The following day, an Army helicopter collided with an airliner in the skies over Washington, D.C., killing 67 people — the first mass fatality aviation accident in the U.S. in nearly 16 years. The rarity of such disasters reflects aviation’s remarkable safety record: Flying at 30,000 feet is safer than driving or walking.  

What separates these two disasters is how differently aviation and education learn from failure. Here are three ideas education leaders can take from aviation.  

First, it’s important to create forums for deeply analyzing what went wrong. After every accident, the National Transportation Safety Board conducts prolonged investigations, extracting lessons that prevent future disasters. The NTSB begins by recognizing that complex failures have multiple causes, investigating aircraft design, crew procedures, air traffic control, routes and flight conditions. 

Six months after the D.C. crash, the NTSB issued an that stimulated in technology use, landing routes and rules for how aircraft separation is maintained. Last month, on the anniversary of the crash, detailed the accident chain, explaining what went wrong.  

Contrast this with Delaware, one of the 10 states that saw a steep drop in early reading scores. A from Gov. Matt Meyer and the state Department of Education lays out four priorities. The plan reasonably starts with “access to grade-level instruction” — but what’s missing is any public diagnosis about current obstacles fornstudents reading below grade level, or why the failure occurred for so many kids in the first place. 

States and districts don’t need an entity as structured as the NTSB, but they would benefit from spending several months analyzing data and developing cases of student reading success and failure at each grade. Disseminating those cases would be a powerful learning tool for real improvement. 

Second, aviation benefits from a . Airline crews don’t have a rigid hierarchy; instead, junior pilots are trained to speak up during critical moments. Tools like pre-flight checklists create predictable ways to voice concerns without seeming insubordinate. A allows pilots to report concerns anonymously, without fear of punishment. 

Most school leaders struggle with this concept. Superintendents too often blame individual teachers for problems that stem from systemic issues. than veteran colleagues, in part because they find it difficult to ask for help and admit when they’re struggling.

Building cultures of safety in schools means regarding mistakes as part of innovation. , the ambitious reform using research-backed curricula in all elementary schools, showed slim results the first two years. The process demanded that teachers unlearn practices they thought had been good for kids and asked them to teach grade-level books for all students — a heavy lift.

Finally, last spring, scores jumped citywide. Two community school district superintendents, Cristine Vaughn and Roberto Padilla said they gave their teachers room to learn during this time. “We tried to set the expectations that this is new for everybody and we’re not going to expect perfection right out of the gate,” Vaughn told me in a research interview. Said Padilla, “Blame would hurt our progress and momentum. We don’t whip through a school evaluating principals and teachers for what they’re still learning.”

Finally, school leaders need to think in systems. Root-cause analysis is an essential part of every airline accident investigation, digging beneath immediate and obvious causes. The NTSB maps any human error back to organizational and systemic precursors. 

The book describes schools as complex environments where many parts need to interact well with one another, but breakdowns can easily occur. It cites a decades-old effort to add instructional coaches in Los Angeles schools. Hundreds were hired in a few weeks, but no one mapped out the logic of how coaches would change teaching and learning within the larger system. Results in the schools with coaches were disappointing.

The 95,000 additional students now reading below Basic on NAEP would fill 500 Boeing 737s. What happened to them last year wasn’t fatal, but they’ve experienced the educational equivalent of a sudden drop in cabin pressure. 

The question isn’t whether school systems can learn from failure — aviation proves they can. The question is whether superintendents, principals and teachers have the courage to look honestly at what went wrong, create conditions where everyone can speak up and trace problems to their systemic roots. The next wave of students is waiting for educators to decide.  

As American students continue to flounder in math, Bellwether, a national nonprofit that seeks to improve opportunities and outcomes for marginalized kids, said schools seeking a turnaround must first establish a clear, shared vision of effective math instruction.

“How We Solve America’s Math Crisis: A Systemwide Approach to Evidence-Based Math Learning,” Bellwether’s done in partnership with K12 Coalition, talks about building a teacher and student “math identity” and balancing “conceptual understanding and procedural fluency while creating meaningful opportunities for real-world application.” 

The plan must also ensure that learning progresses “logically and cumulatively” to deepen students’ knowledge as they move through the perennially difficult subject over time. 

“These steps may seem familiar, and that’s because they are widely accepted best practices for developing and sustaining strong instructional design,” the report reads. “However, to be effective, they must be consistently applied over time and throughout the system.”

And that’s where schools have fallen short, Bellwether’s researchers note, despite evidence supporting the approach. 

“Data demonstrate that when high-quality materials, intentional instructional practices, and strong teacher support are combined, students’ math proficiency can improve significantly — even in schools starting with very low baseline scores.”

Anson Jackson, senior partner at Bellwether, sat down with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Jo Napolitano to describe what schools need to do to get on track. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is effective math instruction? 

There’s a couple of layers to that. At the baseline, it is leaders, teachers and essential office personnel all understanding what good math instruction looks like. And they are not just focused on outcomes, but on the practices they want to see in math classrooms, the mindsets in math classrooms. There’s a shared understanding of what they believe math instruction looks like. That then determines how they build their professional development, how they build their training and how they build their assessments. It’s almost like a philosophy on math instruction. Without that philosophy, it’s like whack-a-mole. 

After they reach this consensus, what then? 

You then align on what those systems and structures look like to support that vision for mathematics. If you are focused on hands-on activities, then you want to have systems to train staff on how to develop strong activities to facilitate hands-on learning. If you believe kids need to show the work and do the math, you need to build in systems that allow kids to show the work and do the math on a regular basis. So that’s the idea: build a philosophy, build a vision, and then build a structure to support that vision throughout the district.

What if you don’t implement a shared vision? 

When you don’t have that, success is random. Teacher development is random. You’re always changing what is in front of kids or in front of teachers. When there’s no real shared vision, then the next leader who comes in changes the vision. And, without that shared vision, when you go from grade to grade, students don’t have the coherence of learning, which they need for success in math.

How can schools identify — and adopt — high-quality instructional materials, especially when time and money are tight? 

The first thing they need to do is understand the science behind mathematics and math learning. High-quality materials are backed by science and evidence of learning. Secondly, there must be coherence across grade levels — and in grade levels. The curriculum must be aligned. But before I get to the curriculum, I want to understand the key things that we know by science and evidence happen for kids to learn math at a high, high level. That could involve professional development, training, school visits, observations, doing some light research and analysis of what math looks like and coming to these conclusions as a collective — from the superintendent to chief academic officers, principals and teachers.

From there, I would then have them do a gap analysis of what they know works. They should ask, “What in our curriculum is missing or lacking from what we know should be there?” From that gap analysis, hopefully they’ll determine, “Oh, guess what? Light bulb moment: We are missing the mark on the curriculum or the materials.”

After that, they go through an adoption process where they take a look at what’s out there, and make some choices. But it needs to be a shared learning experience and not just that a team is told to adopt something because experts said it’s good. They should really understand why it’s good and what in the curriculum makes it high quality.

Is there a shortcut for cash-strapped schools with little time to do this? 

The short answer is yes: There’s lots of resources out there, including lists of high-quality instructional materials that are already vetted and backed by science. You can also use Google or ChatGPT to find them. However, this is where implementation can fail, without a deep understanding of the curriculum and why it works. A lot of folks, when things get hard, they put it away, right? 

So, I would say, yes, expert A can tell you the best resource for mathematics teaching and give you a set of resources. And that’s great. But unless they understand the true reasoning behind it and how it connects to learning, teacher practice, and systems, a lot of times it becomes another resource that’s on the shelf in two years.

How do you get teachers to support your approach? 

It’s about trying to get them engaged early on in the process, not telling them what to do, but having them learn what to do. I would not try to beat them down, but have them understand what’s working already and what’s missing. 

The second piece is that I would want to use a coaching model, side-by-side training and support for teachers — and not use it in a negative way. A lot of times we’ll shift to, “You’re not doing this, you’re a bad teacher,” when it’s actually more about a learning continuum, as in, “We’re going to focus on this in year one, year two and year three.”

What’s at stake if we don’t improve kids’ math scores?

The data shows a lot of the careers that are high paying usually have math as a core foundation. And the other piece is we know there’s an equity gap in this country when it comes to those who do math well and those who don’t — which leads to career choices, right? We want to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether who sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

The national conversation about education, to the extent that one is actually happening, tends to come in two dialects today. The first involves a lot of appropriate hand-wringing about the that started about 10 or 12 years ago, before the sent it over a cliff. This has been particularly acute for the lowest-performing students, who are disproportionately poor, Black and Hispanic.

The more hopeful discussion is about Mississippi and some of its Southern peers, which have bucked these trends, or at least made more progress against the headwinds than the rest of the country. That has, in turn, spurred some excellent journalism about why , and other states and regions have allowed themselves to fall so far behind.

But what’s hardly ever said in either of these conversations is that the declines since 2013 or so came on the heels of two decades of remarkable progress. Perhaps my fellow ed-policy wonks understand that, but I doubt the general public does. And we can’t say it often enough.

That’s for two key reasons. First, as Kant said, the actual proves the possible. It’s important to give people hope that we can turn around today’s challenging circumstances because we did it before, not so long ago. And second, some of the same policies and approaches that worked last time around might work again today. The conventional wisdom might be that education reform failed, but that is factually and historically incorrect.

Which is what made all the more praiseworthy. He noted that Republicans “are now kicking Democrats in the butt” on education policy — but more importantly, he reminded readers about the huge progress made during the reform era:

Student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990, 48% of America’s eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013, that was down to just 26%. The best part of this progress was that the scores of the most disadvantaged students shot up the most. Among Black students, the share of those scoring below basic in math fell from 78% to 48%. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66% to 38%.

Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools. The policies of that so-called neoliberal era helped, too. Economic growth was strong; income inequality decreased. Between 1983 and 2010, the child poverty rate fell from 30% to about 17%.

Those are enormous gains, amounting to two to three grade levels of progress over the course of a generation or two of students. We would love to see that kind of progress today!

But to Brooks, I would say: It wasn’t just test scores. It was also educational attainment. The proportion of young people graduating from high school and completing two- and four-year college degrees also increased dramatically during this period. That’s true on average, but particularly for Black and Hispanic students.

That’s a lot of information to absorb, so let me highlight some of the best news depicted in these figures:

• The percentage of young Americans with no high school diploma dropped by more than half from the class of 1997 to the class of 2016 — from 14% to 5%.
  
• For Hispanic students, it dropped by a factor of three, from 37% to 12%.
  
• For young men, it dropped from 15% to 6%.
  
• The percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher shot up from 37% (Class of 1997) to 51% (Class of 2016). A majority of young Americans now have a college degree of some sort.
  
• The percentage of young Black Americans with at least a two-year degree shot up from 27% to 42%; for young Hispanic Americans, it more than doubled, from 17% to 36%.
  
• The percentage of young women with at least a two-year degree rose from 41% to a remarkable 57%.

There’s a debate in academe about how much these attainment gains amount to real progress versus “degree inflation.” I’ve certainly been skeptical of some increases in the high school graduation rate, given all the games we’ve seen at the state and local levels, such as the adoption of , It’s arguably never been easier to graduate from high school in America than it is today.

But that doesn’t mean all these improvements in the graduation rate are fake. Doug Harris at Tulane University dug into this a few years ago and that most of the progress was real. It helps that student achievement and attainment were moving in the same direction.

Education reform shouldn’t get all the credit for this remarkable progress in achievement and attainment. — and Brooks wrote last week — schools enjoyed strong tailwinds back then thanks to a booming economy, sharply declining child poverty rates and big increases in spending. All that mattered, too.

It’s also worth noting that college-going has declined significantly in the last few years, partly because of the pandemic and partly because of rising doubts about the value of higher education. That will surely translate into flatlining or even decreasing college attainment rates soon.

But here’s the bottom line: Young people made huge gains from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, when education reform was at its zenith. We need to celebrate that success more often. Most importantly, we need to get back to making that kind of progress again.

Fordham Institute research intern Jill Hoppe contributed to the data collection and analysis for this post.

In our roles as deputy mayor for education and state superintendent, we see something remarkable taking shape — a citywide education system leading the nation in how to reimagine what’s possible for every child.

This year’s statewide assessment results tell a clear story of momentum. On the , students made the largest gains in English Language Arts and math proficiency since the pandemic. Forty percent of schools raised proficiency by at least 5 points in one of these subjects, and more than 60% showed measurable progress in both. Across the city, 137 of 223 tested schools boosted English scores, while 141 schools improved in math.

ELA proficiency has now surpassed pre-COVID levels, increasing from 37.5% in 2019 to 37.6% in 2025. Math proficiency reached a record high since COVID, rising from 19.4% in 2022 to 26.4% this year. This is evidence that students are not only recovering, but moving forward at a faster pace than before the pandemic.

National data confirms this progress. The Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research’s ranked D.C. first in the nation for learning recovery in both math and reading for grades 3 to 8 between 2022 and 2024. In that two-year period, D.C. students gained back the equivalent of half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. Just a few years ago, D.C. ranked 32nd in math recovery since 2019; today, it leads the country.

Federal relief dollars helped make this possible. D.C. received more than $600 million in K-12 pandemic recovery funds, about $6,800 per student — nearly double the national average of $3,700. shows that targeting these dollars toward , summer learning and other evidence-based strategies contributed directly to the rebound.

Together, these results demonstrate what families and educators across the city already feel in classrooms: Students are making meaningful, historic gains in learning.

Several factors are driving this progress. Since 2015, local per-student funding has increased from $16,032 to $28,040 — a 75% rise — with more money provided for serving students with the greatest needs.

D.C.’s early education stands above national enrollment levels, with 95% of 4-year-olds and 82% of 3-year-olds citywide enrolled in pre-K. At the high school level, more students are than in 2010-11, with nearly a 20- point increase since 2010-11, growing from 58.6% to 76.1%. These students now graduate with college credits, industry certifications and real-world experience in high-demand fields through , and our growing network of citywide preparing them for .

The initiative enables the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to connect data from pre-K-12 with postsecondary outcomes to better identify which programs propel students forward in college and careers, helping D.C. make future investments accordingly.

Teachers are a cornerstone of this progress. Thanks to big investments in recent years, D.C. Public School educators now earn an average salary of $109,000, among the highest in the nation, with comparable pay in charter schools. Investments in professional development, coaching, structured literacy training, high-quality instructional materials in literacy and math and high-impact tutoring have also helped to strengthen classroom instruction, so students feel challenged, supported and inspired. At the same time, D.C. is tackling barriers outside the classroom, securing school-based mental health supports, providing safe passage to schools and expanding the District’s programming. As a result, chronic absenteeism overall has declined 18.3% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while profound chronic absenteeism — a student missing 30% or more of school days — is down 34.2% over the same time period. 

The vast majority of families receive one of their top choices of district and charter schools through a universal enrollment lottery, helping drive D.C.’s . This system, combined with investments in quality and variety, has helped drive the city’s sustained since the 2008-09 school year and added more than 5,000 students . This is at a time when many large districts across the country experienced declines.

D.C.’s education success isn’t just about test scores. It’s about the child who now walks into class with confidence because tutoring makes reading click. It’s about the high schooler graduating with a resume that includes a paid internship and college credits already earned. It’s about showing the nation that D.C. students — no matter their background or income — can succeed at the highest levels.

D.C.’s experience shows how large urban education systems can rebound and thrive when funding is deep and sustained, resources meet student needs, teachers are well supported and compensated, and learning starts early.

While challenges remain, the data show encouraging momentum that is worth studying nationally. D.C.’s educational vision invariably focuses on ensuring every child is prepared for higher education and a family-sustaining career, while making certain that the city continues to be the nation’s talent capital.

D.C.’s public education leaders can keep proving to the nation what happens when a city dreams big for every student, invests strategically and stays the course: Students and schools will surpass expectations.

Paul Kihn is deputy mayor for education in the District of Columbia. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell is state superintendent of education for the District of Columbia.

But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, across a range of tests, grade levels and subject areas, the scores of the lowest-performing students have fallen dramatically, while the scores of the highest-performing students have been flat or close to it.

The next assumption might be that these declines must be tied to long-running achievement gaps. Indeed, it is and remains true that white and Asian students tend to do better than their Black and Latino peers, and children with disabilities and those who are not native English speakers tend to do worse than average.

But over the last decade, declines have not been about specific student groups. Instead, the story is largely about a growing divergence between higher- and lower-performing kids.

To see this visually, consider the latest in 12^th grade math. As the chart above shows, scores were rising from 2005 to 2013. Not only that, but they were rising the fastest for the lowest-performing students, those in the bottom 10%.

But scores peaked in 2013 and then began falling, especially for the lowest-performing kids. While the performance of the top 12^th graders didn’t fall that much, even during COVID, scores for the lowest-performing students had fallen 6 points by 2019 and have plummeted another 5 points since then.

Looking at the graph, it’s clear there is a cascading effect down the performance spectrum. Students in the middle have lost far more ground than those at the very top, and kids at the very bottom have seen even steeper declines.

What’s more, these patterns in test after test. It’s worth unpacking the data a bit further to understand how these trends are playing out across groups. The first table below looks at the changes from 2013 to 2024 for the top and bottom 10% of students across racial and ethnic categories in 12^th grade math. 

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Student Race/Ethnicity and Performance Level (2013-2024)

The scores for Black and Hispanic students fell across the performance spectrum. But that’s not the main story here, because the bottom was falling so much faster than the top across all racial and ethnic groups. In fact, the lowest-performing white students showed the biggest declines.
Sorting the data by income, the same pattern holds:

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Student Income and Performance Level (2013-2024)

Again, low-income students scored worse than higher-income students. But the bottom 10% percent of students who do not qualify as low-income suffered the biggest slide.

Tim Daly has documented according to parental education levels for eighth grade math, and that holds for 12^th grade scores as well. Even among students whose parents graduated from college, the lowest performers suffered particularly large declines:

Change in 12^th grade NAEP Math Scores By Parental Education and Performance Level (2013-2024)

In 12^th grade math, at least, the scores of students with disabilities and English learners have actually held up pretty well. Performance rose 0.4 points for students with disabilities and 2.5 points for English learners. Neither group saw declines among the lowest performers.

But consider what happened to students without disabilities (scores for the bottom 10% fell 11.9 points) and native English speakers (the bottom plummeted by 10.1 points).

What’s behind these trends? The best evidence to a of in-school and out-of-school factors including screen time, instructional shifts that de-emphasize mastery of basic skills and the lack of school-level accountability for results. It may sound counterintuitive, but policymakers looking to raise the ceiling on student achievement should start by making sure they raise the floor.

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

Virginia students may soon face tougher academic benchmarks as the state aligns its performance levels with the higher standards of a national assessment.

Starting next month, the Virginia Board of Education will begin adjusting its cut scores — used to determine whether K-12 students are meeting proficiency levels — to better match the rigor of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Student performance is typically categorized as “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or“advanced,” reflecting their knowledge and skills in core subjects.

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Since 1998, Virginia has relied on its Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments to gauge proficiency in areas like reading and math. However, NAEP, a widely recognized national organization, has often been used to assess smaller student groups, such as fourth and eighth graders.

“The NAEP assessment provides a common benchmark that states can then use to look at the relative rigor of their own assessment cut scores,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, during a work session Wednesday.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration has frequently pointed to NAEP data to highlight what it calls the “honesty gap” — the disparity between state-level proficiency standards and the more stringent NAEP benchmarks.

Between 2017-2022, Virginia’s fourth-grade reading and math results showed a staggering 40-percentage-point gap between the state’s SOL and NAEP assessments. That disparity does not provide an “accurate picture of student performance,” said Em Cooper, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning, during Wednesday’s work session.

In response, the board has begun discussing plans to revise the cut scores — the threshold for determining student proficiency — in key subjects. The effort is a cornerstone of Youngkin’s broader push to “restore excellence in education,” which includes raising standards in core subjects, increasing transparency and accountability, and overhauling the state’s assessment system.

Youngkin has argued that Virginia’s current proficiency standards are the result of the previous Board of Education lowering cut scores and altering school accreditation standards.

However, Anne Holton, a former state education secretary and an appointee of former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, defended the previous board’s approach. She noted that Virginia’s pass rates aligned with the NAEP’s “basic” achievement level, which reflects “partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade,” according to NAEP.

The Youngkin administration, however, is pushing for Virginia to meet NAEP’s “proficient” standard — defined as a student demonstrating a deeper understanding of complex topics and the ability to apply them in real-world situations.

Board member Amber Northern, a Youngkin appointee, argued that achieving NAEP proficiency is linked to better long-term outcomes, including higher graduation rates and increased job earnings compared to students who score at the NAEP “basic” level.

“NAEP proficiency matters in terms of long-term outcomes for kids [and] I know this because I study it,” Northern said.

She dismissed political finger-pointing over the state’s current standards, urging the board to focus on the benefits of higher expectations.

“I don’t care about the politics, I don’t care about ‘well we did this, and we did this,’ 
 nobody knows why we are in the situation we’re in, we just know that we’re in it and we’re not about pointing fingers. What we’re about saying is, okay, this is what NAEP proficiency does for our kids, and we should actually have that as our goal to do right by them.”

But Holton pushed back, questioning whether realigning Virginia’s SOL to match NAEP would lead to actual student improvement. While she acknowledged that strong SOL and NAEP scores correlate with better outcomes, she argued that no research supports the idea that adjusting cut scores alone drives success.

“The research shows there’s no impact of realigning our cut scores,” Holton said. “We need our students to do well on the test, but where the line is is irrelevant.”

The process

Previously, cut score adjustments went through a multi-step review involving a standard-setting committee, an articulation committee, and the state superintendent before final recommendations were presented to the Board of Education.

On Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Education staff outlined the board’s new approach, which includes selecting and training committee members, assessment date, and ultimately making recommendations on cut scores.

Under the process proposal, committees will primarily consist of education experts, including teachers and instructional specialists, while the remainder will include community stakeholders such as parents and business leaders.

Educators applying to serve must complete an application demonstrating their understanding of grade level content and assessments. Community members will undergo a selection process led by the board and the governor’s office.

The committees are set to convene in late May once enough assessment data from the 2025 assessment cycle is available. Their proposed cut scores will go before the board for an initial review in June, with a final decision expected in July.

On Thursday, the board will on the proposed review process. If approved, the updated performance standards will not take effect until spring 2026.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.

Report cards are the culprit. Almost say their child consistently brings home B’s or better on their report cards. But those grades don’t necessarily reflect whether a student is truly performing at grade level. — they also factor in elements like classroom participation, attendance and completion of assignments. While important, these additional factors can make it difficult for parents to assess whether their child is where he or she needs to be academically.

What would happen if families had an accurate and holistic picture of their child’s and school’s academic progress? Virginia is about to find out.

Over the past two years, Virginia has developed a new accountability model for K-12 schools that prioritizes transparent and timely information for parents. It focuses on academic mastery and growth as well as skills necessary for life after high school, such as collaboration, critical thinking and communication. 

Instead of simply receiving quarterly report cards with classroom grades and an end-of-school year report showing how their student performed on a single exam administered in the spring, families will also get fall and winter that show how their child is progressing throughout the year.

This new system, part of which was created in partnership with Learning Heroes, will provide parents with a host of data points and resources about their child’s performance. And they will come early enough in the year to let families know if they need to sign their child up for tutoring or summer school.

In addition, parents of K-3 students will receive the results of a new literacy screener designed to identify students in need of additional reading support, as well as . And, a new provides information for educators and parents, including a range of tools to guide conversations between parents and teachers and online children’s books, math games and puzzles to help families reinforce their kids’ grade-level skills.

To help parents gauge how well their school is doing, a new online platform will rank each into one of four categories — distinguished, on track, off track, and needs intensive support — explain what each rating level means and provide specific data points for the public to explore.

This is a huge change from the old system, which sorts schools into broad categories based on whether they meet the minimum criteria for accreditation — meaning that parents cannot differentiate between a school with standout performance and one that is mediocre or stagnant.

To help teachers have meaningful conversations with parents, Virginia’s initiative provides training in how to communicate with families about their child’s progress and create a personalized plan to help students recover academically from the effects of the pandemic. Giving families a holistic picture of their child’s and school’s academic progress seems like common sense, but it’s actually all too uncommon.

This focus on improving teacher-parent communication is particularly important in light of the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Many children have faced significant learning setbacks, making it essential for schools and families to work together to help them recover. And, , parents said that they trust communication from their child’s teacher more than any other indicator of student performance.

Research from Learning Heroes shows that when parents know their child is struggling academically, they take specific actions. One of the they take is talking with their teacher. Parents who know their child is behind stack rank academics . But they cannot help solve a problem they do not know they have.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this essay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few of them would think of Neshoba County in Mississippi.

But Neshoba County schools are doing something that those other places are not: They serve a high-poverty community, yet their students’ math scores are competitive with those in wealthier areas.

Back in September, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s art and technology director, to find districts around the country that were doing the best job of helping kids learn to read proficiently by third grade. Today, we’re taking the same approach to eighth-grade math. We calculated each district’s expected math proficiency rate, based on its local poverty level, and compared that to its actual scores. This methodology helped us identify districts that are beating the odds in math. 

Select from the menu below to find the high fliers in your state.

INTERACTIVE

Eighth Grade Math Proficiency

At the national level, eighth-grade math scores peaked in 2013, were slipping leading up to the pandemic and then fell dramatically. The declines were particularly large for students who were already among the lowest-performing.

Mississippi weathered these declines better than most states. As a result, the found that Mississippi climbed the state rankings in both math and reading over the last decade. After controlling for student demographics, Mississippi was ahead of 40 other states by 2019, and its scores quicker than other states’ after COVID.

Neshoba County helped lead that rise. According to data from the at Stanford University, Neshoba’s students went from scoring more than half of a grade level below the national average in 2016 to nearly 1.5 grade levels above the national average last year. Their students made gains even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we started looking for districts that were beating the odds, we aimed to find and celebrate districts like Neshoba. We ultimately identified nearly 600 districts that are getting exceptional results in math, which we defined as significantly outscoring their expected eighth-grade proficiency rate.

Some districts are showing strong performance in both third-grade reading and eighth-grade math. For example, in the reading project we highlighted Steubenville City, Ohio, at the top of our rankings. Despite its relatively high poverty, 81% of its eighth graders score as proficient in math, which puts it on par with districts that have many fewer disadvantaged students. 

States set their proficiency cut points at different levels, and Maryland has one of the highest bars. And yet, students in Worcester, a community that is neither high- nor low-poverty, stands out for having eighth-grade math proficiency rates 20 points higher than kids in any other district in the state.

In Michigan, Dearborn City is getting the same results as other districts with much lower poverty rates.

Other strong outliers include places like Genoa Central in Arkansas, Lake Washington in Washington state, the Fossil School District in Oregon and the Murray Independent district in Kentucky. 

In northern Virginia, where I live, people often say they move here for the schools. But if they were really looking for the best school system in the state, they would move to Wise County, on the Kentucky border. Wise County has much higher poverty rates than the more well-known D.C. suburbs, yet it topped our Virginia rankings in both reading and math.

Looking at the scores this way helps identify the places with great school systems, where learning gains are driven by what students learn in the classroom. This is especially true in math, because unlike reading proficiency — which is closely tied to language skills and background knowledge that children acquire at home — math scores are more directly linked to school-based instruction.

This gets at the heart of the issue at hand. Parents and policymakers should not be content with answering the simple question of, “Where do students do the best?” Wealthy communities are likely to look good by that standard, just by the nature of the students they serve.

Instead, policymakers should be trying to find schools and districts that help all students learn, regardless of their income levels. Poverty is certainly predictive of school performance, but it need not be determinative.

Note: For more details about the data sources and methodology for this project, see our earlier reading analysis. 

The latest round of student test scores show fewer Missouri public school districts and charter schools in jeopardy of losing accreditation, though this year’s data won’t immediately affect how schools are graded.

Based on annual performance report scores released Monday for the sixth iteration of the Missouri School Improvement Program, or MSIP6, there were 343 districts and charters that improved when compared to an average of their scores over the previous two years.

A total of 71 districts and charters scored in the provisionally accredited range, and four charter schools scored below 50%, which is the unaccredited range.

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“It’s something that we’ve been waiting for. Ever since the pandemic, we have looked at scores (and seen declines),” Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger told reporters in a press conference. “Finally
 we’re starting to see the fruits of our labor. We’re starting to see where we are making progress.”

MSIP6, which launched in 2022, has been lauded as “more rigorous” and descriptive than prior versions of the program. Previously, many districts scored above 90%, whereas now their scores are more evenly distributed along a bell curve.

The score is a snapshot of student performance in end-of-course exams and statewide standardized tests along with an assessment of district continuous improvement plans.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education originally planned to base classification decisions on scores this year but will instead make decisions from three-year composite scores. Districts’ accreditation cannot be lowered from MSIP6 scores until 2026.

Based on composite scores for the three years of MSIP6 data, two charter schools are in the unaccredited range. The State Board of Education will determine accreditation status based on other factors, like superintendent qualifications and financial health.

Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner of the Office of Quality Schools, told reporters the department switched to composite scores for classification this spring.

“They’re more stable measures as they contain more data,” she said. “They are less susceptible to extreme changes from year to year.”

For smaller districts, a composite can protect them from volatility while the individual score gives a look at the last school year’s work.

Craig Carson, assistant superintendent of learning of the Ozark School District, said it is “autopsy data.”

“This is data that tells you about where you’ve been,” he told The Independent. “The data we really use are the day-to-day data inside our classrooms.”

Ozark is part of the Success Ready Students Network, which is a group of school districts compiling alternative methods of accountability. This year, the districts are showing the first draft of their plan, in the form of available on their websites.

“We are using a descriptive (report) that is found on our website, and it gives so much more information to our public about how our students are doing in the day to day, and it really emphasizes growth,” Carson said.

He believes that the next iteration of the Missouri School Improvement Program will spring from work the Success Ready Students Network is doing.

“We are now building the momentum we need to really involve real-world learning with competency-based education and make sure that every student leaves being success-ready,” he said. “The excitement around that and the synergy of those school districts are creating, that will eventually turn into what MSIP7 will be.”

Similar to Carson, Maplewood Richmond Heights School District Superintendent Bonita Jamison reiterated that the scores are a limited look at a district.

“That data only tells one story, and there are stories that are not seen and reflected in those numbers, where the impact on the lives of children and their families are profound,” she said.

Benchmark assessments serve the district better to see needs and fill them quickly, she said.

Maplewood Richmond Heights is one of the top-scoring districts this year, amassing 97% of points possible. Just three others fared better.

She points to “shared accountability and ownership” from the entirety of the district’s staff — including a custodian who doubles as an attendance monitor to encourage parents to get children to school.

She has theories why other schools didn’t score as well, mainly a teacher recruitment and retention crisis hitting poorer, urban schools hard.

Eslinger, in last week’s press conference, told reporters that teacher vacancies “make performance and improvement challenging.”

“We know that with fewer educators, more and more courses across the state are being taught by student teachers and by folks that are substitutes that maybe have not really been trained on the specific content area,” she said. “We’ve got work to do there.”

In 2024, of teaching were inappropriately certified for the course they were teaching and .

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While over on Reddit, teachers and students :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprisingly, the data doesn’t show that.

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

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

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

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

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

By , ESSER had made available $40 billion to $60 billion in new government funding to education contractors by 2023, with 40% spent on vendors and the rest on personnel and labor. The amount spent by states and districts to cover COVID contracts could be much higher. Anticipating the end of their ESSER funding, districts such as have moved contracting expenses once covered by federal relief funds onto their general budgets.

With the help of a contract database called , I have been tracking national and regional patterns in what districts paid vendors to do before, during and after the pandemic.

In my forthcoming book, Private Ends, Public Means: Contemporary Dynamics in Educational Privatization, I identify several lessons from this large-scale experiment in federally subsidized education contracts.

First, ESSER-funded vendors helped school districts meet unique conditions but sometimes overlooked equitable access. At one level, vendor contracts supported public schools under emergency conditions in their mission of equal educational opportunity. One example is food service contracts that provided free lunches for pick-up when school cafeterias were closed. Contracts also arguably helped with continuity of instruction, which is another core responsibility of states and districts. Seven out of 10 traditional school districts used ESSER funds to purchase software during the pandemic and 9 out of 10 bought hardware, according to a conducted by the Office of the Inspector General.

These purchases made sense, given the quick pivot to remote learning. However, the pressure to spend quickly and with limited oversight may have contributed to redundancies (too many devices) and issues (wifi hotspots that did not function in areas without broadband or were not strong enough to provide students with stable video and audio). When the next emergency hits schools, public money will presumably once again be up for grabs, particularly for those with the fastest hands. What mistakes were made in areas of educational equity? How can the private sector do better when the next emergency hits?

Second, with physical schools closed, large urban districts spent hundreds of millions of dollars on technology such as iPads, Chromebooks, laptops and software licenses to keep classes in session. Then, they used ESSER funds for repairs, upgrades and parts to keep the devices running. The spending spiked at the outset of the pandemic but still remained higher than pre-pandemic levels once schools reopened. Post-pandemic, vendors are looking for ways to get resource-strapped districts to buy more devices, simply to maintain profit margins. It’s up to districts to exercise good management by pressing pause and reassessing.

There are at least two ways to approach this. First, districts should reassess whether vendor contracts are based on evidence of impact. During the pandemic, companies with minimal track records increased sales at record pace. For example, one small, relatively unknown business specializing in chat-based tutoring saw its annual revenues explode from less than $100,000 before COVID to nearly $3 million by March 2022. This company signed contracts in nearly half the states and showed little sign of slowing once schools resumed in-person instruction. But the strong evidence base around specifies that services must be delivered in person, not remotely. The bar should never be lowered for public school students when it comes to equal access for quality instruction. 

Third, it’s time to commit to transparency and ensure that the public has the information about and input into vendor contracts — particularly those addressing learning loss post-pandemic. That may mean reining in the use of noncompetitive bidding that state and local procurement policies allow during emergencies. In cities such as , noncompetitive bidding may have helped questionable vendors get contracts without proper vetting.

It also means requiring potential bidders to provide evidence of impact for high-needs student populations. I have been analyzing school board meetings across disparate regions of the country and found limited opportunities for public comment even on million-dollar purchases. Materials required by state or local law to help the public and school board make informed decisions, such as descriptions of how a digital product or service works, often are missing from the public record. Contracts commit taxpayer resources and are pivotal in shaping the quality of government-funded services. All stakeholders in education have the right to adequate and accurate information in all stages of contracting, from the bid to the contract to the decision on whether to renew. These are principles of to which districts across the country have committed.  

Fourth, account for the hidden costs for families of maintaining or eliminating certain types of vendor contracts. In my conversations with purchasing officers, I keep hearing that connectivity  — which districts made significant investments in during COVID — is on the chopping block. Further, there are no plans to upgrade or replace older laptops and iPads that were loaned to students. It’s the lower-income kids whose families will bear these costs. As districts assess which contracts to renew and which to ditch, they must be guided by principles of equitable access to high-quality digital content. Low-income families may not be at the table when ed tech contracts are cut, but they shouldn’t be expected to absorb costs interpreted narrowly as district savings. 

During the pandemic, districts and states contracted with vendors to meet the unique needs of this emergency. Now that the public health crisis has passed and COVID funds are largely spent, it’s time for districts to reassess how vendor contracts support public schools in their core mission and to raise the bar for ensuring that purchased services and products directly address widening educational inequalities.

Whether Maine students have recovered from pandemic-era learning disruptions is unclear due to the state’s choice to not make most data before 2020 publicly available.

That’s according to a new national report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, that developed a “report card” to gauge how easily accessible every state made data on student achievement, chronic absenteeism and high school graduation.

Maine was one of only three states across the country — the other two are New Mexico and North Dakota — that earned zero points out of the 21 possible. That means Maine had no data before 2020 available on any of the seven metrics mentioned in the report, including achievement levels, growth and proficiencies in English Language Arts, mathematics, science and social studies, chronic absenteeism or other attendance indicators, high school graduation rates, and English language learner proficiency, according to the CRPE report.

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The lack of this data conceals crucial information from parents and other stakeholders on how well their school district is doing on key performance indicators, according to Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and an author of the report. While making long-term data available is only one of the numerous ways of measuring transparency in public education, it is an important metric, according to the report and Polikoff.

“Parents 
 and other stakeholders may not be aware of the magnitude of this issue when states don’t make this data available for comparison, given how important covid was in disrupting education,” he said.

COVID-19 had enormous impacts on American education. Nationwide, public school students have not recovered from pandemic-era learning loss, chronic absenteeism continues to be an issue, and the pandemic disrupted high school graduation rates, which .

“But those facts are only visible if the data are available,” Polikoff said.

The Maine Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Changing state assessments may be part of the problem

The issue of limited data availability is compounded by changing state-level assessments in Maine. The state has changed how it evaluates student performance at least five times in the last 15 years or so.

These testing discrepancies have continued post-pandemic. Testing paused for the 2019-20 school year, and the way Maine students are evaluated has not remained consistent since. The DOE announced a new mechanism in 2021, which was used for two years. The way students are evaluated changed again for spring 2023 testing, according to a note on the DOE website.

That means even with three years of publicly available data, test scores from the spring of 2021 and 2022 can’t be compared with 2023 to gain a comprehensive understanding of how students are performing.

Other states also have dealt with changing state-level assessments, Polikoff said, but still made data available while presenting the caveat of changing testing models, which Maine could have done for previous years.

“Maine has clearly made the choice to not present any information from pre-2020 and that might be 
 because they change their tests and so they don’t really feel it’s appropriate,” Polikoff said.

“But I would argue that that might be true of the standardized test data, but it’s definitely not true of some of the other indicators,” he added, pointing to high school graduation rates and chronic absenteeism data.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com. Follow Maine Morning Star on and .

The survey didn’t ask about schools, which is too bad. But it made me wonder: When was the Golden Age of American K-12 education? The answers might provide hints about smart policies and practices for the years to come, especially as the nation continues to dig out from the COVID debacle. 

The key question is which indicators to examine. Some might point to high school graduation rates, given that educational attainment is a traditional measure of school quality. But I’m skeptical; it’s a notoriously squishy metric, since the easiest way to boost graduation rates is to lower standards — surely a major reason why grad rates are at an . 

A stronger indicator might be postsecondary completion; no doubt one of the key goals of K-12 education is to prepare students to succeed in college. But there are issues with that metric, too. Colleges can inflate graduation rates by lowering standards. Plus, there’s the newfound recognition that should go, making a focus on postsecondary education feel a bit anachronistic.

But let’s look at it anyway. These come from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which asked a random sample of adults ages 25 to 29 about their educational attainment. If we want to use this as a measure of the K-12 system’s effectiveness, it’s important to remember that there’s a seven- to 11-year lag between high school graduation and the reporting of the data. To make the charts easier to understand, I’ll show the years these young adults graduated from high school. (API stands for Asian and Pacific Islanders.)

As with high school graduation rates, college attainment is up, up and up, climbing from 28% of Americans who graduated from high school in the late 1990s to 41% in the mid-2010s. Note especially the tremendous progress for Hispanic students, whose college attainment rate rose 157% over this period, and for Black students, whose rate grew 68%.

Because of the time lag, there is no data for students who graduated after 2016, including the COVID cohorts. So by this measure, the heyday of American education appears to have been in the early- to mid-2010s, and possibly even more recently.

Student achievement

The other obvious way to identify the Golden Era of American Education is to look at the high point of student achievement. This is harder, if not impossible, to game — but there are issues here, too, especially with scores for 17-year-olds/12th graders. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trends series, for 17-year-olds peaked in the late 1980s or early 1990s in reading and in 1999 in math. Meanwhile, on the main NAEP, which has been adjusted over the decades to better align with curricular changes but goes back only to the early 1990s, 12^th graders hit their peak in 1992 in (the math trend goes back only to 2005, so it isn’t much use)

But because high school graduation rates have increased so dramatically over the decades — — I find the achievement trends for older students unreliable. It seems highly likely that low-performing students who today make it to graduation (and thus sit for the NAEP exams), but back then would have dropped out, are lowering recent achievement results.

So that leaves scores for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds (on the LTT) and fourth- and eighth-graders (on the main NAEP). 

According to the LTT, students hit their peak in 2012, both in reading and math and for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds. (Granted, the reading trends, especially for 13-year-olds, were pretty darn flat, so “high point” might be an exaggeration.) Scores were trending down even before the pandemic, when they fell off a cliff.

Meanwhile, on the main NAEP, students hit the high point in 2013 or 2015, depending on grade and subject area, before entering a pre-COVID decline.

Meanwhile, on the main NAEP, students hit the high point in 2013 or 2015, depending on grade and subject area, before entering a pre-COVID decline.

So according to achievement scores, education’s Golden Era was in the early to mid-2010s. 

But is that the right answer? It’s certainly when American students performed their best, both on test scores and in terms of college attainment. The adults who were in school back then — the youngest Millennials and oldest Gen-Zers, or what some call — might be considered the Smartest Generation.

Measuring school effectiveness

But I want to know when the education system was at its best. For that, we can do better than raw test score averages. That’s for a couple of reasons. First, there is the composition of the student population. Think of the mistake some analysts made back in the Nation at Risk era, when they pointed to falling SAT verbal scores as proof that America’s education system was in rapid decline. They failed to note that the population taking the SAT was changing rapidly. Whereas it used to be just elite students taking the college entrance exam, more middle-class and even working-class kids did as well. Not surprisingly, they performed worse on the test and lowered the average scores.

That’s why the NAEP, for as long as it has existed, has been a better measure of student performance than the SAT (or ACT), given that it tests a representative sample. That addresses the selection effects problem, but doesn’t tackle the compositional effects problem — at least, not entirely. With a rapidly changing student population, as we’ve had in recent decades, average scores can mislead. 

In particular, the growing number of Hispanic students entering American schools every year — who tend to come from families with lower educational opportunity, and thus score lower on average — will automatically reduce the average test scores of the nation as a whole. Especially given that so many of these new students are still learning English. Indeed, the new federal finds that the number of students classified as English learners rose by more than a million from 2011 to 2021. If we’re trying to gauge school performance, we have to control for such changes. 

One straightforward way to do so is to look at trends in student achievement for individual racial/ethnic groups. This doesn’t alter the picture much for math; the trend lines for the major subgroups track that national average pretty well, with all generally increasing until the 2010s. Here’s what that looks like for the Long Term Trend assessment for 13-year-olds:

But in reading, there were periods when all or most of the major racial groups were making progress, even though the national average looked flat. From 2002 until 2019, for example, fourth-graders’ average reading scores barely budged, ticking up just a single point. But both Black and Hispanic students made significant gains, with increases of 5 and 8 points, respectively. That progress remained hidden within the national averages, largely because the Hispanic population share was also growing rapidly at the same time.

So when we analysts reported that, pre-COVID, American reading scores were flat as a pancake, we weren’t wrong — but that wasn’t the full story. Schools were doing something to boost reading performance over time, at least for Black and Hispanic students, albeit more slowly than the country would have liked.

Cohort growth

It’s also important to consider what might be changing in American society. That’s because test scores correlate highly with family background, and those backgrounds have changed a lot over time. Child poverty rates have gone up and (mostly) down; the number of two-parent families has declined; nutrition has improved; environmental risks (like lead paint) have decreased. All these factors affect test scores.

Most importantly, what happens to kids in the years before they sit for a test — especially before they even enter school — has a big impact on their achievement. Yet, there’s no good trend line for student performance before age 9 (for the LTT) or fourth grade (main NAEP). I’ve called for the federal government to to partially correct for this, so we would at least get a good read on whether students are coming into schools better or worse prepared than in the past. We could then use those kindergarten scores as controls to better isolate the performance of schools versus everything else going on in society. (By one metric — the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress test — student readiness started to fall , which might partially explain the pre-COVID slump.)

In the meantime, we can apply the same logic by using fourth-grade scores as controls. In other words, looking at the changes in test scores for the same group of students as they move from fourth to eighth grade can give a rough estimate of school performance, at least in the upper elementary and middle school grades. This measure has become popular among some analysts, including Matt Chingos at the Urban Institute, and for good reason. (Unfortunately, LTT doesn’t work for a similar analysis because its testing schedule has been too irregular. Likewise with grade 12 trends on the main NAEP.)

We’ll focus here on math, given that progress in reading has been so slight, and see when cohort growth was the strongest. This provides a very different answer: The mid- to late-1990s were the heyday of American education. Indeed, whereas achievement kept improving until the early to mid-2010s, the trend for cohort growth is generally downward. 

Though not shown here, the cohort patterns look largely the same when disaggregated by race and percentile level, though the mid-2010s slump was particularly bad for the lowest-achieving kids and for Black students — as was the COVID era.

Summing it up

So where does that leave us?

• Student achievement reached its all-time high in the early to mid-2010s, before slumping through the rest of the decade and then falling off a cliff during COVID. College attainment was also highest for students who graduated high school in the early to mid-2010s, though it might have kept rising afterward. The young Americans who were in school in the early to mid-2010s, then, might be considered our Smartest Generation.
  
• Gains in math have been particularly impressive over the years, at least until the 2010s — though schools performed somewhat better in reading than national averages indicate, given the rapidly changing composition of the student population, especially the dramatic rise in (lower-scoring) Hispanic students and English learners.
  
• However, schools’ productivity — in terms of boosting students’ test scores from grades 4 to 8 — peaked much sooner, in the mid to late 1990s, before declining somewhat in the 2000s and even more in the 2010s. The mid to late 1990s, then, might be considered American Education’s heyday.

The , when the Cold War was over (and the war on terrorism hadn’t started), the economy was booming, child poverty was falling and the combination of increased school spending and consequential accountability were marching across the land. (No, those weren’t my childhood or teenage years, but it was the time when I was lucky to join the nascent education reform movement.)

As an eternal optimist, I must remain hopeful that another Golden Age might be right around the corner. I know, COVID learning loss was massive, and kids are still entering school behind where they used to be. And educators are struggling mightily with a student engagement crisis, with chronic absenteeism, misbehavior and phone addiction creating daily challenges. 

But at the same time, many states and districts have been investing in high-dosage tutoring, getting their act together when it comes to the Science of Reading and adopting () high-quality instructional materials. A strong economy is keeping child poverty rates low, too. All these factors should help kids make progress in the years ahead — especially if policymakers decide to as well. 

If we analysts focus on cohort growth rather than raw trend lines, Americans might spot a rebound sooner than many naysayers expect.

Special thanks to Fordham senior research associate Meredith Coffey for the extensive data analysis represented here.

About 600 schools have joined a pilot program to give Indiana’s Learning Evaluation and Assessment Readiness Network (ILEARN) tests in four stages next school year, instead of just end-of-year tests that are used for state report cards. 

In the pilot, the state will give three new “checkpoint” math and English tests spread through the school year to third- through eighth-graders that let teachers see right away how well students perform, allowing lessons to be adjusted.

“The checkpoints will be very intentionally for the school
the local teacher
to improve the learning in that classroom,” said Indiana state education superintendent Katie Jenner.

The mid-year scores won’t be reported publicly or count toward school or district report cards, which will remain based on the end of year tests.

“It’s not punitive,” Jenner told the state school board. “It’s in support of student learning, which is why we’re all here.”

The checkpoint tests will fill much of the role of the diagnostic tests districts buy from private providers and regularly use during the year, like NWEA’s Measures of Academic Promise (MAP) tests and Edmenutum’s Exact Path tests, state officials said.State Rep. Bob Behning, author of a bill passed this spring giving final authorization of the pilot.

“I frequently hear education leaders complain about the fact that their kids look like they’re doing great, but when they take ILEARN, they don’t,” said Behning. “The reality is this test will be aligned directly to statewide assessments, so there will be that much more correlation and much more predictability.”

If the checkpoint tests go well, he said, the state might stop giving more than $14 million in grants each year to districts to pay for other diagnostic tests, which it has done since 2015. Districts could use just the free ILEARN checkpoints and stop buying other tests.

“We know already that some of the benchmark providers are not happy with this direction,” Behning said.

Kevin Briody, chief marketing officer for Edmentum, one of a handful of vendors approved for grant money, did not object to the new tests and said his company supports improving tests to help teachers.

NWEA representatives, however, would not answer whether their company is worried about losing business.

Mid-year standardized tests are common nationally and go by several names-— diagnostic, formative or through-year tests. Though districts often pay for such tests on their own, Indiana is one of 13 states either using or exploring a plan to give them, according to a report by Education First, an education advocacy organization.

That report, cited by Indiana Department of Education officials in presentations on the plan, was partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

How states use through-year tests varies, though most, like Indiana, use just the final test to rate schools and districts. A few states  — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana and Montana  — are considering or using results from all tests during the year to set a final student school and district rating, that report found. 

According to the plan outlined to Indiana’s state school board last year, the “checkpoint” tests will be given every nine or 10 weeks during the school year with flexibility for districts to pick testing days. 

Each test will have 25 to 30 questions covering four to seven learning standards in the subject.

At each checkpoint test, students and teachers will see if they are on-track or off-track for passing the final test as well as how they compare to other students in the state.

Students who “fail” a checkpoint test can receive help in tested skills and re-take the test later to see if they have learned them.

Giving students a chance to re-learn skills and then be tested on them again is a step toward schools potentially using a “mastery” or “competency” learning and grading system, a concept with growing support among some state officials. Such systems have students keep working on skills until they “master” them, rather than having a class move on to other material after a set period of time and just giving low grades to students that lag behind.

“If a school really wanted to get into a true kind of mastery, competency-based (approach), they could use these assessments to really understand where students are at different points and act accordingly,” said state school board member Scott Bess.

So far, the tests seem to have support statewide. The state’s plan to make the final, year-end ILEARN test shorter because of the added tests eased concerns about testing taking too much time, said Terry Spradlin, executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association.

“It makes kind of good sense, so we’ll be supportive of that for sure,” he said.

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Two performers are seated in the middle of the stage, shooting the breeze as they pretend to get ready for an upcoming performance.

“We never know what the future holds,” one actor laments to his friend. “I mean, they thought computers can’t write poetry or compose music, but now they can.”

“There are AI-generated characters in some places, but nothing can replace the magic of live performance,” the other performer replies.

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This one-act, titled “Theatre Kids At The End of the World,” is one of 16 recently performed by Bismarck State College as part of “The AI Plays,” a production reflecting on recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and its implications for ordinary life.

The works are purposely self-referential and introspective, with the actors often playing the role of students, performers or both.

And the whole thing was written by ChatGPT, the famous chatbot by OpenAI.

ChatGPT is primarily a text tool; you tell it to write something, and it whips up an answer. Its ability to handle sophisticated instructions has attracted a level of attention unlike any AI before it.

A study by the Union Bank of Switzerland named ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer app in history, Reuters .

But that’s also inspired widespread anxiety, even existential fear, about the future of creative work.

The recent strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, for instance, were spurred in part by concerns that generative AI would sideline creative workers. Both successfully bargained for regulations on how the technology can be used by film and television producers.

In “The AI Plays,” students at Bismarck State College Theatre throw their two cents into the debate.

“I think we, as artists, need to get in front of this,” said Director Dean Bellin, associate professor of technical theater at the Bismarck State College.

The group decided to have ChatGPT write the scripts as an interesting way to show people just how far the technology has come.

He and his students wrote the general outline of each scene. They fed ChatGPT writing prompts based on their real feelings toward AI — from reverent, to skeptical, to indifferent.

Then, they performed the scripts completely unedited – quirks and all.

In one scene, a woman chopping vegetables bemoans the constant frustration of living in a world where technology is advancing so quickly. (ChatGPT did not feel it necessary to explain who the woman is or why she was chopping vegetables.)

“I have seen the rise and fall of Tamagotchi, lived through Y2K, and even managed to scan a QR code” — she pauses, still bent over her cutting board — “ 
 once.”

“At the rate we’re going, I’m afraid I’ll blink, and then my toaster is giving me life advice,” she continues.

Government oversight

Lawmakers in 2023 grappled with definitions, standards and regulation of artificial intelligence, and Congress and more. Senators from both sides of the aisle agree there’s a need . Legislators and officials in many states are studying the issue and weighing AI legislation in upcoming sessions.

The North Dakota Legislature is also on the bandwagon; this interim session, the Information Technology Committee is researching potential paths for AI investment and regulation.

At its next meeting on Dec. 14, lawmakers will hear from the Department of Public Instruction, the university system, the attorney general’s office and other groups about the future of AI in the state.

Earlier this year, the statehouse passed a law preventing AI from gaining human rights. (The law extends the same ban to animals, the environment, and inanimate objects.)

Sponsor Rep. Cole Christensen, R-Rogers, told fellow lawmakers during the session the legislation was intended “to define personhood and to retain its exclusive rights to human beings.”

Several acts explore the concept of AI sentience. In one scene, a medieval court goes on a witch hunt for a robot masquerading among them as a human. The village ultimately accepts the machine with open arms.

Even though the work it produces can be uncannily similar to human writing, tools like ChatGPT don’t think like people.

ChatGPT and other so-called “generative” AI — like DALL-E, which makes images — are trained on massive hordes of data that help them approximate human language, photography, art and so on.

But it’s only an approximation. When ChatGPT asked to write creatively, it’s often choppy, repetitive and lacking depth.

The dialogue became circular in several scenes of “The AI Plays,” with characters making the same two or three points over and over again until a scene ended.

Bellin said he and his students learned a lot about scriptwriting by studying where ChatGPT’s writing missed the mark.

Bismarck State College isn’t the first higher ed institution to experiment with AI theater.

This summer, students at University of Wollongong in Australia performed a three-act drama written by ChatGPT, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation .

In that case, the performers may have been a little more involved in the writing process. The show’s director said he and his students had to tinker with the app quite a bit before it spit out something they liked.

Earthquakes in academia

There are plenty of other reasons why AI may be front-of-mind for colleges and universities — say, how it makes it easier for students to cheat on homework.

AI may not be good enough to write a flawless essay, but a student might be able to pass ChatGPT-generated work off as their own if they proofread it and introduce a few minor tweaks, Bellin said.

Many higher ed institutions have already adopted policies regulating AI. One survey published in June by UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — estimated that globally, about 13% of universities have issued official guidance on the technology.

For the moment, the North Dakota University System, of which Bismarck State College is a member, isn’t one of them.

Not that it isn’t giving the subject any attention.

In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, the university system convened a task force to help it navigate the many opportunities and obstacles AI presents to higher ed.

At a Dec. 7 State Board of Higher Education meeting, Chancellor Mark Hagerott urged the University System to invest in AI technology.

He pointed to a handful of other higher ed institutions scrambling to get ahead in what he likened to an “arms race.”

“We have to be able to adapt and move and change to the landscape that’s in front of us,” said Hagerott, who has a background in cyber security. “And we have to plan for the unknown.”

In 2020, the University of Florida hired 100 new faculty members to study artificial intelligence. The University of Albany announced this year it would set aside $200 million toward AI. It says it wants to integrate the technology in all of its academic programs. Meanwhile, Arizona State University formed a schoolwide community of practice this fall to figure out how to integrate AI into its classrooms.

“This is an earthquake,” Hagerott said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. North Dakota Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Amy Dalrymple for questions: info@northdakotamonitor.com. Follow North Dakota Monitor on and .

They had given him a test to see how well he recognized numbers, but it hadn’t taken into account the fact that he’s shy. It was a matter of quantitative data versus qualitative data. 

Teachers need to know both about their students, and they gather both types of information every day in their classrooms. But there’s a way to get them even more of this essential data.

Around the country, districts and states are turning to high-impact tutoring, whether as part of the school day or afterschool, to reverse severe declines in reading and math scores since the pandemic. Tennessee has invested a lot of money and resources into this effort, and is marching down the same path. 

What makes tutoring ? According to the , it involves substantial time each week, sustained and strong relationships between students and tutors, close monitoring of student knowledge and skills alignment to school curriculum, and oversight to ensure quality interactions. 

With feedback from a tutor, teacher/student conversations are more productive because

the teacher can speak directly to what the student did well or struggled with during

tutoring. Having a tutor’s feedback also means teachers spend less time teasing insights out

of data. For example, a single note from a tutor is a much more efficient way of discovering

students’ misconceptions than asking a teacher to dig through pages of data.

That’s the quantitative part. But there are also insights into how students are learning, feeling and doing — the qualitative piece — that tutors can gain insight to, and that can help teachers understand their students better.

If a tutor writes a paragraph of observations about each student at the end of every session, the teacher will have useful information to act on in real time. A note such as, “Jimmy struggles to answer questions in front of his peers, but one-on-one he gets nearly every question right” allows a teacher to respond immediately and provides a reason as to why Jimmy might be struggling. A test score doesn’t do either one.

Students who are distracted by something they don’t feel comfortable talking about in class might be willing to share it with a tutor in a small group or one-on-one setting. That information, which a teacher otherwise wouldn’t know about, can be quietly shared.

This sort of feedback is also critically important for the students who are being tutored. Imagine playing basketball, but every time you shoot, your eyes are covered up so you can’t see where your shot goes. You’d probably come to hate basketball pretty quickly, because you wouldn’t know when you were successful. When you failed, you wouldn’t know if you shot an air ball or just got an unlucky bounce off the rim.

That difference between an airball and an unlucky bounce is crucial to becoming better. An airball tells you that you need to make a large adjustment, while the bad bounce tells you you’re right on track and maybe need to adjust only slightly. Students need the same kind of feedback to help them make their academic struggles productive and begin closing in on successful solutions in math.

To provide that feedback, tutors need insight into how students are thinking. For example, a tutor might ask elementary school students different types of questions about this image of animals missing legs.

One of the simplest, which a tutor might ask a kindergartner, is, “How many legs are missing?” Another approach is asking a student to skip-count and get two plus two plus two plus four plus four, which is a second-grade question and answer. A student working at a third-grade level might answer with an expression: three times two plus two times four.

These answers provide insight into how the students are thinking. If they touch every leg, the tutor knows they’re counting. If they touch the animals, they’re skip-counting. This difference gives tutors valuable information that they can share with teachers, who then know what skills students need to work on. Having this clear direction allows teachers more time to focus on building rapport with students. 

Tutors, armed with appropriate curriculum, can not only help students make academic progress; they can offer teachers more of the kind of data that helps them build strong relationships with their class. Students, like all humans, are motivated to work hard for someone they have a connection with, so any solution for improving academic outcomes needs to have relationships at its center.

While her son, Roy, would ace spelling tests at the Leadership School in St. Louis, Missouri, his mom said, he would cry while doing homework because he couldn’t read any of the questions.

Ross-Porter’s realization solidified when she received a letter in the mail from his public charter school — part of a new statewide literacy awareness campaign — informing her that Roy had a reading deficiency.

“He made it through kindergarten and first grade and nobody said he was behind or he needed tutoring or extra help,” Ross-Porter said. “I don’t know where the disconnect is.”

Ross-Porter is like many parents around the St. Louis area who are now receiving the same letters in the mail, explaining that their child scored below grade level in reading.

The letters are coming as a surprise for some who are unaware of how their child is really doing in school, said Rachel Powers, a partner with a St. Louis education foundation.

“Parents really just don’t know. Everyone thinks, ‘My kid is good. My kid is fine’,” Powers said. “Or maybe they’re like, ‘Something seems off, but I don’t really know what to do about it. The report card seems OK, but they are struggling with their homework.’”

The Opportunity Trust and , a national parent advocacy organization, announced on Oct. 24 the launch of . It’s an awareness campaign for Missouri families in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, they said,to improve the gap between the perception and reality of their child’s progress in the classroom.

Go Beyond Grades STL is partnering with St. Louis nonprofits to connect with parents in order to help them understand their child’s achievement scores and teach them how to communicate with schools, along with offering them other resources. It’s also working with schools to improve relationships between teachers and families.

The campaign is part of a national Go Beyond Grades movement organized earlier this year by Learning Heroes, in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

Learning Heroes representative David Park said the organization created the national Go Beyond Grades campaign because of the increasing number of parents who are unaware of how their child is doing at school.

“There’s a significant amount of parents who believe their child is fine — and it’s not their fault,” Park said. “Eighty percent of students nationally come home with a B or above on their report card.”

In the St. Louis area, that number is nearly 90%, according to an August survey commissioned by Learning Heroes and conducted by Edge Research, a Virginia-based research firm. The survey found that 96% of St. Louis parents believed their child was at grade level in reading and 94% thought their child was at grade level in math.

Most students aren’t even close, Powers said.

St. Louis has been hit especially hard by the pandemic, which burdened elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States, recent research shows.

In 2022, 42% of students in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County were at grade level for reading, while 36% were at grade level for math, according to .

In just the City of St. Louis, the numbers drop to 23% for reading and 17% for math.

“Parent-teacher conferences are 15 minutes (long),” Park said. “What we’re pushing more than anything is ongoing communication with the child’s teacher — setting up a learning plan and touching base regularly — that’s what teachers say is the most important.”

Ross-Porter said that would be essential for her. The second-grade mom said she can’t understand Roy’s achievement scores and what they mean for her son’s progress. She said she doesn’t even know what the school letter about Roy’s reading scores really means.

Mary LaPak, a representative for Rockwood School District, the largest public school system in the St. Louis area, said while the district hasn’t worked with Go Beyond Grades STL, it values a trusting relationship between parents and teachers.

“We encourage transparency and recognize that open communication is vital between parents and Rockwood staff in order to support all students,” LaPak said in an email. “Rockwood parents are essential partners and allies in the education of our children.”

Powers said parent-teacher communication about the recent reading letters is one of the main reasons The Opportunity Trust launched Go Beyond Grades in the St. Louis area. The letters are part of a new literacy law passed earlier this year in Missouri.

The legislative piece was included in the , created by the state education department. It’s a comprehensive plan that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, a part of the science of reading, in order to improve the .

The law requires schools to identify students who are reading at one or more grade levels below what they should be. If a student is found with a reading deficiency, parents are sent a reading success plan, which provides a set of goals and skills needed in order for the child to reach their grade level. 

“We wanted to get the word out about what that law means for families, what it means for schools, how families and teachers and educators connect and work together to really address this issue that is happening,” Powers said. 

Powers said staff with Go Beyond Grades have been contacting St. Louis area schools to pinpoint when letters will be sent and learn how they plan on implementing the reading success plans. They also have been talking to parents about what they can expect if they receive a letter and what resources they should seek out to help their child.

“We want to make sure parents don’t just get a letter at their house and then they go on about their business,” Powers said. “And then it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Like, no, this is really important, this really means something if you’re getting this letter, this is really important for your family.”

When parents are involved in their children’s schooling, students show higher academic achievement, school engagement and motivation, according to a of 448 independent studies on parent involvement.

High levels of family engagement also helped decrease chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic, according to research by Learning Heroes and other partners.

Ross-Porter said her involvement in Go Beyond Grades STL prepared her for October parent-teacher conferences. She and Powers worked together to decipher Roy’s test scores so she could arrive armed with a long list of questions to ask Roy’s teacher.

“The questions that she gave me were able to get me better answers, just because of the way the questions are worded,” Ross-Porter said.

Powers said she hopes Go Beyond Grades STL can one day go beyond the boundaries of the St. Louis area and help parents across Missouri. For now, billboards are going up around the city and county to alert families to the importance of being involved in their child’s education.

“How do we make sure folks are clear about what to expect from their schools and how to partner with their educators to really support their children? Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re fighting for,” Powers said. “What we’re trying to really support is our kids, so they can have a strong future with the basics of reading and math.”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Learning Heroes and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Likewise, when students are struggling, failing to turn in work or at risk of falling behind, teachers should tell them. It’s kinder — and fairer — for educators to set clear expectations and hold students to them.  

Many schools have started to take the opposite approach. Perhaps in the mistaken belief that it’s gentler to give struggling students second and third chances, schools across the country are essentially withholding honest feedback from kids (and ) through no-zero grading policies or by passing students along even though they haven’t mastered the content.

These trends started before the pandemic but have accelerated since then. And they’ve created a growing disconnect between subjective evaluations like grades and objective data like attendance and achievement. Student and rates are rising to new highs, while attendance and academic performance are hitting modern lows. 

Most recently, the testing company ACT announced that average scores this year than at any point since 1991. The declines were particularly notable for Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Latino students.

So, what does the research say? Is it better for schools to pass kids along or hold the line on high standards? 

A new working paper from Brown University titled “” digs into these questions by looking at what happened when a state, North Carolina, lowered its standards. North Carolina is unique in that it has a state-level grading scale for high school students, and in fall 2014, it lowered that scale. The threshold for an A dropped from 93 to 90, from 85 to 80 for a B, from 77 to 70 for a C, from 70 to 60 for a D and from 69 to 59 for an F. 

As a result, student grades went up, by a lot — at least initially. In the first year of the new policy, the number of A grades rose by almost 20%, the number of F grades fell by 20% and the average GPA rose by 0.27 points, an 11% increase. Students or parents who weren’t aware of the policy change may have been happy to see these gains. 

Except, the authors found that the easier grading standards had other consequences as well, and those varied across student groups. Students in the top half of the performance distribution were the main beneficiaries of the easier grading scale, and students with incoming test scores below the median saw no GPA increases at all. 

How could this be? After all, the policy made it harder to fail a class. One explanation the authors found is that students at the bottom end of the academic distribution started missing more classes. The new, laxer standards allowed the lower-performing students to increasingly disengage from school and fall further behind their peers. Worse, these effects compounded over time, and the more lenient grading standards eventually led to lower ACT scores for the students who came in the furthest behind. 

This builds on work suggesting that and individual can also affect student choices and behavior over time. On the more rigid end of the spectrum, there’s also a growing body of literature suggesting that holding back students who are struggling to read can be beneficial for their long-term trajectories — and for their younger siblings as well. 

Economist Eric Hanushek has framed this distinction as the difference between schooling and learning. Schooling in this context refers to the amount of time students stay in class, while learning is a measure of what they actually know and can do. It may be easier to keep kids in school, but metric that educators and policymakers should pay attention to. 

Hanushek estimates that the lost learning suffered by students during the pandemic will translate into on their earnings. That’s the average, and the losses are even larger for Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students who fell further behind. Multiplied across the nation and over each child’s lifetime, that works out to an economic loss to the country of $28 trillion. 

In other words, policies that sound generous in spirit may actually harm students in the long term. Leniency may be easier, but honesty is the best policy, and kids who are the furthest behind will benefit the most from clear, objective and high standards.

NYC has attempted to combat that inequity in a variety of ways. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio implemented initiatives ranging from , which cost the city almost , to universal pre-K, while current Mayor Eric Adams has called for and a mandatory .

Such initiatives are expensive and can take years to fully implement, not to mention properly evaluate. Their success rate is also spotty. Universal pre-K ended up than those in the middle class. The Renewal Schools were dubbed a , an African-American publication, which noted that “only a quarter of the 100 schools targeted by the program were reported to have seen any improvement at all.”

There is, however, a cost-effective and immediate tweak that has proven effective in raising grades and test scores, as well as reducing suspensions for middle and high school students, especially those who are low-income: Starting the school day after 8:30 a.m. 

A study from :

We find robust evidence linking later start times to increased test scores for middle school students. A one-hour delay in middle school start times predicts math scores 8% of a standard deviation higher and reading scores 4% of a standard deviation higher. 
 These results are particularly large for economically disadvantaged students.

confirms these results for both middle and high school students: 

In the wealthier school, there wasn’t much change in missed school hours. But at the school with more low-income kids, the new start time boosted attendance. During the academic year, the school recorded an average of 13.6 absences and 4.3 tardies for the first period. Before the schedule change, those yearly numbers were 15.5 and 6.2. 
 Lower-income kids sometimes get worse grades than their wealthier peers 
 (T)here are many reasons why this might happen. Anything that helps reduce this achievement gap is a good thing. That includes better class attendance.

The average NYC public middle or high school starts between 8 and 8:20 a.m. A in 2018 shifted the start time to 8:30 at five schools. Seeing positive results in attendance and discipline, 14 more were added to the initiative in 2019.

Assemblyman Harvey Epstein has submitted a , co-sponsored by state Sen. Robert Jackson, to make 8:30 a.m. the earliest permitted school starting time. Any school that chose to begin earlier would risk losing state aid.

Still, the majority of NYC schools start before 8:30, and, in fact — due to the newly negotiated teachers contract — several have recently announced they’ll be .

Notable exceptions include the Bard High School Early College schools, which are some of the highest-performing in the city. The Queens campus sets aside for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, while, at the Manhattan campus, that number is . Both schools .

At the other end of the admissions spectrum is Essex Academy, which accepts students at all academic levels, with 65% qualifying for free lunch, and has an . There, at 9:25 a.m..

Starting middle and high schools later would not only improve attendance and cut down on suspensions, leading to higher grades and test scores, but it is a fix that can be implemented with minimal cost. And here is the most important aspect: The worst thing that will happen with moving to a later school start time is
 nothing. No change for the better, but also no change for the worse.

At a price point of nearly zero, an equal amount of risk and no evidence of unforeseen consequences, what excuse does any school have for not giving a post-8:30 a.m. start time a try?

Data presented to the Akron, Ohio, school board revealed not a single student from the school’s inaugural third-grade class — now entering eighth grade — .

“It is discouraging,” said Keith Liechty-Clifford, the district’s director of school improvement, in a model of understatement.

State test scores in English and science are nearly as bad, and Black students at I Promise test in the bottom 5% of all Black students in Ohio.

Expectations for the school were much greater in 2018. because it wasn’t a charter school, it featured smaller class sizes, it included a host of wraparound services, it incorporated many “” concepts and its staff was unionized. for its STEM curriculum, its extended school day and year, and its emphasis on students taking responsibility for homework, paying attention to teachers and being respectful.

Even I was hopeful, but not because of any of those things. I found the spirit of cooperation unique among school reform efforts. The local union, the Akron Education Association, is not affiliated with either the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. It showed uncommon flexibility in seeing to it that the I Promise school got off the ground.

The school receives the same taxpayer funding as other district schools, but the LeBron James Family Foundation put up funding for building renovation, free school uniforms, free bicycles and helmets, free breakfast, lunch and snacks, a food pantry, GED and job placement services for parents, and guaranteed admittance to the University of Akron. The foundation raised funds from philanthropists to ensure free tuition as well.

With this entire wish list of public school advocates in place, why aren’t the results better?

Unfortunately, the school may be unique, but the explanations were unimaginative.

“We believe our students are more than a test score,” , the foundation’s senior director.

“If I could take kids who are two and three years behind and get them on level in one year, I’d probably resign and take my show on the road,” .

“The type of growth that is important to us is not made overnight. It takes time,” said Stephanie Davis, the new principal at I Promise.

Members of the school board were not so sanguine.

“For me as a board member, I just think about all the resources that we’re providing,” said President Derek Hall. “I’m just disappointed that 
 it doesn’t appear like we’re seeing the kind of change that we would expect to see.”

Even the union is having doubts.

“I think that the red flags that are being thrown up about the [I Promise School] are concerning,” said Pat Shipe, president of the Akron Education Association. “I think there have to be much deeper conversations and more data looked at before we can really address some of the issues that we’re seeing.”

Shipe’s worries may have been prompted by the fact that 15 of the school’s 50 teachers have resigned in the past two years.

All these reasons are legitimate. Schools shouldn’t be judged on a single test score. The I Promise kids were already behind. It does take time to turn things around. High levels of teacher churn is a problem.

But the resources and programs committed to I Promise were supposed to be the solutions to those types of difficulties. It’s correct to be skeptical that test scores can give a complete picture of a school’s worth. But they also give reason to be skeptical of a school’s self-evaluations. The I Promise students who do attend the University of Akron may be required to take a math placement exam; it’s counterproductive to institute a STEM curriculum and then have your school’s graduates enrolled in remedial math in college.

If LeBron had scored 5 points a game last year instead of 29, the entire sports world would question his basketball performance. The stakes are much higher for the students at his school.

This Week’s Top Story

• “We have all been questioning, ‘When does COVID look like influenza?’ ” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco . “And, I would say, ‘Yes, we are there.’
• “So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID’s menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives,” says Gandhi, “in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu.”
• “We are now seeing consistently that more than 70% of our COVID hospitalizations are in that category,” says Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist at the Tufts Medical Center and a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “If you’re counting them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, you are pretty dramatically overcounting.”
• “If deaths were classified more accurately, then the daily death toll would be closer to the toll the flu takes during a typical season,” Doron says. “If this is true, the odds of a person dying if they get a COVID infection — what’s called the case fatality rate — would be about the same as the flu now, which is estimated to be around 0.1%, or perhaps even lower.”
• “I’ll probably feel more comfortable saying something like, ‘Oh, COVID is similar to the flu’ when we actually see a pattern that resembles that,” says Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in the division of health policy and public health. “We’re sort of just starting to see that, and I haven’t really seen that in a sustained way.”

The Big Three — September 23, 2022

• “Doughty’s injunction applied to the 24 state governments that acted as plaintiffs in this case,” .
• “These states were: Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.”

• “The pandemic is over,” . “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
• “Biden’s insistence on Sunday night that the pandemic is over . The declaration was not part of his planned remarks ahead of the 60 Minutes Ÿ±ČÔłÙ±đ°ù±čŸ±±đ·É.”
• ” ‘It is unlikely the U.S. will eradicate the coronavirus, and ,’ President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said Monday during a fireside chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”
• “The White House , dismissing it as the president’s attempt to highlight the administration’s success in beating back the virus. Widely available vaccines and treatments are capable of blunting the worst of COVID’s effects, businesses and schools are open, and emergency health measures have largely evaporated.”
• “Even if the U.S. is technically still in a pandemic, aides argue, Biden was trying to express that .”

‘Wake-up Calls’: New Parent Survey Shows 9% Enrollment Drop in District Schools

• “Districts faced persistent annual enrollment challenges due to a set of factors we call the “Three Ds”: dropouts, demographics and deferments.” As ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ reports, from spring 2021 to spring 2022, a new survey estimates a decline of roughly 300,000 students in district public school enrollment due to these three factors.
• “Parents report their top reasons for changing schools .”
• “In addition, our analysis determined that parents’ political beliefs had little to no impact on their reasons for changing their child’s school. Conservative, liberal and moderate parents alike ranked academic quality and safety as their top motivations.”

City & State News

CALIFORNIA: Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “California Poll Finds Parents Leaving Traditional Public for Charter Schools.“

• “The poll found a higher percentage of school switches among Democrats, white parents, families with English as a primary language and households earning more than $150,000 per year.”
• “Among parents surveyed that switched their child’s school, the 52% that originally attended traditional public schools dropped to 41% — an 11 percentage point decline. In contrast, the 15% that attended charter schools grew to 23% — an 8 percentage point increase.”
• “38% of parents decided to switch schools because they wanted a different educational experience for their children. The poll also found 31% of parents dissatisfied with COVID-related safety measures at their childrens’ school and 30% dissatisfied with mental health support or one-on-one learning help.”

COLORADO:

• “The curriculum grants come at a time when many Colorado districts are adopting new K-3 reading curriculum to comply with a 2019 state law that requires them to use programs backed by research on how children learn to read,” . “While there’s no similar law covering math curriculum, education department rules say the grants can only be used for certain math programs — specifically, those that earned top ‘green’ ratings from EdReports, a national curriculum reviewer.”

ILLINOIS: 

NEW YORK:  

NORTH CAROLINA: as of Sept. 1, which represents about 3% of the district total. The number is higher for child nutrition workers, where the vacancy rate is 13%.The highest vacancy rate is for school bus drivers, with 30% of positions, or 267 drivers, still unfilled.

OKLAHOMA: 

TENNESSEE: ““

VIRGINIA: Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive directive that aims to address teacher shortages through strategies that include hiring retired educators and targeting recruitment and retention efforts toward communities most in need

WASHINGTON:  Shifting Students: A Look at Washington State School Enrollment from 2020 to 2022: Via

• “There were 16,371 fewer students enrolled in all Washington schools in the 2021-22 school year than in 2019-20.”
• “Enrollment in Washington’s district-run public schools declined 2% per year on average from September 2019 to September 2021.”
• “During the same period, private school enrollment increased by 10% per year on average, enrollment in homeschool increased by 27% per year on average and enrollment in charter schools increased by 28% per year on average.”

Federal Updates

ED: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a clarifying how states should distribute funds from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Priority for funding should go to districts with high rates of poverty and one of the following:

• A high student-to-mental health professional ratio
• High rates of chronic absenteeism, exclusionary discipline, and/or referrals to the juvenile justice system, bullying/harassment, community and school violence, or substance abuse
• Students who recently experienced a natural disaster or traumatic event

Supreme Court to Consider Taking Up Challenge to New York’s Vaccine Mandate:

Resources to Support Governors’ Advisers With Tracking Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Programs: 

COVID-19 Research

CDC Expects Omicron COVID Boosters for Kids by Mid-October: Via .

• “The CDC said in a released on Tuesday that it expects to make a recommendation in early to mid-October on the use of the new bivalent vaccines in the group, if they are authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
• “The CDC said it expects Pfizer-BioNTech’s, bivalent vaccine to be available for children aged 5-11 years, and Moderna’s vaccine for those aged 6-17 years, pending FDA authorization.”

U.S. Delivers Over 25 Million COVID Boosters: 

• “According to the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, retail pharmacies will be receiving millions more doses of Moderna this week and that production is ramping up.”

Omicron Sublineage BA.2.75.2 Exhibits Extensive Escape from Neutralising Antibodies: on the variant we highlighted back on and

• “In recent serum samples from blood donors in Stockholm, Sweden, BA.2.75.2 was neutralised, on average, fivefold less potently than BA.5, representing the most neutralisation resistant variant evaluated to date. These data raise concerns that BA.2.75.2 may effectively evade humoral immunity in the population.”

Viewpoints

The Case for Curriculum: Why Some States Are Prioritizing It With COVID Relief Funds:

• “A new CCSSO brief details the ESSER spending decisions of those states that are part of the group’s High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network. The collective, formed several years before the pandemic, aims to encourage schools to use curricula aligned to state standards and get students engaged in grade-level work.”
• “Advocates for a more standardized, district-led approach say that using the same curriculum across schools can ensure that all students are receiving grade-level work and that lessons progress in a clear sequence, building knowledge and skills as students move through the grades. As some states have urged districts to adopt high-quality materials, they’ve also offered aligned professional development and coaching to support teachers.”
• “Several IMPD network states, including Massachusetts and Tennessee, are using these funds to adopt new curricula or support schools in purchasing core reading and math materials. In some cases, states have introduced a quality-control element: In Nebraska, districts have to pick curricula that are high-quality, which is defined as meeting expectations on the nonprofit reviewer EdReports’ evaluations.”

Confronting COVID’s Lost Generation: Very long and important piece in

New Directory of Innovative School Models Aims to Encourage Experimentation: on the


 And on a Reflective Note

Remembering Queen Elizabeth: as she signs off the BBC’s 11 days of coverage. 

• “She made history, she was history. Queen Elizabeth II has gone, but she will surely never be forgotten.”

Queen Elizabeth II Has Completed Her Final Journey to St. George’s Chapel: Where she will be laid to rest alongside her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. 

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

Quality of schools in the region, which encompasses Boise, could be a factor, according to a from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that identifies the nation’s best and worst metro areas for educational effectiveness. 

“Literally, you see the houses springing up like mushrooms,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, a nonprofit supporting charter and district schools in the area. 

The region is among those where schools made above-average academic progress prior to COVID-19, the report shows. With the pandemic now accelerating toward suburbs and smaller metro areas — and often away from high-priced coastal cities — the authors say families and business leaders looking to relocate should factor in school quality when deciding where to settle down.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Institute, cautioned that there’s no guarantee the pandemic hasn’t stalled progress in areas where student performance once trended upward. Some experts, for example, have called recent “staggering.” But he said the message to districts and charter schools that were effective before the pandemic is to stay the course, and those that are ineffective “cannot just go back to normal.”

“I would assume that school districts and charter schools that were doing well by kids before the pandemic are probably largely the same ones doing well by them during the pandemic,” he said.

Using the — a national database of student performance — and graduation data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fordham-Chamber project focuses on 100 large and mid-sized metro areas. The top locales include Miami, which recently received back-to-back from the state; Memphis, where Black, Hispanic and low-income students have shown above-average academic growth; and the Atlanta region, which ranks fourth in the study.

Atlanta has been ranked among the best places to start a new business, attracting tech leaders like . Collaboration among districts across the metro area is one reason why students were making progress before the pandemic and are “well-positioned to return to growth,” said Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education outcomes across the metro Atlanta area. “Substantial inequities still exist, but the gap in several key indicators has been slowly eroding.”

Smaller metro areas, such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Brownsville, Texas, also emerged as places where schools performed better than expected based on demographics.

Those on the lower end of the spectrum include the Salt Lake City area, Las Vegas and Tulsa. Average achievement in math and English language arts has improved over the past six to 10 years in the Las Vegas metro area — essentially the Clark County School District — but schools still perform below average nationally, according to the report. 

Eighty percent of the population

The researchers focused on the nation’s metro areas because that’s where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives and where economic activity and labor market trends tend to have the most impact. Issues such as school choice and racial segregation also affect multiple districts. 

In addition to identifying areas with above- and below-average academic growth, the researchers factored in progress among Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students, a region’s improvement over the past six to 10 years, and high school graduation rates. They combined these indicators into a measure they call “student learning accelerating metros” — or SLAM. The report includes interactive features so users can isolate results for specific indicators, subject areas or demographic groups.

The authors stressed that while achievement scores might seem to be an obvious indicator of high-quality schools, achievement alone often reflects students’ family backgrounds instead of a school’s effectiveness.

That’s why “Best Places to Live” lists should provide families a more comprehensive view of school quality instead of relying on standardized test scores, the authors wrote.

The SLAM rankings show that a metro area in which students have high achievement scores overall might not perform as well on the other measures. 

In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, in the state’s Research Triangle region, has among the highest ACT scores in the state, but also large in achievement between Black and white students. 

That hasn’t stopped the region from attracting Google, Apple and Nike, which are in the area.

And the Raleigh area ranks fourth in raw achievement scores, but falls to 48th in the report when the other indicators are considered. On the other hand, the McAllen, Texas, area — which includes the Sharyland, Edinburg and Hidalgo school districts — ranks 41st in raw achievement, but third based on the report’s SLAM measure.

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, a nonprofit organization of business leaders in North Carolina, praised the report for providing relevant data for her state, where countywide districts include both urban centers and higher-performing suburbs. 

She said in an email that she’s “most concerned” about Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and is “most eager” to see where the Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg districts go in the years to come.Those two districts, she said “have some really interesting promising practices emerging” around literacy and teacher recruitment in high-needs schools.

The authors note that while charter growth and district reform efforts have often focused on the cities at the heart of a metro area, the “suburbs are where many of the kids — and much of the action — are at, and they often explain a metro’s grade.”

Looking at broad trends across metro areas, however, can hide “meaningful variation” from one district to the next, said Alex Spurrier, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. In October, the think tank released a report showing how a lack of affordable housing in some of the nation’s most sought-after districts limits educational opportunity. 

“Even if families decide to move to a metro area with higher-performing public schools,” Spurrier said, “their access to specific public school systems may be limited based on where they can afford housing,” Spurrier said.