollment and presence will continue to expand. Whereas they were at one point an answer to desegregation and integration of schools, they are increasingly a means for parents to express their preferences in terms of students’ education opportunities. Their growth continues, and while charter school enrollment remains larger, magnet schools remain a viable way to provide differentiated education opportunities. Moreover, as charter schools become more specialized (e.g., STEM or vocation focused), the line dividing magnet and charter schools will continue to blur. 

School leadership

Another trend that has taken place since ANAR is the increased emphasis on high-profile school district superintendents. In many large school districts, superintendents have become chief executive officers with greater power and salaries. For example, Barbara Byrd-Bennett served as the CEO of both Cleveland Public Schools and, later, Chicago Public Schools. She previously served in a leadership capacity for New York City schools. Her compensation in both Cleveland and Chicago was controversial, given the size of the packages. Other CEOs grabbed headlines and made national news as well, such as Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, and Arne Duncan in Chicago Public Schools. In districts with more than twenty-five thousand students enrolled, superintendent compensation ranges from $140,000 to almost $400,000. To put this in perspective, the median base salary for a beginning teacher in districts of the same size is $44,150. 

Prioritizing hiring high-profile CEOs with extensive experience and increasing their compen sation has been a prevailing societal trend. Just as CEOs’ track records were believed to have an impact on a company’s performance, schools sought to enhance their quality by appointing elite superintendents who would bring about substantial improvements and elevate the institutions they served. Hence, an increasing number of school districts applied corporate strategies to superintendents. In the corporate world, there was a perception that the supply of such leaders was finite, leading to bidding wars and large compensation. The emphasis on superstar superintendents faced the same competition and compensation. 

However, as Chingos et al. demonstrated, superintendents who bring about significant, statistically reliable changes in student achievement within their districts, while controlling for other factors that affect academic performance, are indeed rare. They found that superintendents account for only a tiny fraction (0.3 percent) of student differences in achievement, significantly less than other factors such as student characteristics, teachers, schools, and districts. They further indicated that student achievement does not improve with longer superintendent service, and hiring a new superintendent does not lead to immediate gains in student achievement. 

Increased emphasis on superintendents may not directly yield higher test scores, but nevertheless it remains an area of continual research. For instance, Hart et al. proved that encouraging superintendent longevity can support student achievement, as those with more in-state experience possess a comprehensive understanding of the state’s curriculum, testing programs, and the organizational stability required for effective leadership. Mitigating superintendent turnover, as suggested by Grissom and Mitani, could involve considering salary increases, particularly in smaller and rural districts and those with lower student achievement, as this would help retain superintendents who are often lured by higher-paying positions in larger, more urban districts with better academic performance. 

The hiring and reliance on superstar superintendents is very much an experiment in progress. While some districts have moved away from the strategy of hiring CEO-like superintendents in favor of other approaches, there are still districts that continue to explore this path. Ongoing research and the findings regarding superintendent longevity and compensation emphasize the importance of considering contextual circumstances being faced or the necessity of exploring alternative strategies. 

Innovation zones

While the principles of innovation zones may have been part of the policies dating back to the early 1990s, states and school districts began implementing legislation in the mid 2000s. Innovation zones are schools or districts to which states or districts grant greater autonomy over curriculum, budgeting, and staffing. Typically, states and districts grant innovation zones additional relief from other state and local regulations. While schools are free to enact policies and practices that differ from the norm, the schools are held accountable for improvements in student outcomes. After some early experimentation, innovation zones began expanding, and by 2017, they covered more than 108 schools and 63,000 students. 

Innovation zones presuppose that regulation and centralization impair the ability of a district to try new and innovative practices. By providing greater autonomy, schools and districts can explore new practices in finance, governance, curriculum, and staffing. This greater autonomy comes at the cost of higher accountability for student outcomes, and schools and districts can lose the autonomy if student outcomes do not improve. More generally, innovation zones are just one category of school turnaround. Under the Race to the Top (RttT) legislation, the federal government funded school turnaround strategies that included other variants such as school improvement grants or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. These school turnaround programs also allowed school districts to have more autonomy in some aspects of staffing, management, and curriculum. 

Many studies of innovation zones are emerging. Zimmer et al. (2017), for example, examine the innovation zones established in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. They showed that innovation zones significantly outperformed other public schools and other alter native methods of changing governance. Math scores, for example, increased by 0.20 standard deviations in innovation zones relative to other schools. Science and reading scores also increased. Zimmer et al. (2017) argue that one of the largest mediating factors in the innovation zone was the retention of experienced, successful teachers. Innovation zones in Tennessee generally offered significant raises for teachers who transferred to innovation zone schools. Teachers who previously had significant value added in the classroom were more likely to shift into these innovation zone schools. While the competition for high-achieving teachers may be a zero-sum game in the short run, the responsiveness to compensation incentives alongside the added autonomy may strengthen the overall workforce by inducing the retention and recruitment of top teachers. 

The use of innovation zones and other strategies aimed at strengthening school autonomy remains a hot topic. In this series, Michael T. Hartney, for example, explores other innovations in governance and how they have played out. While the current scale of innovation zones is low, the case of innovation zones is interesting as the initial results have encouraged continued expansion, with at least twenty-five states having adopted policies encouraging innovation zones in districts that were previously classified as failing and more considering legislation to allow innovation zones.  

The expansion of innovation zones raises questions about teacher supply. If, as Zimmer et al. (2017) argue, the mechanism by which innovation zones improve outcomes is through attracting top teachers at the cost of having other schools lose top teachers, then innovation zones might lead to a continued division between high-value-added teachers and others. If the higher wages and reduced legislation in innovation zones serve to attract more (and better) teachers to the profession, then innovation zones might generate momentum toward improving the overall teaching pool. However, if this does not happen, then the competition for teachers is a zero-sum game in which the available teachers for underprivileged schools will be disadvantaged relative to those who want to attend innovation zone schools.

Finally, the continued expansion of innovation zones has two implications for the future. First, the continued expansion of legislation allowing innovation zones suggests that these zones will become increasingly visible in the future. Second, given that the emphasis on innovation zones is both deregulation and expanded accountability, it also suggests a growing discontent with the existing regulations in traditional school districts. Innovation zones are a means of circumventing some regulations. If innovation zones eventually create momentum around deregulation, then deregulation might displace (or potentially devalue) innovation zones.

Classroom innovation

I next turn to classroom innovation. I focus on two separate innovations — class size and the  timing of schooling. As before, these are only a fraction of the possible innovations that I could use; however, these are two areas where significant experimentation and subsequent policy implementation have happened since ANAR.

Class size

Scholars from all disciplines have long postulated that class size affects student outcomes. The underlying theory suggested that teachers can give more attention to students in smaller classes and that this extra attention might provide a boost in students’ education outcomes. Lazear (1999), for example, uses a model to demonstrate that the probability of classroom disruptions likely increases as class size goes up.  

However, in the mid-1980s, some doubt emerged on the relationship. In a series of papers, Hanushek (e.g., 1986, 1999) showed that estimates of the effects of class size were ambiguous. Perhaps students were not as sensitive to class size as they might have been to other inputs, or perhaps teachers used different technologies as class size changed. Nonetheless, the relationship between class size and academic achievement has been hotly contested in the education literature.  

In 1985, then governor Lamar Alexander sponsored the Tennessee STAR experiment. The experiment created small classes in kindergarten through third grade and implemented the intervention with a school-based randomized controlled trial. The results of the experiment were stunning. Education test scores improved by roughly 0.25 standard deviations, roughly one grade level higher than students in regular classrooms. Subsequent research suggested that the impacts endured through primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling.  

Some criticisms have been made of the Tennessee STAR experiment. For example, Hoxby discusses the possibility that the results are exaggerated. She argues that they may be the result of the Hawthorne effect arising from teachers performing differently than they would have otherwise as a result of participating in a high-profile experiment. Others have refuted this characterization, calling the Tennessee STAR experiment the “Barbary steed” of the class size literature. Nonetheless, Tennessee STAR influenced policymakers. States including California, Florida, and Texas established class size limits. The policy in California in particular provided extensive financial incentives to schools that implemented class size limits. 

While the policy debate has leaned heavily in recent years toward reductions in class size, there have not been significant studies to date documenting whether state policies around class size have generated close to the same effects as observed in Tennessee STAR. In fact, there is some evidence that the emphasis on class size has come at the expense of other inputs. For example, Sims shows that California schools largely achieved class size reductions up to grade three by increasing class sizes in subsequent grades. He shows that the increase in test scores after grade three may have reversed potential positive impacts of class size. 

The class size debates are not over and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Until evidence can definitely show that the expansion of reduced class size through state policies leads to sustained improvements in student achievement, the debate over class size will continue. Even if Tennessee STAR’s evidence shows improvements in student outcomes as a result of class size reductions, it does not mean that class size reductions can produce impacts in scaled-up policies. In the Tennessee STAR experiment, Tennessee allocated additional funds. In scaled-up versions at the state level, the cost is likely prohibitive. States have to reallocate funds toward increasing the number of teachers and away from other inputs. In the case of California, it allocated funds to increase the number of early elementary school teachers, yet the cost of this was a decrease in the funds to hire teachers in other grades, and hence, higher class sizes resulted in those other grades. This could counteract any positive impacts from class size in early grades. Indeed, there is no evidence to date that California’s aggressive class size policy has led to any improvement in outcomes. The literature on class size largely focuses only on class size, but in a scaled-up policy, the improvements from class size must be weighed against the costs of reduced educational inputs elsewhere. As long as costs remain prohibitive, it is unclear whether any state can produce a class size policy that can replicate the gains from the Tennessee STAR experiment.  

While ANAR did not necessarily take on the issue of class size, its call for local experiments to identify promising solutions resonates with the issue of class size. In considering changes in classroom practice, the debates on class size have led to significant investigations throughout the United States and beyond—not just in primary schooling but also in higher education. However, a limitation of experimentation can be its ability to understand how the impacts would change as scaled-up versions of the policy reverberated throughout the education landscape. The formulation of policy around class size has largely proceeded without finding a solution for the costs of reduced class size, and states have sacrificed other inputs in order to accommodate class size. While innovation is present in the case of class size, pushing innovation forward without considering the costs of scaling may never generate the promised impacts.

Timing of schooling

One input that was specifically mentioned in ANAR was the length of the school day and year. ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s authors lamented that the United States had shorter school days and school years than its competitors. The ANAR authors strongly recommended a seven-hour school day and a school year of two hundred to two hundred twenty days.  

For at least a decade after ANAR, there was very little movement or experimentation with the length of the school day. In 1997, Arizona became the first state to increase the length of the school year, requiring at least two hundred days of instruction rather than one hundred eighty. By 1998, fourteen states were considering changes to the school calendar; however, outside of a few districts in Arizona, few changes were happening at scale. 

Since 2000, though, there have been significant changes in the time allocated for school ing. Some of these have come in response to the charter school movement. For example, from 2000 to 2012, the average length of the school day nationally increased by 0.2 hours; by contrast, the average length of the school day in charter schools increased by 0.4 hours. As Farbman noted, multiple studies of charter schools and other school turnaround efforts have attributed the impacts of charter schools, in part, to the length of the school day.

Additional evidence has come from outside the United States. For example, Germany increased weekly education instruction by two hours, thereby improving outcomes, particularly for high-achieving students. Studies in Chile, Israel, Italy, Brazil, and Latin America more generally have shown similarly positive impacts of increasing instructional time. These other studies have found greater benefits for both low- and high-performing students. 

Within the United States, RttT grants for school improvement often targeted limited exper iments in the length of the school day and evidence to date. Some schools implemented changes in the length of the school day in response to these grants. More generally, the largest policy shifts have been in Chicago and Boston. In 2012, Chicago moved from a 5.75-hour school day to a seven-hour school day, and in 2015, Boston Public Schools approved a forty minute extension of the school day. 

While the length of the school day has been the subject of both policy changes and exper imentation, there are few studies on lengthening the school year. The average number of school days has shown almost no change nationally and remains around one hundred eighty days.  

What does the future hold? The mounting evidence on the impact of increased instructional time will likely increase pressure to consider policy options, particularly for students who are struggling. The continued expansion of charter schools, which have longer school days on average, will continue to put upward pressure on the length of the school day. Not only do they contribute to the increased average school day, but they also put pressure on districts to examine the amount of instruction time they offer. Areas where charter schools provide greater competition to local schools are likely to face greater pressures to increase instruc tion time. In terms of increasing the average length of the school year, there appears to be little momentum. 

Other systemic shifts

While I have highlighted systematic changes that have focused on improving education quality, there are other systemic shifts that have occurred. Many of these have less to do with school inputs and more to do with the changing context of education. I briefly consider three examples.

Learning disabilities

Learning disabilities have become more prevalent over time. Zablotsky et al., for example, report a significant increase from 2009 to 2017 in the percentage of children diagnosed with any developmental disorder, attention deficit disorder, and autism. Special education enrollment rates continue to rise. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic increased attention on issues of mental health among students. 

These changes in health have impacts on classrooms. Students with disabilities have renewed protection and have increased access to accommodations as a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the expansion of “504” plans. Students with disabilities are often more expensive to educate, costing as much as thirteen times that of the average student, and the increased incidence of documented disabilities puts financial pressures on schools. While schools receive additional funds for students with disabilities, the marginal cost of educating a student with disabilities is likely higher than the increased allotment. Indeed, Bergman and McFarlin showed that charter schools actively discriminate against students with disabilities in the way that they encourage (or discourage) enrollment. The reason for this discrimination is likely the disparity between the cost and revenue associated with a student with disabilities.  

While the increase in disability diagnosis and treatment will certainly improve education quality for those with disabilities, the additional education expenditure required to teach students with disabilities inevitably leads to reductions in expenditures elsewhere. Increased expansion of charter schools, if indeed charter schools discriminate against students with disabilities, could exacerbate existing inequalities by segregating students by costs. Improvements in our ability to diagnose and treat learning disabilities can reduce the costs of educating students with disabilities and reduce the fiduciary burden. 

School safety

School shootings have become more commonplace, and a frequent motivation for students to pursue charter or private schools is often school safety. Since ANAR, the presence of police, metal detectors, and other security enhancements has shifted the ways schools behave. While the prevalence, particularly in the wake of violent shootings, seems high, in truth there has been a decline in the rate of victimization and threats to teachers from 1994 to 2016.  

School safety, including policies and procedures to ensure safety, continues to be a hot topic in state and federal legislation. Each school must maintain a plan for ensuring safety and for dealing with school violence. As in the case of increased disability rates, a focus on school safety requires resources and attention. Governments have been reluctant to increase funding to fully cover the costs of such expenditures. The resulting policies create more pressure on schools to cut expenditures in other ways. Moreover, to date, there has been little experimentation in ways that can help identify cost-effective strategies for improving school safety. Using schools as laboratories across the United States could provide greater opportunities to learn best practices.

Parental inputs

Education scholars have often posited that parental inputs are a significant part of students’ academic achievement. While the correlation between parental characteristics is extremely strong, particularly in the case of the mother’s education, few papers have established causal relationships between parental inputs and student outcomes. Many localized experiments have attempted to increase parental involvement; however, none of these efforts have scaled in any meaningful way. 

There are a couple of notable exceptions in more recent years. While not occurring in the United States, the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program was a major randomized controlled experiment in Mexico that targeted parents and students. Parents received a subsidy conditional on student attendance and student health visits. These programs had a demonstrable impact on student attendance and attainment. While parents are clearly involved in the treatment, it is not clear if the effects came because of their vigilance or other factors (attendance, health, or increased family income).  

Recent randomized controlled experiments have aimed at a more novel approach to encouraging parental involvement. With the expansion of texting capabilities, researchers have used text messages to try to engage parents. York and Loeb did this for literacy among low-income parents. Through a series of text messages, York and Loeb coached parents of young children how to teach literacy skills. They found that students arrived at kindergarten with improved literacy as a result of parental engagement. 

Bergman and Bettinger et al. tested interventions that focused on communicating with parents about students’ academic behaviors. Parents received notes about students’ truancy and assignment completion. These notes reshaped parents’ beliefs and led to improvements in attendance and academic achievement. Bettinger et al. demonstrate that the saliency of the messages in informing parents of important behaviors that they should be monitoring was likely the mechanism by which this impacted student achievement. In both cases, the cost of the intervention was small relative to the benefits. 

New and innovative research designs are extending more and more interventions to parents, and this remains fertile ground for the laboratory of public schools. The recent text message interventions are particularly cost-effective and may have more potential to scale. 

Conclusion and discussion

When I was invited to write this chapter, the charge was to document how education systems changed after ANAR. How does one capture forty years of trial and error, of innovation and failure? I have chosen to identify a handful of innovations within districts and within schools. These examples — using small schools, specialized schools, school leadership, and innovation zones as cases of education system innovations and class size and using the time spent in schools as cases of classroom innovation — are just a sampling of innovations that have changed, at least incrementally, the way in which education is delivered. One only needs to browse the research-related web pages of organizations such as the American Institute for Research, MDRC, Mathematica, and RAND Corporation to learn about the breadth of continued experimentation and innovation in schools. 

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of many of these interventions is their failure to be scaled up or to generate impacts when scaled up. The key problem in many cases is the cost of scaling. Oftentimes, scaled versions lack the same features as the original laboratory experiment, and in many cases, funding the scaled version requires sacrifices in other areas. Moreover, in many cases, we lack the supply of personnel or funding to move forward. Perhaps the great challenge of the next forty years will be learning how to create cost effective versions of the innovations that laboratories produce. 

ANAR envisioned an education ecosystem where experimentation and learning from the laboratories of local schooling provided lessons and accelerated the process of change. While one can debate the relative quality of education over time, education systems of experimentation and learning across organizations have greatly increased, especially with the advent of the internet and the role of social media in drawing attention to innovation and to evidence. 

The What Works Clearinghouse and other formal and informal collections of evidence on innovative practice and policy only accelerate the role of education institutions as laboratories in identifying promising practices and moving them to scale. However, finding and scaling the products of these laboratories remains the next challenge to be solved if the vision of schools as laboratories is to yield long-run improvements in the quality of education.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: .

This vision encompasses the knowledge and skills needed for success in school and the dispositions that students must have for success beyond the classroom. But despite decades of education reform efforts stemming from the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, numerous factors have impeded widespread innovation in schools. Striving to create meaningful learning experiences for all students, Liberty Public Schools, home to approximately 12,500 students from Liberty and Kansas City, Missouri, has taken significant steps in designing a learner-centered ecosystem. This work has evolved through local, regional and state-level collaboration, ensuring that the ideas of students, educators, policymakers and the business community are incorporated.

Strategic planning efforts have defined what it means to be learner-centered so that all children can thrive. These approaches focus on the unique abilities and interests of each student, compared with the traditional, one-size-fits-all model. Through significant community engagement and professional development across all 19 schools in the pre-K-12 system, the district developed a Graduate Profile and Vivid Vision. For over a decade, the district has been working to offer various learning experiences, such as elementary- and secondary-level microschools and the UnSchool Challenge.

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These are rooted in Missouri’s educational standards but designed with students at the center. EPIC elementary — EPIC stands for “Every Person Inspired to Create” — was established in 2014 as an incubator for experimenting with such innovative practices as project-based learning and then implementing them across the district. It is a school of choice — meaning a lottery-based educational option outside their traditional neighborhood elementary school that a student’s family can opt into. At the secondary level, North Nation by Design and EDGE are microschools within traditional high schools that focus on collaboration with peers and professionals, student voice and choice, content-specific seminars, problem-based learning and real-world experiences. The UnSchool Challenge, developed in an effort to rethink alternative education, incorporates reverse internships in which business and community partners mentor students both on projects they are passionate about and areas they desire to pursue beyond high school, whether in the workplace, college or the armed services.

With the support of the community and in collaboration with other innovative districts, Liberty Public Schools has created a learning network that extends beyond its boundaries, allowing for exchanging ideas and best practices. Organizations like Education Reimagined reaffirmed our aim to transition from traditional approaches. Acceptance into Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools expanded our partnership with like-minded leaders in innovative districts nationwide to learn from one another. The district’s shift in culture and a growing desire to collaborate across the region resulted in a Business to Education (B2E) partnership with area Chambers of Commerce, civic organizations, philanthropic foundations and higher-education partners to expand real-world learning experiences for all students.

One of its key partnerships has been with area districts that are part of the Kansas City area Real World Learning (RWL) initiative. The network is a collaboration of area Missouri and Kansas school districts that connects students with business, industry and higher education to provide experiences that prepare them for success beyond graduation. Through internships, dual-credit classes, industry-recognized credentials, client-connected projects and entrepreneurial experiences, students develop the knowledge and skills needed to excel in college or the workplace.

In Missouri, the State Board of Education and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education are working to redesign traditional approaches to assessment and accreditation. Creating the Success Ready Students Network and establishing Innovation Zones has laid the groundwork for personalized learning that aligns with the Aurora Institute’s definition of competency-based education. By emphasizing the importance of ensuring that students graduate with at least one market-value asset, Missouri is designing a more personalized and effective approach to education.

As the state faces changes in leadership and governance, it must remain committed to innovation and personalized learning experiences for students. By building upon the successes of the past and embracing new approaches to assessment and accreditation, Missouri can create the learning ecosystems that students need and deserve.

The Liberty Public Schools’s learning ecosystem exemplifies what is possible when educators, policymakers and the community unite to prioritize student success and create a learner-centered approach to education. By continuing to innovate and collaborate, districts in Missouri and across the country can work to scale innovation that truly meets the needs of all learners.

Strangely, the subject of revenues and expenditures is never addressed in A Nation at Risk (ANAR). That omission makes the cascade of calls to increase funding for schools, often justified by reference to the message of urgency in ANAR while disregarding use of funds, ironic. By ignoring the role of funding and budgeting, the recommendations from the US National Commission on Excellence in Education are untethered from any grounding in choices and trade-offs that all public policy required. On the other side, the calls for funding that are divorced from ideas of how the funds are to be used are equally problematic.

Spending on schools is frequently used as a summary statistic of the quality of schools. And in discussions of how to make schools better and more equitable, the first order of business is frequently the necessity of increasing our investment in schools—in other words, our spending on schools. Unfortunately, history has not been very supportive of this strategy.

A conventional perspective is that legislatures and school districts should decide how much to spend based on the trade-off between the expected benefits of school spending and the taxes required for any given revenue. Once the revenue is determined, school districts would make budget allocations in order to produce the best student outcomes.

However, this picture is complicated in the case of schools, since states—which have primary responsibility for schools—are concerned not only with overall student outcomes but also with the equity of public provision. Two factors enter into the equity discussions. First, education is not entirely a function of schools but has components of families and circumstances that enter into student outcomes. Thus, children from more educationally disadvantaged households, English language learners, and children with various handicaps need more from the schools if they are to pull even with students not facing such difficulties. Second, because local funding is heavily reliant on local property taxes, the size of the district tax base will directly influence the ability of a school district to raise revenues. Students who happen to reside in districts where the value of residential property and the presence of commercial and industrial properties are high have an advantage in raising revenues for their schools.

The legislature in each state is charged with making political decisions about both the level of spending and how statewide education and funding differences are addressed. How to reach decisions that weigh the underlying trade-offs is vigorously debated, and every state has its own solution to this.

Legislatures are not the only actors in these discussions. Various parties who have not liked the legislative outcomes have gone to the courts to try to change the legislative decisions. Starting in California in 1968, courts in all but two states (Hawaii and Utah) have had litigation about school funding. The early cases in the 1970s and 1980s focused on equity issues largely related to differences in property tax bases and spending differentials across school districts, but the cases evolved throughout subsequent decades to focus more on the overall adequacy of funding to meet educational objectives.

The largest difficulty with the pattern and outcomes of revenue decisions is, however, the lack of a clear relationship between added spending and student outcomes. In simplest terms, the division of decisions between how much to spend and how to spend it has historically led to highly variable and quite disappointing results in terms of student outcomes. Specifically, it appears that how funds are spent is crucial—and generally more important than how much is spent. This does not say that more resources are never important for student outcomes. Nor does it say that more resources cannot be important for improved student outcomes. It does say that divorcing decisions on “how much” from “how” has not been successful within the current structure of school decision-making.

This chapter documents these overall conclusions. It then discusses alternative perspectives on funding for schools.

A short history of funding

In order to frame the school finance discussion, it is helpful to describe briefly the nature of financing of schools in the United States. The overall picture of enrollments, structure of the schools, and funding shows significant changes over time. Further, the aggregate picture hides significant variation across the states. The variety provides an important backdrop both for the analysis of school finance issues and for decision-making in the schools.

An overview of U.S. schooling

Public school enrollment in the United States, while rising during the 1990s, reached fifty million students in 2013 and stabilized there until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. The full impact of the pandemic is not yet known, but public school enrollment fell by 3 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021 and remained at the lower level through fall 2022.

These students are spread very unevenly across states and, within states, across separate local school districts. At the state level, Vermont had a total of 82,000 students while California had six million. The prime operating level is the school district, of which there were 13,452 in 2019, down from 117,408 in 1940. Moreover, the states are broken up into widely varying numbers of local districts. While Hawaii and the District of Columbia each have only one school district, five states had more than one thousand districts.

But even these aggregate variations understate the degree of heterogeneity in the schools, because the growing importance of school choice leads to even more decentralized operation of education. The public school district is the prime operating unit, but it does not cover the full provision of education services. Charter schools were first established in Minnesota in 1991, and the model spread across the country. Charter schools are public schools that operate with varying degrees of autonomy, depending on the state. Typically, they are free to operate outside of many of the education regulations in a state, and importantly, they can set their own requirements for teacher preparation, salary schedules, and personnel rules independent of local teachers’ unions. They receive public funding, and they are almost always required to take all applying students or to randomize admissions if more students apply than they can accommodate. They are also required to participate in the state student assessment systems.

Students can also attend private schools or be homeschooled. While this is changing, private schools almost always receive no direct public funding, as is the case for homeschooling. These parts of the system are generally very unregulated, and they can set their own curricula, standards, and hiring rules. They generally do not participate in state student assessment systems, and little is known about their performance except as indicated by parental choices.

Figure 1 shows the substantial changes in the structure of US schools in the twenty-first century in terms of parental choices that interact with school finance. There has been a steady rise in charter school attendance with relatively stable homeschool attendance and some decline in private schooling. The private school attendance is one-quarter nonsectarian and three-quarters religious based, with the religious component evenly split between Catholic and other denominations.

Note, however, that these data are pre-pandemic. With the pandemic, traditional public school attendance fell, while the other choice options increased. Within the public school sector there was also a shift from the traditional public schools to charter schools. The longrun distribution of students remains unclear at this time.

Revenues for U.S. education

The structure of the education sector and the attendance patterns that were highlighted relate directly to school finances. Because private schools and homeschooling are not publicly supported (to any significant degree), any increased attendance in these sectors relieves state and local governments of resource demands.

Figure 2 traces revenues for the public schools from 1960 to 2019. The bulk of funding comes from state and local revenues, which each correspond to roughly 45 percent of per-pupil funding. The federal share, which began rising in the 1960s as the federal government assumed a larger role in financing schools for disadvantaged students and subsequently for special education students, rose around the 2008 recession and then returned to its historic levels. While not shown, the federal government also contributed large additional amounts of temporary funds with the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The steady increase in per-pupil funding over the entire period puts public school revenues per student in 2019 at more than four times that in 1960 in real terms. In fact, except for the dip in school revenues after the end of federal support for the 2008 recession, real per-pupil spending (i.e., adjusted for inflation) has risen continuously for more than one hundred years.

State revenues come from a variety of sources that differ across the fiscal structures of the different states. At the same time, with few exceptions, property taxes are the dominant source of local revenues.

Public school spending incorporates both traditional public schools and charter schools. For a variety of political and institutional reasons, charter school spending is systematically below that for traditional public schools, although there is debate about the exact magnitude of differences.

The aggregate revenue data hides the wide variation that is seen at the state level. States differ significantly in how revenues are raised and in the level of spending. Table 1 shows the extent of compositional differences in school funding. Typically, most of the revenue is derived from state and local sources with the federal government contributing a smaller portion, but the federal share across states differs from 4 percent to 15 percent of funding because the federal revenues are driven largely by poverty rates and special education classifications that differ across states. States like Hawaii, with its one district, and Vermont provide almost all funding at the state level, while funding for schools in Washington, DC, is provided almost entirely at the local level. For Alaska schools, 15 percent of the funding comes from the federal government, the highest percentage of all states.

Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of state per-pupil spending levels in the 2018–19 academic year. Northeastern states spend more than $15,000 per student, significantly higher than the $9,000 to $11,000 per pupil spent by the majority of southern states.

Student performance

The United States has reliably assessed student performance with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the Nation’s Report Card. The long-term trend (LTT) assessment of NAEP makes it possible to get representative national data for math and reading performance of students aged nine, thirteen, and seventeen since the 1970s. Beginning in 1992, a second version of NAEP, called Main NAEP, was started with testing of math and reading in grades four and eight.

Table 2 provides data on NAEP testing results both in terms of changes in standard deviations (SD) and in terms of these changes relative to school expenditure. The pre-pandemic results fall into two distinct clusters. There are strong gains in the level of math performance for younger students—age nine (grade four) and to a lesser extent age thirteen (grade eight). But there are much more modest gains for age seventeen math and for reading at all ages.

The scores cover different periods of time, so it is also useful within this discussion to place them in comparison to the spending on schools. When normalized by spending over the relevant time periods, the younger cohort math gains are all greater than 0.07 SD per 10 percent larger spending, while the remaining gains are all less than 0.03 SD per 10 percent larger spending.

The results were, unsurprisingly, dramatically altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The MainNAEP had testing in spring 2019 (included in Table 2) and spring 2022. In math and reading for both grade four and grade eight, average scores fell dramatically with the largest declines being recorded for math performance (Table 3). Grade eight (grade four) gains from 1990 through 2022 were down to 0.33 SD (0.72 SD). For reading, virtually all gains since 1992 were erased by the pandemic; the 1992–2022 gain was 0.01 SD for grade eight and 0.02 for grade four. It is of course difficult to know how to interpret the scores after the pandemic. Clearly, the substantial added funds over the pandemic period were insufficient to overcome the learning disadvantages of the pandemic period.

The achievement gains in Table 2 are unconditional changes in student performance. In interpreting this performance data, it is important to note that, because achievement is a function not only of schools but also of parents, peers, and neighborhoods, the data do not indicate the causal impact of schools or spending, but they do provide an important backdrop to finance discussions.

One related pattern that does consider some of the nonschool factors is the historical evolution of achievement gaps by socioeconomic status (SES). Concerns have been raised that the widening of the US income distribution led to expanding SES achievement gaps (Reardon 2011). That concern is unfounded because test information that is linked over time shows a slow shrinking of gaps for birth cohorts born between 1961 and 2001 (Hanushek et al. 2022).

Court involvement

While the federal courts were involved in school funding issues for a while after the school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court in 1973 declared school finance outside the federal role (Rodriguez v. San Antonio), effectively moving all litigation to state courts.

Litigation in the state courts is filed under the state’s equal protection clause or the state’s education clause as covered by individual state constitutions (see Hanushek and Lindseth 2009). The equity cases under the equal protection clause argue that state efforts to ameliorate either cost of education differences (e.g., for English language learners) or differences in property tax bases are insufficient. The adequacy cases under state education clauses argue that the current level of funding is insufficient to meet the constitutional obligations of the state.

The judicial branch has been asked to assess the level and pattern of school spending in 205 separate court cases adjudicated across forty-eight of the fifty states. There is no distinct geographical pattern to where these court cases have been found. The prevalence of cases is almost evenly split between below-average and above-average spending states, but the success of defendants in maintaining the existing finance structures is relatively greater in low-spending states. Perhaps surprisingly, decisions in cases focused on adequacy tend to be more successful in states that are already at above-average achievement levels as measured by NAEP.

Interestingly, while the court cases are focused on school spending, there is no overall relationship between spending growth and either decisions that favor the plaintiffs or the number of cases in any state. States with mandates from the courts to increase spending average somewhat larger immediate growth (within five years of the decision) than states where there is no such court mandate, but these short-run changes do not lead to differences in long-term growth of spending. Thus, the school finance litigation has occupied the attention of state legislatures across the country, but it has not changed the overall funding outcomes across the states.

The spending-achievement dilemma

Since the first major study of school resources and student achievement (Coleman et al. 1966), there have been questions about the strength and consistency of any relationship between the two. This very influential study, the Coleman Report, suggested that school resources were not closely related to student outcomes; instead, families and peers had the primary influence. While the study was not well executed by current scientific standards, it evoked a huge response, with many researchers pursuing related questions about the determinants of student achievement.

The early research confirmed the doubts about whether strong impacts on student achievement would follow added spending (Hanushek 2003). But the early research was marked by studies of highly variable quality, and many would not meet current empirical standards. There are a variety of problems faced by this research, but the main problem is that insufficient attention is given to finding the “causal impact” of added funding. In other words, the correlations of resources and achievement could well be affected by other unmeasured factors that bias any empirical analysis.

A more recent body of research has developed that emphasizes careful identification of the causal impact of resources on student outcomes. The ideal approach to investigating the causal impact of resources is a randomized controlled trial where some group of schools is randomly chosen to receive more resources while another group does not. Such a research design is, of course, not really feasible with schools (or in many other circumstances). As a result, a variety of other approaches that are designed to mimic randomized controlled trials have been developed. These approaches have two common elements: the existence of a change in resources that is not correlated with other factors that affect student outcomes and the availability of a control group that can indicate what would happen in the absence of the added resources.

Finding circumstances that meet the requirements for these quasi-experimental approaches is not easy. Observations of most actual school operations do not meet these stringent requirements. In fact, the relevant scientific conditions are relatively unusual. But over the past two decades a number of such circumstances have been uncovered by researchers, lending the possibility that evidence on the causal impact of added resources can be more thoroughly investigated.

The studies falling into this category come from a variety of circumstances, ranging from added funding that results from court decisions in finance cases to the impact of budget decreases following the 2008 recession. Because these studies reflect such a wide range of circumstances, it is difficult to provide a direct comparison of the various estimates, but there are now two reviews of the work over the past two decades (Jackson and Mackevicius 2021; Handel and Hanushek 2023b).

Two general conclusions come from the recent studies:

• With high probability, adding resources to schools has a positive effect on student outcomes.

• The estimated impact of resources is highly variable and depends on the context and constraints on the spending.

The first conclusion largely underscores the contentious political nature of the research in this area. Nobody believes that adding resources to schools is likely to harm students and learning, but because parts of the research enter directly into legislative and judicial decisions about funding, there has been some effort to make this the focus of attention. By phrasing the issue as “does money matter?” the intent is to set the low hurdle of “no harm.” Of course, rational public decision-making would not fund all public programs that don’t harm the recipients.

The second conclusion of the research is much more relevant. The estimates of spending impacts range from too small to reject the possibility of no impact to very large effects on both student achievement and attainment of more schools. The small estimates would not justify added public expenditure because the costs would exceed the social benefits. The large results, on the other hand, would justify considerable commitment of added public funds.

Table 4 provides a summary of the results from the separate studies of student outcomes that meet modern empirical standards for estimating the causal impact of funding. All estimates represent the expected improvement in outcomes for a 10 percent increase in funding. The preferred estimates relate to achievement test scores. While most are positive and nine of sixteen are statistically significant, they vary widely. Part of the variation just represents normal sampling errors that are present in all studies, but most of it represents true differences in the underlying impact of funding. The estimates for test scores range from a reduction in achievement of −0.24 SD (not statistically significant) to +0.54 SD (statistically significant). This large range leaves substantial uncertainty in what can be expected from added funding. Clearly, averaging across these estimates to get a predicted impact would be misleading: in addition to having a small number of estimates in the sample, we could not be confident that they are typical of the full set of funding decisions that have not been measured.

While all of the results for school attainment (high school graduation, not dropping out, and continuing to college) are positive, they also cover a very wide range. They, too, have the same challenges for interpretation.

The major difficulty is that it has not been possible to describe when funds are particularly effective or ineffective (Handel and Hanushek 2023a). The estimated impacts of resources, as noted, come from very different circumstances. They do not reflect differences in the underlying methodology, in whether funds are targeted at a particular group such as disadvantaged students, whether they come from court directives, or whether they reflect differences across states in policies. To date, little headway has been made in describing the features of the particular contexts or the particular use of funds that yields significant learning gains.

In many ways, it is not surprising that the underlying methodology does not provide clear information about the underlying structure of effectiveness. The appeal of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs is that it is possible to provide causal impact information without knowing or being able to specify the full range of factors that enter into determining the outcomes. But this does not mean that the specific impact estimates are unaffected by the circumstances or even the design of the specific use of resources. The combination of the use of resources and the context within which they are applied is in how funds are used. The current research underscores the importance of how funds are used if student achievement is to be improved.

An ideal funding policy

Education policy has two broad goals: reach high levels of achievement and do this in an equitable manner. The way that we fund schools should clearly relate to meeting these goals. The overall level of funding is a political decision, not a scientific decision. Legislatures decide on funding levels on the basis of both their judgments about reaching the desired learning standards of the state and their views on the trade-offs with other public expenditures and with private expenditures (as related to tax rates). But because the outcomes of the funding depend on how the funds are used, the education policy surrounding any funding cannot be ignored.

A fundamental problem is that we do not have a set of simple policies that can be put in place and that have a high probability of successful impact on student achievement. We know some things that have an impact, but it is often not clear how they can be put in place at scale.

For example, there is extensive information about the importance of effective teachers (e.g., Hanushek 2011; Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff 2014; Bacher-Hicks and Koedel 2023). Knowing how important teachers are is different from having a clear set of policies that can be legislated and put into place. There are examples of the application of teacher policies that work in some locations, such as Washington, DC (Dee and Wyckoff 2015, 2017) and Dallas (Hanushek et al. 2023). It is nonetheless difficult to legislate adoption of these complex plans that have been honed to the circumstances of the individual areas.

There are institutional structures that tend to promote better achievement—and that are likely to work in part through promoting better teachers. For example, recent evidence points to good overall performance results from allowing the greater flexibility and parental choice that come with charter schools (see CREDO 2023). Yet the details remain difficult to legislate.

In discussing guiding principles for an effective funding system, Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) proposed seven general principles:

• If the objective is to improve outcomes, the system should focus on outcomes. Accountability for performance should be substituted for restrictions on local decision-making. 

• The system should reward those who contribute to success—that is, those who bring about high achievement.

• Rewards should be based on each person’s contribution to success and not on external factors such as the education inputs of families and neighborhoods.

• School funding formulas should minimize unproductive “gaming” by avoiding rewards for things that are easily manipulated by school personnel.

• School funding policies must recognize the underlying heterogeneity of students and their education challenges and ensure that all schools have the means to succeed. 

• School authorities must gather relevant programmatic and performance data and use it to refine and improve performance. 

• New policies or programs should be introduced in a manner that enables direct evaluation of their results.

These principles can, of course, be filled in a variety of ways, but they revolve around setting up incentives so that the decision-makers take actions that lead to better student outcomes. An example of the application of these principles is what Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) call “performance-based funding.”

The central elements of such a system, building on what has previously been successful, include a strong accountability system with incentives and direct rewards for successful performance, empowered local decision-making by both schools and parents, and an ongoing information and evaluation system. This would all be built on a rational and equitable base of funding that provides basic support and that recognizes both different abilities of districts to raise revenue and different costs for educating individuals (e.g., for children from poor families and for students with special needs).

Perhaps the key idea, however, is recognizing and rewarding success. Today many public funding programs actually do the opposite: they reward failure. For example, if a school shows poor performance from its students, more funds are provided; if the school shows improvement, funds are reduced. In other words, they provide an incentive for failure, not for success.

Policies based on incentives for outcomes do not call for completely understanding what works and why. They implicitly acknowledge that there might be alternative ways to achieve the same outcomes and that the choices might reflect both differing demands and differing capacities of schools.

Headwinds

An incentive-based funding program faces headwinds from a variety of sources. Perhaps the largest is simply the inertia in the system: “That is not how we do it.” There is a long history of approaches to funding that avoid policies offering direct positive incentives. This history is deeply embedded in both state policies and local decision-making—and leads to a majority of personnel in the current system being happy with the overall structure. Moreover, public views remain supportive of the institutional structure of the public schools. As a result, the system itself resists attempts at alteration.

The strongest force of resistance to change is the teachers’ unions. They, as a matter of principle, push back against any attempt to make policies based on differential performance (Moe 2011). As part of this, they resist accountability of schools and of personnel in general, and they resist linking resources to good performance.

At the same time, the unions do not stand alone. This is perhaps easiest to see in states that do not permit collective bargaining and that still resist changes in terms of accountability and incentives. It is also seen in the fact that right-to-work states do not systematically perform better.

COVID-19 brought new challenges to schools, and it has been common to blame all concerns and policy challenges on the pandemic. In reality, NAEP scores began falling after 2012 and simply continued their slide during the pandemic. The prior falls in scores have hit minorities and disadvantaged students exceptionally hard. The COVID cohort as a group has been seriously harmed by learning losses that accrued during the pandemic (Hanushek 2023). Just getting schools back to their 2020 levels appears to be a major challenge in a range of schools. But if we just get back to 2020, the COVID cohort will be permanently harmed. Eliminating the learning losses for this generation is a major policy challenge, but as described, it is far from the only challenge facing the schools. COVID underscores the urgency of the situation but does not provide a long-run solution.

In another matter that affects budgets but is not closely related to student outcomes, many schools are facing significant budget overhang from their retirement programs. The impact of the retirement system varies widely, depending on state rules on funding and depending in part on the character of prior contract negotiations. Most of these issues are beyond the scope of this discussion—with one exception. There is now evidence that schools tend to put too much teacher compensation into retirement plans that are valued by the teachers as having lower value than salary dollars (Fitzpatrick 2015). Thus, the state funding formula must be sensitive to the incentives sent to districts when they negotiate contracts.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

Several years ago, fresh from my South Bronx fifth-grade classroom and still feeling my way through the unfamiliar world of public policy and education reform, I found myself in a New York City ballroom where Michelle Rhee was receiving the Manhattan Institute’s Urban Innovator Award. She was, at that time and by a considerable margin, the most prominent and celebrated figure of the education reform movement in the United States, which was itself at the zenith of its power, prestige, and moral authority. As then chancellor of Washington, DC, schools, Rhee instituted a series of high-profile reforms, including closing chronically failing schools and tying teacher pay to performance. A few months earlier, she had been on the cover of Time magazine scowling and wielding a broom—a symbol of her determination to sweep underperforming teachers out of the city’s classrooms.

Rhee had recently announced the launch of a new initiative, Students First, and a goal to raise $1 billion to support political candidates to advocate for “real change,” which she defined as putting students’ needs before those of adult interests such as teachers’ unions or wasteful bureaucracies like the one she’d been waging war upon in the nation’s capital. From my vantage point as a classroom teacher and curriculum reform advocate, focusing attention, energy, and resources on political campaigns and legislative races seemed even less likely to improve student outcomes than the work she’d been doing running Washington’s school system.

After the event, I had the opportunity to talk with Rhee about her reform work as chancellor and the work she was now envisioning in political advocacy. I wondered aloud whether it made sense to reach conclusions about the effectiveness of individual teachers who are poorly trained, have little say over their curriculum, and as often as not have no curriculum at all. As she moved from leading a major metropolitan school district to a position of influence over state-level education decisions, perhaps she might keep curriculum in mind? “The last thing we’re going to do,” she replied with a chuckle, “is get wrapped up in curriculum battles.”

I was taken aback by the dismissal. Readers may recall that Rhee was the embodiment of an ed reform movement that embraced a confrontational, even pugilistic style. In her talk that afternoon before a number of prominent figures in education and policymaking, she’d urged her listeners not to shrink from conflict on behalf of children, yet she herself had no stomach for a debate over what America’s children should learn in school.

Go Deeper With the Author: Robert Pondiscio talk with an expert panel about curriculum reform, and why it could be the answer to some of education’s long-standing questions. 

More than a decade later, the encounter still stands out in my memory. Confronting the teachers’ unions on pay and tenure is worth a fight. So, too, is flipping a state legislative seat. Yet it was too heavy a lift to say what third-graders should know about American history, geography, or science, or whether they needed to know anything at all.

In fairness, this mindset was not unique to Rhee, who was merely the most vocal and visible representative of a theory of change common to education reformers of the time, which saw the external structures of education and the exercise of political power as the most important levers for improving student outcomes. The logic of this brand of reform assumed, at least tacitly, that schools and teachers know what to do, have the capacity for improvement, and need mostly to be properly incentivized—or threatened—in order to be made to do it. The cri de coeur that launched the modern education reform movement, the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, appropriately sounded an alarm over school curricula that “have been homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose” and have been replaced with “a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.” But concern over the substance of K–12 education in the United States had become an afterthought among the “structural reform” leaders like Rhee who came to prominence a generation later.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is no longer controversial to say that the structural reform theory of change has underperformed, its assumptions found wanting. To be sure, while twelfth-grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have not budged in two generations, there was evidence prior to the COVID-19 pandemic of gains in the earlier years of the twenty-first century, particularly in fourth-grade reading and math. Nor has the education reform movement been without significant accomplishments. Urban charter schools, the movement’s clearest victory, have transformed urban education for low-income students of color in many major US cities, creating unprecedented opportunities for students and bringing competitive pressure to bear on local school districts. Graduates of schools founded and run by charter management networks continue to graduate from high school and attend college at much higher rates than they would have had those schools never existed. But the fact remains that if the classic ed reform playbook of higher academic standards, high-stakes testing, and muscular accountability was going to bear fruit, drive watershed improvement in student outcomes, or appreciably narrow racial achievement gaps, we’d have clear evidence of it by now.

Worse, as the education reform movement evolved from the do-gooder earnestness of its early days to a punitive technocratic regime, it overspent its moral capital and contributed to unmistakable reform fatigue. This led a significant number of public education stakeholders — parents, teachers, and taxpayers—to regard its policies and practices with skepticism, even cynicism, particularly as education spending continued to rise while student achievement stagnated and even declined.

The lingering effects of COVID-related disruptions have shifted much of the attention in US education away from long-running debates over testing and accountability to more urgent discussions about learning loss, student mental health issues, and declining school attendance. It seems unlikely that the bipartisan ed reform coalition whose agenda dominated America’s K–12 agenda in the first decades of the twenty-first century will be returning to prominence anytime soon, if ever. The appetite for reform has waned considerably. The movement is what advertising and marketing professionals call a tainted brand. Indeed, ed reform “is now considered to be a loaded term that is no longer spoken in polite company,” former Massachusetts secretary of education James Peyser recently observed, “without risking a heated argument or losing the friendship of former allies.”

Education reform’s next frontier: Instructional reform

A simple fact about education in the United States trumps all others, yet has been largely overlooked in the education reform era and contributed to its disappointing underperformance: it takes nearly four million women and men to staff America’s K–12 classrooms. A number that large, by definition, means that teachers will be people of average abilities and sentience—not saints, not superstars, and, more pertinently, not the cognitive elite, who do not exist in sufficient numbers to staff more than a fraction of America’s classrooms. At the same time, it is not an overstatement to say that the ever-increasing demands placed on the average teacher make the job nearly impossible to do well, consistently, or sustainably. The reluctance even to cite, let alone address, this mismatch of expectations and abilities contributes to the mediocre performance of education in the United States, which has not changed significantly or satisfactorily since A Nation at Risk warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

If teacher capacity is unlikely to change, then what must change is the teacher’s job. If the education reform movement is to regain its momentum and moral authority, becoming not merely a disruptive force but an effective one, it must reinvent itself as a practice-based movement that is clear-eyed and candid about human capital and system capacity, committed not to transforming the teacher workforce but to making teaching doable by the existing workforce and those likely to enter the profession in the future.

At the same time, candor requires acknowledging that this transformation can’t be speedily or satisfactorily addressed, even if taken up with urgency. Education policy is a weak lever to change classroom practice. Enduring change requires shifts in the culture of teaching, which is notoriously slow to evolve, resistant to change, and skeptical—even cynical—about reform. For a 2017 study published by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, Wartburg College professor Richard Snyder interviewed a series of teachers with more than twenty years in the field to understand their perspectives on reforms and change. One teacher, who was aggravated with changes to class schedules, often ignored new directives from administrators. “In fact, Mr. Booker—a social studies teacher with over 30 years of experience—acknowledged giving ‘lip service’ to numerous initiatives, then returning to his own classroom intent on accomplishing intellectual discourse through interactive lecture.” Other teachers criticized increased top-down control, whether it be from Common Core State Standards or area education agency (AEA) consultants. Concerned about her loss of autonomy, Mrs. Rittmeyer stated:

So now the AEA is teaching us how to teach because we don’t know how to teach kids how to read, and learn letters and sounds, things like that . . . never have darkened the doors of our classroom, but they can meet with us once a week and tell us what to do. That’s very frustrating.

The cyclical change and rebranding of old ideas common to education reform frustrated teachers the most. A high school teacher told Snyder, “I’ve become more frustrated, especially when I started hearing things I’ve heard before and [being] spun as new. . . . I don’t like the way we, we put brand new wrappers on things . . . and I sit through a pile of meetings and hear the same things I heard 15 years ago.”

There is one arrow in the policymaker’s quiver that remains mostly unutilized and can be used to effect positive change: curriculum reform. The adoption and implementation of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and making curriculum and its implementation central to school improvement efforts contribute to working conditions that allow teachers to focus on lesson delivery—not lesson design—while lending greater consistency to the student experience regardless of school setting and raising outcomes at something closer to scale. A systematic 2017 review of the effects of curricular choices in K–12 education conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education concluded that curriculum is “a critical factor in student academic success” and that a “comprehensive, content-rich curriculum is a common feature of academically high-performing countries.” However, to a degree largely lost upon policymakers and other stakeholders in education, the curricula in most US schools and districts are not “comprehensive and content-rich” at all, but teacher driven, often improvisational and incoherent.

We have known for some time (or at least have had ample reason for curiosity and further study) that curriculum could be a richer vein of ore to mine than many of the more commonly pulled “structural” reform levers. In 2012, Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst and Matthew M. Chingos noted in a widely read Brookings Institution paper that the effect size of choosing a better second-grade math curriculum was larger than replacing a 50th-percentile teacher with a 75th-percentile teacher. Clearly, it is easier to give children access to a strong curriculum than it is to dramatically increase the effectiveness of their teachers. At the same time, Whitehurst and Chingos lamented that “little research exists on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, and very little systematic information has been collected on which materials are being used in which schools.”

It is hard to account for or excuse entirely the long-standing indifference to curriculum in education reform, which has long seemed to assume that differences in student outcomes are attributable mostly to who the teacher is, not what is being taught. To be sure, researchers have amply demonstrated that some teachers are more effective than others. But identifying what makes them so has proven elusive. No consistent or clear relationship has been found, for example, between teacher credentialing or certification exams and classroom effectiveness. However, education reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s were enamored with “alternative certification” routes and high-profile initiatives like Teach for America to lure the “best and the brightest” graduates of elite universities to spend at least a few years in the classroom. Results have been mixed. But even if they were stellar, more than 80 percent of full-time teachers still enter the classroom via traditional training and certification routes, limiting this strategy’s potential for transformational change.17 Neither is it likely that simply paying teachers more will make the profession as attractive to the best and brightest as technology, engineering, medicine, or law.

“What we teach isn’t some sidebar issue in American education: it is American education,” David Steiner, executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins, has noted. “The track record of top-performing countries, early evidence of positive effects from the faithful implementation of high-quality curricula here in the United States, and the persistent evidence that our classrooms are underchallenging our students at every level compel us to put the materials that we use to teach at the core of serious education reform.” If the assumption is that curriculum either is settled or doesn’t matter to student outcomes, it is a demonstrably incorrect assumption. A 2016 study by RAND Corporation revealed that virtually every English language arts (ELA) teacher in America — 99 percent of elementary teachers; 96 percent of secondary school teachers—routinely use “materials they created or selected themselves.” Among elementary school teachers, 94 percent reported turning to Google to find ELA lesson plans and instructional materials; 87 percent searched Pinterest. The numbers are virtually the same for math. Survey data by the research firm MDR found that teachers spend seven hours per week searching for instructional resources and another five hours per week creating their own classroom materials. The open question is whether this is an effective use of teacher time, and what might they use those hours for instead.

In theory, curating, customizing, or creating lessons from scratch allows teachers to tailor their instruction to meet the specific needs, interests, and abilities of their students. By designing their own curriculum, either in whole or in part, teachers can ostensibly adapt and differentiate class content, instructional methods, and assessments, resulting in a more personalized and engaging learning experience for students. If it could be demonstrated that the vast number of hours teachers spent doing curriculum design work paid dividends in raising student achievement, then no further comment would be necessary. The available evidence does not suggest a richer academic experience for students, however.

A 2019 study authored by University of Southern California Associate Professor Morgan Polikoff and education consultant Jennifer Dean explored the quality of supplemental materials teachers downloaded from popular websites, revealing “a major mismatch between what content experts think educators should (and shouldn’t) use in classrooms and what teachers, hungry for instructional resources, are choosing to download.” Polikoff and Dean rated most of the materials teachers chose themselves from popular websites such as Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” Similarly, a 2018 report from the New Teacher Project (TNTP) based on one thousand observations found that students “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.” Disadvantaged students were the hardest hit. “Classrooms that served predominantly students from higher income backgrounds spent twice as much time on grade-appropriate assignments and five times as much time with strong instruction, compared to classrooms with predominantly students from low-income backgrounds,” the study found.

A more comprehensive and rigorous study, conducted by Thomas J. Kane of Harvard University and David Blazar of the University of Maryland, examined data on student achievement and math textbook adoptions in six states over the course of three school years and found “little evidence of differences in average math achievement growth in schools using different elementary math curricula.” However, the pair also reported that while the vast majority of teachers used their school’s official curriculum in more than half of their lessons, few used it exclusively. Even more pertinently—perhaps ominously—they found only “modest” amounts of teacher professional development on the adopted textbooks and curriculum.

“Some may interpret our findings as implying that curriculum choice does not matter. We believe that would be an overstatement,” wrote Kane, Blazar, and their colleagues. “It is true that, at current levels of classroom implementation, we do not see that schools using different textbooks or curriculum materials differed in terms of average student achievement growth on the CCSSaligned assessments. Yet, it is possible that, with greater support for classroom implementation, the advantages of specific curricula would emerge and we would see larger differences.”

In a commentary on the report, Kane and David Steiner compared teachers’ use of newly adopted curricula to a smartphone with “mysterious functions” that most consumers never use, preferring instead to dabble with the unfamiliar device. “With the new curricula, we have handed teachers a tool much more complicated than any smartphone, one that holds great promise but requires complex behavior changes. And we have largely left them to figure it out on their own,” the pair observed. “The average teacher received only 1.1 days of professional development devoted to their curriculum during the 2016–17 school year and 3.4 days when including prior years.” Rather than conclude that curriculum has no effect on student outcomes, the pair wisely prescribed a “call to action,” stating the following:

Education policymakers can no longer simply exhort schools and districts to implement curricula more thoroughly. We need to provide clearer guidance on an effective transition to more-rigorous curricula. States, districts, and the national philanthropies who have been supporting the better materials should test different packages of supports—with different combinations of professional development for teachers, training for principals on what to look for during classroom observations, classroom coaching, videotaped practice sessions with teachers—and identify the suite of supports necessary to generate closer adherence to the curricula and to boost student achievement.”

In sum, spending hours on customizing curriculum or creating units and lessons from scratch is burdensome, results in lessons of low rigor and quality, and is almost certainly a less valuable use of teacher time than studying student work, giving feedback, developing subject matter expertise, and building relationships with students and their families. The bespoke nature of instructional planning is a standard feature of a teacher’s job in the United States but one that lacks evidence of efficacy.

Change does not have to come in the form of a centralized, top-down curriculum imposed by distant state governments, but as the guarantor of public education, states have a clear interest in ensuring that the best curricula are adopted and implemented. In the early 2010s, under the tenure of then superintendent of education John White, the state of Louisiana pioneered an approach whereby the state department of education, in partnership with teachers across the state, evaluated dozens of math and ELA curriculum programs, sorting them into three quality tiers and publishing the results online. Districts that adopted the top “Tier 1” programs were given financial incentives and state-provided professional development to encourage adoption, thus, in the words of one state education official, “making the best choice the easy choice.” Initial results were encouraging: the 2015 NAEP tests showing that “Louisiana 4th graders showed the highest growth among all states . . . and the second-highest in math” provide suggestive evidence that curriculum reform holds promise as an effective weapon for raising test scores.

Crucially, there is broad support among teachers for the adoption and implementation of HQIM. In a May 2022 report on the availability of HQIM, EdReports, the leading reviewer of instructional materials in the United States, surveyed teachers and asked how important it was for the materials they use to be aligned with standards. Nearly three-fourths (73.3 percent) of teachers said it was “extremely important,” and another 20.9 percent said it was “somewhat” important. Even so, the actual use of HQIM in classrooms is shockingly low. EdReports also found that only 25.6 percent of teachers used at least one ELA standards–aligned material per week, with that percentage rising to 39.7 percent for math standards materials. This reinforces the impression that teachers lack the discernment when choosing or customizing curricular materials to exercise their judgment appropriately. Reducing this gap between the belief in using HQIM and the actual use of those materials is a key priority in making sure students get the best possible education.

The benefits of a core curriculum

For decades, the renowned education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued for the adoption of a core curriculum across academic disciplines and from the first days of school based on a belief, firmly grounded in cognitive science, that a shared body of knowledge is an essential building block of literacy in an economically and socially diverse country. Hirsch’s argument emphasizes that a core curriculum would help bridge gaps in knowledge among students from diverse backgrounds, promote social cohesion, and equip individuals with the foundational knowledge necessary for success in various academic and professional pursuits, while contributing to the broadly embraced goal of building students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Hirsch’s vision suggests that there should be far more similarities than differences in the student experience regardless of where a child attends school and regardless of their socioeconomic status. Specifying the knowledge and skills that children should share and which their education would give them fair and equal access to would promote educational excellence and equity, allowing all to engage meaningfully in society, understand complex texts, and communicate effectively.

It is beyond the reach of even the most determined policymaker to impose a single curriculum on America’s K–12 education system, however, simply because no such system exists. The word “education” famously appears nowhere in the US Constitution, thus devolving the responsibility to the individual states. The political unpopularity of Common Core State Standards, commonly mistaken for a national curriculum, demonstrates the hostility to anything approaching federal control of classroom content. Our tradition of local control of education makes it unlikely in the extreme that the United States will ever adopt the kind of national curriculum common to many other nations, including those whose academic performance easily outpaces our own. Any significant momentum to make curricular content more consistent from state to state, from district to district, and even across the hall in the same school will have to be driven by reforms from within the field of education itself. The strongest argument for this is that it is simply too much to ask of teachers to be effective at both curriculum design and delivery. It places undue burden on teachers with no evidence of effectiveness for students.

In his 2016 book Leadership for Teacher Learning, Dylan Wiliam observes that when teachers are asked to identify something that they will stop doing or do less of to create time and space for them to explore improvements to their teaching, they fail miserably. “They go through the list of their current tasks and duties and conclude that there is nothing they can stop doing or do less of, because everything that they are doing contributes to student learning,” he writes. “In my experience, it is hardly ever the case that teachers are doing things that are unproductive. This is why leadership in education is so challenging. The essence of effective leadership is stopping people from doing good things to give them time to do even better things.”

What might those “better things” include? For my own 2019 book, How the Other Half Learns, I spent a year embedded in a high-performing Success Academy charter school in New York City’s South Bronx, a few blocks from where I’d taught fifth grade in a struggling elementary school run by the New York City Department of Education some years earlier. Success Academy, a network of approximately fifty charter schools based in New York City, has distinguished itself with an outstanding track record of high achievement among the predominantly low-income, minority students it serves. If it were a stand-alone public school district, its test scores would make it New York State’s best-performing district, despite the high concentration of poverty in most of the neighborhoods in which its schools are located.

The purpose of the book was to see what lessons could be gleaned from Success Academy’s instructional model and exported to K–12 public education at large. In the course of my reporting, I interviewed a pair of hedge fund managers who had written the charter school application for what was originally called Gotham Charter School. Joel Greenblatt and John Petry focused their efforts on creating a school model that was replicable, a conviction reinforced by visits to high-performing New York City charters like KIPP Infinity Middle School in Harlem. “We were watching this amazing English lesson. I elbowed the assistant teacher and said, ‘Just for my interest, what’s the background of that teacher?’,” Greenblatt told me in an interview for the book. “‘He wrote for [the television sitcom] Frasier for five years,’” she replied. “It would be wonderful if everyone could have that teacher, but everyone can’t,” Greenblatt explained.

This insight was out of step with the education orthodoxy of the time and the orthodoxy of the “no excuses” charter school movement in particular. But it found its way under CEO Eva Moskowitz into the model of Success Academy, which implements a single curriculum across its network, creating ripple effects in the classroom. Like teachers everywhere, Success Academy staff spend a significant amount of their time preparing lessons for students. However, where lesson planning for many, even most, US teachers involves lesson creation or customization, at Success Academy it’s referred to as “intellectual preparation.” As the name implies, it means preparing to teach a lesson or unit, not creating one from scratch. This appears to greatly contribute to one of Success Academy’s most significant accomplishments: its ability to get uniformly good results from relatively inexperienced teachers. It is important to note that Success Academy’s curriculum is not “scripted.” Teachers work from an established curriculum—units and lesson sequences prepared by network-level staff. Success Academy’s model asks teachers to focus on teaching, not on creating curriculum or gathering instructional resources. Compared to the more common practice of lesson planning as lesson design, Success Academy’s model functionally creates hours of capacity for teachers to look at data, study student work, diagnose, act, adapt, and intervene quickly when students are struggling or falling behind. As Moskowitz told me at the time, “You can’t be successful in our model without studying student work.”

One of the promises of the US charter school movement is that those schools might serve as laboratories for innovative instructional practices and strategies. Adopting a core curriculum and asking teachers to focus on lesson delivery, not on lesson design, and asking them to study student work and become effective diagnosticians and interventionists is one such practice that appears worth emulating.

Conclusion

Gifted musicians in an orchestra generally do not write the symphonies they play. We do not think less of a talented actor who merely performs but did not write a Shakespearean tragedy. Great chefs need not be farmers, butchers, or fishermen. Teachers, by noteworthy contrast, are expected to be both expert lesson deliverers and instruction designers. Significantly, this expectation is something the profession tends to valorize; it didn’t drift into it. Teachers College at Columbia University, for example, among the premier teacher preparation programs in America, maintains as a core tenet of its Master of Arts in Curriculum and Teaching program that “teachers are necessarily and rightly adapters and designers of curriculum.” There is no evidence that this practice benefits students.

Making curriculum an afterthought in our efforts to improve student outcomes and giving insufficient professional development to properly implement those materials when they are adopted makes a hard job nearly impossible and virtually enshrines poor performance and teacher burnout as policy. As Marcy Stein, an education professor with expertise in evaluating instructional design at the University of Washington–Tacoma, puts it, “Few teachers ever take coursework on instructional design and, therefore, have little knowledge of the role it plays in student learning.” Further reflecting on the many extraneous burdens we place on teachers, Stein notes:

Even if teachers were taught about instructional design, they would likely not have the time to prepare instructional materials, field test those materials to determine if they are effective, and modify the materials before using them to teach students. An iterative process is crucial for the development of effective materials.

Readers might be tempted to see in between the lines of the preceding quotation an argument for the elimination of teacher autonomy or even a case for “McSchool,” a basic education deliverable by teachers of minimal competence and cognition who must be spoon-fed a scripted curriculum. Having anticipated this argument, let me put it to rest. An idea that is common to teacher training and professional development is that there should be a “why” behind everything a teacher does in the classroom, from classroom management to instructional decisions. The same principle applies here: the point is not for school districts to adopt a curriculum and for teachers to deliver it robotically. Well-prepared teachers should acquire through their training and professional development a sophisticated understanding of their subject matter and pedagogy and have it operationalized for them in the form of a curriculum or program.

The one thing we cannot give teachers is more time. It is too much to ask of teachers to create their own programs and curricula; the opportunity costs are profound. The twofold challenge for policymakers is to privilege the adoption of an effective curriculum but also for teachers to understand why it’s effective. It cannot be denied that the current culture of teaching largely expects teachers to both deliver and design curricula, making it less likely they do either expertly. This de facto demand tends to result in a student experience that is incoherent, marked by curriculum gaps and repetitions and by lessons that are lacking in rigor. The principal point here is to return to teachers time spent needlessly or excessively planning units and lessons from scratch so that they can spend more time on higher-yielding activities: studying student work, giving feedback, deepening their subject expertise, and building relationships with students and families.

The ed reform era, now receding in power and prestige, overestimated the impact of education policy and “structural reform” to improve student outcomes. Renewed efforts to improve school performance must focus on instructional reform. This does not imply, however, that there is no role for policymakers, only that they must be clear-eyed about their leverage and its limits, keeping in mind these key takeaways:

• Efforts to improve student outcomes by changing the composition of the teacher workforce or dramatically raising their level of sophistication and skill are unlikely to be successful due to the large number of teachers needed to staff our schools. What must change is the job: teaching must be doable by women and men of ordinary talents and sentience

• While the evidence base is insufficiently robust to say with certainty, there is ample reason to suggest it is easier, less expensive, and more effective to change curricula than to change teachers.

• The soul of effective teaching is studying student work, giving effective feedback, and developing relationships with students. Teacher time spent on curating and customizing lessons, however valuable, takes time away from these more impactful uses of teacher time. The adoption of a high-quality curriculum and training on its effective implementation is the first, most critical step toward transforming the teacher’s job.

• Education occurs in a public context; there will always be a role for policymakers to ensure accountability. However, improvements at scale will not be wrested from rewards and punishments, nor from other “structural” reforms.

There are, finally, encouraging signs in both education policy and practice that suggest a new willingness to question long-standing classroom practices and that curriculum and instruction are gaining traction as reform levers, at least in early childhood education. In the past few years, the science of reading (SoR) movement has emerged as one such welcome development in literacy education.

Drawing upon a deep research base in a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience, the movement has sought to reorient teacher training, curriculum adoption, and teacher professional development around evidence-based instructional practices, particularly foundational skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Critically, the SoR movement seeks to address the shortcomings in teacher preparation and professional development.

Indeed, much of the movement’s energy and focus have been directed at colleges of education, which have come under harsh scrutiny for their failure to adequately prepare teacher candidates to successfully teach reading. In a 2023 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), which monitors and reports on teacher preparation programs, Dr. Heather Peske, NTCQ president, stated, “We’re in the midst of a long overdue revolution on the science of reading but teacher prep programs haven’t fully caught up.” The report studied nearly seven hundred teacher preparation programs across the country, looking for evidence that coursework for future elementary school teachers included “core components of scientifically based reading instruction.” NCTQ determined that only 25 percent of the programs it evaluated adequately cover all five core components of scientifically based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. “Perhaps more alarmingly, another 25% of programs do not adequately cover even a single component,” the report noted.

What is true of teacher training can be said with equal certainty about curricula. It is simply too much to expect teachers to be able to effectively operationalize the science of reading in the absence of effective curriculum and professional development on its implementation. As many expert observers have noted, the SoR movement will ultimately succeed or fail not just on early literacy skills but through the adoption and implementation of the kind of “knowledge-rich” curriculum E. D. Hirsch Jr. and others have championed for decades. This requires collaboration and coordination by teachers within and across grades and over many years of schooling. It is literally impossible to accomplish if teachers simply close their doors and teach what they like. Thus, the SoR movement offers both a test case and a potential proof point for many of the arguments made above.

A strong, knowledge-based curriculum not only leads to smarter teachers and students but also has beneficial downstream effects, such as giving teachers the opportunity to develop subject matter expertise, help struggling students, and make connections with families rather than spending hours each week scouring the internet and creating lesson plans from scratch. Let’s not ask what more teachers can do. Let’s ask instead what are the things that only a teacher can do. Everything else should be a job for someone else.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

“Standards-based reform” in the heyday of the education reform movement was a bit like the title of a recent film: Everything Everywhere All at Once. The strategy of setting statewide standards, measuring student performance against those standards, and then holding schools accountable for the results was at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dominated education policy for most of the “long NCLB period” from the 1990s into the 2010s. To many observers, standards-based reform was education reform, and so the question about whether standards-based reform worked is equivalent to asking whether education reform worked.

Answering that question is only possible if we define what’s in and what’s out: What counts under the umbrella of standards-based reform? Did it succeed as an overall strategy? Were there individual components that were particularly effective?

In this chapter, we will work our way through these and related questions, but readers should beware that the results will not be entirely satisfying. Get ready for a lot of shrugging. We know, for example, that student achievement improved markedly in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the very time that states were starting to put standards, tests, and “consequential accountability” into place. Some of the gains can be directly attributed to those policies. But the improvement was likely driven by other factors, too, some of which had very little to do with education policy or even schools, such as the plummeting child poverty rate at the time.

On the flip side, when student achievement plateaued and even started to decline in the 2010s, it’s plausible that the tapering off was related to the softening of school-level accountability, as NCLB lost steam and eventually gave way to the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Common Core State Standards. But hard evidence is scant, and it’s difficult to know for sure, especially because—again—so much else was going on at the same time. That included the aftermath of the Great Recession (and its budget cuts) as well as the advent of smartphones and social media, which may have depressed student achievement just as they boosted teenage anxiety and depression.

And while we know that standards, testing, and especially accountability drove some of the improvements in student outcomes in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in math, we unfortunately have limited information about exactly what schools did to get those better results. For the most part, the “black box” that is the typical K–12 classroom stayed shut.

Here’s the good news: despite all these uncertainties, there’s still much we can learn from the era of standards-based reform—both for future efforts to use standards, assessments, and accountability to improve outcomes and for education reform writ large.

A short history of standards-based reform

The NCLB Act locked into place a specific version of standards-based reform, one that incorporated a mishmash of ideas that had been floating around since the 1980s and arguably since the 1960s. Think of it like a dish at a fusion restaurant, reflecting a novel combination of flavors and culinary lineages—not always with a satisfying outcome.

One might even say that this version of standards-based reform was incoherent—which is ironic, given that coherence was arguably the number-one goal of the original progenitors of the idea. In a series of articles and books in the late 1980s, scholars Jennifer O’Day and Marshall Smith argued for what they called “systemic reform.” Their key insight was that the multiple layers of governance baked into the US education system as well as myriad conflicting policies emanating from the many cooks in the K–12 kitchen were pulling educators in too many directions. What we needed was to fix the system as a whole, to think comprehensively and coherently and thereby get everyone rowing in the same direction in pursuit of stronger and more equitable student outcomes.

To do so, we needed to get serious about “alignment.” We should start with a clear set of desired outcomes, also known as standards, delineating what we expect students to know and be able to do—at the end of high school but also at key milestones along the way. Those curricular standards would set forth both the content of what kids needed to learn and the level at which they needed to learn it. Regular assessments would help practitioners and policymakers understand whether kids were on track to meet expectations and ready to progress to the next grade level and, ultimately, high school graduation. This approach would allow for the assessment of student performance against common expectations and criteria rather than measuring students against one another (norm-referenced evaluation and rankings) to determine academic achievement. But perhaps most importantly, all the other key pieces of the education apparatus needed to be aligned to the standards as well—especially teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, and funding systems.

O’Day and Smith didn’t say much about “accountability” as we would later come to talk about it—consequences that would accrue to educators, especially for poor student performance. Instead, their focus was primarily on coherence, alignment, and building “capacity” in the system to improve teaching and learning.

Systemic reform was popular with traditional education groups. It spoke to the frustration of classroom teachers as well as principals and superintendents, without directly threatening the political power of key constituencies, especially teachers’ unions. They welcomed the additional help envisioned by scholars such as O’Day and Smith—and the additional money.

But this approach was hardly the only school improvement game in town. Other ideas were gaining prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, too, ideas promulgated by governors, economists, political scientists, and business leaders. To oversimplify a bit, they coalesced around the “reinventing government” frame — namely that to reform a broken system like K–12 education, leaders needed to embrace a “tight-loose” strategy: tight about the results to be accomplished and loose about how people closer to the problem might get there. This was how business titans of the time steered their organizations, especially as the economy was shifting to knowledge work. To get the best results, people on the front lines had to have the autonomy to make decisions and solve problems themselves in real time rather than take orders from the top. They should be rewarded when they improved productivity accordingly. But if they failed to generate the desired results, unpleasantness might be expected to follow. They might even lose their jobs.

This struck a chord among some education scholars as well. As far back as 1966’s Coleman Report, we knew about the disconnect between education inputs and outcomes. If we wanted better results, it made sense to focus on the latter. Furthermore, many of the reforms embraced in the wake of 1983’s A Nation at Risk report tried to tweak inputs such as teacher salaries, course requirements, and days in the school year. In an era of stagnant achievement and widening achievement gaps, none of that seemed to be working. It was time, many thought, for something else.

By the early 1990s, the tight-loose frame was a big driver behind the charter schools movement and the notion of “accountability for results” for public schools writ large. Lamar Alexander, who was governor of Tennessee before becoming US secretary of education under George H. W. Bush, was apt to talk about “an old-fashioned horse trade”: greater autonomy for schools and educators in return for greater accountability for improved student outcomes. And it wasn’t just Republican governors who embraced this model; several Democratic ones did, too, especially southern governors such as Jim Hunt (North Carolina), Richard Riley (South Carolina), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas). It helped that the Progressive Policy Institute—a think tank for the New Dems—supported this approach enthusiastically.

This version of standards-based reform had some overlap with O’Day and Smith’s systemic reform, especially when it came to the centrality of academic standards. But it put greater emphasis on the measurement of achievement against those standards—in other words, high-stakes testing—and especially on accountability measures connected to results. This reflected the thinking of both economists and political scientists, who thought that the right incentives might allow local schools and school systems to break through the political barriers to change. With enough pressure from on high, schools might finally put the needs of kids first rather than follow the lead of adult interest groups, especially unions. They would remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, for example, ditch misguided curricula, and untie the hands of principals. The assumption was that the major barrier to improvement was not incoherence or the lack of capacity per se, but small-p politics and, especially, union politics. Getting the incentives right by tying real accountability to results could take a sledgehammer to the political status quo in communities nationwide.

This made sense to some key actors on the political left as well, especially the Education Trust and other civil rights organizations. They bought into this version of standards-based reform but with an important twist: doing right by kids would be defined primarily as doing right by kids who had been mistreated by the education system. That meant Black, Hispanic, and low-income students especially. These reformers wanted to counterbalance the political power of the unions but also that of affluent parents and other actors who tended to steer resources to the children and families who needed them the least. They wanted to use top-down accountability to redirect money, qualified teachers, and attention to the highest-poverty schools and the most disadvantaged kids.

These various flavors of standards-based reform were all in the mix in the 1990s, with many public discussions in particular about the wisdom of a strategy focused on “capacity building” versus one that stressed “accountability for results.” The enactment of NCLB settled the debate; the accountability hawks won. Capacity building would mostly be put on the shelf in favor of a muscular, federally driven effort to hold schools accountable, especially for the achievement of the groups that most concerned civil rights leaders.

Enter No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush-era reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was the law of the land for an entire generation of students. The kids who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2002, nine months after then president George W. Bush put his signature on NCLB, were seniors in high school in December 2015 when then president Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (its reauthorized successor).

That’s not to say that the same policy was set in stone for those thirteen years. For the first half of its life, federal officials implemented it rather faithfully, but the second half came with major policy shifts driven by regulatory actions and what might be termed “strategic nonenforcement.” Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane.

“NCLB-classic”—which was the 2001 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—centered on the three-legged stool of standards, tests, and accountability. But those three elements were not treated with the same level of prescription. States had complete control over their standards—both in terms of the content to be included and in terms of the level of performance that would be considered good enough. Not so when it came to the tests—those had to be given annually to students in grades three through eight in reading and in math, plus once in high school, plus three times in science. And the assessments had to meet a variety of technical requirements.

But where NCLB’s designers really got prescriptive was around accountability requirements. They created a measure called adequate yearly progress, which judged schools against statewide targets for performance and decreed that subgroups of students—the major racial groups plus low-income kids, students with disabilities, and English learners—would need to hit those targets as well. If schools failed to achieve any of their goals in a given year, they would face a cascade of sanctions that grew more severe with each unsuccessful year. Students would have the right to attend other public schools in their same district and, eventually, to receive “supplemental education services” (i.e., free tutoring) from private providers. Districts were charged with intervening in low-performing schools with ever-increasing intensity.

NCLB had a plethora of other provisions, from mandating that schools hire only “highly qualified teachers” to bringing “scientifically based reading instruction” (now called the science of reading) to the nation’s schools. Some of these other pieces could be considered capacitybuilding efforts. But overwhelmingly, NCLB was about accountability for results. It assumed that with enough pressure, schools and districts would cut through the Gordian knot that was holding them back in order to raise the achievement of students, especially those from marginalized groups. That was the theory. And as we’ll get to in a moment, it partly worked.

But it also soon became clear that many schools and systems didn’t know what to do in response to the accountability pressure—or couldn’t steel themselves to make the requisite changes in long-established practices and structures. Some educators narrowed the curriculum, significantly expanding the time spent on math and reading at the expense of other subjects. Stories filled the nation’s newspapers about schools teaching to the test, canceling recess, even ignoring lice outbreaks, all because of the accountability pressures of NCLB. In perhaps the most notable education scandal, teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools district were found to have cheated on state-administered tests by providing students with the correct answers to questions and even changing students’ answers and modifying test sheets to ensure higher scores.

NCLB Evolves

As with most federal statutes, Congress was supposed to update NCLB after a few years. A reauthorization push in 2007 came close to doing so and would have made the law even tougher, but it fell apart under fierce opposition from teachers’ unions and other education advocacy groups. So the law lumbered on even as it became clearer to its strongest supporters, including then education secretary Margaret Spellings, that parts of it were becoming unworkable.

One of the major issues was that an increasing number of schools were failing to meet NCLB’s adequate yearly progress provisions. If tens of thousands of schools were deemed subpar, then the sting and stigma were lost, as was much of the motivation to do something to fix it. In particular, the law’s focus on achievement rather than progress over time was snaring virtually all high-poverty schools in its trap, given the enduring relationship between test scores and kids’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Now that annual tests were in place, and states had, with federal money and support, built more sophisticated data systems, it was technically feasible to measure individual students’ progress from one year to the next. Such measures were much fairer to schools whose students arrived several years below grade level. But these growth models weren’t contemplated back in 2001, so they weren’t allowed under the law.

Through a series of regulatory actions, Spellings (under George W. Bush) and Arne Duncan (under Obama) allowed states to make critical changes to their implementation of NCLB to address these concerns. They allowed growth models provided the models still expected students to hit “proficiency” within a few years. They loosened rules around supplemental services so that school districts could provide tutoring themselves rather than outsource it to private providers. The cascade of sanctions was replaced with a menu of intervention options and funded generously through the School Improvement Grants program—all meant to encourage “school turnarounds.” An Obama-era waiver program allowed states even greater flexibility to tinker with their accountability targets in return for commitments to embrace other reforms the administration supported.

Meanwhile, states were working to address another key issue with NCLB: its encouragement of low level academic standards and much-too-easy-to-pass tests. Because the law required states to set targets that would result in virtually all students reaching the “proficient” level by 2014, it incentivized states to set the proficiency bar very low. This, in turn, may have encouraged educators to engage in low-level instruction, with teaching to the test and “drill and kill” methods. It also provided parents with misleading information, as states told most parents that their children were “proficient” in reading and math, even if they were actually several years below grade level and nowhere near on track for college or a decent-paying career. In Tennessee, for example, the state reported that 90 percent of students were “proficient” in fourth-grade reading in 2009 while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had the number at 28 percent. Advocates came to call this the “honesty gap.”

Under the leadership of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, states started collaborating on a set of common standards for English language arts and math—what would eventually become the Common Core State Standards. The hope was that, by working together and providing political cover to one another, the states would finally set the bar suitably high—at a level that indicated that high school graduates were truly ready for college or career and that would encourage teachers to aim for higher-level teaching. It would certainly be hard for the effort to result in worse standards than what most states had in place. Multiple reviews of state standards over the years from the American Federation of Teachers, Achieve, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that they were generally vague, poorly written, and lacking in the type of curricular content that “systemic reformers” had envisioned so many years before.10 It wasn’t surprising, then, that so many educators reported teaching to the test. The tests became the true standards, and they were perceived to be of low quality too.

The Common Core standards were adopted by more than forty states in 2010 and 2011, changing the very foundation of NCLB’s architecture. No longer were states aiming to get low-achieving students to basic literacy and numeracy; now the goal was to get everyone to college and career readiness. But that shift was largely overlooked at the time, drowned out by a fierce political backlash to the Common Core. It mostly came from the right, as the newly emerging conservative populist movement seized on Obama’s involvement in encouraging the adoption of the standards (through his Race to the Top [RttT] initiative). Nonetheless, by 2015, more than a dozen states were using new assessments tied to the standards (largely paid for through RttT funds), and even today, most states still use the Common Core standards or close facsimiles.

So did standards-based reform work during the NCLB era?

As mentioned before, judging the success or failure of such a sprawling reform effort is hard to do. Thankfully, scholars Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research offered a wonderful overview of the research literature in a recent report for the US Chamber of Commerce, Looking Back to Look Forward: Quantitative and Qualitative Reviews of the Past 20 Years of K–12 Education Assessment and Accountability Policy. I strongly encourage readers to review their findings; allow me to summarize them here.

First, it’s clear that student achievement in the United States improved dramatically from the mid to late 1990s until the early 2010s—especially in math, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, and especially for the most marginalized student groups. Pointing to studies by M. Danish Shakeel, Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek, Ayesha Hashim, Sean Reardon, and others, Goldhaber and DeArmond conclude that “the long-term gains on the NAEP reveal a decades-long narrowing of test score achievement gaps between underserved groups (e.g., students of color, lower achieving students) and more advantaged groups (e.g., White students, higher achieving students).”

My own analysis of NAEP trends from that time period focused on the impressive gains made by the nation’s low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, especially at the lower levels of achievement. The proportion of Black fourth-graders scoring at the “below basic” level on the NAEP reading exam, for example, dropped from more than two-thirds in 1992 to less than half in 2015. Likewise, the percentage of Hispanic eighth-graders scoring “below basic” in math dropped from two-thirds in 1990 to 40 percent in 2015. Those numbers were still much too high, but the improvement over time was breathtaking.

Nor was it just student achievement. High school graduation rates shot up as well, climbing fifteen points on average from the mid-1990s until today. We saw major improvements in college completion, too, with the percentage of Black and Hispanic young adults with four-year degrees climbing from 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in 1995 to 23 percent and 21 percent by 2017. Some analysts have argued that these improvements might reflect a softening of graduation standards, but rigorous studies have found that a significant proportion of the gains were real.

Alas, the progress in test scores stalled in the early to mid-2010s, and achievement even declined in some subjects and grade levels in the late 2010s, before the pandemic wiped out decades of gains. As Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, this has led some analysts to argue that the rise and fall of test-based accountability can explain the rise and fall of student achievement.

That’s possible, but NAEP’s design makes it hard to know for sure. What scholars can do is compare states with various policies (and policy implementation timelines) to try to link the adoption of standards-based reform to changes in student achievement. That’s exactly what a series of studies did in the 2000s, including ones by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, another by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, and a seminal paper by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob. The latter compared states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the late 1990s to those that adopted it in the early 2000s, once NCLB mandated them to do so. Dee and Jacob found large impacts of those policies on math achievement (an effect size in the neighborhood of half a year of learning), with even greater effects for the lowest-achieving students as well as Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. The impacts on reading and science were null.

Another study, by Manyee Wong, Thomas D. Cook, and Peter M. Steiner, used Catholic schools as a control group and found more evidence that accountability policies raised achievement in math in the public schools. Other research, also reviewed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, looked at the impact of NCLB on the so-called bubble kids—the students who were closest to the proficiency line or the schools most at risk of sanctions. Most studies found the largest gains for such students and schools, for better or worse.

A brand-new study, by Ozkan Eren, David N. Figlio, Naci H. Mocan, and Orgul Ozturk, found that accountability policies had an impact on more than just test scores. “Our findings indicate that a school’s receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students’ reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s.”

Circumstantial evidence from individual states also points to a big impact from consequential accountability. Massachusetts, which combined standards-based reform with an enormous increase in spending in its 1993 Education Reform Act, saw student achievement skyrocket in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the much-remarked “Massachusetts miracle.” Fourth-grade reading scores increased by nineteen points from 1998 through 2007—the equivalent of about two grade levels. Eighth-grade math scores jumped thirty-one points from 2000 to 2009. With its high-quality academic standards, intensive supports for teachers, lavish funding, and new high school graduation exam for students, the Bay State showed what was possible.

Nor was Massachusetts alone. Other states made significant progress, too, including Texas and North Carolina in the 1990s, Florida in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi in the 2010s, and the District of Columbia throughout the entire reform period.

What we can say, then, is that NCLB-style accountability worked, at least for a while and at least in math. Nationally, it didn’t make an impact in reading, even though reading achievement was improving during the NCLB era (including in states like Massachusetts and Mississippi). We also aren’t sure if achievement plateaued in the 2010s because accountability necessarily stopped working or because accountability stopped.

It doesn’t help that we don’t have much evidence about the mechanisms that might have driven the gains Dee and Jacob (and others) found. Did schools improve their approach to teaching mathematics? Did they make more time for intensive interventions such as tutoring, especially for their lowest-performing kids? Did they work harder or smarter to support teachers and get their best folks where they were needed most? Why did accountability lead to gains in math but not in reading?

We only have a few studies on how these policies might have changed classroom practice. As mentioned above, it was widely perceived that schools—especially elementary schools, where the schedule is more flexible—narrowed the curriculum and spent more time on math and reading and less time on social studies and science. Several teacher surveys showed this to be the case.19 (Perhaps that’s one reason standards-based reform failed to move the needle on reading achievement, given the growing evidence linking content knowledge in subjects like social studies to improvements in reading comprehension.) The improvement of scores for bubble kids indicates that schools and teachers may have shifted their attention to kids near the proficiency line. And teaching to the test was also thought to be pervasive; some teacher surveys, for example, found that instruction became more teacher centered and focused on basic skills.

Alas, studying policy implementation all the way into the classroom is difficult and expensive. So save from surveying teachers about their practice—which is better than nothing but not terribly reliable—not much else was done. As a result, when it comes to changes that standards-based reform might have brought to the classroom, we have more questions than answers.

School improvement, school choice and school closure

In 2009, the Obama administration successfully lobbied Congress to allocate $3.5 billion (eventually growing to $7 billion) into the Title I School Improvement Grants program. This sum was directed primarily to the 5 percent of schools in each state with the lowest academic achievement. The federal government instructed districts to select from four intervention options, from replacing the principal to closing the school entirely. Most selected the least onerous option, and perhaps for that reason, a federal evaluation of the effort found no impacts on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

However, as Goldhaber and DeArmond explain, some local and state studies did find positive impacts arising from the SIG initiative. California’s implementation was particularly well studied by scholars including Thomas Dee, Susanna Loeb, Min Sun, Emily K. Penner, and Katharine O. Strunk.25 Both statewide and in particular cities, the results were generally positive, with improvements in both reading and math. This may be because California required its lowest-performing schools to implement more intensive interventions. It also focused a great deal of money—up to $1.5 million—on each school and gave the school lots of help in spending it well.

Though not addressed by Goldhaber and DeArmond, another place to look for lessons on accountability is the school choice movement. In particular, we can compare the relative success of charter schools with private school choice, given that the former operates under a strict accountability regime while the latter, in most states, does not. A growing body of research, including a new study from CREDO at Stanford University, shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion. That is especially the case for urban charter schools and for Black and Hispanic students.

Private school choice programs, on the other hand, have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana all show voucher recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes quite significantly. To be sure, another set of voucher studies finds positive long-term impacts on measures such as high school graduation and college enrollment. But the negative findings on achievement are still worrying and might reflect the lack of consequential accountability baked into these programs.

In the charter schools sector, authorizers are empowered to close low-performing or financially unsustainable schools, and they do so with regularity. This is real accountability, and the threat of closure very likely contributes to—perhaps even causes much of—the charter achievement advantage.

What’s less clear, once again, are the exact mechanisms. Does the threat of school closure encourage charter schools to improve? Perhaps—and a series of studies from the Fordham Institute and others have found that charter schools tend to embrace a variety of practices associated with improved achievement, from higher teacher expectations to greater teacher diversity to firmer policies around student discipline. On the other hand, it’s surely the case that school closures themselves automatically improve the performance of the charter sector, as the worst schools disappear, shifting the bell curve of achievement to the right. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that accountability plays a key role in the relative success of charter schools.

Unresolved tensions in standards-based reform

Accountability versus capacity building:

The most fateful decision in the history of standards-based reform might have been the move—cemented by NCLB — to place accountability at the heart of the strategy while largely neglecting capacity building; in other words, to assume that the only problem was the lack of will rather than skill. As Robert Pondiscio argues in chapter 5 of this series, that decision was particularly critical when it came to the issue of curriculum. Even those of us who believe in the importance of standards understand that they don’t teach themselves, nor do they provide day-to-day guidance to teachers on how to instruct students in an effective, engaging, evidence-based way.

Yet only in recent years have reformers embraced curriculum as a key lever for school improvement, with foundations and even states investing in building high-quality instructional materials and organizations such as EdReports judging them for alignment with rigorous standards. Imagine how much more progress we might have made had we embarked on these efforts twenty years earlier!

Yet that would have been hard to do, since back then states were just developing their standards, and they differed dramatically from one another even as most were of low quality. Only with the creation of the Common Core State Standards was there an opportunity to build a truly national marketplace for curricular materials, which is exactly what has happened in recent years. As high-quality products like Core Knowledge Language Arts and Eureka Math gain market share, we might be returning to the capacity-building effort we ditched so many decades ago. Perhaps fixing teacher preparation and professional development can come next.

It’s become clear that states need to show leadership around curriculum and instruction rather than sit back and hope districts make the right decisions on their own. States that have done so over the past twenty-five years—including, at various times, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Mississippi—have seen improvements in achievement (though, of course, correlation does not equal causation).

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?:

As with so much else about this topic, it’s hard to know whether there were particular components of standards-based reform that made a bigger difference than others. As explained earlier, seminal studies found that it was “consequential accountability” that led to test score gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which meant some sort of system to classify schools and some legitimate threat that something might happen to those deemed low-performing. My vague language is intentional. State policies, especially pre-NCLB, varied greatly, and yet scholars still detected an impact on achievement. We can say, then, that the threat of rating schools as poor and potentially taking action was enough to move the needle—at least when these policies were first introduced.

It’s likely, though, that when accountability systems were discovered to be mostly bark and no bite—because state officials were loath to follow through and actually shutter schools—these impacts faded. That brought us to a new stage, when the federal government spent billions of dollars through the School Improvement Grants program to turn around low-performing schools. This was a helping-hand approach rather than tough love, and as discussed earlier, it mostly didn’t work.

Nor can we make strong claims about the standards and assessments that are at the heart of standards-based reform. Scholars have failed to detect any difference in achievement in states that had low standards versus high ones or weak tests versus strong ones. As they say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It’s hard to believe that the quality of standards and assessments does not matter; rather, it’s more likely that to drive positive change, demanding expectations and tests must be connected to sophisticated school rating systems; meaningful accountability for results; and capacity-building efforts, like the introduction of high-quality curricular materials, to help students succeed.

The lesson for standards-based reform—and many other reforms as well—is that policymakers can’t view components as items on an à la carte menu. In order to drive improvements, it’s all or nothing. Especially in the push for “systemic,” coherent reform, the effort is only as strong as its weakest link. If the question is which is most important (standards, assessments, school ratings, consequences, turnaround efforts, or capacity building, especially around curriculum), the correct answer is “all of the above.”

Common standards versus student variation:

Other key issues that reformers often swept under the rug were (1) the inevitable conflict between the desire to set a single, high standard for achievement and the undeniable reality that kids come into school with widely varying levels of readiness and may need varying amounts of support and time to reach standard; and (2) that schools and school systems in the United States have historically underserved and under-supported students experiencing poverty and students with lower socioeconomic status.

The standards-based reform movement succeeded in promoting the idea that “all students can learn” and that we must reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” These are powerful and necessary maxims. But they rub up against the lived experience of educators, who must cope with the reality of classrooms of students who can be as many as seven grade levels apart on the first day of school.

Slogans about “holding schools accountable for results” elide critical questions over the details. Results for which students? All of them? Including the ones who start the school year way above or way below grade level? The embrace of “growth models” in the late NCLB period and under ESSA helped to circle this square. By focusing on progress from one school year to the next, accountability systems could give schools credit for helping all of their students make gains, no matter where they started on the achievement spectrum.

NCLB had an answer to this question, implicit though it may have been: the sharp focus of NCLB was on helping the lowest-achieving students—who tended to be Black, Hispanic, or low-income, or students with disabilities, or those still learning English—reach basic standards. And as discussed earlier, this focus worked for a time (again mostly in math) as those were the precise groups whose achievement rose the most during the 1990s and 2000s and who were much more likely to graduate from high school in the 2010s. But did this hyperfocus unintentionally incentivize the success and growth of some students over others? And was getting these students to a baseline level of proficiency setting them up for postsecondary success?

Tests as accountability metrics versus instructional tools:

Another key conflict throughout the standards-based reform era was the role of testing. To put it mildly, “high-stakes tests” were not (and are not) popular—with the general public, parents, and especially educators—even though “accountability” in education polls quite well.

The pushback to testing has been significant. Some of that stemmed from how schools responded to the tests—as discussed earlier, by “teaching to the test” or narrowing the curriculum. Some of it related to the Obama-era push to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Some of it focused on the tests themselves. Making kids sit for annual assessments from grades three through eight ate up precious instructional time. But since the results didn’t come back until months later—even until the next school year—they weren’t of much help to educators. They weren’t “instructionally useful.” Thus, most school districts opted to give students additional standardized tests, such as NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, in
order to receive real-time information about how students were doing. One study found students spending as many as twenty-five hours a year sitting for tests.

In recent years, some advocates and assessment providers have called for testing systems that can produce both accountability data and instructionally useful information for educators. That’s an understandable impulse, but trade-offs are unavoidable. Some approaches would assess students three times a year, for example—so-called through-year assessments—which might increase the testing load and encourage schools to adopt a curriculum closely aligned with the scope and sequence of the tests, for better or worse. Assessments that return results immediately, meanwhile, are by definition not graded by humans, and (so far at least) they can’t test the same higher-order skills that the better state assessments today can. This might encourage a return to low-level teaching of the skill-and-drill variety.

A key issue going forward is whether states will pursue these more instructionally useful assessment systems or simply acknowledge that we need a variety of tests, some to guide instruction and others to generate accountability data, as unpopular as the latter may be.

Lessons for the future

What can tomorrow’s policymakers learn from our experience with standards, assessments, and accountability?

• Be clear-eyed about capacity in the system. Some of us wrongly assumed that incentives were the only big problem—that once we put pressure on schools to improve, they would figure out how to help their students meet standards. What standards-based reform revealed, however, was how little capacity existed in many schools. Educators didn’t know how to boost achievement, or they only knew how to do this for some kids in their schools. They didn’t know what curricula to use. And accountability wasn’t generally strong enough to overcome the political incentives operating in the system, especially union politics. Reformers can’t wish realities like these away. Fixing perverse incentives is necessary but not sufficient; capacity building is needed too. And that means states need to take a more muscular role around issues like curriculum and teacher preparation than some of us once imagined.

• Be wary of any reform that is about “all” students (or all schools). Yes, all kids need to learn to read, write, and do math, and virtually all students can reach basic standards. But not all kids need to (or can be) college ready. Reforms that don’t come to terms with the huge variability in kids’ readiness levels, cognitive abilities, and prior achievements will lose popular support and will flounder.

• Don’t take success for granted! Especially in the wake of the awful COVID-19 pandemic and its disastrous impact on our schools, it’s hard not to romanticize the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when achievement was skyrocketing. What we wouldn’t give to have those test score gains back! Yet the education debate at the time wasn’t full of celebration and confidence, but angst about things not moving quickly enough. What we need to remember is that education happens slowly, year by year, and we need to make sure that policy leaders stay on course over a long period of time. We should fight the urge to look for the “next big thing.” At the current moment, for example, there’s much enthusiasm about universal education savings accounts as new and exciting, in contrast to charter schools, which feel old and dated to some. Yet based on their strong track record, slowly but surely continuing to expand high-quality charter schools may be the best approach to improving student outcomes and expanding parental options. Policymakers, advocates, and philanthropists need to get better at finishing what we started.

• Scholars need new ways to study policy change all the way to the classroom. Thanks in part to the data produced by standards-based reforms, the field of education research has improved markedly in recent decades. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are much more common, and every day brings important new findings about interventions and their impact on student outcomes. Yet as this chapter demonstrates, we still struggle to follow policy changes all the way down to the classroom. But that doesn’t have to be a given. It’s now technically and financially feasible to put cameras and microphones in classrooms nationwide to collect detailed information about teaching and learning. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will soon allow us to analyze such data to gain insights about curriculum implementation, effective instructional strategies, grouping practices, student discipline, and much else. The question is whether we will have the political will to make this vision a reality while ensuring safeguards for teacher and student privacy.

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that standards-based reform in general, and NCLB in particular, didn’t work. That conventional wisdom is incorrect. These policies deserve some of the credit for the historically large achievement gains of the 1990s and 2000s and the equally impressive improvements in the high school graduation and college completion rates of more recent years.

But this approach to reform will work much better if it is combined with efforts to boost the knowledge, skills, and confidence of educators on the front lines. Providing high-quality instructional materials is arguably the best way to do that, and it’s an effort that states have finally embarked upon. This is still no panacea; the Gordian knot hasn’t been sliced through, nor have teachers’ unions disappeared, nor have we solved the riddle of how to get fourteen thousand school districts to embrace smart policies and practices. Systemic dysfunction remains. But a recommitment to accountability for results, along with a focus on making classroom instruction more coherent, effective, and equitable, could yield stronger results in the years ahead.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

When A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, I was twelve years old. I was growing up in Los Angeles as one of three birth children in a diverse family of fourteen, and I had witnessed firsthand the unacceptable circumstances my adopted brothers and sisters experienced in a broken child welfare system. It was clear to me that our education system was similarly broken, and I could plainly tell that succeeding in school was much easier for those of us who held privilege.

As the child of two dedicated civil servants who are avowed Democrats, I never would have guessed that a report coming out of the Reagan administration would help spur a transformative movement that would tap into my activist, social justice upbringing and provide a path for me to play a small part in moving the needle on education equity.

We’ve come a long way since 1983. Over these many years, my friends and colleagues in the school reform movement and I have led hard-fought progress—as well as committed some glaring missteps. These years of experience, coupled with a deep and growing body of research, have yielded invaluable lessons for how we, as a nation, can come ever closer to delivering on the promise of education excellence for all kids.

Educational leaders have used these decades to explore an entire continuum from tweaking and refining existing systems to innovating and disrupting the status quo. The solutions are out there. The talent is out there. Even the money is out there. So what is holding us back?

In this chapter I will share reflections from our attempt to answer this question in Newark, where I served as superintendent from 2011 to 2015. Building on the lessons and experience from nearly twenty years of reform, we launched a number of ambitious but commonsense reforms, culminating in the “One Newark” plan. Our goal was to engage the entire community and its leaders to address the educational needs of every child in every neighborhood in Newark. It was a bold and controversial effort that aimed to bring the best of what educators and policymakers had learned about driving change through top-down systems reform, bottom-up community demand, innovative labor approaches, and new school models.

Much has been written about the personalities and political drama in Newark during that time, but almost nothing has been written about the actual playbook and results. More importantly, I believe the reform efforts there still serve as useful examples to illustrate what is possible, what we should correct, and where we should go next.

Examination of this period in Newark will raise critical questions about what policymakers and community leaders at all levels should do to foster a system holistic and flexible enough that it would address the needs of all children, especially those our current systems of education and social service have historically and consistently failed the most. I will outline four steps policymakers can take to catalyze change and center the students and families who face the most challenges.

The road to reform in Newark

I was appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools (NPS) in 2011 by then governor Chris Christie and the state’s education commissioner at the time, Chris Cerf. While most school districts have a local board charged with hiring a superintendent, NPS had lost that authority back in 1995, when the state took control of the district.

New Jersey’s constitution has uniquely strong language compelling the state to intervene in the event of chronic failure. As far back as the 1967 rebellion in Newark, there had been growing political support for the state to step in and address the city’s abysmal student achievement, despite vehement objections from local elected officials.

I was the fourth in a line of state-appointed district leaders to arrive with a mandate for reform and improvement to Newark. But my arrival came with an even greater sense of urgency. About nine months before my first day, multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg famously announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show, seated next to Governor Christie and Cory Booker, then mayor of Newark, that he was making an unprecedented one-time gift of $100 million to the city’s school reform efforts. Just prior to this, the governor had also announced his decision not to renew my predecessor’s contract, sending a clear signal that change had not moved quickly or decisively enough in Newark.

It was clear that Newark school improvement was a signature political issue for Christie, and the pressure to raise achievement and improve efficiency was intense. On a trip to Washington, DC, earlier that year, he proclaimed to national media that “in the city of Newark, we are spending $24,000 per pupil, and public money for an absolutely disgraceful public education system—one that should embarrass our entire state.”

Indeed, as I arrived in Newark, 39 percent of students who entered the system failed to graduate, and only 40 percent of third-graders could read and write at grade level. Enrollment was plummeting. The district’s nearly forty thousand6 students and one hundred schools made it the largest in the state, with the majority of students living below the poverty level. The schools themselves were a physical manifestation of the deterioration and decay. I still shudder at the memory of rats floating in basements amid boilers dating back to the 1950s and of Lafayette Elementary School (built when Abraham Lincoln was president), which had actual mushrooms growing in the cafeteria after Hurricane Irene.

Local politicians and families had grown impatient. For the five years prior to my arrival as superintendent, many elected leaders had become early adopters of a growing national charter school movement that aimed to free individual schools and networks of schools from government red tape and allow them autonomy to innovate and build excellent schools. These supporters included Booker (then a young councilman), school board member Shavar Jeffries (who now heads the charter school behemoth KIPP Foundation), and state senator Teresa Ruiz, among other notable local leaders. Charters weren’t the only new option—other school models, such as magnet high schools (often with entrance requirements) and partner-run small high schools, had gained momentum too.

Some of these schools had notable evidence of improving achievement for Newark students, and it was understandable that they were gaining strong support from local leaders, influential funders, and certainly the families of the nearly 5,500 students who were enrolled in them. Indeed, Zuckerberg’s gift earmarked a significant amount of funds to growing the charter and small-school footprint. A plan between Christie and Booker that was leaked to the press around this time (causing uproar in the community) revealed that a central focus was to build more charter schools and open new small schools as quickly as possible.

It was clear that the most impactful efforts at improving schools in Newark were actually working around the very system they were trying to improve. And in New Jersey, these new schools were funded on a per-pupil basis; in other words, the money followed the child out of the traditional system and into the public charter system. Logically, this made sense. But in practice, this proliferation of competitors to district-run schools was creating unintended consequences that few wanted to discuss.

During the interview process to become superintendent, though, I was very eager to discuss it. What was the long-term plan to ensure that students who remained in traditional district schools benefited from the cash infusion as much as those who were lucky enough to win school enrollment lotteries? What about the school closures and layoffs that would be inevitable when the footprint of traditional schools shrank? Would charter and new-school growth help bring excitement and excellence to our poorest neighborhoods, or would it give some kids better schools but make the conditions in their communities worse? Wouldn’t the district end up serving more students who required the highest levels of support? No one seemed to have answers for these tough questions.

I had questions for the anticharter folks too. How could you blame families for exercising choice given the abysmal conditions of many traditional schools? Why were thousands of families on waiting lists? What policies—labor and otherwise—were holding traditional schools back from succeeding? Why hadn’t those policies been advanced? Were community leaders ready to push the bold reforms necessary for traditional schools to compete with charters? And what should we do about the chronically failing, profoundly underenrolled schools? The answers to these questions were complicated and generally had only to do with adult politics, not what’s best for kids.

My background and the questions I asked made a lot of people very uncomfortable. Some saw me as “antireform” because I wasn’t “charter-friendly” enough, especially with the eyes of the nation now on Newark. At the same time, others felt I was in cahoots with the “privatizers” trying to kill public education by supporting new school models. In hindsight, it is easy to see that my story was just an example of a growing and deeply polarized national debate on whether and how we can radically improve the quality of education for low-income families and students of color at scale. Meanwhile, from day one, our team wasn’t focused on winning favors or promoting specific ideologies. We were focused on great schools for all kids in every neighborhood, by any means necessary.

Building a ‘system of great schools’

Given the perilous state of the city’s schools, the unrealistic expectations around quick achievement gains, and the pressure from ideologues on all sides, many speculated that the superintendent role wasn’t doable. But I was inspired by the scale and the ferocious commitment of many leaders in the community.

I interviewed with a large committee and countless stakeholders, who spent hours debating diverse theories about what to do to improve schools. I was also moved by the unusual personal and political alliance formed by Christie, a popular Republican governor in a Democratic state, and Booker, a popular mayor and rising Democratic star, to do something bold. Something was in the air, and it felt like transformation was possible for children and families who had been failed by public systems for generations. I was convinced, perhaps naively, that if we could harness the debates and emotion around what to do, we could lift up a whole city. I remember thinking, There are one hundred schools—we can do this!

I assembled a diverse team of exemplary senior leaders—some known and trusted from within Newark, some with a track record of results elsewhere, and some with a lot of promise who were ready to step up. When I say “we” in describing the work in Newark, it is not simply rhetorical. I cannot take sole credit for anything we accomplished in those four years; it was this stunning team that acted as both the architects and the engineers behind the policies and practices we implemented, tirelessly, on behalf of Newark families. I wish I could list them all here by name.

It was time for us to craft our own plan for Newark’s schools. We started with the theory that the unit of change was the school itself and embraced the idea that what we were building was what my former boss, then New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein, called “a system of great schools,” not a “great school system.” This was a subtle but profound distinction, because it meant we were seeking to ensure that there were one hundred excellent schools serving every child in every neighborhood—regardless of governance structure.

In the long term, we knew that Newark required a citywide master plan that would account for every school building and every child. But in the immediate term, we had obvious and dire issues to address in the district’s own schools.

First, we needed to set a unifying goal for the district: every child would be college ready. That’s right, college, not just career—because we believed that choice of higher education should be up to the student, not simply determined by the inadequacy of their preparation, and because Newark families were demanding this.

While college readiness is an obvious educational goal for affluent families and communities, in Newark it was far from obvious that this was attainable or even desirable for most students. But to families, it was obvious. In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, they told us very clearly: they wanted their children to graduate college ready. Moreover, they believed that “career ready” was a euphemism for low expectations. Families felt that academic excellence was a passport out of poverty.

Most parents were with us from day one. The challenge was the well-meaning funders and other influencers who wanted to muddy the waters and talk about everything except whether students could read, write, and do math at grade level.

To make a case for action, we shared baseline achievement data and started to create a sense of urgency around this critical goal. Looking unflinchingly at this data wasn’t easy, and it made many educators and leaders uncomfortable to acknowledge so blatantly how poorly our schools were preparing our students to succeed in life. When we started sharing actual data about proficiency rates and the number of young people earning diplomas indicative of their mastery of hard content, we started to encounter real pushback, both within and outside the school system. This was a theme I became increasingly familiar with: often what families say they want can be quite different from what those who speak for them are willing to stand for.

Ensuring ‘four-ingredient schools’

With our North Star established, we rolled up our sleeves to improve the district, school by school. By this point in US education reform, it had been nearly thirty years since the release of A Nation at Risk, and there was a large and growing body of research and evidence about high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Combined with our team’s years of on-the-ground school transformation experience, we zeroed in on four basic ingredients that every high-quality school possessed: people, content, culture, and conditions.

To extend the cooking analogy, we knew each ingredient could have a different flavor profile in a different environment. The exact mix of ingredients varies based on context as well. Getting all four ingredients right in a school building is a huge challenge on a good day and nearly impossible the rest of the time. And yet the ingredients themselves are relatively uncontroversial—even commonsense—and should be the central focus of systems leaders and policymakers.

Our aim: ensure that every NPS school was a four-ingredient school so that we could make steady progress toward college readiness for all. Our philosophy: focus on what works regardless of ideology, which often led to “third-way” solutions—combining the best of seemingly disparate views or forging a new path to transcend old, binary thinking. Our mantra: implementation matters.

People

It’s critical to have the right people in the right seats, from the leadership team to the teachers to mental health professionals to custodial staff. No matter their role, every adult in the building must be equipped with the right mindsets and skill sets to uphold the mission and goals of the school.

Education reform birthed a broad array of nonprofits and policies focused specifically on teacher quality, notably Teach for America (TFA) and TNTP (formerly the New Teacher Project), the latter with its landmark Widget Effect report. We know intuitively the power that a great teacher has, and a growing body of research reinforced this belief, showing us that teachers are the most significant in-school factor determining a child’s level of achievement. Further, the most significant factor in getting great teachers in every classroom is the quality of the principal. Meanwhile, author Amanda Ripley showed us that in Korea, master teachers are treated like rock stars, which is hardly the case here in the United States.

Partly because of my experience working on the talent side and the emerging research about the strong correlation between school leaders and student achievement, we focused on leadership from day one in Newark. I’ve never been to a great school with a mediocre principal, and I have never been to a failing school with a terrific principal (except perhaps at the very beginning of a turnaround). Within two years, we had replaced nearly one-quarter of our principals through aggressive recruiting and selection, giving preference to Newarkers and leaders who not only knew instruction but thought of themselves as community organizers and change agents.

We took a page from New York City’s playbook, enacting a “mutual consent” policy that allowed principals to select teachers aligned to their school’s goals, as opposed to having them force-placed according to seniority. We adopted a new teacher evaluation system that required more evidence-based classroom observations and feedback, taking a page from Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her team’s work in the District of Columbia. We trained and empowered principals to hold teachers accountable when they failed to uphold expectations—and we had their back when teachers needed to be removed. We created “career ladders” for teachers to become leaders without having to leave the classroom, taking a page out of the Baltimore playbook.

As was a consistent theme with our approach in Newark, pursuing and advancing third-way ideas had us making people on all sides of the issues uncomfortable. Many states at this time were starting to use quantitative test score data in teacher evaluations, and New Jersey was eager to follow suit. However, my team and I felt that the science for such “value-added” approaches didn’t hold up when it came to determining the effectiveness of individual teachers. We took a lot of flak from hardline education reformers, who had become fixated on using test scores as a shortcut to accountability and who worried that our questioning the use of test scores in teacher evaluations would water down reform efforts more broadly since Newark was such a high-profile example. But not only did we feel that using the value-added approach in teacher evaluations would be unfair to teachers, we also knew that including such a poison pill in our new evaluation plan would create a backlash that could sabotage the entire effort.

To help noncharter schools accelerate the “people” ingredient, we negotiated what was widely considered an ambitious contract with Newark teachers. We were able to find agreement with both the local and national teachers’ unions on contentious issues such as freezing pay for teachers who were ineffective; on providing bonuses for high performers working in hard-to-staff subjects; on expediting firing for the small number of teachers caught doing egregious things; and on finding pathways for individual schools to innovate outside the four corners of the contract. We also asked the state to grant us a waiver from traditional tenure laws so that we could consider quality alongside tenure when making decisions about whom to retain as we set about the necessary downsizing.

Despite agreeing to key labor reforms after more than two hundred hours at the bargaining table, some in the Newark Teachers Union and their national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, vociferously advocated against them within weeks of the contract being ratified by an overwhelming majority of teachers. Both groups had a long track record of preserving some of the sacred cows of labor negotiations with teachers: seniority-based placement, infallibility of teachers with tenure (regardless of what they do), and resistance to any form of accountability—no matter how nuanced. Meanwhile, we found many of these ideas to be popular among everyday teachers, who told us the quality of the teacher in the classroom next door is a factor in whether or not they want to stay at a school. In fact, research shows teachers want access to high-quality curricula, comprehensive assessment systems, and the ability to collaborate with colleagues. As the granddaughter of a union organizer and as a strong believer in collective bargaining, I was pushing largely because I believed then — and still believe now—that teachers’ unions need to evolve to become part of the solution or they will become obsolete.

We also had to completely restructure and reimagine the central office to be in service to schools and families. This required breaking senior leaders into new teams and inviting them to clearly articulate how they would enable the four school-level ingredients. It also meant crafting clear plans with goals aligned with good management and coaching—not simply doing what had always been done. Many rose to the occasion and embraced the opportunity for clarity and coaching. Some didn’t. This was another necessary and politically fraught task. Newark Public Schools was one of the biggest employers in the city, so many staff on the central team were connected to a local politician, vendor, or influencer who had their back if their job was in jeopardy, regardless of whether or not the job was necessary or they were doing a good job.

Content

A high-quality school needs high-quality and culturally competent curricula. It also needs frameworks, protocols, and data that drive great instruction and continuous improvement. As computer programmers like to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” This “content” ingredient is all about replacing that “garbage” content with engaging and carefully crafted content.

I started in Newark about a year after the Common Core State Standards had become a force nationally and the same month that New Jersey adopted a version of them. It was good timing, because I have long believed in fewer, clearer, more rigorous standards, as opposed to the laundry list I was handed as a young teacher in California. Common Core gave us an unambiguous and evidence-based target. It also served as a catalyst to scrutinize our curricula with a more rigorous lens.

The research here is undeniable; high-quality instructional materials are critical to ensuring that students are truly internalizing difficult content. Historically, though, we had all underinvested in this area in the early reforms after A Nation at Risk. A lot of us made the mistake of keeping a hyperfocus on teachers, which indulged an assumption that if we had a perfect person in every classroom, they could invent brilliant content from scratch. Fortunately, the introduction of common standards forced the issue and led to game-changing work by leaders like John King and his team in New York to develop what would become the EngageNY curriculum. Many education advisors and publishers have caught on, and there are far more “good enough” options out there, but there are still not enough.

We also were informed by systemic approaches to “managed instruction” like efforts in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Success for All initiative in Los Angeles, and Newark’s own NorthStar Academies (a charter network). These reforms, often literally telling teachers what to teach and how to teach minute to minute, yielded some impressive results. But they also predated important reforms around teacher quality. Our team aimed to blend the best of both by making “good enough” choices about curricula, creating spaces for teachers to use existing scope and sequences and lesson plans but also building the capacity of teachers to use data and knowledge of their classrooms to adjust.

High-quality instructional materials are an ingredient that is hard to get right when you are working only at the school or small network level. Scale is your friend. These decisions are better made at a system level, where content experts can dedicate the necessary time to addressing academic needs and cultural contexts, as well as coherence and alignment between the plethora of different curricula and assessments. It is also the area that, at the time in Newark, brought the most consensus. We did “teach-ins” for administrators, educators, influencers, and families who all really seemed to get and support the mandate for good, rigorous content that was consistent across the city.

As I write this, the country has been embroiled in a resurgence of culture wars around what we teach in our classrooms. It’s unfortunate, considering that this content ingredient was actually a rare point of local and national consensus not that long ago. The current political climate adds an unwelcome layer of complexity for systems leaders to battle.

Culture

We know from research that schools with intentionally curated environments characterized by high standards alongside high support produce better student outcomes. Students learn healthy habits, and the school community has well-established values and expectations. Norms and protocols prevent incidents, and when incidents happen, adults minimize shame and exclusion to keep students learning. In these schools, there is joy and choice.

From day one in Newark, we focused on the seminal research work and promising practices that had emerged, connecting how kids feel, how adults feel, and student outcomes. Years after comparing student achievement results to staff, student, and family survey responses, researchers Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider found that the schools with high levels of trust were far more likely to get beat-the-odds results than their counterparts. Economists like Ron Ferguson and social policy experts like Christopher Jenks found a direct correlation between adult expectations, student surveys, and student outcomes. Though controversial, it is also no surprise to me that recent research has shown student surveys can predict student achievement as well as teacher evaluations. When young people say things like, “My teacher doesn’t stop until I get it” or, “My teacher believes I can understand anything,” or, “When my teacher asks me how I am doing, I believe s/he wants to know,” we know those students will do better. Jeannie Oakes’s Keeping Track showed very explicitly how adult biases and expectations can have a negative impact on student achievement.

Relatedly, an area where I have seen some of the greatest challenges for adults in establishing and preserving culture is in response to conflict and disruptive incidents. How we handle student discipline, struggle, and conflict is where adult biases show up the most. Black students are four times as likely to be suspended than their White peers, often for the same behaviors. Black students make up one-third of school-based arrests, though they are only 16 percent of the student population. Moreover, nationwide, Black boys are almost twice as likely to experience corporal punishment as their White peers, and Black girls are about three times as likely. Adults rate Black girls as “less innocent” than their White peers, with damning implications. Students with disabilities are far more likely to receive exclusionary discipline for subjective things like “disrespect” and “insubordination.” This is a problem not only from an equity and justice lens but also from a student achievement standpoint. Often students who need the most support and time on task are being excluded the most. Students can’t learn when they feel shame and helplessness. So it is no surprise to me that data shows that the relationship between the discipline gap and achievement is more than correlative—it is also causal.

The research squared with our team’s lived experience in Newark. Traditional schools like
Chancellor Avenue Elementary School and Sussex Avenue Elementary School, charter schools

like KIPP Spark Academy and North Star Academy’s Alexander Street Elementary School, and partner schools like Bard Early College got this ingredient right, and their results showed it. Adults, kids, families, and community partners rallied together around a common vision and values—and shared expectations and norms at the school reinforced them. Their results showed how critical it is to build a collective culture of high expectations and high support.

For these reasons, we hired administrators who showed skill in building culture and partnering with families. We created an entire central-office team focused on student well-being and discipline and charged them with building the capacity of schools to create environments where all kids would thrive and to respond to incidents skillfully. We reinvented the role of school resource officer and hosted weeklong restorative practice institutes that brought together student leaders, administrators, families, teachers, and police officers.

We made progress, but admittedly, the playbook on culture is harder to run for many reasons. Too often, discussions about what student culture should feel like are preachy, ideological, or theoretical—devoid of practical, research-based, promising practices. Building culture is far from a paint-by-numbers task. Cultures that are simply cheap forms of imitation, are inauthentic, or are misaligned to the needs of a particular community don’t create the conditions for achievement. Frequently, we think about individual tactics for establishing and preserving culture, such as specific expectations or restorative circles, but not about how they all fit together, and this leads to cultures that feel disjointed and incoherent. Effective cultures don’t feel the same in every school, but they do share key components. This is nuanced and hard to teach to administrators. At a systems level approaches to this ingredient often devolve into compliance lists and checklists. Further, the culture work requires us to surface and address adult biases about what kids can accomplish and what is considered “dangerous” behavior, and this can cause real discomfort and resistance.

Conditions

This ingredient is all about strong operations and infrastructure. The building is clean, well equipped, and well run. The trains run on time. You have the facilities, management structures, and funds to support learning, and you have the funding, supplies, and technology to support all of the other ingredients of a high-quality school.

While setting the right culture creates a social and emotional environment where both students and adults can thrive, it is important to simultaneously address the physical environment and the day-to-day operations. It may not be as compelling or sexy as the other ingredients, but none of the other ingredients of a strong school or system can succeed if we don’t address the conditions in which our children learn and our teachers teach. In Newark, we had a lot of work to do on this ingredient.

When I started in Newark, Malcolm X Shabazz High School had a river running through its fourth floor on rainy days. Many schools didn’t have air conditioning, in a city where average temperatures reach above a humid ninety degrees for months. Some schools weren’t even wired for internet access, and only a few had laptops to check out to students for the day.

Local leaders openly talked about a “rolling start” at the beginning of the school year, which referred to the fact that it took weeks to sort out the basics: enrollment, special education schedules and services, buses, and even books. Honestly, I had never heard of a system where instruction didn’t start on day one.

And while I’ve never bought into the idea that market forces are a panacea for improving school quality (and research suggests I’m right), you can bet my team took note when our colleagues at KIPP would make an overnight run to the hardware store for window A/C units to survive a Newark heat wave, while we were forced to navigate a maze of vendor regulations and nepotistic relationships just to open a window. Trust me, there’s an entire chapter to be written on reforming procurement and purchase ordering alone.

Some of these intolerable conditions were due to bad public policy and some were because of poor management. My team and I would say we could tell if a school was getting results by how visitors were greeted at the door (if at all) and how quickly families could get the answer to whatever they were asking. When organizations are well run, their primary constituents— in our case, students, families, and community members—are at the forefront of everyone’s mind. This service orientation is shared by noninstructional staff members, from the custodial staff to the crossing guard to the budget team. All are invested in the mission, goals, and shared values. We created school operations managers (similar to how some charter networks like KIPP have created business operations managers) to attend to the operational needs of the school. At the time, this got me in trouble with the administrators’ union (because I was seen as encroaching on district administrator roles and jobs). Even today our approach to operations is considered innovative, which just shows how little we prioritize the conditions in our schools.

Getting the conditions for achievement at every school in Newark was an expensive and backbreaking task, and progress was excruciatingly slow. Bureaucracy at every level—local, state, and federal—made our vision of goal-based budgeting, twenty-first-century facilities, nutritional food, and high-quality customer service feel nearly impossible on some days, even with exemplary people working on it. When academics and policymakers talk about disrupting systemic inequity, rethinking our entire system of education, or rising to the grave challenges initially posed by A Nation at Risk, they’d do well to spend a lot more time talking about basic operations. We need an entire movement to break the bureaucracy that is crippling school infrastructure.

The One Newark plan

While establishing a focus on college readiness and building four-ingredient schools was our primary focus right out of the gate, we knew we had to make progress on a citywide plan that addressed the schools beyond our purview. Looking at the full picture in Newark, you saw that everyone—local early childhood providers, the district, third-party school operators, private schools, individually run charters, and large charter networks—was doing their own thing, and the unintended consequences of this lack of coordination were becoming more evident and unsustainable every day.

From our earliest school visits, we could see that the poorest neighborhood schools were emptying out and becoming concentrated with the highest-need students and the lowestquality staff. Historic buildings were crumbling while new facilities were being built, sometimes down the street or downtown. Supply and demand were misaligned: for example, the number of magnet high school seats requiring a certain level of academic attainment far exceeded the number of eighth-graders prepared to meet them. The diversity and variety of school models wasn’t materializing; with all the new schools, we weren’t actually providing a lot of choice, just more flavors of “no excuses” ice cream at the elementary level and a bunch of run-of-the-mill high schools.

Meanwhile, every year, including my first, our district had to cut about $50 million. While there was certainly a lot of bloated bureaucracy to streamline, more than 80 percent of that money was wrapped up in people. Newark Public Schools employs many Newarkers in a city with double the national poverty rate.

With every set of data that we unearthed and every school that I visited, the pit in my stomach grew as I saw the magnitude of the challenges. Keeping open too many schools without enough students meant that thousands of Newark’s students were attending schools that were crumbling, not just physically but educationally. We were spending more money per pupil than almost every other district in the United States, with terrible results. And there was no denying that the rapid growth of the charter movement further complicated the problem.

Past district leaders—and many city leaders—viewed charters as “the enemy.” Families able to navigate the charter lotteries were fleeing the traditional system, and thousands more were on waiting lists. Who could blame them, given that many charters were radically outperforming traditional schools? As money followed students out of the traditional schools and into the charters, the available resources to revive these schools or attract talent were being stretched increasingly thin—and the trend was likely to continue. Charter leaders planned to grow the sector from serving 5 percent of students to serving more than 40 percent, which would mean $250 million of funds leaving the district with no quick or painless way to shrink infrastructure or union-guaranteed jobs. Seeing that dozens of district schools were dying a slow death, with some of the city’s neediest students trapped in them, I knew something had to be done—and soon.

As a city, we had to ask ourselves: “Is it even possible for every child in Newark to have access to a school that meets their needs? Even those children facing the longest odds?” Note that this is a fundamentally different question than “Can we get some kids in this community access to great schools?” That framing suggests we are not responsible for all of the children in our community, only those whom our school model can accommodate. It is also a fundamentally different question than “Can we build more great schools?” That question ignores the community context within which the school exists, and it fails to address very real and sometimes serious consequences when we focus on building some great schools and letting others fail. We were seeing that play out in Newark already.

Our team had no choice but to stare down these questions, which led us to some unconventional and controversial answers. The first thing we had to do: try to rise above political arguments rooted in ideology and self-interest about what type of school models should exist. There were about a hundred schools in Newark. We knew we would get to excellence more quickly if we had a variety of governance structures: traditional, charter, magnet, partner run, and hybrid. But we also knew we couldn’t simply let a thousand flowers bloom and allow others to die, especially when those vulnerable schools were serving our students with the highest need. We also knew that the community deserved excellence citywide.

Just as always, our team was guided by national promising practices and research. Only this time, we were limited by a dearth of examples in which systems leaders thought about the entire community. So we pored over our own data: student enrollment trends across governance models, overall city population trends, facilities assessments, and (of course) student outcomes. We fanned out and hosted more than a hundred community-based meetings with faith-based leaders, nonprofit executives, families in struggling schools, families in highperforming schools, charter advocates, charter operators, private schools, local funders, elected officials, union leaders, and early childhood providers. We began to socialize the idea that we needed one citywide plan across governance structures, as well as the harsh reality that the district’s footprint had to shrink. We wanted to find a way to preserve the best of the new-schools movement while also addressing some of the unacceptable consequences of its uncoordinated growth.

This process—over the course of about a year—led to a comprehensive plan we called One Newark. The plan was more than just a collection of policies and tactics. It was carefully architected with a clear and accessible framework to communicate honestly and transparently with an extremely broad array of stakeholders and get buy-in across the city. We knew that the best plan in the world would mean nothing if we didn’t tell a coherent story that motivated change.

The plan opened with three core values to drive our collective decision-making: equity, excellence, and efficiency:

• Excellence: We must ensure that every child in every neighborhood has access to a “four-ingredient” school as quickly as possible and that no kid is in a failing school.

• Equity: We must ensure that all students—including those who are facing the longest odds—are on the pathway to college and a twenty-first-century career.

• Efficiency: We must ensure that every possible dollar is invested in staff and priorities that make a positive difference for all students.

It was followed with seven focus areas, which we mapped onto the letters in the word “success” to send a clear signal of optimism and affirmation:

• (S)ystemwide Accountability: Envision and publish a standardized approach to tracking school and system success and progress across all schools (district, charter, and provider run).

• (U)niversal Enrollment: Launch a straightforward, user-friendly enrollment system that empowers our students and families to choose the school (charter, partner, or district) that best meets the student’s needs.

• (C)itywide Facilities and Technology Revolution: Create a bold plan to operationalize twenty-first-century learning environments for all students, ensuring no vacant buildings.

• (C)ommon Core Mastery and PARCC Readiness: Lead the nation in the number of students living below the poverty level (especially those currently struggling) who make progress toward Common Core mastery and readiness for PARCC, the standardized test aligned to those standards.

• (E)quity and Access for All Students: Increase the number of high-quality seats for all students, especially those currently in low-performing schools.

• (S)hared Vision for Excellent Schools: Cultivate demand for one hundred excellent schools and the groundswell of support for the changes necessary to get there.

• (S)ystemic Conditions for Success: Radically transform the district itself to ensure that it is a high-performing organization for years to come.

While the backbone of the overall picture and the building blocks of the plan were emerging in the spring of 2013, we didn’t feel we had enough operational capacity or community momentum to implement the plan that fall. Instead, we continued to engage, discuss, and refine the plan’s tenets with diverse stakeholders. We launched headlong into implementation in the winter of 2013–14.

We knew from the start that we needed a fair way to compare school quality across model types to meet the goals of our citywide vision of excellence for all. I’d seen firsthand how smart ways of tracking progress could drive good change in New York City under former mayor Mike Bloomberg, and we knew of years of research by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and others about the correlation between accountability and student outcomes.

We started publishing “family-friendly” snapshots — across both district and charter schools — so that community members could see how their schools were doing in comparison to schools with similar populations. We looked at overall proficiency but also at growth, critical in a city like Newark with low rates across the board. We also compared schools with similar student populations to one another. There was no question that students at schools like Shabazz High School and South Street Elementary School were in much higher need than students at Science Park High School and Ann Street School. Success was possible, of course, but harder—and we needed a fair accountability system to make decisions and create the right incentives.

We created a simple red, yellow, and green system so that the community could see the landscape clearly. “Red schools” were low-proficiency, low-growth schools. Green were high proficiency and high growth (e.g., we didn’t want selective high schools to recruit “proficient” students and fail to grow them to “highly proficient”). Yellow schools were “on the move” (low proficiency, high growth) or “to watch” (high proficiency, low growth). The color-coding was clear and intuitive, and many in the community started talking about “no red schools.”

We placed an emphasis on transparent data about how schools were doing with students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners. We created standard measures — across district and charter schools—to report on student retention. Up to this point, accountability systems implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused almost exclusively on proficiency, which unfortunately incentivized schools to enroll and retain students who were likely to be successful and to subtly counsel out (e.g., “you are not a good fit for this school”) or explicitly push out (e.g., through suspensions and expulsions) students who were harder to serve. We couldn’t afford to make the same mistake.

People from all sides fought us on this level of transparency — the unions, some charter schools (which weren’t obligated to share their data with us), and some funders who worried we were reducing children to numbers. But many families and policymakers embraced the information. There’s no perfect system, but there was no way to make a citywide plan without a decent measure of school quality.

We performed detailed enrollment analysis and defined the need for a common definition of a “minimum viable school.” From a funding standpoint, schools with fewer than five hundred students are hard to sustain with a staffing model that ensures things like appropriate class size, electives, teacher preparation times, and staff to attend to running operations. Newark had a lot of “red” schools that were also not financially viable, and many of them were in the poorest neighborhoods.

We also looked at demand data—who was applying to charters and from what neighborhoods, who was seeking new small high schools and from what neighborhoods, and which neighborhoods were growing and which were shrinking.

The picture was becoming increasingly clear: the need for a course correction was long overdue. We had traditional schools where 80 percent of families were on charter school waiting lists, but the district’s resistance to collaboration and the charters’ insistence on growing only one grade level each year meant large-scale closures and consolidations were inevitable.

The district had too many elementary schools overall, due to a population decrease, neighborhood shifts, and charter growth. We didn’t have enough early learning centers to meet the increased demand. We had too many selective high schools. Most of the new small high schools being incubated downtown were serving families from other wards, while iconic and historic high schools were emptying out. Overall, we had too many old buildings that were crumbling due to underinvestment and age, and some of them simply weren’t fixable. At one point, the district was paying more than $1 million just for scaffolding on vacant buildings that were never going to reopen. The picture was bleak. We had to make some hard decisions.

We decided to be radically transparent about our findings and the implications in a proposed ward-by-ward plan. Some charters should take over existing schools with high demand, keep families who opted in, and keep the buildings and the school name, instead of simply continuing to build new schools one grade at a time. Some elementary schools needed to convert to early learning centers. Some small high schools that were performing well needed to move into our comprehensive high schools, and some underperforming partner-run high schools needed to close. Magnets had to change their enrollment process. And some buildings had to be shut—some condemned, some repurposed, and some sold, potentially to charters.

Another anchor of the One Newark plan was ensuring that every family had equal access to choice. Both psychologically and practically, it didn’t make sense for one-third of families to get what they wanted and the rest to get what was left over. For starters, this dynamic was creating an almost civil war–like atmosphere, with charter and noncharter families pitted against each other and magnet and nonmagnet families screaming at each other in meetings. Also, one goal of establishing high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods is to feed the groundswell of belief that kids can achieve. Newark’s choice system was helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in the noncharter schools.

We had to find a way for the idea of choice to lift all boats, but it wasn’t happening—and it can’t happen without good public policy and collective action. I’ve had many school choice advocates dispute this. Some ideologues will have you believe that the mere presence of competition somehow magically raises everyone’s game. It certainly didn’t happen that way in Newark, nor in the dozens of systems I have worked in since.

This is where universal enrollment came into play. Cities like New Orleans and Denver had implemented systems where families could access a common application instead of having to apply to and navigate multiple lotteries.43 We built on what they had learned (even flying in officials from both systems to participate in community panels) and took it a step further. We envisioned and implemented a system where all schools—charter and traditional—marketed themselves on the same timeline, using citywide approaches, and alongside our common accountability system. All families could access the system and apply to all schools. An algorithm gave preference to kids in the neighborhood, followed by kids in poverty, then kids with disabilities, and then everyone else at random.

It was a game changer. Now all schools were required to think about how to market themselves and own their quality, or lack thereof. By year two, more than three-quarters of the families of kindergartners and ninth-graders were using the system. At one point, we opened a family support center to help families exercise choice. We had actually planned for a soft launch, but word got out and more than a thousand families showed up on the first day, and the situation almost devolved into chaos. While our critics crowed about our operational failure—and it was indeed a failure—it also showed how much family demand there was for choice and quality. This is one of the hundreds of examples I’ve had throughout my career that defies the ridiculous stereotype that poor families don’t care about education.

The universal enrollment system may have been hardest on some members of Newark’s political elite who were used to the benefits afforded to them in an unfair, transactional system. I recall one meeting in which a prominent official—previously a supporter of mine—yelled, “You made a liar out of me! I told my cousin I could get her kid into this school!”

We had other “lift all boats” strategies. In partnership with the Newark Trust for Education, we created shared campus grants so that charter and district schools in the same building were incentivized to envision projects that helped their students and staff collaborate on schoolwide and community improvement projects. We asked charter teams to lead professional development for some of our turnaround schools on things like comprehensive approaches to instruction where many of them had more robust practices than we did. We created a collective action team of special educators across district and charter schools to help share and promote promising practices.

The plan meant a lot of changes for a lot of people. Some shuttered buildings were historic, and even though it was clear these buildings needed to have a divestment plan, community elders who remembered their heyday didn’t want to hear it, understandably. Many charter leaders and their supporters dug in their heels on their model of growing slowly and where they wanted to grow according to optimal facilities, regardless of the consequences. The idea of small schools within high schools—which had been successfully implemented in New York at scale—was new to Newark and, therefore, scary for many who had found their pet school to support. Some local and national funders who were excited about ribbon cuttings and smaller projects simply didn’t want to get involved in the far messier project of citywide progress.

Our team knew that the tenets of the plan were bold, unconventional, and controversial and that the politics were going to be tough to navigate. Choice, charters, labor reforms, and teacher excellence polled well. Laying off Newarkers and teachers and “closing” traditional schools or turning them over to highly successful charters were wildly unpopular. But to have the plan succeed citywide, you couldn’t have one without the other.

To add a deeper degree of difficulty, while the plan was emerging and leading up to the official launch, we suffered a series of seismic political blows at the worst possible moment. In September 2013, the Bridgegate scandal broke and increasingly sidelined Governor Christie. My team went from coordinating with his team and political allies in Newark (he had a lot)

on a weekly basis to going months with virtually no communication. Shortly thereafter, then senator Frank Lautenberg tragically passed away. Mayor Booker, who had also been an active and strong supporter of the plan and was working hard to build momentum around it, announced he was running for that US Senate seat. This not only effectively took him off the field from a local political standpoint, but also created a scenario where he needed the support of local officials and union leaders who opposed many parts of the plan. His announcement also spurred the need for an earlier-than-expected mayoral election where the leading candidates spent considerable time spewing hatred about charters and about me personally (although backstage and publicly, they had previously supported both). Shortly thereafter, Commissioner Cerf resigned. To use a sports analogy: the entire offensive line left the field.

The overall approach was comprehensive, and it had to be to ensure that none of our kids were trapped in failing schools, the district didn’t go bankrupt, communities weren’t living with vacant buildings, and the city was on a path to success. I described the plan to author Dale Russakoff as “three-dimensional chess” in an effort to convey why all the pieces had to happen at one time and couldn’t be phased. There were too many interdependent parts to a very complex system, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, in her book about Newark, The Prize, which went on to become a bestseller, this quote fed an inaccurate portrayal of me as a top-down, cold technocrat—a narrative that was taking shape across much of the media coverage about our work in Newark. It couldn’t have been further from the truth—the emotional pieces of what needed to happen were not lost on me or the team. I lived with my husband and baby son in Newark and had conversations with neighbors in grocery stores and local watering holes on a daily basis. It all felt so heavy, but also necessary.

Results and lessons

During my tenure and the subsequent years under Cerf, our district teams improved outcomes for students in every neighborhood and every age group—from early childhood to high school.

In early childhood, we secured a $7 million Head Start grant48 (only the second district in the country to do so) to add more than one thousand early childhood seats. We brought early childhood standards to life and sounded the alarm to focus on the importance of high-quality early learning. Newark went from having fewer than half of our residents eligible for free early childhood programs (which was most families) to enrolling nearly 90 percent.

In 2015, the Center on Reinventing Public Education named Newark as the number-one district in the country for high-poverty, high-performance elementary schools that beat the odds. By 2019, more than one-third of Black students attended schools that exceeded the state average, compared with 10 percent in 2011. A study conducted by Harvard University showed across-the-board increases in reading and initially slow but then impressive gains in math. The number of good schools and schools “on the move” grew every year due to our district-run turnaround approach, charter conversion schools, and some outright closures and consolidations. Newark was among the top four cities in the country for student outcomes of Black students living in poverty.

The citywide graduation rate rose 14 points, closing the gap with the state average by 7 percentage points—with almost double the percentage of students graduating having passed the state exit exam. About 87 percent of Newark graduates returned for a second college term, far exceeding national averages given the high poverty rates.

And we saw signs that the overall community—despite the political rancor we encountered — was starting to believe in the “system of great schools.” For the first time in decades, student enrollment was increasing overall in Newark, as was the population of the city.

Our labor agreement, too, was a long-term success. More than a decade later, most of these terms still exist in the contract today, and an independent study of the agreement found that the “new evaluation system is perceived as valid, accurate, fair, and useful.” This suggests that its durability is not just due to luck and that the approach could and should be replicated elsewhere.

Similarly, universal enrollment still exists in a modified form to this day and is used by nearly 20 percent of families. I believe managed school choice was starting to play a role in dissipating the city’s deeply concentrated poverty.

Despite these significant accomplishments, we knew from day one that we would not succeed in Newark unless everyone, from the grandmother at a profoundly struggling school to the dad at a magnet school to the aunt at a charter school, believed things could be different — better for everyone, for Newarkers. We knew we had to build a completely new normal and that some of that work involved helping the entire community see that it didn’t have to accept the failed status quo. We exerted a lot of effort that, in the end, fell short of generating the kind of collective momentum we needed. The reasons are complicated but instructive.

Because we felt responsible for every child in Newark, we engaged all families, charter and district, with equal vigor. This was a good and mission-aligned approach, but it was almost impossible to execute, given the tensions (both perceived and very real) inherent in growing the charter footprint. The conundrum is perfectly exemplified by the mother who called in to ask me a question on-air during a local NPR show. She had just dropped off her kids at North Star Academy Charter School, she said, because she needed them to have access to excellence. At the same time, she was on her way to my office to picket against me on behalf of her nephew, who had lost his job as a school aide due to the smaller footprint of the district.

Our strategy all along was to be up front about failure and embrace accountability. Again, while our radical transparency seemed like a good idea on its face, it turned out that a lot of people don’t want to hear their school is failing—no matter how carefully crafted the message. Also, while some community members were grateful that someone was “finally telling the truth” (an actual quote from a community meeting I led at a failing school), others were understandably angry. Our team was on the receiving end of the grief and loss that result from telling the patient they have stage IV cancer when someone should have caught it years ago.

We were lucky to have a popular Republican governor in Christie and a Democratic mayor in Booker, who teamed up to create a real mandate for change and put a laser focus on what’s best for students. This was a tremendous asset (and seems unthinkable in today’s environment) but also a challenge. Some Newarkers resented the involvement of the state (particularly in managing the school system directly) and, by extension, me. And local officials fought even harder to exert influence, sometimes over off-the-mark things, to show they were relevant.

We prioritized students who were at the back of the line. Our universal enrollment system gave preference to students from the poorest neighborhoods and those with disabilities. We revamped the magnet school admissions process to look at multiple factors for student admissions at the central office. These were good decisions for children, families, and equity, but it also put us in the crosshairs of power brokers who were used to getting what they wanted and considered coveted seats theirs to give out. They also had access to the biggest microphones and would use them to mobilize the community against our efforts.

Some charter school operators and their supporters mobilized their constituents in opposition to these citywide efforts as well. They wanted to grow where they wanted to grow, not necessarily in alignment with supply-and-demand patterns or the overall plan. Many (not all) were content to crow about how much better they were than the district without digging into what percentage of “high-need” students they were serving—conveniently avoiding an apples-to-apples comparison that was much more complicated. They enjoyed promises from politicians and funders that were out of alignment with the One Newark collective plan. Many liked running their own lotteries because they had more control over admissions; some would say things like “we don’t offer that kind of special education program.” Also, many had legitimate concerns about turning over enrollment processes to a district that had been underperforming and had actively sought to extinguish them for many years.

Charters weren’t the only group stuck in their own goals and plans—and at least most of their concerns were in service of building quality schools. School-based partners and vendors, local nonprofits, funders, and other leaders all had their individual projects, schools, and pet issues. The incentives to keep doing one’s own thing were profound. I was stuck in a daily loop of explicit and often threatening demands to support individual agendas—many of them having nothing to do with what was best for individual neighborhoods and schools, let alone the collective. A local reporter continually nagged me about shoring up my “natural allies.” I remember wondering who they were. Breaking up monoplies and pursuing third-way ideas is a lonely endeavor, particularly in cities like Newark, with its transactional, machine politics.

Well-resourced forces of opposition spent a considerable amount of money spreading misinformation and actively attacking me personally. They made expensive sandwich boards, posters, and fliers with my face on it. In one image, the word “Liar” was printed as if it were carved into my forehead and dripping blood. It was an open secret that they hired a full-time blogger to write stories about our work and about me personally (some with twists of the truth and some with outright lies). The blog was well formatted, looked like a real newspaper, and generally contained kernels of truth that were leaked from inside. Ads were purchased to place those stories in actual newspapers so that they looked like real news. Canvassers were hired to distribute leaflets about false school closures, and social media stalkers posted where my family and I were eating dinner.

As important as we knew collective buy-in was to our success and as much time as we invested in it, our team was ultimately not successful in creating a groundswell quickly enough. We certainly had moments, but not enough. The One Newark plan should have been envisioned before the unintended consequences were at our doorstep. Maybe that would have given us more time. Surely, I was the wrong messenger: a White woman from out of town who represented the system. One Newark could have been a third-party entity with representatives from various sectors and a trusted, local leader. I thought this all along but failed to get stakeholders to agree and execute quickly enough. Meanwhile, we had to balance the budget and ensure quality in education.

I also clearly made mistakes. My messages were not straightforward and sticky enough. This work, as you can see, is complex and multifaceted, and I could have paid more attention to how to ensure good, proactive, community-friendly communication. I did not lead our team in good enough ways, small and large, to predict and combat misinformation that was rampant and that got even worse as social media exploded during my tenure. The forces for the status quo were organized and mobilized, and we were caught flat-footed. I didn’t manage the flow of information with nearly enough precision, let alone attend to building my own brand. I made a classic mistake that many leaders have made before me: I presumed that if I did good work and led with authenticity, people would support progress.

More critically, I poured valuable energy into the community without focusing as much as I should have on the community influencers closest to our work at the school level. Since then, I’ve developed a more sophisticated understanding of how to see the community in relation to the system of schools. In figure 1, the center is the school, and the next level out is the families and students (red ring). The next ring is influencers (orange ring)—folks connected to the school who have direct influence on that specific school. The next ring is community-wide partners (yellow ring)—community-based agencies and other city agencies like police and child welfare. And the next ring out (green ring) is elected officials and power brokers—for instance, pastors of large congregations, thought leaders, and community-based organizations serving the city.

We knew it was critical to focus on our families and students, and we knew it was a tremendous amount of our work to build collective action focused on them. I give us high marks for our dogged and strategic work on the red ring. But in retrospect, we spent far too much time with folks in the outermost ring—the political and power class—and not enough with those in the orange and yellow rings. It wasn’t until nearer the end of my tenure that we started to create a database for each individual school’s yellow ring. We also made a much more concerted effort to know the civil servants at all of our partner agencies. I came to realize a hard lesson—that while the politicians and power brokers confidently spoke for the community, they were often after a political win: a contract, a coveted spot in a school, a policy, or a job for a family member or friend. I wish I could take precious minutes I spent with those in the green ring and reinvest them in the yellow and orange rings.

The painful but informative experiences I had in Newark, along with a long career since then of working with systems leaders across the country, have convinced me that collective action is the missing link for change at the systems and community levels. Sadly, it is also the element I find most commonly reduced to uninspired bumper stickers and is wholly disconnected from the powerful and real work of reform. We talk about “community engagement” without honestly defining who the community is. We talk about consensus when real and hard calls have to be made every day about managing access to scarce resources, coveted high-quality seats, and community-based jobs. Many of those decisions can be in direct tension with building a system of great schools in every neighborhood by any means necessary. We interchange concepts of true grassroots organizing with community engagement and sidestep the obvious truth that power brokers and special interest groups have an organized, well-resourced, and often outsized influence on speaking for the community.

Recommendations for systems leaders

While the work we did in Newark has been treated by many in education reform as a critical case study for emerging superintendents and district leaders, it is often told as a cautionary tale of doing too much and ignoring community engagement. What is often lost are the lessons for building a successful “systems of schools.” Fundamentally, the story of the One Newark plan is a story of a district seeking to break out of the shell of its narrow school footprint and hold itself accountable for the educational futures of all its city’s children. The story of Newark should push all of us to define the role of the “system” and why it is so critical and yet so difficult to fulfill that mandate for an entire community.

Since A Nation at Risk was published, we’ve had important attempts at systemic reform that focused on specific pieces of the puzzle. Sadly, many of those efforts focused narrowly on individual “ingredients” (to use my earlier analogy) but not on the whole recipe, or the whole system.

We’ve had a lot of reforms focused on “community engagement” approaches, like the Annenberg Challenge. But those initiatives failed to address the fundamentals of building better schools and didn’t wrestle with the extremely tricky work of defining community that is illustrated in the Newark example.

We have also seen many efforts to build better individual schools; most of the charter and “high-quality schools”’ movement has been about that: creating individual proof points without thinking about the layer above the school, let alone the community. New Orleans shows the profound limitations of this strategy, as the city still struggles to figure out the role of the system after watching a bunch of individual charter operators solve some problems and create new and complicated ones. The Newark case study illuminates that while this approach can be vital for building “four-ingredient” schools, it will always be insufficient for establishing a holistic system of great schools.

We must focus on creating systems of great schools—not great school systems, not individual schools alone, not one piece of a puzzle, not some simplistic version of community engagement. We need to get clear on the roles of leaders at the systems level. In short: the system should manage the incentives, policies, guardrails, and resources to ensure that every child has access to a four-ingredient school by doing four things.

1. Enable ‘four-ingredient’ schools

As discussed above, we have promising practices when it comes to ensuring a gamechanging principal in every school and an excellent educator in every classroom. We know the impact of high-quality instructional materials that are culturally competent. We have proven research on the importance of school culture and handling discipline. We know what conditions have to be in place to enable achievement. Systems leaders should set direction and advocate; procure best-in-class materials; set policy to incentivize districts, schools, and charter management organizations to implement what we know works; and sanction practices antithetical to student progress. As one example, when Mississippi focused on the science of reading, providing best-in-class materials, training, and a way of measuring progress, kids across the state started reading at unprecedented levels. As another example, Nebraska adopted high-quality instructional materials statewide and provided options but also high-quality implementation support. This drove impressive gains in student outcomes.

Too often, cities select a superintendent or states select a commissioner because they are zealously focused on one single ingredient. Sometimes cities and states simply won’t touch an ingredient because they don’t want to fight with the union or other interest groups.

Policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that schools can obtain and mix best-in-class ingredients more quickly—trying to do so one school at a time doesn’t make sense. A lot of this work happens at the district and network levels, but leaders at all levels must put people in place who understand and are committed to all four ingredients.

2. Ensure quality and equity

Our current system of districts versus charters sadly guarantees that many kids—particularly those with the most challenges—are left behind. Policymakers and community leaders should be held accountable for allowing kids and families to fall through the cracks.

Leaders need to step up and raise their hands for being accountable for all kids to access high-quality schools. They need to embrace good enough ways of measuring what that means—in terms of what students are learning and how they are feeling. Accountability systems need to help families hold schools to a standard of excellence for all kids, including those who consistently fail in all kinds of schools. These accountability systems should be family friendly and public. And they should explicitly shine a light on where inequities show up: fewer Black students having access to AP course and magnet programs, special education students in segregated classrooms with abysmally low student outcomes, inequitable criminalization of student behavior, and kids living in concentrated poverty too often getting the lowest-quality staff. Our new accountability systems should correct for some of the mistakes we made before, from focusing only on proficiency and meaningless graduation rates to treating growth, college-readiness, and retention as critical outcome measures.

Effective accountability systems have incentives that inspire schools and communities to step up. As one recent example, schools that were designated as failing were more than twice as likely to make big gains than those that weren’t. Researchers surmised that this is because the label drove resources and supports where they needed to go—and rallied communities to do better. Good accountability systems drive decisions, sometimes hard ones, about redesigning schools, radically changing who runs them and how they are run, and even closing them.

3. Break up bureaucracy

A fundamental way to clear a runway for accelerated school improvement is to actively tear down past practices and federal, state, and local policies that block individual schools from innovating. As one example, school finance formulas are unnecessarily complicated and opaque. Most states have an even worse and more complicated approach to funding facilities and infrastructure. We need more of a “whiteboard” approach than one that tweaks decades of dysfunction.

Traditional schools will never be able to “compete” with charters if we don’t actively tear down the unnecessary bureaucracy in existing schools. As one example, when Klein was New York City Schools chancellor, he had an entire team dedicated to creating one-stop compliance and communication approaches for principals in New York City over multiple years. They shrank thousands and thousands of pages of sometimes competing “mustdos” (most of them having nothing to do with serving students better) and still felt there was more to do.

Policymakers and community leaders need to wake up every day wondering what they can do to ensure that people running schools have the time to do the right thing as opposed to managing byzantine policies and procedures from competing departments. We certainly need oversight and compliance, but it must be streamlined and reexamined every year.

4. Create cross-system and community-based solutions

The students who face the most challenges have generally been failed by multiple systems. I have a term for this: students whom systems have failed the most (SSFMs). Statistically, they are likely to be students of color. Too often they are labeled “special populations” and further marginalized out of classrooms and into separate and unequal programs. Very few schools of any governance structure meet the needs of these young people. Schools—and the systems in which they operate—are consistently failing 20 percent of their most vulnerable students.

Often these students and their families are connected to multiple systems: child welfare, public housing, homeless services, juvenile justice, criminal justice, immigration services, family services, and food programs. Some examples: nearly 90 percent of the juvenile justice population were in foster care at some point in their lives. About one-third of thirteen-toseventeen year-olds experience some sort of homelessness. These students struggle tremendously in school. In other words, we take the kids who—through no choice of their own—have been failed by one system and then fail them in another.

In order to truly reverse patterns for students that systems have failed the most, we need crossagency and community-based solutions with school success at the core. Neighborhood-based collaboratives, like the Harlem Children’s Zone, have produced promising results that we started to scale during Arne Duncan’s tenure as secretary of education. I’ve had the pleasure of working with teams creating memorandums of agreement between disparate agencies—the DA’s office, probation, public housing, and school systems—to share data and create common family support plans for young people and families connected to multiple systems. We need more out-of-the-box ideas to aggregate services and help students who are the most vulnerable succeed.

Conclusion

The insights and recommendations I’ve shared above are not based on any specific ideology. They were developed out of necessity and refined through years of application and practice across a wide variety of settings—from New York to California and many places in between, in both districts and charter networks, in small-school communities, and in the largest cities and states.

It may seem like a lot to tackle, and indeed it is. But if we are to truly transform our systems at scale, we can’t simply cling to one specific ingredient or hew to a single governance ideology. The surest way to avoid bias and ensure a holistic strategy is to zoom out to the communitylevel goal. Make the community—not just one school, network, neighborhood, or district—the unit of change.

When I arrived in Newark, we started by asking how to ensure one hundred excellent schools to educate every child—including and especially those who are typically left out of the conversations about excellence. Moreover, how could we do it as quickly as possible (because kids only have one third grade)? Many education reformers at the time were looking for silver bullets—debating whether charters are better than traditional schools or what makes the perfect teacher or curriculum. Our approach of stepping back and asking what the shared goal was for the entire community led us down a fundamentally different path. That path was inherently third-way and therefore had us at odds with hard-line choice advocates, status quo defenders, and other rigid ideologues. But it also kept us focused on the community level and (on our good days) prioritizing those members of the community closest to the center of the circle.

Our efforts in Newark stood on the shoulders of emerging research and promising practices from around the country. Our team’s focus on talent at every level was inspired by work in New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, and in organizations like the New Teacher Project and New Leaders for New Schools. We took lessons from Student Achievement Partners, New York State, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, and high-performing charters when it came to focusing on high-quality instructional materials. Our focus on high expectations and high support cultures was informed by research on achievement motivation, the intersection of adult expectations and student outcomes, and Chicago’s work on measuring student and family satisfaction. Our citywide plan built on work from the new small schools
movement in Chicago, New York, and Denver and universal enrollment in New Orleans and Denver. Throughout, we aimed to take the best of what was working elsewhere and ensure that it met the unique needs of our comprehensive citywide plan in Newark.

When leaders make the commitment to put community at the forefront of their work, they will encounter a number of challenges. In closing, I’ll offer four guidelines to help us move forward.

First, think about the system of schools, not the school system. As I said before, this sounds like merely a semantic difference, but don’t be fooled. Anytime we find ourselves putting aside what the broader community needs and instead focusing on what the district or network needs, we may achieve some short-term gains for the school system but often at the cost of the long-term goals for the community’s system of schools. Continually reminding ourselves of this important distinction can go a long way toward preserving our focus.

Second, embrace a better, more honest definition of community. It is critical that the bounds of the community feel authentic to the members of that community—geographically, culturally, and politically. It is often convenient for politicians and others in positions of power to leave out members of the community to allow special interest groups to frame the conversation. In the planning and execution of systemic work, we have to put at the core of the work the very members who have been consistently failed by the system itself. When we are honest about who the real stakeholders are in our community and have clear priorities, the opportunity for real systemic change becomes possible.

Third, reject the idea that we have to start from scratch. In this chapter, I have identified many policies and practices that worked, some of which have been tossed out because of politics. The past five years have been a time of extreme polarization in all areas of public discourse, with education as no exception. An emerging playbook was beginning, but it has been all but obliterated. We need innovation for sure, and we also need a clear-eyed assessment of what didn’t work, but we aren’t starting from scratch. Kids don’t have time for us to reinvent the wheel.

Fourth, accept that this is messy and that revolutions are never quiet or fast. As much as I’ve tried to codify my lessons and experiences into an actionable, coherent framework, nothing gets around the fact that transformative and disruptive systemic change will never be quick or tidy. This is not outpatient laser surgery that leaves no scar; this is chest-opening, quadruple bypass surgery with a lot of risks and long-term effects. But like a good doctor’s goals, our charge is to help the patient lead a long, healthy life. We also cannot expect immediate results. Real change takes time. The ideas and epiphanies in this chapter I share humbly and with tremendous gratitude to the countless friends, colleagues, and mentors in this sector who helped shape my beliefs about this work. It’s been more than a decade since I arrived in Newark and forty years since A Nation at Risk. My hope is that we’ve all gained a bit of useful perspective and are ready to roll up our sleeves and put the lessons we’ve learned into action.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

The publication of A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in 1983 was the defining moment of the “first wave” of education reform. It articulated improbably long-lived insights that continue to define education policy and discourse to this day. In particular, ANAR underscored, with uncommon rhetorical flourishes, the contrast between the ambitious ideals of a “Learning Society” and existing educational standards defined by modest minimum requirements, such as the low expectations embedded in high schools’ minimum competency tests and “cafeteria-style” curricula. Clearly, ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s most prominent recommendation was the adoption of high school graduation requirements grounded in a “New Basics” curriculum that would feature four years of English; three years of science, math, and social studies; a half year of computer science; and, for college-bound students, two years of foreign language instruction.

However, ANAR also commented on several other dimensions of the education system in the United States, including the state of the teaching profession. In particular, ANAR concluded that “too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” The report also underscored the inadequate subject-matter focus of teacher training, low pay, teachers’ limited influence on key professional decisions (e.g., textbooks), and the targeted character of teacher shortages. These findings—and the seven specific recommendations ANAR made regarding teaching—have been the focus of education research, commentary, and policymaking to this day.

Below, I provide a compact overview of key insights from the research and policymaking that occurred in the wake of these recommendations. I focus specifically on the developments relevant to in service teachers, while the important issues related to recruitment, induction, and mentoring in the teaching profession are addressed separately by Michael Hansen in a previous analysis. ANAR made four specific recommendations relevant to in-service teachers. One is that teacher salaries should be “professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based” and linked to “an effective evaluation system” that rewards effective teachers and guides underperforming teachers toward improvement or termination. A related second recommendation advocates for collectively developed “career ladder” designations that distinguish beginning, experienced, and master teachers. ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s remaining two recommendations for in-service teachers focus on supporting teacher improvement through funded time for professional development.

Theories of Action

´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s recommendations for in-service teachers tacitly reflect two broad and complementary theories of action for improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. One involves improving the effectiveness of existing teachers. The intent is for this to occur through professional development activities and through the implementation of well-designed financial and professional incentives. Both of these intend to promote an understanding of high-quality classroom practices as well as their consistent use. The second theory of action focuses on selection—that is, performance assessment systems designed to retain and elevate the most effective teachers while ensuring that persistently ineffective teachers exit the classroom. Notably, these policy recommendations stand in sharp contrast to conventional efforts to promote teacher effectiveness through generic salary increases unrelated to performance or need and through reducing class sizes by hiring more teachers.

The motivations for ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s theories of action rest upon several important stylized facts about teachers that have become increasingly well established since its publication. Arguably, the most foundational evidence concerns the variation in effectiveness across teachers. An older debate had questioned whether there are aspects specific to teaching that make it prohibitively difficult to measure teacher effectiveness in a valid and reliable manner. However, richer data and methodological advances have led to a consensus about the general validity of teacher effectiveness measures while also acknowledging important evidence on the degree of noisiness common to such measures.

These studies indicate that the variation in teacher effectiveness is large, particularly relative to the effects of other promising education interventions. Specifically, a one-standard deviation improvement in teacher effectiveness corresponds to a gain in student performance on standardized tests of roughly 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. Critically, the manner in which teachers are currently assessed — that is, informal, “drive-by” evaluations — captures virtually none of this documented variation, rates the vast majority of teachers as satisfactory, and results in little performance-based attrition of low-performing teachers from the classroom.

Another important stylized fact is that, at the hiring stage, school leaders have little capacity to identify the teachers who will become more effective. This combination of facts that teachers vary considerably in impact, but this impact can be observed much more easily after several years in the classroom than at the hiring stage—suggests the need for broader access to the teaching profession coupled with discerning assessment systems that guide subsequent personnel decisions. In particular, decisions to tenure rather than dismiss the lowest-performing teachers can have dramatic consequences given the length of teaching careers.

Over the past fifteen years, this evidence has motivated a number of ambitious public and philanthropic efforts to systematically improve the effectiveness of the teacher workforce through performance-based assessment systems. Recent research has also provided more credible evidence of direct initiatives designed to improve the performance of all in-service teachers through professional development. I discuss these policy innovations and the related research below.

Improving teacher effectiveness

ANAR recommended that teachers receive eleven-month contracts so that they could spend more time in professional development and provide additional instruction for students with special needs. While the eleven-month contract has not been widely adopted, broader efforts to improve the performance of in-service teachers through direct training and support involve a substantial expenditure of time and money. However, accurately identifying the magnitude of these outlays is not straightforward given the accounting challenges of categorizing such activities and their demands on time for both teachers and nonteaching staff. For example, a 2019 study by Alexander and Jang examined expenditure reports for Minnesota school districts and found that 1 percent of 2013–14 operational expenditures was spent on activities defined by the state as staff development. In contrast, a 2015 study by the New Teacher Project found that 2013–14 expenses related to teacher improvement constituted, on average, 8 percent of district budgets. This figure consisted of both direct expenditures on teacher improvement, such as professional development, coaching, and new-teacher support, as well as related indirect expenditures, such as the management, strategic, and operational expenses for these improvement efforts.

Focusing specifically on professional development, a 2014 study commissioned by the Gates Foundation found that the typical teacher spends sixty-eight hours per year on professional learning directed by districts, or eighty-nine hours when courses and self-guided professional learning are included. Most of the time spent by teachers in professional development occurs in workshops and professional learning communities conducted by district staff. The cost of this professional development was estimated at $18 billion per year in 2014. Teacher perceptions of the quality of these investments have generally not been encouraging, nor do they appear to have clear links to teacher performance or improvement. The Gates report also stresses the overwhelming use of district staff instead of market-tested external providers to provide professional development, as well as limited teacher voice in choosing their training.

Despite the considerable expense and prominence of teacher professional development, credible research on the impact of these investments has also been quite limited over much of the period since ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s publication. For example, Yoon et al. reviewed more than 1,300 studies potentially addressing the impact of teacher professional development on student learning and found only nine studies that met the evidence standards in the federal What Works Clearinghouse: six randomized controlled trials and three quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1986 and 2003. However, what these studies revealed suggests a striking proof of concept: teachers who received substantial professional development could boost the achievement of the average control-group student by 21 percentile points. Notably, these nine professional development initiatives focused on elementary grades but differed in their theories of action.

However, other quasi-experimental studies serve as a reminder that implementing effective professional development consistently at scale is a serious challenge. Jacob and Lefgren examined the effect of teacher training in Chicago Public Schools using a credible natural experiment in which schools with low baseline test scores received additional resources for staff development. They found that this initiative had “no statistically or academically significant effect” on math or reading achievement of elementary students. Similarly, Harris and Sass examined student-level longitudinal data linked to teacher data for the state of Florida and did not find an overall impact of professional development on teacher productivity. However, they did find positive effects of content-focused math professional development on student outcomes at the elementary and middle-school levels.

Over the past decade, experimental studies of teacher professional development have proliferated. In general, they have provided mixed evidence of the learning impact of investments in professional development. For example, experimental studies by Garet et al. found that reading- and math-focused training changed teacher knowledge and practice but without clearly improving student achievement. However, meta-analytic summaries of such experimental professional development evaluations suggest that positive effects exist but vary considerably by program design. For example, Basma and Savage examined seventeen literacy-focused professional development studies and found an overall effect size for reading achievement of 0.225. Similarly, in a meta-analysis of ninety-five STEM-focused professional development studies with experimental and quasi-experimental designs, Lynch et al. report an average effect size of 0.21.

However, other multisubject meta-analyses suggest smaller but still positive effects on student learning. For example, Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo identified fifty-three experimental evaluations of teacher professional development and found an overall effect size of 0.09. Similarly, Sims et al. reviewed 104 experimental evaluations and found an overall effect size of 0.05. Given the considerable financial expense of most training investments, effects of this size, though positive, raise serious questions about cost-effectiveness.

These reviews also note and seek to examine the considerable variation across professional development programs in terms of impact. Kennedy argues that the widely discussed design features of teacher professional development — namely program duration, emphasis on content knowledge, and use of professional learning communities — are far less relevant than whether the training addresses any of the four persistent challenges of teaching: portraying content, managing student behavior, enlisting student participation, and knowing what students understand. In a similar vein, Sims et al. characterize professional development programs by the more general ways they change teacher skills and behaviors. Specifically, they characterize teacher professional development by four “IGTP” traits that indicate whether teachers are provided with new insights (I), goal-oriented behaviors (G), and techniques (T) that are embedded in practice (P). And they conclude that professional development programs with all four traits have an effect size on student learning of 0.17. However, these assessments may obscure the relevance of professional development initiatives that focus on the most effective elements of content and practice, such as an emphasis on “science of reading” approaches in literacy-focused training.

Overall, this evidence indicates that ANAR was prescient in emphasizing the need for ongoing training of in-service teachers. The available evidence suggests that such training can have substantial effects on student learning. However, realizing the increasingly well-established potential of this training is not straightforward. It involves the perennial challenge of translating research findings—that is, the critical design features of effective professional development— into genuine changes in high-impact practice at scale.

Teacher evaluation and performance-based incentives

ANAR also made prominent recommendations to dramatically change how we pay and evaluate public school teachers. In general, the status quo to this day compensates teachers according to single-salary schedules that rigidly structure pay according to years of experience and observed qualifications (e.g., a graduate degree) that do not consistently predict teacher effectiveness. This approach has historical origins in well-intentioned efforts to eliminate overt discrimination and capriciousness in teacher pay. Today, critics allege that this inflexible approach has led to low and undifferentiated salaries that do little to attract, motivate, and retain the most-effective teachers and to direct the least-effective teachers out of the classroom, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and high-need subjects. Furthermore, this approach to pay is coupled with low-stakes, “drive-by” teacher evaluations that capture little of the variation in teacher performance and do not provide reliable guidance for professional learning.

ANAR envisioned an alternative in which teacher compensation was substantially higher but also based on performance in a manner that would direct persistently underperforming teachers either to improve or to leave the profession. In the aftermath of ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s publication, several states and districts experimented with providing teachers with extra pay and career-ladder recognitions for demonstrated merit (though, not generally, dismissing chronically underperforming teachers). These reforms tended to be short-lived despite encouraging results. While the rollback of these reforms was clearly a policy choice, the underlying causes are debated. Ballou argued that it largely reflected the opposition of teachers’ unions. Murnane and Cohen contended that it reflected the distinctive character of teachers’ professional practice — that is, multidimensional and difficult to observe. However, random-assignment evidence from a comparatively well-implemented career ladder program in Tennessee indicates that it was effective in identifying teachers who raised student achievement.

The past two decades have witnessed a diverse variety of ambitious efforts, often encouraged by prominent philanthropic and federal initiatives, to measure teacher performance and to link it to improvement supports and incentives such as financial benefits, career-ladder designations, and dismissal threats. The research on these different reforms suggests their promise but also underscores the nontrivial challenges (e.g., design features, implementation, and political credibility) that make the consistent realization of this promise difficult. For example, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative disbursed more than $5 billion to states in a competition based in part on their commitment to developing systems for promoting teacher effectiveness. While RttT was effective in promoting state policy adoption, its effects on key design features and implementation are far less clear. In particular, while states were more likely to have multiple measures of teacher performance in the wake of RttT, the use of this data to inform salary and retention decisions remained uncommon. The state reforms over this period were “rarely sustained over time,” offered low bonuses, and rated fewer than 1 percent of teachers as unsatisfactory.

A more granular focus on the available evidence from specific initiatives provides richer insights into these issues of design, implementation, and political durability. For example, several studies focused narrowly on simply providing teachers with incentives for improved performance. These studies often found null (or weak) effects that are likely to reflect the unique character of these programs. “Cash for test scores” experiments with individual incentives for teachers in Nashville and group incentives for teachers in Round Rock, Texas, found little to no evidence of effects on teacher practices, attitudes, and the learning gains of their students. Similarly, studies of a group-based teacherincentive experiment in New York City found that they had no overall effects on key teacher or student outcomes.

Critics of teacher incentives suggest that these null findings reflect a misunderstanding of teacher motivations and the manner in which such incentives might debase intrinsic motivation. However, three design features of these studies could also contribute to these null findings and have important implications for performance-based assessment and compensation. First, the fact that participants know that these experimental incentives have a short term (e.g., two years) can sharply attenuate the resulting motivation to undertake changes in professional practices. This same concern can also apply to the incentives embedded in at-scale policy reforms that are viewed as faddish and unlikely to endure politically. Second, these initiatives generally focused on student achievement as the incentivized outcome. This may weaken the impact of incentives if teachers do not see or understand how they should change everyday practice to realize these rewards. A related third point is that these incentive studies generally did little to support and guide teachers in how they could change their professional practices to earn these rewards.

Three other studies suggest the potential importance of other design features. A teacherincentive study in Chicago Heights, Illinois, found positive effects on student achievement (but only in the first wave of the experiment) when the incentives were framed as the loss of an award rather than a gain. Second, the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) found positive effects when offering high-performing teachers a high-powered incentive ($20,000) linked to a distinctly clear, easily observed, and important behavior: working in a hard-to-staff school for two years. However, it is notable that these incentive-based gains were difficult to realize. More than 1,500 teachers had to be approached in order to fill only eighty-one vacancies. Third, the Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program in Dallas similarly provided large incentives to highly effective teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools. Morgan et al. presented evidence that ACE produced dramatic gains in student performance: a 0.3 effect size in reading and 0.4 in math. This study also found that this success replicated as the program went to scale and that these gains were reversed when the program was eliminated.

Notably, these focused incentive programs all fall short of the more comprehensive system of assessments, supports, and incentives recommended by ANAR. TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (formerly known as the Teacher Advancement Program), which was introduced in 1999 and is currently active in “nearly twenty states and hundreds of school districts across the US,” is closer to ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s vision. Specifically, the defining features of TAP include career ladder designations for teachers and job-embedded, professional learning led by master teachers. In support of this professional learning, TAP also provides teachers with comprehensive evaluations of their professional practice. However, it is not clear that this “instructionally focused accountability” articulates clear mechanisms for directing consistently low-performing teachers out of the classroom (the selection mechanism in ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s theory of change). Finally, TAP includes performance pay typically linked to observations of teachers’ professional practice, such as classroom observation, portfolios, and interviews, as well as test scores.

The available evidence suggests that TAP is effective in improving teacher performance and student outcomes. Specifically, in a quasi-experimental study based on 1,200 schools from two states, Springer, Ballou, and Peng found that TAP increased student performance, particularly at the elementary school level, with effect sizes varying from 0.12 to 0.34 by grade. Similarly, Cohodes, Eren, and Ozturk, leveraging the rollout of TAP across schools in South Carolina, found that it generated improvements in several long-run outcomes, including educational attainment, criminal activity, and the take-up of government assistance. However, a random-assignment evaluation of TAP in Chicago schools by Glazerman and Seifullah found that it did not improve student achievement and that it was also vexed by the challenges of implementing this reform with fidelity, such as teacher payouts being smaller than originally stated and no rewards based on value added because of inadequate data systems.

Two other high-profile studies provided further evidence of the serious challenges of implementing comprehensive reforms of teacher assessments and compensation as well as of credibly assessing their effects. The first example is the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). Congress established TIF in 2006 to provide grants to high-need schools implementing performance-based compensation systems. The four required components of TIF reforms also resembled those suggested by ANAR: (1) measures of teacher performance, including observations of classroom practice; (2) large, differentiated, difficult-to earn performance bonuses; (3) additional pay for career-ladder opportunities, such as becoming a master teacher and coach; and (4) professional development linked to the teacher assessments. A congressionally mandated study of TIF focused on the 2010 grant recipients in more than 130 school districts and found it led to student achievement of 1 to 2 percentile points higher in reading and math.

However, there are two important caveats to this evidence of modest impact. First, the implementation of these reforms in the study districts was incomplete. Only about half of the participating districts reported implementing all four components of the reforms required by TIF. In particular, professional development was frequently not provided, and most teachers received bonuses, “a finding inconsistent with making bonuses challenging to earn.” Second, the treatment–control contrast assessed in this random assignment study did not examine the effect of TIF versus “business as usual.” Instead, the treatment schools in the study were intended to receive pay-for-performance bonuses while the control group received automatic bonuses. And all study participants, both treatment and control, were assigned access to the three other TIF components: career ladder responsibilities and rewards, evaluative feedback, and professional development. In this critical but often overlooked detail, the federal study of TIF more closely resembles the studies of teacher incentives noted above than a true evaluation of teacher assessment systems.

The Gates-funded Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative is a second widely discussed example of implementing and evaluating teacher assessment systems. This initiative sought to introduce assessment reforms within three school districts and four charter management organizations. Similar to both TAP and TIF, this effort featured focused professional development and career ladder incentives along with performance pay and retention decisions based on direct, structured observation of teacher practice and value-added scores. A quasi-experimental study found that these reforms did not clearly improve the focal student outcomes of high school graduation and college attendance. However, the implementation of the reforms appears to have been weak. The teacher evaluations flagged few teachers as poor performers, and in sites with available data, only 1 percent were dismissed for poor performance. As with the federal TIF evaluation, the treatment contrast that was studied was muted because the comparison schools in this study often adopted similar policies.

IMPACT, the highly controversial teacher assessment reforms introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), is distinctive as a seminal and enduring effort to implement ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s recommendations with fidelity. IMPACT evaluated DCPS teachers on multiple measures with a heavy emphasis on structured classroom observations, including some conducted by district staff, and linked professional development. These evaluations resulted in measures of teacher performance that exhibited variation rather than being largely uniform. IMPACT linked these measures to high-stakes consequences: substantial pay increases for “highly effective” teachers, particularly those in high-poverty schools; dismissal for a small number of “ineffective” teachers; and a dismissal threat for “minimally effective” teachers who did not become effective within a year.

A quasi-experimental study of the incentive contrasts embedded in IMPACT found it had positive effects on teacher performance. This study’s design leveraged a feature of IMPACT in which teachers with performance scores just below a threshold value were deemed “minimally effective” and subject to a dismissal threat while those with scores at or above the threshold were not. A comparison of teachers just below and above this threshold found that the threat of dismissal caused minimally effective teachers either to leave the district or to improve their measured performance substantially. A powerful financial incentive for highly effective teachers to repeat their prior performance also appeared to have positive effects.

Three other aspects of IMPACT merit emphasis. First, the political credibility and resiliency of IMPACT appeared to be highly salient. In 2010, when the city (and district) leadership who championed IMPACT were forced out of office, the first “minimally effective” designations did not appear to change teacher behavior. However, the ratings reported in the summer of 2011, when it appeared that IMPACT would endure, did drive changes in teacher behavior.

Second, evidence indicates that IMPACT not only improved the performance of existing teachers but also replaced underperforming teachers who exited with substantially more effective instructors. Specifically, a quasi-experimental study by Adnot et al. finds that, when a low-performing teacher exited, their replacement raised student performance by 0.14 standard deviations in reading and 0.24 standard deviations in math. Third, the performance benefits of IMPACT’s incentives endured through subsequent revisions to the teacher supports and ratings structure.

A second district reform of note (and one with strong parallels to IMPACT) began in the Dallas Independent School District in 2015. Specifically, like IMPACT, the Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI) replaced a single-salary schedule with compensation based on multiple measures of teacher performance. Furthermore, like IMPACT, it also did so in the context of accountability for school principals. TEI also implemented a unique design feature to discourage inflated or arbitrary ratings of teachers. It fixed the overall distribution of ratings and penalized principals for subjective ratings that were highly misaligned with test-based ratings. A synthetic-control study by Hanushek et al. found that these reforms led to statistically significant increases in student achievement that grew over time to a roughly 0.2 standard deviation in math and a 0.1 standard deviation in reading.

Concluding thoughts

´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s recommendations that focused on improving the effectiveness of in-service teachers were a harbinger of some of the most dramatic education policy innovations of the past forty years. And these innovations have provided us with several proofs of concept and new insights that establish the potential to improve student learning through dramatic changes in teacher evaluation, in-service training, and compensation.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there has clearly not been large-scale, lasting change regarding ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s teacher-focused recommendations. Uninformative, low-stakes assessments of professional practice and rigid single-salary schedules are still the norm for the vast majority of teachers in US public schools. And while in-service teachers do engage in extensive professional development, the impact of these expensive and highly variable investments is uncertain at best.

Any serious effort to reimagine the assessment, training, and compensation of in-service teachers should begin by confronting the factors that have contributed to the long durability of the status quo. There appear to be three broad and interrelated impediments to substantive change. The first is the need to improve the knowledge base of how best to design the key features of these reforms. For example, efforts to improve teacher evaluation and introduce performance-based teacher pay rely critically on valid and reliable measures of teacher performance. Promising gains in measuring teacher effectiveness are likely to come from continued improvements to structured rubrics for classroom practices. Incentives can better guide the professional improvement of teachers when they are linked to the high-impact, everyday classroom practices teachers directly control and can enhance through complementary training.

Another important area where improved knowledge is critical to driving at-scale change concerns the design of teacher professional development. The typical professional development experience, workshops directed by internal district staff, is often criticized (e.g., the New Teacher Project 2015). At the same time, a recent and growing body of experimental studies indicates that purposively designed professional development can have substantial impact. This literature generally emphasizes the particular benefits of in-service training that focuses on meeting more general challenges of teacher practice. While more can be learned about the design of professional development, the question of how to design its delivery is even more uncertain. A study from the Gates Foundation suggests that relying more on external providers of professional development will make it easier to move nimbly to market-tested and effective approaches. However, several of the teacher assessment reforms discussed here instead emphasize redesigning internally provided professional development to rely on master teachers who may be better positioned to serve as coaches providing embedded and relevant training. These issues underscore the need to build a complementary learning agenda around any new reforms (e.g., inquiry cycles, networked improvement communities).

A second impediment to realizing ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s vision concerns the multifaceted operational challenges of implementing meaningful reforms effectively at scale. The null findings from credibly identified studies of professional development in at-scale field settings suggest this issue. However, more-direct and sobering evidence comes from several well-funded, high-profile efforts to introduce teacher assessment and compensation reforms at some scale. These include (1) the failure to deliver value-added bonuses because of data-system inadequacies in TAP; (2) the limited variation in teacher ratings and their infrequent use in personnel decisions in the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching; (3) the inconsistent delivery of professional development and the broad distribution of bonuses under the federal Teaching Incentive Fund; and (4) the limited use of teacher evaluations to guide salary and retention decisions under the RttT initiative.

A third and closely related impediment is political opposition. With regard to introducing performance-based pay, this most obviously refers to the opposition of teachers’ unions. However, it can also involve unresponsive public-sector bureaucracies. Furthermore, reform efforts can also fail when their success and durability rely on politically determined funding commitments. The political opposition to reform in the broader public also turns on misinformation about what the existing evidence discussed here actually indicates. Specifically, opponents of the types of reforms recommended by ANAR often argue that investments in professional development are effective while performance-based pay has failed.

Given these interlocking issues, a compelling way to achieve change at scale may involve forming political coalitions around compelling reforms that adopt some but not all of ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s proposals. For example, it may be possible to move school districts toward more effective professional development delivered by a carefully curated set of outside vendors if their provision involved cost-sharing that saved district resources. Alternatively, it may be possible to achieve durable political support for a teacher evaluation system if that system focuses narrowly on identifying master teachers and providing them with training and extra pay to coach their peers but takes a more incremental approach toward dismissing underperforming teachers. Intentionally combining such efforts with careful evaluation could, over the longer term, seed further evidence-based change in this important domain.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

In 1983, a special commission organized by the U.S. Department of Education released , an unapologetic critique of America’s public schools. Its publication prompted both a firestorm of public response and a seismic shift of policy and practice reforms at every level of the education system, permanently altering the policy landscape that has shaped today’s public schools. 

The report directed many pointed barbs at the teacher workforce and those tasked with preparing them. It concluded that both the quality of current teachers and the quantity of available talent to fill teaching roles in schools were sorely deficient; both dimensions needed immediate intervention to achieve educational excellence. What the report failed to do, however, was reconcile the inherent tensions in simultaneously pursuing both higher quality and quantity, or offer a strategy to systematically develop the teacher workforce that was desired. 

Consequently, as A Nation at Risk unleashed a wave of education reform, the initiatives focused on teachers were both expansive and incoherent. In my essay, “,” recently published in the Hoover Institution’s series (edited by Stephen L. Bowen and Margaret E. Raymond), I recount the divergent approaches to reforming the teacher workforce that developed over time. 

This post highlights some of the lessons learned from looking back at the 40 years of reform and research on the teacher pipeline since the report’s publication.

Teachers: Part of both the problem and the solution

In the late 1970s and early 1980s leading up to the report’s publication, the public seemed to be losing confidence in the nation’s public schools. , , and desegregation efforts were widely perceived as .

The teacher workforce was also viewed as a depreciating asset. The professional workforce was opening for educated young women, and as a career. The starting in the late 1960s, and public sentiment turned decidedly anti-union under the Reagan administration, with unions often perceived as stymying public schools’ ability to serve students. 

It was into this downtrodden atmosphere that A Nation at Risk’s scathing critiques were published. Yet instead of arguing for divestment from public schools, the report offered a laundry list of recommendations to promote comprehensive reform. Policy recommendations regarding teachers, and the pipeline leading to the classroom featured prominently in this list, including compensation reform, student grants or loans for those who commit to becoming teachers, and alternative certification.

The report’s authors clearly felt that the teacher workforce had problems with both the quality of the workforce and the quantity of people signing up for the profession, and both needed to be remediated. However, the report failed to acknowledge that quality and quantity are inherently in conflict—for example, as far as the teacher pipeline is concerned, prioritizing quality will limit the quantity of people who can meet the higher expectations. 

Improving the teacher pipeline on either dimension would have been challenge enough, but to address both teacher quality and quantity simultaneously would be a Herculean feat.

Two approaches to reform teaching, frequently in conflict

Some teacher policy actions started immediately in the wake of the report—for example, four states had by the following year. Other initiatives incubated for a bit before reaching maturation, including the establishment of the (NBPTS) in 1987.

Looking back at the various approaches to shoring up the teacher pipeline, I categorize these policy actions into two types. Actions that seek to shore up weak points in the teacher workforce and recruit more into the profession I call “outside-in” reforms, as they see the primary challenge of teaching as a failure to attract and retain the best talent (think of alternative certification or loan forgiveness policies). Another approach sees the failure to support and develop talent within the workforce as the primary challenge. I call these “inside-out” initiatives (think of NBPTS or career ladders). 

These two approaches are not inherently in conflict, but they take different stances on the relative importance of teacher quality versus quantity. The “outside-in” approaches lean heavily on teacher quantity first (through recruiting to high-need settings, say) and then assume policies will follow that enable school systems to be more selective to ensure teacher quality. The “inside-out” approach reverses that prioritization, focusing on developing quality within the workforce first (through demonstrating mastery through NBPTS certification, for example) and assuming that elevated role will attract new supplies of teacher candidates. 

With limitations on both funding and public attention, these two approaches often find themselves in conflict within the education policy space. Moreover, these diverging approaches have attracted different sets of advocates and public champions over time (for example, think of philanthropic megadonors often representing the “outside-in” approach and teacher unions as representing the “inside-out” approach). These groups frequently engage in conflict over teachers’ role (or blame) for past failures and offer contrasting views towards school improvement. Conflicts like these are at the heart of why teaching has earned the ignominious label of “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Strategically deploying different strategies, based on school context

Despite these conflicts, both policy approaches offer good ideas that have been borne out in the evidence, though they also come with limitations. And neither set offers enough to ensure a sufficient supply of effective teachers accessible for all students, a . If only we could deploy these policies in complementary ways, then we can make headway on some of the real staffing challenges facing schools. 

What this looks like in practice is that we develop a systematic plan about workforce management that is sensitive to workforce needs on the ground. The most important context here—the one conspicuously omitted from A Nation at Risk—is school settings that serve high-need student populations. We must recognize that these schools have a unique difficulty attracting and retaining quality teachers. Consequently, these schools spend disproportionate amounts of money and time recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new teachers. Even if they could invest in building teacher quality, the high levels of turnover lower the expected return on that investment. In other words, these schools have a problem with teacher quantity first.

I propose that policymakers and school leaders prioritize efforts that build and sustain teacher quantity in these settings; in other words, the “outside-in” options are those most readily applicable. For example, monetary bonuses for teachers or generous service scholarships conditioned on working in high-need settings would be an excellent way to shore up the workforce. This does not mean that we ignore quality in these schools entirely, but we should only look to building quality once policies prioritizing a robust supply of qualified teachers are firmly in place, avoiding the unfortunate (but too common) scenario in which disadvantaged schools are seen as mere training grounds for novices before moving to greener pastures. Thus, the quality-developing “inside-out” reforms come second.

Outside of these high-need settings, where teacher supply is not nearly such a pressing need, these schools should emphasize building teacher quality first. Thus, the “inside-out” options come to the foreground. Further, as they develop and sustain these approaches, they can in turn offer a supply of high-quality teachers to support higher-need settings.

The state of the teacher pipeline continues to challenge schools

The state of public schools now is, on the surface, very different from that in 1983. We have just recently witnessed schools shutting down for months on end to limit the spread of COVID. Schools have also become new battlegrounds in culture wars. 

These developments have impacted the teacher workforce. First, teachers became frontline workers aiding children’s learning recovery, and increased burnout and elevated turnover in the wake of the pandemic. Second, the culture wars appear to have had on teachers. These challenges are layered on top of a teacher pipeline that was already weakened before the pandemic hit, prompting some experts to warn of a “” forming in the teacher labor market. 

The pipeline into teaching is objectively worse than any point in recent memory, with nearly of teacher training programs in 2020-21, a decline of over 40% from the (284,000 completers). These teacher graduates are now serving a student body that is more than than it was in 1970. The growing cost of college is also a widely perceived barrier for entry into profession, especially for who are have fewer financial resources and are more burdened by debts to get through school. Yet, are on the decline, offering little hope for a resurgent teacher pipeline. 

Under the surface, though, I also observe parallels between then and now. In 1983, like today, student achievement was tapering off after a period of high growth, and there was growing dissatisfaction with the . Also, student enrollments were dropping, as some families began opting for non-public school options. It was clear then, as it seems now, that our public schools are far from returning to that level of performance in our recent past.

Another fascinating parallel comes from a 2022 study by . Looking at historical trends in teacher prestige, interest in the profession, teacher preparation, and teacher satisfaction, the authors conclude that the teacher workforce is now near or at historic lows. In fact, the last time we were in this position was in the early 1980s, right before A Nation at Risk. Afterwards, there was a quick upsurge in public support for and interest in the teaching profession, though the authors could not pinpoint exactly what the catalyst was back then. Perhaps part of this turnaround was new messaging about the nobility of the teaching profession (championed by those reforming from the “inside out”). Perhaps part of the new interest in teaching was due to easier access into the profession and visible pay reform efforts (thanks to the “outside-in” reformers). 

Regardless of the source, what it suggests to me is that a much-improved prognosis for the teacher workforce and pipeline may not be far around the corner. We don’t need to think of new solutions. We just need to deploy the ones we have with more strategy and purpose.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ is partnering with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ‘A Nation At Risk’ report. Hoover’s spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. (See our full series)

Moderated by Stephen Bowen, executive director of the Hoover Education Success initiative, the conversation features Hoover Visiting Fellows Corey DeAngelis, Anna Egalite, and John Singleton. Watch the full conversation, and check out our past coverage from School Choice Week: 

• 40 Years After ‘A Nation At Risk,’ How School Choice Policies Are Reshaping American Education

• Next Wave of Microschool Founders are More Diverse, Less Likely to be Educators

• New Analysis Finds Charter School Sector Still Has Plenty of Room to Grow

• Seizing on Parents’ Frustration, GOP Governors Push for Education Savings Accounts

• The New Face of Homeschooling: Less Religious and Conservative, More Focused on Quality

The past forty years witnessed several significant initiatives in K–12 education policy in the United States. These include school finance reforms to ensure equity and adequacy of funding as well as the adoption of school accountability policies (exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act) linking measures of student success with sanctions and rewards for teachers and schools. A major development was likewise school choice: public policies that provide families with increased access to schooling options other than a neighborhood-assigned public school.

Although school choice policies in the United States take several forms in practice—this chapter surveys findings from public school choice (e.g., “open enrollment”), charter school, and private school voucher programs—the school choice movement is unified around a common logic and set of policy goals. Its intellectual heritage typically is traced to economist Milton Friedman’s argument that, while government rightly should fund primary and secondary education, a robust system where substantially more private providers also produce and deliver that education and where the funding a school (public or private) receives is directly linked to its enrollment could be more efficient and more equitable (Friedman 1955). As with the debates over school finance and school accountability, a central issue is the low productivity of public schools in the United States in comparison with other nations. School choice policies distinctly diagnose this problem as a symptom of monopoly power. Poorly performing public schools are the logical product of weak incentives to supply a high-quality education in this view. Introducing choice and therefore competition—to K–12 education follows as a remedy.

Watch: A Special Hoover Institution Panel on the State of School Choice Policies

This broadly economic rationale connects with two other motivations for the introduction and expansion of school choice policies. The first can be described as a pragmatic appeal that has historically proven important: given the entrenched power of the public education bureaucracy in the United States (e.g., the political influence of public teachers’ unions), reform from without—as opposed to from within—has often proved more feasible. In other words, rather than attempting to reform public education from the “top down,” school choice policies advance reform in a more decentralized, “bottom-up” fashion. The other motivation recognizes that the students who are most underserved by public education in the United States are disproportionately disadvantaged. In particular, it is families of low socioeconomic status who otherwise effectively lack school choice; they often do not have the resources to pay for private school tuition or to move to affluent suburban neighborhoods with good public schools. From this perspective, school choice policies stand to level the playing field for low-income and minority students both by improving access to high-quality schools and by spurring improvement of public schools.

This chapter surveys the present landscape of school choice policies in the United States and assesses what global experience so far suggests about their potential for reforming public education. This experience includes both several decades of state- and district-level choice policies in the United States as well as the experience of countries where choice has been introduced (e.g., Sweden and India) or has long been a feature of the national education system (e.g., Chile). A major point of emphasis is that the potential of school choice policies as a large-scale education reform rests in large part on the degree to which they improve the quality of education in traditional public schools. Such learning spillovers are likely to depend on how school choice programs are designed and may or may not be positive.

The chapter then summarizes key elements of the major school choice policies present across the United States, with a focus on the incentives that funding and accountability provisions may or may not create. These policies include public school choice options, such as magnet schools and open enrollment policies, as well as charter schools, which are operated independently but are publicly funded and tuition-free. While vouchers (and voucher-like programs) that defray or reduce the cost of tuition at private schools have attracted renewed policy interest recently, a much greater share of current public funding for school choice flows to charter schools: more than ten times as many students attended a charter school in fall 2019 as used a voucher to attend a private school. Charter schools educated around 6 percent of all students. Survey numbers also suggest that around as many students “chose” their public school (as opposed to attending an assigned one).

This leads into a critical appraisal of the empirical literature to date. The review focuses primarily on the evidence regarding the effects of school choice programs on public school students. It is argued that a consensus, built on the findings from both domestic and international programs, supports the view that school choice policies usually—but not necessarily—have positive spillover effects and that they do so by causing public schools to raise their quality in the face of competition. The chapter then highlights several important gaps in current knowledge. These include the need to understand the sources and significance of heterogeneity in impacts across different settings and programs and for greater evidence of effects on long-run student success (such as education attainment). There is also a need for work that considers the implications of the growing reality in the United States where several different school choice policies can be present at the same time.

The last sections of the chapter reflect on takeaways for school choice policy moving forward and on challenges of evidence-based policymaking in a post–COVID 19 future that is likely to feature greater school choice. One conclusion is that policymakers should consider and leverage incentives that stand to intensify competition. Specific applications include providing public funding for transportation to nonpublic schools; producing and supplying families with information about schools and their impacts; and targeting vouchers to those students who are underserved by public education.

Orienting the focus toward education quality in the aggregate

How should school choice policies be evaluated as successful or not? The perspective adopted in this chapter is that their impact on the quality of education, understood as the level of skills that students acquire in schools, should be the foremost focus. An important point is that this focus accommodates a broad conception of skills that encompass cognitive and other (noncognitive) aptitudes; it is not reducible to academic achievement. While measurement raises crucial questions returned to later, skill production in schools as a central focus has two advantages. The first is that it serves to summarize in terms of student outcomes the multitude of individual elements that constitute a schooling environment —for example, the quality of the teachers, the culture and leadership, the curriculum, and so on. The second advantage is from the perspective of policy: it provides a common basis for comparing the effectiveness of school choice policies with other major K–12 education reforms.

One way the question is often framed of whether school choice policies are successful or not is from the perspective of parents and caregivers: “Will sending my student to a charter school be better than sending them to their assigned public schools? Will using a voucher program to send my student to a private school be better than sending them to their assigned public schools?” This framing connects with a mature empirical literature and body of evidence that asks whether charter and private school alternatives provide higher education quality than traditional public schools. A fundamental empirical challenge for research is self-selection—the fact that the students who choose to use a voucher or switch to a charter school are not randomly drawn from the population—and scholarly work has advanced several approaches to address this. Important findings in the literature include that certain charter schools (many aligned with “No Excuses” practices) generate dramatic improvements in students’ academic achievement and whether they go on to college (e.g., Angrist et al. 2016; Dobbie and Fryer 2020); that recent national data sources show learning gains of charter school students exceed those of traditional public school students (Shakeel and Peterson 2021; CREDO 2023); and that voucher recipients in statewide programs in several US states perform lower than comparable traditional public school students on state standardized tests (e.g., Mills and Wolf 2017; Abdulkadiroğlu et al. 2018).

From a policy perspective, however, some of the attention to whether school choice alternatives are higher quality is misplaced. This is because the promise of school choice policies as large-scale education reforms rests in a fundamental way on how those policies impact students who choose to attend traditional public schools. In theory, school choice policies can increase education quality in the aggregate by creating incentives for public schools to raise their productivity. Analogized to a “tide that lifts all boats” (Hoxby 2003), this competitive response prospectively redounds to the benefit of students who remain in public schools. The key point, emphasized in the next section’s survey of the school choice landscape in the United States, is that those students who participate in choice programs (i.e., use a voucher program to attend a private school or choose to attend a charter school) are a minority of all students. As a consequence, even small spillover effects on the comparatively larger share of students who remain in public school will matter more in the aggregate. A numerical example helps illustrate this point: if 10 percent of students used a voucher to attend a private school and their learning was consequently advanced by six weeks each, education quality on average would be negligibly improved if there was zero impact on the 90 percent of public school students. While the voucher program in this example might pass a cost-benefit analysis, the point is that it would be difficult to justify the attention of policymakers concerned with developing and implementing policies that address the systemic failures of K–12 public education in the United States.

A growing literature, drawing on evidence from programs in the United States as well as international findings, tests for competitive effects of school choice policies. School choice policies can have negative spillovers, too, however, and a central empirical question concerns effects on resources and student composition in public schools and separating those effects from changes in public school productivity. A major empirical challenge for this branch of the literature is that the public schools that are exposed to competition are likely not random. The review of the empirical literature below summarizes the major findings about spillovers of school choice policies.

The school choice policy landscape in the United States

There are various policies that create or expand access to school options across the United States. This chapter provides a brief overview of three broad categories: (1) policies that provide choice among public schools (e.g., open enrollment and magnet programs); (2) charter school laws that allow for the creation and operation of publicly funded and tuition-free schools by independent organizations; and (3) voucher and voucher-like programs that defray the cost of tuition at private schools for qualified students.

Public school choice

Public school choice policies offer families choice among public schools. One example is magnet schools, which are typically district run, feature specialized curricula, and often have selective admissions. Students must apply to be considered for admission. Examples include “exam” schools such as Stuyvesant in New York City, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, Virginia, and many schools of the arts around the country. Another example of public school choice is open enrollment policies intended to provide a process whereby students can transfer between public schools. Most states allow school districts to voluntarily accept students from other districts, and twenty three have policies in place that make such interdistrict transfers mandatory (Education Commission of the States 2017). Transfers within a school district are mandatory, subject to limitations, in nineteen states.

Choice mechanisms are a kind of open enrollment policy that facilitates within-district public school choice. Such mechanisms allow students to submit ranked lists of school preferences, which are then aggregated (and can be combined with preferences identified by schools and specialized programs and other criteria) to assign students to schools via an algorithm. An example is Denver’s SchoolChoice process, first put in place in 2012, where families (most with students in either kindergarten, sixth, or ninth grade) rank up to twelve schools, and matching priorities include neighborhood zones and siblings. School districts often pair choice mechanisms with guides for families to understanding the ranking and allocation process and that detail aspects and attributes of the various schools and programs available. While public school choice mechanisms expand choice options beyond charter or private schools—and introducing choice into the system may be a response to the availability of charter or voucher options there is greater ambiguity about the theoretical system-level implications of magnet, specialized programs, or open enrollment policies on education quality. This is because choice between public schools does not obviously create meaningful competitive incentives: whichever public school a student chooses to attend, they (and the revenue attached to them) ultimately stay in the public system.

It is difficult to provide an exact number as to how many students in the United States “chose” their public school via a policy option (as opposed to being assigned it based on residence). Pre-2020 survey numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) imply a figure of around three million students (about 6 percent of all public and private enrollment) (Hanson and Pugliese 2020). A number of large public school districts have at least limited school choice mechanisms in place, including New York City, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg (in North Carolina). These programs can take different forms. In some cases, magnet program and charter school options are integrated into the same choice mechanism as for traditional public schools.

Charter Schools

Charter schools, in contrast, are essentially privately operated public schools. Charter schools are supported by tax revenues, are regulated by government entities, do not charge tuition, and cannot have selective admission criteria. They also participate in school accountability programs (i.e., standardized testing) and can be closed by public school authorities for poor performance. At the same time, they are created, operated, and managed by independent organizations and, like private schools, have considerable autonomy when it comes to decisions over curricula, human resources, and where to locate. Charter school operators are generally nonprofit organizations (well-known examples include the Knowledge is Power Program, Rocketship, and Success Academy), though for-profit management companies operate in several states.

How (and at what level) charter schools are funded has long been a major point of debate. This is in part because most per-pupil funding for charter school students moves out of the public school system to the charter school the student enrolls in. Thus, the fiscal implications of school choice can be immediate for public schools in the case of charter school competition. From an economic perspective, this means that the presence of charter schools in principle creates a meaningful incentive for districts to retain students (though public school leaders may not act on those incentives). In several states, however, these incentives are muted by “hold harmless” provisions that at least temporarily offset the full financial impact of enrollment lost to charter schools. Public school leadership, at both district and state levels, has at times been hostile to charter school growth in the face of fiscal impacts, and charter schools are a frequent target of public school teachers’ unions. At the same time, the amount of funding is also typically disparate—charter schools generally receive less revenue per pupil than is spent on a student in a traditional public school—and this disparity has itself been (and continues to be) a focus of policy attention.

About 3.4 million students in the United States attended a charter school during 2019–20. This equates to more than 6 percent of all school enrollment and reflects steady growth; charter schools enrolled about 4 percent of students in 2010–11. The average charter school student is much less likely to be White and more likely to be economically disadvantaged than the average public school student (NCES 2022). Although all but four states have charter school laws in place, charter school penetration varies considerably across places. In several states, more than one in ten non–private school attendees attended a charter school in 2019, including Washington, DC (45 percent), Arizona (18 percent), Colorado (14 percent), Louisiana (12 percent), and Florida (11 percent) (NCES 2022). Note that these numbers mask major within-state heterogeneity: for example, about 25 percent of Miami-Dade non–private school students attend a charter school. In New Orleans, virtually all students who do not attend private schools attend charter schools.

Vouchers

The last variety of school choice programs highlighted in brief here are those that defray the cost of tuition at private schools for eligible students. These programs are generically referred to as “voucher” policies but can take several different forms across the United States. These forms include prototypical government-funded programs that cut families a check; tax credit scholarships—which deputize nonprofits to receive tax-advantaged contributions and provide scholarships to students; and education savings accounts. Education savings accounts instead allow families to allocate a given sum of government funds across education expenses, including private school tuition.

Voucher programs have historically been means tested, whereby eligibility is restricted to students in families whose income does not exceed some threshold. A number of programs are targeted specifically to students with disabilities, and a few restrict or expand eligibility to students assigned to persistently low-performing public schools. Similar to the revenue disparity between traditional public schools and charter schools, effective voucher amounts are typically well below per-pupil expenditures in public schools and often do not cover the average sticker price at private schools. For example, Ohio’s means-tested statewide vouchers are worth $5,500 at the elementary and middle school levels for 2022–23. Other policy parameters concern accountability provisions of voucher policies. At issue are typically
three aspects of the programs: (1) whether participating private schools may apply their own admission criteria or not (with seats in oversubscribed private schools allocated by lottery); (2) whether private schools can require supplemental tuition from voucher recipients; and (3) whether voucher recipients must take the same achievement exams as in public schools.

While the country’s first voucher program (which began in Milwaukee in 1990 and served nearly thirty thousand students in 2022–23) requires lotteries and allows tuition supplements only at high schools, almost all major voucher programs instituted in the United States in the past twenty years relax these provisions.

In fall 2019, about 4.7 million K–12 students were enrolled in a private school nationally (NCES 2022). This level, which is a little less than 10 percent of all students, has been relatively constant over recent. years. However, the estimated share of private school enrollees who are part of a voucher or scholarship program has grown. More than five hundred thousand students (about 1 percent of all public and private school students) attended a private school via a school choice policy in 2019—more than double the number ten years prior (EdChoice 2023). As of 2023, thirty US states (plus Washington, DC) had some kind of voucher program in place. The country’s largest voucher program, Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, began in 2001 and served more than one hundred thousand students as recently as 2020–21. While private school students as a whole tend to be more advantaged (and less likely to belong to an underrepresented minority) than public school students, those students who use vouchers— reflecting in part the income-based eligibility criteria for such programs—are generally less advantaged and relatively more minority (Wolf 2020).

What do we know?

What do we know about the externalities of school choice policies on the learning of students who nonetheless attend a traditional public school? This section considers the evidence on this question. The topic of spillovers juxtaposes countervailing forces. On the one hand, incentives to retain enrollments may lead public schools to respond to school choice policies by raising quality, as intended. On the other hand, expanded school choice may negatively impact students who remain in public schools through a resource or peer effect channel. If, for example, more advantaged or higher-achieving students leave public schools (and exposure to such students benefits their peers), the learning of students left behind will suffer. There is also an important concern that low information about school quality (or preferences for other attributes of schools) could incentivize responses by public schools that are unrelated to impacts on learning.

The body of rigorous evidence to date supports the conclusion that spillover effects on student learning are usually—but not necessarily—positive on net. The pieces of evidence supporting this are twofold. First, the net effect on students remaining in an assigned traditional district school is generally zero or positive; this implies, and more direct evidence affirms, that negative externalities from peer sorting are limited. Second, the patterns for net improvements in student outcomes are consistent with increased competition causing public schools to raise their productivity.

A recent review of the findings from private school choice programs in the United States highlights that most studies find positive evidence of competitive effects and that no study finds evidence of negative effects on students attending traditional public schools (Wolf 2020). Figlio and Karbownik (2016), to highlight one example, compare two sets of Ohio public school students: (1) those in traditional public schools who marginally exceeded a score threshold (based on standardized test performance) below which all students would become eligible to receive a voucher; and (2) those in public schools who marginally failed the score threshold. The latter group, who were exposed to private school competition but should otherwise be on average the same as the first group, showed greater test score growth. The body of evidence on spillovers of charter schools on public school students is more ambiguous. Older findings drawn from a variety of states suggest that test score impacts are limited. One important study, by Imberman (2011), reports negative impacts from charter schools on the achievement of students in traditional public schools. The more recent evidence is generally more positive. Studies that find improvements in public school students’ test scores include Cordes (2018) for New York City, Gilraine et al. (2021) for North Carolina, and Ridley and Terrier (2022) for Massachusetts. The New York City study compares student test scores between traditional public schools exposed to charter school competition at different times and at different distances. These studies of US programs are accompanied by results showing increases in public school student outcomes following the introduction of vouchers in 1992 in Sweden (Sandström and Bergström 2005) and, despite increases in stratification that likely reduced average student academic potential in public schools, no changes associated with entry of private schools in India (Bagde et al. 2022).

Two kinds of evidence additionally support the claim that increased competition can cause public schools to raise their quality. The first kind is from settings where competition increases but in which other responses cannot arise. Figlio and Hart (2014) is a foremost example: students could apply for Florida’s means-tested voucher one year in advance of the program launch. The authors present evidence of increases in test scores at competitively exposed public schools in even this “pure competition” year where students could not yet re-sort. Implementing the same idea, Gilraine et al. (2021) provide evidence for competition in the context of charter schools in North Carolina. The second kind of evidence is drawn from models of school choice that generate predictions for how much competitive pressure different public schools experience. Gilraine et al. (2023), for example, show (1) that demand for charter schools offering a “nontraditional” curriculum is not very sensitive to the quality of public schools; and (2) that, as would be expected, the quality of public schools does not increase following nearby entry by a “nontraditional” charter school. They further show that the test score value added of public schools does increase following entry of math and reading skills–focused charter schools. Campos and Kearns (2023) take a similar approach to argue that competition among public schools is the mechanism supporting improvement in student outcomes, including high school completion, in Los Angeles’s high school Zones of Choice. Card et al. (2010) for Ontario, California, and Neilson (2021) for Chile, respectively, are two examples that bring international evidence of this kind to bear.

What do we not yet know that we need to know?

While the evidence summarized in the previous section points to emerging consensus on the spillover effects of school choice policies, this section highlights several gaps in current knowledge. These gaps include (1) the paucity of evidence on long-run impacts, such as on wages; (2) the little attention to implications of how choice programs are designed; and (3) the need to consider markets (which may feature several overlapping choice options and programs) as the appropriate units of analysis, not individual programs and policies.

First, a major limitation of the existing evidence on the aggregate effects of school choice policies is the limited amount of work that speaks to impacts on students’ “long-run” outcomes. These outcomes include educational attainment (such as college entrance or graduation), marriage, employment, work history, and labor market earnings. This is important because long-run indicators of success are reliably better measures of human capital acquisition than test scores, which are more widely used due to their greater availability in US datasets. Long-run markers of success, for example, depend on many kinds of skills, while test scores may only reliably measure cognitive skills acquisition. A large literature recognizes that near-term impacts on math and reading scores or measures derived from them may not capture durable (and multidimensional) skill gains. An exception in the literature is studies that examine effects on postsecondary outcomes of charter school attendance. But the lack of long-term outcome data is especially relevant to the evidence on statewide voucher programs, where negative effects on test scores for voucher recipients may conflate lower education quality with private schools’ nonalignment with the public school curriculum. Further, little to no existing work estimates competitive impacts from school choice policies on measures of student success in the long run.

A second gap in the existing evidence concerns how impacts on education quality relate to how choice programs are designed and implemented. This is because how policy elements combine has implications for the incentives facing public school leaders and thus for the potential of choice to generate competition. A simple example in illustration is whether (and how much of) public funds actually follow students who switch from public schools to a school choice option like a private school via voucher or a charter school. However, other elements of choice programs are also relevant. These include whether funding and policy support a competitive threat to public schools. For example, are negative impacts of statewide voucher programs on participants partly due to high-quality private schools being insufficiently incentivized to participate? Should barriers to charter school entry be kept low, or is it better that authorizers screen applications to open new schools or expand existing schools based on proven success and limit where new charter schools can open? Answers will require more work that tackles how schools—public, private, and charters alike—make decisions. Though they have clear implications for policy, little existing evidence in the literature speaks to these questions.

This relates to a third limitation of the existing stock of knowledge, which concerns its applicability in the current policymaking environment: increasingly, K–12 education “markets” feature multiple school choice programs. It is no longer unusual for a voucher program that defrays private school tuition, several charter schools, and some kind of choice among public schools to all be options available to families in a district. One issue this creates is interpreting findings from individual choice programs: a case in point is that recent data from the Washington, DC, voucher program shows that 42 percent of the control group students attended charter schools (Dynarski et al. 2017). The bigger question raised, however, concerns how combinations of school choice programs interact at scale. How should limited resources be allocated across schools and programs? Is the marginal dollar better spent on expanding charter schooling, or on expanding vouchers, or on implementing better public school choice mechanisms, or on increasing public school quality generally? This requires a shift in focus from school choice options and policies in isolation to “education markets” as they exist and evolve.

What should be done?

This section collects several takeaways from the global experience with school choice programs to date. A first recommendation is that policymakers should recognize the central importance—and leverage the power—of incentives. The simple point is that, for choice policies to create meaningful competition, traditional public schools and districts must feel threatened with losing students and funding. One practical application of this recommendation is to transportation: a compelling argument that education funding should be directed toward providing transportation of students to charter schools or, in the case of voucher programs, to private schools is that doing so will make it easier for students to potentially leave traditional public schools; it will increase competition. A second application is providing parents with better information about schools (public, private, and charter). A large body of evidence indicates that parents may not know about available choice options and do not have accurate information about school quality. The implication is that supplying information to parents about the effectiveness of different schools at advancing student learning will strengthen incentives facing traditional public schools to increase their quality.

Given limited resources, policy decisions would additionally benefit from considering where returns are likely to be highest. This recommendation channels an animating motive for school choice programs: expanding choice for low-income families and students will yield greater improvements in education quality overall than will expanding choice for high-income families, who already have the means to choose private schools or public schools in affluent neighborhoods. But combined with the logic of incentives, this recommendation produces additional insight: because high-income families experience little real change in their ability to exercise choice, the schools under their consideration also experience limited changes in incentives. This stands in marked contrast for low-performing schools that disproportionately serve low-income students: continuing to miss the mark, when effective choice programs are in place, will risk losing enrollments. This observation has several applications. One is that policymakers could provide financial incentives to charter schools to locate in neighborhoods and areas where traditional public schools underserve students. Several pieces of evidence show that financial considerations are important for where charter schools open (and whether they survive). Long-standing eligibility criteria for voucher programs that are based on the performance of the student’s local public school or family income carry a similar logic. This implies that making vouchers and voucher-like programs universal, while perhaps appealing on fairness grounds, also may reduce their overall effectiveness. An alternative would be to scale the generosity of the voucher with family income. Policy decisions about charter school authorization (and funding) could also benefit from considering which providers or operators generate greater competitive externalities. It stands to reason that high-quality or “proven” providers likely have an advantage in this regard, and evidence, mentioned earlier, suggests that core skills–focused charter schools compete more closely with traditional public schools.

A final recommendation is just that policymakers value the potential of data and evidence to inform policy development and implementation. For example, there is no technical obstacle to creating measures of school (and teacher) quality that recognize multidimensional, durable skill development and reflect long-run success. Such measures could be built on rich evidence from test scores across many subjects, from GPAs, from attendance and discipline records, from college entry and completion data, and even from earnings in the labor market. These measures could then be used to inform parents so that they can make better decisions about schools (publicly available information about the quality of private schools is especially scarce), to target policies in effective ways, and to allocate resources. Rather, the obstacles are tragically often bureaucratic.

Looking forward

The COVID-19 global pandemic and the resulting school closures and shift in education delivery models will likely prove to be the largest single “shock” to school choice in the United States to date. This shock has a demand side and a supply side. On the demand side, widespread dissatisfaction with the responses of public school leaders to the pandemic—in particular, delays in reopening schools drove many families to seek choice alternatives. Private and charter schools were generally quicker to return to in-person instruction. This dissatisfaction is reflected in data on enrollments, which shows declines in public school enrollment (particularly among kindergartners) that were especially pronounced in districts that were slow to open buildings to in-person instruction (Dee et al. 2021). Public school enrollment declined nationally by 4 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020, whereas charter school enrollments over the same time period increased by 7 percent (NCES 2023). Rates of students attending private schools and being homeschooled also increased (Musaddiq et al. 2022).

The durability of this increase in demand for choice—particularly as new cohorts of students come of age—will combine with policy developments on the supply side that likewise portend a future with more school choice. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy momentum behind expanding private school voucher programs has rapidly gained steam across numerous states. An example is 2023 legislation that extended the eligibility for Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, mentioned earlier, to all Florida students. Previously, eligibility was means tested (though vouchers remain prioritized to lower income students under the new legislation) and was restricted to students either attending a public school or entering kindergarten or first grade. Florida is joined by Arizona, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia in creating new or expanding existing private school voucher programs postpandemic. Like the Florida program, several of these will be universal in student eligibility, marking a significant departure from earlier voucher programs in the United States.

The fresh momentum for vouchers highlights a fundamental challenge of evidence-based policymaking: research findings typically lag policy. This is brought into relief by the fact that the recent turn to vouchers arrives amid important new findings pointing to successes from charter school choice. Moving forward, the post-pandemic policy developments raise at least two questions for policymakers and researchers alike. The first is, for effective school choice policies, how important are accountability provisions—as opposed to accountability to the “market” alone? As detailed earlier, charter schools are generally subject to accountability provisions that are typically absent for private schools in voucher programs. The second question is how to produce rigorous evidence about new voucher (and voucher like) programs as they grow. Many existing data systems do not contain reliable information about private schools (or private school teachers), may not record or track recipients of vouchers (especially those who do not at some point have contact with the public school system), and—in states where administration of state tests is not required—will not readily contain information suitable for evaluation. Producing rigorous research findings in the post-pandemic world will thus require renewed cooperation to develop and make available high-quality data as well as creativity to identify and draw from other information sources.

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Whole-child education models are those that expand the ambit of schools beyond a traditional academic focus. While a range of whole-child models have been explored since at least the Progressive Era, use of these models has expanded greatly over the past twenty years.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a tempting place to provide near-universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families and educators are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. In the Hoover Institution’s report “,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades: community schools, school based health centers, wraparound service models, and social emotional learning curricula. 

While some models have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven — at large scale, using high-quality causal research methods — to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today in terms of improving academic outcomes. Though they may have other positive impacts on their own, without related investment in academic reforms, they are unlikely to be the panacea for the low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. Thus, at the end of my brief, I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts.

• Whole-child education models are becoming better known in the United States

• Their adoption in some public schools provides an opportunity to see which models contribute to academic success.

• However, they are a part of the topic of child welfare, not the entire picture.

In the past couple of decades, there has been a renewed interest in the idea that schools should expand their ambit to address a wider range of student needs around health and well-being. Often this is described as a focus on development of the “whole child” rather than just the academic aspects of child development.

Of course, promotion of a wider ambit for schools beyond the academic sphere is at least a century old, as is the debate about whether it is optimal. The intellectual leaders of the Progressive Era, in the nineteenth century, sought to bring a broader focus to education systems than the traditional academic one. This included various ways of engaging the whole child, some of which are similar to the models covered here, particularly the social and emotional learning curricula and community school models that have skyrocketed in popularity in the past several years.

Similarly, the roots of whole-child reforms that are focused on improving children’s physical health are deeply embedded in US education history. As early as 1850, states began requiring immunizations and sometimes hosted immunization clinics in schools, where there was easy direct access to children. Also, the beginning of what we now know as the standard school nurse model began in 1902 as a pilot program aiming to insert healthcare into schools in order to improve chronic absenteeism by managing easily treatable illnesses and focusing on prevention. Each of these foreshadowed the more recent creation and rapid expansion of school-based health centers, which insert healthcare providers directly into schools with the goal of improving academic and overall well-being.

Recent decades have seen a renewal in the popularity of whole-child models. To some extent, this renewed interest is partly a backlash to what many perceived as the laser focus of the No Child Left Behind era on student test score performance. The difficult periods of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to this shifted focus. The recent version of this movement has also been helped by increased emphasis on the complex relationships between education, health, housing, and other social dimensions across a range of academic disciplines and policy spheres.

This whole-child movement in schools has taken many forms, some of which I describe in more detail below. Across all its forms, the theory of change driving whole-child reform has two main parts. First, many students struggle academically because their basic needs are not met. Second, supporting these basic needs directly by bringing healthcare and/or social service resources into the school itself will overcome the access barriers that some children face, particularly poor children, thereby increasing their ability to thrive academically and socially.

To some extent, this theory of change pervades the entire US education system. Almost all districts in the country provide some form of nonacademic care to students through the school nurse, school counselors, or expanded offerings like universal vision screening programs. And many provide extracurricular activities or partner with community organizations in a variety of ways. What differentiates the whole-child models of reform here from the standard public school environment is the broader range of services provided and the depth of engagement between the school and community partners.

Intuitively, the first part of this theory of change makes some sense. How can a child learn if they suffer from an ongoing undiagnosed disease or disorder that prevents them from attending school regularly, concentrating in class, or participating fully in the community around them? How can a child learn if they feel isolated in a community, are surrounded by violence, and lack strong support inside and outside of school?

There is little direct causal evidence to support this theory of change, and there are plenty of anecdotes about children thriving despite incredibly challenging experiences during childhood. Yet a majority of parents would agree that children thrive most when their basic needs are met. However, as with all aspects of childrearing, there is debate about which “needs” require fulfillment for children to thrive. Furthermore, there is debate about whether schools are the best provider of health and social services to support children.

For decades, people have debated whether schools are the most effective places to solve the deep-rooted societal problems, like poverty, that leave many children with their basic needs unmet. Some people see schools as the great equalizer, holding them uniquely responsible for the achievement and well-being of all students, regardless of their backgrounds or the social forces determining those backgrounds. Others argue that systemic poverty, isolation, violence, poor health, and other ills have such a strong role that schools cannot be responsible for overcoming them.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a useful place to provide nearly universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. Some have concerns about the differences between their own values and beliefs and those promoted in the school environment, as is the case with the recent backlash among social emotional learning programs. Others have concerns about whether school employees have the bandwidth and expertise to provide an expansive range of high-quality care; instead, they suggest that a focus on academic knowledge would allow school employees, like teachers, to be more impactful. Still others distrust the push for schools to focus on issues beyond academics because of concerns about greater intrusion into the private lives of families.

In “A Nation At Risk +40,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades. After describing the general framework of each, I explore research into each model’s effectiveness. Most have been described as effective by the literature, but this assertion is generally based on research that is largely theoretical, comprises mixed methods, or is conducted either at a small scale or without the types of carefully constructed comparison groups that are essential for determining causal impacts. I focus on summarizing the subset of this literature that meets the Tier 1 or Tier 2 standard of the US Department of Education for strong or moderate evidence of effectiveness from either an experimental or a quasiexperimental design study (What Works Clearinghouse 2020).

Further, since many areas of research have shown patterns of effective programs in small studies that have limited effectiveness when taken to scale, I place particular emphasis on the relatively few studies that have analyzed the effectiveness of programs with large numbers of students across multiple school settings. 

While some have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven at scale, using high-quality causal research methods, to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today. Importantly, when looked at in total and given the scale of the existing research, the lack of conclusive evidence of a clear positive causal effect of these reforms on children’s academic achievement casts doubt on the theory underlying these reforms. Though they may have other positive impacts, on their own and without attention to academic reforms they are unlikely to be the panacea for low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. 

Thus, at “A Nation At Risk +40,” I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts. . 

Maria D. Fitzpatrick is a professor of economics and public policy in the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She is co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate in the CESifo Research Network. Her research focuses on child and family policy, particularly education. 

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This chapter summarizes the history of the development of public preschool in the United States and its current role in education reform. The chapter reviews research on preschool’s effectiveness and research related to the many decisions that states need to make after deciding to invest in public preschool. Pros and cons of each decision are discussed, along with specific recommendations for state policymakers.

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, extending school downward to include younger children has become the most expansive and deeply rooted strategy for improving achievement and reducing the achievement gap. The theory of change for public investment in preschool is that enrolling children in an educational program before they enter elementary school can help them develop the skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and can thus set children on a trajectory for school success.

Preschool programming can take many forms, which are explored in depth here, but with regard to student outcomes, the operative phrase is “high quality.” Only programs that meet high quality standards have shown long-term effects. States have many policy levers to affect quality, including program licensing standards, teacher and administrator credentialing standards along with ongoing resources to support effective teaching, child learning standards and assessments, program quality monitoring systems, and curriculum guidance.

Policies related to preschool should not be considered in isolation. If teachers in the upper grades do not build on what children learned in preschool, the benefits will fade. States can help sustain benefits by making sure that learning standards, program standards, curriculum, assessments, and teacher credentialing are aligned across preschool and the early grades.

Preschool is not a panacea. It alone will not improve achievement scores and other important child outcomes or reduce that achievement gap. But of the many school improvement initiatives this series discusses, preschool is among the most studied, and it may have the most potential to move the needle on improving student achievement.

• Preschool has become the norm in children’s educational experience, although controversies still exist about specific goals and how to provide it.

• Policymakers increasingly view preschool as a strategy for launching children on a positive trajectory for academic success and reducing the achievement gap related to economic circumstances that exists before children enter kindergarten.

• Research demonstrates long-term benefits of preschool only for high-quality programs, especially when followed by high-quality and coherent instruction in the early elementary grades.

PRESCHOOL CONTEXT

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, efforts to improve student achievement have taken many forms. Extending school downward to include younger children has become the most expansive and deeply rooted strategy. Nearly every state in the country has made significant investments in public preschool, and preschool has become the norm in children’s education experience.

Preschool is defined as an education program provided to three-to-five-year-olds during the two years before entering kindergarten. Traditionally, preschool has been an education-focused half-day program, which does not meet working parents’ childcare needs. To address this need, preschools are increasingly offering extended-day (“wraparound”) childcare.

Given that children are learning something all day, whether that is intentional or not, the distinction between childcare and preschool is blurry on a practical level. But the distinction has policy implications. Funding for childcare and preschool often comes from different sources, with different family eligibility requirements and standards. This chapter concerns programs (or those parts of programs) that intentionally focus on promoting children’s learning and development, not caretaking.

Unlike the K–12 system, in the United States preschool has no common governance structure, and administrative oversight rests with different levels of government. Children can attend a private, tuition-based preschool; a public preschool funded by the federal government (Head Start) or the state government (state preschool); a program funded by local resources (e.g., local taxes or philanthropy); or a preschool that involves funding from several sources.

A commitment to educating children before school has its roots in the infant school, designed in the 1820s and 1830s by social reformers to offer free daycare and education emphasizing “moral habit” for the children of poor working parents. In many respects, this is the original “compensatory education” for young children, although it emphasized values and behavior, not preparing children for school success. Soon after infant schools were created for the poor, more affluent parents began sending their young children to private infant schools where the emphasis was on early enrichment and social skills rather than moral reform. But preschools as we currently know them were not widespread in the United States for either poor or more affluent children until the 1960s.

At about the same time that infant schools were introduced in the United States, kindergarten was developed by German educator Friedrich Froebel. He believed that children should be in school from a young age, and the lessons he designed for children ages three through six emphasized music, nature, stories, and play. The first kindergartens in the United States were created by German immigrants in the mid-1800s. Over time, kindergarten for five-year-olds became a grade of schooling in the United States. In 1965, eighteen states funded public kindergarten. By 2000, all states funded some sort of kindergarten, most of them free to all children who met the age qualifications. Today nearly all (about 98 percent) children attend kindergarten prior to first grade, although kindergarten is not compulsory in most states. As kindergarten became viewed as “school,” preschool for three-to-four-year-olds (sometimes referred to as prekindergarten or pre-K) took its place as the education program for the year or two before school. Preschool has become the norm in the United States, and although private programs exist, preschool, like kindergarten, is increasingly supported with public funds. The theory of change for public investment in preschool is that an education program before children enter elementary school can help them develop the skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and can thus set them on a trajectory for school success. The next section offers a brief explanation and history of private and public preschools in the United States.

PRIVATE PRESCHOOL

In the decades prior to Head Start, children younger than five years of age were mostly in private and tuition-based preschool programs affiliated with universities or with religious or other community-based organizations. Now there are many community-based nonprofit programs as well as for-profit chains. Families that enroll their children in private preschool have, on average, higher incomes than families that enroll their children in public programs.

Although academic-focused private preschools exist, most focus primarily on social development and socialization — giving children an opportunity to learn how to get along in a setting with peers — as well as general cognitive development, including communication and problem-solving skills. Specific models, such as Montessori and Reggio Emilia, are prominent in the United States. As publicly funded preschools become more available, the proportion of children in community, tuition-based programs is declining.

PUBLIC PRESCHOOL

Specific goals of public preschool vary across funding sources, states, and localities. Kindergarten readiness, however, is ubiquitous, signified by the widespread state adoption of kindergarten readiness tests for children. There is considerable research to support the belief that kindergarten readiness predicts success in school, which in turn predicts education attainment and accompanying benefits. Because some families cannot afford private programs, public funds are needed to make preschool accessible to all children.

Public preschool has had its critics. Some opposition comes from the more conservative view that the government should not be in the business of educating young children; that is parents’ responsibility. A comment in 1971 by then president Richard Nixon sums up this argument: “For the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Some opposition has also come from skeptics about its effectiveness. A related concern is the isolation of low-income children in a program, especially given evidence that low-income children benefit from being in programs with more economically advantaged peers. Despite such
objections, the federal government launched the first expansive public preschool, Head Start,
in 1965; state and locally funded programs followed.

Head Start

Head Start was created in 1965 as part of then president Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, and it is one of the only Office of Economic Opportunity programs to survive. It was launched with a clear and ambitious goal: to reverse the cycle of poverty. Head Start was considered compensatory education in the sense that the education program was compensating for inauspicious home and community environments associated with poverty.

The specific program reflects beliefs about the academic and life skills required to escape a life of poverty. Unlike most other publicly funded preschool programs, Head Start is a comprehensive program; in addition to promoting cognitive and social-emotional development, it is designed to promote children’s physical and mental health with nutrition and social supports that affect their home environment. Health screenings and provisions for physical health (e.g., dental care) and parent involvement are key components. Head Start thus overlaps in approach with the whole-child reforms described by Maria D. Fitzpatrick in chapter 2 of this series.

Head Start has served an increasing number of children over its history, from fewer than two hundred thousand in the yearlong program in 1967 to over eight hundred fifty thousand in 2020. There has been ongoing tension between the desire to serve more children and at the same time increase quality, both of which add to the program’s costs. Quality has been given considerable attention in the past couple of decades. The 2007 reauthorization of Head Start included a revision of the quality standards and a 40 percent set-aside for quality enhancement (used in part to increase teacher salaries). The reauthorization also required that by 2013 half of Head Start teachers have a BA degree and assistant teachers have at least a Child Development Associates credential. 

Opposition specific to Head Start has been consistent but has come in different forms. Many conservatives opposed all of Johnson’s Great Society antipoverty programs. Critics concerned about parent choice have suggested that the money could be better spent by providing parents with vouchers to purchase their own childcare or education program for their children. There has also been opposition to the broad whole-child goals of Head Start by those who seek a narrower focus on academic skills. Among supporters of Head Start, the primary concern has been about effectiveness. Despite opposition, the program has survived and in fact grown with bipartisan support.

State and Local Preschool

During the 1980s, states began to develop preschool programs for students from low-income families. State-funded and locally funded preschool goals are typically more limited than Head Start, focusing primarily on kindergarten readiness. Few state preschool programs offer the health and social supports for children and families that Head Start offers.

A total of forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, now provide at least some state funding for preschool programs, enrolling in 2021 about 29 percent of four-year-olds.11 A number of cities have also used various sources of funding to increase access to preschool. For example, San Antonio, Texas, increased its sales taxes; San Francisco added a rental tax, and Seattle added a property tax. Funding levels vary substantially from state to state, from a low of $420 (North Dakota) to a high of $19,228 (Washington, DC) in 2021.

There are several reasons for the growth in state and local preschool programs. First, preschool among middle-class four-year-olds was becoming the norm. Children in families that could not afford tuition-based preschool were therefore at a disadvantage when they entered kindergarten. Second, policymakers were increasingly aware of the large achievement gap related to economic circumstances that existed at kindergarten entry and persisted through school. It was clear that any effort to reduce the achievement gap needed to start early in children’s lives. Third, there were significant concerns about the inadequacy of public education and frustration from failed reform initiatives at the K–12 level. For example, disappointed by the results of $40 million granted to reform the Philadelphia School System, the Board of the Pew Foundation turned to preschool education with the hope that it would be more amenable to change.13 Fourth, there was accumulating research evidence for the short- and long-term benefits of high-quality preschool, including programs implemented at a very large scale. And finally, neuroscientists were demonstrating the significant effects of children’s early experience on the architecture of the brain, making clear that early brain development served as the foundation for future learning and development. Although funding for state and local programs ebbs and flows, the general direction has been toward growth.

A Nation at Risk, published in 1983, played a significant role in the rise in states’ interest in early education. While the report initially stimulated reforms mostly at the high school level, findings at the time related to the benefits of preschool education amplified interest in early childhood education (ECE) as a strategy to improve education outcomes. Many national reports after the publication of A Nation at Risk make clear that promoting “school readiness” became an important element in the school reform agenda. In 1987, the Council of Chief State School Officers included pre-K for low-income four-year-olds in its list of recommendations for improving high school graduation rates. In the six national goals for 2000, created at a national education summit in 1989 under then president George H. W. Bush, “All children will start school ready to learn” was listed first. The National Association of State Boards of Education recommended that elementary schools create early childhood (EC) units for children ages four to eight and develop relationships with community preschools to help coordinate the fragmented services.

In the decade following, preschool for economically disadvantaged children was also frequently included in state school reform legislation. By 1989, thirty-one states either funded their own preschool program or contributed funds to increase access to Head Start. Nearly all of these state programs were instituted in the 1980s. The programs were typically administered by state departments of education and were located in school buildings. Some states funded preschool through separate grants, and some included preschool in their school funding formulas.

Most of the publicly funded state preschool programs have targeted children from lowincome families in a mixed-delivery system, which can include public schools, Head Start, private preschools, and family childcare homes. States vary in whether they offer a program for half or full school days, although the trend has been toward more full-day programs to meet working parents’ needs.

Some of the opposition to state preschool comes from within the ECE field. Programs for infants and toddlers that cannot avail themselves of preschool funding often take a financial hit when the older children move to a public preschool. The problem stems from reimbursement rates being too low for infant and toddler programs to survive with the low child–teacher ratios required. Programs manage financially by including preschool for older children in the mix, which allows higher child–teacher ratios overall. Also, in mixed-delivery programs, private or community-based programs are sometimes at a disadvantage because they lack the resources and the ability to pay teachers the salaries that public programs offer. As a consequence, some people working in community settings view public preschool as an unfair competitor.

Universal Preschool

Most publicly funded preschool programs target children in low-income families. But since the early 1990s, interest in universal programs available to all four-year-olds has increased. This movement was encouraged in part by research finding preschool benefits for nonpoor as well as economically disadvantaged children.

Social programs that are universally available are also considered to be politically more robust than programs targeting the poor. A universal program extends preschool opportunities to the working poor—families that are economically fragile but with incomes just above the eligibility cutoff for programs targeting impoverished families—and it relieves middle-class families of the cost of private programs. It thus develops a stronger constituency. Greenstein suggests furthermore that a program that serves not only the poor but also people significantly above the poverty line and the middle class may lessen the racial imagery of the program.

One argument some advocates make for universal prekindergarten (UPK) concerns the value of mixed socioeconomic status (SES). Programs with low-income eligibility requirements isolate the poor. Research evidence shows, however, that children from low-income families make greater gains in programs with more affluent peers than in segregated programs. De facto segregation will continue, but children from low-income families are not officially segregated where universal preschool is available.

Georgia (1995), New York (1998), New Jersey (in Abbott districts serving low-income students, 1998), and Oklahoma (1998) were pioneers in the universal preschool movement, committing to making publicly funded preschool open to all children whose parents chose to enroll. Currently, seventeen states have legislation committing the state to universal preschool. Despite claims of “universality,” however, most states that have legislation to support universal preschool do not serve all four-year-olds, partly because of inadequate funding and partly because of parent choice and staff and facilities shortages. In the 2019–20 school year (the last year not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic), only four states and Washington, DC, had more than 70 percent of their four-year-olds enrolled in state preschool.

The infrastructure for universal preschool programs varies considerably. For example, public preschool in Oklahoma operates through the public school system. In Georgia, the program has been set up with voucher-like subsidies; money from the state is given to parents who can choose from among private and public programs that have been certified by the government. In West Virginia, state funding for public preschool flows to both local education agencies (LEAs) and non-LEAs through County Offices of Education. Most states and cities that have passed legislation to expand preschool to all four-year-olds rely on a combination of funding sources, including federal Head Start and state preschool. The one exception is California, which has used state education funds to expand preschool to all four-year-olds by essentially adding a grade to elementary school (referred to as “transitional kindergarten”).

Objections specific to universal preschool focus mainly on public subsidies for middle-class and affluent families when, critics point out, they have shown they are willing to pay for preschool. Critics have also claimed that the state should not expand preschool education when so many of the country’s public schools are failing.

ISSUES AND CONTROVERSIES

Although not uncontested, preschool is deeply rooted in the education landscape; the debates are less about whether public resources should be used to support it than they are about which type of preschool the resources should support (targeted or universal, as discussed above), where the preschool should reside (in public schools, community programs, or both), and how to ensure high quality. The latter two issues are discussed next.

COMMUNITY VERSUS SCHOOL-BASED PROGRAMS

Advocates of placing preschool in public schools argue that it is the most efficient approach to offering ECE at scale and that it contributes to alignment in curricula and teaching between preschool and the early elementary grades, which can help maintain the benefits of preschool over time. Alignment with kindergarten is difficult when children come from many different preschool contexts, and the public school they enter has no authority over the standards, expectations, curricula, and other policies at the preschool level. Another argument for public schools is that they have an infrastructure, including all the back-office supports (e.g., finance, facilities, human resources) needed. Finally, advocates point out that teachers in preschools that are part of public school systems are generally more educated and better paid and have easier access to special education supports.

But public school–based preschool has its critics. Private program providers complain that they are at a financial disadvantage, lacking the purchasing power of a school district. Another concern is that a direct link to K–12 schooling will result in a focus on academics that can divert attention from the more holistic set of goals that most experts in the field of ECE champion. Many critics expect school-based programs to “push down” from higher grades an emphasis on academics using structured, didactic instruction that is developmentally inappropriate for young children. They also worry that K–12 schools are less likely to communicate with and involve parents, a central principle of Head Start and many non-school-based programs. And there is evidence that public school–based programs often have higher child-to-teacher ratios than is recommended for young children.

For practical reasons, almost every state with a public preschool program uses a mixed-delivery approach, with some classrooms in public schools and others in community-based organizations (CBOs). A mixed-delivery system expands access by using a broad array of existing programs—including Head Start agencies, childcare centers, private schools, faith-based centers, charter schools, and family childcare homes—giving families choice and supporting small businesses. It also saves the state the cost of new facilities and allows it to take advantage of existing staff, enrollment, and organizational structures. Furthermore, including private and community providers increases political support for state programs. Another advantage of including CBOs is that teachers tend to be more diverse and likely to speak the native language of dual-language learners. A study in New York City found that CBOs also offered care for longer hours on average and were more likely to provide mental health services.

On the downside, depending on how it is organized, there are many challenges associated with coordinating preschool providers that operate in very different settings with different funding structures and often fewer resources. Also, in many states, childcare and preschool systems are overseen by the state’s human services agency, which can create a disconnect between the human services and the education aspects. It is a challenge to effectively braid and distribute funding as well as maintain quality across a wide variety of settings with different administrative oversight.

Evidence also suggests differences in the quality of CBOs and public school–based preschools. Studies show that preschool teachers in public school settings are generally better educated and better paid. A study of five large-scale, mixed-delivery preschool systems (Boston, New York City, Seattle, New Jersey, and West Virginia) showed differences in quality, despite explicit steps to improve equity in quality across settings. All five systems implemented similar program standards in both public school and CBO programs. For example, all required lead teachers in both settings to have at least a BA degree, and New Jersey, Seattle, and Boston paid teachers the same in CBOs and public schools. (New York City did so in the years after the study was conducted.) Nevertheless, analyses by Weiland et al. (2022) reveal that children in CBOs, who were disproportionately children of color and children from low-income families, were taught by less educated teachers in all localities and showed lower student gains than their peers in public schools. The authors point out, however, that differences in child gains by setting were smaller in New Jersey and Seattle, the two systems in which policies for CBOs and public schools were the most equitable. The Abbott program in New Jersey stands out for its significant efforts to ensure quality in community-based programs. The state requires frequent site visits from master teachers to coach staff, gives districts tools to conduct assessments, and employs university researchers to assess classroom quality and track children’s learning.

To summarize, there are some practical reasons for mixed-delivery systems, but ensuring quality is more challenging than in a more centralized system such as public schools. If a mixed-delivery system is used, considerable attention needs to be given to supporting equity in quality, including pay equity for comparably educated teachers across settings.

DEFINING AND MEASURING QUALITY

There are three primary levers for ensuring quality: (1) state preschool program licensing standards, including teacher-to-child ratios and teacher credentialing requirements; (2) monitoring of programs that have been licensed; and (3) resources for improvement, such as teacher professional development. In many states, monitoring and improving are combined into what is referred to as a Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). Programs are rated along particular dimensions and are typically offered opportunities to improve on those dimensions rated low. In some states, funding levels are based on a program’s QRIS ratings. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) also offers accreditation to programs that meet its high standard, although few programs go through the arduous process to receive and retain NAEYC accreditation.

Two categories of quality are included in most state preschool program licensing standards and monitoring systems. The first involves “structural” indices that can be relatively easily regulated and measured, such as requiring particular teaching credentials, teacher-to-child ratios and group size, and aspects of the physical environment considered important for safety. The second involves “process” variables having to do with the learning environment and the interactions between teachers and children and among children.

There is fair agreement on what constitutes quality regarding teachers’ general interactions with children. Research evidence indicates the value of (1) an overall classroom climate or tone that is emotionally warm, accepting, and supportive; (2) positive, proactive, and consistent classroom management practices that include more affirmation and warmth and fewer disapproving and behavioral controls; (3) educators’ positive, non-conflictual relationships with individual children; and (4) explicit modeling, teaching, and scaffolding of social-emotional skills.

There is emerging agreement as well that effective teachers need to engage in bias-free and culturally responsive teaching. Defining and measuring quality related to instruction is difficult and controversial for all education programs. But unlike K–12 education, where there is consensus on academic achievement as the primary goal, the goal of preschool is disputed. At the heart of the controversy is how much academic achievement should be a goal and, if it is, what teaching strategies are appropriate to attain it.

What Should Preschoolers Learn?

Most EC educators believe that preschool should attend to multiple domains of development— that is, the whole child. Proponents of focusing on the whole child argue that even learning basic academic skills requires self-confidence and self-regulation skills, such as paying attention, as well as the social skills required to avoid wasting learning time engaged in conflict with peers or the teacher.

On the other hand, the accountability movement, instantiated in No Child Left Behind legislation, created pressure for preschools to emphasize academic skills. School districts became focused on raising scores on standardized achievement tests, and many believed that starting early would help them achieve that goal. Current evidence that young children are able to develop foundational literacy and math skills supports advocates’ attention to academic skills, as does evidence that early literacy and math skills when children enter kindergarten are highly predictive of reading and math achievement in school.36 Although Head Start has from the beginning been committed to supporting the development of the whole child, there have been efforts to focus it more on academic preparation. The George W. Bush administration, for example, proposed shifting Head Start from a comprehensive intervention to a program that focused on language and literacy.

The debate rests to some degree on a false dichotomy. A focus on academic skills in math, literacy, science, or any other domain does not preclude attention to other dimensions of children’s development. Nonacademic dimensions of the whole child, such as self-regulation and social skills, can be developed even in the context of academic instruction. For example, math activities can involve cooperative learning opportunities that are designed to help children develop such social skills as listening, taking turns, and negotiating. Moreover, EC educators are less critical of the goal of academic achievement if other important dimensions of development are also stressed and if literacy and math are taught in what EC experts consider developmentally appropriate ways, explained next.

How Should Preschoolers Be Taught?

The debate about how preschoolers should be taught is characterized variably as play based or child centered versus teacher directed. In the extreme of play-based/child-centered programs, children choose and initiate most activities, actively exploring and manipulating concrete materials. The teacher may build on children’s activities (“How many blocks do you have in your tower?”), but they are responding to child-initiated activity. In the extreme of teacher-directed instruction, teachers lead children through rote learning exercises, such as counting and identifying letters, and children work individually on tasks that often involve worksheets. People endorsing a more child-centered approach worry about the effects of structured, teacher-directed instruction on children’s motivation and enjoyment of learning. People endorsing a more teacher-directed approach argue that children do not learn foundational academic skills through self-initiated play.

Research suggests that child-initiated play is important for children to develop general problem-solving and social skills, but the development of subject-matter skills requires more intentional teacher guidance. Research suggests that whole-child, child-centered, play-based curricula fail to produce gains in either math or literacy. In contrast, several meta-analyses of research have shown that math curricula involving teacher-led activities can have strong effects on math learning and that literacy curricula are modestly successful in boosting literacy achievement.

Academically focused instruction does not necessarily mean rote learning and worksheets. Literacy, math, and science can be taught to young children in a developmentally appropriate, engaging way. Research suggests that literacy and math are most effectively taught through intentional but playful activities in which the teacher leads children through a learning activity, but children have some discretion in how they achieve the goal of the activity. In addition to the benefits of teacher-guided, playful activities, research supports the value of a language-rich environment in which teachers listen to and engage children in conversation and small-group instruction, which is well designed to engage children’s interest in the context of a positive emotional climate.

MEASURING AND SUPPORTING QUALITY

The research is somewhat mixed on how well-structural dimensions of quality, such as teacherto-child ratios and teacher credentials, predict child outcomes and does not pinpoint specific regulations, such as determining whether a 1:12 or 1:10 teacher-to-child ratio is ideal. The evidence is also mixed on the associations between teacher credentials and quality measured by either classroom observations or child outcomes. There is some evidence that the amount of specific training in child development and ECE may matter more than the level of the credential. And there is compelling evidence that professional development (PD) can have an impact on the quality of children’s experiences. But not all PD programs are created equal. The evidence on PD suggests the value of coaches working directly with teachers, focusing on content knowledge and effective pedagogy within an identified domain. Brief workshops are ineffective in promoting lasting changes in instruction.

Classroom observations are needed to assess process quality. Those that are typically used provide valid information on general teacher–child interaction, but they do not assess the quality of literacy or math teaching. The field needs to develop assessment instruments that states can use to measure instructional quality in preschools.

CHALLENGES TO QUALITY

The most significant obstacle to quality is cost, and the critical variable is the teacher. Although research does not provide strong guidance on exactly what kind of preparation is ideal, there is good evidence that preparation is important, as is professional development. But both come with costs. Increasing the rigor of training can improve quality, but it will exacerbate the teacher supply problem without commensurate increases in salary. Professional development also requires time on the part of the teachers and funding for the people who do the PD (and ideally for the participants).

Teacher pay affects quality indirectly through its effect on the economic stress teachers experience, their classroom behavior, and ultimately, turnover.54 Because preschool teaching is typically relatively low paid, turnover is high. Turnover undermines quality because programs that invest in professional development do not get much of a return on their investment, and high turnover causes children to experience instability, which undermines the quality of the relationships they can develop with their teachers.

The field is also challenged by inequity in quality for low-income and more affluent students. A study of 1,610 preschool sites in New York City found classroom quality to be lower in sites located in poor neighborhoods and in centers serving higher percentages of Black and Latino children. Even in Georgia, a national leader in universal preschool, state preschool classrooms in low-income and high-minority communities were rated significantly lower in classroom quality.

IMPACT

Public preschool is costly, and policymakers understandably want evidence that it helps them achieve the goal of improving education outcomes. In brief, the findings indicate that preschool can but does not necessarily have both short- and long-term effects for children that also yield economic and social benefits.

The most notable long-term impact study, which has had a significant (perhaps outsized) impact on ECE policy, is the Perry Preschool Project. The program provided very high-quality preschool education to 123 three- and four-year-old African American children.

Findings based on participants and the control group long into adulthood show many longterm benefits of the program, including higher high school graduation rates, higher earnings, and lower arrest rates. Cost-benefit analyses suggest a substantial return, which economist James Heckman concluded is about 8 to 1. A substantial portion of the return comes from reduced incarcerations. The findings from this one small study have been used to convince many policymakers of the value of investing in preschool. The public programs that have been developed since, however, are not near the level of quality of Perry Preschool, which employed primarily teachers with graduate degrees in ECE and which offered a staff-to-child ratio of 1:6, teacher weekly visits to children’s homes, and parent education. It cost $21,800 per child in 2017 dollars, compared to the $5,867 spent per child on average in state preschool programs.

Results of the many studies on the impact of preschool cannot be reviewed here. Metaanalyses, however, indicate meaningful positive effects overall on school academic readiness, reductions in grade retention, and special education placement as well as small effects on social-emotional development, especially when this is a specific goal of the program.

Many studies, including a large-scale study of Head Start, show an initial benefit of preschool, but the benefit fades over the first few years of elementary school. One study in Tennessee found that the control group had higher achievement scores in fourth grade than the children who had been randomly assigned to state preschool. These findings raised questions about the quality of the Tennessee state preschool program and what early educational experiences the control group had. But along with the many studies that have documented the fading of preschool benefits in elementary school, the Tennessee study makes clear that simply implementing a large-scale preschool program does not guarantee the desired effects on children.

There are several possible explanations for the fade-out effect. One explanation, supported by research, is that kindergarten teachers often repeat material that children had already learned in preschool, allowing children who did not have preschool to catch up with those who did. Another is that teachers in the early grades do not differentiate instruction for children with varying skill levels, which impedes children’s opportunities to continue to exhibit growth. Both explanations suggest that preschool is more likely to yield long-term academic benefits if it is followed with instruction that builds on initial gains.

Although there are only a few studies of long-term effects, there is evidence that preschool implemented at scale can have significant effects into adulthood. A random assignment study in Boston found increases in high school graduation, SAT scores, and college attendance and a decrease in juvenile incarceration, especially for boys, but no detectable impact on state achievement test scores. A recent study of the Tulsa preschool likewise found effects on college enrollment. Reviews of studies that assessed long-term effects, including some studies of Head Start participants, describe increases in college enrollment and decreases in incarceration rates and teen pregnancy.

A task force created by the Brookings Institution, which included individuals with very different perspectives on the value of state preschool, worked through all of the evidence on state-funded preschool to produce a consensus summary of impact.68 Following is a summary of the task force’s conclusions:

• Studies of different groups of preschoolers often find greater improvement in learning at the end of the pre-K year for economically disadvantaged children and dual-language learners than for more advantaged and English-proficient children.

• Pre-K programs are not all equally effective. Several effectiveness factors may be at work in the most successful programs. One such factor supporting early learning is a well-implemented, evidence-based curriculum. Coaching for teachers as well as efforts to promote orderly but active classrooms may also be helpful.

• Children’s early learning trajectories depend on the quality of their learning experiences not only before and during their pre-K year but also following it. Classroom experiences early in elementary school can serve as charging stations for sustaining and amplifying pre-K learning gains. One good bet for powering up later learning is elementary school classrooms that provide individualization and differentiation in instructional content and strategies.

• Convincing evidence shows that children attending a diverse array of state and school district pre-K programs are more ready for school at the end of their pre-K year than children who do not attend pre-K. Improvements in academic areas such as literacy and numeracy are most common; the smaller number of studies of social-emotional and self-regulatory development generally show more modest improvements in those areas.

• Convincing evidence on the longer-term impacts of scaled-up pre-K programs on academic outcomes and school progress is sparse, precluding broad conclusions. The evidence that does exist often shows that improvements in learning induced prior to kindergarten are detectable during elementary school, but studies also reveal null or negative longer-term impacts for some programs.

ECONOMIC RETURN TO PRESCHOOL

Some impacts on individuals (improved school readiness, higher achievement, increased high school graduation, higher education attainment, higher earnings) bring social benefits, such as increased taxes, reduced use of welfare, and improved health. Other public-sector benefits come in the form of reduced child abuse and neglect and reduced incarceration. Public school savings are found in reduced grade retention and reduced special education use.

Because the large-scale programs are relatively recent, most cost-benefit analyses project benefits from shorter-term impacts. For example, a study of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers (CPC) used data from subjects at age twenty-six on special education use, grade retention, juvenile and adult crime, and adult earnings to project impact beyond age twenty-six, such as earnings, taxes on earnings, incarceration, depression, smoking, and substance abuse. The net economic benefits to society were estimated to reach almost $97,000 per child (in 2016 dollars), a return of nearly $11 for every $1 invested.69 Looking across cost-benefit studies, including Chicago, Tulsa, and Head Start, estimates show a more realistic return of between 2:1 and 4:1; however, such analyses are based on many assumptions for which there is not total agreement. Another caveat is that the conclusions are based on relatively highcost, high-quality preschool programs and are not likely to apply to programs of lower quality.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Publicly supported preschool began with the goal of giving children living in poverty a “head start” in school, but over time it became a strategy for reducing the achievement gap and improving academic achievement. Will public preschool close the achievement gap? No. There are many other factors associated with poverty—including poor nutrition, crowded and unstable housing, poor medical care, and stress—that have significant effects on children’s learning. But access to high-quality preschool can give children from low-income families a fairer chance of succeeding in school, and the research on long-term impact suggests it can alter life trajectories. The operative term is “high-quality.” All of the research on longterm benefits with economic returns to individuals and society are based on programs that employed well-trained and well-supported staff.

This chapter has outlined a number of issues that need to be addressed after the decision to invest in public preschool has been made, such as whether to support a targeted or universal program, whether to implement a mixed-delivery or school-based delivery system, and how to define, measure, and ensure quality. Below are a few recommendations related to specific choices.

Clearly articulated goals are important. The goals guide program development as well as the strategies and measures used to assess program quality, support program improvement, and track progress in achieving the goals.

Achieving consensus on the goals is no easy task, because there are strong differences of opinion. But many of the differences rest on false dichotomies. Even if academic skills are the primary goal, all dimensions of children’s development play a role. Furthermore, developmentally appropriate, teacher-guided instruction can be playful, and time can be put aside for children to play freely and explore.

Quality is the primary consideration in any preschool system. Only preschool programs that meet high quality standards have shown long-term effects. States have many levers to affect policy, including program licensing standards, teacher and administrator credentialing standards, and ongoing resources to support effective teaching, child learning standards and assessments, quality monitoring systems, and curriculum guidance. These policies need to align with the articulated goals of preschool and with each other. For example, teacher credentialing requirements and ongoing supports for teachers should prepare teachers to help children achieve the state learning standards.

Of the many dimensions affecting quality that these policy levers can be used to promote, the following are particularly important:

• Adult-to-child ratios that allow adults to form close, caring relationships with children

• Preparation and ongoing support for teachers in developmentally appropriate, differentiated instruction, including developing a safe, secure, and inclusive environment for all students

• Curricula that offer sufficient and developmentally appropriate attention to language, literacy, math, and social-emotional development as well as other important dimensions of child development such as creativity and motor development

• An assessment system that can be used to guide teacher decisions at the classroom level and track children’s progress related to the standards

Depending on the approach to be used, different policy considerations apply.

• If the decision is made to use public funds only for children in low-income families:
  • Because children from low-income families learn more on average in a mixed-SES setting, avoid isolating the poor by offering hybrid programs in which some children are subsidized by the state and some families pay tuition, or implement a sliding scale.

• If universal preschool is implemented:
  • Ensure that community-based providers for infants and toddlers are reimbursed enough to cover costs when they lose older children.

• If a school-based delivery system is employed:
  • Ensure that programs are developmentally appropriate for young children and that teachers and principals have training in ECE.

• If a mixed-delivery system is employed:
  • Establish strong program standards across school-based and CBO settings, and implement other policies (e.g., teacher pay equity) to support equity in quality. Findings suggest that even in states where efforts have been made to equalize quality, extra resources may be needed for CBO programs.

What happens after preschool affects the long-term benefits of preschool. Policies related to preschool should not be considered in isolation. If teachers in the later grades do not build on what children learned in preschool, the benefits will fade. Districts need to reflect on the nature and organization of instruction through the early grades, joining the movement expanding throughout the United States to develop greater P–3 alignment (i.e., alignment from preschool to third grade). States can help by making sure that learning standards, program standards, curricula, assessments, and teacher credentialing are aligned across preschool and the early grades. They also need to ensure strong connections among state agencies overseeing preschool and K–12 education.

Streamline connections between preschool and childcare. Working parents need childcare. The different funding sources and eligibility requirements cause difficulties for both programs and parents. States need to streamline funding and requirements for preschool and childcare as much as possible, and they need to facilitate wraparound childcare for preschool programs.

The politics of pre-K can be complicated to navigate. Many constituencies are affected by decisions related to state-funded preschool, including state agencies that oversee its implementation, community-based programs that are affected by whether and how they are included, higher education where teachers are prepared, school districts, Head Start, the people who staff the programs, and parents. All policy decisions should include their voices.

Preschool is not a panacea. It alone will not improve achievement scores and other important child outcomes. But of the many school improvement initiatives this series discusses, preschool is among the most studied and may have the most potential to move the needle.

The Hoover Institutions A Nation At Risk +40 research initiative spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. () 

In 1983, the release of the groundbreaking A Nation at Risk report ignited a nationwide movement for educational reform. Marking the 40th anniversary of this pivotal moment, A Nation at Risk +40 sets out to delve deeper into the reforms that have shaped the modern education landscape. This research initiative aims to draw valuable insights, examine the evidence of reform impact, and offer lessons for today’s education policymakers.

The series, , features an array of distinguished authors, each dedicated to exploring critical aspects of school reform. By examining key questions, they seek to shed light on the path taken by education systems nationwide:

• What kinds of reforms have been attempted and why?
  
• What is the evidence of their impact?
  
• What are the lessons for today’s education policymakers?

“Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society, and for the past four decades, we have witnessed a tireless pursuit of reform to ensure our education system is stronger and more resilient. A Nation at Risk +40 illuminates where we have come since the groundbreaking report of 1983, offering invaluable insights and evidence-based practices for navigating today’s challenges,” said Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice. “This research initiative serves as a guiding light, empowering policymakers, educators, and stakeholders to safeguard the future of American education.” 

The authors of A Nation at Risk +40 have undertaken extensive research, bringing expertise from diverse fields, including education, policy, and academia. Their collective efforts culminate in a rich tapestry of insights, aiming to inform and guide the decisions of policymakers, educators, and stakeholders in the education sector.

Against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with schools across the United States facing unprecedented challenges, A Nation at Risk +40 offers more than a retrospective analysis. The series also provides relevant and research-driven guidance for navigating the current landscape and crafting strategies for a stronger, more resilient education system.

As the nation grapples with the educational effects of the pandemic, A Nation at Risk +40 bears witness to four decades of reform striving to improve education outcomes. By documenting this journey and distilling its wisdom, the series illuminates a path forward rooted in evidence-based practices and a commitment to safeguarding the future of American education.

In incendiary language that still echoes four decades later, the report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” that was “eroding” the “educational foundations” of the nation. “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur,” the authors wrote, “others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

Policymakers wasted no time responding, with governors of both parties quickly adopting the report’s recommendations including raising graduation requirements, strengthening teacher certification and evaluation systems, and increasing instructional time. In the decades that followed, countless additional attempts at reform were launched at seemingly every level.

But what has resulted from this constant, decades-long churn of change?

In a new to be released by the Hoover Institution on Dec. 12, a dozen scholars set out to answer that very question. In examining the reforms enacted over the past four decades, each author focused on the impact of these efforts, digging into the evidence base and providing lessons for today’s education policymakers.

• Stanford University’s Deborah Stipek kicks off the series by diving into the rapid expansion of early childhood programming. The “operative phrase,” Stipek concludes, is “high quality.” Programs that “meet high-quality standards” have “the most potential to move the needle on improving student achievement.”
  
• In her analysis of “whole child” education models, Cornell’s Maria Fitzpatrick finds “promising evidence from a few programs in a few settings” but cautions policymakers to be sure to maintain a “focus on academics by investing in tools that we know work,” such as improving teacher quality.
  
• Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explores ANAR’s recommendations for strengthening the teacher pipeline, and the tensions between the need for more, versus more effective, teachers. This tension, he writes, “coalesced into two different approaches to teacher reform that frequently came into conflict and worked at cross-purposes.”
  
• Hoover senior fellow Tom Dee focuses on efforts to better evaluate and support teachers. Dramatic policy interventions followed, writes Dee, such as new evaluation, professional growth and compensation models, but “uninformative, low-stakes assessments of professional practice and rigid single-salary schedules are still the norm.”
  
• Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, describes what he sees as a “new willingness to question longstanding classroom practices.” He makes the case for “a strong, knowledge-based curriculum” that will allow teachers to “develop subject matter expertise, help struggling students and make connections with families.”
  
• Hoover senior fellow Eric Bettinger focused his research on “within-system” innovations such as reducing class sizes, adjusting the length of the school day and year, and creating specialized schools. Despite “continuous experimentation and innovation,” he writes, what may be most notable about these efforts is their “failure to be scaled up or to generate impacts when scaled up.”
  
• Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, dives into “the 40-year shift from print digital learning,” which he characterizes as “gradual, chaotic, expensive and largely ineffective at transforming learning experiences and outcomes.” The introduction of artificial intelligence, he says, marks “the beginning of a new era” that will “change how we work and learn.”
  
• In his exploration of school finance, Hoover senior fellow Eric Hanushek finds that despite ever-increasing K-12 spending, “it has not been possible to describe when funds are particularly effective or ineffective.” He suggests a new approach to school funding based around “setting up incentives so the decision-makers take actions that lead to better student outcomes.”
  
• Hoover fellow Michael Hartney investigates efforts to reform a “century-old, one-size-fits-all governance model.” Innovations such as mayoral control and site-based management hold promise, he writes, and he encourages policymakers to overcome the “failure of imagination” that burdens schools with “bureaucratic structures and work routines.”
  
• In his study of school choice, the University of Rochester’s John Singleton concludes that such policies can “cause public schools to raise their quality in the face of competition.” There are, though, “important gaps in knowledge” around the “impacts of school choice on students’ long-run success,” which will be critical to address as choice options expand across the nation.
  
• Michael Petrilli, Hoover research fellow and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, dives into the standards-based reform movement that has “dominated education policy” in recent years. Education researchers need to continue exploring “what exactly schools did” to generate the learning gains that came as a result of these efforts, he writes, but there are “clear lessons” for policymakers.
  
• Cami Anderson, CEO of ThirdWay Solutions, closes out the research series by describing the “enormous challenges” of “whole-system” reforms like the one she led in Newark. “Transformative and disruptive systemic change will never be quick or tidy,” she writes, but “real, material gains” can be realized by “stepping back and asking what the shared goal was for the entire community.”
  

This analysis could not be timelier. The nation’s schools face an ongoing cascade of challenges, not the least of which is the continuing impact of COVID-19 learning loss. Federal pandemic relief funding is scheduled to sunset next year, creating a fiscal cliff for school systems. Student absenteeism continues to be a serious issue, and  student population declines in some areas, driven by longer-term demographic trends, will present school and district leaders with hard choices.

Hoover’s new research series digs deeply into the past 40 years of reform to better understand what worked, and why, and to provide policymakers with key takeaways and recommendations.In the conclusion to their report, ´Ąąˇ´Ą¸é’s authors wrote that the road to reform would “take time and unwavering commitment” as well as “widespread, energetic and dedicated action.” Four decades of widespread, energetic and dedicated action did indeed result. The imperative today is to better understand what worked, why and how the nation and its schools can best meet the challenges ahead.