What that means, practically speaking, is that the most targeted and resource-heavy programs are poured into turning around the bottom 5% of schools in every state, including those with chronically bad graduation rates and those where certain subgroups of students languish below grade-level. 

On its face, that’s not a bad priority — though being identified as such has historically meant being targeted with drastic policy changes, including state takeovers. But in many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the traditional school landscape: Suddenly, math and reading scores plummeted across the board for students in every school, and chronic absenteeism soared. Four years later, the U.S. education system is still trying to claw its way back to pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

It’s no longer just the bottom 5 percent of schools in each state that are in trouble — it’s the majority of them. Recognizing this, Illinois developed a universal model of continuous school improvement to ensure that every school in the state — not just those identified for support by being the very worst — benefits from evidence-based improvement strategies. The goal of extending that type of focused support to every school, unique to Illinois, was developed in partnership with administrators, school boards, superintendents and principals. 

So when the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University announced it was planning a new state collaborative aimed at helping states identify, study and share their most effective school improvement policies, Illinois knew it would have something special to share.

The state is one of nine — along with Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas — participating in “States Leading States.” The goal of the initiative is ambitious: to work alongside state leaders to evaluate policies meant to solve their most pressing challenges and make those lessons rapidly accessible via a series of rolling policy reports to lawmakers and practitioners across the country.

“We are in a crisis moment in education,” said Scott Sargrad, director of States Leading States. “Now is really the time to double down on what works. And so in order to double down on what works, we need to know what works.”

The effort comes as the most recent math and reading scores for high schoolers plummet to record lows, chronic absenteeism soars and more and more students graduate without the skills necessary to be successful in college or the workplace. And it’s all occurring against the backdrop of a significantly diminished federal role in education under the Trump administration — both in terms of funding K-12 programs and prioritizing research to elevate best practices.

Take the myriad state efforts to boost reading scores by adopting policies better aligned to the science of reading. “It’s not totally clear what the best policy levers are to pull at the state level to actually get better teaching in the classroom, instructional coaching,” said Sargrad. “Is it tutoring? Is it high-quality instructional materials? Is it all of those things combined? We’re trying to figure out what the most effective state policies are on a bunch of pressing issues.” 

In addition to its continuous improvement plan, Illinois, for example, is in the process of developing a so-called “Comprehensive Numeracy Plan.” Modelled after a literacy program by the same name, the numeracy plan will establish a roadmap for strengthening math teaching and learning across the state, which right now, most states haven’t attempted. 

Harvard’s initiative is already garnering praise from both sides of the edu-political spectrum, with Margaret Spellings, former Education Secretary under President George W. Bush, and John B. King Jr., former Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, both backing the plan.

“At a time when too many students are not reading at grade level or able to do basic math and the gaps between highest and lowest performing students are growing, we need to make student achievement a priority again and develop evidence-based strategies that help all students succeed,” said Spellings, who is now the president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. King, who is currently the Chancellor of the State University of New York, said the initiative “sets a powerful example for the country.” 

States Leading States plans to publish research reports and practical policy solutions, sharing what works and what doesn’t. Attracting the right mix of states was important, Sargrad said, since ensuring geographic, demographic and political diversity of states participating in the initiative increases the likelihood for other state education leaders to glimpse how these policy lifts might play out in their state or district.

During this first year of collaboration, states are focusing on a variety of K-12’s biggest challenges. With social media and cell phone bans top-of-mind right now, a handful of states are focusing their initial efforts on identifying the most effective policy: Ohio is preparing to implement a statewide bell-to-bell cell phone ban, while Illinois and Delaware school districts are testing alternative cellphone policies, like requiring students to use phone pouches or keep them turned off and stored by the teacher. 

The current federal landscape puts “an urgent responsibility” on states to collaborate, try new ideas, measure their impact and share what works, said Angélica Infante-Green, commissioner of elementary and secondary education for Rhode Island. Beyond the current federal government shutdown, which has, among other things, resulted in the near total layoff of staff at the Office of Special Education Programs, the current administration’s efforts to dismantle the entire Education Department portends dire consequences for the ability to identify which state policies are working.

Some of those states are focusing on more traditional academic metrics: To improve reading proficiency in sixth through eighth grade, Indiana is piloting an outcomes-based approach for improving middle school literacy. This is a newer type of education vendor contract that holds service providers and districts accountable for student progress through language that stipulates payment upon literacy improvement on test scores. 

Alabama is requiring every district to offer summer reading and math camps for struggling students. The camps are a component of statewide efforts to improve reading and math proficiency, as mandated by the . For struggling third-grade readers, attending a summer reading camp is one option to avoid being held back and requires passing a second reading test to advance to the fourth grade. Some districts are already seeing significant improvement, including in DeKalb County, where math scores are at an all-time high. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee, Texas, and Rhode Island are taking on a host of challenges, from boosting access to career credentials, to implementing high-quality curriculum and addressing chronic absenteeism.

A key piece of the initiative involves equipping state agencies with the skills and personnel needed to conduct and use data analysis for continuous improvement — a boon for states in search of technical assistance in the wake of a 90 percent cut to the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Each state will host a data project fellow from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research to help organize data, analyze implementation, and build a community of researchers ready to share insights across state lines.

“We’re not a political action committee, we’re not an advocacy group. What we know how to do is measure the efficacy of policies, and when we find things that work, we’re going to try to make sure other states are aware of it,” Sargrad said. “There are a lot of things we can’t do right now, but one thing we can do is shine a spotlight on things that work. And we can do it well.”

While critics say it failed to boost student achievement — average fourth-grade math scores have dropped three points and eighth grade by nine since 2009, according to — its champions say it alone can’t improve test performance. Teacher preparedness and learning materials play a far greater role, they argue.

And they credit the Common Core for achieving something that had never been done before: building an on-ramp to algebra from arithmetic. 

Dave Kung, executive director at , a professional organization that works in the higher education space, said this transition was critical, and a major departure from how the subject was taught in earlier decades. 

“The system I went through was largely arithmetic in elementary school and all of a sudden, bam, you hit algebra and suddenly it’s pretty theoretical and pretty abstract,” he said. “The ramp I’m describing is from the concrete nature of arithmetic to the more abstract world of algebra. The Common Core refocused people’s attention on student thinking and that’s an important thing.”

The Common Core was rolled out in 2010 to address the unevenness with which the subject was taught throughout the nation and deepen students’ understanding of this complex topic, often providing children with more than one way to solve a problem. 

Many at the new approach and parents, flummoxed by not being able to help their kids with a subject they’d learned so differently, begrudgingly .  

It took years in many cases for schools to create or adopt the to support the standards. Meanwhile, political foes labeled the standards and school communities buckled under the constant testing pressure with many students of related exams. 

Despite these challenges, math experts say dozens of states still use the standards, some by their original name and others under new monikers. The Common Core has, in many cases, survived even as states across the country revamp their standards to combat poor student performance and wrestle with how to make math and STEM pathways more inclusive. 

While and Florida are among those that dropped the standards — Sunshine State leaders were gleeful about abandoning what they called — others have kept them while making some modifications. 

Louisiana is one such location, changing in 2016. Fourth graders saw their NAEP scores jump between 2022 and 2024 while eighth graders moved a single point. State schools chief Cade Brumley credited the state’s back-to-basics approach for students’ success. 

In Wisconsin, the Common Core remains largely intact, surviving three U.S. presidents and all of the politicization of education that has come with each new term. 

Mary Mooney, a mathematics education consultant with the state, was serving Milwaukee Public Schools when the standards first arrived in 2010. She said her district was uniquely receptive thanks in part to its strong focus on professional learning.  

“At the district level, we were incredibly excited for the Common Core,” Mooney said. “It was finally going to tell us what mathematics is. We thought it was a collection of skills that helps you get an answer. But the Common Core did an amazing job of building better narratives about what mathematics really is and why it is important to every student.” 

She said it helped teachers make connections they hadn’t before. 

“Everybody was challenged with these standards to think differently about mathematics,” she said, adding some teachers, for example, didn’t realize multiplication was so closely tied to elements of geometry. “That was the power of the Common Core. But you really needed good professional learning to see the beauty and power in those standards.”

And while some lament the Common Core for its perceived lack of impact on test scores, Kung said he isn’t too concerned about the standards’ relationship to students’ grades. 

He said the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state tests often reflect “straightforward procedural stuff,” adding, “if a student lost a little bit of that, I’m kind of OK with that if what they gained is a better understanding of what is going on.”

As a historical analogy, he noted that at some point students lost their ability to use . And nobody bemoans that, he said, adding there are some elements of mathematics — what he calls “the drill-and-kill stuff” — for which there are no remaining proponents. 

When Wisconsin was given a chance to jettison the standards during a review process a few years ago, Mooney said, the state opted to keep them, driven by their success and the effort it took to learn and adopt them. And the Common Core made educators rethink the notion of math fluency, which often equated to speed. 

There are far better goals, she said.

“When you think about being fast, you tend to have memorization as the only strategy for understanding your facts,” she said. “We added ‘flexible’ and ‘efficient,’ which helped teachers … to teach the math behind the facts and not simply getting an answer.”

Arlene Crum, director of math for Washington state until last year, said state law requires the education department to periodically revise its learning standards. The review began when Crum still worked for the state, she said, adding she urged officials to stay true to the Common Core for three critical reasons. 

First, she said, the standards were sound. And districts had been working for the last 10 years to make sure their instructional materials were aligned to it at her office’s request, she said. 

“So, I felt it would be a huge task for districts to have the rug suddenly pulled out from them,” Crum said. “And because it’s a national set of standards, there are a ton of resources to help teachers with it.”

Josh Recio of the in Austin said the Common Core works best in the younger years and in getting students ready for the challenges of algebra, a gateway course to higher-level math in high school and college. 

“Most people realize the K-8th grade Common Core standards do a really nice job of preparing students for algebra in high school,” he said. “There is something to be said for having guidance, for having people who are very smart and understand these issues that students face and took the time to write down a set of standards to prepare students for high school. There is a progression of learning that makes sure you are successful once you get there.”

The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Charles A. Dana Center and to ����Ӱ��.

One is the overwhelming flood of unilateral, executive action. This has included the haphazard dismantling of the federal Department of Education, on-and-off-again suspensions of various education-related spending — from research grants and leftover COVID dollars to afterschool and summer programs — and aggressive use of civil rights laws to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs and transgender athletes.

The other is the persistence of pandemic learning loss and the absence of political interest or will to do anything about it. The from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, showed only modest improvements in math scores and continued declines in reading achievement, to the lowest rates recorded on this series of exams. Similar trends have been confirmed by vendors.

What if these two developments are related?

This suggestion is at the core of the argument I make in my new book, . The same electoral processes that gave the nation President Donald Trump — and the same democratic justifications his administration now offers to defend his norm-shattering actions — represent some of the biggest impediments to solving today’s most pressing educational challenges.

First, consider the intellectual and philosophical similarities. Trump’s aggressive approach to presidential power is based on the , a controversial scholarly thesis that escaped from the legal academy into the real world. It views a strong presidency as a democratic antidote to unaccountable, deep-state bureaucrats and “elites,” and condemns any effort to block or undermine executive authority by unelected officials as inherently illegitimate.

The downplaying or of learning loss also has roots in once-fringe academic ideas — accounts that dismiss standardized testing as outgrowth of toxic “neoliberalism.” These scholarly treatises feature their own mustache-twirling villains — corporate reformers and billionaire philanthropists, a different kind of elite — and a restoration of truly democratic control of public education.

When federal courts stepped in to block some of the Trump administration’s executive actions, the White House “unelected judges” and Vice President J.D. Vance that their intervention represented “an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.” 

Defenders of chronically underperforming schools have lodged nearly identical complaints against efforts to fix them.

After Louisiana officials took over the undeniably corrupt and woefully run New Orleans school district in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and turned almost all of it over to charter schools, academic achievement and attainment . For years, however, critics attacked the new system as “.”

More recently, Houston’s state-appointed superintendent has produced turnaround less than two years after sidelining the district’s elected school board. As one local journalist : “The news from the Houston Independent School District at the end of the 2025 school year is wonderful for Houston, wonderful for Texas and wonderful for the nation.”

Rather than celebrate these improvements, however, opponents continue to demand “” to the “undemocratic seizure of Houston’s public schools” and warn that “these kinds of undemocratic seizures of power aren’t just a Houston problem — they’re a threat to every public school.”

Last November, the Houston teachers union helped persuade city voters to the school district’s $4.4 billion bond proposal — not because union leaders disagreed about the need to upgrade aging school buildings, but because that any investments must be delayed until “we have steady, trusted and accountable elected leaders running the district once more.”

Fortunately, many Americans appear to reject the Trump administration position that presidential power is unlimited and any intervention to rein it in illegitimate — suggests that public approval of his performance is underwater almost across the board. Voters seem to understand that there is much more to democracy than mere elections and that electoral control can be a double-edged sword. That unelected judges with lifetime appointments (and ) play an essential role, too, in providing restraint against the popular passions of the moment. And that groups without the right to vote, whether non-citizen immigrants or underage children, require special protections, because their interests are especially likely to be overlooked in the political process.

Similar dynamics apply at the local level. They help explain why much of the dysfunction that plagues schools is hard-wired into a governance model that puts the short-term political agendas of adults ahead of the educational interests of students that local schools serve. The argument that responsiveness to voters is the only outcome that matters and any intervention limiting the authority of elected officials is undemocratic did not begin during the Trump administration — and similar claims have long been used to insulate chronically underperforming school systems from meaningful accountability and reform.

In 1997, political commentator Fareed Zakaria published a article in Foreign Affairs warning about the rise of what he called “illiberal democracy.” Too many, he warned, made the mistake of equating “democracy” with elections. But democracy is much more than that, he argued. It is “a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property.”

At the time, he was focused mostly on newly democratizing countries in the developing world, but the distinction seems equally relevant in America today.

Zakaria’s insight is also relevant for understanding the problem with education governance. If “illiberal democracy” is characterized by fetishizing electoral procedures at the expense of substantive performance, and if it prioritizes popular participation and (adult) majority rule over minority (and student) interests, public education has long had an illiberal democracy problem. And America’s schoolchildren have paid the price.

This scenario played out in 15,700 elementary schools across the nation in the 2022-23 school year, our of the latest federal data shows, up from 3,550 elementary schools before the pandemic. 

The impact from so many students missing so much school has made learning more challenging not just for the students who are chronically absent (missing 10% of the school year) but also for those who . These very high levels of chronic absence are also causing teachers to feel less satisfied with .

The disappointing results of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) underscore that high levels of absenteeism continue to contribute to the decline in student performance. In fact, an analysis of past NAEP results show that students who missed more school scored far lower than their peers. Keep in mind that this year’s 4th grade NAEP scores are for students who were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit, causing huge disruptions to acquiring the fundamental habits and academic skills needed to lay a strong foundation for school success.

When chronic absence is pervasive, it has a profound impact on the learning experience of all students. When teachers are constantly having to reteach kids that have been absent, that limits their ability to continue making progress with the kids that are there every day. 

Recent studies show that when chronic absence reaches high levels, it has spillover effects dragging down the math and reading scores of even those classmates who aren’t missing too much school. It can also that regularly attending peers will become chronically absent.

The U.S. Education Department data for the 2022–23 school year shows that 61% of schools had chronic absenteeism rate of at least 20% – the level at which it affects all students, not just those who are chronically absent. That’s down from the previous year’s 65% levels but still more than twice the 28% of schools with these levels in 2017-18. This meant that for the average-sized school in 2022-23 that reached the 20% mark, there were at least 88 chronically absent students in each elementary school, 113 in each middle school and 139 students in each high school. 

The federal data also reflect that 30% or more of students are chronically absent at 36% of all schools, compared to 43% in 2021-22 and 14 percent 2017-18. This kind of absenteeism can overwhelm a school and certainly is too much for just one attendance monitor, social worker, or counselor to address. 

Overall, the federal data found that the share of students who were chronically absent slightly decreased from its high of 30% of students in the 2021-22 school year to 28% in 2022-23. for 2023-24 shows some improvement but still not a return to pre-pandemic levels.

The improvements reflected in the federal data were uneven – some places didn’t improve and some places even found it getting worse – but overall there were small improvements. This means that chronic absence remained highly elevated during the second year of in-person schooling for students, even though during the 2022-23 school year, attendance was not affected by widespread Covid-19 outbreaks.

While chronic absence was decreasing for all student groups, sizable gaps remained. We see that historically marginalized groups – Native American, Pacific Islander, Black and Hispanic students, students with disabilities and English language learners – continued to experience much higher absenteeism. At the same time, there were encouraging attendance improvements for Black and Hispanic students overall. 

The years following the pandemic have, for many families, resulted in a shift in s around education. High levels of schoolwide absenteeism can exacerbate the mindset that showing up to school in person is optional. It harms teachers’ perceptions as well. Research shows that significant chronic absence leads teachers to view students who are missing 18 days more negatively, and also leads teachers to feel worse about their jobs. 

Given the persistence of chronic absence, we can all agree that focusing on student engagement and attendance must be a top priority for every state, district, school and community. States and districts must set ambitious but achievable goals like reducing chronic absence  and implementing a systematic road map for change. 

It’s true that in many cases elevated levels of chronic absence will not be eliminated overnight. The good news is that we have seen substantially improved student engagement and attendance in states including , , ,  and  as well as in many districts across the nation. 

How did these improvements happen? Each involves an investment in a comprehensive, data-informed, prevention-oriented, all-hands-on-deck approach to improve engagement and attendance.

There are three different sources of information to answer that question. Two of them are showing students made no or small gains last year, and the third, NAEP, will come out in early 2025 and provide the final word. 

The first results were the interim benchmark assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready. Combined, they test millions of students several times a year, so think of them as the canary in the coal mine. Although they found slightly different trends across subjects and grade levels, they that students made little progress in math and may have even declined in English Language Arts. 

The interim assessments are voluntary, and they don’t break out the results by state, district or school. So the next piece of evidence comes from the tests that states administer each Spring, and those results have been slowly trickling out. Now, the team behind has organized that data, and as of the end of November, they had grade- and subject-level results for 39 states and the District of Columbia. 

The states are painting a slightly more optimistic picture than what the interim assessments showed, but just barely. For example, the median state reported a one-point increase in the percentage of 8^th graders who were proficient in math. States reported similarly small gains across grades and subjects, with the exception of 8^thgrade English Language Arts, which declined by 0.2 points. 

To put it bluntly, these small gains are not enough to get kids back up to their achievement levels prior to the pandemic. And, with ESSER funds expiring earlier this year, there’s not a lot of fuel left to help students get back on track. 

The table below shows the state-level results in 8^th grade math. Readers should take those with a grain of salt. For example, Oklahoma and reported double-digit increases, but those are largely due to leaders in those states lowering standards. 

You can also see some missing data in the table. Some states haven’t released their results by grade level, as they are required to by federal law. And as Dale Chu noted in the , 10 states are out of compliance with federal law with respect to how scores are reported, and 13 are not reporting what percentage of students actually took the tests. 

Some states have been putting up modest gains for the past few years. In 8^th grade math, for example, 10 states—Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have all increased proficiency rates by more than 1 point a year for multiple years in a row. Other states have shown little to no progress from their pre-pandemic lows, notably Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. 

To know for certain which of these gains are real, and which ones are artificially inflated, we’ll have to see the third set of data, the NAEP results that are scheduled to come out early next year. Given that they use one common yardstick across the country, those should provide the final verdict on these early recovery years. Judging by what we’ve seen from the first two sources, we shouldn’t hope for much more than a very slight uptick nationally. 

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman works with NWEA and the Collaborative for Student Success. 

But researchers with The University of Chicago say such data points represent a mere snapshot of student achievement for those still learning a new language, telling just a fraction of a greater story. 

They’ve been turning their attention instead to a different group of children: Former English learners who, by the time they reached ninth grade, had graduated from language support programs.

Their of 78,507 Chicago Public School students who started high school in the fall of 2014, 2015 and 2016 shows this group is thriving: They had better cumulative grade point averages and SAT scores and were more likely to graduate high school than the district average.

Their two-year college enrollment rate was also higher. 

“There is this perception that English learners are particularly struggling, that they don’t do well … that they are perpetually behind,” said Marisa de la Torre, a managing director and senior research associate at the . 

Incoming Vice President JD Vance furthered the notion that these students are a burden, when he pointed to the tens of thousands of school-age children in whose parents are undocumented.

“Now think about that,” he said in October. “Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English. Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Xenophobia and race-baiting were central to Donald Trump’s re-election efforts. The incoming president has said he will to drive millions of undocumented people from the country, a plan and  

de la Torre said the belief that all children associated with English learner programs are forever adrift is misleading and unfair to students and their teachers: It’s a far smaller subset of active English learners — those who struggle to make it out of English learner support programs — who tend to have lower grades, she said.

Jorge Macias, now a senior consultant to the Latino Policy Forum, led Chicago Public School’s multilingual program for years. He said the narrative must be changed to reflect reality. 

“State-level data and national data doesn’t capture this group properly,” Macias said, noting that 78% of English learner students in the Chicago school system transitioned out of the program by 8th grade, according to an earlier study. “And once the students exit, they actually show just as much success — if not more — in the factors that matter most for postsecondary success. “

UChicago researchers divided active English learners into categories, including long-term English learners. These students were in the program for at least six years: Many had learning disabilities and Individualized Education Programs outlining their mandated special education services.

The final category consisted of late-arriving students, those who came to the district after the third grade and remained active in the English learner program in their freshman year of high school. 

Former English learners represented 23% of the school system’s ninth graders in the years the study covered. Long-term English learners without IEPs made up 4%. Their performance was substantially lower than the district average. 

These students were more likely to enroll in a two-year-college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college — and when they did enroll in a four-year college, they had lower persistence rates., they had lower persistence rates. 

Long-term English learners with IEPs made up 3% of ninth graders in the study. Their high school performance and college enrollment and persistence rates were similar to non-English learners with IEPs. 

Late-arriving English learners, who also made up 3% of the study’s ninth graders, graduated high school at similar rates to their peers: 81% compared to the district average of 84%. But their college entrance exam scores were lower. 

Despite this, their two-year college persistence rate was markedly higher than most other students who enrolled in college.

Researchers found that while late-arriving English learners struggled with standardized tests, their grades were strong. And they were more successful than their native English-speaking peers — and former English learners — in college, suggesting their poor test performance was not predictive of later success. 

This new report builds upon earlier research in this area. Another de la Torre of Chicago Public Schools found that English learners who demonstrated English proficiency by eighth grade had higher attendance levels through elementary and middle school, better math test scores and core course grades compared to students never classified as ELs.

It found, too, that English learners who did not achieve English proficiency by eighth grade struggled with declining attendance by the middle grades and also had considerably lower grade point averages.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, the Latino Policy Forum’s vice president of education policy and research, said quality bilingual programs and other supports can help active English learners succeed. 

The achievements of former English learners, she said, are “a powerful reminder that bilingualism is not a barrier, but a bridge, to greater opportunities.”

A Delaware-based found that a substantive increase in young immigrants leads to sizable academic gains for students who were already in English learner programs or who had graduated from them. 

And at a time when immigrant students are portrayed as a drain on U.S. schools, researchers also found that those who had never been enrolled in English learner programs were not significantly impacted. Their performance improved, but by a negligible amount. 

Researchers analyzed student-level administrative data from Delaware covering 125,500 fourth through eighth graders enrolled in public schools between the 2015–16 and 2018–19 school years. They note the timeliness of the study, which was published last month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

President-elect Donald Trump, who won decisively in his re-election bid against Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday, regularly lambasted immigrants in  throughout his campaign and promised mass deportation of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. without legal immigration status.

“What are the effects of immigrants on communities?” asked David Figlio, professor of economics and education at the University of Rochester, in a recent interview with ����Ӱ��. “Especially those that are ‘new immigrant destinations’ that have not historically had large numbers of foreign-born residents? This paper directly addresses one of the most important potential mechanisms through which immigrant students might affect incumbent students — the consequences of increased linguistic diversity in the classroom.”

Delaware’s share of immigrants increased by 65% between 2000 and 2010 — and by 53% between 2010 and 2019, according to the study. Likewise, the number of English learner students in Delaware public schools increased seven-fold over the past two decades. 

Researchers say the share of English learners in the public school system soared from 2% in 2000 to 11% in 2019: The increase accounted for about half of the overall enrollment growth in Delaware public schools in that timeframe.

Umut Ozek, a senior economist at RAND, said a sudden increase in newcomer students can test schools: their needs might call for added social and academic support. 

But, he said, these findings should assuage concerns by state and federal policy makers that large upticks of newcomer students are overwhelming school districts and degrading classroom achievement, saying such conversations must be rooted in fact. 

“We don’t want these debates to take place in vacuums,” he said. 

Conservative forces have long considered , the 1982 Supreme Court decision that prohibits schools from turning away students based upon their immigration status. 

Politicians in several states are already targeting these students. Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters demanded — — a nearly for what he claims is the cost of educating “illegal immigrant children.”

“Under your supervision, the costs in education due to illegal immigration have risen astronomically,” he wrote. “Your failed oversight and efforts are a direct cause of the current crises Oklahoma and other states now face. Oklahoma taxpayers, schools, teachers, and parents should not bear the burden of your failings.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said two years ago that Plyler should be revisited: A politician introduced legislation that would bar undocumented students from public school. A state representative in made similar remarks earlier this year. 

RAND researchers are not entirely sure why current and former English learners benefit from the arrival of newcomer students but cite three possible explanations: First, they say, immigrant students often trigger increased funding for schools, money that could be particularly helpful to existing English learners. 

For example, if the English learner population reaches a particular threshold, schools might hire additional staff to support these students. Second, a marked uptick of newcomers in the classroom might prompt teachers to use more effective strategies to serve this population, a change they might not have made if their numbers remained small. 

Finally, researchers say, English learners in receiving schools tend to be more academically motivated and can also help their peers feel less isolated. 

This is just one of a handful of studies these researchers have conducted in this area. 

, centered on Florida and published in April 2023, found that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

in 2018 focused on the impact of Haitian newcomers on existing students in Florida: Researchers found ​​no evidence of negative effects on incumbent students’ school outcomes after the young immigrants arrived. 

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

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

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

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

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

What did we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inputs

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

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

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

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

Processes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outputs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outcomes

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

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

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

Insights from the audience

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

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

Impulsive

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

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

Incremental

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

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

Incoherent

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

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

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

Impatient

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

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

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

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

Intransigent

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

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

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

Ineffective

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

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

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

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

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

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

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

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

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

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

ADULTS ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED TO PRIORITIZE STUDENT OUTCOMES

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

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

COORDINATING MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE IS A CHALLENGE

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

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

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

VESTED INTERESTS DOMINATE EDUCATION POLITICS

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

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

ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

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

SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT

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

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

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

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

ALT-GOVERNANCE (MAYORAL CONTROL, STATE TAKEOVERS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PORTFOLIO FRAMEWORK OR PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT MODEL

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

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

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

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

LESSONS AND RECURRENT TENSIONS IN GOVERNANCE REFORM DEBATES

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

1: DEMOCRATIC PROCEDURES ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN DEMOCRATIC OUTCOMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINAL THOUGHTS

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

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

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

That’s the finding of a from researchers at the University of Arkansas. Charter schools in Indianapolis; Camden, New Jersey; San Antonio, Texas; and New York City were all particularly cost-effective.

First, the report compares spending versus achievement for traditional district and charter schools in nine cities. On average across the sample, charter schools got less money than nearby district schools. Yet charter students made greater academic gains than their peers in the traditional schools.

Next, using data showing that higher achievement is linked to greater lifetime earnings, the authors calculate precise estimates for returns on investment in public education. On average, students in traditional public schools earned $3.94 in future lifetime earnings for every $1 invested in public schools. Public schools are a good investment!

But charters were an especially good investment, the research shows. For every $1 these cities invested in charter schools, students could expect to gain $6.25 in lifetime earnings. That works out to a 58% advantage for charters for every dollar spent.

Consider the case of Indianapolis, which had the biggest charter school advantage of the nine cities in the study. Its charter schools spent nearly $8,000 less per pupil than the local district, and yet students in Indianapolis charter schools made faster progress in reading and math. In Indianapolis, every dollar spent on charters returned 106% more than the same amount invested in the city’s traditional public schools.

The report does not go into why charters are more efficient, but it would be worth a broader look. Is it merely that charters pay their teachers less money, or do they deploy staff more strategically? Are the charter school gains caused by specific academic programs or curricula, or are they tied to a of high expectations?

Historically, education has shied away from conversations about trade-offs and the output of different types of investments. In some corners, discussions of productivity are considered taboo or inappropriate in the context of a public good like education.

But American schools have a growing (in)efficiency problem. It’s simple math: Achievement levels are at multi-decade lows at the same time as spending and staffing levels are at all-time highs. Combine these two trends, and it’s fair to say that American schools are less productive — in an economic sense — than they’ve ever been.

OK, you might say, the math checks out, but who cares? Isn’t productivity just for pointy-headed economists? Besides, budgets are strong right now, and school districts don’t need to turn a profit, so they don’t need to engage in this type of cost-benefit thinking.

These are short-sighted arguments. For one, the good times will end, perhaps soon, and school districts will once again need to balance their budgets. And in the meantime, they’re facing growing competition from public charter schools, private schools and homeschooling. Plus, school district advocates will have an easier sell when they’re able to show that traditional schools are good stewards of public resources.

Efficiency concerns are everywhere. We care about inflation and the price of goods and services. We hunt for good deals.These concepts, so common in our everyday lives, are all too rare when it comes to education. But they shouldn’t be. With student enrollment declining and one-time federal funds about to expire, schools will need to start paying more attention to the value they’re getting from their investments. In some cities, that may mean looking to how charter schools are operating successfully with fewer resources and leaner budgets.

Missouri is one of the newest states to see exponential growth in the adoption of this policy. In 2009, no district in the state had a four-day school week; but, as of the 2022-23 school year, are now on that schedule. Generally, most of the schools and districts adopting the policy are rural and west of the Mississippi River.

Against this growing trend, however, there is increasing evidence that, by and large, a four-day school week causes student achievement to suffer. To study the policy’s effects, we looked at a — Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota — five of which had the student achievement data we needed for the study. We compared achievement in English and math in grades 3 through 8 in schools that adopted the four-day school week against that of their five-day-a-week peers. We found that students in four-day school week districts fell behind a little every year. Though these changes were small, they accumulated. We estimate that after eight years, the damage to student achievement will about equal that caused, according to , by the pandemic. The potential long-term learning deficit in student achievement from the four-day school week is, our findings suggest, not trivial.

Why, then, is the policy so popular? For one thing, district leaders cannot see the harm. We found that school leaders, teachers and parents in districts with a four-day week reported that test scores were equal to, or even better than, results from before the policy was adopted. Our analysis confirmed that, by and large, exam results remained the same or went up year to year, even after the shorter week was adopted. But if school leaders were able to see the bigger picture of what was happening outside their district, they would realize that students in five-day-a-week schools were progressing faster. The four-day students were actually, comparatively, falling behind. In other words, their performance would likely have grown faster if their district had never adopted the four-day school week.

The ideas behind the policy are simple and appealing. A shorter week makes it easier to staff schools, a particularly challenging task for rural schools, due to their geographic isolation and lower salaries. Proponents of the four-day week also say a shorter workweek could get teachers to , or bring retirees back into the classroom. It could reduce burnout and improve job satisfaction, and it could attract teachers from neighboring five-day school week districts, even if pay is lower in the four-day district. For districts facing budget shortfalls, the shorter week could save money on, for example, buses, school lunches, substitute teachers and hourly employees, and spend it to preserve staffing levels or hire specialized staff such as reading coaches.  

Indeed, in the 12 rural school districts we visited, school administrators, teachers, students and parents reported that the shorter week did indeed improve school morale. Teachers feeling less burned out and missing fewer instructional days due to illness or exhaustion. And while they spent time working on school tasks like grading and lesson planning over the weekend, they had more time to prepare for the coming week.

In a few schools, teachers also reported delaying retirement due to the shorter work week. Some even told us they were now willing to drive longer distances, and accept reduced wages, to work in a school that had adopted a four-day week. Students and parents were, by and large, also very satisfied with the shorter week. It allowed teachers, students and parents time to recover from the general stresses of school (e.g., early start times, homework, athletics) and spend more time at home with their families or engage in outside activities.

But even these perceived benefits have shortcomings. Take, for example, the recruiting advantage a four-day school week gives a district. This works only if neighboring districts still have five-day weeks, and even then, it is likely a short-term gain. If a district with lower pay but a four-day week successfully poaches teachers from a district nearby, what’s to stop those same districts from adopting the same policy and winning its teachers back? Indeed, of a district adopting a four-day school week is proximity to a district that already has one. Teachers have a strong preference for , so when all surrounding districts operate on the same schedule, the four-day week ceases to be an attractive perk in making long-term employment decisions.

More generally, the four-day school week is being used to sidestep deeper underlying issues that are enduring, complicated and difficult to fix. For example, in our study, we found that the most common reason districts adopted a four-day week was to reduce costs on the expenses named above. Rural schools in particular have than urban ones because transportation costs more and rural areas tend to be poorer, leading to lower local school funding levels. Overhead costs are also higher because rural schools serve fewer children, and continued reductions in state funding makes these districts less able to sustain the costs of running a school. Lastly, while the four-day week might temporarily attract talent, it does not address the longer-term teacher shortages caused by factors such as and that is not keeping up with inflation or other college-educated or advanced degree professions.

A better approach to improving outcomes for both students and teachers would be to address the root cause of the challenges schools and districts face, including insufficient and inequitable funding and teacher and student stress. Though the four-day school week can, at first, seem like an appealing solution to some of the problems that beset schools across the United States, in the long run the benefits may not outweigh the drawbacks—both in slowing learning, and by papering over the deeper issues schools and teachers face.

This essay represents the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the RAND or the University of New Mexico.

Districts that spent the majority of that year learning remotely tended to lose more ground in fourth-grade math scores than districts that reopened sooner. Every 10 additional days of school closures was associated with a roughly 0.2-point loss on NAEP from 2019 to 2022. The pattern was statistically significant and held even when controlling for the share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty.

“The districts with more remote learning have larger test score losses,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor who has tracked school closures through the pandemic. 

“It’s pretty consistent with what we have seen up until now,” added the researcher, an early and ardent supporter of reopening schools during the pandemic shutdown whose positions were .

The finding adds to the that online learning during the pandemic had a negative impact on student learning outcomes, even while there is renewed debate over how strongly the 2022 NAEP scores reflect it. The highly anticipated results released Monday showed the largest drops ever recorded in 4th and 8th grade math.

Peggy Carr, head of the U.S. Department of Education center that administers NAEP exams, played down any possible relationships between school closures and test results.

“There is nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed,” she said during a Friday press conference.

Oster, who also of the relationship between remote learning and NAEP results, called the National Center for Education Statistics director’s statement “odd” and “not very consistent with what we are seeing in the data.”

However, she acknowledged that there is an element of truth to Carr’s words.

“Maybe what they’re saying is that [school closure] is not the only determinant, and that’s right. It is not the case that there is a straight line between remoteness and test score losses,” she said.

An NCES spokesperson affirmed that stance Tuesday, denying any “simple direct relationship between duration of remote learning and score declines based on NAEP results” in a statement emailed to ����Ӱ��.

“Controlling for free- or reduced-price lunch is helpful but not sufficient,” the spokesperson continued. “NCES will be conducting analyses that conform to the highest statistical standards, consider multiple variables and link data collected by NCES to other high quality datasets.”

On the whole, results from what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card revealed the stark drop offs in math and a slide in reading since 2019, the last time the exam was administered. Some individual school systems, however, performed better than expected, including Los Angeles, among the districts which stayed in remote learning the longest and which saw improvements in reading for fourth graders and in both reading and math for eighth graders.

Since the release of NAEP results on Monday, and have conducted several analyses correlating scores with length of school closures and found moderate, statistically significant links. However, those analyses have largely focused on state data, an approach some experts warn against because it lumps districts that reopened quickly with those that stayed shuttered much longer.

“Within states, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in terms of closure policies,” said Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

“Looking at district data is superior to looking at state data because that’s where the [reopening] decisions were made,” he said.

����Ӱ�� took the district-level approach, crunching data from a sample of large urban school systems included in the NAEP release. Their scores were then matched with closure data from Oster’s , which tracked the percentage of the 2020-21 school year that districts offered remote, hybrid or in-person instruction. From the full sample of 26 school systems, Fresno was removed because it had no publicized 2022 NAEP scores and New York City, the nation’s largest school district, and Shelby County, Tennessee were excluded because they had no district-level school closure data available in the Hub.

Among the 23 remaining school systems, fourth-grade math was the only subject with a statistically significant relationship between district performance and time spent in remote learning. There were weak correlations in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math and no association for eighth-grade reading.

“It was very hard for the little kids to focus on Zoom,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the younger students saw more of an impact on literacy skills and early foundational computational skills.”

Her research group analyzed data on the effects of school closures, finding , especially for younger students and those living in poverty. 

“Schools stayed closed too long, especially in urban areas,” Lake said, noting that her judgment is much easier to make now with the benefit of hindsight as opposed to during the height of COVID when the science on infections and transmissibility was still coming into focus.

The variation in the NAEP results represents “shades of badness,” she said. “Some states are celebrating not being as bad as other states, but nobody has much to celebrate here.”

NAEP results must be interpreted carefully, experts caution. They are built to show how students are doing, not to explain the reasons behind their performance, Loveless said. (He compared the exam to a thermometer: “It can tell you if you have a temperature, but it can’t tell you why.”)

However, the exam is also the only U.S. test administered to students in all 50 states, making it “the only game in town when it comes to comparing across states,” said the former Brookings Institution researcher.

����Ӱ�� analysis, he said, “makes an addition” to the continued dialogue on the impacts of school closures during the pandemic.

Now, with the extent of pandemic missed learning coming into greater focus across the nation, Lake said, it’s time to hone in on how to respond.

“We’ve just got a lot of work to do to give kids back what they were owed, both academically and developmentally.”

Oster agreed that it may be time to put aside reopening showdowns and instead work toward recovery.

“There is a very reasonable desire to move on from the discussion of, ‘How important were school closures?’ into, ‘How do we fix this?’” she said. “I’m quite sympathetic to that desire to move on.”

Some of these children also struggled with a language barrier — as did their parents — making the switch to remote learning even tougher, according to UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, which released the study July 11 at its conference in San Antonio. 

“This report comes at a pivotal time as our schools and communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Latino students and their families,” UnidosUS president and CEO Janet Murguía says in the foreword. “We cannot allow hard won educational gains to be reversed, yet we also know that the pre-pandemic status quo was not working as well as it should.” 

Latinos make up a formidable percentage of the K-12 population, growing from 9% in 1984 to 28% today. Some 94% of those under 18 are U.S.-born citizens and nearly three quarters are of Mexican descent. Despite stringent and sometimes hostile U.S. immigration policies, their numbers are increasing: Latinos are expected to hit 30% of the K-12 population by 2030. 

First Lady Jill Biden, who spoke at the conference Monday, said the White House stands in support of the Latino community. She touched upon the gun safety laws brought about by the tragic shootings in nearby Uvalde, the diversity of the Latino population as a whole and the goals that unite this group. 

“Yes, the Latino community is unique,” she said. “But what I’ve heard from you again and again is that you want what all families want. Good schools. Good jobs. Safe neighborhoods. You want justice and equality—the opportunity to build a better life for your families. It’s not only what all families want; it’s what all families deserve.”

Latino students have made substantial gains in recent decades on the education front, UnidosUS notes. Their on-time high school graduation rate increased from 71% in the 2010-11 school year to nearly 82% in 2018-19, an all-time high. Likewise, the number of Hispanic students enrolled in postsecondary programs jumped from 782,400 in 1990 to nearly 3.8 million in 2019, a 384% increase.

But both of these figures took a hit in recent years: The on-time Latino high school graduation rate dropped by .7% from 2020 to 2021, according to a data analysis from 25 states representing 57% of the student population. Even more troubling, Latino freshman enrollment in college shrunk by 7.8% in spring 2021 compared to the year before, marking the first such decline in a decade: The figure rebounded by 4% by the spring 2022 semester, UnidosUS found, but it remained below pre-pandemic levels. 

The trend is in keeping with that of the overall college population, which is down by more than 1.4 million undergraduates.

Not all academic indicators are available and many poor students were not tested during the height of COVID, but at least one critical test shows a lag: Latino students in 3rd through 8th grade saw greater declines than their non-Latino white peers on NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, an interim assessment administered in schools across the country.

But, UnidosUS writes in its report, the loss needs to be put in context. Latino students were more likely to attend high-poverty schools that participated in remote instruction for a longer period of time, often yielding a greater rate of learning loss for students, the organization found.

UnidosUS recommends improved data collection and analysis meant to identify academic weaknesses and improve results. It implores districts to honor student’s rights to their education — some schools have been sued for failing to enroll immigrant students whom they feel will not graduate on time — and include the voices of students and their families in shaping education policies and services. 

It also calls for a major increase in funding, a “bold and historical investment in Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” the federal formula grant program intended to support English learners by increasing funding from $831 million to $2 billion. 

“Since 2001, the population of English learners has increased by 35%,” the report notes. “However, Title III funding has not kept pace. When adjusted for inflation, funding has decreased by 24% since 2002.”

The group found Latino students are more likely than their peers to attend a low-rated school and to have a novice teacher. These children also have limited exposure to educators who look like them — just 9% of teachers are Latino — which is an important factor in student success. 

And language access remains a challenge: More than three quarters of the nation’s 5.1 million English language learners are Latino and a similar percentage speak Spanish at home.

Research shows students learning English typically make academic gains at rates similar to or higher than their peers, the study notes, but experience greater learning loss in the summer months when they are not in the classroom. The pandemic, which sent the nation’s entire school population home for months at a time, worsened this slide for Latino children, who were disconnected from their teachers and the technology their schools offered. Just two years prior to the pandemic, data shows nearly a third of Latino households lacked high-speed broadband internet and 17% did not have a computer in the home.

Despite many schools’ efforts to place a device in the hands of every child, Latinos remain at a disadvantage. Two years into the pandemic, 1 in 3 often or sometimes faced one of the following problems: They had to complete their homework on a cell phone, were unable to turn in their assignments because they lacked computer or internet access, or were forced to use public Wi-Fi to complete at-home work, UnidosUS reported.

And their lack of connectivity wasn’t the only problem, the group found: 50% of Latino parents reported having difficulty helping their kids with unfamiliar coursework and 58% had problems communicating with teachers, possibly because of a language barrier and schools’ failure to employ translators.