The scale of the disparity has fueled intense debate. Some policymakers argue the gap is primarily the result of systemic racism or unequal school resources. But does the data back up this notion?  Recently, I to try and determine what factors are truly driving this gap in the Badger State. 

This new analysis of Wisconsin’s statewide Forward Exam indicates that a significant share of the gap is driven not by racism, but by factors strongly correlated with race: especially poverty, disability status and family stability. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in reality it is key for figuring out how best to address the problem.  

Common policy solutions often focus on skin color as the driver of disparities. For instance, when he was state superintendent, now Gov. Tony Evers that one cause of the racial achievement gap is that too many people who work in schools “look like me.” Current Superintendent Jill Underly that “culturally responsive teaching” and diversification of the education workforce are among the keys to addressing the achievement gap.  

But it’s not clear those steps are the right approach. Using data from the 2022-23 edition of the state’s Forward Exam, I conducted what is known as a mediation analysis. Mediation analysis attempts to figure out how or why something causes an effect by identifying the middle step —the “go-between” factor — that explains the relationship. The results of one such mediation analysis with poverty as the go-between is shown below. 

The direct pathway shows that as the percentage of African American students in a school goes from 0 to 100 percent, the proficiency rate on the Forward Exam would be expected to decline by about 39%. However, there is the “behind the scenes” path to consider as well. A school with 100% African American students would be expected to have poverty rates 69% higher than a school with no African American students, and high poverty is in turn correlated with about a 41% reduction in proficiency rates. The analysis shows schools with higher percentages of African American students also tend to have far higher poverty rates, which then play a major role in academic outcomes.

Decades of research show that economic disadvantage strongly affects academic performance. Students growing up in poverty often face barriers that can hinder learning, from unstable housing and food insecurity to limited access to books, educational materials and early learning opportunities. In Wisconsin, poverty rates among African American families are particularly high. More than in the state live below the poverty line, placing Wisconsin among the highest in the nation on that measure.

Another factor influencing achievement gaps is disability identification. African American students are identified for special education services at higher rates than their white peers in both as a whole, particularly in categories that rely heavily on subjective judgment, such as emotional disturbance or intellectual disability. Students receiving special education services on average score lower on standardized tests and have lower graduation rates than students without disabilities.

 The Forward Exam analysis found that disability status explains a smaller but still measurable portion of the achievement gap. About 3.6% of the relationship between race and proficiency was mediated by differences in disability rates.

Some influences on student outcomes cannot be directly measured in the school-level data that we have access to. One of the most significant is family structure. Research that children raised in two-parent households tend to experience stronger academic outcomes and fewer behavioral challenges. Two parents simply have more time and resources to devote to a child’s development, from supervising homework to reading together at home.

In Wisconsin, however, the rate of married African American adults is the lowest in the country—, well below the national average of 31% for African Americans nationwide. Although the precise impact cannot be quantified in school testing data, decades of social science research suggest family stability plays a meaningful role in shaping educational outcomes.

Survey data from the in 2020 — the most recent year for which there was a large enough sample size for each group in Wisconsin — shows that African American families in Wisconsin are less likely to read regularly to young children than white or Hispanic families. About 55% of Black families report reading to young children fewer than four days per week, compared with 33% of white families. It is important to note that this factor is likely also correlated with poverty, but teasing out any independent effect between the two is not possible with existing data. 

Those early literacy experiences matter. Foundational reading skills built before kindergarten strongly influence later academic success across subjects.

Wisconsin’s disparities are real and deeply concerning. But the research indicates that race itself is not the primary driver of the state’s academic divide. Poverty, disability status, and family stability  together explain a large share of the gap.

Strategies focused narrowly on racial identity — such as diversity training or race-based programs — may miss the deeper issues shaping student outcomes. Other approaches, such as  focusing aggressively on early literacy, have shown progress in other states. Mississippi, as has been well-documented in The74, dramatically improved reading outcomes through policies aligned with the “science of reading,” which emphasize systematic instruction in phonics, vocabulary and comprehension.  A significant achievement gap still exists in Mississippi, but at 25 points it is significantly smaller than Wisconsin’s, even as proficiency levels rise in the state across the board. 

Closing the gap will likely require policies that address the broader social and economic realities affecting students’ lives: reducing poverty, strengthening families, improving early literacy and targeting support to disadvantaged students regardless of race. Reduction will also require a focus on what can work in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where about 44% of the state’s African American students attend school. This district has been plagued by decades of and across the racial spectrum.

If Wisconsin hopes to move up from the bottom of the nation’s achievement-gap rankings, solutions will need to look beyond race, and stop accepting the soft bigotry of low expectations. 

SPRINGFIELD — The first school report card issued under Illinois’ new, revised scoring system shows higher student proficiency rates in English language arts and math, but continuing disparities between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups.

The 2025 report card shows more than half of all students (52.4%) scored proficient or better on English language arts exams, but only 38% met grade-level proficiency standards for math.

Those numbers are based on standardized tests that students from third grade through high school took in the spring 2025 semester. They reflect a the Illinois State Board of Education approved in August that established new benchmarks for proficiency.

“Illinois’ previous benchmarks for English language arts proficiency were the most restrictive in the country, resulting in the mislabeling of high achieving college ready students as being not proficient,” State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said during a media briefing on the report card.

“This meant that the students who were succeeding in school passing advanced placement and dual credit courses, taking leadership roles within their schools, enrolling in college and still being labeled as not proficient on our state assessment.”

The change in scoring systems was expected to result in more students being classified as proficient in reading and math, but fewer in science. And that is what happened.

In 2024, only 39% of students who were tested scored proficient or better in English language arts and only 28% did so in math. On the science assessment, which is given to fifth and eighth grade students, the proficiency rate dropped from 53.1% in 2024 to 44.6% in 2025.

But Sanders said the 2025 scores cannot really be compared with previous years because the year-over-year changes are mostly the result of the new scoring system, not a change in how well students performed. However, he also said there were other indications that student performance did improve in 2025.

“They would have increased if we had kept the same cut scores,” he said. “However, we changed the cut scores, so we can’t tell you what they would have been. But we know they would have improved.”

Performance gaps

All states have issued annual report cards since the 2002-2003 school year when they were mandated by the federal law known as the . They were intended as a tool to hold districts and individual schools accountable for bringing all students up to a level of proficiency in reading and math, and for improving their high school graduation rates.

That also meant closing the persistent achievement gaps between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups of students.

But the law also gave states flexibility to establish their own standards for proficiency and to develop their own tests to measure student performance.

In Illinois, most students in grades 3-8 take the for English language arts and Math. Students in fifth and eighth grade also take the Illinois Science Assessment.

At the , ninth and 10th grade students take the PreACT Secure exam. High school juniors and some high school seniors take the ACT with Writing, which includes tests in English, math, reading, science and writing.

In Illinois, the 2025 report card shows there are still wide gaps in proficiency rates between white, Black and Hispanic students in both English language arts and math.

Among fourth graders, for example, 55.4% of white students scored proficient or better in math, compared to 28.8% of Hispanic students and 17.4% of Black students.

Among eighth graders, two-thirds of white students (66.6%) scored proficient compared to just over one-third (36.7%) for Black students and 45.4% for Hispanic students.

The 2025 report card also includes data for the first time for a newly categorized ethnic group — “Middle Eastern or North African,” abbreviated MENA in the data files.

Among MENA students, the 2025 report card showed a 53.9% proficiency rate in fourth-grade English language arts and a 42.3% proficiency rate for eighth-grade math.

Graduation rates

One area where Illinois has made progress in closing achievement gaps is high school graduation rates.

In 2025, the statewide four-year graduation rate reached a 15-year high of 89%. That was up 3.4 percentage points from a decade earlier. But the rate was also up across all demographic groups, and the gap between those groups narrowed significantly.

In 2015, the four-year graduation rate among white students was 90.2%. That was 14.7 points higher than the Black graduation rate, and 9.5 points higher than the rate for Hispanic students.

In 2025, the graduation rate for white students inched up to 92.4%, but it also rose among other groups. As a result, the gap between white and Black students narrowed to just 9.5 percentage points, and the gap between white students and Hispanic students narrowed to just 6 points.

Sanders gave credit for much of that improvement to the Evidence-Based Funding formula, which lawmakers passed in 2017. That law called for adding at least $300 million per year in new funding each year to the state’s K-12 education budget.

Since then, Sanders said, Illinois has added more than $3 billion in EBF funding to the budget, with the bulk of that money targeted toward the least-funded school and earmarked for things specifically designed to improve student outcomes.

“Districts have used these resources to expand interventions like summer school,” he said. “They’ve added mentoring, credit recovery courses, transition programs for English and math, and they broadened access to career and technical education, advanced placement, international baccalaureate and dual credit. These opportunities keep students engaged and on track for success.”

Other findings

The report card also contains data on several other measures of the state’s education system.

The number of full-time equivalent teachers working in Illinois reached a new high of 137,899, an increase of 687 from the previous year. The teaching workforce also became slightly more racially diverse, with 21.1% of them classified as nonwhite, compared to 20.4% last year. But total student enrollment decreased slightly to just under 1.85 million.

Chronic absenteeism declined for the third consecutive year in 2025 but still remained high at 25.4%. Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the days in a school year, regardless of whether the absence is excused or not. The rate shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a peak of 29.8% in 2022.

is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Inserting brief quiz questions into an online lecture can boost learning and may reduce racial achievement gaps, even when students are tuning in remotely in a distracting environment.

Statewide, and here in Los Angeles, Asian students who completed California’s 2024 assessments showed higher levels of proficiency in reading and math, compared to other racial groups. 

Asian kids’ dominance of California’s state tests echoes the results of national exams, where the same, long-standing trend of academic achievement by these students holds true in other cities and states across the country. 

So, why do Asian kids do so well on those exams? In my experience, the reasons are complicated.       

I grew up in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley, where I attended high-performing public schools that enrolled a lot of Asian students like me. We consistently outperformed other schools and student groups across the state.

But here’s what the high test scores didn’t show. Many of us poured countless hours into our studies and extracurriculars. Many of us were also privileged enough to have tutors. 

Growing up, I had classmates who started their academic after-school programs in elementary school. And although not every family in the neighborhood had a tutor, education was definitely one of the top priorities for the majority in my community. 

We were in a high-pressure environment, and assimilation meant performing well. In high school, students engaged in afterschool activities, such as sports and academic clubs. Some parents paid tens of thousands on college counselors. 

All this pressure, however difficult at times, created “success,” which ultimately meant being accepted to reputable universities. Our graduating class had around 250 students. One of our most notable statistics for college admissions was 26 confirmed acceptances to U.C. Berkeley. 

However, a highly competitive atmosphere like this can exact psychological and social costs. 

Many students around me growing up were constantly stressed. It felt like college admissions were the be-all end-all. It shouldn’t be that way.

My mom and dad immigrated from China, and I am forever grateful for their dedication and sacrifices. One way to show my appreciation and that their efforts weren’t wasted was through my academic and professional achievements. 

It’s all part of the American Dream.

However, that pressure to succeed can also hold a dark side. 

A University of Michigan research project called found Asian students “often experience extreme pressure and stress.” We may also feel “the responsibility and guilt […] for [our] parents’ sacrifices.”

This is what academic achievement costs for some Asian students, and also probably what it costs some other kids from other ethnic groups. 

However, not every student has access to the same opportunities as me. And not everyone’s experience was like mine. 

While my school growing up provided structure, support, and community, many other students in L.A. are navigating underfunded schools. And often those students also have less academic support and face greater socio-economic instability. 

��’v��&�Բ�����;worked as a tutor in South Central L.A., so I’ve seen some of these issues first-hand. 

I’ve worked with fourth graders struggling to read. It’s not that those students lacked the ability to learn. It’s that they’ve been disadvantaged by systematic issues and other external factors they can’t control.

But I believe that education is the great equalizer. And I think that we are making progress on fulfilling that potential. Organizations such as Teach for America, Khan Academy, Head Start, and PeerForward are excellent starting points in the ultimate goal of closing the achievement gap. 

It sounds simple, but it’s not. Educators and policymakers everywhere need to ensure every student has an equal opportunity to a quality education. It’s a multifaceted issue.

That’s why our conversation should not center solely on why Asian students score higher than other kids. We should also be talking about how to ensure that all students have all the resources they need to succeed.

Before fourth and eighth graders took the 2024 NAEP math assessment, they were asked how many days of school they had missed the previous month. Forty-nine percent of fourth-graders who would score at the 75^th percentile or higher on the test had missed no days the previous month, compared with 26% of those scoring below the 25^th percentile.

Equally striking, 45% of students in the bottom quartile reported missing three or more days of school in the previous month compared with just 20% of students in the top quartile. And at the extreme ends of the absenteeism spectrum, 7% of the lowest-performing eighth graders on the NAEP math test reported missing more than 10 days of school in the previous month, compared with just 1% of top scorers.

Correlation strongly suggests causation. It’s impossible to prove that students performed better because they were in school every day, but it’s the logical conclusion.

A detailed comparison of state test scores and student absenteeism by Rhode Island education officials suggests as much. They found that just 10% of students who had been chronically absent for three consecutive years scored proficient on Rhode Island’s own standardized math tests in 2024, and 13% were proficient in reading. In contrast, 40% of students who attended regularly were proficient in math and 38% were proficient in reading. As on the state’s dashboard, “long-term chronic absenteeism has a compounding negative impact on student performance.”

Attendance influenced achievement significantly even among students facing the many challenges of poverty. While it’s hardly surprising that only 18% of Rhode Island’s low-income students who attended school regularly were proficient in reading and math last year, just 11% of those who were chronically absent were proficient in reading, and only 9% met that bar in math.

The upshot is there needs to be a relentless focus at the state and district levels — beyond the work of individual schools — on getting every student in school every day. Transparency is essential to progress. Rhode Island is the only state that publishes detailed, real-time attendance data for every one of its public schools, allowing officials to correlate state test scores and absenteeism.  More than a dozen states have yet to release attendance data from the 2023-24 school year, making it difficult for policymakers to even know which absenteeism problems they need to solve.

The quality of instructional materials, tutoring programs or new technology tools can’t make much of a difference if students aren’t in school.

NAEP also offers insight into why achievement gaps are widening. Survey results show increasingly lower expectations and higher absenteeism rates among both students and their teachers. Nearly 60% of high-performing students said they were asked more than five times to write long answers to questions on tests or assignments that involved reading last school year, compared with only 32% of low-performing students.

No one should dismiss these results or try to explain them away. American students are not receiving the educational opportunities they deserve or the preparation they need to succeed in an increasingly complex society and changing economy. The current system is failing them, and the consequences will be severe and long-lasting.

Our analysis in September was clear: Unless something changes dramatically, this trend will continue for years. The current struggles are not just pandemic-induced: There has been little sustained progress in student achievement since the early 2000s; in fact, in some areas, progress has backslid. Some states and cities have managed to make progress, and they may offer useful lessons, but the overall picture remains bleak. There are no quick fixes, but there are certainly steps that can and must be taken.

The first is acknowledging the scale of the problem and responding with urgency. Policymakers and educators can implement evidence-based strategies to help students recover. We and others have consistently documented the positive impact of:

• High-dosage tutoring;
  
• Summer school programs;
  
• High-quality curriculum;
  
• Excellent teachers.

None of these are fundamentally partisan issues. Red and blue states alike are adopting these interventions, and they should be implemented everywhere. These are the basics. Are the decisionmakers who fail to put these proven interventions into place truly serious about solving the problems at hand?

Let’s be honest: The NAEP scores make their own case that what’s needed are fundamental reforms — not just tinkering around the edges. This is not just about playing catch-up from the pandemic; it is about redesigning an education system that has been failing too many students for too long. This means embracing bold, evidence-based reforms, even when they are politically difficult:

• Expand high-performing public charter schools. The best charters are delivering results for the students that NAEP shows are falling farthest behind. The nation needs more of them.
  
• Redesign high school. The current model is outdated and ineffective for too many students. The nation needs schools that are more relationship-based, relevant and engaging.
  
• Leverage emerging technologies. Tools driven by artificial intelligence that support personalized learning, tutoring, curriculum and assessment can help ensure all students get the support they need while empowering educators to be more effective.
  
• Provide families with honest data. Parents deserve to know how their child is really doing, not just receive meaningless report cards that obscure academic struggles.
  
• Hold adults accountable for student outcomes. Education leaders and policymakers must be responsible for results through thoughtful and fair accountability mechanisms.

Every city and state in this country has work to do, and that has been clear for a long time. The inertia, political resistance and implementation fatigue that have held back so many students must be confronted head-on. Now is the time for leadership.

If you have been paying attention, the NAEP results should not shock you. What should shock you is that education systems are not, on the whole, changing course. Isn’t the very definition of insanity doing the same things while expecting different results?

The data are clear. Young kids are not catching up. Gaps were widening even before the pandemic. The crisis is real, and it is not going away on its own. Believing the NAEP results means acting on them. Hope is not a strategy. Strong leadership, political courage and a commitment to evidence-based reforms are the only paths forward.

Governors, state chiefs, mayors and federal officials must commit to the long, politically challenging work of ensuring that all American students can realize their full potential. If they do not, this will be yet another opportunity squandered — and the cost will be measured in the futures of millions of children.

Across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas, American achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling ever since. 

Will the new NAEP scores coming out this week show a halt to those trends? We shall see. But even if those scores indicate a slight rebound off the COVID-era lows, policymakers should seek to understand what caused the previous decade’s decline. 

There’s a lot of blame to go around, from cellphones and social media to federal accountability policies. But before getting into theories and potential solutions, let’s start with the data.

Until about a decade ago, student achievement scores were rising. Researchers at Education Next found those gains were across racial and economic lines, and achievement gaps were closing. But then something happened, and scores started to fall. Worse, they fell faster for lower-performing students, and achievement gaps started to grow.

This pattern shows up on test after test. Last year, we looked at eighth grade math scores and found growing achievement gaps in 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 large cities with sufficient data.

But it’s not just math, and it’s not just NAEP. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has the same trend in reading, history and civics. Tests like and are showing it too. And, as Malkus found in released late last year, this is a uniquely American problem. The U.S. now leads the world in achievement gap growth.

What’s going on? How can students here get back on track? Malkus addresses these questions in a  out last week and makes the point that any honest reckoning with the causes and consequences of these trends must account for the timing, scope and magnitude of the changes.

Theory #1: It’s accountability

As I argued last year, my top explanation has been the erosion of federal accountability policies. In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. That timing fits, and it makes sense that easing up on accountability, especially for low-performing students, led to achievement declines among those same kids.

However,  there’s one problem with this explanation: American adults appear to be suffering from similar achievement declines. In results that came out late last year, the average of Americans ages 16 to 65 fell in both literacy and numeracy on the globally administered Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. 

And even among American adults, achievement gaps are growing. The exam’s results are broken down into six performance levels. On the numeracy portion, for example, the share of Americans scoring at the two highest levels rose two points, from 10% to 12%, while the percentage of those at the bottom two levels rose from 29% to 34%. In literacy, the percentage of Americans scoring at the top two levels fell from 14% to 13%, while the lowest two levels rose from 19% to 28%. 

These results caused Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, to , “There’s a dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills.” Carr could have made the same comment about K-12 education —  except that these results can’t be explained by school-related causes.

Theory #2: It’s the phones

The rise of smartphones and social media, and the decline in , could be contributing to these achievement declines. Psychologist Jean Twenge 2012 as the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone, which is about when achievement scores started to decline. This theory also does a better job of explaining why Americans of all ages are scoring lower on achievement tests.

But there are some holes in this explanation. For one, why are some of the biggest declines seen in the youngest kids? Are that many 9-year-olds on Facebook or Instagram? Second, why are the lowest performers suffering the largest declines in achievement? Attention deficits induced by phones and screens should affect all students in similar ways, and yet the pattern shows the lowest performers are suffering disproportionately large drops.

But most fundamentally, why is this mostly a U.S. trend? Smartphones and social media are global phenomena, and yet in Australia, England, Italy, Japan and Sweden have all risen over the last decade. A couple of other countries have seen some small declines (like Finland and Denmark), but no one has else seen declines like we’ve had here in the States.

Other theories: Immigration, school spending or the Common Core

Other theories floating around have at least some kernels of truth. Immigration could explain some portion of the declines, although it’s not clear why those would be affecting scores only now. The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has partly blamed America’s “lost decade” on economic factors, but school spending has rebounded sharply in recent years without similar gains in achievement. Others, including historian and the Pioneer Institute’s , blame the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. But non-Common Core states suffered similar declines, and scores have also dropped in non-Common Core subjects.

Note that COVID is not part of my list. It certainly exacerbated achievement declines and reset norms within schools, but achievement scores were already falling well before it hit America’s shores.

Instead of looking for one culprit, it could be a combination of these factors. It could be that the rise in technology is diminishing Americans’ attention spans and stealing their focus from books and other long-form written content. Meanwhile, schools have been de-emphasizing basic skills, easing up on behavioral and making it easier to pass courses. At the same time, policymakers in parts of the country have holding schools accountable for the performance of all students.

That’s a potent mix of factors that could explain these particular problems. It would be helpful to have more research to pinpoint problems and solutions, but if this diagnosis is correct, it means students, teachers, parents and policymakers all have a role to play in getting achievement scores back on track. 

The Iowa Department of Education has identified 377 schools that are in need of targeted support and improvement because of performance and achievement gaps among some student groups.

The schools were identified as part of the  for the 2023-2024 school year posted Tuesday. The profile system, first set up in 2018, is the state system for reviewing schools’ performance and federal designations.

According to the department, the system was revamped to include a “streamlined set of core indicators” for assessing schools performance and identifying areas where assistance and improvement is needed — metrics measured by the profiles include proficiency results for English language arts, mathematics and science, as well as issues like chronic absenteeism, graduation rates and student academic growth.

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“The updates to the approved accountability system provide consistently rigorous, reliable and fair school ratings that are easily understood by families, educators, communities and taxpayers,” a department news release stated. “The school performance ratings also inform the department’s investment of over 6,000 hours of school improvement assistance each year to schools in need of comprehensive support and improvement.”

Of the 377 schools identified as needing assistance, 93%, or 351 schools, were put in the category because students with disabilities at the school performed in the lowest 5% of all schools, according to the release. Within that group, 110 schools were also identified as needing assistance to make up for performance gaps with other specified student groups, the largest subset being 78 schools that saw achievement gaps between English language learners and the larger student population.

The department also found that fewer achievement gaps were found in Iowa schools for students from low-income backgrounds, as well as Black, Hispanic and multiracial students.

From the 377 total schools listed as in need of targeted or comprehensive support, a majority — 271 — were schools that also were identified as needing assistance last year. There are 106 schools that were newly identified this year, according to the department.

In addition to the state’s assessment on achievement gaps for specific groups of students, the profiles also show that 35 schools are “in need of comprehensive support and improvement” to meet federal Every Student Succeeds Act requirements. The 35 schools in this category represent the lowest performing 5% of Title 1 public schools, and schools with graduation rates lower than 66%, according to the department.

While 20 schools were added to this category this year, the state education department also noted that 16 schools graduated from that designation.

Iowa Department of Education Director McKenzie Snow said in a Tuesday statement that the performance profiles will help inform the department, educators and communities on areas that need improvement and how to best designate resources.

“Built with the feedback of thousands of Iowans, our new, world-class accountability system celebrates school success and supports continuous improvement, focusing resources on the classroom and what has the greatest impact on student achievement and growth,” Snow said. “The department will continue to partner with schools in need of support to accelerate student learning through high-quality instructional materials and practices, evidence- based professional learning, leadership coaching, and learner engagement.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

I have always enjoyed working with students and felt it is a way to give back to the community. 

When I enrolled at the University of Southern California two years ago, I kept up the tutoring, bringing my skills to elementary schools in the low income neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. 

What I quickly noticed was, despite the San Gabriel Valley being only 20 miles away from South Central LA, there was a huge disparity in literacy levels. 

The kids in the Valley could read at far more advanced levels than the kids in South Central. And the test scores confirmed what I saw in the classroom.

According to , 77% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading in the Arcadia Unified School District, in the Valley where I tutored; and 76% tested at or above that level for math. 

Compare that with the literacy levels for , where 43% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 36% tested at or above that level for math. 

During my first semester tutoring in South Central, I had a 4th grade student who struggled to read. 

As I continued my time tutoring in South Central, I realized many of my students struggled with reading and pronouncing words. I spoke to teachers who told me that the pandemic took a toll on learning. 

Some students struggled to focus on their work during online classes. And many struggled with disruption and trauma caused by the pandemic, teachers said.  

But I found there were ways that I could help these kids learn to read. 

I focused my lesson plans on phonics, the building blocks of words. We focused on pronouncing different letter combinations with a phonics book as my chosen curriculum. It turned out that my decision to focus on phonics made a huge difference.  

I used phonics to teach reading because it helped me guide my students. While I know all the pronunciations and word combinations, I didn’t have a list of sounds or letter combinations to teach, so a phonics textbook helped with giving my lessons structure.

As it turns out, districts around the country are embracing phonics as part of a movement in teaching called “the science of reading,” which relies on letter recognition and sounding out words to teach literacy. New York City has rolled out a phonics-based curriculum and Los Angeles Unified is in the process of doing so.

A number of states have laws to mandate the science of reading, but an  in California failed last year. Still, educators and districts are free to use the tools of phonics in their lessons. 

Through my phonics-based lessons, my students started to increase their literacy level, and reading became easier for them. However, one tutor can only do so much. 

There are many variables that can contribute to the educational chasm. The average household income for the is $115,525, and the average household income for  is $64,927, according to Point2Homes. Wealth puts some students ahead academically. 

From my experience, I know that many families in the San Gabriel Valley hire tutors to ensure their children stay on track and perhaps even surpass the educational requirements of their schools. 

But although students in the San Gabriel Valley have more financial resources, that doesn’t mean LAUSD elementary students can’t meet or exceed San Gabriel Valley’s test scores. 

To increase literacy rates in South Central schools, I believe that teachers and parents should create a culture where students are encouraged to read more. Students should view reading as something fun rather than work. 

While tutors can facilitate the reading process, students need to be self-motivated. Tutors can help students pronounce words and teach them the basic building blocks of reading. However, if students don’t read on their own time, they can’t take their skills to the next level. 

That’s why it’s so important for teachers and families to impart kids with a love of reading. The combination of phonics and a genuine interest in reading creates lifelong learners.

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.

“Camden is home to one of the most innovative school systems in the country,” Giana Campbell, Executive Director of Camden Education Fund (CEF), said in an interview. “We are proud to serve as an example of what an equitable modern school system looks like when we come together across sectors to ensure that we have the best educators, that all of our students feel supported, and that families feel welcomed to participate in their success.”

It is worth looking back at the evolution of this South Jersey city, just across the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia, which was once the subject of acalled “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch From America’s Most Desperate Town.” Eleven years ago the NJ State Department of Education took over the district due to student to outcomes so dismal that 23 of the Camden City School District’s 26 schools ranked in the bottom 5 percent of the state, the high school graduation rate was 49 percent, and a total of three high school students scored “college-ready” on the SAT’s. Shortly after the takeover, the State Legislature passed the , which allowed three city school boards, Camden, Trenton, and Jersey CIty, the chance to approve nonprofit charter partners to act as “turnarounds”—take over failing district schools and transform them by providing whole-child learning and wrap-around services–with the district controlling enrollment. Newark and Jersey City declined to participate. The Camden board chose three charter operators: KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon.

During this period student learning accelerated, first under the leadership of Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard and now under his successor, Superintendent Katrina McCombs, a Camden native and long-time Camden teacher and administrator. A  from Brown University, which analyzed state takeovers of districts from 2011 through 2016 for their effects on student achievement, found that in most students didn’t improve but in Camden they did. Research by  showed by 2017 all students—traditional, charter, and renaissance— were achieving roughly 85 days more of learning in math and 30 days more in reading. And according to a 2018 study by , after the state takeover, Camden high schools saw their average high school graduation rates increase by 17 percentage points while elementary school students doubled their proficiency rates in reading and math. 

Then Covid hit. Camden’s schools closed in March 2020 and, while younger students started returning in April 2021, the district wasn’t fully open until September, eighteen months after the initial closures. Like districts all over the country that primarily serve low-income students of color, proficiency levels plummeted. The gaps that had been closing pre-pandemic widened once again. 

Yet, as CEF’s report, “Can Camden Students Continue the Comeback?,” points out, while “Camden students fell behind at a rate similar to statewide averages,” they “are now catching back up at the same rate statewide,” unlike many other urban districts.

In addition, while much of the country reports declines in enrollment, “Camden schools have seen enrollment remain steady overall,”  with a 400-student increase from last year to this year. 

Here is what has changed: While enrollment in district schools has dropped by nine percentage points in the last five years, there is a ten point increase in students enrolled in renaissance schools. (Traditional charter enrollment is steady.)  Currently renaissance schools serve four percent more English language learners and students with disabilities than district schools.

Much work remains. Citywide, the chronic absenteeism rate is 51 percent. Social-emotional well-being looms large, with parents citing it as their second biggest concern, just after teacher shortages.(A non-profit called  is using a new grant from CEF to address middle school girls’ childhood trauma.). Student learning is still depressingly low: Improvements aside, four out of five students citywide are not reading at grade-level.  

Yet the story of Camden seems to offer a holistic model built around effective options for families that other city school systems can emulate:  When leaders recognize that the student outcomes are more important than which public school a child attends, when different sectors collaborate—supported with a district-run —to bolster academic success, all students benefit.  “Our collective efforts have demonstrated and revealed that all of Camden’s children, all of them, are valued, said  said Superintendent McCombs  at the reopening of the district’s Eastside High School. Or, as Campbell of CEF remarks, “We know that our students are gifted, our staff are dedicated, and our city is focused. By working together, we can ensure that Camden continues to rise.”

This analysis originally appeared at

Programs that add hours and support to the school day, are especially critical for low-income students who were set back the most during the pandemic, according to the report, “The Expanded Classroom.” Those students’ families can’t pay for tutoring, museum visits, and arts activities that more affluent families can.

“The classroom has been the primary venue for helping students learn, build relationships, and develop skills for the workforce,” according to the report. “But in the current era, such activities must transcend the classroom to help kids fully recover from learning loss, close longstanding achievement gaps, and prepare students for 21st-century careers.”

Only one quarter of Indiana students are able to attend these programs, the report found, but many more should be added, not reduced, as will happen if money runs out in the next two years. 

“Effort must be sustained over years—not months—to make up for the lost time of the pandemic and to begin to chip away at a decades-old gap in educational outcomes between high- and low-income students,” states the report, a joint project of the United Way of Central Indiana, the Boys and Girls Clubs serving South Bend and Indianapolis, and nonprofit education advocacy groups The Mind Trust and Indiana Afterschool Network.

Since the start of the pandemic, the state has devoted $35 million of federal COVID relief money to out-of-school learning, plus another $185 million in state money. The federal money runs out next fall and the state money runs out in the summer of 2025.

Mind Trust officials said they hope the report rallies support for out-of-school learning with legislators ahead of the 2025-2027 state budget debate. The report doesn’t ask for a specific amount of money or for money for any particular program, just for understanding the importance of learning outside of the school day.

“It’s really to make sure that our state leaders, legislators and others are thinking about the out-of-school time programs in Indiana as an important part of the ecosystem, and not as something that is just a time-limited program that’s about COVID recovery, and nothing else,” said Mind Trust chief strategy officer Kristin Grimme.

State Rep. Bob Behning, chairman of the House Education Committee, said there’s support for programs outside of the school day in the Legislature. But he cautioned there will be competition for money in the next budget.

“I would predict it’s going to be tight, tighter than we’ve had the last couple of budget cycles,” Behning said. “So you’re going to have to really define not just the need, but that there are gains. Once you can define the academic gains. I think that there would be more interest.”

Grimme agreed and said programs need to be evaluated and money should go to those that were the most successful. Some programs have evaluations pending while others have emerging data on their academic impact that should be reviewed next year.

Adding academic gains is extra important because Indiana’s recovery from the pandemic has “stalled,” the report contends. Though state test scores have improved since 2021, reading proficiency rates fell slightly between 2022 and 2023 while other gains were small.

 Indiana also saw college enrollment drop from 65 percent of graduating high school seniors before the pandemic to 53 percent in 2020–21.

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The report highlights the Indy Summer Learning Labs the Mind Trust and United Way have organized in Indianapolis using state money the last three years. That five-week program serving more than 5,000 students in 43 different sites around the city shows double-digit gains in proficiency rates in the tests students take at the start of the program and at the end.

Last summer, the labs saw 23 percentage point increases in students scoring at grade level or above in English and 22 percentage points in math.

The state will soon take applications from organizations around the state to expand that summer program to other cities, though money set aside for them ends in 2025.

Indiana Learns, another program that gives $1,000 grants to low-income parents to spend on tutoring or afterschool programs for their children, is being evaluated now to see if it needs changes. With more than 10,000 students using more than 100 different tutoring providers, Grimme said, it’s hard to know if Indiana Learns is reaching the right students and if they are getting what they need.

“I do think it’s something that we launched quickly to try to support students and families across the state,” Grimme said. “Is it the version of the program that the state should sustain in the future?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRESCHOOL CONTEXT

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRIVATE PRESCHOOL

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

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

PUBLIC PRESCHOOL

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

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

Head Start

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

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

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

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

State and Local Preschool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Universal Preschool

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISSUES AND CONTROVERSIES

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

COMMUNITY VERSUS SCHOOL-BASED PROGRAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEFINING AND MEASURING QUALITY

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

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

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

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

What Should Preschoolers Learn?

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

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

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

How Should Preschoolers Be Taught?

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

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

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

MEASURING AND SUPPORTING QUALITY

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

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

CHALLENGES TO QUALITY

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

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

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

IMPACT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECONOMIC RETURN TO PRESCHOOL

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

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

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Maryland State Department of Education released detailed results Tuesday on how some students in the state’s 24 public school systems fared on the latest standardized tests.

Broader results from each school system were from the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) tests students took during the 2002-23 school year.

The latest data are from tests taken by students in grades 3 through 8 in English language arts and math.

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Additional tests in English were administered for 10th graders; science tests were given to students in fifth and eighth grade; and students were tested who were enrolled in Algebra 1, Algebra 2 and geometry.

The data also broke down school system performance based on race, English language learners and students with disabilities.

Each school’s data and other information can be viewed on the state’s annual .

MCAP results are among the factors that determine the state’s report card and school star rating system. Schools get stars based on what percentage of total points they earned in measurement areas such as growth in achievement, high school graduation rates, student access to a well-rounded curriculum, progress in achieving English language proficiency, the prevalence of chronic absenteeism, and student and teacher perceptions of the school environment.

New reports were , the first time the state dispensed the annual report card since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While discussing an update on a college and career readiness standard in the state’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan, State Superintendent of Schools Mohammed Choudhury had a message Tuesday for parents and guardians with children at a school where MCAP test results are low.

“Your child is not a failure because they didn’t do well on the MCAP,” he said. “Your child knows a lot of things because [he or she] got that ‘B,’ that ‘A’ in their class. They know a lot of things and we’re going to acknowledge that and…we’re not going to use one approach to deem what they know.”

Here’s a summary of the proficiency level on how some schools fared on English, math and science:

English language arts

Twenty-two schools with students in grades 3, 4 and 5 recorded at least 90% proficient on the MCAP.

Bonnockburn Elementary in Montgomery County (94.7% in grade 3) had the highest proficiency level among all schools in English, according to the state data.

Glenarden Woods Elementary in Prince George’s County reached the highest proficiency level among fourth grade students at 94.2%. Another school in the county, Heather Hills Elementary, recorded the highest percentage of fifth grade students at 93.3%.

Schools that exceeded 90% proficiency in grades 6, 7, 8 and 10 are:

• South Dorchester School in Dorchester County (91.7% grade 6 and 92% grade 7)
• Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Montgomery County (90.8% grade 8)
• Barbara Ingram School for the Arts in Washington County (92.6% grade 10)

Montgomery and Baltimore counties both had seven schools record at least 90% proficiency in English.

The state also reported schools that showed the lowest proficient level in these grades.

Several of those schools are in Baltimore City, including New Song Academy (5.9% grade 3), Bay-Brook Elementary/Middle School (5.1% grade 6) and National Academy Foundation (5.3% grade 10).

A few schools in the Baltimore area recorded some of the lowest percentages in middle and high school, including sixth grade students at Bay-Brook Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore City (5.1%), seventh graders at Crossroads Center in Baltimore County (5.9%) and 10th graders at National Academy Foundation in the city.

Math

Glenarden Woods, a Talented and Gifted school (TAG), also had third grade students achieve a 90.1% proficiency level in math, one of the highest percentages in the state for that grade.

The other three schools with third graders to reach at least 90% proficiency were two schools in Montgomery County — Woodfield and Wayside elementary schools — and West Towson Elementary in Baltimore County.

Some schools reached 90% proficiency in Algebra 1, Algebra 2 and geometry.

Students who took Algebra 2 at Robert Frost Middle School in Montgomery County recorded the highest percentage in math at 94.7%, according to the MCAP results.

Students at Lime Kiln Middle School in Howard County also scored above 90% proficiency in that subject.

Three Howard County middle schools also achieved at least 90% in geometry — Clarksville (93.3%), Burleigh Manor (93%) and Mount View (91.3%).

Students at Greenbelt Middle School in Prince George’s also exceeded above 90% proficiency in geometry.

On the opposite end, several schools recorded slightly above 5% proficiency in math at various grade levels.

The state reported several of those schools are located in the majority-Black jurisdictions of Baltimore City and Prince George’s County. These include Highlandtown Elementary/Middle in Baltimore (grade 3), Gwynns Falls Elementary in Baltimore (grade 4), John Hanson Montessori in Prince George’s (grade 4) and Chillum Elementary in Prince George’s (grade 5).

Three Montgomery County middle schools recorded some of the lowest proficiency levels at 5.1%, including Forest Oak (sixth grade), Briggs Chaney (seventh grade) and Julius West (eighth grade).

Science

Test scores showed seven elementary schools in four counties with fifth graders recording at least 80% proficiency in science. Those schools were West Towson (89.7%) and Rodgers Forge (80.5%) in Baltimore County, Bells Mill (87.4%) and Cold Spring (82.8%) in Montgomery, Glenarden Woods (85%) and Heather Hills (84.4%) in Prince George’s and Benfield (86.6%) in Anne Arundel.

Eighth grade students at Monocacy Valley Montessori in Frederick County was the only middle school in the state to achieve at least 80% proficiency in science.

Two other middle schools — Clarksville in Howard and Thomas W. Pyle in Montgomery — had eighth graders that exceeded 70% proficiency.

MCAP results also show which elementary schools recorded the lowest percentage of students in grades 5 and 8 who were proficient in science.

A few of the schools with fifth graders that achieved 6% proficiency or lower were Moravia Park in Baltimore City, Oakleigh in Baltimore County and Carmody Hills in Prince George’s.

Eighth grade students were just slightly above 5% proficient in science at some schools, including Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Prince George’s and Maree Garnett Farring Elementary/Middle School and KIPP Harmony Academy in Baltimore.

Statewide test results in science showed a slight increase by fifth grade students overall at 35% proficient, compared to nearly 31% last year.

But there was a decrease among eighth grade students statewide, who scored 26% proficient, versus 35% last year.

Student performance by race last year broke down this way:

• Asian students: 59% of fifth graders were proficient this year compared to 56% last year; eighth graders were 56% proficient this year and 69% last year.
• White students: eighth graders were proficient at a 53% rate this year and at 46% last year; eighth graders were at nearly 42% proficient this year and 52% last year.
• Black students: eighth graders were at 20% this year and 17% last year; eighth graders were at 13% this year and 20% last year.
• Latino students: fifth graders were at 20% this year and 17% last year; eighth graders were at 13% this year and 20% last year.

Carroll County fifth graders recorded the highest proficiency percentage statewide this year at 54%, compared to 45% last year. Howard County eighth graders achieved the highest percentage at 42%, but that represents a 12-point decrease from last year.

Baltimore City recorded the lowest proficiency percentage in fifth and eighth grade students this year at nearly 12% and 9%, respectively. The percentage in fifth grade increased by nearly 3 points from last year, but decreased by that same figure in eighth grade.

This story was originally published by .

Those conclusions represent the latest and widest-ranging evidence yet of the damage inflicted by the emergence of COVID — both in terms of direct interruptions to schooling and the social and economic turmoil in other spheres of life. They dovetail with the observations of education experts who have also pointed to steep declines in nationwide academic performance, along with the billion-dollar investments made by governments to help schools bounce back.

But they also come as have argued that learning losses may be less harmful than advertised, that a single-minded focus on the pandemic’s toll could hurt teacher morale. With American students now returned to a post-COVID reality in the classroom, a recent speech by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona largely skirted the subject of learning loss.

By contrast, the review, based on 42 research studies from 15 countries, calls for heightened urgency from both leaders and educators in re-setting the trajectory for student outcomes.  

“The persistence of learning deficits two and a half years into the pandemic highlights the need for well-designed, well-resourced and decisive policy initiatives to recover learning deficits,” the authors write. “Policymakers, schools, and families will need to identify and realize opportunities to complement and expand on regular school-based learning.”

Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said the findings were consistent with those of her own organization’s , released last summer.

“There is no question that learning gaps have become chasms and that while some students are catching up quickly, too many are not,” Lake wrote in an email. “This is a global concern and requires innovative and urgent action. I am deeply concerned that national educational and civic leaders in the U.S. are not taking this learning crisis seriously enough.”

Here are four key takeaways from the study:

1. Inequality in education grew

While the dozens of studies classified socioeconomic status according to different metrics (including parental income, free lunch eligibility, and neighborhood disadvantage, among others), most estimates indicated that achievement gaps between richer and poorer students tended to increase in both math and reading. Most showed widening inequality during the first year of the pandemic, but a sizable number also pointed to the same trend even into its second and third years.

In an email, Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, called the results “depressingly consistent about the pandemic exacerbating learning loss along preexisting lines of inequality.”

2. Poorer countries were hit harder too

No low-income countries were included in the analysis, as little evidence exists to identify the academic impact of COVID in the developing world. But the four middle-income countries under study (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa) saw larger average learning deficits than their higher-income counterparts, including the three largest overall estimates of learning loss. 

The authors write that the effects of the last three years are likely to worsen the long-term inequality in international learning outcomes and “undo past progress” in closing gaps across borders.

3. Learning loss is stuck in 2020

After first emerging in the early months of the pandemic, the literature suggests that learning deficits have roughly held steady in the time since. That implies that efforts to adjust to ever-changing disruptions in schools were successful in holding off further losses, the authors write, but also that those efforts “have been unable to reverse them” so far. The pattern, which appears throughout all 15 countries, is also consistent within the three (the United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands) that have cumulatively generated the most research findings.

4. Losses were greater in math than reading

In keeping with one of the most consistent findings in education research, the review shows that academic reversals in math have been significantly greater than those in literacy. Given the to teach their children reading skills, math has been characterized as a more “school-dependent subject,” and previous data on COVID-era achievement — including results from America’s foremost standardized K–12 exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress — has already shown math scores absorbing a greater blow over the past few years. Across the study’s included in the review, reading losses at the median were only about half the magnitude of math losses.

Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” fell by a jarring eight points since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points; both are the largest math declines ever recorded on the test. In reading, both fourth- and eighth-grade scores fell by three points, leaving them statistically unchanged since 1992, when NAEP was first rolled out. 

The findings comport with those of previous assessments of students’ COVID-era achievement, whether conducted by academic researchers or state and district authorities, which have shown undeniable evidence of diminished performance in English and especially math. Just a few months ago, the release of scores for 9-year-olds on NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” assessment — a different exam measuring today’s students against a baseline set in the early 1970s — offered similarly ominous results.

Even still, the education world has waited nervously for the unveiling of today’s data, perhaps the most important federal scores to appear since the pandemic began. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that while relative stability in reading scores across some of the nation’s largest districts offered a few “bright spots … amidst all the chaos of the pandemic,” the unprecedented reversals in math should spark serious concern.

“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Carr said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”

A look at the results in their entirety show just how significant. There were no statistically significant gains in math, for either fourth or eighth graders, in any state in 2022. Instead, fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in 43 jurisdictions (either the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity) while remaining statistically unchanged in 10. Eighth-grade math fell in 51 jurisdictions while holding steady in just two, Utah and the DoDEA schools. The average eighth-grade score has not only fallen since 2019 — it is significantly lower than when the test was administered in 2003.

Translated into the exam’s performance levels, a massive downward shift can be seen. In 2019, 34% of fourth graders and 27% of eighth graders scored below the “NAEP Basic” level in reading — the most rudimentary threshold of English mastery classified by the test. In 2022, those groups had grown to 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders, respectively. The below-basic classification also swelled in math, from 19% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders in 2019 to 25% of fourth graders and 38% of eighth graders in 2022.

Beneath the headline numbers, differing effects among student groups also made an impact on longstanding achievement gaps. For example, gaps expanded in fourth-grade math performance between white and African-American students, white and Hispanic students, male and female students, and students with and without disabilities. Conversely, gaps actually closed between many of the same groups in eighth-grade reading — including by a surprising seven points between English learners and native English speakers. 

Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has studied the effects of COVID and remote learning on student achievement, said that trends in NAEP scores were dynamic and varied, making them difficult to distill. Big-picture phenomena, however, broadly lined up with the existing evidence, she argued.

“Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”

Julia Rafal-Baer is a K-12 education expert who serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, a nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP. In a statement, she said the results demonstrated the existence of “an education crisis” that demanded new solutions.

“The latest data isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know,” Rafal-Baer wrote in an email. “COVID was exceptionally disruptive, and we’re running out of time to ensure that kids can indeed recover from this level of unfinished learning.”

State-by-state comparisons difficult

No state could be said to have defied the downward pressure exerted by the pandemic and its countless challenges to learning. But the national averages do conceal substantial variation across different areas of the country. 

Some of the states where scores dropped the furthest, for example, were clustered in the mid-Atlantic region. Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various grade/subject combinations.

By contrast, a small group of states seemed to weather COVID reasonably well, experiencing less severe declines than most. Overall, while performance in eighth-grade math was weakened virtually everywhere, 10 jurisdictions, including Georgia and Wisconsin, saw no statistically significant decline in fourth-grade math. Another 22 were able to stave off declines in fourth-grade reading, while 18 did so in eighth-grade reading. 

A small number of states — Alabama, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa and Louisiana — kept scores from significantly falling in three out of four grade/subject combinations. Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019. 

The differences between states will naturally raise questions about the procedures they followed to offer schooling during the pandemic. Among the states that saw the largest score declines, many stuck with remote learning far into the 2020-21 school year as a precaution against COVID spread. 

Oster, whose previous research has found that longer periods of remote instruction were linked with more severe learning loss, called the results “very consistent with what we’ve seen in state-level data, which suggests that places that had the most in-person learning lost less than the places that had more virtual learning.” Even so, she added, a state like California — where she would have expected student scores to fall especially dramatically based on that correlation — instead saw more modest declines.

NCES’s Carr argued that the release provided little scope for comparisons between states, since so many jurisdictions experienced “massive, comprehensive declines.”

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” she said. “Let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different across the United States — the quality, all the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning. It is extremely complex.” 

Megan Kuhfeld, a researcher at the nonprofit testing organization NWEA, said that the average NAEP effects dovetailed with her own expectations based on of post-pandemic learning loss. That said, she agreed with Carr that the huge diversity of COVID learning policies — where neighboring school districts sometimes took radically different approaches — made direct comparisons difficult.

“ has supported the idea that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps, but I think it is harder to make that sort of inference at the state level because district reopening policies often varied widely within states,” Kuhfeld wrote in an email.

Urban districts fared better in reading 

If a silver lining exists within the release, it comes from some of America’s biggest cities.

In addition to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 26 urban school districts around the country participate in NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment program. The measure offers a unique look inside districts that collectively enroll millions of students and were subject to substantially different state-level public health policies.

Disappointingly, math results in these districts were no better than elsewhere: Fourth-grade and eighth-grade scores alike sank by eight points on average, matching or surpassing the declines for the nation as a whole. 

Performance in English, however, offered somewhat sunnier news: Average scores in reading held up in 17 cities, falling in just nine. Fully 21 of the 26 urban districts managed the same in eighth-grade reading, with only Shelby County, Tennessee; Jefferson County, Kentucky; Guilford County, North Carolina; and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing statistically significant drops. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, eighth-grade reading performance even improved. 

Michael Petrilli, who leads reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, nevertheless took a dark view of the overall NAEP outcomes. 

“There’s no sugar coating these awful results,” Petrilli said. “Save for Los Angeles (which I honestly cannot explain), the only question is whether states and localities did bad or worse. These data tell us how big a hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Now it’s up to all of us to dig ourselves — and our students — out.” 

Others took a somewhat more hopeful outlook. Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the urban districts’ results provided “a glimmer of hope in these otherwise dismal data.” Moreover, he added, both the NAEP data and state standardized test scores have already shown evidence that student achievement is bouncing back from its pandemic nadir.

Going forward, Loveless observed, state and school district leaders will likely view this round of scores as a kind of new student performance baseline. That could provide an accountability mechanism if things don’t improve.

“I think 2021 was probably the bottom, and we’re getting little shards of progress in these NAEP data,” he said. “But I’m expecting [the 2024 NAEP results] to look quite a bit better, and the state tests, too. If they don’t, I think people will start raising harsh questions.”

The results of the benchmark federal exam, referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed startling declines in student performance, including the first-ever drop in long-term math scores. Nine-year-olds, who have made steady progress since the test was first administered in the early 1970s, saw roughly twenty years of measured growth evaporate between 2020 and 2022. 

Using the results of state standardized tests, as well as private assessments like the MAP or iReady exams, a growing cadre of academics have offered evidence of K-12 learning deficits produced COVID’s disruption to school operations — including signs that Democratic-leaning states and districts, which were more likely to close schools longer, saw less instruction and steeper hits to achievement. But NAEP provides the first nationally representative data confirming those suspicions and charting the diverging effects on distinct student groups.

While average math and English scores fell for virtually all students, historically disadvantaged children — among them African Americans, Hispanics, the poor, and academically struggling students — generally saw larger drops, widening the gaps with their higher-scoring peers. 

Martin West is the academic dean and Henry Less Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent, nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP, he also has a unique perspective on the test and the data it generates.

In an email exchange Thursday with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, West spoke about the results, the possibility of growing educational inequity as a result of the pandemic, and public perception of schools in its wake. Asked whether the steep drop in performance could be remedied with time and more resources, his answer was stark.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before,” West said.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: The public reaction to these results has been huge — almost surprisingly so, given that prior studies have indicated significant learning deficits resulting from the pandemic. Do you think NAEP’s role as the authoritative national exam just makes these trends un-ignorable?

Martin West: It has certainly been gratifying, as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to see the strong reaction to the results. And I do think that reaction speaks to NAEP’s reputation as the authoritative source for tracking the achievement of American students over time. The NAEP Long-Term Trend, in particular, has remained essentially unchanged for more than fifty years. NAEP assessments are also the only tests that are routinely administered to samples that are truly representative of the nation as a whole. I think the latter factor in particular helps explain why NAEP results garner so much national media coverage. Reports based on state tests are inherently local stories. Reports based on interim assessment data leave room for doubts about whether they are truly representative. NAEP releases are national stories.

Do you think the steady trickle of bad news, whether from NAEP or other tests, is related to the diminished perceptions of public schools found in the EdNext poll, among others?

I think it is impossible to separate the role bad news about test scores has played in shaping public perceptions from the role played by factors like prolonged school closures that caused test scores to decline in the first place. So the bad news is definitely related to the diminished perceptions of school quality, but I don’t think we can say for sure that it has an independent effect.

It sounds pretty bad for students to be scoring at levels that were last seen 20 or more years ago. But what should we expect in terms of bounce-back achievement now that schools are essentially all offering in-person learning? In other words, while this is a very sharp one-time decline, is it likely to reset the learning trajectory for millions of kids permanently?

The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before. Recent reports based on interim assessments suggest that, as students resumed in-person instruction, they have generally demonstrated rates of achievement growth that were typical before the pandemic. That is encouraging as far as it goes, but it would not be enough to help the students whose educations have been disrupted return to where they would have been absent the pandemic.

This is one reason why I think it is critical to be clear about what we mean by recovery. Over the next decade, as students whose learning was not disrupted by the pandemic begin to move through the K-12 system, I’d expect NAEP results to revert back to pre-pandemic levels. We might then be tempted to say that the system as a whole has bounced back. But there are roughly 50 million students whose educations were disrupted — including two of my sons — and I would not want us to declare success unless we’ve also helped the specific students who were impacted make up lost ground. We have an obligation to help them experience accelerated rather than typical growth going forward.

On the other hand, these large scoring drops are presumably also interacting with the long-term stagnation or declines that we saw in last year’s release of long-term trends data from before the pandemic. If the pre-COVID situation was essentially one of weak growth, is it fair to say that the mere return to in-person learning won’t be enough to get students back on track?

That’s exactly right. From 2009 to 2019, we’ve seen the unfortunate combination of stagnant average scores and growing inequality between higher- and lower-achieving students. Today’s release confirmed that those lower-achieving students were also hardest hit by the pandemic. A return to business as usual would therefore only reinforce the pandemic’s unequal effects rather than offset them.

My impression is that the Long-Term Trend results since the early ’70s have essentially shown slowly shrinking performance gaps between students in different subgroups. But yesterday’s release indicated that the math disparity between white and African American students is now growing, and I believe Hispanic and students in the National School Lunch Program (a common metric of poverty) also experienced larger declines in math than white and non-NSLP students, respectively. How concerned should we be that COVID has not only led to general learning loss, but also hindered the progress of historically disadvantaged subgroups?

One legitimate (if clearly partial) success story of American education that is well documented by the Long-Term Trend NAEP is the gradual narrowing of achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. It is therefore jarring to see the math gap between Black and white students increase sharply in this year’s data. The other differences you note across groups were not large enough to be statistically significant, but they do point in the same direction of greater inequality. This is not necessarily surprising given what we know about the pandemic’s impact on historically disadvantaged subgroups generally, but it is certainly concerning.

Were you as surprised as I was by the reading scores, which didn’t show widening racial gaps between white, Hispanic, and African American students? Given what existing studies have shown about literacy setbacks during the pandemic, I was expecting a different result. It also seemed noteworthy that schools in cities, which obviously enroll disproportionate percentages of non-white students, didn’t see lower reading scores for nine-year-olds. How much faith should we put in these figures?

I agree that this pattern in reading is a bit unexpected, all things considered, but I find it hard to be too encouraged by results showing an equally large decline across these three racial groups. I’ll also be curious to see if this pattern is confirmed on the “main NAEP” results set for release this October. The lack of a decline for city schools is also a puzzle. Here, though, it is important to keep in mind that the NCES [National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test] definition of “city” schools is not limited to large urban districts. 

For example, my own local district in Newton, Massachusetts, is classified as a “city” district despite the fact that most Boston-area residents would think of it as a suburb. The results for the 26 school districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment and will be included in the main NAEP release will provide a clearer picture of what’s happened in the nation’s big-city schools.

Dismal releases from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — often referred to as the “nation’s report card” — have become a biannual tradition in recent years as academic progress first stalled, then eroded for both fourth and eighth graders. But today’s publication, tracking long-term academic trends for 9-year-olds from the 1970s to the present, includes the first federal assessment of how learning was affected by COVID-19.

The picture it offers is bleak. In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years. And in another familiar development, the declines were much larger for students at lower performance levels, widening already-huge learning disparities between the country’s high- and low-achievers. 

The results somewhat mirror last fall’s release of scores for 13-year-olds, which also revealed unprecedented learning reversals on the long-term exam. But that data was only collected through the fall of 2019; the latest evidence shows further harm sustained by younger students in the following years. 

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a call with reporters that the “sobering” findings illustrated the learning losses inflicted by prolonged school closures and student dislocation. 

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group of students,” Carr said. “We don’t make this statement lightly.”

Average math scores for 9-year-olds sank by a staggering seven points between 2020 and 2022, the only such decline since the long-term test was first administered in 1973. Average reading performance — generally by schooling than math, and therefore theoretically shielded from pandemic shock — fell by five points. 

Inevitably, that means that fewer students hit the test’s benchmark performance levels than two years ago. For math, the percentage of 9-year-olds scoring at 250 or above (defined as “numerical operations and basic problem solving”) fell from 44 percent of test takers to 37 percent this year; those scoring 200 or higher (“beginning skills and understanding”) fell from 86 percent to 80 percent; even the vast majority scoring at the most basic threshold of 150 (“simple arithmetic facts”) shrank slightly, from 98 percent to 97 percent, across the two testing periods.

No demographic subgroup saw gains on the test, but disparities existed in the rates of decline. For instance, math achievement for white 9-year-olds dropped by five points, but for their Hispanic and African American counterparts, the damage was even greater (eight points and 13 points, respectively). As a result, the math achievement gap between whites and African Americans increased by a statistically significant amount. 

In reading, scores for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites were all six points lower, leaving relative gaps unchanged. Scores for Asian students only fell by one point. 

Notably, the long-term trend assessment differs somewhat from the main NAEP test administered every two years. It follows student performance going back a half-century, and it is taken with a paper and pencil instead of digitally. For the most part, testing items are unchanged from the early 1970s, assessing more basic skills of literacy and computation than are generally seen on the main NAEP.

The broad trend-line has been positive over the life of the exam, and even in the most recent release, student scores on both subjects are far higher than when they were first measured. But Dan Goldhaber, a researcher and longtime observer of student performance, said it was striking to see that upward momentum evaporate so quickly.

“A bit of a hidden story in education, when you look at a swath of 40 or 50 years, is the progress that students have made — and the disproportionate progress that historically marginalized students have made,” said Goldhaber, the of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes. “We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years.”

‘Particularly bad’

One of the most consistent, and consistently worrying, findings of previous NAEP rounds has been the sharp disjunction of students at either end of the performance scale. For over a half-decade, high-scoring students have generally performed a point or two better with each iteration of the test — or at least stayed at the same level — while low-scoring students have seen their scores fall.

The phenomenon of growing outcome gaps is again apparent in the post-COVID results, though it takes a slightly different form. At all performance levels across both subjects, 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.

In reading, 9-year-olds scoring at the 90th percentile of all test takers in 2022 lost two points compared with their predecessors in 2020. But students scoring far below the mean, 10th percentile fell by 10 points.

Consequently, the average reading gap between kids at the 90th versus the 10th percentile grew from 103 points to 110 points in just two years. In math,the divergence grew from 95 points to 105 points over the same period.

Goldhaber said that the trends visible in NAEP performance largely dovetailed with those using test scores from the MAP test, administered by the assessment group NWEA. In multiple data sources, he argued, it has become clear that the pandemic’s effects have been disproportionately negative for already struggling and disadvantaged children.

“It’s not just the drops, it’s where we’re seeing the drops in math and reading tests, and they’re disproportionately at the bottom of the test distribution,” he said. “So the pandemic is reversing a long-term trend of narrowing achievement gaps. That’s particularly bad, to my mind.”

The fact that losses are so heavily concentrated among the lowest-scoring segment of students may help explain what Goldhaber termed an “urgency gap”; neither states, school districts, or even families seemed driven to embrace the generational learning interventions — from dramatically lengthening the school year to implementing widespread one-to-one tutoring — that the scale of learning loss demands. As just one indicator, billions of dollars of federal COVID aid to schools remains unspent more than a year after it was first allocated.

That may change in the wake of the NAEP release. While previous studies have pointed to similar, and similarly inequitable, learning loss over the last few years by using data from the MAP and state standardized tests, the Nation’s Report Card is seen as the authoritative performance metric for American K-12 schools. As NCES Commissioner Carr noted, today’s release provides the first nationally representative results measuring achievement before and after the pandemic. Ninety-two percent of schools where the test was administered in 2020 were re-assessed earlier this year.

Tom Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that NAEP scores definitively affirmed what prior studies have already demonstrated. More observers needed to study the magnitude of the loss, he added, because the proposed academic remedies in most of the country are “nowhere near enough” to combat it.

Kane analogized classroom learning to an industrial process — the conveyor belt slowed in 2020 and 2021, but has resumed functioning since at roughly the same rate as before the pandemic. But to make up for lost time, he argued, it would need to be sped even further.

“What we learned…is that the conveyor belt is back on, but at about the same old speed,” Kane said. “Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to help students learn even more per year in the next few years, or these losses will become permanent. And that will be a tragedy.”

Two weeks ago, ����Ӱ�� and the Reinventing America’s Schools project of the Progressive Policy Institute brought you a spirited discussion about a growing movement to create a new right around quality schools — and tools parents can use to demand change in their districts.

At 3 p.m. ET today, we’ll present part two in the ongoing conversation, spotlighting grassroots methods and organizing strategies being used in various states to secure such a right.

If you can’t view the video, click here to watch.

Expert panelists will be Minnesota state Rep. Hodan Hassan, Chris Stewart of Brightbeam, Nevada Littlewolf of Our Children Minnesota, Lakisha Young of The Oakland REACH and Christina Laster of the National Parents Union.

You can stream the conversation by refreshing this page at 3 p.m. 
For more information on the event, and .

In Minnesota, the home of former State Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, the state constitution – ratified in 1857 – only requires “a general and uniform system of public schools.” 

Page thinks the education provision is way overdue for an overhaul. 

“I don’t need to remind everybody what this country looked like in 1857,” Justice Page said. “That was the year that the United State Supreme Court decided Dred Scot in which the Chief Justice of the United States said, and I’m paraphrasing here: those who had been imported as slaves had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. That’s the context in which this language – our current language – was drafted.”

Justice Page is a driving force behind the , which seeks to change the Minnesota constitution to read: “All children have a fundamental right to a quality public education….” He was among several experts to join a panel discussion last week presented by ����Ӱ�� and the Reinventing America’s Schools project of the Progressive Policy Institute.

“Here we are in the 21st century,” Justice Page said. “Because we’re talking about a system – a system that has systemically and systematically left far too many children behind – you can’t sort of fix it. You have to start over.”

The proposed Page Amendment is among several efforts in various states that aim, in one fashion or another, to establish a constitutional right to a quality education. As ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson pointed out in an article in November, measures like these would give parents “legal standing” to sue school districts for better education.

Ben Austin, a founding partner of the advocacy group Education Civil Rights Now, said the events of the past 22 months have helped fuel this movement.

“Politicians have been talking about education as a civil right since long before Brown v. Board of Education,” he said. “But I think the modern movement around translating that sound-bite into an actionable civil right for all children, especially all children of color and low-income children in America, really came out of the pandemic.”

“Before the pandemic shuttered schools for well over a year, 20 percent of Black students in America were reading at grade level,” Austin said. “But the pandemic, I think, shined a light on these inequities in a way that made them at least politically indefensible, and parents began organizing across race and class and other lines of political difference.”

Austin also pointed out that Los Angeles parents banded together to file suit against the L.A. Unified School District. In response, according to Austin, the LAUSD “said the quiet part out loud,” arguing “that because students do not have the right to a quality education, the LAUSD is under no legal obligation to prove one and parents have no standing to challenge school reopening policies or anything else.”

While Austin focused on the local dimension of providing a quality education, Dr. Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, said the civil right issue demands focus on states and the federal government. 

“Civil rights have always been defined as federal and, by extension, state requirements,” Noguera said. He noted that the Brown decision “really had far-reaching effects on the whole society,” particularly in housing, voting rights and employment. 

But when it came to education “it didn’t live up to the promise of the Supreme Court decision because it didn’t go far enough,” he added. “It said at all deliberate speed, and then the federal government pulled back and it was left to local communities to decide whether or not they would integrate their schools.”

Noguera advocated thinking about schools “the way we think about our highways: if you’re driving through a poor neighborhood on an interstate highway, the highway doesn’t suddenly start to fall apart.” He added: “It shouldn’t matter where you live, every school should be equipped with laboratories, with libraries, with well-trained teachers so that every child has the opportunity in education.”

Jacobson, a senior writer for ����Ӱ��, noted that both the Page Amendment proposal and a similar effort in California face significant opposition from teachers’ unions. “They’re viewed as a threat to job protections for teachers, like tenure,” she said.

But former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the idea of education as a civil right is not a conservative notion. “It should be one that people who call themselves progressives ought to be getting behind,” he said. 

Noting that he had worked for as an organizer for the teachers’ union before entering politics, Villaraigosa said, “I am unabashedly pro-union, pro-teacher. I was married to a teacher for 20 years; I saw her sacrifices; I saw her commitment to her kids.” 

He also said that as a Latino, particularly one that had risen to lead the nation’s second-largest city, he had first-hand experience with the value of a quality education. “How did I break the glass ceiling?” he asked. “Because I could read and write.”

Villaraigosa said he believes that a constitutional guarantee of a quality education “could transform our town.” 

“We have to make sure that this high-quality education, however you define it, is connected to accountability, is connected to the ability of people like parents to be able to say to the government: No; you say it’s high quality, but the results don’t reflect that,” he said. 

Villaraigosa also scolded progressives “who love to talk about how progressive they are and are unwilling to take on this issue of inequality which has as its base…a lack of education, a lack of investing in everyone at the same levels that we invest in those who are at the highest echelons.”

While some good has come from NCLB’s core approach — notably a clearer focus on outputs over inputs, the disaggregation of student results by race and ethnicity, and a revolution in education data — it is hard to argue that the law has lived up to its promise. Roughly one-third of students graduated ready for college or a career back then, and the same is true today.  Performance on international assessments , while recent trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that performance is going in the wrong direction. 

Nor did NCLB put the nation on a path toward any semblance of educational equity, as . Eight percent of Black 12th graders, for example, are now proficient in math — up from 6 percent  back in 2005. At that rate of progress, it would take another 200 years for their performance to match that of white students, and that would assume white students’ performance stayed the same.  

Now, as schools try to address the profound learning losses caused by the pandemic, the NCLB playbook seems wildly out of touch. Students returned to school this fall in need of real solutions to support their educational and social-emotional recovery following 18 months of profound disruption. But for many schools, the challenges of filling an unprecedented level of staffing vacancies, implementing COVID-19 precautions and managing parent politics have taken all priority. Accountability based on end-of-year grade-level assessments may well be the last thing on their mind. 

Why did NCLB fail to deliver on its promise? Some will fault political opposition, economic conditions or bad implementation as key reasons, and there is some evidence to support each of these claims. However, we believe these explanations belie a larger truth that those who wish to improve our nation’s system of schooling can no longer ignore:

To modify the James Carville adage: It’s the model, stupid. 

While NCLB shaped the foundation for the work of those looking to reform education, it left the basic century-old industrial paradigm of how schooling happens intact. Schools function, by and large, with all same-aged students learning the same material at the same time from a single teacher and textbook. 

In the middle of the 19th century, this model was considered the most efficient way of supplying a factory-ready workforce that needed some assimilation and to be able to perform repetitive tasks, follow directions and apply basic numeracy and literacy skills. But from that point forward, nearly every effort at school improvement has been limited by its inherent constraints.

NCLB was only the latest of many well-intended school improvements that could not overcome the limits of the industrial paradigm of schooling. Raising academic standards can signal to teachers what they should expect, but they provide little guidance on what to do when students begin the school year multiple years behind. Good teacher training can make a big difference, but when skilled educators quit because of a fundamentally unsustainable role, it’s back to square one. Assessments can also be useful, but adjusting instruction to meet each student’s unique needs is near impossible. School choice can be a godsend for families whose children would otherwise be stuck in a low-performing school, but if the schools that are chosen are operating within the same industrial-era boundaries, differences may not be so stark.

Ironically, NCLB’s focus on trying to optimize a century-old delivery model took effect during the same time that other sectors saw the internet and its related technological advancements as an opportunity to modernize the ways in which they did business. From retail to energy to media to banking, the world of 2021 bears little resemblance to what existed at the dawn of the 21st century. Even churches now livestream on Sunday mornings. 

Many of these shifts were funded by commercial forces looking to leverage modern technologies to capture new segments of the marketplace. When early-stage investment was deemed too risky for private capital, public investments in research and development stepped in to fund breakthroughs such as the internet, GPS and mRNA vaccines.

NCLB did little to stoke any form of R&D investment to modernize the K-12 delivery model. In 2001, the federal government authorized — dead last among all federal agencies. That expenditure (and still dead last).  And since the vast majority of education R&D dollars have gone toward research and not development, in 2020 was actually aimed at building things that schools could actually use. By comparison, in 2020 on R&D, exploring new ways for teens to send digital photos to one another. 

Why has the industrial paradigm remained steadfast? Perhaps because there isn’t much effort aimed at creating any viable alternatives to it.

Beyond the lack of R&D, overcoming the limits of the paradigm was made even more difficult by the policies embedded within NCLB itself. Annual accountability for performance on grade-level-aligned exams meant everyone was on the hook for showing higher proficiency on the next year’s test. In response, many schools decided to hunker down and teach harder. 

But when the pandemic hit, the implications of trying to improve schooling without really changing it were fully laid bare. While the general public was still able to do much of what it could do pre-pandemic — order groceries, watch movies, pay bills, stay connected to friends — schooling was reduced to teachers scrambling to bring their industrial-era classrooms online or somehow make them work in a hybrid context. 

Make no mistake about it: It was optimization-only thinking at the heart of NCLB that left them in the lurch.

Parents are now onto all of this as well. Many had a front-row seat to Zoom school and didn’t like what they saw. A recent survey revealed they in how school happens. On their wish list: relevant and real-world learning, improved technology to better support instruction and greater customization to meet varied learning needs.

While some schools and districts will take bona fide steps to respond to these aspirations, many know that systemically achieving them within the constraints of the industrial paradigm is futile. 

It simply cannot be, in the 21st century, that the best way for students to learn about photosynthesis, parallelograms or the Vietnam War is through the pages of a tedious textbook in the company of 28 same-aged students. Yet, these core elements of an industrial paradigm from a time long past remain an ever-present design constraint that leaves millions of students bored, stressed and unable to access a high-quality education.

Nor does the factory-inspired model seem to work especially well for educators. Before the pandemic, teacher satisfaction had reached its . Now, more than a quarter of educators The pandemic made them , but the burden of reimagining what a classroom can look like cannot fall on their shoulders. 

If our ways of education are not working for students, for teachers or for the nation, how long will we continue down this path without laying the foundation for new ways of schooling? Can we not conceive of more effective ways to educate students that are not viewed through the industrial-era prism?

The architects of NCLB were right: Expectations matter. However, policies that center exclusively on optimization around the existing model of schooling reflect just the opposite — that the century-old way of doing school is simply the best we can hope for in the 21st century.

It’s not.   

As policymakers look forward to more recovery investment and to future reauthorizations of the federal education law itself, they would be wise to heed the most important lesson from the last 20 years: 

Our nation cannot force an educational system that leaves no child behind. It must invent one. 

Jenee Henry Wood is head of learning at Transcend, a national nonprofit organization that supports communities to create and spread extraordinary, equitable learning environments. Joel Rose is CEO of New Classrooms Innovation Partners, a national nonprofit organization focused on the development and adoption of innovative approaches to learning that personalize education for each student.

Advanced coursework can include International Baccalaureate, dual high school-college enrollment, or Advanced Placement (AP) courses, with AP being the most popular and widely available mechanism. Taking such courses helps students gain college credits while still in high school, earn admission to top colleges, and flourish in the work world.

Yet a recently released report from the Center for American Progress  that Black, Indigenous, and rural students were far more likely to attend schools offering fewer AP courses than schools attended by their White, Asian, and suburban counterparts.

And even when students have similar access to AP courses, lower percentages of Black, Indigenous, and rural students enroll in the courses and pass them. In high schools offering 18 or more AP courses, White students taking at least one AP exam had an average passing rate of 72 percent. For Black students in these circumstances, the average passing rate was 42 percent. Latino students are not experiencing the same gaps in access as other ethnic and racial groups, but they do have lower enrollment and pass rates.

This speaks to what many educators and advocates already understand: Equitable access and success in advanced coursework requires more than availability and there are policy investments that schools and districts can leverage to help students succeed in advanced courses.

The first is creating a national database on student participation and performance in advanced coursework (including dual-enrollment courses offered at local universities), disaggregated by race. Currently, no comprehensive national dataset exists for multiple dual enrollment options, and individual state report cards vary greatly in what is publicly reported.

Much of the research on advanced coursework, by default, is limited to AP participation and performance because that is the only data that is easily aggregated, transparent, and comparable among all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Future iterations of the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection should also report on IB and dual-enrollment participation and performance.

Another crucial investment is to remove entry barriers to AP and other advanced courses.  and subjective gatekeeping measures have a way of creeping into the enrollment process for advanced courses through overreliance on teacher referrals or counselor recommendations. This often results in students being overlooked for enrollment in  at the elementary school level or  at the high school level.

Districts have succeeded in combating this through the use of universal screening for gifted-and-talented programs and automatic-enrollment or academic-acceleration policies for AP courses. Automatic-enrollment policies,  in several states, require that students who meet benchmark proficiency levels on statewide examinations be automatically enrolled in the next highest available class, including advanced courses, though they can opt out.

In addition to making sure students are properly identified for enrollment in advanced courses, it is important to ensure students are prepared to handle the content and demands of the coursework. That takes regular communication and lesson planning among elementary, middle, and high school educators to map out common instructional vocabulary and concepts, known as .

Moreover, supporting students and teachers during their experiences in advanced courses is critical. One strategy that many states and districts embrace is to  associated with taking an AP or IB exam. Additionally, some schools are experiencing success through creating , where junior and senior AP students advise and tutor younger high school students to make sure they are setting themselves up for success.

Finally, both teachers and students benefit immensely from the creation of regional and statewide . This can take different forms, but usually involve time outside the regular school day when students and teachers can refine their skills, learn from experts, and get real-time feedback on teaching and learning.

None of these strategies alone can surmount the stubborn and persistent inequities in participation and success in AP courses. But when done in concert and with dedicated leadership, they can help broaden access to and success in advanced coursework.

This article originally appeared . 

But suggests that access to educational opportunity is also unequally distributed among children at the top of the academic heap, and that even some of the brightest young students are at a high risk of being overlooked within their schools and districts.

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The study, commissioned by the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, points to clear disparities in the prospects of high-achieving students along lines of race and class. Black and low-income elementary schoolers in Ohio who scored well on state exams were less likely to be classified as gifted and talented than comparable white and high-income children. Into middle and high school, they achieved at lower levels on standardized tests, Advanced Placement exams, and college entrance exams, and they were less likely to enroll in college.

Scott Imberman, the report’s author and an economist at Michigan State University, said that it wasn’t certain whether the lower rates of gifted identification exacerbated the performance gaps between student populations. Beginning in 2017, Ohio mandated more comprehensive screening for gifted status in the early grades, but historically, even some students who received that status have gone without gifted services.

“The main thing here is that there was, and probably still is, a problem with these gaps,” Imberman said. “These higher-achieving minority and disadvantaged students were not performing as well, over time, as high-achieving students who were advantaged, and they were also less likely to be enrolled in gifted programs.”

To study the long-term trajectories of academically promising students, Imberman sought student-level records from the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, which included third-grade performance on Ohio’s state standardized test for over 900,000 participants between the 2005-06 and 2011-12 academic years. Imberman focused on students of all backgrounds who scored in the top 20 percent statewide — a sample of roughly 180,000 — and matched those results with scores on the ACT and SAT, as well as college enrollment figures from the National Student Clearinghouse.

In terms of both short- and long-term academic performance, poor and African American students who scored in the top 20 percent fell behind their peers. Subsequent standardized test scores from grades 4-8 revealed that high-achieving students generally lost ground to their classmates in the bottom 80 percent, principally due to improvement among lower-performing students in late childhood and early adolescence. But in both reading and math, the relative performance of high-achievers who were white, Hispanic, Asian American, and higher-income held up significantly better than their economically disadvantaged and African American classmates.

High school assessments showed evidence of the same persistent differences. Black and disadvantaged students who were high-achievers in the third grade were less likely to take the ACT test and AP tests, and scored lower than other high-achievers when they did. The average AP scores for more affluent students (3.2 on a five-point scale) and white students (3.1) were notably higher than less affluent students (2.6) and African Americans (2.3).

Finally, 57 percent of white high-achievers later enrolled in a four-year college, compared with 53 percent of Asian Americans, 30 percent of Hispanics, and 26 percent of African Americans; among students who weren’t classified as economically disadvantaged, 58 percent later enrolled in a four-year college, compared with 35 percent of high-achievers who did receive that classification.

In a separate set of conclusions that may offer a partial explanation for those sharp divergences, Imberman found that students from different demographics were identified for gifted and talented services at vastly different rates. Black and low-income high-achievers are less likely to be identified in the third grade than other student groups, and the gaps substantially grow by the time they’ve reached the eighth grade.

In fact, the report finds that simply being identified as gifted may carry some achievement benefits: Receiving the gifted classification in math led to a modest increase in reading scores of .02 standard deviations and a boost to math scores of .03 standard deviations — equivalent to a performance boost of roughly one percentile annually. What’s more, those effects were relatively larger for African American and Hispanic students than white ones.

The findings echo those of published by economists David Card and Laura Giuliano, which found that when a large urban school district adopted universal gifted screening for second graders, it led to large increases in the number of minority and low-income students who were classified. A from Fordham found that just 61.5 percent of K-12 schools in Ohio offered gifted programming, and less than 8 percent of students enrolled at those schools received access to them.

Imberman called the effects on achievement “plausibly causal,” noting that social factors other than gifted identification might play some part in explaining the effects.

“I’d say that this provides some prima facie, suggestive evidence that expanding access to gifted education among minorities, in particular, could be a way to help reduce these gaps among high-achievers,” he told ����Ӱ��.