The , circulated through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute in January, examines the learning of American students attending traditional public schools, charters, Catholic academies, and schools operated by the Department of Defense. While disparities between high-flyers and their lower-performing counterparts have widened across the board, they grew the fastest in public and Catholic schools. 

Education leaders have warned of the trend toward increasing educational inequality for much of the last decade. During that time, each release of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered exam commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — showed lower-scoring test takers falling further behind; typically, top-scoring participants were also pulling away from the pack. By the end of the COVID era, differences in outcomes that were large at the outset had ballooned even wider.

Patrick Wolf, an economist at the University of Arkansas and one of the paper’s co-authors, called his findings “demoralizing,” arguing that many American schools are clearly failing the students who most need their help.

“We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers and will reduce gaps between the top performers and the low performers, or the rich and the poor,” he said. “But over the last 20 years, we don’t see that in the data, and the gap has grown by a lot.”

‘We were not being heard’*

Wolf and his collaborators set out to measure what he referred to as the “90/10 gap” — the difference in NAEP scores between students who score at the 90th percentile (i.e., those scoring higher than 89 percent of their counterparts across the country) and those at the 10th percentile (those outscored by 90 percent of other test takers). To do so, they measured performance data from 2005, the first year that charter schools participated in the test, through 2024.

In all, the research team gathered scores from six million test takers through 10 iterations of the exam, controlling for factors like students’ race or socioeconomic status, as well as the educational background of their parents. Each NAEP administration generates data for both fourth and eighth graders in the core subjects of math and English.

Their estimates show that the academic gaps grew fastest in public schools. In each of the two decades between 2005 and 2024, scores for fourth graders at the 90th percentile increased by about four points in math and three points in reading; 10th-percentile scores dropped by roughly three and five points, respectively, resulting in a net disparity that was seven points larger in both subjects. 

While those calculations are somewhat technical, the bottom line is much starker: The already-substantial gap between the most advanced and most challenged fourth graders expanded by 1.3 years’ worth of learning gains between the Bush administration and the Biden administration. For eighth graders, the gap grew by one-half year of learning in both subjects over the same time period.

Similar divergences, though of somewhat smaller magnitude, were found in Catholic schools, which enroll . During the period under study, the 90/10 gap grew by roughly 5 points per decade in fourth-grade math, six points in eighth-grade math, and four points in reading for both fourth and eighth graders.

Strikingly, the 90/10 gap for both sectors swelled even in the years preceding the pandemic. Those gaps, leading up to 2019, reflected both steady growth from children at the top of the heap, along with a lack of progress — and, in some cases, pre-COVID learning loss — from those at the bottom.

Peggy Carr is a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the research entity responsible for administering NAEP and reporting its results. Until February, when she was fired by the Trump administration along with most of the NCES staff, she regularly communicated with both politicians and the public about the meaning of the exam — the growth of the 90/10 gap and the persistently disappointing performance of children scoring at the 10th percentile.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, she said the discourse around NAEP was too focused on scores at the average, which tend to conceal wider swings among students far above or below that point.  

“We were not being heard as clearly as we wanted to be,” Carr said. “We were trying to make it very clear that you need to look at the entire distribution for years, but it wasn’t the focus of policy makers.”

DoD schools, charters

Notably, both charters and DoD-administered schools saw a much slower drift between high- and low-achieving students, much of which appears to have been triggered directly by the pandemic. 

In charter schools, the 90/10 gap grew by less than one point between 2005 and 2019 for fourth graders; for eighth graders, the gap actually shrunk during that period because students at the 10th percentile improved in performance faster than those at the 90th. The same narrowing was seen in fourth-grade math scores at DoD schools, where students across the spectrum made huge gains before the onset of COVID.

Tom Loveless, a veteran observer of K–12 schools and former director of the Brookings Institution’s , called those results impressive, but noted that the lessons that can be drawn from the charter and DoD sectors were limited. Collectively, they account for only about 8 percent of America’s K–12 students, and parents enrolling their children in them can differ dramatically from the public at large.

“If you work for the Defense Department, your employer is running the school,” he observed. “Your superior officer can call you up and say, ‘Your kid is acting up,’ and something’s going to be done about it quickly.”

Perhaps the most dispiriting part of the trend is that America’s 90/10 gap exploded so visibly at the same time that achievement gaps — whether along racial, socioeconomic, or other lines — transfixed the education world. Educators, office holders, policy wonks, and activists all put academic disparities at the heart of their work during the years between the late-1990s and the mid-2010s.

For a large portion of the “education reform” era kicked off by the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind law, underperforming students did see significant progress, Wolf said. But the years since 2013 have been marked by a pronounced reversal of those gains.

“By definition, there will always be a gap between the students performing at the 90th percentile and students performing at the 10th percentile,” he acknowledged. “But we don’t want it to be wide, and we don’t want it to be getting wider.” 

Many stories also picked up on the fact that achievement gaps are growing, as lower-performing students have fallen further behind. For instance, in eighth grade math, the scores for the top 10% of students rose 3 points, while the bottom 10% fell 5 points.

But these national numbers are hiding the fact that achievement gaps are growing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. While they vary in magnitude, the extent of the divergence playing out in schools across the country is alarming. 

Before going into those state-level results, it’s important to acknowledge that this is a uniquely American problem. The separation between the higher- and lower-performing students in the United States has over the last decade, and there’s no signs yet of that slowing down. 

Last spring, I did an analysis that showed that before 2013, achievement scores were rising, and those gains were broadly shared across student performance levels. 

Consider the left side of the graph below, which shows the NAEP results in eighth grade math, updated through 2024. It is clear that something happened around 2013: On average, scores fell a little bit, but lower-performing students (in red) fell off a cliff. 

Meanwhile, the scores of higher-performing students (in blue) suffered a bit in the wake of COVID-19, but they improved noticeably last year, while the lowest performers did not.

A similar pattern shows up across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas. 

It is also evident in state after state. After the latest results came out, I looked to see how these gaps were changing at the state level. I looked specifically at eighth grade math, and the numbers were shockingly bad. In fact, in every state, the achievement gap has grown over the last two years. 

But those short-term changes don’t explain the full extent of what has happened to American children over the last decade. Each state has seen its achievement gap increase significantly.

To see the full state-level results, check out the table below, which shows the changes from 2013 to 2024. It breaks down the gains (or losses) for students at the 90^th percentile, the midpoint of all students in the state (the median) and the bottom 10^th percentile. It also shows how much these groups have diverged over time and the gap that has grown. 

And those gaps have increased in every state, most dramatically in Massachusetts, California, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In all of these, the gap widened by 20 points or more.

How meaningful are these changes? Depending on the year, the average student gains about 10 points per year on the NAEP math tests. As a rough comparison, that means  achievement gaps have grown by the equivalent of one to two years’ worth of schooling. That’s substantial.

These gaps may seem daunting, and policymakers might be tempted to throw up their hands. But they should take heart from the fact that this recent period of academic stagnation is unusual. Until about a decade ago, small but steady gains were the norm. When researchers M. Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham and Paul Peterson from Harvard University looked at this question a few years ago, they that, “average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95% of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning.” They found smaller but still positive results for reading and a narrowing of gaps across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic status. 

In other words, progress is possible. At the moment, American achievement scores are falling and gaps are growing, but it wasn’t that long ago when the data were going in a much more positive direction.

The yawning chasm between academic achievement of Black and white D.C. students has widened since school year 2015-16, from a 54.5% deficit in reading and math standardized test scores to 60%. On this year’s citywide standardized tests, 73.5% of white students met expectations in math, but only 11.8% of Black peers did. In reading, the results were 81.7% versus a mere 23.5%.

Public education in the District is provided by both D.C. Public Schools, the traditional system, and independently run charter schools that educate nearly half of the District’s public school students. D.C.’s 29-year-old public charter school legislation and 15 years of mayoral control of the school district are widely credited with higher test scores, graduation rates and college-acceptance rates in both sectors. However, both sectors operate schools that are failing the most disadvantaged students.

One solution is offered in a recent comprehensive national of charter and traditional public schools by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. CREDO’s research matched five years of performance data for 1,853,000 charter students in 32 states, including the District, with a demographically identical “virtual twin” in the comparable system school.

The researchers found that, “Charter schools produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population than their adjacent [traditional public school]. They move Black and Hispanic students and students in poverty ahead in their learning faster than if they enrolled in their local [district school].”

In D.C., the study found that, based on their academic proficiency, students attending one of the District’s public charter school networks — those with three or more campuses — received the equivalent of 50 more instructional days of math and 12 more of reading than peers in district schools. Children educated at the District’s four largest and longest-operating networks — Center City, DC Prep, Friendship and KIPP DC — did better still, averaging 83 more days of academic growth in math and 21 in reading compared with district enrollees. Together, these well-established networks educate almost one-third of DC charter school students. 

By contrast, kids learning in stand-alone charters — those with one or two campuses — performed only marginally better than district-enrolled students, adding six days of reading annually but losing six in math.  

Providing students with the equivalent of more instructional days is essential to narrowing the expanding achievement gap. Stanford found “nationally, Black students in charter management organizations received 41 more days reading in learning and 47 more in math compared to traditional public schools.” In D.C., 88% of charter school students are Black or Latino.

Charter networks in other states and cities did even better than those in the District. New York City charter network students recorded 114- and 62-day gains in math and reading, respectively, compared with students in NYC public schools. New York City’s Success Academy, serving over 20,000 students at 57 charter schools, added the equivalent of an astounding 107 extra days in reading and 260 in math.

The CREDO research makes clear that the scale and size of large charter networks provides many advantages over stand-alone schools: building a brand to better attract philanthropic funds, students and top teachers; attracting, training and sustaining strong leaders; and more effectively researching and replicating best practices.

This is particularly important because, according to a released in November by Bellwether, “from FY22 to FY 2025, DCPS received $7,713 more per student, per year than charter schools.” That means that many charters, particularly stand-alones, struggle to match school-system teacher salaries and benefits. 

To better serve the most vulnerable students, D.C. education decision makers must find the political will to enable more underperforming and underenrolled charter and district schools to remodel or partner to improve or shutter. Vacant and underutilized school system buildings should be made available to higher-performing charter networks.  

The city’s charter board should continue to encourage high-performing stand-alone charters to replicate and successful charter networks to grow. And it should attract proven out-of-town providers to bring their educational programs to the District.

America’s public schools can be the great equalizers the nation’s most underserved students urgently need — if policymakers follow the evidence to build on what works.

High schools in states that start after Labor Day end up with fewer instructional days before the exams than those that open their doors in mid-August, and sometimes even in late July. Does this discrepancy create a difference in results?

Having had three children in NYC public high schools, where classes start in September, I’ve repeatedly heard from their teachers that they don’t have enough time to cover all the material on the AP tests.

My daughter reports of her AP Calculus class, “We have to do a lesson a day. Every time we take a test we are, technically, falling behind, because it takes a whole period. So we’re learning new material (sometimes in a different unit) while still studying for the test on material we’ve already moved on from.”

I asked fellow NYC moms and dads whether the same was true at their schools.

“My student goes to Stuyvesant,” an NYC mom confirmed. “The AP European History class follows a ridiculously regimented schedule. The entire year is already mapped out to the day. This is surely an artifact of the tight timeline the teacher is forced to follow to cover the material before the spring exam.”

“I experienced it as a student in the early ’90s in a post-Labor Day-start school system,” Elizabeth Jones Polkovitz, another NYC public school parent, said. “It’s a month of instruction or more! It can make a really big difference for Calc BC in particular. We really had to rush sequences and series. And we had to rush through sections of [AP U.S. History]. My kid experienced the same. The end of [these classes] were a sprint for both of us, 30 years apart.”

A contributor with a student in an NYC private school revealed that her child’s teacher “often has students do a unit or two of work in summer before school starts for many of the AP classes.”

This is not a problem exclusive to NYC. National message boards like find parents lamenting: Living in a state that goes back after Labor Day and having multiple kids take AP, I have seen firsthand how teachers push topics together to try to get everything to fit in. 

While over on Reddit, teachers and students :

• Schools that don’t start until late August and early September are at a disadvantage. States that start school in early August get an extra month of instructional time before AP tests.

• We don’t start until after Labor Day. I teach AP Calc AB, and it is impossible to cover all of the material without feeling like I have to rush every lesson.

• To teach my AP class using the minimum recommended time described by the College Board, I would have to see my students for over 27 more class periods than I currently have.

• My school started around Aug. 3. My friend in New York started after Labor Day. I had an entire month to teach the same material for the same AP test.

• I’m in NY and recently learned that the states that start school sooner (August, like AZ) get 40 weeks to prep for the exam, versus our 32.

• My AP Biology teacher … told us that we would have to study the last part of the course ourselves.

• There were … not enough instruction days to cover all the material. [My teacher] would choose a few chapters that were purely homework, and then have one or two optional afterschool workshops to go over the material.

It’s out of concern for this AP inequity, among other factors, that of U.S. public school students now begin class before Labor Day.

: An earlier start to the school year… lets students and teachers have the maximum amount of instructional time prior to the start of standardized tests and assessments.

: The early start calendar gives… AP students more learning time before taking exams in the spring. (The district changed to a September start but planned “to offer more learning time for AP … students during ‘Saturday academies’ and summer school.”)

And : It… gives students more time to prepare for… Advanced Placement exams.

The assumption is that more time to prepare for AP tests will lead to better outcomes.

Surprisingly, the data doesn’t show that.

The with the “highest percentage of public high school graduates scoring a 3 or higher on an AP exam,” according to the College Board, are Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, all of which begin school at the end of August or after Labor Day. The three lowest-scoring states, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mississippi, start , and in , respectively. 

Not coincidentally, the wealthiest states by are Massachusetts, Connecticut (ranked No. 5 by AP scores), New York and New Jersey. Mississippi is the poorest, with Oklahoma and Kansas placing in the bottom half.

The College Board by socioeconomic status in 2021. But a concluded, “the performance levels for low-income test-takers has not dramatically shifted from the early 2000s: 60% of students from this demographic group only earned a 1 or 2 out of a possible 5 on the exam.” It’s highly unlikely that’s changed since.

So maybe all that cramming isn’t necessary if you live in a high-income state. For low-income students, some teachers may generously schedule extra study sessions to fit in material they don’t have time to cover. But students of means, even if their teachers decline to go above and beyond, will still do just fine — because their families can simply hire a .

Despite what seems like inequity, success on AP exams may have less to do with when classes begin and more with whether you live in a state where students can afford to learn everything they need outside of them.

In a signed letter attached to today’s “Ours to Solve, Once — and For All” report, the six-member council (Jean-Claude Brizard, Mitch Daniels, Chris Howard, Andrew Luck, Frances Messano and Condoleezza Rice) writes that it identified “fundamental barriers” to student equity and success within the current school system. “Despite our national commitment to the issue, steep increases in funding, and decades of reform efforts, our current system has been unable to offset poor student outcomes – particularly for minority and low-income students,” the introduction to the report says. “This failure goes against who we profess to be as a nation.”

Hoover Institution Director and Council Co-Chair Condoleezza Rice went a step further in a Tuesday statement, framing the issue through the lens of national stability: “Education excellence is critical to the societal contract supporting our democracy and is inextricably tied to the success — or failure — of our nation.”

Today’s report is unique in its focus on broader, system-level reforms. The council criticizes the existing structure of the nation’s education landscape, noting that the local school boards and state and federal agencies that run today’s schools “are not the product of coherent and thoughtful design. Rather, they evolved over decades to a point where they hinder more than help the cause of improved outcomes for all students.”

The group also highlights the “perplexing contradiction” of today’s public schools, where the current system boasts strong community support, superior research and dedicated teachers and staff, but students’ academic outcomes vary widely — and many of these results are underwhelming. 

“According to virtually every available metric, the overall quality of American schools has either declined or remained stagnant since the 1970s,” the council writes.

On a per-student basis, the U.S. spends 40% more than the average spent by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the council notes. At the same time, the U.S ranks 34th in math globally on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluations.

“Changing the way these institutions are organized and function ― what we call the ‘operating system’ of public education ― will raise trust, respect, agency, and empowerment for teachers and principals and will provide essential support from other education leaders,” the group says in the report.

The council recommends four core commitments that they believe will help improve the educational “operating system”: Re-organizing the current system toward a new “true north”  that focuses on student outcomes; minimizing regulations and mandates in favor of embracing incentives; cultivating and rewarding professional mastery in the education workforce; and flipping the system “from top-down to bottom-up.”  

“In the flipped system hierarchy, schools are the apex organization,” writes the council. “They need sufficient discretion to make decisions in situ to manage their own operations and to adapt their efforts to address the needs of their students.”

A Hoover Institution spokesperson said that a dedicated website will accompany the report. Set to launch next month, the hub will offer readers and policymakers additional resources and details. 

A summit is also being scheduled for January at Stanford University, which will aim to bring experts together from across the country to discuss  and debate the findings of the report. 

“We hope this report builds motivation and commitment for change,” the council members write in their introduction. “Together, we can launch a new approach to address the current state of public education in America, and provide every child the foundational opportunities they deserve.” 

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

Ten years ago, Camden Prep became one of the first schools in New Jersey’s to attempt to resuscitate a chronically poor-performing elementary school.

That same year, Maurquay Moody started fourth grade at Camden Prep, in a classroom dubbed “The College of New Jersey.” Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit charter operator tasked with turning around Maurquay’s neighborhood school, names each classroom after a college in an effort to raise postsecondary expectations.

The state had recently taken control of K-12 schools in Camden, a city then-Gov. Chris Christie had called “a human catastrophe.” Barely 20% of students could read at grade level, and fewer than half graduated high school. Twenty-three of the city’s 26 schools were among the lowest-achieving in the state. 

Over the next few years, like many other urban districts beset by plummeting property values and spiking rates of poverty and crime, Camden welcomed several new public charter schools and turned over its most chronically failing schools to education nonprofits, which rebranded them as renaissance schools. 

Today, Camden is considered one of the country’s most innovative districts. More than two-thirds of students attend public charter or renaissance schools, enrollment is climbing and the city is steadily, if incrementally, closing performance gaps among low-income kids.

To be sure, the school system has a long way to go: The majority of students still don’t read on grade level, chronic absenteeism is on the rise and budget constraints present a serious challenge. 

But shows that low-income kids in Camden boosted their proficiency on state standardized exams by 21 points between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years. And in doing so, they closed a longstanding performance gap with peers statewide by 42%. 

Maurquay was among those who benefited from this evolution. And in a full-circle testament to just how far the city has come, in August he stepped onto The College of New Jersey’s real-life campus as a freshman – a first-generation college student with a full scholarship. 

Camden isn’t the only low-income city where students in charter or renaissance-like schools are closing learning gaps with their more affluent peers. 

A from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools. In fact, in the 10 districts with the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25% to 40%. (The analysis doesn’t include New Orleans, where 100% of district students attend charter schools.)

“We just wanted to … see if the impact was spilling over,” says Tressa Pankovits, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing Public Schools project. “We were really surprised by the amount of gap closure between students citywide and the statewide averages. It wasn’t just single digits. It was well into double digits.” 

The analysis examined data from cities across the country where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and where at least a third of kids attend a public charter or charter-like school. The researchers used average standardized test scores from third through eighth grade. 

The researchers underscored that the one-third proportion is not a guaranteed or proven tipping point, but that in nearly every case where those schools reached or exceeded that enrollment level, academic growth rose across the city for all low-income students.

“There has been slow but steady progress in Camden,”says Giana Campbell, executive director of the Camden Education Fund. “Sure, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but when we look at where the city was 10 years ago, we’re really, really encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing across the city.”

“We knew a time in Camden where we didn’t have this diversity of school types and progress wasn’t what it is today. The proficiency scores in Camden in 2010 were just criminal. There wasn’t much lower we could go,” she says. “And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that being one of the most innovative school systems, with all these different school types, that we’ve been able to see the progress that we have today.”

New Jersey is home to another standout in PPI’s report: Newark, where 35% of students are enrolled in public charter schools and the performance gap closed by 45% across the same 12-year period.

Missouri boasts two school systems making similar progress. In Kansas City, where 46% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all students closed by 31% between the 2010-11 school year and 2022-23. And in St. Louis, where 39% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap closed by 30%.

Hannah Lofthus, founder and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, says the report’s findings reflect what she has experienced over the last 15 years in Kansas City, which offers enrollment in neighborhood schools; charter schools; “signature” schools, which focus on college preparation; and career and technical schools. Kauffman consists of two charter middle schools and a charter high school.

“We said, ‘How can we figure out what works for kids and then replicate that,’” she explains. The daughter of two public school teachers, she says collaboration among the various types of schools in the city has been key to the big gains posted by low-income students. “We have kids coming to us in fifth grade 15% proficient in reading and math, and they leave somewhere around 70% proficient.”

Pankovits cautions that the analysis shows correlation, not causation. And while the increases demonstrate significant academic growth, proficiency is still low for the majority of students in these districts. 

But Pankovits also says the report refutes that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates “a positive competitive dynamic,” and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities. 

Effectively, a rising tide lifts all boats: When looking only at traditional district schools in Camden, for example, low-income students closed 35% of the proficiency gap during the same decade-long window, versus 42% for the district overall.

Like Camden, Indianapolis has traditional district schools, charters and so-called innovation schools that it uses to drive its academic turnaround. The report found that in the city, where 58% of students are enrolled in public charter schools or innovation schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all kids statewide closed by 23% between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years.

“The report confirms what we’ve seen in Indianapolis for a long time,” says Brandon Brown, CEO of the , a nonprofit that supports the city’s charter and innovation schools. “And a lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district. It really tends to lift many of the outcomes for schools of all types.”

“I think we’ve shown in Indianapolis that it’s hard and it’s not a straight line and we don’t always agree, but when these systems work together, the chances that kids are going to benefit will go way up,” he says. “And I think we’ve seen that here very clearly.”

The report comes as America’s schools are still trying to chart a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which set students back academically and decreased enrollment. A from National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that over the past five years, charter schools gained nearly 400,000 students, while district schools lost 1.75 million. Hispanic and Black families are increasingly choosing charters, the report shows, with Hispanic enrollment growing 18 times faster in charters than in district schools. 

In Indianapolis, enrollment is on the rise, and at the highest point in more than a decade — a fact Brown credits to the public school choices that families have. For the first time, he says, parents from adjacent school districts are opting into the city system. 

“Large urban districts across the country that are facing massive enrollment declines should look at Indianapolis and see the collaboration to create high-quality options for families, and see it as a way to mitigate negative impacts on enrollment,” Brown says. “When system leaders can work together, it tends to grow enrollment, and that stands in stark contrast to a lot of school districts across the country.”

Correction: The former Camden Prep student’s name is Maurquay Moody.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

On a recent afternoon, Caroline Able, a first-grade teacher at North Frederick Elementary School in Frederick County, Maryland, sat in a small office with her principal, Tracy Poquette, carefully practicing the next day’s math lesson.

Able, who is in her third year teaching, walked through each step, demonstrating how she was going to present comparisons between two numbers, then what students would do. She sometimes stopped to focus on granular details: Should she go over math vocabulary words like sum and difference beforehand, or will her students remember what they mean? Should students write down problems and answers in notebooks, or on mini-whiteboards?

Poquette recommended the whiteboards. “You’re going to ask them to hold them up,” Poquette coached Able, miming holding a whiteboard in the air. “Then you can see their answers, and how they got to that. Every student is responding.” 

Giving students multiple chances to “respond,” or provide answers, is a learning strategy , and part of why Able is here — to ensure that she’s incorporating evidence-based practices into her teaching. The sessions are meant to accelerate student learning and take some of the guesswork out of becoming an effective teacher, part of a larger district plan to incorporate research from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and cognitive science — often referred together broadly as the ‘science of learning.’

Frederick County, situated about 50 miles north of Washington, D.C., and 50 miles west of Baltimore, is a diverse district , and one of only a handful to use learning science research to try to improve schools at scale. Launched in 2015, it’s the centerpiece of a school improvement plan, and leaders say the goal is to raise academic achievement overall, as well as shrink stubborn gaps between more advantaged students and their less advantaged peers. 

“As a district, we’ve been talking about achievement gaps for a long time,” said Margaret Lee, Frederick County’s director of organizational development who has led the charge toward the science of learning. “I’ve seen it in every role that I’ve had, always looking at what could make the difference. Like every district in America, every silver bullet that people thought up had been peddled to us. It started to frustrate me that none of these things were making a difference, and that was a catalyst that led us here.” 

The district is seeing steady progress in a positive direction, even when accounting for pandemic-related learning loss. Third-grade , for example, on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program test, rose from 49.5% proficient in 2018, to 60% proficient in 2023 — 12 points above the state average. In math, students from disadvantaged groups have also seen steady gains. African-American third graders were 38% proficient in 2018, but rose to 43.8% by 2023; over five years, low-income Title I third graders slowly grew from 32% to 37.6% proficient. 

Amid a of learning science and a spotlight on curriculum reform, experts are beginning to look to districts like Frederick County to gauge whether it can be a model for academic improvement. Unlike more common state plans reforming how , or increasing support for struggling students, the Frederick County plan is tackling learning as a whole — across subjects and grades — to systematically alter the paradigm of how teaching and learning happens throughout its schools.

Training adults on how the brain learns

Frederick County’s plan turns on a single premise: who work with kids don’t know how the brain learns, and haven’t been exposed to the body of research on which teaching practices are more likely to support it. 

that applying cognitive science principles and strategies to classrooms are “significant factors affecting rates of learning and its retention in many everyday classroom situations,” with certain caveats regarding the limitations of what scientists currently know about when and where to implement them. But within universities, scientific research on learning has historically been separate from teacher training, and misunderstandings about how learning happens are common in the field of education. They’ve led to such disproven ideas as children having “,” like being a “visual” or “kinetic” learner, or using the to teach reading, prompting students to try to guess at unfamiliar words using context clues like looking at pictures. 

The district has made educating faculty and staff on cognitive science a top priority. In 2017, Frederick County formed a partnership with and began training teachers, instructional coaches and leaders in the , including an understanding of how memory works and its pivotal role in academic learning; creating classroom environments that reduce obstacles and distractions while maximizing student memory; and creating effective ways to test whether students have learned the needed material.

The training homed in on how to translate findings from cognitive science and educational psychology into classroom practice, including in learning new material, meaning direct instruction heavily guided by the teacher, and why students need to understand what they read and form connections to new learning. Classroom changes also include specific learning strategies like retrieval practice and interleaving, in which teachers go back to learned material in multiple ways, spaced out over time, which has been students’ memory of what they learned. 

The training has changed the way the district is approaching content subjects like math. Stacy Sisler, a secondary math curriculum specialist for Frederick County, credits increased knowledge of learning research with steady gains middle schoolers have seen in math across the district. She first learned about the science of learning through the district training, and admits she was initially reluctant to adopt the changes. The more she learned, however, the more Sisler began to think the research made sense, and was applicable to every math classroom.

“As I started to learn more and gain a deeper understanding, then it became — how does instruction change because of this?” Sisler said. “We don’t just say it and it magically happens, so what does that actually look like?” 

Under her leadership, curriculum and instructional practices were re-designed to better reflect the research. Middle school math teachers have been trained in practices like teaching math more directly using example problems, checking student work multiple times during class time to gauge student understanding and incorporating more math practice both into each lesson and across lessons. 

Lee said even when considering how hard it often is to pinpoint what caused learning gains, the instructional changes coincided with significant improvements for students in Frederick County. Over five years since implementing the changes, middle school math students’ benchmark assessments have grown, in some schools by as much as 20%, especially among students of color and English learners. Over the same five-year period across the state of Maryland, students of color and English learners’ math proficiency has declined. In 2023 for example, only 8.2% of Black middle school students were proficient in math, down 8 percentage points from 2018. 

‘Using the time we do have differently’

New teachers across the district are onboarded in a three-year science-of-learning coaching program, which includes lesson coaching like first-grade teacher Caroline Able’s, but also group study. The aim is to give new teachers evidence-informed knowledge and tactics to decrease some of the trial-and-error that comes along with being a beginner. 

First-year eighth-grade math teacher Elizabeth Sypole’s monthly training is currently focused on evidence-based classroom routines that foster students’ attention.

Sypole has learned techniques like , a simple hand motion followed by a pause meant to help students get quiet quickly. Previously unaware of the technique, Sypole said it has been instrumental in her classroom management. “Literally within two days of doing it, everybody is quiet. It’s so much less stressful than trying to get everybody to quiet down. They know exactly what to do now and it’s just the routine.” 

Leaders get the training, too — principals, assistant principals and supervisors are focused on equity, and how schools can eliminate learning gaps between groups of students. Kent Wetzel, the district’s leadership development specialist, trains leaders in researcher , which include presenting new material in small, manageable steps and providing extra support for students if the task is especially difficult. The idea is to make learning as accessible as possible to everyone. 

The training, book studies and coaching sessions focused on the science of learning make up the heart of the district’s professional development, and therefore don’t require tons of extra funding or extra time for educators and leaders outside their contract hours, said Lee. In the past, professional learning brought in from outside vendors were “one-off” learning experiences not tied to any bigger picture or goal. Now all professional learning must meet a set of district standards for being “evidence-informed and equity-driven,” ensuring the entire district is swimming in the same direction. 

“We haven’t made extra time, we are just using the time we do have differently,” Lee said. 

While much of the district training is mandatory—like district-wide professional development and leadership training—other parts are optional or opt-in, like teacher book studies and principal coaching. The district is hoping that by making the science of learning training something gradual that takes hold naturally, it will win buy-in from the most experienced staffers over time because it was not a one-and-done push. 

Bernard Quesada, the veteran principal at Middletown High School, has embraced the science of learning approach to teaching. He said the organic approach and long-term picture has been key to its success at his school of mostly accomplished, veteran teachers. 

“When these things become mandates, and schools have to comply, you get a lukewarm reception,” Quesada said. “Schools get initiative fatigue.” 

Middletown teachers have adopted the new learning, Quesada said, because administrators have been intentional to connect the research to what teachers are already doing well. Quesada quoted learning researcher and retired University College London professor — a speaker he heard at a recent science of learning conference. 

“Wiliam said, ‘There’s no next new, big thing. It’s a lot of old, small things that work and are boring,’” Quesada laughed. “That’s about as true a statement as I’ve heard in my life.”

‘Guilty of chasing the next greatest thing’ 

On the other side of the country, in rural Delta County, Colorado, teachers are working on asking students better questions to get them thinking stronger and deeper — moving beyond basic factual answers to more “how” and “why” questions that require students to think not just about the answer, but how they got there.  

Like Frederick County, the small southwestern Colorado district with one-quarter English language learners and 65% low-income students has been training all their teachers and school leaders in the science of learning. Also like Frederick County, the district has taken a “no-silver-bullets” approach and has revamped professional learning, putting learning research at the center, with deep dives for teachers and leaders into cognitive science principles like “,” a technique where teachers design lessons that require students to evaluate, provide reasoning and detailed explanations for learned material. 

The district’s science of teaching and learning lead, Shawna Angelo, said she’s looking to help teachers “align how the brain learns with how we are delivering instruction.” 

The focus on effortful thinking was supported by , an organization that has worked for nearly a decade to improve teaching by getting the scientific principles of learning into more classrooms.  

Executive Director Valerie Sakimura sees districts like Frederick County and Delta County as models for improving academic achievement in more school systems across the country. “The priority for our work is helping teacher preparation programs and partnering districts trying to support teachers around the science of learning,” she said. “Our particular focus is aspiring and early-career teachers.” 

Deans for Impact is also brokering partnerships between school districts and local universities, offering coursework and training on cognitive science principles for student teachers. Teacher training facilities as varied as the and are breaking down the longstanding barrier between teacher training and research science, teaching future educators about how learning happens long before they step into a classroom. 

Frederick County has partnered with Hood College, where many local teachers get their degrees, to design coursework and provide instruction based on the science of learning for student teachers. District instructional coaches and mentor teachers work with teachers in training as well, giving them a chance to watch evidence-informed techniques in action and practice them in their student teaching.

Michael Markoe, deputy superintendent for Frederick County, said through all this work, the district is trying to create a throughline, where all teachers, coaches, principals — everyone is moving in the same direction, speaking the same language, all based on the research. When school leaders recently inquired about personalized learning, for example, where students progress and master subjects at their own pace, Markoe reminded them that the district is, for the time being, focused on only one thing: evidence of effectiveness. 

“I’ve been in education almost 30 years. I’ve been guilty of chasing the next greatest thing,” he said. “If we are going to advance personalized learning, we have to see the research behind it and ensure it’s the right thing for our children.” 

Getting the entire district on board is long, slow work. Because there are no mandates, some schools haven’t embraced the science of learning, or have chosen to focus on other priorities, despite leadership’s wholesale commitment to the methodology. 

But Lee, the district’s organizational developmental director, isn’t deterred.  

“I compare it to moving an aircraft carrier. To move the ship, you are making lots of tiny moves in the same direction. If you spin a wheel in a school system, you will throw people off the ship,” she said. “Public education isn’t patient. Everyone wants to fix it tomorrow, but those things don’t work.” 

A new report from the  released this week studied the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on disparities in reading, mathematics, and science achievement among racial and ethnic groups of elementary students in the United States.

Among other things, the study looked at which SES factors best explain existing achievement gaps, along with disparities among high-achieving students. The authors analyzed two sets of data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study, from 1998-99 and 2010-11.

The study’s resulting analysis “a broad set of family SES factors explains a substantial portion of racial achievement gaps: between 34 and 64 percent of the Black-white gap and between 51 and 77 percent of the Hispanic-white gap, depending on the subject and grade level.”

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“Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved,” the “While SES accounts for much of the racial achievement disparities, closing these gaps requires a comprehensive approach, including improving school quality and supporting family stability.”

The institute’s study used a broad set of measures of family background, including parents’ education, family finances, household structure, and “household opportunity factors.” The latter measure refers to academic, enrichment, and familial activities.

The authors of the study, University of Albany’s Eric Hengyu Hu and Paul L. Morgan, identified the following key findings from their analysis:

• Racial achievement gaps decrease significantly when controlling for the SES factors (though SES explains more of the Hispanic-white gap than the Black-white gap).
• Of all the SES factors analyzed, household income best explains the Black-white gap in academic achievement and mother’s education best explains the Hispanic-white gap.
• SES indicators, and the extent to which they explain racial/ethnic achievement gaps, are stable over time (1998-99 and 2010-11).
• SES also helps explain racial and ethnic excellence gaps (differences in the proportions of student groups within the highest achievement levels). The SES factors explain a larger share of Hispanic-white excellence gaps than Black-white excellence gaps across the board.
• The Black-white achievement gap grows as students age through elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.

Key findings from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s study.

To close such gaps, the authors recommend investments in early childhood education and income supplements, such as expanding child tax credits.

“Because achievement gaps are already evident by elementary school, including as early as kindergarten, investing in high-quality early childhood education programs, especially in underprivileged communities, may be beneficial in mitigating the effects of socioeconomic disparities,” the report says.

In addition to early childhood investments, the authors also propose the following solutions:

• Support programs to help parents earn their high school diplomas or higher education credentials.
• Economic support and financial aid for low-income families.
• Addressing racial and ethnic disparities, including the adoption of “curricula that reflect diverse cultures and programs that specifically support underrepresented students,” and student-teacher racial and ethnic matching.

“Whatever the approach, there is no denying the urgency of making the U.S. educational system more equitable,” the report says. “…The time to act is now. By enacting comprehensive and inclusive policies, we can narrow achievement gaps and create a more just educational landscape for the next generation.”

You can download and read the full study .

A look a gaps in North Carolina

Achievement gaps — also known as opportunity or equity gaps — follow national trends in North Carolina.

, following the start of the pandemic, only 51% of students tested as grade-level proficient. Proficiency was even lower among historically disadvantaged students, at 33% for Black students, 40% for Hispanic students, and 35% for economically disadvantaged students.

While those rates slightly increased during , gaps and low proficiency rates persist.

More highlights from the report

Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael J. Petrilli wrote in the report’s foreword that “the vast racial disparities in socioeconomic conditions and prenatal and early-life health experiences explain the achievement gaps we see between racial and ethnic groups, at least at school entry.”

Citing by economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, “Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Petrilli writes that this suggests that “universal, race-neutral interventions designed to improve the academic, social, economic, and health conditions of the poor would lift all boats and would also narrow racial gaps.”

Using data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study — data cited by Fryer and Levitt, along with more recent data — Petrilli said the report aimed to answer a few questions:

• Had the relationship between socioeconomic achievement gaps and racial/ethnic achievement gaps shifted?
• Was the Black-white gap still growing during elementary school?
• And how did all of this look for the white-Hispanic gap and for subjects beyond just reading and math?

Here is a look at the measures explored in the institute’s paper.

The institute’s study found that family socioeconomic factors explain more “of the Black-white achievement gap in first grade reading than in other subjects and grade levels.” The report proposes this may be the case because parents play a larger role in teaching language skills to young children than they do for math and science.

“The advantages of high SES—and disadvantages of low SES—thus show up more for students’ initial reading skills than for their math and science ones,” the report says. “As students get older and benefit from classroom instruction, their relative advantages and disadvantages start to matter less.”

However, while the gap narrows with age, there is still a gap. According to the report, this likely means “we still haven’t closed the ‘school quality gap’ between Black students and their white peers.”

As mentioned above, the report also found that family socioeconomic factors “explain more of the Hispanic-white achievement gap than the Black-white achievement gap.”

According to the report, this could be because Hispanic children in Spanish-speaking families “have latent potential that is obscured by their lack of English skills.”

The report also suggests that non-socioeconomic factors, racism, and bias affect Black children at higher rates than their Hispanic peers.

“For lower-income Black children, who are more likely to experience deep, persistent poverty than other groups, the combination of ‘adverse childhood experiences’ might exacerbate inequalities,” the report says. “And for middle class Black children, bias, stereotype threat, and related factors might be especially at play. This might also be why the Black-white achievement gap grows over the course of elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.”

Petrilli concludes: “When it comes to the interplay between race, poverty, and schooling, the honest read is that it’s complicated. What’s undeniable, though, is that much hard work remains, especially when it comes to providing effective schools to marginalized students, especially those who are Black. Let’s keep at it.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David C. Banks unveiled the initiative, “,” earlier this week, saying they hoped to build off the success of “NYC Reads.” 

Starting in the fall, 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will use the , open-source Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, which is . Schools in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle also use the curriculum.

Like many school systems across the country, New York City, the nation’s largest, has long struggled with the subject. in 2023, but the figure is stubbornly low and is even worse for some student groups: of the city’s Black and Latino children are not performing at grade level in the subject. 

“Schools all over the city, even on math, were just kind of doing their own thing — people just creating their own curriculum,” Banks said during a televised press conference. “That’s no way to run a system.” 

I’m proud to be following the groundbreaking rollout of ‘NYC Reads’ with ‘NYC Solves,’ reimagining math education and ensuring students and educators have access to high-quality instructional materials and support.

— Chancellor David C. Banks (@DOEChancellor)

The chancellor did not blame teachers, administrators or students for their struggle, saying they just needed a better framework. Marielys Divanne, executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, said her group has been pushing for change for years: More than 1,000 of her 16,000 members signed a petition urging the city to act on the issue.

“Our educators feel that NYC Solves is a much-needed step forward in making progress in addressing our crisis in math instruction,” Divanne said, adding that the previous, school-by-school approach left “thousands of students with low quality instructional materials and uneven support for educators.” 

In addition to the mathematics initiative, Adams also announced the creation of the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, which aims to support multilingual learners and students with disabilities. The division will have a $750 million budget — and roughly 1,300 staff members.

Maria Klawe, president of Math for America, a non-profit organization founded 20 years ago to keep outstanding math teachers in the classroom, lauded the city’s choice of Illustrative Mathematics, calling it a very strong curriculum. She had already reviewed some of the materials and praised its approach in taking math from the theoretical to the practical.

“The whole idea is trying to help students understand that a mathematical concept, even if it’s abstract in nature, is actually something that you encounter in your daily life,” she said. “You have a sense that what you’re learning is … something that you can actually use.”

William McCallum, Illustrative Mathematics’s CEO and co-founder, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards in math. He said, through a spokesperson, that IM’s work “has evolved far beyond its original focus on illustrating the standards.”

The Common Core had a bumpy roll-out, was maligned by some parents and . The math portion became a , though it has won favor in academic circles.

McCallum strongly recommends teacher training for those who seek to implement Illustrative Mathematics. 

“The curriculum supports a problem-based instructional model that is a shift for many teachers, and they have the most success when they have the support they need to make that shift,” he said. “IM and its partners offer professional learning for those districts that want it.”

Klawe also credited Department of Education officials for making the curriculum the standard for schools. She said it allows teachers to work together across the city to share best practices. 

“It’s also very helpful for students who move from one school to another,” she added. 

New York City officials say each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by , a nationally recognized nonprofit organization. The curriculum also has undergone a formal review by a committee of New York City Public school educators including those with expertise in mathematics, special education and multilingual learners — in addition to district-based mathematics specialists. 

Minus charter schools, there were close to in the NYC school system as of fall 2023. Nearly 73% of students were economically disadvantaged. 

Like Klawe, , executive director of The Education Trust–New York, favors the uniform curriculum, though she notes it might not be the preference for all. 

“Different schools have different feelings about that,” she noted. She added that the approach does, however, relieve teachers from the arduous task of having to develop their own curriculum, allowing them to instead focus on implementation.

But teacher Meredith Klein, who worked for more than a decade at before switching to West Brooklyn Community High School, which serves under-credited students, said the new curriculum might not satisfy all kids’ needs. 

“I’ve always worked with a really specialized population of students and the curriculum is usually not designed with them in mind,” she said.

Klein has spent the past year implementing Illustrative Mathematics as part of the pilot program and said she struggled to adapt the materials for her students. While the city initially pushed for strict adherence to a pre-set learning schedule, the coach who visited with her to help with the rollout soon recognized the need for adaptation. 

“The curriculum is written like a story and you need to teach the full curriculum without any alterations for a full year,” she said, but that’s not the educational experience of so many of the students she’s served. “There wasn’t any guidance about how to break it up … how to retrofit it to our existing system. Not all students are the same.” 

While students across the country continue to struggle to make up the learning loss from the pandemic, with many states seeing the gulf separating the achievement of poor and non-poor students growing larger, a study led by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities says Massachusetts has the seen the largest widening of that gap of any the states they examined.

Massachusetts students lost the equivalent of about two-thirds of a typical year of math learning and two-fifths of a year in reading from 2019 to 2022, according to from the Center for Education Research Policy at Harvard and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Many of the state’s Gateway Cities, home to lots of the state’s poorer students, saw declines of as much as a full year of learning. While many districts began to see achievement gains from 2022 to 2023 – the first full year when students returned to in-person learning – many Gateway Cities saw achievement levels continue to drop, making the achievement gap even larger now than it was before the pandemic.

“No one in Massachusetts wants to leave poor kids footing the bill for the pandemic, but that is the path we are on,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and one of the study’s co-authors.

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The gap within Massachusetts between poor and non-poor students is now roughly half a grade wider than it was in 2019, according to the analysis of achievement trends across 15 states, a finding that shows just how much harder the school disruption hit lower-income students here – and how uneven the recovery from it has been. Five of the 15 states actually recorded a narrowing of the poor/non-poor gap in one or both subjects.

Kane says without focused effort by districts and the state to address the growing achievement gap, research suggests poor students in Massachusetts will face setbacks tied to the pandemic that extend into adulthood, affecting everything from lifetime earnings to incarceration rates.

Many districts with lots of students from higher-income households began to see achievement start to bounce back between 2022 to 2023, following large drops during the pandemic. In Longmeadow, for example, a well-off suburb of Springfield, proficiency rates for grade 3-8 reading went from 61 percent in 2022 to 64 percent in 2023 and in math rose from 58 percent to 65 percent.

In many districts with large populations of low-income students, however, it’s been a very different story.

Lynn, where 74 percent of students are low-income, has recorded the largest drop in reading and math proficiency rates in the state since the pandemic, with the achievement falloff from the COVID school shutdowns continuing even after the return to classroom instruction. The district’s grade 3-8 reading proficiency rate fell from 38 percent in 2019 to 21 percent in 2022, before falling two points further to 19 percent in 2023. In math, proficiency fell by more than half during the pandemic, from 37 percent in 2019 to 15 percent in 2022. But the slide continued in 2023, when math proficiency fell to 14 percent.

“Our student achievement is always a top concern, so I think it is absolutely troubling to see the trends we’re experiencing,” said Mayor Jared Nicholson, who also chairs the Lynn school committee. The district is “committed to addressing and reversing the learning loss and getting students what they need to close the achievement gaps we’re experiencing,” he said.

Kane said there is no single explanation for the widening achievement gulf between poor and non-poor students. But he said many students from higher-income households saw less learning loss to begin with during the pandemic, and they were far more likely than their lower-income peers to have families that sought out private tutoring or other ways to make up for school closures.

Meanwhile, some of the districts that have seen the biggest achievement declines also saw a  huge growth in student groups that face particularly steep learning challenges. In Lynn, the share of the district population made up of English language learners rose 75 percent over the course of the pandemic, from 25 percent in 2019 to 43 percent today.

Framingham, where 54 percent of the district’s 9,100 students are low-income, also saw a steep drop in achievement during the pandemic, with no recovery seen in the first full year in which students returned to in-person classes. English proficiency for grades 3-8 fell from 40 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2022, but showed no recovery in 2023. For math, proficiency fell from 37 percent in 2019 to 24 percent in 2022, and then dropped an additional 2 points to 22 percent in 2023.

“Yes, we’re concerned,” said Robert Tremblay, Framingham’s superintendent, who said the district has deployed math and literacy coaches to every school as part of the effort to reverse the pandemic slide.

Edward Lambert, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said the widening gulf between poor students and their better-off peers should be getting more attention from state and local leaders. “I think it’s pretty damning for Massachusetts,” he said. “As we consider ourselves a leader, it’s pretty disconcerting to see the impacts here and what appears to be the lack of rebound other states have experienced, particularly in some of the Gateway Cities.”

Massachusetts received more than $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief money for schools, aid that has been allocated through three rounds of funding. Districts are currently devising plans for how they’ll use the final round of money, which must be spent by September.

Although federal rules require that at least 20 percent of the money is spent on academics, Lynn is planning to spend about 30 percent of the $42 million in its last round of federal relief funding on learning recovery. That will include funding for afterschool tutoring and summer school classes, but also a lot of programming during the school day focused on learning recovery.

“When we have a student in schools is when you really have to take advantage of that time,” said Evonne Alvarez, the district superintendent. “When you focus on after or before school, you’re really at the mercy of that student and whether they can get there or stay.”

Framingham is committing more than a third of its final round of federal funding – $4.7 million out of $14.4 million – to mitigating learning loss through tutoring and afterschool programming, and funding for reading teachers.

“We’re not quite sure what the variable is that’s causing learning to not grow at the rate we want it to be,” said Tremblay, the Framingham superintendent. “It’s not for lack of investment in resources.”

Kane said districts need to allocate even more of the federal aid to learning loss if they are serious about seeing students recover academically, especially low-income students who have fallen behind the farthest.

“From the beginning of the pandemic, I have tried but failed to get the message across that districts needed to do the math on their plans,” he said.

Kane said that means taking stock of the impact of strategies like high-dose tutoring, through which students can make up an entire added year of learning, or summer school classes, which can remediate about a quarter of a year of learning loss. Even districts employing some of those strategies, he said, aren’t doing it at the scale needed to remediate the losses students have experienced. “Nobody’s actually doing a plan that makes sure every district has enough of those things to allow kids to catch up,” he said.

Kane said it’s not too late for districts to redouble their focus on tutoring and summer school with the final round of federal funding. He also thinks districts should be more transparent in communicating to parents how far behind their children are, something he thinks has been widely lacking.

Kane thinks education leaders and families alike haven’t come to terms with the long-term impact of pandemic learning losses, if they aren’t remediated. He pointed to research on the state’s strong K-12 achievement growth over the last several decades, outcomes that he said are correlated with increased earnings, higher post-secondary educational attainment, lower arrest rates, and lower teen pregnancy rates. He said all the positive trends connected to achievement growth are likely to move “in the opposite direction” if scores decline and remain low.

State officials acknowledged the greater toll the pandemic took on higher-need students, and emphasized the steps taken in recent years to revamp the school aid formula and direct more money to districts serving those students.

“Massachusetts is proud to lead the nation in student achievement, but we recognize that more needs to be done to address learning loss, particularly for English learners and students from low-income families,” said state education department spokeswoman Jacqueline Reis in a statement. “That’s why we have fully funded the Student Opportunity Act, which is targeted at districts with high concentrations of poverty, and proposed a nation-leading literacy strategy.”

Massachusetts has a long history of deference to local school districts, and the federal pandemic aid did not authorize states to tell districts how to spend the money. But Kane insists the state could do much more to highlight the urgency of the problem and prod districts to do more to address it.

He pointed as an example to Texas, which didn’t prescribe how districts spent the federal money but passed a law requiring that all students not testing at proficiency be provided at least 30 hours of small group instruction next year.

“It should be alarming that inequality has increased and we’re not making progress closing that increase that happened during the pandemic,” he said. “We’re the ones who supposedly care about education equity.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

She chose to enroll her daughter in Atlas Elementary, a public charter school in the city’s Downtown West neighborhood. Her daughter settled into kindergarten, but Lowman didn’t feel at home in her old hometown.

Volunteering at a school enrollment fair, Lowman stopped and talked with the women at the table. What happened next would help Lowman find a community and become deeply involved in her daughter’s education. She spent the next several months engaged in a combination of research and learning, being coached to understand how to create change in schools.

Founded in January 2022 by a former educator, ActivateSTL trains parents and teens in St. Louis to advocate for quality education. This training and support is needed, parents say, because public schools in St. Louis are so inequitable and on standardized tests. White children are than Black children to attend schools where it’s the norm for students to meet math and language arts standards, according to Missouri state data.

In June, ActivateSTL began its first training cohort with 17 parents and 11 students. It started with a data download: Who’s in charge of traditional public and charter schools — from local school boards to state officials — how do St. Louis’s suspension rates vary by race and gender and what are the student proficiency outcomes at the state, district and individual school levels?

“I had no clue that public school scores were as low as they were,” said Lowman. “Looking at those numbers, that was disheartening. Since then, I’ve been more involved, and not just in the fun stuff, for my kid and others as well.”

That’s the kind of insider understanding that Tiara Jordan wanted to give parents when she started ActivateSTL. Jordan, who is Black, attended mostly white schools when her parents moved the family to an affluent district outside of Flint, Michigan. She saw how assertive white parents were about advocating for their children. Later, while studying to become a teacher, she saw how broken and under-resourced many urban schools are. 

“I was blessed and fortunate,” she said. “Not everybody has the resources to up and move to a better school district.”

Jordan worked as a teacher and principal in Chicago, Cleveland and New York. She opened new charter schools in Chicago and Brooklyn and experienced the benefits that charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, can offer communities where public schools are failing. When she moved to St. Louis in 2019, she connected with the St. Louis-based education nonprofit and was struck by how much work needed to be done to address inequities in the city’s schools. 

“How is it that Chicago, D.C. and other cities have figured this out [better]?,” she recalls wondering. “What is happening in St. Louis that it could be so behind in funding, and proficiency levels?”

But she was new to town, so she spent some time meeting with parents and education advocates and was struck again: so many parents weren’t aware of how badly the city’s schools were struggling. 

“I didn’t want to define what ActivateSTL was without knowing the community,” she says. “We’re mobilizing parents and developing their leadership skills, so they can drive the plan of attack.”

Fully funded by the Opportunity Trust, ActivateSTL has three full-time employees, including Jordan and St. Louis educator LaShonda Hill. They are part of a national movement that has only grown since the pandemic — with groups like and the — to help parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. 

Parents, Jordan says, have more power than they realize to put pressure on state, district and charter officials.

“Our end goal is to get parents in seats of power,” Jordan said. “Going to a I saw how much influence parents could have.”

With support, parents with ideas for how schools can improve might be able to make positive changes. After moving her dyslexic daughter out of several schools because they weren’t providing adequate support, Kathryn Bonney found a private school that offered life-changing tutoring.

“The impact it had on my child was night and day. Utterly transformative,” said Bonney, who is white.

She wondered, what would it take to bring this kind of high-quality tutoring to all St. Louis children with dyslexia? She happened to have a conversation with Tiara Jordan, who encouraged her to pursue the question. 

“ActivateSTL is specifically geared toward parent organizing and leadership,” Bonney said. “Parents like me who have really big ideas.”

She joined the training cohort and got help fleshing out her goal — to have tutors trained in a highly structured, phonics-focused method of reading instruction, present in all St. Louis elementary schools. In addition to meeting other parents passionate about advocacy, she found a mentor in Jordan who assigned Bonney homework to advance the tutoring project: create a pitch deck in PowerPoint or meet with tutoring providers, for example. She also checked in every week to see what progress was being made, Bonney said.

Jordan has an understanding of how educational systems work: who makes decisions at school sites as well as downtown at the central office and in the state capitol. She passes that knowledge on to parents and helps them understand how they can ask for what they want.

When Shae Lowman’s first-grade daughter was struggling with reading, Lowman didn’t know where to begin to address the problem. 

“Tiara did a presentation about who to start with,” Lowman said. “I sent my daughter’s teacher a text and the next week they had my daughter reading. Having the courage and support to point out the discrepancies my daughter was having is fabulous.”

Older students, Jordan believes, can advocate for themselves, with the right support. During a summer training cohort for high school students, 10 teenagers were paid $20 an hour to meet every day for a month. Jordan explained the history and principles of public education and took students on field trips, showing them what the affluent schools in St. Louis look like. They got a bird’s eye view of how unequal school funding really is.

“I want to be an actor and my school took away the theater program,” said Alana Wilson, a senior at KIPP High School. The ActivateSTL training included information about budget transparency, which means parents and students have a right to see how money is spent at the school. “Why is my intended major being replaced with political science?” Wilson asked. 

Wilson, who said she is usually “shy and quiet” has now joined the student council. Together with other members, she asked to meet with the school principal to present a petition, signed by students who want bottled water to be available in the cafeteria in addition to milk, but the principal said it wasn’t her decision to make. Wilson said she’s trying to figure out a different way to handle the situation.

“Before the cohort, I never would have opened my mouth,” Wilson said. “I learned that I have a voice and I don’t have to be silenced by the system.”

The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��. 

It could be the carpets on all the floors. 

Or even the framed prints hung on the schools’ walls of fine art from around the world. 

The Paramount Schools of Excellence have a lot of “bells and whistles,” as one parent put it, that make them look and feel different from other elementary and middle schools. 

Few schools have miniature farms out back, after all.

But observers and school leaders say more fundamental differences have made the network of schools — which will grow to six schools by fall — a fast-growing and top performer in the city. 

All that coming from a single school started in 2010 that was warned that its D and F grades could shut it down. That school, now known as Paramount Brookside, has since received nine straight A ratings before the pandemic halted Indiana’s letter grades for schools. The U.S. Department of Education named that K-8 school a in 2018. Parents now drive their kids there every day from half an hour away. 

Paramount now has another elementary school and another middle school in the city, whose proficiency rates all far exceed those of the Indianapolis Public Schools by a wide margin. It added an online school and just opened new schools Aug. 1 in two other Indiana cities, Lafayette and South Bend. Paramount is also creating an innovative new all-girls STEM school in partnership with the Girl Scouts to open in 2024.

“There’s a culture, there’s a vibe, there’s a climate that is palpable in each of the sites,” said Danielle Shockey, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, who sought Paramount as a partner in the new school. “They all have this feeling of just calm, but yet exciting reverence to the opportunity to learn. That’s the foundation to what leads to the strong academic outcomes.” 

Shockey, a former teacher and former deputy state superintendent, said Paramount’s academic results, teacher training program and ability to replicate its success at multiple schools drew her.

Tommy Reddicks, the founding CEO of the schools, credits more nuts and bolts reasons for success than the flashy trappings of goats, cheese, and paintings. 

The biggest factor: Rejecting what Reddicks calls the “Dead Poets Society” approach of many schools who rely on inspiring lectures by passionate teachers like those portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie. 

“You see in movies all the time, the teacher who gives the 45 minute amazing speech that really inspires the students,” Reddicks said. “Then, when the bell rings, as the kids are running out, teachers are like, ‘Make sure to get your homework done on chapter four.’ That model is like a poison pill for urban education.”

He added: “I’ve done school tours, where the principal says ‘This is our best teacher’ and you see them talking for 30 minutes. And it’s really cool what they’re showing and demonstrating. But there’s no student work happening. There’s no student interaction happening.”

Paramount instead wants teachers to spend little class time on lectures, often just the first 15 minutes. Students then work independently as teachers step in to help students one on one or in small groups.

“It makes our classroom look pretty boring,” Reddicks joked.

But having students work in class means little to no homework, which is an intentional strategy so that students with tough family or living situations still do well.

“They’re getting all the work done during the school day,” Reddicks said, when teachers can immediately correct errors. “So if they go home at night, and they don’t have any parental support, they can still come back tomorrow and be just fine.”

The schools closely track how well students master skills they are taught. 

Teachers have a training academy in which new teachers are mentored by veterans and veterans are helped with either advanced teaching or administrative skills. 

And Paramount bought laptops for third graders and up even before the pandemic, both to improve learning but also so students could be familiar with them and score better on state tests.

It’s working. In 2016, Paramount Brookside was lauded as one of the top 10 schools in the city at raising scores of poor students closer to affluent ones using the Education Quality Index, an effort of multiple non-profit organizations looking at national achievement gaps.

Last year, the Indianapolis Public Schools highlighted Paramount as a city leader in closing learning gaps between Black and white students. Proficiency rates at all three brick and mortar Paramount schools — students proficient in both math and English — are several times higher than Indianapolis Public Schools for Black, Hispanic and economically challenged students.

In the most recent state test results, released in July, between 34 and 57 percent of Black students were proficient in both English and Math at the three in-person Paramount schools, compared to just 5.4 percent in Indianapolis Public Schools.

For students receiving free or reduced lunch, 38 to 58 percent were proficient in both at the three Paramount schools, compared to just eight percent in the district.

Those scores, as well as a growing reputation, have won over Joe Bowling, executive director of the Englewood Development Corporation, which serves the neighborhood where Paramount opened one of its new schools. Along with helping to that was a neighborhood eyesore, he said the school has become an asset to the community

“The Paramount schools draw lower income households and yet the test results and the achievement seems to be there,” he said.

The scores for Black students also drew parent LaToya Tahirou after she grew frustrated with a district school.

“Some kids aren’t getting the same opportunities as other kids as far as quality of educators, quality of curriculum, quality of just the environment at the school as a whole,” she said. “I think Paramount stands above a lot of schools and their city as far as it pertains to educating low income black and brown students.”

That has led to some calls for the Indianapolis Public Schools to share more tax money with schools like Paramount so they can expand and help more students with challenges. Brandon Brown, CEO of Mind Trust, a philanthropy that supports education issues in the city, wants more money for charter schools overall so that students of color who use them heavily can have better opportunities.

Even without extra funding, Paramount still creates an unusual atmosphere for students, with all its “bells and whistles.”. Schools have their own coffee shops that deliver free drinks to teachers in their classrooms. Paramount Brookside has its own planetarium that students in the other schools can visit. The hallways display prints of art by Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Renoir, but also artists of color like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Jean-Michel Basquiat. All have QR codes next to them so students can easily link to more information about the artist and piece. 

“There’s some real intentionality around our diversity,” Reddicks said. “I’m a huge impressionism person so I made this space just so I can be happy. But for the kids, it’s more about the diversity of artists and the types of art.”

The floors are all carpeted to reduce noise and distractions.

And both Paramount Brookside and Paramount Cottage Home have miniature barns and gardens, where a full time farm manager tends the plants and goats and chickens to help students learn. The goats milk is then processed into cheese in a separate room at the school and sold at farmers markets and some local grocery stores.

The cheese is a passion and hobby of Reddicks, a self-described “cheese nerd,” who learned to make specialty cheeses after finding few he liked in Indianapolis markets. He soon realized that a commercial kitchen in the school would let him sell cheeses along with sparking interest of students.

“It became a really cool balance against the hard work in the classroom,” he said. “That’s what I now call scaffolding excitement. We’ve got to scaffold in exciting stuff in all of our different areas outside of the classroom to make sure that for teachers and for students, for parents, they want to keep coming back, even though it’s such hard work.”

But Paramount schools are not farm schools, Reddicks stresses. Teachers create a lesson each quarter that uses the farm to teach other skills, but the school is not a project-based school or one where parents should expect students to have a lot of farm time. The exception is the group of about 20 students at each of the two schools who are hired to work the farm as summer jobs.

“We have to stay really focused academically,” he said. “The farm becomes a great outlet. And it’s exciting. And there’s great things going on up there. And you’re out there every day at recess experiencing it, but it’s not part of the everyday curriculum.”

Inside classrooms, portions of Paramount’s focused academic mission stand out. Color-coded charts on the walls show how each student is faring over the school year in reading and math skills — blue for above grade level, green for at it, yellow for approaching

“Generally, what we see is many of these students in red and move up a yellow, green and blue by the end of the year,” said Kyle Beauchamp, Paramount’s chief academic officer.

The schools also carefully watch what they call the “Fast Five,” five skills a teacher focuses on that week.

If students lag, the school urges them to attend two-hour afterschool tutoring sessions five days a week.

The chain has long term goals itself. Reddicks hopes to have 10 Paramount schools by 2030 and is well underway toward that goal. Along with the three schools in Indianapolis, Paramount has taken over closed schools in both South Bend and Lafayette and is fixing them to open in the fall. 

The schools received a surprise $3 million gift in 2022 from author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott of the Amazon fortune that will help pay for the expansion.

Paramount is also close to naming a site in northern Indianapolis for the new school it is creating with the Girl Scouts. Girls IN STEM Academy will mix portions of the Girl Scouts’ STEM programs with Paramount’s academic model, though students won’t be scouts.

That school will also continue Paramount’s connection with Purdue Polytechnic High School, another star school chain created by Purdue University with two locations in Indianapolis and a third in South Bend. Reddicks says he has no interest in trying to create Paramount high schools, but Paramount Englewood, a middle school, shares a building with one of the Purdue Polytechnic High Schools so students can easily shift to that school once they finish middle school.

Purdue Polytechnic is also helping Paramount and the Girl Scouts with IN STEM.

“We see their older students serving as role models, mentors, with our K-8 girls,” Shockey said. “It’s not going to be a must-do feeder model, but obviously Purdue hopes that by creating this network with the K-8 girls that by the time they’re ready to choose a high school, they’ll strongly consider Purdue Polytechnic, and maybe before they wouldn’t have even known about it.”

Reddicks said he hopes the new schools will convince others that Paramount’s success is not a fluke and that expansion elsewhere is worthwhile.

“I think we can take that model and put it anywhere and be successful,” he said.

I have been a member of a working group for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s for the last year and a half. Recently, the foundation released a report titled, . The report is authored by Dan Goldhaber, Mike DeArmond and Chris Stewart and his colleagues at , and offers crucial insights for the education community. This point strongly resonated with me:

“… We have heard loud and clear the feedback that many of the assessments we use today don’t provide a full picture of what a student knows and can do … and that some contain outdated material that is not culturally inclusive.”

I am a psychometrician. I have been committed to developing justice-oriented assessment and accountability practices for over 15 years. I am not anti-test. I believe educational assessments can be a powerful lever for positive social change and justice.

Yet, when policymakers and education experts use language that implies large-scale standardized tests represent the best, or the only, sources of legitimate data in an accountability system, they miss the opportunity to employ assessments as a tool for positive social change.

For example, using “achievement gap” to describe underserved populations perpetuates false narratives that assume their inferiority. Instead, “education debt” indicates the systemic inequities and injustices that have persisted for years.

In addition, using broad terms such as “outcomes-based” when meaning large-scale, quantitative, standardized data — and then referring to those data as “objective” — implies that outcomes measured by these tests are the only acceptable indicators. And, because most stakeholders interpret objective as neutral, and thereby fair, this leaves little room for real discussions about what a truly fair and justice-oriented accountability system could look like.

The truth is that terms like “objective” and “outcomes-based” have been co-opted by individuals and institutions with very particular perspectives and agendas. What these tests measure, and how they do it, conforms to what some in society want. But it does not represent what all of society values. And none of it is objective or neutral. All measurement is political.

Stephen Sireci, executive director of the Center for Educational Assessment at University of Massachusetts Amherst, once , “…the goal of educational measurement is not to measure the students who are the easiest to measure and who conform to the most dominant culture associated with the measurement enterprise, but rather to obtain the best measure of each and every student’s proficiencies.”

A comprehensive and justice-oriented accountability system would measure the extent to which schools have established conditions for feelings of belongingness, affirmation, empowerment and cultural competence among all students.

What I am proposing is an accountability system that begins by listening and responding to the voices of all stakeholders, not just the ones with power and influence; assigns value to, and measures, the outcomes that represent the knowledge and needs of these populations; and does not contribute to, or seek to confirm, the longstanding deficit narrative about these students’ capacities, but rather highlights their strengths and points of brilliance.

Moving forward, I encourage everyone to commit to building a shared K-12 education accountability system that orients toward justice and centers the voices of the most marginalized populations — those whom America’s schools are intended to protect.

After five years of leading , where I work with school systems across the nation to help them create a reality where critical thinking is no longer a luxury good, I was extremely reluctant to step into the world of “equity training” when the demand exploded after the summer of 2020.

For one, I took great pride in my obsessive focus on practical, but powerful tools educators could use to seamlessly integrate critical thinking into their existing content. As a Black man leading this work, it meant something to be known as a curriculum and instruction expert, a resource for enhancing access and outcomes in gifted and talented programs, and a trusted guide for helping parents and families . I refused to be pigeonholed as the “DEI guy.” 

But this was not just about image, it was about impact. Although I’ve attended many powerful workshops dealing with issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, it always felt like something was missing. As many of our school system partners across 40 states engaged in this work, a strange pattern emerged. So many school leaders and educators left these workshops pumped up, especially when you looked past the naysayers and focused on those who were fully bought-in to the big ideas around systemic racism, implicit bias and opportunity gaps. 

This pattern raised a challenging question that confounded school system cabinets across the nation: Why do so many educators who are deeply committed to ending educational inequity still struggle with persistent inequities in their classrooms? Inequitable academic outcomes, inequitable disciplinary consequences, and in some cases, inequitable everything?

All of these educators understood why achieving educational equity was an urgent priority. They all saw enough of that equality vs. equity graphic with the little boys standing on crates to see the baseball game from outside of the fence to know, conceptually, what equity was. But the “how” remained elusive, and sometimes, flat-out wrong.

Part of why I wrote was to offer a clear definition of what educational equity actually means to me. I define educational equity as the work we do to eliminate the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes. This would destroy the norm of demographics determining destiny. The outcome of anything we call equity work must accomplish this goal. If the policy change, program, or service does not disrupt the predictive power of demographics, it isn’t equity. 

This transformational vision of educational equity is multi-layered. On one level, Tangible Equity requires a laser-focus on traditional academic outcomes. This approach is indifferent to the common practice of rejecting the deficit phrasing of “the achievement gap” calling it “the opportunity gap,” instead. This distinction means nothing to minoritized students grappling with intergenerational poverty, students who will struggle to have any opportunities without successful academic outcomes. In other words, the outcome is the opportunity. How could we reduce the predictive power of demographics on outcomes without focusing on outcomes?

But the second level of the Tangible Equity approach requires a bolder vision. As an achievement-over-everything educator, I preached the same sermon to my students that my immigrant grandmother and mother preached to me. The same sermon so many in marginalized groups heard when they grew up and still preach to their children: “You can’t just be good. You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” 

It is easy to be outraged about crystal clear racial injustice, police killings of unarmed Black folks and racist shooting sprees. But after decades of hearing and preaching the work-twice-as-hard-to-get-half-as-far gospel,. I suddenly asked myself, “isn’t this unacceptable, too?” This gospel is and always has been extremely unjust, but it is so deeply entrenched into our reality that most marginalized and minoritized folks accept it and keep pushing it. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I drew a line in the sand. I refuse to teach this lesson to my children.

Maybe I could lead an equity workshop if the outcome was a practical instructional framework and set of tools that prepared students to not just play the game, but to slay the game. I want to use my life as an example of the problem here. My education was successful on the first level of Tangible Equity, because I am blessed to have a demographics-defying story. I grew up on free and reduced lunch in Brooklyn, New York as a child of immigrants in a single-parent home with a father incarcerated for selling drugs. And I “made it” by getting into NYC’s gifted and talented program, attending one of NYC’s top specialized high schools, graduating with my computer science degree from Syracuse University, teaching, graduating top of my law school class, getting the big law firm job, founding this organization thinkLaw that is working with schools all over the country, and selling over 20,000 copies of my first book, .

But so much of me “making it” was about me learning all the things and doing all the things necessary to successfully navigate an unjust system. I get that this is the way it is. But this is not the way it ought to be. If all we focused on was playing the game, we have to ask, “at what cost?” Scholar-activist and education leader Charles Cole III’s addresses this in his book, , where he coins the jaw-dropping term “The Black Achievement Trauma Tax.” I “made it,” but I also paid this tax. I started going bald in my early twenties, I struggle with prostate and high blood pressure issues, deal with deep levels of imposter syndrome and irrational fears that my success can instantly be snatched away, and grapple with strained family and personal relationships. 

Academic success matters. So does building instructional models that give students frequent opportunities to go beyond analyzing the world as it is and push them to question what the world ought to be. It would inflict massive harm on students if we did not give the tools needed to successfully navigate our systems. But if we do not also give them the tools to question and dismantle the unjust elements of these systems, the work is not enough. 

This is why I wrote . I wanted to help educators, school and system leaders see why it was so important to shift from a conversation to something more concrete. Tangible Equity obsesses with the “how” by providing several systemic approaches all stakeholders in our school systems can use to eliminate inequities by prioritizing issues within their individual scope of power and authority. 

This book also lays out the five philosophical shifts necessary for school systems to adopt a Tangible Equity culture, such as moving the conversation from closing achievement gaps to shattering achievement ceilings. And lastly, but most importantly, Tangible Equity provides practical, easy-to-implement frameworks teachers can seamlessly integrate into their existing curriculum to deepen learning relationships, accelerate learning outcomes and hold up a mirror to our students so they can see their own power.

It is my hope that this book helps educators, school and system leaders overcome the “one more thing” syndrome that often plagues new initiatives, including equity efforts. Because you should not have an equity plan, anyhow. Equity needs to be the lens used to plan for everything. Please let the Tangible Equity approach guide the vision of your equity lens and translate your plans into reality. A reality where students will successfully play the game and have all the tools necessary to slay the game.

In the introduction, I defined equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics and zip codes to determine the success of young people inside and outside of the classroom to zero. This utopian idea sounds too pie-in-the-sky for a book called Tangible Equity. But there is a reason I set forward such an extreme, unreachable goal for equity: the process matters more than the outcome.

The Tangible Equity process is part of my personal journey. My story, as a Black child receiving free and reduced lunch from a family of immigrants with an incarcerated father, is one of bucking the highly predictive power of demographics on student success. On demographics alone, I am the type of student our educational system typically does not serve that well. Making matters more complicated, I was not just a bad first grader — I was gifted at being bad. I went above and beyond in my mischief. Looking back at my behavior as an adult, I realize that the greatest crimes I committed were not quite the acts of terror they were painted as at the time.

Apparently, I talked. A lot. To everyone. At any time. It did not matter how many days in a row I would lose recess as a punishment, I was going to talk! It is worth noting that taking recess away from a high-energy child is probably going to punish that teacher post-lunch much more than it punishes the child. I was shocked to learn as an adult that at some point, my mother told my third-grade teacher she was no longer allowed to call her to complain about my unappreciated gift of gab. She couldn’t figure out how to stop me from talking either! So deal with it! With the hundreds of keynotes, YouTube videos, podcasts, and panels I speak on each year, maybe talking in class was not really willfully defiant after all.

I was also a repeat offender of the serious felony of excessive question-asking. Because how dare I ask “why” and protest that “it makes no sense” to write the word “paint” ten times when I already knew how to spell it before class even started? My most terrible act? Fighting my teacher. Not fist-fighting or physically attacking my teacher. I’m from a Caribbean family and I learned in pre-school that my family’s old-school method of parenting and my highly-sensitive rear end were not compatible, so I was not going to go there. By fighting, I mean having the audacity to question the way a teacher was doing something, or even worse, suggesting that she ought to do that thing my way instead.

As “bad” as these so-called behavior challenges were, they all stemmed from the same root: a lack of being challenged. As you read that last sentence, can you think of a child who shares my story? Behavior challenges arising due to a lack of academic challenges? I want you to personalize this as much as possible because a major event happened in my academic career that can certainly happen for the child you are thinking of right now. That major event was my accidental identification into the New York City Department of Education’s gifted and talented program. This was the most transformational experience in my educational career. But you know what the biggest transformation was? The fact that I did not change.

I was still the same Colin. But I was no longer “bad,” I was gifted. Talking was far less offensive in a class where student-centered work, student-centered inquiry, and basically student-centered everything was simply the way it was. We were the classroom that frequently got that knock from the law-and-order teacher next door about needing to tone it down because her students were almost always at Level 0 (complete silence) while learning. And for some reason, these students then and students I see in classrooms across the country today are often asked to be at Level 0 for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learning. But that is an issue I will get to later in the book. Another transformation? Asking questions was no longer disrespectful. Asking questions was now required for what it meant to be inquisitive and curious. When Mr Eisenberg wanted me to do the required math fair project on fractions with some annoying, unoriginal recipe assignment about multiplying fractional quantities to feed the school what I was certain would be subpar cupcakes, I refused! I told him it was boring, dumb, and I did not want to do it. This would have been a no-recess-for-life moment in another classroom. But for Mr Eisenberg, he was as cool as the other side of the pillow:

            Him: “Do you have a better idea?”

        Me: “Of course I do! I play piano and I want to do a project called Fractional Music where we look at all the ways fractions show up in music with quarter notes, half notes, triplets, dotted quarter notes, etc.”

        Him: “Class, Colin had a different idea for the math project. Colin, explain what you were saying.”

         Me: “I am brilliant. Just do what I say because I am brilliant.” (paraphrased)

        Class (in unison): “Colin is brilliant! Let’s just do what he says because he is brilliant.” 

                                                                                   (100% accurate, word for word)

What could have been a moment of willful defiance in any other classroom became a moment where my advocacy and leadership was encouraged and celebrated. This memory helps me see that I omitted a huge piece of the puzzle in my zealous advocacy for a critical thinking revolution in education. There is a massive prerequisite for critical thinking to flourish in today’s education system that is almost entirely an adult issue: ensuring children have the safety to be brilliant. In many of our hyper-compliant, rules-over-everything classroom environments, I question whether these spaces are psychologically safe for students to wonder, ask, speak up, collaborate, offer alternatives, think creatively and do all the things we associate with 21st century readiness.

Culturally, my Caribbean upbringing, like the upbringing of many immigrant households and other super-strict families, was one where “because I said so” was a good-enough justification for parents to do just about anything. But when we think about the safety to be brilliant, do we ever ask ourselves why parent phrases like “don’t get smart with me” exist? It is hard for me to think that the grave consequences Black folks could face historically for “getting smart” with the wrong white person does not play a role in this type of rhetoric. I have undocumented family members. So, I am also very familiar with the guidance, said or unsaid, that children of undocumented parents receive about not shining their lights too brightly in school to avoid raising unnecessary attention.

Tangible Equity recognizes that we cannot rest on proclamations and resolutions about how much we care about and value student diversity. It makes no sense to have this beautifully diverse set of students and ask them to spend most of their time conforming to what we deem “normal.” There is no value to our students’ diversity if we do not find ways to allow them to be themselves as a regularly-scheduled aspect of their learning process.

This resonates with me because I have experienced the downside to what happens when we do not create the psychological and actual safety students need to exercise their brilliance. I lived the student experience of never having a learning space speak to the magic of my identity, and I know that I am not alone. My elementary school, self-contained gifted class bussed in some of the most brilliant children from South Brooklyn. But as amazing and transformational as this experience was, I spent years scratching my head about why three of these students did not graduate from high school. Not graduate school, not college, but high school. Mind you, my classmates and I all started high school at least one or two grade levels ahead because of high school credits we earned in middle school. Still, three did not graduate, and I was so close to being the fourth one with the 80 absences I had in ninth grade.

Why does this happen? Why do we have so many children who are rock stars in their earlier grades, but go through this process where the longer they are in school, the less they are into school? I have more questions than answers, and there are plenty of amazing scholars who research this question in more detail. I just know that the painful sight of leaving genius on the table was unbearable for me.

This sight stuck with me when I became a teacher. I was the outcomes-over-everything educator to the extreme. I was not pro-high stakes standardized exams. But I was, and still am, pro-reality. Leveraging Tangible Equity’s power must involve interrupting intergenerational poverty. As an educator, therefore, I had to ask myself a simple yes or no question: is education an important part of disrupting intergenerational poverty? Yes or No? Mind you, I’m not asking whether education is the be-all, end-all. But I doubt any reader of this book would doubt whether education was at least an important part of what it takes to interrupt intergenerational poverty.

If we believe this, we must also be able to look into our classrooms and see our students as future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. This means they have to pass tests. A common objection usually occurs around this time where someone chimes in saying “college isn’t for everyone.” When we say this, we miss the reality that the power of a thoughtfully financed college degree is undeniably transformational, particularly for women and people of color. Given the vast improvements in earnings with a four-year college degree vs anything less than this, it literally still pays to go to college. But in recognition of the growing opportunities for well-paid, high advancement potential fields that do not require a four-year college degree, we should be clear that tests are still necessary. Plumbers still have to pass tests. So do police officers. We cannot talk about Tangible Equity without talking about the outcomes needed to fulfill the promise of Tangible Equity.

Equity of outcomes sounds utopian. I am often asked, “don’t you mean to say equity of opportunity?” The answer is no. I mean to talk about the equity of outcomes. Recall that I am defining equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics on outcomes. This means that changed outcomes are the only way to show that the predictive power of demographics has been reduced. Fortunately, the equity of outcomes is tied to equity in opportunity in significant ways. I would not have received a transformational educational experience had I not been accidentally identified as gifted and bussed to a gifted and talented program outside of my neighborhood. For brilliant students with no such program within bussing distance and without transformational learning options in their neighborhood schools, they do not have this opportunity. But even if they did, opportunity itself would not be enough.

Let’s use basketball as an example. Pedro Noguera often uses an example of the National Basketball Association that I want to borrow to explain why opportunity is not enough. In 2020, although Black people represented 13.4% of the population, Black players in the NBA represent 75% of all NBA players. This statistic is often used by doubters, who say “See! Racism and poverty are just excuses. Black athletes’ dominance and prominence in basketball proves that if they cared about school as much as they cared about shooting hoops, these inequities would not exist.” But Noguera offers brilliant insights to counter this flawed reasoning that uses basketball to teach us what an equity of outcomes could look like in education.

In basketball, the rules are standardized and common to all players. The rim is always ten feet off the ground. Basketballs must be inflated between 7.5 and 8.5 pounds. The free throw line has to be set 15 feet away from the face of the backboard. The point system is standardized and common to all players. A basket in the hoop counts for two points during play. Free throws count as one point. Anyone gets three points for shooting the ball from 23’9” away from the middle of the basket. These rules are the same no matter what state you live in, what basketball court you are playing in, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level. Basketball, therefore, is a level playing field. The rules of playing the game and the rules for winning the game are always the same. I can therefore conclude that athletically gifted basketball players who do not get injured and put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at NBA success as anyone else with similar situated gifted, healthy, athletes who exert the same time, effort, and hard work.

We are nowhere close to this in education. The only universal standard in the United States’ education system is that nothing is universally standard. Outcomes must be tied to opportunity because equitable opportunity is not enough for a brilliant child who is the fourth generation of her family to grow up in an economically disadvantaged trailer park community. She can have a 4.0 grade point average and even be the valedictorian of her class. And even with this impeccable resume, she could still not be accepted to highly selective universities. As outrageous as this might sound, it is even possible that she could graduate at the top of her high school class and not meet the course requirements to enroll in her state’s flagship public university. This is not to say merit does not matter, because it does. But merit, alone, is not enough.

When we consider the extraordinary educational effort required to transcend intergenerational poverty, the time, effort, and hard work are not measured by any sort of standardized or common set of rules. Do you remember the wild Varsity Blues scandal that revealed the lengths wealthy families went through to buy their children access to universities through bogus sports accolades, extra-curricular activities, and faked test scores?7 This illegal scandal pales in comparison with the very legal system that gives the super-privileged access to (and the ability to afford) prestigious unpaid internships, and the pay-to-play social capital system from prestigious pre-kindergarten programs to Ivy League feeder high schools. These are not the same rules. This is not even the same game.

This reality is not news to those growing up in the struggle. Part of why I push so hard for equitable outcomes goes beyond knowing our students need to pass tests to be future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. Because this is so much more complicated than simply passing tests. As an immigrant, my mother was raised under the mantra that she had to work twice as hard to get half as far. She raised me to understand that as a Black boy growing up in Brooklyn, I was also required to work twice as hard to get half as far. As a father to two young children, I feel completely ashamed that at some point, I need to explain the same thing to my children. I am truly ashamed of myself.

I have dedicated so much of my life to ensuring that stories like mine are no longer the exception to the rule. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy challenging myself to successfully navigate this unfair system instead of challenging the unfair system itself. The rules for playing the game and winning the game are not standardized and common. The rules are highly dependent on what state you live in, what kind of school you go to, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level.

In education, we are still very far from being able to conclude that academically gifted students growing up in the struggle who put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at successful educational options as anyone else with similar gifts who exert the same time, effort, and hard work. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy helping children master all the tricks and shenanigans of playing an unfair game. What would happen if instead, I focused more on what it would take for them to master the skills needed to slay the game altogether.

Tangible Equity is not an either/or challenge? Academic success must be present for Tangible Equity to exist. But as long as a child’s race, income, and zip code translates to requiring extraordinary levels of academic success to reach ordinary outcomes, academic success is not enough. We need academic success and educational justice. Educational justice would mean getting our system to be similar to the standardized and common rules of basketball. The math teacher in me recognized the need for a formula to describe what I am trying to say here in a way that breaks it down more clearly in Figure 1.1.

Think about how often we celebrate stories of children who grow up in the struggle, overcome all sorts of unfair obstacles, and “make it.” The Tangible Equity Equation helps us rethink what it means to truly “make it.”

I recall my experience as a Computer Science major selected for the amazing INROADS program. This non-profit organization’s vision of diversifying Corporate America is 50 years strong, and I was proud to go to New York City and meet lots of other Black and Brown college students aspiring for internships that would put us on the path for lucrative, successful careers in Fortune 500 companies. I remember attending a workshop on how to dress appropriately.

All of us college students had our most professional clothing on, but I only heard what they told us young men because young women received a different workshop. I learned that facial hair was a no-go. I learned that bright-colored shirts underneath my suit were loud and improper. I learned that cornrows were unprofessional. Wearing my hair in twists or locks? Completely unacceptable. I learned how to sit. I learned how to look someone in the eyes and give a firm handshake. How to speak, sit, question, and answer professionally. I could only imagine the kind of lessons the young women learned about how not to dress and how not to style their hair. By the end of the day, I learned the hidden curriculum of how to succeed in Corporate America.

The most important lesson of this hidden curriculum was that important pieces of me needed to stay hidden. The two Black men presenting this workshop were passionate, funny, cool, and caring. They wanted nothing more than to open doors for us, doors that would not be opened if we could not master all the necessary ways-of-being that make these lucrative careers accessible to Black and Brown college students. We had to be “professional.” As uneasy as I felt about this, I carried this same mindset into my classroom. I spoke frequently to my students about code-switching so they understood that when they were in “professional” settings they needed to act differently. Speak “properly.” Act “appropriately.” Because again, if we want to realize the potentially transformational impact of education for students most impacted by the ills of racial discrimination and poverty, access to successful career paths matters.

Something always bothered me about my INROADS experience. If diversity is such an asset to Corporate America, why would they require folks from diverse backgrounds to conform in such an extreme fashion? How could they realize the benefits of my diverse perspective and unique understandings if I am asked to hide so much of myself to even gain access to the entry level? It is even more bothersome when I realize that I attended this INROADS workshop in the year 2000. In the 20-year period after that workshop, Fortune 500 companies have had only 16 Black CEOs, 36 Latinx CEOs, ten East Asian CEOs, and 22 South Asian CEOs. With only 72 white women holding at the helm during this same time period, leading in Corporate America is still clearly a white man’s game.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong about teaching our young people the hidden curriculum to successfully navigate an unjust system. But at what point do we teach them how to use their access to the system to question it, reimagine it, and dismantle it altogether? From an educational perspective, it is hard to think about classrooms that equip young people with the tools to lead, innovate, and break what needs to be broken when students still get in trouble for asking too many questions. I cannot envision a dismantling of unjust systems when it is still far too common for classroom teachers to punish student leadership and advocacy as “willful defiance.”

I understand and value my mother’s journey and why working twice as hard to get half as far mattered so much to her life that she had to pass that lesson onto me. I understand and value the journey of the gracious Black men who took a Saturday break from their challenging positions in Corporate America to school us to the tricks we needed to master to access these lucrative career fields. But the work of reducing the impact of demographics on the predictability of outcomes requires that we put equal effort into helping young people know what it takes to play the game as we do equipping them with the transformational tools needed to slay these unjust games altogether.

“We keep cohorts together during lunch, so if you’re in a mask-required classroom, you’re eating as a group — socially distanced,” said Superintendent Mark Hansen. “We’re keeping those bubbles pretty tight.”

Until now, elementary schoolers couldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine. No longer. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday endorsed the unanimous vote of a CDC vaccine advisory panel recommending Pfizer-BioNTech’s pediatric coronavirus vaccine for use in children ages 5 to 11. That means as many as 28 million children can begin receiving shots this week. 

But just as parents split on masks, they’re also divided on vaccines: Nearly half say they may pass on vaccinating their children for now, mostly because they aren’t especially worried their children will get seriously sick from coronavirus — even as doctors warn the virus will become endemic and virtually unavoidable in coming years, much like the annual flu.

That could set up a tense confrontation in coming months between schools and parents as public health officials push to make the shots part of mandatory school vaccine regimens. And as with the divide over masking, social distancing, and other practices, it could also change how schools operate, as pro-vaccine parents insist on keeping their kids apart from unvaccinated classmates.

Even requiring the vaccine for enrollment might not settle the dispute: An Oct. 23 poll found that 46 percent of parents simply wouldn’t send their child to school if COVID vaccinations are required.

In southern California’s ABC Unified School District near Los Angeles, Superintendent Mary Sieu said many cautious families are already hesitant to send their children back to school — about 700 have remained in remote instruction programs this fall. Overall, she said, the district has lost more than 1,400 students over the past two years, forcing her to consider closing one of her schools next year.

“I just feel that a lot of people are afraid of coming back to school,” she said.

While suggests that children remain at a lower risk than most adults of contracting serious illness due to the virus, outbreaks happen. In , conducted in early October, nearly one in three parents said their child’s schooling had been disrupted by COVID-19.

“Look at your ZIP code and see what your vaccination rates are, and your infection rates are,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “That’s going to tell you the quality of education that those kids are getting in those schools. If a child isn’t in school consistently, they’re not going to be getting the quality education that they need. That’s the bottom line.”

Domenech, a former superintendent in Fairfax County, Va., said he fears that the vaccination gap taking shape between districts could replicate the existing achievement gap. Recent research in has found, for instance, that communities with high poverty rates had COVID-19 infection rates in 2020 that were two to three times as high as those in wealthier areas.

“What we’ve seen is that the areas that are suffering the most in terms of lack of a vaccine and high infection rates are exactly [high-poverty] areas, where families of color are afraid to get their kids vaccinated and are afraid to send their kids to school,” Domenech said. 

‘Ripe for a contentious situation’

Though they typically get a raft of vaccinations just to attend school, children’s COVID-19 vaccination rates have already shown evidence of parental hesitation. In September, the CDC said just of children ages 12 to 17 had gotten at least one shot and 32 percent had completed the two-shot dose by July 31. That’s more than two months after the FDA granted it emergency use authorization — and more than seven months after it first approved the vaccine for adolescents aged 16 to 17. 

In Marshalltown Community School District, northeast of Des Moines, Iowa, as many as 90 percent of school employees are vaccinated, said Superintendent Theron Schutte. But just 40 to 50 percent of eligible students have been vaccinated so far. For the youngest eligible students, ages 12 to 13, the vaccination rate is closer to 40 percent. “My guess is that a lesser percentage of the younger kids’ parents will probably get them vaccinated,” he said. “I’m hoping that more of them do.”

Dr. William Raszka, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, said the risk-benefit analysis for vaccination “is just so overwhelming. I have trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t get vaccinated at this point in time.”

So far, he said, life-threatening illnesses associated with the vaccines “are awfully rare.” One of the most common reactions to Pfizer’s vaccine — the only one approved for emergency use in children — is “a sore arm,” he said.

From the beginning of the pandemic, said Schutte, “We operated on the premise that we know COVID’s going to come into the school. There’s no way we can know whether it is or isn’t coming in – but what we can control is its opportunity to spread.”

He couldn’t immediately predict how his school board would respond to the recent FDA approval of childhood COVID vaccines. “They’re a reflection of our community. So if our community is split on whether we should or shouldn’t require vaccinations, I think it’s always going to be ripe for a contentious situation.”

Mandates are years off

Once COVID vaccines earn full FDA approval, states could move quickly to mandate them for school attendance — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has he plans to add it to the list of vaccinations required to attend school in-person for middle and high school grades, as with vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, and the like. “We want our kids back in school without episodic closures,” on Oct. 27.

Speaking after he received a COVID booster shot in Oakland, Newsom said children already receive 10 other vaccinations in order to attend school. “The politics around this are disturbing to me. Lives are quite literally at risk.”

Leaders in four of the state’s — Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Oakland — have already said students must get a first shot of the vaccine or attend school virtually from home in January.

But former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb in October predicted that any COVID vaccination mandate for school attendance would be “a couple of years away, perhaps a little longer,” for children ages 12 to 17, and even further for children ages 5 to 11. Appearing on CBS’s , Gottlieb said CDC has typically taken several years to add most childhood vaccines to their immunization schedule. 

That will leave the decision for now to parents like Debra Garrett, a mother of four children, all of them under 12, in Troy, N.Y. 

Garrett said she’s vaccinated, but added, “I’m not really sure about my kids getting it done right now.” Parents need more information about how the vaccines affect children, she said. “It’s all brand new. We don’t know how anybody’s going to respond to it.”

That sensitivity is heightened, Garrett said, because she grew up Black in a country with a history of mistreating Black research subjects in the name of medicine. “I just don’t want my child to be looked at as ‘the tester,’” she said.

Garrett’s four children all attend , part of the Uncommon Schools network of charter schools in six Northeastern cities. She said the school has given parents of students 12 and up the choice to vaccinate. 

But if Uncommon makes vaccination mandatory, “that’s when it’s going to be tricky — and it’s going to get tough for the school, and for parents. I just feel like there is going to be some kind of push and pull on both ends. I can’t say whether one is right or wrong, but what I do know for certain is that we have to educate people in order for them to be able to fully get it and fully feel like, ‘They’re not just pricking my kid.’”

Many parents will likely find themselves agreeing with Garrett. In a June survey , as the more-contagious Delta variant began to take hold in the U.S., the parents of just 51 percent of students under age 18 said they’d “probably” or “definitely” have their child vaccinated, with vaccine hesitancy much higher for parents of younger children. They’re far less likely to say they’ll vaccinate their kids compared to parents of high schoolers — 46 percent vs. 59 percent. 

Political party affiliation also plays a role: Republican-identifying parents of 35 percent of children say they’ll vaccinate their kids, while that figure is much higher for Democrats at 66 percent.

A September Gallup poll suggests that of parents of children under 12 would get them an available vaccine. Parents’ own vaccination status strongly predicted their attitude toward their kids: 82 percent of parents who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 said they’d vaccinate their child, while just 1 percent who don’t plan to get vaccinated themselves planned to vaccinate their kids. 

Dr. Benjamin Lee, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and associate professor at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital, said the findings are cause for concern.

“It’s discouraging to me to see how many parents have already sort of expressed that they don’t want to get their children vaccinated as soon as vaccines are available,” he said.

While it’s natural for parents to hold out a high threshold for vaccine safety, he said, no vaccine carries zero risk. “And that includes all of the vaccines that we use routinely” for both children and adults. “In all scenarios, the data are so overwhelming that risks from vaccination are far lower than the risks of natural infection.”

Schutte, the Iowa superintendent, said it’s true that children are less likely than adults to get seriously ill due to COVID, but he urged parents to see the bigger picture: Even if kids don’t get sick, they could take the virus home. “We have a lot of multi-generation (families) living under the same roof in our community,” he said. “So it’s not only the parents, but the grandparents, and maybe in some cases, the great-grandparents.” 

The longer it takes to get most people vaccinated, he said, “the longer the situation is going to stretch out.”

In reality, said Lee, the Vermont pediatrician, SARS-CoV-2 “is going to be with us from now on. Any chance to completely eradicate this virus is long gone. And this will become an endemic virus,” like the annual flu, sticking around for years. Because it’s so contagious, he said, “what we should recognize is that all of us are going to get this virus. And the question is: Under what conditions or terms do we want to catch it?”

So far, the only statistically significant side effect of the vaccine is a mild case of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, in adolescent males. But it’s enough to prompt physicians in a few countries to give young people of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, offering at least partial protection from the virus without this side effect. 

“We should acknowledge that that is a known risk of vaccination,” Lee said. “However, when you look at the risk of myocarditis from vaccine versus the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19, the risks are far higher of catching myocarditis if you catch COVID-19 than from the vaccine itself.” 

Also, he noted, “almost without exception” the myocarditis associated with the vaccine is “a very, very mild illness that completely resolves.” COVID-19, by contrast, carries a higher risk of severe outcomes. 

Lee also warned against taking to heart the many unsupported claims about the vaccines’ quick development and emergency approval, claims that might turn parents, like Garrett, off to vaccination. “When all is said and done, these will end up being the most heavily scrutinized vaccines in terms of safety perhaps ever, compared to any vaccine that we’ve ever used.”

The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.” Various iterations of the exam, each tracking different subjects and age groups over several years, have now shown flat or falling numbers. 

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. In a Wednesday media call, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

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“I asked them to go back and check because I wanted to be sure,” Carr recalled. “I’ve been reporting these results for…decades, and I’ve never reported a decline like this.”

The eight-year gap between 2020’s exam and its predecessor, in 2012, is the longest interval that has ever passed between successive rounds of the long-term trend assessment; a round that was originally scheduled for 2016 was for budgetary reasons. Given the length of time between exams and the general trend of increasing scores over multiple decades, observers could have expected to see at least some upward movement.

Instead, both reading and math results for nine-year-olds have made no headway; scores were flat for every ethnic and gender subgroup of younger children — with the exception of nine-year-old girls, who scored five points worse on math than they had in 2012. Their dip in performance produced a gender gap for the age group that did not exist on the test’s last iteration.

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

In keeping with previous NAEP releases, the scores also showed significant drops in performance among low-performing test-takers. Most disturbing: Declines among 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile of reading mean that the group’s literacy performance is not significantly improved compared with 1971, when the test was first administered. In all other age/subject configurations, students placing at all levels of the achievement spectrum have gained ground over the last half-century.

“It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research.  

Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the reversals in math performance were particularly disappointing because they defied NAEP’s recent trends. For roughly the last three decades, even as politicians and education policy mavens have emphasized literacy instruction, comparatively rapid growth in math scores have made that subject “the star of the show,” Loveless said. 

“Now it almost appears as if those gains are now unwinding, they’re going away. And I don’t think anyone has been able to identify why that’s happening.” 

Bohrnstedt who has followed NAEP for much of his career, said the declines in 13-year-old math performance was notable for another reason: The long-term trends assessment, which been administered by NCES for a half-century, differs substantively from from the content found on other versions of the test. Reflecting the way math was taught in the 1970s, the assessment features more naked math problems and less complex problem-solving than the so-called “main NAEP,” which is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years.

“For the most part, it’s a more basic kind of math than is being taught today, so it’s disappointing to see that we’re still seeing this poor performance by large percentages of our children,” Bohrnstedt said.

Overall, Loveless said, the combination of flat scores on the biennial “main NAEP” and significant declines on this version of the test indicates that American math instruction changed direction over the last decade in a way that may have stymied learning. While hesitating to blame the Common Core curricular reforms that spread during the Obama administration — he recently wrote on the oft-maligned learning standards — Loveless called for further research to investigate possible causes.

“To me, it suggests that beginning a decade or so ago, something went wrong with how we teach math to younger students,” he said. “My own hypothesis is that an emphasis on conceptual understanding has gone too far, that without computational skills to anchor math concepts, students get lost.”

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a defender of the Common Core standards, said that the results could reflect an alternative theory: That the social and financial overhang of the Great Recession profoundly disrupted skills formation for children who are now reaching their teen years. 

“Assuming that Common Core wasn’t implemented until about 2013, the 13-year-olds wouldn’t have been exposed to it until about second grade,” Petrilli wrote in an email. “The nine-year-olds, on the other hand, got it from kindergarten. So why are the 9 year olds holding steady?”

‘Very Discouraging’

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the release is the continued divergence in scores between students at the top and bottom of the performance distribution — a phenomenon that Commissioner Carr called “well-established” during Wednesday’s media session. 

Throughout all four age and subject configurations, when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

In nine-year-old reading, where average scores remained unchanged from 2012 — and scores for the top-performing students ticked up a point — those for students scoring at the 10th percentile fell seven points. The same students lost six points in math, while 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile dropped five points in reading and an astonishing 12 points in math.

Even comparatively low-performers at higher levels lost ground in some respects. Nine-year-olds marked at the 25th percentile dropped four points in math, while 13-year-olds at the 25th and 50th percentiles lost eight and five points, respectively, in the subject. 

“It’s very discouraging to see this steep drop at the 10th percentile in both reading and mathematics, but especially in mathematics,” Bohrnstedt concluded. “It also confirms what we’ve seen with respect to the high percentage of kids performing at the ‘below basic’ level in the main NAEP.” 

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

“These scores represent the last valid, national assessment of student achievement pre-pandemic. For that reason, they will take on historical significance as a baseline measure when future analysts attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”