Indiana’s Purdue University in December approved an AI “working competency” , saying that by the time they earn a diploma, undergraduates must be able to use the latest AI tools effectively in their chosen field while understanding both the technology’s strengths and limitations. 

Graduates must also be able to defend decisions informed by AI while sussing out its “presence, influence and consequences” in their work.

“The root of all of this is really making sure that our students are ready for the workforce and are not left behind by AI,” said , Purdue’s senior vice provost for academic and student success. While admitting that college students likely rely on AI for class assignments, she said what’s missing is the ability to go deeper. 

“Yes, they know how to use it, but are we instilling a framework and a practice where we’re emphasizing critical thinking?” she said. 

The long-term goal of the effort is to ensure that graduates are “wildly successful in an AI-enabled workplace,” while being able to evaluate AI-generated work and criticize it. 

A microbiologist by training, Oliver-Jischke said AI has already “revolutionized” her field. Recent research suggests that AI-enabled analysis of large genomic data sets, for instance, is allowing scientists to look at DNA directly from environmental samples, revealing of previously unknown microbes.

“The technology is here,” said Oliver-Jischke. “You will lose out on opportunities if you don’t understand it or know how to utilize it and apply it effectively.”

Purdue’s faculty and curriculum committees began discussing the new requirement last summer, she said. The university has already identified 35 courses that will lead the way toward fulfilling the requirement. It goes into effect fully for the graduating class of 2030, who are due to arrive on campus in the fall. It won’t require a separate exam or course, but rather it will be embedded into students’ required coursework, she said.

While it’s unusual, Purdue’s move isn’t unprecedented. 

In January 2025, the State University of New York system its information literacy curriculum to include requirements that SUNY students effectively recognize and ethically use AI. While it integrates AI into an existing requirement, it doesn’t create a standalone competency like Purdue’s.

In June, The Ohio State University unveiled its initiative, which will embed AI education “into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them — no matter their major.”

Both Purdue and Ohio State are public , founded within months of each other in 1869 and 1870, respectively, to meet what was at the time a booming demand for agricultural and technical expertise. 

Ohio State’s AI effort will require all graduates, beginning with the class of 2029, to be “fluent” in the technology and how it can be responsibly applied to advance their field. “In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be impacted in some way by AI,” Walter “Ted” Carter Jr., the university president, said at the time.

Executive Vice President and Provost told ����Ӱ�� that as AI continues to influence how we work, teach and learn, “we will remain at the forefront of this technology.” 

Is ‘vibe coding’ the future?

The moves come as recent surveys suggest that college students are already making AI a large part of their education, even if they’re mostly outsourcing hard work: The AI and plagiarism detection platform Copyleaks in September found that of college students have used AI for academic purposes, with 53% using it either daily or several times a week. 

While most students say they use it for brainstorming, half use AI to draft outlines and 44% to generate actual drafts of work. About one in three students uses AI to summarize readings.

In light of statistics like these, requiring a deeper competence around AI is “a good step in the right direction,” said Alex Kotran, CEO of the . “Closing out 2025, I was feeling like post-secondary is sort of deer-in-the-headlights” when it comes to AI. “This is promising, but the proof will be in the pudding: Are they building the systems for professional development and learning, because that’s going to be critical. The policy is just step one.”

Kotran noted that the vast majority of job postings now specifically name AI skills as a requirement. Colleges that are seen as more effective at helping students get those skills are likely producing “more employable” graduates.

Purdue’s Oliver-Jischke said the focus at the university, which enrolls , is on “working competencies” and how they can fit into instruction across departments. “This can be a large boat to turn, but because we have a commitment to AI and this is obviously a massive STEM school, everybody is curious, interested and willing to explore how this should be implemented into the core curricula.”

At the same time, she said, AI is evolving quickly and the landscape could soon be very different. “We recognize that, and we want to remain nimble,” she said. “And we will keep our curricula nimble to do that.”

The two schools’ focus on differentiated, workplace-specific use of AI is a smart one, Kotran said. But to be effective, universities should go beyond simply relying on off-the-shelf commercial products. “The future of work is not a bunch of employees using ChatGPT or Gemini day-to-day and being more productive because of that,” he said.

Instead, the real value of AI, at least for now, is in the custom software it enables users to build via what’s known informally as “,” or using AI prompts to do the actual behind-the-scenes coding that once took advanced knowledge. “The real unlock comes when you’re building custom software to do stuff more efficiently,” he said.

Since generative AI came to market in 2022, the cost of building apps, websites, games and other software has dropped precipitously, while the task has gotten easier for non-technical users. 

“That’s going to change the way we work,” Kotran said. The more users can develop and control their own software, the more productive they’ll be. “But it’s very hard to get that insight if you haven’t seen vibe coding for yourself.” 

Done right, the efforts at Purdue and Ohio State could be significant, Kotran said. “It just increases the exposure that students are going to get to having the opportunity to build that intuition and to experiment,” he said. “And it will force professors to start building their assessments around it.”

University of Toledo law students and Ohio State University professors spoke out in opposition against a bill that would create new centers at both universities that would expand and affirm what sponsors deem “intellectual diversity.”

the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University and the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo’s College of Law.

Eleven people submitted opponent testimony and there was one interested party for SB 117 at Wednesday’s Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee meeting. There was little questioning from the five-person committee.

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The bill was introduced by Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, and Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, who also introduced a that recently passed in the Senate.

SB 117 would give UT $1 million in fiscal year 2024 and $2 million in fiscal year 2025 for the Institute, and Ohio State $5 million in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 for the Center.

$5 million during those two years could pay Ohio State’s full in-state tuition costs for 400 students each year of the biennium, said Steve Mockabee, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, speaking on behalf of the Ohio Conference American Association of University Professors.

“At a time when college affordability is a significant concern for Ohio families, we owe it to Ohioans to be sure that funds allocated by the legislature are being spent in ways that maximize their positive impact,” he said.

“We remain deeply concerned that attempts by the General Assembly to override the autonomy of our colleges and universities will have many unintended consequences that damage, not enhance, the climate of free inquiry on our campuses and the quality of education that is offered to our students.”

University of Toledo’s College of Law

for the institute in 2019 and sees this not only as a way to better train future lawyers, but also as a recruiting tool for the university.

But three UT students don’t see it that way.

Megan Anderson, a third year UT law student, said she wouldn’t have picked UT  if the proposed institution was in place. She called the proposed center “a subtraction from our current law school” and said she has talked to others students who have ruled out UT for law school because of this bill.

“Why would the pure existence of this center turn off a student in the first place?” asked Cirino, one of the bill’s sponsors and chair of the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

Anderson said students go to law school to make the world a better place and “this institution is not helping with that.”

“It’s not real-world practical experience that I think a lot of students are seeking out when looking for a law school,” she said.

She said UT Law School funding has been on the decline — meaning fewer professors and less courses being offered.

“The narrowly pointed focus of SB 117 fails to address the areas of law where we face significant shortages in specialized professors, such as family law, criminal law, administrative law, and estate law,” Anderson said.

She also worries the College of Law will be forced to absorb funding for the institute once the initial money runs out.

“I think it would require resources that we just don’t have,” she said. “We are running low on classrooms. I’ve taken several classes in the auditorium because the classes are so big they don’t fit into the classrooms.”

Benjamin Noah Woods, a third year UT law student, said the institute would not prepare students for the bar exam, which students must pass in order to practice law.

“This is going to teach us indoctrination of conservative, Christian nationalist interpretations of our Constitution,” he said.

Thirty-four percent of University of Toledo and 61% passed in July.

Clifton Porter, a third year law UT law student, said SB 117 is an “unnecessary and frivolous use of state funds.”

He also criticized the language of the bill and the bill’s sponsors for not defining the term “intellectual diversity,” which is used throughout the bill.

“I find this to not only be sloppy, but incredibly dangerous,” he said.

Ohio State University

Richard Fletcher, an associate professor at Ohio State, said SB 117 is a “destructive power grab” to control what is being taught at universities and by whom.

“Here we have arrived at the endgame — universities being told what they can teach and how they should teach,” he said. “Yet it is the students who suffer when their education is gerrymandered in this way.”

The Salmon P. Chase Center would be an independent academic unit and would have a director that would report directly to the provost and university president.

Ohio State already has more than 70 centers, and Christopher Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State, said the Chase Center resembles a small department, school or college.

“What it does not look like as proposed is anything approximating a center or institute as they currently operate at OSU in the social sciences or liberal arts,” he said. “It also would not operate in keeping with how the vast majority of centers and institutes work on virtually all U.S. campuses.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

An Ohio state Senate bill is trying to create new centers at Ohio State University and the University of Toledo that expand and affirm “intellectual diversity.”

Senate Bill 117 — introduced earlier this month by Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, and Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon — would create the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State and the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at UT’s College of Law.

“There is a structural preponderance of one line of thought in our universities today,” Cirino said during a recent Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee meeting. “One of the ways to change the structural preponderance of one line of thought is to set institutes like these up to assist our universities in moving forward with more intellectual diversity.”

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He went on to say that university faculty are predominantly liberal.

“This causes a single ideological perspective to dominate academia,” Cirino said. “With the passage of this legislation, we are giving students and their parents’ options within the market to choose an education that is best suited for them.”

Both centers would begin this fall if the bill is able to pass quickly enough, McColley said.

“I’m hoping that our institutions will embrace this as something that is going to help them move the dial just a little bit in favor of true intellectual diversity,” Cirino said.

He said using public funds to create centers at colleges is not unheard of.

“Both Arizona State University and the University of Florida have created similar centers to aide in establishing diverse viewpoints at their respective universities,” Cirino said in his testimony.

SB 117 would give UT $1 million in fiscal year 2024 and $2 million in fiscal year 2025 for the Institute, and Ohio State $5 million in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 for the Center.

University of Toledo

The Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership would be housed in the university’s College of Law and it would expand “the intellectual diversity of the university’s academic community,” according to the bill’s language.

The institute’s mission would be to “create and disseminate knowledge about American constitutional thought, and form future leaders of the legal profession through scholarship, teaching, collaboration, and mentorship,” according to the center’s concept overview.

UT Law Professor Lee Strang first got the idea for the institute in 2019 after visiting the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and Princeton University’s James Madison Program.

“Those places provided the resources in an intentional space for people from a wide variety of perspectives to respectfully and civilly present their views, present their research, present their arguments on whatever the topic was,” Strang said.

He wanted to bring something similar to UT, so he got approval from UT’s president to move forward with the institute and he has been working with McColley on the bill, who graduated from Toledo’s College of Law in 2010.

“It seems to me that in many of these law schools across the state of Ohio and across the country, there is no longer as much intellectual diversity among the faculty, particularly in the area of constitutional law as there once was,” McColley said. “This has a critical role to play in the training of future lawyers, but also it’s a potential recruiting tool.”

He said has has been in talks with UT’s president and the dean of the law school about SB 117.

The institute would bring in more money for the law school — which would allow UT to invite more law scholars, judges and lawyers from across the country to symposiums and classes, said Professor Rebecca Zietlow, the associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Law.

“That spices things up for students,” she said.

The institute would also give the law school more resources to teach additional courses. For example, Strang said this would help give him the resources to teach a class on Ohio constitutional law.

“(The institute is) a mission of academic excellence, it’s a mission of a wide variety of viewpoints debating, discussing these important constitutional issues, role modeling vivid debate and discussions for future leaders in the legal profession in Ohio,” Strang said.

He emphasized SB 117 is separate from that has received lots of pushback. Both bills were introduced within a couple months of each other by Cirino and have language that includes “intellectual diversity.”

“One thing I’m trying to avoid is wrapping this up in SB 83,” Strang said.  “I’ve been working on this independent of and without knowledge of SB 83 since 2019,” he said.

Ohio State University

The Salmon P. Chase Center, named after Ohio’s 23rd governor, would be an independent academic unit and would “affirm the value of intellectual diversity in higher education and aspire to enhance the intellectual diversity of the university,” according to the bill’s language.

Cirino said in his testimony that the center “would introduce a new level of debate that would allow students to receive broadened viewpoints.”

Chris Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State, is skeptical.

“There’s a lot of things that already do a lot of what they are wanting to mandate through the Salmon P. Chase Center and it seems like a bit of a mistake to reinvent the wheel when you could actually just work with the existing faculty, staff and student centers and institutes that are pledged to do a lot of this kind of work,” Nichols said.

He wonders what problem the bill is trying to solve.

“It looks like building a very small parallel university within a university,” Nichols said. “This is frankly dropping down a center that duplicates some of what’s already happening and also doesn’t have an organizational structure that makes sense.”

The center would have a director that would report directly to the provost and university president.

Ohio State already has more than 70 centers, and Cirino said he has had general discussions with Ohio State about the center.

“We expect to have further discussions with them regarding the implementation,” he said.

When asked about the bill, Ohio State spokesperson Ben Johnson said “we look forward to discussing the proposal with the sponsors.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Now, as courts and politicians decide the future of the state’s school voucher program, a study released in December indicates that private school choice hasn’t had the damaging impact that many of its detractors claim. In fact, its author argues, racial segregation of students tended to decline in school districts where more students were eligible to receive vouchers from the state. 

The was commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a reform-friendly think tank with a special focus on research and advocacy in Ohio. Its arrival could help shape the debate over the effects of school vouchers and the course that the state’s ambitious choice agenda will take in 2023, though voucher critics may contest its findings on school funding.

Alleging that the public funding of private schools is unconstitutional, and that the current system “discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools,” a coalition of school districts last year. A Columbus judge by the government to dismiss the case just a few weeks after the Fordham report was issued. At the same time, Republican lawmakers to massively expand the voucher program, known locally as EdChoice, to all of Ohio’s K–12 students after stalled in December. 

Roughly 60,000 kids statewide receive EdChoice scholarships ($7,500 for high schoolers, $5,500 for younger children) to defray tuition costs at private schools, including religious institutions. That number over the last decade, leading supporters of public schools to complain that their enrollment, finances, and academic offerings have been harmed by the rapid movement of families and funding from districts.

But study author Stéphane Lavertu, a political scientist at Ohio State University, argued that his research didn’t support those claims. The report shows that vouchers’ effects on student achievement and per-pupil funding in public schools are ambiguous, but not obviously negative — and far from increasing racial segregation in affected schools, he argued, EdChoice seems to actively decrease it.

“What we can say with some level of certainty is that segregation did not go up in district schools,” Lavertu said. “In fact, we can say with some confidence that it went down. That’s the only finding where I would say that there’s a clear direction, and it’s down.”

Lavertu examined school- and district-level figures for 47 Ohio districts where students in at least one school were entitled to scholarships between the 2006–07 and 2018–19 academic years. While eligibility was eventually expanded to students from comparatively low-income families, the study focuses almost exclusively on the original eligibility threshold, which hinged on students attending a school designated by the state as underperforming. 

The availability of vouchers clearly impacted student headcounts: On average, a district with at least one EdChoice-eligible school experienced a decline of between 10 and 15 percent of its students over a little more than a decade. 

But those exits were disproportionately driven by non-white students, Lavertu found. Data from the Ohio Department of Education revealed that 56 percent of participants in EdChoice during the period under study were African American, Hispanic, American Indian, or Alaskan Native. Consequently, the average district that was exposed to EdChoice saw a 13 percent decline in its percentage of minority students; those departing students left for private schools with higher concentrations of white and Asian students, while the district schools they left became less racially isolated (falling from roughly 57 percent minority-enrolled to roughly 50 percent). 

Happily, academic outcomes also improved somewhat. Using Ohio’s “district performance index,” a composite measure that includes the proficiency levels of students in all tested subjects and grades, Lavertu found that achievement climbed in the typical district with EdChoice-eligible schools. Those gains were reached from a startlingly low baseline, with average academic performance rising from the second percentile statewide (roughly the twelfth-lowest-performing district in Ohio) to the sixth percentile (roughly the 37th-lowest-performing district). 

Those findings were far less definitive than those for segregation, the study notes, because it can’t be known why the index ticked upward. The impetus might be improved teaching in public schools as a product of private school competition, but it could also stem from relatively lower-performing students being more likely to receive vouchers, changing the composition of the existing school system.

While the academic results were “very noisy,” Lavertu said, the results make it hard to claim that the remaining public school students are worse-off academically than they would have been if vouchers didn’t exist.

Funding questions

The study’s most disputed assertions relate to the financial consequences of EdChoice, which are central to the arguments of its opponents. 

Because voucher funding originates with the state, school districts only lose that portion of K–12 revenue when their students leave for private schools (according to , 42 percent of Ohio’s total K–12 spending came from the state in Fiscal Year 2020, though the percentage allocated from Columbus to each district is determined through a complex formula). Local dollars, which are principally collected through property taxes, are not affected.

Once some families use their vouchers, that money is also spread over fewer public school students. In fact, per-pupil expenditures rose by 1.39 percent in districts exposed to EdChoice; operating expenditures (i.e., those unrelated to capital spending on things like land, buildings, and equipment) rose by 4.55 percent per-pupil. While those results aren’t big enough to be considered statistically significant, Lavertu argues in the study, they can effectively rule out the notion that tax-funded scholarships lead to declining spending on public school students.

Even if those calculations are accurate, however, voucher critics say that they ignore a disquieting reality: Some localities find themselves needing to raise their own property taxes in order to cover costs when students and state funding are gone. Their efforts to do so often fall short — the people of Parma, the state’s seventh-largest city, that were brought to the ballot — and even when they succeed, cash-strapped towns and cities are left reaching deeper into their own pockets to fund essential services.

Thomas Sutton, a professor of political science at the private Baldwin Wallace University, pointed to that has occurred since 2019, when the Ohio legislature lifted income thresholds for families to become eligible. Some districts have been left asking their residents to pay more for the same schools, often while attempting to cut costs by closing or consolidating buildings that cost the same to maintain no matter how many students are enrolled. 

“The amount of money those districts are using per-pupil hasn’t declined precipitously,” Sutton said. “But the reason it hasn’t declined is because they’ve had to make it up through local taxation, not because there’s been no impact on the local district.” Meanwhile, state spending on private schools .

Lavertu acknowledged that the immediate effects of losing students to programs like EdChoice could be “difficult to deal with.” But he added that the influence of school choice could still be neutral, or even beneficial, over time — particularly when combined with necessary reforms to adjust for shrinking enrollment.

“When you’re losing students and losing revenue, but those fixed costs are there, you’ve got to make some really hard choices going forward. In the short term, that can be really, really painful,” he observed. “What I’d say with the funding is that, in the long run, it doesn’t appear to have a negative financial impact.”

The fiscal challenges facing Ohio’s schools could grow even more tangled with of HB 126, legislation that limits public challenges of property tax valuations. In recent decades, school districts have clawed back significant amounts of annual revenue by appealing to county boards when they believed that nearby properties — the — were undervalued. Under the new law, the avenues to such challenges are sharply curtailed. Local authorities have also struggled to that allow millions of dollars of tax revenue to go uncollected.

Matthew Chingos, vice president for education data and policy for the Urban Institute, has conducted several reviews of the effects of private school choice on phenomena . Much of the existing research, he noted, looked at small-bore programs that were intended only for poor children or those with disabilities. But with more and more states attempting to rapidly scale their voucher initiatives — Ohio could be next if Republican lawmakers are successful — there could be a need for “a new generation of evidence” to shed light on how a more muscular approach to choice helps or hurts traditional public school systems.

“[Scaling up] increases the potential for these programs to make a difference for the better, but it also raises the risk that, if they have negative effects, they’ll be more widely felt,” Chingos said.

The political impact is increasingly seen in state and local elections, where school board members have faced a historic spate of recall attempts and gubernatorial candidates are familiarizing themselves with the tenets of critical race theory. But new research also suggests that adult disputes can have a measurable effect on how kids learn.

In a study of student test scores, a political scientist reveals damage to math achievement following high-profile controversies around cultural issues in school districts. Fairly modest on average, the effects resulting from debates specifically focused on race and evolution are somewhat larger, and they may result from the strain imposed on educators by enervating fights over competing values.

Study author Vlad Kogan, a professor at Ohio State University, informally referred to the phenomenon as the “Loudoun County effect” — a reference that emerged last year in one of Virginia’s largest districts.

“Almost by definition, the more attention these [controversies] get, the less attention student learning receives,” said Kogan. “We could just be seeing the natural result of that: When adults are focused on other stuff, it’s the student learning that falls through the cracks.”

that Americans are, on balance, satisfied with the performance of their local schools since the beginning of the pandemic. But public discontentment has also repeatedly flared around issues like the inclusion of trans athletes in girls’ athletics, while experts have simultaneously documented steep learning loss resulting from COVID-related school closures.

The study, which has not yet undergone peer review, examines the outcomes of specific episodes featured in the , a publicly available inventory of culturally inflected disputes in K-12 schools. The database, maintained by the libertarian Cato Institute, details nearly 3,000 local controversies relating to “basic rights, moral values, or individual identities.” Those controversies appear in the Battle Map on the basis of local news coverage, and each case is grouped into one of nine broad categories, including sexuality, religion, race and ethnicity, and freedom of expression. 

To assess the academic impact of those incidents, Kogan relied on math and English test score data provided by the . A widely used research tool, SEDA allows comparisons between student performance in roughly 13,000 school districts around the country by indexing different state standardized test results to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

In all, Kogan gathered a sample of approximately 520 local controversies between 2010 and 2018, dropping from the sample any districts that saw more than one controversy over that span and any larger-scale controversies likely to affect all districts within a state. He then compared the trajectory of their academic performance before and after the high-profile battles against a group of control districts that did not experience similar uproars.

The results were mixed: Compared with the control group, school districts that experienced cultural controversies did not see a drop in English scores measured between the third and eighth grades. But math scores among those students did decline in the aftermath of such controversies by an average of .018 standard deviations. (A “standard deviation” is the statistical unit most often used to measure effects in education research; an effect of that size would generally be considered small.)

In the context of the SEDA data — which finds that student math scores increase by an annual average .39 standard deviations between third and eighth grade — that relative downward movement accounts for about 5 percent of a full year’s growth in the subject.

Digging deeper into the results, Kogan also found that the overall math slippage following was driven overwhelmingly by cultural controversies in two of the nine Battle Map categories: race and human origins (including disagreements over the teaching of evolution versus intelligent design), for which the negative impact was three to four times larger. Students of different socioeconomic backgrounds were equally affected, meaning that the scale of local achievement gaps was unaltered by political fights.

Disquietingly, even if political attention dissipates, the apparent academic setbacks don’t disappear quickly. Math achievement still showed evidence of decline in the affected school districts even four years later. 

Serotkin said it was “absolutely true” that his district had seen markedly higher attrition over the past two years, but argued that its cause couldn’t be known in an environment as chaotic as the pandemic.

“I have no idea whether that [turnover] is a result of the national political controversies that Loudoun has become a part of, or whether it’s just because of COVID.”

Dan Domenech, the longtime executive director of the American Association of School Superintendents, said that the most plausible cause for lower scores could simply be that a distracted local education establishment is necessarily a less effective one. Fractured goodwill and divided attention might lead to students getting the short end of the stick in terms of both oversight and learning resources.

“With functional school boards and administration, you can see that they’re providing teachers with the necessary materials — the technology, the books, the teacher training,” he argued. “The parallel to that on the negative side would be that if the board is in turmoil and involved in these culture wars, perhaps they’re not providing teachers with the resources that they need.”

Even so, Domenech pronounced himself skeptical of such a direct connection between controversy in school governance and results in the classroom. 

“From a political point of view, I’d love to be able to say, ‘Stop your fighting — you’re affecting kids’ learning.’ It would be great to be able to say that, but they’re going to ask, ‘Well, how’s that happening?’ And that’s a question I’d have a hard time answering.”

Kogan conceded that the effects measured in the study are comparatively slight, but added that test scores themselves are only the clearest outward manifestation of how political strife affects teaching and learning.

“There’s probably other dimensions of the school environment that are really important to students but that we can’t measure through test scores. So in some ways, this is just the iceberg tip of the underlying dynamics in the districts. The fact that test scores are dropping in non-trivial amounts suggests that there are changes in how the districts are run that really filter down to the classroom level.”