Teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores usually signal to parents how well a student is grasping reading, writing and math skills, but the two measures “often conflict,” the report said. 

While trends across the country show , an online survey of more than 2,000 parents by researchers at the University of Chicago and Oregon State University found parents are less likely to invest in academic support when a child has high grades and low test scores. Similarly, parents are more likely to intervene when grades are low, even if a student is scoring proficient in standardized tests.

Many parents surveyed voiced resistance to standardized test results as a measure of how their child is doing in school because of cultural bias and appropriateness. Given the options to answer agree, disagree or neither agree nor disagree, nearly 40% said they believe tests “are biased against certain groups,” and 27% “see tests as reflecting a family’s income.”

Grade inflation may make families think a student is performing better than they are; along with a distrust of standardized testing may mean “there’s skills that we’re leaving on the table,” said co-author Derek Rury, assistant economics professor at Oregon State University. 

“If it’s true that parents place more weight on information contained in grades rather than test scores, that has very big implications for the economy and the growth of skills [in students],” Rury said.

The responses around testing confirmed previous research studies around parental skepticism of  standardized testing, including how test questions often lean into and in later grades, wealthier students often performing better on the SAT and ACT because of access to better opportunities. 

In the survey, parents responded more positively to grades, with 71% saying grades are more important than tests in their decision making for their children.

found parents believe that grades “incorporate effort, behavior and compliance in addition to mastery,” the report said. But Rury’s study found parents also likely trust grading because it’s reported regularly throughout the school year and is more understandable.

Grades make performance comparisons relative to classmates, the report said, while test scores are reported annually – usually a year after they’re taken – and make national comparisons, which can be hard to understand.

Standardized test scores are presented with “histograms and numbers, and there’s multiple comparison groups, like my kid in the school district versus my kid nationally, and we’re talking about percentiles and ranks,” said Ariel Kalil, co-author of the study and public policy professor at the University of Chicago. “This is all very confusing to parents.”

Parents are more likely to accept a “familiar, frequently received signal” like grading instead of a “less familiar signal,” like test scores, the report said, “regardless of relative accuracy.”

An emphasis on good grades, “may systematically mislead parents about true standing,” the report said. Grades can mask academic struggles and how well a student fully grasps skills – leading to an underinvestment in resources, according to the report.

Rury also called grades subjective and that “you don’t know what you’re getting.”

“Test scores, for all their flaws, are objective and the same for people who are in that testing regime, which gives us so many advantages,” Rury said.

Other studies have found similar results, including one in 2024 that found don’t match student test scores and newly-released earlier this month that reported grade inflation can reduce a student’s future test scores, graduation rate, college enrollment and lifetime earnings. 

Grade inflation is also being addressed at the higher education level, where instructors at Harvard University would only be able to under a new proposal. 

“The real downstream effect of [grade inflation] is that you have people who are leaving school unprepared for the labor force. … That is a policy failure in the United States,” Rury said. “A big part of what school should do is prepare people with the skills they need to at least figure out how they’re going to be productive later on.”

Part of better equipping students for the future involves reframing the importance of standardized testing, Kalil added.

“In a world in which we know that grades are inflated, and in a world in which we know that on average, test scores are highly valuable predictors of future outcomes, then we’re trying to get to the parents who are just missing the signal,” Kalil said. 

If test scores were made more accessible to parents, the measure could be another trigger to encourage academic intervention. Further investment from parents could help level a playing field for all students when it comes to measuring the full extent of their proficiency, Rury said. 

“For any kind of policymaker, it’s in their best interest to help parents kind of shift the weight from grades to test scores,” Rury said. “We want everyone to succeed, particularly low income kids, who I think are the population that’s really hurt by these test optional policies. Those high-grade, low test scores, kids could really benefit from interventions from their parents.”

The Texas Education Agency last year launched plans to take over four school districts due to low academic performance, confiscating decision-making power from elected leaders based on state-issued F grades at six campuses.

All six trigger schools share notable similarities.

Between 80% and 97% of their students live in low-income households, far above the state average of 60%.

Black and Hispanic children make up the dominant majority of the student populations, from 88% at Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to almost every child at Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.

And nearly half of students at each school are on the fringes of dropping out — including 64% to 92% of kids on five of the six campuses.

°Őąđłć˛š˛ő’ places a momentous decision in the hands of the state’s education commissioner. When at least one school receives an F for five years in a row, the commissioner must order the campus closed or initiate a state takeover of the entire district, replacing elected school board members with leaders of the education chief’s choosing.

Commissioner Mike Morath, in his decade as leader of the Texas Education Agency, has ordered two campuses closed: Snyder Junior High and Travis Elementary, both in West Texas. Snyder Junior High, located in the Snyder Independent School District, has since using a new academic framework. The Midland Independent School District with a charter school operator to overhaul Travis Elementary.

Over the same 10-year span, Morath ordered seven district takeovers based on academic performance, concluding that school leaders consistently demonstrated an inability to govern effectively and stood in the way of kids reaching their full potential.

But critics of the accountability system say state takeovers penalize districts based on factors beyond their control. Schools alone cannot solve inequality tied to race and poverty. Yet that inequality, critics say, helps explain why many of the takeover trigger schools in Texas share nearly identical characteristics.

“Not everybody gets a hot breakfast and Mom taking them to school or putting them on the bus and giving them a kiss on the cheek,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.

Morath last year announced his intention to appoint superintendents and replace the school boards of the Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally, and Lake Worth districts due to five consecutive F grades at . The Beaumont and Connally districts each had two schools that met the takeover threshold.

Morath said the districts’ inability “to implement effective changes to improve the performance of students” justified his decision. He also cited elevated percentages of children not meeting grade-level expectations across each district, not just at the trigger campuses.

In Fort Worth’s case — the second-largest takeover in state history, — Morath pointed out that districts of similar size and demographics had found ways to produce stronger academic results.

°Őąđłć˛š˛ő’ accountability system measures school performance on an A-F scale. Based largely on the state’s standardized exam, ratings are intended to measure how well students learn, how students progress academically through the school year, and how schools perform compared to campuses with similar percentages of low-income students.

An F means at least 65% of children at the school tested below grade level.

“Getting an F is really, really hard to do in our system,” said Iris Tian, deputy commissioner of analytics, assessment and reporting for the Texas Education Agency. “For a campus to have gotten an F five years in a row, it is a disaster — it is truly an emergency.”

Low-income schools, including those educating mostly Black and Hispanic students, can thrive in Texas’ A-F system. In the most recent ratings, 382 out of 3,203 high-poverty campuses, or 12%, earned an A, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

But those campuses were the exception. Schools with high poverty were the least likely to earn an A and the most likely to receive Ds and Fs. Compared to low-poverty schools, those campuses were more than 30 times as likely to receive a D or F.

Similar disparities exist when factoring in race and ethnicity. Majority-Black schools were more than four times as likely as majority-white schools to receive a D or F, while majority-Hispanic schools were more than twice as likely.

Critics of the system argue that the state punishes schools without holding itself accountable, particularly when it comes to providing resources for a public education system that serves 5.5 million children — most of whom are Hispanic and Black and come from low-income households.

Research points to several strategies for improving outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, including , , and .

In Texas, however, schools spent six years without an increase in the state money they typically devote to salaries and operations, before the Legislature passed in 2025. The state has made it easier for schools to . Districts can no longer . And teachers are in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.

Texas also fails to address educational inequality when it focuses attention on testing outcomes at the expense of other in-school factors that impede the academic progress of Black and Hispanic students, said Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization.

Students of color, for example, have faced discipline because their . Some have sat through lessons that . Others have

“What good is it to have moderately improved reading levels that come from a state takeover when the children are being called the N-word every day and cannot have a peaceful environment in which they learn and seek to grow?” Hairston said.

Hairston expressed frustration that the accountability system also does not consider the lingering effects of residential segregation, community resistance to integration, or cuts to federal and state resources. That means, he said, Texas is not adequately measuring schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most.

The best school leaders and education reform efforts take those societal factors into account, said Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty and inequality.

When that doesn’t happen, he said, students in need of the most help can end up worse off.

“If we want our children to be successful in Texas, we have to pay attention to those districts where parents aren’t making as much money, where there’s lower levels of educational attainment,” Sanborn said. “That often translates into immigrant communities, Black and brown communities, and I think people don’t like to talk about that in Texas.”

“Meeting the needs of all students”

The Texas Education Agency insists the A-F system helps districts improve outcomes by “accurately and fairly evaluating school performance.”

“Inequality cannot be addressed by hiding outcomes, but instead, must be addressed by improving them,” agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement. “Our state’s legal framework ensures that school leaders remain focused on meeting the needs of all students, regardless of their background.”

In recent letters to school leaders announcing the state’s intention to intervene in their districts, Morath said unacceptable performance in a single year represents a “significant academic weakness.” When it continues for multiple years, he wrote, “the children in those campuses develop significant academic gaps.”

“We clearly have a school system that has prevented children from getting the education to which they are morally entitled,” Morath said last year at the University of Texas, where he spoke about the academic takeover in Fort Worth. “What do you do when you have a situation where our locally elected school board has, for really over a decade, been sort of incapable, for whatever reason — sins of omission, sins of commission — of giving kids a shot at success in America?”

Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally school district, understands why the commissioner often attributes school struggles to governance, saying district leaders in her community did not adequately respond to students’ academic shortcomings prior to her appointment in 2023. 

But Bottelberghe also feels state leaders do not fully understand how factors outside of school can hinder academic performance. The state’s accountability system gives schools some grace by taking into account socioeconomic makeup and measuring academic growth beyond just kids’ mastery of content, but she doesn’t think the system goes far enough.

Bottelberghe’s Waco-area district includes students who have to wake themselves up in the morning because their parents cannot, athletes who rely on coaches for rides because buses don’t run early enough, and children who don’t always know where they’re going to lay their head at night.

“It’s very unfortunate that we have so many kids that are in that situation,” Bottelberghe said. “I think people lose sight.”

Tian of the Texas Education Agency acknowledges that academics are not the only important factor in education.

But one of the primary goals of the accountability system, she said, is to direct attention to where children need academic support. Schools can have strong internal cultures and positive relationships with their communities, but if they lack rigorous quality instruction, Tian said, “kids are not going to be where they need to be.”

“Really, all the intervention is, is like, ‘Let’s try something new because what we’ve been doing for the past few years has not been working.’ These kids are not getting what they deserve. And we have to do something different,” Tian said.

“We felt alone”

State takeovers can severely disrupt community morale, said Kevin Jackson, who provides behavioral support to children at the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program in Beaumont.

More than a decade before the state announced plans to replace its school leaders for academic reasons, the Beaumont district was taken over due to concerns about its financial practices. Jackson, a 25-year veteran of the district and president of the Beaumont Teachers Association, said the previous intervention left educators and students feeling punished for acts they weren’t responsible for.

“We felt alone,” Jackson said. “We felt like we were put on an island out there by ourselves, because you remove the people that we elected to work with us and protect us and help us create a better district. You removed all of the board and everyone from their positions, and you brought in your own people. And as a result, that didn’t look well, because the people that you brought in weren’t familiar with this area. I don’t believe you were really tuned in to what was really going on here in Beaumont.”

The education agency and supporters of the accountability system often cite the Houston Independent School District as an example of what takeovers can accomplish. °Őąđłć˛š˛ő’ largest school district educates a population of mostly Black and Hispanic children, while roughly 80% of students come from low-income households.

Since the state takeover in 2023, the Houston school district has seen in test scores. Last school year, it had — down significantly from before the intervention.

But critics say the takeover also serves as an example of what can happen when leaders emphasize testing metrics over the broader school climate.

Teachers and students have . District leaders have struggled to earn trust, as evidenced by 58% of 450,000 voters aimed at improving school infrastructure. Some Houston residents are skeptical about whether short-term academic success on standardized exams will lead to sustained progress in the years to come.

Education research on offers a wider glimpse at the potential impact on students:

• Takeovers across the U.S. are more likely to occur in districts where students of color and low-income children constitute a majority of the schools’ populations.
• Takeovers tend to increase per-student spending and some measures of schools’ financial health.
• Takeovers have demonstrated more positive academic effects on districts with large concentrations of Hispanic students but have affected Black students more neutrally or even negatively.
• Takeovers, on average, do not improve test scores.

The Texas Education Agency says comparing academic performance before and after takeovers shows improved governance and higher test scores in nearly all state-operated districts, defying the national trend.

Beth Schueler, an education professor and researcher at Stanford University, said it’s also important to evaluate simultaneous trends in similarly sized districts not under state control, providing a more reliable measure of a takeover’s impact.

Still, Schueler noted, conversations about how to best serve the most vulnerable children are common nationwide, with broad agreement that education must focus on what’s best for children before opinions differ on which policies can best make that happen.

The presence of so many societal constraints leaves an important question for state leaders and local educators: What are reasonable expectations for schools?

“I don’t think we want to lose sight of the fact that the demographic composition of a school system is the thing that’s going to be the most predictive of variation in performance and outcomes,” Schueler said.

“But I do think there’s room for education systems to make a difference, because we’ve seen that they can make a difference,” she added. “There’s limits to what they can do, and I think that’s important context. But it’s not as though we should give up, I think, on trying to make more effective education policy.”

Alex Nguyen and Rob Reid contributed to this story.

Disclosure: Texas Appleseed and Texas State Teachers Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

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Charles Longshore distinctly remembers the tipping point that led his Alabama middle school to ban cell phones, two years before the state adopted its own ban.

Longshore, then the assistant principal at Dothan Preparatory Academy, had gotten wind that two girls planned to fight in the courtyard between classes and pulled them into the office about 10 minutes before the scheduled rumble. That prevented the fight, but it didn’t stop hundreds of other students from racing to the courtyard hoping to watch a spectacle advertised through texts and chats, with their own phones out ready to record it.

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Stories like these — along with countless less dramatic moments of distraction and disengagement — have made cell phone bans a rare point of bipartisan agreement on education policy. Twenty-six states now have . Two-thirds of principals said their school had a bell-to-bell ban in a .

But so far there hasn’t been much concrete evidence about the impacts of school cell phone bans.

“The policy action is just happening at a level that far surpasses the available evidence,” said David Figlio, an economics professor at the University of Rochester. “The available evidence is largely people’s hunches.”

Figlio and Umut Özek, a senior economist at RAND Corp., a research organization, set out to address that gap. Their study, , analyzes data from a large, county-level urban school district in Florida, which was the first state to adopt a cell phone ban.

The study found modest improvements in test scores in the second year of the ban, after an increase in suspensions in the first year.

The Florida school district had adopted a bell-to-bell ban, more restrictive than the state law, which requires that students not use their phones during instructional time. Students violating the ban had their phones confiscated but got them back at the end of the school day. Students could also face discipline, including suspension, for violating the ban.

Florida students take standardized tests three times a year, and schools report discipline and attendance daily, giving researchers a lot of information to work with.

Using data about cell phone usage coming from each school building, the researchers first identified schools where students used cell phones at higher and lower levels before the ban, which went into effect in 2023. Middle schools had higher cell phone use than high schools before and after the ban.

Researchers then used data from the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years to compare changes in schools with the highest cell phone use before the ban and those with the lowest.

This study design, known as difference within difference, allows researchers to draw stronger conclusions about causality.

In the second year of the ban, average test scores on the higher-stakes spring test went up by 1.1 percentiles more in the schools where students previously used their phones a lot, compared with low-activity schools. The results were more significant for middle and high school students, and boys seemed to benefit more than girls.

But the gains came with tradeoffs. Suspensions went up in the first year of the ban, the study found, especially for Black boys.

And white students saw greater test score growth than Black students.

“Black students seem to be accruing fewer of the benefits of the cell phone ban and more of the disciplinary costs,” Figlio said.

The study can’t answer why Black students — who often face disproportionate discipline — were suspended more often. The increase largely went away in the second year of the ban. Still, Figlio said, the finding calls for schools to be thoughtful about how they approach enforcement.

The study didn’t directly measure school climate — the kind of improvement Longshore and other principals often notice most after they adopt a ban — but researchers did track unexcused absences and students changing schools, potential proxies for how content or safe students feel at school.

Both metrics improved after the cell phone ban was in effect. In fact, the study found that the improvements in attendance contributed to about half the increase in student test scores after the ban.

Figlio called the test score increases “meaningful but not game-changing.”

“It’s not transforming test scores,” he said. “But we’re observing palpable improvement. We’re observing kids attending school more.”

Test score declines blamed on cell phones

American students’ scores on and have been trending down for the past decade, well before COVID disruptions. Researchers are not entirely sure why, but one theory is that the rise of cell phone and social media use among children has had deleterious cognitive and social effects.

“We lack direct evidence of a causal link between smartphones and learning, but I’m convinced that this technology is a key driver of youth mental health challenges, a distraction from learning, both inside and outside of schools, and a deterrent to reading,” Harvard education professor Martin West told the .

Because social media wasn’t introduced to children through a randomized controlled trial, it’s hard to isolate the effects, West said at the hearing. Cell phone bans provide an opportunity to study what happens when social media is removed from the school environment.

But West urged policymakers and parents to address social media use outside of school as well. A study published in JAMA earlier this month found that than those who used little or no social media.

Figlio said he’s prepared to say that cell phones are a driver of test score declines, but there’s not enough evidence to say whether they’re the primary driver.

Longshore, whose school was not involved in the study and who had not read the study when he spoke to Chalkbeat, said state test scores didn’t change significantly after the school started requiring students to leave their phones in a lockbox all day. The school maintained its trajectory of slow but steady growth.

But far fewer students failed their classes, he said. Longshore referred roughly 80 students to summer school the year before the ban. This past summer, it was just 20.

Longshore, who left Dothan at the end of last school year to take a principal job in another district, didn’t suspend students who violated the ban. Instead, after the first offense, the school would hold onto the phone until a parent could pick it up. At a high-poverty school where many parents work multiple jobs, students might go days without their phones — and the parent usually made sure the child didn’t bring it to school again.

With chronic absenteeism already high, Longshore said the last thing he wanted was more students out of class as a result of the ban.

And in fact, discipline at the school improved significantly. There was less drama, Longshore said, and far fewer fights. The lunchroom got loud again with students talking to their classmates.

Future research on cell phone bans could dig into school climate surveys or examine academic or discipline data in different school contexts, Figlio said. The question of impact is “not asked and answered,” he said.

“I care a lot about test scores, but I care even more about kids’ life outcomes — graduating high school, attending college, workforce participation,” he said. “These are things we won’t know for a while.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .Ěý

North Carolina’s , which allows highly effective teachers to receive salary supplements for teaching additional students or supporting other teachers, is having positive effects on math and science test scores, according to an presented by NC State University’s at the State Board of Education meeting last week.

Since 2016, the ATR initiative has allowed districts to create new career pathways and provide salary supplements for highly effective teachers — or Advanced Teachers — who mentor and support other educators while still teaching part of the day. Their roles include Adult Leadership teachers, who lead small teams and receive at least $10,000 supplements, and Classroom Excellence teachers, who take on larger student loads and receive a minimum of $3,000 supplements. 

Those in adult leadership roles teach for at least 30% of the day, lead a team of 3-8 classroom teachers, and share responsibility for the performance of all those teachers’ students. Classroom excellence teachers are responsible for at least 20% more students than before they enter the role.

“Our ATR program was designed to allow highly effective classroom educators to reach more students and to support the professional growth of educators,” said Dr. Callie Edwards, the program’s lead evaluator, at the State Board of Education meeting last Wednesday. “ATR aims to improve the quality of classroom instruction, the recruitment and retention of teachers, as well as ultimately impact student academic achievement.”

In the 2024-25 school year, 26 districts operated ATR programs across 400 schools — 56% of which were elementary schools — employing 1,494 Advanced Teachers who supported nearly 4,000 classroom teachers statewide, according to the evaluation. Edwards said that 88% of Adult Leadership teachers received at least $10,000, and 85% of Classroom Excellence teachers received $3,000 or more.

Statistical analysis of the 2023-24 school year’s data found that students in ATR schools outperformed their peers in non-ATR schools in math and science, showing statistically significant learning gains. 

“Across the various programs I’ve evaluated, these are positive results — especially in math and science — where the impact of ATR is equivalent to about a month of extra learning for students,” said Dr. Lam Pham, the leading quantitative evaluator. “The results in ELA are positive but not statistically significant, which has been consistent for the last three years,” Pham said, referring to English Language Arts.

These effects on math and science grow over time, . Math scores improved throughout schools’ first six years of ATR implementation — though they are no longer significant by the seventh year of implementation, . For science scores, statistically significant gains began in the fifth year after schools began implementing ATR.

Additionally, math teachers in ATR schools reported higher EVAAS growth scores than their peers in comparable schools.

Teachers in ATR schools also reported feeling like they have more time to do their work compared to teachers in non-ATR schools.

This year’s report featured data on teachers supported by ATR teachers for the first time. The evaluation found no positive effects on test scores for students taught by supported teachers compared to students taught by teachers who are not in the program. The researchers also found no effect on turnover levels for teachers supported by Advanced Teachers. However, the report says additional years of data will be necessary to verify if those effects appear over time.  

The evaluation recommended that principals in ATR schools should foster collaboration and communicate strategically about the program with staff, beginning during Advanced Teachers’ hiring and onboarding.

“It’s important to integrate ATR into those processes,” Edwards told the Board. “That means introducing Advanced Teachers to new staff and making collaboration, especially mentoring and coaching, a structured part of the day.”

Edwards said these practices have been adopted in some schools, but principals reported needing more time and support to build collaboration opportunities into the school schedule.

The report also urges district administrators to coordinate with Beginning Teacher (BT) programs, advertise ATR in recruitment materials, and improve their data collection practices. It also calls on state leaders to standardize the program to ensure consistency across participating districts.

“Districts need standardized messaging, professional learning opportunities, and technical assistance to support implementation,” Edwards said. “The state can also create more opportunities for districts to share what’s working with one another and expand the evaluation beyond test scores to capture things like classroom engagement, social, emotional development, and feedback from teachers and principals.”

The evaluators also said “there’s more to do” to expand the program in western North Carolina after Board members raised concerns about uneven participation across the state’s regions.

2026-27 participants

After the Friday Institute’s presentation, Board members from Dr. Thomas R. Tomberlin, senior director of educator preparation, licensure, and performance.

Tomberlin said DPI received 15 proposals representing 22 districts. These proposals have been evaluated by seven independent evaluators, Tomberlin said. The Board had to choose the program’s next participants by Oct. 15 to comply with a legislative requirement. 

The state can only allocate $911,349 for new implementation grants in 2026-27 — less than one-sixth of the funding required to fund all applications. That level of funding is “very low” compared to previous years, Tomberlin said. In the 2023-25 state budget, for these supplements in each year of the biennium.

Tomberlin recommended that the Board approve the three highest-scoring proposals for the 2026-27 fiscal year, and fund these districts at 85% of their request. If the Board approves this recommendation, the state would still have $37,981 in planning funds left over for districts approved during the 2026 proposal cycle.

Tomberlin said districts are already struggling to pay for the program’s salary supplements. The Friday Institute’s report showed that, despite the high median supplements, some districts are offering supplements as little as $1,000.

“Some districts are not able to pay the full $10,000 because they have more ATR teachers than the funding that we can give them in terms of those allotments,” Tomberlin said. “And we had requested the General Assembly, I think, an additional $14 million to cover those supplements, and we didn’t get any.”

The this session included funds to expand the ATR program over the biennium, while the . The General Assembly has not yet passed a comprehensive state budget, and its funding.

Tomberlin said DPI would be in touch with the three districts to verify if they can proceed with the program despite limited funding.

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Texas public school administrators, parents and education experts worry that a new law to replace the state’s standardized test could potentially increase student stress and the amount of time they spend taking tests, instead of reducing it.

The new law comes amid criticism that the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, creates too much stress for students and devotes too much instructional time to the test. The updated system aims to ease the pressure of a single exam by replacing STAAR with three shorter tests, which will be administered at the beginning, middle and end of the year. It will also ban practice tests, which Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the standardized test. But some parents and teachers worry the changes won’t go far enough and that three tests will triple the pressure.

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The law also calls for the TEA to study how to reduce the weight testing carries on the state’s annual school accountability ratings — which STAAR critics say is one reason why the test is so stressful and absorbs so much learning time — and create a way for the results of the three new tests to be factored into the ratings.

That report is not due until the 2029-30 school year, and the TEA is not required to implement those findings. Some worry the new law will mean schools’ ratings will continue to heavily depend on the results from the end-of-year test, while requiring students to start taking three exams. In other words: same pressure, more testing.

Cementing ‘what school districts are already doing’

The Texas Legislature passed during the second overtime lawmaking session this year to scrap the STAAR test.

Many of the reforms are meant to better monitor students’ academic growth throughout the school year.

For the early and mid-year exams, schools will be able to choose from a menu of nationally recognized assessments approved by the TEA. The agency will create the third test. Under the law, the three new tests will use percentile ranks comparing students to their peers in Texas; the third will also assess a student’s grasp of the curriculum.

In addition, scores will be required to be released about two days after students take the exam, so teachers can better tailor their lessons to student needs.

State Sen. , R-Houston, one of the architects behind the push to revamp the state’s standardized test, said he would like the first two tests to “become part of learning” so they can help students prepare for the end-of-year exam.

But despite the changes, the new testing system will likely resemble the current one when it launches in the 2027-28 school year, education policy experts say.

“It’s gonna take a couple of years before parents realize, to be honest, that you know, did they actually eliminate STAAR?” said Bob Popinski with Raise Your Hand Texas, an education advocacy nonprofit.

Since many schools already conduct multiple exams throughout the year, the law will “basically codify what school districts are already doing,” Popinski said.

Lawmakers instructed TEA to develop a way to measure student progress based on the results from the three tests. But that metric won’t be ready when the new testing system launches in the 2027-28 school year. That means results from the standardized tests, and their weight in the state’s school accountability ratings system, will remain similar to what they are now.

Every Texas school district and campus receives an A-F rating based on graduation benchmarks and how students perform on state tests, their improvement in those areas, and how well they educate disadvantaged students. The best score out of the first two categories accounts for most of their overall rating. The rest is based on their score in the last category.

The accountability ratings are high stakes for school districts, which can face state sanctions for failing grades — from being forced to close school campuses to the ousting of their democratically elected school boards.

Supporters of the state’s accountability system say it is vital to assess whether schools are doing a good job at educating Texas children.

“The last test is part of the accountability rating, and that’s not going to change,” Bettencourt said.

Critics say the current ratings system fails to take into account a lot of the work schools are doing to help children succeed outside of preparing them for standardized tests.

“Our school districts are doing a lot of interesting, great things out there for our kids,” Popinski said. “Academics and extracurricular activities and co-curricular activities, and those just aren’t being incorporated into the accountability report at all.”

In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, HB 8 also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.

“There is some other interest in looking at other factors for accountability ratings, but it’s not mandated. It’s just going to be reviewed and surveyed,” Bettencourt said.

Student stress worries

Even though many schools already conduct testing throughout the year, Popinski said the new system created by HB 8 could potentially boost test-related stress among students.

State Rep. , R-Salado, who sponsored the testing overhaul in the Texas House, wrote in a statement that “TEA will determine testing protocols through their normal process.” This means it will be up to TEA to decide the rules that it currently uses for the STAAR test. Those include that schools dedicate three to four hours to the exam and that administrators create seating charts, spread out desks and manage restroom breaks.

School administrators said the worst-case scenario would be if all three of the new tests had to follow lockdown protocols like the ones that currently come with STAAR. Holly Ferguson, superintendent of Prosper ISD, said the high-pressure environment associated with the state’s standardized test makes some of her students ill.

“It shouldn’t be that we have kids sick and anxiety is going through the roof because they know the next test is coming,” Ferguson said.

The TEA did not respond to a request for comment.

HB 8 also seeks to limit the time teachers spend preparing students for state assessments, partly by banning benchmark tests for 3-8 grades. Bettencourt told the Tribune the new system is expected to save per student.

Buckley said the new law “will reduce the overall number of tests a student takes as well as the time they spend on state assessments throughout the school year, dramatically relieving the pressure and stress caused by over-testing.”

But some critics worry that any time saved by banning practice tests will be lost by testing three times a year. In 2022, Florida changed its testing system from a single exam to three tests at the beginning, middle and end of the year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the new system would , but the number of minutes students spent taking exams almost the year the new system went into effect.

Popinski added that much of the stress the test induces comes from the heavy weight the end-of-year assessment holds on a school’s accountability rating. The pressure to perform that the current system places on school district administrators transfers to teachers and students, critics have said.

“The pressures are going to be almost exactly the same,” Popinski said.

What parents, educators want for the new test

Retired Fort Worth teacher Jim Ekrut said he worries about the ban on practice tests, because in his experience, test preparations helped reduce his students’ anxiety.

Ekrut said teachers’ experience assessing students is one reason why educators should be involved in creating the new end-of-year exam.

“The better decisions are going to be made with input from people right on that firing line,” Ekrut said.

HB 8 requires that a committee of educators appointed by the commissioner reviews the new test that TEA will create. Some, like Ferguson and David Vinson, former superintendent of Wylie ISD who started at Conroe this week, said they hope the menu of possible assessments districts can pick for the first two tests includes a national program they already use called , or MAP.

The Prosper and Wylie districts are some that administer MAP exams at the beginning, middle and end of the year. More than 4,500 school districts nationwide use these online tests, which change the difficulty of the questions as students log their answers to better assess their skill level and growth. A conducted by the organization that runs MAP found that the test is a strong indicator of how students perform on the end-of-year standardized test.

Criteria-based tests like STAAR measure a student’s grasp on grade-level skills, whereas norm-based exams like MAP measure a student’s growth over the course of instruction. Vinson described this program as a “checkup,” while STAAR is an “autopsy.”

Rachel Spires, whose children take MAP tests at Sunnyvale ISD, said MAP testing doesn’t put as much pressure on students as STAAR does.

Spires said her children’s schedules are rearranged for the month of April, when Sunnyvale administers the STAAR test, and parents are barred from coming to campus for lunch. MAP tests, on the other hand, typically take less time to complete, and the school has fewer rules for how they are administered.

“When the MAP tests come around, they don’t do the modified schedules, and they don’t do the review packets and prep testing or anything like that,” Spires said. “It’s just like, ‘Okay, tomorrow you’re gonna do a MAP test,’ and it’s over in like an hour.”

For Ferguson, the Prosper ISD superintendent, a relaxed environment around testing is key to achieving the new law’s goal of reducing student stress.

“If it’s just another day at school, I’m all in,” Ferguson said. “But if we lock it down, and we create a very compliance-driven system that’s very archaic and anxiety- and worry-inducing to the point that it starts having potential harmful effects on our kids … our teachers and our parents, I’m not okay with that.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Texas lawmakers have sent legislation replacing STAAR, the state’s widely unpopular state standardized test, to Gov. ’s desk.

Once Abbott signs , Texas will swap the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness for three shorter tests at the beginning, middle and end of each school year. Students will begin to take the new tests in the 2027-28 school year.

“House Bill 8 ends the high stakes and high stress nature of one test, one day,” Rep. , the bill’s author, said Wednesday evening before the Texas House voted to send the proposal to Abbott. “This is unprecedented oversight of the assessment and accountability system by this body.”

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Legislators replaced STAAR amid frustration from families and teachers, who say the test puts too much pressure on students and that preparing for it takes up too much time in the classroom.

The bill’s passage comes after two earlier attempts failed to scrap STAAR. Legislation to that effect during the final hours of this year’s regular lawmaking session because the House and the Senate could not agree on what they wanted out of the new test. Chamber leaders reconciled many of their differences earlier this summer, but when they fled the state in an attempt to stop a rare mid-decade redistricting effort. in August, allowing the House to continue working on legislation.

School accountability experts celebrated the new standardized testing system, which is used to assess whether students have the core academic skills they need to be ready for life after high school. Testing throughout the year, experts said, will give families a better window into how their children are doing and help teachers tailor their instruction to meet students’ needs.

But some House members were displeased with the concessions the lower chamber made to the Senate to reach an agreement. They questioned whether HB 8 does enough to reduce the pressure on students and the amount of time spent on testing.

“This bill was supposed to be the bill that was the win for our public schools and for our kids,” Rep. , D-Austin, said on the House floor Wednesday. “This is no win. This is a terrible bill … I can’t even believe it’s made it this far.”

Here’s what you need to know about the changes coming to the state’s standardized test.

Students to take three, shorter standardized tests

The three shorter tests will replace the end-of-the-year STAAR in an effort to reduce the pressure that a single test puts on students and monitor more closely their academic growth.

Schools that already require students to take nationally recognized assessments will be able to count those as the beginning- and middle-of-the-year tests. It is unclear yet which exams will be acceptable to meet that requirement.

The Texas Education Agency will have a hand in creating the end-of-the-year test. Many House Democrats opposed HB 8 saying the TEA should have less of a role in shaping the test at a time when STAAR’s shortcomings have pushed school districts and families to distrust the agency. Buckley has defended TEA’s role by pointing to a committee of 40 classroom teachers that will act as a counterbalance, reviewing the tests’ questions and weighing in on their rigor.

Families can expect to get test scores in about two days, a much speedier turnaround compared to the current wait, which can take up to several weeks. Results for all three tests will now be presented as percentile ranks, which show how students are performing compared to their classmates. The end-of-year test results would also show the state’s assessment of whether students have approached, met or mastered grade-level skills, like the current STAAR test does.

Proponents of testing students throughout the year hope it will give teachers useful information about where students are struggling, so they can tweak instruction to meet those learning gaps.

Educators can no longer run students through practice tests

Teachers won’t be able to give their students practice exams ahead of the state standardized tests.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath has told lawmakers that practice exams can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the test.

The ban on practice tests could buy back 15 to 30 hours of lost instructional time per student each school year, according to estimates from David Osman, an auditor of standardized testing.

Graduation requirement to pass English II ends

High schoolers will no longer need to pass the English II assessment, which is currently a graduation requirement. It’s the first time Texas has eased graduation testing requirements since 2015, Buckley said.

Students will still need to pass an end-of-the-year test on English I to get their high school diploma, along with exams in algebra and biology.

The House pushed to make exams optional for some subjects in HB 8 to decrease testing. Before the lower chamber voted on the bill, Hinojosa added a provision to get rid of the English II test.

Hinojosa also tried to get rid of social studies portions of the exam. But when HB 8 got to the Senate floor last week, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, added them back in, saying students should test in that subject to ensure they have foundational knowledge for civic engagement. As a result, eighth graders will continue to test on social studies and high schoolers on U.S. history.

Scores on three tests will count toward schools’ A-F ratings

Texas uses standardized test results to grade schools on how well they are educating their students through what is known as the state’s A-F accountability system. With testing set to change, legislators instructed TEA to develop a metric for student progress based on growth over the three new tests, with the intent of factoring that metric into each school’s rating.

Such a metric hasn’t been introduced into any state’s school accountability system, according to analysis from EdTrust. It is unclear how the TEA will create a consistent way to track student growth given that schools will be allowed to take different tests for the beginning and middle of the year.

HB 8 also waded into how much power TEA should have in changing the benchmarks for schools to get a good grade, a key point of tension in between school districts and the education agency. The bill codifies that the TEA has the power to refresh those goal posts every five years. It also requires TEA to announce any changes to the accountability system by July 15 of each year, about a month before the school year starts.

The stakes for how the state measures schools’ performance are : Failing grades can bring on state sanctions, like forcing a struggling school to close or ousting a district’s democratically elected school board.

In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, the legislation also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

North Carolina’s public schools reached their highest graduation rate in history last year, while students also posted a three-year high on most standardized tests, according to test data presented Wednesday to the State Board of Education.

The state’s four-year graduation rate climbed to 87.7% for the 2024-25 school year, marking the third consecutive increase.

“We’re very excited, of course, today to recognize the highest four-year cohort graduation rate for North Carolina at 87.7%,” said Tammy Howard, the Department of Public Instruction’s senior director of accountability and testing, during a press conference on Wednesday. “This is a consistent increase for the past three years, but most notable, the highest ever.”

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The report showed improvements in 12 of 15 reading and math exams, including gains on every end-of-grade math test for grades three through eight. Howard said the results also revealed steady progress across all racial and ethnic groups, the strongest performance in three years.

“These results represent more than just numbers,” said State Superintendent Mo Green. “They represent thousands of students better prepared for their next phase in life.”

One of the standouts was Nash Early College High School, which earned an overall A rating and exceeded academic growth targets for the sixth year in a row. Students there achieved proficiency rates of 83% in biology, 89% in math and 96% in English.

Principal Thomas B. McGeachy attributed the school’s success to its strong culture of teamwork and willingness to take risks.. “I’ve tried to create an environment where I encourage staff and scholars to take risks,” he said during the press conference. “Don’t be afraid of failure, because if you didn’t achieve what you wanted to that means you reflect on the experience and you build upon it.”

Frederick Lindsay, a 13th-grader at the school, said the school’s dual enrollment program with Nash Community College gave him new experiences that reshaped his goals.

“Since we’re linked with Nash Community College, we have a wide variety of opportunities,” Lindsay said. “I got to experience a for the first time for $500 to stay there for five days. That’s an opportunity that you wouldn’t get many places.”

Challenges remain

While math proficiency is nearing pre-pandemic levels, only 52.5% of third through eighth graders were proficient in reading last year, a rate still below the 57.3% recorded six years ago.

“Reading is more difficult and takes more time,” said Stacey Wilson-Norman, chief academic officer. “Our teachers have been trained, but we just need to align some of the other supports to really accelerate that progress.”

Green noted that North Carolina ranks 48th nationally in per-pupil spending, nearly $5,000 less per student than the national average, which could constrain future improvements. That gap, he said, makes it harder to attract the best teachers and to offer a full range of resources.

Officials also pointed to lingering setbacks from the pandemic and natural disasters, including lost instructional days in western school districts impacted by Hurricane Helene.

Despite these challenges, state leaders said the gains mark an important step toward their goal of making North Carolina’s public schools the best in the nation by 2030.

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

Reading and math scores shot up across New York City’s public schools last school year, according to state test results released Monday.

Among students in grades 3-8, nearly 57% of students were considered proficient in math, an increase of 3.5 percentage points. The gains were even sharper in reading. About 56% of students were proficient in the subject, a 7 percentage point increase.

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Those gains come after Mayor Eric Adams has made overhauling reading instruction , an effort that has won support from union leaders and in this November’s election. Top city officials argued Monday that their efforts are bearing fruit, as all elementary schools were required to use city-approved reading curriculums last school year through an initiative known as NYC Reads.

“This is what happens when we stay focused on evidence-based instruction and never lose sight of what’s possible for our young people,” schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement.

Experts said the test score gains were encouraging, but cautioned that many factors can influence them and it’s impossible to isolate the effect of the curriculum overhauls.

“It’s at least suggestive that there’s real improvement,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied school performance and accountability systems. Results from a also hinted at some progress.

At the same time, Pallas noted test scores increased statewide by a similar magnitude as in New York City, which “does tamp down a little bit that it’s something special New York City is doing.” The city’s overall proficiency rates are slightly higher than those statewide, where 53% of students are proficient in reading and 55% are proficient in math.

City Education Department officials also mounted an targeting students who were at the cusp of passing the exams, which may have played a role in the test score increase. Some experts criticized that approach because it could create incentives for schools to focus on students close to proficiency rather than those furthest behind.

Officials noted that reading scores increased more sharply in earlier grades that were subject to the reading curriculum changes. There was an 11.6 percentage point jump in reading proficiency among students in grades 3-5 who were in the first phase of schools that started using the new curriculums two years ago. Among the second phase of schools, which implemented the curriculum changes last year, reading scores increased 10.4 percentage points.

Overall, Pallas said that more data is needed to draw firm conclusions about student proficiency over time. “If there’s real growth, it should be sustained. And that requires looking at scores over the next couple years,” he said.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers union, said in a statement that the test score increases are “a testament to the hard work by New York City educators and our students. He singled out Aviles-Ramos, noting she “fought the Education Department] bureaucracy to make sure the needs of students and school communities came first.”

The continued to reflect deep disparities between different student groups, though in some cases those gaps narrowed somewhat.

Black students, for instance, posted the largest test score increases in reading and math in the city’s public schools of any racial group. But they still lag their white and Asian American peers.

About 75% of Asian American students and 73% of white students were proficient in reading compared with 43.5% of Latino children and 47% of Black students. (Black students’ proficiency jumped about 8 percentage points.)

Meanwhile, nearly 81% of Asian American students and 75% of white students passed state math exams while only 43% of Black and Latino students were considered to be on grade level.

Only 29% of students with disabilities were proficient in math and nearly 27% were in reading. Even as students with disabilities made some gains in reading and math, the gap between those children and their nondisabled peers widened slightly.

Among students learning English as a new language, nearly 30% were proficient in math and 12.5% were proficient in reading — a gain of more than 4 percentage points in both categories.

The state exams have undergone a series of tweaks in recent years that have to draw comparisons from the results year over year. For the last two years, the tests have remained stable, meaning the results should be comparable.

The state Education Department has expanded computer-based testing in lieu of paper exams and all students will take digital versions of the test next school year. Pallas said it is unlikely that will dramatically skew the results, though some schools have struggled with .

Curious about school-level test results? Here is a searchable breakdown of math and English scores across all of the city’s public schools. (Charter schools are included in the table but not in the district’s overall numbers above.)

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

End-of-year testing results show Florida students were more proficient in math and reading than a year ago.

Statewide progress monitoring , announced by Gov. Ron DeSantis Wednesday, detail how Florida’s students performed in reading, math, social studies, and science.

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Math scores for all students from third grade to high school improved by 3% from 2024, with 58% of students demonstrating a level 3 or higher understanding. The county with the lowest score was Gadsden, with 35% testing at a level 3 or higher, and the highest, Nassau, with 78%.

Level 3, on the state’s scale of 1-5, is considered on grade level. Level 4 is considered proficient and level 5 is considered exemplary. Students who scored below level 3 are considered below or well below grade level.

Reading scores for students in grades 3-10 increased from 53% at level three or higher in 2024 to 57% in 2025. Gadsden County had the lowest performance at 36% at level 3 or higher and St. Johns was the highest at 72%.

“Florida insists that education be factual, student-focused, and parent empowered,” DeSantis said in a news release. “Florida has led the nation in instituting progress monitoring assessments that allow for teachers and parents to provide real-time interventions that support the long-term success of their students, and our approach has paid off.”

The progress monitoring tests are administered three times per year by the state. The periodic testing is designed to allow instructors to make interventions for struggling students sooner. This is the third year of progress monitoring in Florida.

During the Spring 2025 end-of-course assessment for the civics assessment, 71% of students tested at a level 3 or higher; 47% were proficient or higher.

“Today’s results affirm that our first-in-the-nation statewide progress monitoring system is making a difference for our students. Under Governor DeSantis’ leadership, Florida will continue to provide the best opportunities for our students,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said in a news release.

This year Florida on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Eighth grade math scores have dropped in the last three iterations of the test, and Florida students that age ranked in the bottom 10 states for math and reading scores. Fourth grade reading scores on the NAEP were the lowest in 2024 since 2003, while their math scores increased but remain below pre-pandemic numbers.

The data for the NAEP, collected in early 2024, were disputed by Diaz, who questioned the methodology of the exam. Diaz wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education with “suggestions to help make NAEP great for educational progress once again.”

He took issue with the lack of inclusion of private school students and he believed urban students were included at a disproportionate rate.

Diaz will step down next month to become interim president of the University of West Florida. , the Florida Board of Education named DeSantis deputy chief of staff Anastasios Kamoutsas the next education commissioner.

The year COVID-19 shuttered classroom doors, St. Louis’s Premier Charter School was acclimating not only to a new normal, but to a new way of teaching literacy.

The K-8 school and its 900 students shifted their curriculum in fall 2020 to include the science of reading — a  switch many U.S. districts have made because of its positive results on literacy scores. But last year, with results remaining stagnant and low, Premier’s administrators started to wonder what they were missing.

“We are not seeing the gains and the progress that our school should be making,” said Jessica Smyth, one of Premier’s elementary principals. “We just know that our kids are capable of so much more than what the outcomes are currently showing.”

So, in December, Smyth and educators from three other St. Louis schools traveled to Washington, D.C., to learn from Garrison Elementary. The school had across the nation and has seen improved literacy scores as a result. 

The trip was part of a two-year program called the Emerson Early Literacy Challenge that launched last fall to help educators from the four St. Louis-area schools brainstorm ways to improve reading in the early grades. Atlas Public School and Premier Charter School in St. Louis, Commons Lane Primary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District and Barbara C. Jordan Elementary in the School District of University City share a $1 million grant for the work.

Efforts to improve St. Louis reading scores have been ramping up since last year, when the local NAACP chapter launched a literacy campaign and later filed a federal complaint against the city and county school districts because of disparities in reading proficiency for students of color. 

Leaders of the Emerson challenge say the biggest problem in improving St. Louis’s reading proficiency rates — which were at 20% for third graders in the city and 46% for third graders across the county in — is how the science of reading is implemented.

There are key elements besides using curriculum based on the science of reading that are needed to create substantial academic progress, said Ian Buchanan, a steering committee member for the Emerson challenge. For example, Garrison has more teachers in the classroom, efficient employee schedules and intensive tutoring sessions that allow its staff to increase their focus on literacy. 

“We can have all of the curriculum resources. We can have rock star teachers,” he said. “We can have all of that, but there are some foundational pieces that need to be in place.”

Smyth said that even before Premier was chosen for the Emerson program, administrators had eliminated outdated instruction strategies like , which encourages students to use context clues to guess what a word could be instead of sounding it out. 

The strategy is a major part of balanced literacy, an approach that has been by cognitive scientists. Its lack of emphasis on phonics can cause students to fall behind as they encounter harder text in later grades. 

While using a curriculum based on the science of reading was a step in the right direction, Premier’s administrators still weren’t happy with the school’s third grade reading scores: About 28% on the state MAP reading test last year, down from 33% in 2018.

“While we see some really strong instruction that aligns with the science of reading in some classrooms, it’s not necessarily consistent among all classrooms,” Smyth said.

Premier is still training teachers in how to teach lessons based on the science of reading, Smyth said. 

Garrison Elementary School began changing its reading instruction in 2018-19. Just a year before, only 13% of the school’s 250 students were meeting or exceeding expectations for reading on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education.

In 2023-24, that number rose to .

Teacher training and explicit phonics instruction are crucial to gaining results like that, but schools also have to focus on staffing, class schedules and literacy screening tests, said Katharine Noonan, an English language arts instructional coach who helped implement the science of reading at Garrison.

The school already used DIBELS, a screening tool that evaluated students’ literacy skills and identified learning disabilities like dyslexia. Noonan said teachers were coached to use the screener more effectively by catching gaps in reading proficiency early and ensuring struggling students received the most intervention. 

“(It’s) putting your best teachers in front of the kids that need the most help, and really prioritizing teacher-driven instruction,” Noonan said. 

Garrison administrators had to rethink staffing and traditional class schedules, Noonan said. Rather than giving students the same amount of time with their teachers and pulling children who needed extra help out of the classroom to work with a reading specialist, staffing and schedules were restructured for those who were the furthest behind. 

“That means, if I have 20 kids in my kindergarten class and I have three children who are behind — our screening data has showed us that they have gaps — then they see the (specialist) possibly every day, maybe even two adults a day, as a way to provide those interventions inside of the classroom,” Noonan said. “It does require a lot of creativity around staffing and schedules, because you have to sort of think, who are my available adults?”

Smyth said she and the other visiting St. Louis educators watched Garrison’s reading specialists conduct small-group lessons inside classrooms. The school “had some really great models in place, like classrooms that had two teachers in their rooms during all intervention blocks, which is wonderful. But then we got to ask questions like, ‘Who were those people? How do you have the staffing? How do you have the funding for the staffing to get these models to work?’ ” Smyth said. 

Noonan said Garrison uses federal Title I funding to provide enough staffing for interventions, but schools can also use instructional aides and parent volunteers.

Buchanan said Garrison Elementary was chosen because it has similar student demographics to the St. Louis schools in the Emerson challenge. Even if it has more resources, Buchanan said, he thinks that what Garrison has accomplished can be replicated in St. Louis.

Leaders of each selected school received $20,000 at the beginning of the academic year to brainstorm strategies and craft plans to improve early literacy. They can get up to $250,000 during the 2025-26 school year to implement those plans.

“It was an excellent visit, because we were able to see in real time what teaching and learning looks like and to understand why they have been making gains,” Buchanan said. “We have a better feel for what it takes, where we are and what we need to do.”

Clarification: Some 28% of Premier’s third graders scored as proficient or advanced on the MAP reading test last year.

Jill Norton, an education policy adviser in Massachusetts, has a teenage son with dyslexia and ADHD. Shelley Scruggs, an electrical engineer in the same state, also has a teenage son with ADHD. Both students go to the same technical high school.

But last fall, Norton and Scruggs advocated on opposite sides of a Massachusetts ballot referendum scrapping the requirement that high school kids pass a standardized state test to graduate.

Norton argued that without the high bar of the standard exam, kids like hers won’t have an incentive to strive. But Scruggs maintained that kids with learning disorders also need different types of measurements than standardized tests to qualify for a high school diploma.

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Voters approved the referendum last November, 59% to 41%, ending the Massachusetts requirement. There and in most other states, Scruggs’ position against testing is carrying the day.

Just seven states now require students to pass a test to graduate, and one of those — New York — will end its Regents Exam as a requirement by the 2027-28 school year. Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas and Virginia still require testing to graduate, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that opposes such mandates.

In Massachusetts, teachers unions favored getting rid of the exam as a graduation requirement. They argued it forced them to teach certain facts at the expense of in-depth or more practical learning. But many business leaders were in favor of keeping the test, arguing that without it, they will have no guarantee that job applicants with high school diplomas possess basic skills.

State by state, graduation tests have tumbled over the past decade. In 2012, half the states required the tests, but that number fell to 13 states in 2019, . The trend accelerated during the pandemic, when many school districts scrapped the tests during remote learning and some decided to permanently extend test exemptions.

Studies have found that such graduation exams disadvantage students with learning disabilities as well as English language learners, and that they aren’t always a good predictor of success in careers or higher education.

An oft-cited 2010 by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin may have ignited the trend to scrap the tests. Researchers’ review of 46 earlier studies found that high school exit exams “produced few of the expected benefits and have been associated with costs for the most disadvantaged students.”

Some states began to find other ways to assess high school competency, such as grades in mandatory courses, capstone projects or technical milestones.

“Minimum competency tests in the 1980s drove the idea that we need to make sure that students who graduate from high school have the bare minimum of skills,” said John Papay, an associate professor of education at Brown University. “By the mid-2000s, there was a reaction against standardized testing and a movement away from these exams. They disappeared during the pandemic and that led to these tests going away.”

Despite the problems with the tests for English learners and students with learning disabilities, Papay said, the tests are “strong predictors of long-term outcomes. Students who do better on the tests go on to graduate [from] college and they earn more.”

Papay, who remains neutral on whether the tests should be required, pointed out that high school students usually have many opportunities to retake the tests and to appeal their scores.

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, a think tank and advocacy group for underserved communities, noted that in many states, the testing requirements were replaced by other measures.

The schools “still require some students or all students to demonstrate competency to graduate, but students have many more options on how they could do that. They can pass a dual credit [high school/college] course, pass industry recognized competency tests. …

“A lot of states still have assessments as part of their graduation requirements, but in a much broader form,” she said.

Massachusetts moves

Scruggs said her son took Massachusetts’ required exam last spring; he passed the science and math portions but fell 1 point short in English.

“He could do well in his classes, but if he didn’t pass the three tests, he wouldn’t get his regular diploma,” Scruggs said. “How do you go out into the working world, and you went to school every day and passed your classes, but got no diploma?”

Her son has taken the English test again and is awaiting his new score, she said.

Norton, by contrast, said the exam, called the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, gave her son an incentive to work hard.

“I worry that kids like him … are going to end up graduating from high school without the skills they will need,” Norton said. “Without the test, they will just be passed along. I can’t just trust that my kid is getting the basic level of what he needs. I need a bar set where he will get the level of education he needs.”

Students in Massachusetts still will have to take the MCAS in their sophomore year of high school, and the scores will be used to assess their overall learning. But failing the test won’t be a barrier to graduation beginning with the class of 2025. The state is still debating how — or whether — to replace the MCAS with other types of required courses, evaluations or measurements.

High school students in Massachusetts and most states still have to satisfy other graduation requirements, which usually include four years of English and a number of other core subjects such as mathematics, sciences and social studies. Those requirements vary widely across the country, however, as most are set by individual school districts.

In New York, the State Education Department in 2019 began a multiyear process of rethinking high school graduation requirements and the Regents Exam. The department decided last fall to phase out the exit exam and replace it with something called a “Portrait of a Graduate,” including seven areas of study in which a student must establish proficiency. Credit options include capstone projects, work-based learning experiences and internships, as well as academic achievement. Several other states have moved recently to a similar approach.

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy group that works to limit standardized testing, said course grades do a better job of assessing students’ abilities.

“Standardized tests are poor ways of incentivizing and measuring the kinds of skills and knowledge we should have high school kids focusing on,” Feder said. “You get ‘teaching to the test’ that doesn’t bear much of a relationship to the kinds of things that kids are being asked to do when they go on to college or the workplace.”

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association union, said phrases such as “teaching to the test” disrespect teachers and their ability to know when students have mastered content and competency. The high school tests are first taken in the 10th grade in Massachusetts. If the kids don’t pass, they can retake the exam in the 11th or 12th grade.

“Educators are still evaluating students,” he said. “It’s a mirage to say that everything that a student does in education can be measured by a standardized test in the 10th grade. Education, of course, goes through the 12th grade.”

He added that course grades are still a good predictor of how much a student knows.

Colorado’s menu

Several of the experts and groups on both sides of the debate point to Colorado as a blueprint for how to move away from graduation test requirements.

Colorado, which made the switch with the graduating class of 2021, now allows school districts to choose from a menu of assessment techniques, such as SAT or ACT scores, or demonstration of workforce readiness in various skill areas.

A state task force created by the legislature recently to the education accreditation system to “better reflect diverse student needs and smaller school populations.” They include creating assessments that adapt to student needs, offering multilingual options, and providing quicker results to understand student progress.

The state hopes the menu of assessment options will support local flexibility, said Danielle Ongart, assistant commissioner for student pathways and engagement at the Colorado Department of Education.

“Depending on what the student wants for themselves, they have the ability to show what they know,” she said in an interview. In particular, she said, the menu allows for industry certificates, if a student knows what type of work they want to do. That includes areas such as computer science or quantum computing.

“It allows students to better understand themselves and explain what they can do, what they are good at, and what they want to do,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Having pledged to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education and get “woke” out of public schools, Donald Trump is returning to office. The coming year could start to reveal what these promises mean for American schools that face significant challenges, including looming building closures, stagnant student learning, and big questions about the very purpose of education.

Here are some of the education stories we’re watching in 2025.

What a Trump presidency means for schools

President-elect Donald Trump had some strong words for American schools on the campaign trail. He and “send education back to the states.” He also , an endeavor that presumably would require some bureaucracy to oversee American schools.

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With Trump returning to the White House, the big questions are whether he’ll follow through on campaign pledges — and whether American students will feel the difference in their classrooms.

Most observers think actually abolishing the U.S. Department of Education is unlikely. It would require an act of Congress, and there’s probably not enough votes. But the idea does seem to have more traction than in the past, and a bill that would — as envisioned in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — was recently filed by a GOP senator.

The Trump administration could also cut funding for or eliminate certain programs, and replace career bureaucrats with political appointees, all without getting rid of the department. Civil rights enforcement could also look very different.

Some Republican state leaders have associated with federal compliance. They envision but with fewer requirements around how to spend it.

Trump has also promised to roll back new Title IX regulations that treat discrimination against transgender studnets as a form of sex discrimination. Conservative parent groups and Republican attorneys general have already sued to block the new rules, which LGBTQ advocates saw as . Some conservatives want these cases to still go to the Supreme Court in hopes the court finds gender identity is not protected under laws barring sex discrimination.

Increased immigration enforcement also is . Reports indicate that limited immigration enforcement in schools, hospitals, and churches. . School leaders and advocates are trying to balance the reality that they may not be able to protect all students with the .

School closures are increasing, but not everywhere

Faced with declining student populations, higher staffing costs, and the end of federal pandemic relief money, districts around the country are closing schools — or doing serious fiscal gymnastics to avoid it.

The from 2023 shows school enrollment holding nearly steady from the year before, but still down 2.5% from pre-pandemic levels. Notably, while high school enrollment has stabilized, elementary enrollment is down, suggesting there’s no big rebound on the horizon. The ratings agency for 2025 due to falling enrollment and lower revenues.

Declining birth rates, gentrification, high housing prices, and more families opting for private school and home schooling have all played a role. In many cases, these trends were evident before the pandemic, but school districts used federal COVID relief dollars to shore up budget holes. In some cases they also added staff and raised teacher pay, exacerbating the fiscal crunch to come.

Already, leaders in , , and have voted to close schools. and are making plans to do the same.

The case of P.S. 25 in Brooklyn, New York, . New York City spends $45,420 per child to keep the 52-student school open, yet it struggles to afford art, music, or after-school programming.

But these decisions are often wrenching and . Citing lack of community support, Boston . So did San Francisco — and the . The Chicago school board put a , even as .

With school closures come questions of equity and fairness. In many cities, the schools with the lowest enrollment serve mostly students of color. But keeping those schools open might mean students don’t have the same resources as their peers in other neighborhoods. Some advocates have to give students a shot at a better education. That approach harkens back to education reform policies that have largely fallen out of favor.

Many school districts are also trying to limit layoffs, which could reduce the savings they see from school closures. Districts are also trying to find ways to maintain tutoring and counseling programs they started during the pandemic.

NAEP could add to discouraging post-pandemic scores

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, are expected in early 2025. The tests were given in spring 2024 and will provide insight into the state of student learning four years after COVID school closures.

The results are much anticipated after a series of tests, studies, and analyses have painted a conflicting but often discouraging picture of student recovery. Most recently, a major international test showed that , with the declines concentrated among lower performing students. This widening gap between high- and low-performing students was .

Similarly, state and local test results show gaps based on income, race, and ethnicity. A found that students on average had recovered to close to pre-pandemic levels, a surprising outcome, but that analysis also found that academic inequality was growing.

Meanwhile, are showing delays, as are .

The big question going forward is: What are we going to do about the state of student learning?

Statewide efforts to improve math and reading instruction continue to gather steam, but for better or for worse, schools with low test scores don’t face many consequences. The research on aggressive school turnaround efforts is decidedly mixed. Democrats have largely backed away from test-based accountability, and Republicans are more focused on expanding school choice.

How states and Congress could expand school choice

Private school choice has exploded in recent years, with a dozen states now running universal or near-universal voucher or education savings accounts programs that give parents money to send their children to private school or educate them at home.

Trump’s election could give these efforts a boost. He’s promised to expand school choice, and Republicans in Congress are making another push on a federal tax-credit scholarship proposal championed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that could make billions available, including in Democratic states that have been hostile to vouchers and education savings accounts.

At the state level, many anti-voucher Republicans who had teamed up with Democrats to block private school choice lost their primaries as outside money poured into obscure legislative races. Now pro-school choice governors and lawmakers are making new pushes in , , , and elsewhere.

These coalitions could still fracture. A major voucher expansion seemed inevitable in Tennessee this year until disagreements over testing requirements and funding sank the deal. Now to expand them.

The meaning of high school is changing

Education advocates for years focused on getting more students to and through college. We still haven’t solved that problem, but a lot of the shine has come off “college for all.” Student debt concerns loom large, and there are widespread labor shortages in the trades. for , which is also being touted as a way to fight disengagement.

At the same time, states are ditching exit exams. This year Massachusetts voters overturned a requirement that students pass a standardized test to graduate high school, and starting in the 2027-28 school year. New Jersey — one of just six states to still have an exit exam — .

All of this is fueling a conversation about the meaning of high school, one that’s resurfaced periodically since the high school movement in the first half of the 20th century .

That played out in Indiana this year with the . An initial proposal called for to reflect that fewer Indiana students are attending college. To satisfy critics who said work requirements would make it , the state ultimately settled on a diploma that offers multiple pathways.

Other states, such as Colorado, are developing programs that alongside classroom learning.

But .

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 .

COLUMBIA — The Williamsburg County school board will be able to start making decisions again with oversight from the state Department of Education, marking the first move toward regaining local control in six years.

The rural, county-wide district of 2,800 students — located in the Pee Dee between Sumter and Georgetown — has been under the state’s control since 2018, meaning the district Board of Trustees can meet but can’t make any decisions for the district.

The return of some power is the first step in returning control to the locally elected board members, according to a Tuesday news release.

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“We’re excited to serve in the capacity the citizens elected us,” said board Chair Marva Cannion, who was elected in 2019.

A report on the district’s improvements, which a state budget clause requires the state education agency to produce, could offer other poor, struggling school districts some insights into how they might boost performance and avoid a state takeover, Rep. Roger Kirby, D-Lake City, told the SC Daily Gazette on Wednesday. The directive in the state budget was his idea.

When the state first stepped in under then-state Superintendent Molly Spearman, the district was in dire straits financially and academically.

Officials had to repay more than $280,000 to the federal government and use another $368,000 to hire help in following federal spending and reporting requirements, at the time. Less than a quarter of all students could read on grade level, and even fewer third- through eighth-graders were passing their state-required math tests, according to state education data.

The district had been under notice for three years by that point, but little had changed, Cannion said. When Spearman declared a state of emergency and outlined the issues, Cannion agreed something had to happen, she told the Daily Gazette.

“At the time, it was warranted,” Cannion said of the state takeover. “But it is now time, definitely, for local governance.”

Improving grades

District officials thought they had hit the goals Spearmen set for them by 2022. The district’s finances were in order. The past several years of audits found no major issues. And students were improving academically, Cannion said.

When state Superintendent Ellen Weaver started her term last year, she gave a more specific benchmark. All eight of the district’s elementary through high schools needed to be rated at least “average,” Cannion said the department told board members. As of 2022-2023, the district still had three schools falling behind that goal.

When the state for last school year, though, officials saw marked improvements.

The scores were enough for to receive at least an average rating, which takes into account student progress: Five received an “average” rating, two were rated “good,” and one — an arts magnet middle school — rated “excellent,” the highest possible.

Scores in every subject increased from the school year before. The largest jump was in the number of students passing their end-of-course Algebra 2 tests, which went from 20.7% to 59.2% — an increase of nearly 40 percentage points.

Improvements were even more significant when compared with scores during the 2017-2018 school year, the year before the state education agency took over.

On average, the percentage of third- through eighth-graders able to pass the end-of-year English test — showing they can read on grade level and are ready to advance — jumped from 24% to 42%.Ěý In the same group, 25% received passing math scores at the end of last school year, compared to 18% six years before.

Still, just in the district’s Class of 2024 were considered , while 60% met benchmarks for being prepared to enter the workforce.

Students’ performance remains below the state’s , showing the district has more work ahead of it. But the improvements are promising, Kirby said.

“It certainly is an indication that improvements are being made, but I don’t think anyone would argue there’s not progress to be done,” Kirby said.

The state department will continue to monitor the district’s progress over the next year and will discuss next steps with district leadership when the 2024-2025 report cards are out, according to the news release.

How it happened

Monitoring student progress and helping those who lagged behind played a major role in improving test scores, said district Superintendent Kelvin Wymbs, who was hired by the state agency.

After the takeover, the district started assessing students weekly to check their progress, Wymbs said. Teachers could then use those scores to determine which students needed extra help.

Teachers shifted their focus to what is known as tiered instruction, grouping students based on their skill level and giving them different versions of the same lesson in an effort to make sure every student grasped the concepts being taught, Cannion said.

That gave students who were struggling smaller groups to work in, she said.

Beginning in 2022, the district started offering specialized classes for eighth- through 12th-graders who had to repeat a grade at any point and were not on track to graduate.

Students in the program, known as , could enroll in middle and high school-level classes simultaneously, with smaller class sizes than typical, in an effort to make up any credits they may have missed, according to the district.

“These were students who may have been counted as dropouts,” Cannion said.

Partnerships with outside groups have helped give students access to opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have, such as that offers cybersecurity courses. That, in turn, encourages students to engage with their other schoolwork, Kirby said.

He credited Wymbs’ leadership in pursuing those sorts of opportunities.

“It’s those types of things that could create exceptional outcomes, innovative things that previously were lacking,” Kirby said. “There are new ideas that are yielding results that point to visionary leadership.”

Part of the change came from a shift in culture, Cannion and Wymbs said.

Teachers and administrators tried to drive home a sense of ambition and confidence in students, more than 90% of whom live in poverty, Wymbs said.

“Our students are competent. They want to compete academically,” Wymbs said. “I think we’ve done a good job of instilling the idea that poverty, your ZIP code, none of that matters if you really engage in what we’re trying to teach you.”

The district also hired security officers and started using wands as metal detectors at school entrances in order to bolster security and students’ feeling that they were safe at school.

And a hired consultant helped officials come up with plans and coached teachers, especially the district’s growing population of teachers from other countries, Wymbs said.

“It comes down to personnel and having people who truly care about student success,” Wymbs said.

What comes next

Other school districts, particularly those at risk of a takeover under state law, could use similar methods to improve their own academic performances, Kirby said.

Kirby’s proposal for the state budget directive came out of frustration from Williamsburg County’s board of trustees, who met with him. Inserted by the House during floor debate on the budget, it required the department to give legislators a report on why Spearman took over the district, what the state has done since then, and what specific benchmarks the district must meet to receive full governing powers.

The budget clause, which ended up in the state’s final spending package, was meant to give clarity to the school board, which was “truly almost in the dark for the past four years,” Kirby said at the time.

The report is due by Jan. 1. It must be provided to legislators representing the county. The entire delegation consists of one senator and two House members, with Kirby representing the majority of the county.

The report should give district officials in Williamsburg County a more detailed idea of what to expect moving forward.ĚýIt could also help other districts understand what, exactly, the department considers success in struggling schools and what help is on the table, Kirby said.

Agency spokesman Jason Raven said the department offers extra support to districts underperforming academically to keep them from getting to the point of a state takeover.

Three districts “facing potential takeover” — Colleton, Jasper and McCormick counties — improved in their report cards this year, he said in an email.

, the former state superintendent, took over three failing districts in a . State law has authorized such takeovers of schools and entire districts since 1998, but no other superintendent had attempted to take control of so many.

The other two were , which remains under state control, and tiny Timmonsville (Florence 4), a district so small that all of its students were on one campus. State control ended there following a with neighboring Florence 1, the county’s largest school district, which includes the city of Florence.

Kirby said the agency’s report could give Allendale County officials a better idea of what benchmarks it needs to meet.

Without that information, Kirby’s not sure what must happen to improve rural districts’ performances, he said.

“I’m anxious to see what the department is recommending,” he said. “What is their answer to this?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

COLUMBIA — It’s probably not surprising that students who are chronically absent from class tend to perform poorly on end-of-year tests. It’s the extent of the problem in South Carolina that seemed to stun lawmakers.

An analysis found that 1 of every 5 South Carolina students missed at least 10% of their school days during the 2022-23 school year, according to a presentation Monday to the Education Oversight Committee, an independent oversight group that evaluates K-12 achievement.

“One out of five? That’s a lot of kids,” said Rep. Terry Alexander, D-Florence, who’s among legislators on the committee. He repeated himself, drawing out one word for emphasis: “That’s a lot of kids.”

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Among those chronically absent students, fewer than a quarter could do math as expected, and less than half could read on grade level, committee researcher Matthew Lavery found.

“My data point is a very simple one,” Lavery said: “Chronic absenteeism hurts achievement — kind of a lot.”

On average, fewer than half of South Carolina’s third- through eighth-grade students meet math expectations, and barely over half can read well for their grade, according to . State report cards being released Tuesday grade elementary and middle schools based on how well their students performed on those tests.

Contributing to those dismal results are students simply not being in class for much of the school year, said Lavery, the oversight agency’s deputy director.

By law, the school year must include at least 180 days of instruction. The data analyzed absences over 115 school days, leaving out the weeks at the beginning and the end, so as not to count students who moved into or out of the state partway through a semester. But it did include those who switched schools within the state, Lavery said.

A student who skips 10% or more of their school days, including half days, is considered chronically absent. For the study, that meant students missed at least 12 days’ worth of classes.

The numbers

More students missed out as they got older, Lavery said.

In third, fourth and fifth grades, 15% of students missed 10% of the year or more. By eighth and ninth grades, that was up to 22%. And in 12th grade, 37% of students qualified as chronically absent, according to the data Lavery presented.

That could be because older students have more freedom. Parents usually put their younger children on the bus and see them off. But high schoolers who drive or have another way of getting to school might find it easier to cut class, said Sen. Kevin Johnson, a former school board member in Clarendon County.

“These higher grades, these students may not be going to school, and parents may not even be aware of it,” the Manning Democrat said.

Nationally, more students have been absent since the years of virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the 2019-20 school year, 13% of students were chronically absent. In the 2021-22 school year, that spiked to 28%, and in 2022-23, it was 26% nationally, according to data presented to the committee.

That could be because of a shift in attitudes toward virtual learning as opposed to classroom instruction, committee members said.

“A lot of the time, if you’re working from home, you think your child can do the same thing,” said Dana Yow, director of the oversight agency.

But the more a student misses school, the more likely they are to fail the benchmark tests the state uses to gauge achievement, according to the report.

For instance, 23% of students who missed at least 12 school days got a passing score on the end-of-year math test, compared to 47% of those who missed fewer days.

The same pattern was true for reading, with 40% of chronically absent students getting a passing grade for English language arts, compared to 60% of other students.

And 26% of chronically absent students received a passing science score, compared to 49% who were not chronically absent, according to the presentation.

Test scores worsened the more often a student was absent.

Among middle school students considered “extremely chronically absent,” meaning they missed 20% of the school year or more, 8% met math expectations.

In high school, 12% of extremely chronically absent students could do math at grade level, according to committee data.

“This impact is big for being chronically absent at all, but it’s severe when you’re extremely chronically absent,” Lavery said.

Changing schools can also affect a child’s performance.

Regardless of absences, 22% of students who switched schools partway through the year could do math and 34% could read on grade level. Among those who didn’t switch, 42% could do math as expected, and 57% could read, according to the data.

“To me, the takeaway here is go to school. Go to the same school. Stay there. Learn,” Lavery said.

Why students are absent

What causes a student to be frequently absent can vary.

The committee did not have data on the reasons. But member  said she had heard from students who worked long hours at night to help pay bills, which made them too tired to come to school the next day. Other long absences are due to families going on long vacations in the middle of the semester.

“We’re battling (absences) across all socioeconomic” groups, said Pender, principal at Coosa Elementary School in Beaufort County and a former teacher of the year.

In other cases, it could just be that students and parents don’t understand why their child needs to go to school, said Melanie Barton, the governor’s education adviser.

“I am fearful that this is now a cultural shift for all kids, that they just don’t see the value, and parents don’t see the value anymore,” said Barton, the agency’s former director.

That’s especially true among high school juniors and seniors who may be considering going into a field that doesn’t require a high school diploma or college degree.

When Sen. Dwight Loftis worked as an insurance agent, students would sometimes shadow him and tell him they were considering dropping out because they didn’t need to finish school, the Greenville Republican said.

“I’ve heard some other talk from other students who begin to think about what they want to do career-wise: What is the incentive to stay in school that they don’t see?” Loftis said. “They don’t get it.”

What to do

By law, school officials and parents are supposed to jointly figure out how to get those students back in class.

After three consecutive absences or five total absences unapproved by administrators, state law requires school officials to develop a plan alongside the absent student and their parents. If a child continues not to show up to school, district officials can then refer them to family court, according to the state Department of Education.

Making a change could be a matter of making sure schools enforce that rule, said Rep. Neal Collins.

“State law already contemplates this question, and it’s not enforced,” the Easley Republican said. “Locally, statewide — it’s just not enforced.”

Or, state education officials and local school leaders might need to do more to hammer home just how important it is for students to go to school and what children are losing by missing classes, Lavery said.

“If the student doesn’t understand the benefit of being here, it’s definitely going to be more challenging to get them to be here,” Lavery said. “And it might suggest that we could do a better job of narrating that, to make it clear to students what they stand to gain and, if they are not seeing the benefit, then changing our delivery or changing our approach so they can find that benefit.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

Over the last three years, Maui Waena Intermediate has invested nearly $300,000 in Covid-19 relief funds in its after-school program, hiring more staff and adding new programs to help students recover academically and socially from the pandemic.

The Valley Isle school’s extracurricular offerings have been a big draw for students, and class attendance has been steadily improving.

“They’re more connected and they want to come to school,” said Jennifer Suzuki, Maui Waena’s media teacher and after-school coordinator.

But while the increased after-school offerings may be drawing more kids to campus, the infusion of pandemic-era funding hasn’t achieved its primary goal: improving academic achievement. Only 26% of students at the school were proficient in math in the 2023-24 school year — the same as the year before, and a slight dip from the year before that.

Maui Waena’s struggles are reflective of a broader challenge in the state. Academic test scores in Hawaii have essentially flatlined for the last three years, despite an infusion of over $600 million in federal support to help schools address pandemic-era challenges, including learning loss.

Test scores released last month showed that 52% of Hawaii students were proficient in language arts last year, compared to 54% in the 2018-19 school year. Approximately 40% of students were proficient in math, down from 43% before the pandemic.

Advocates have been calling for years for the Hawaii Department of Education to provide greater detail about how schools are spending Covid relief funds. With funding ending this fall, a bigger concern is emerging over the lack of information about what the federal investment has achieved.

Principals say federal funds have supported student learning by enabling schools to purchase new curricula, hire more staff and expand access to tutoring and after-school programs. But there’s little information on what initiatives have resulted in the greatest student improvements, even though school leaders will likely need to convince lawmakers next year that the state should spend its own money to continue pandemic-era programs.

The DOE said in 2021 that it would fund a  to assess how different strategies helped middle school students recover from the pandemic, but spokesperson Nanea Ching said the initiative hasn’t been started. She did not say if the department still plans to move forward with the study.

In some cases, it’s too early to tell which federal investments drove the greatest gains in student learning during the pandemic, said Ash Dhammani, a policy data analyst at the . The long-term effects of programs from the pandemic may also depend on whether schools can use state funding to replace federal funds, he added. 

“It’s really important to highlight now, are we doing right by our students,” Dhammani said, “and did we do enough with this one-time money?” 

Covid Funds Spent On Variety Of School Needs

Hawaii schools experienced a smaller drop in student achievement during the pandemic than most states, but it’s concerning that progress has stalled in recent years, said David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN.

Improving student achievement was already a major issue in Hawaii before the pandemic. In early 2020, former superintendent Christina Kishimoto  of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in math and reading by the end of the decade. Some educational advocates deemed her plan as overly ambitious but recognized that schools needed to progress at a faster rate.

A revised DOE plan calls for 65% of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in reading and 50% in math by 2029.

In a Board of Education meeting last month, DOE Assistant Superintendent Elizabeth Higashi said Hawaii is following a national pattern of states seeing small to no improvements in academics. Attendance remains a challenge for some Hawaii schools, she said, which also reduces students’ learning time. Roughly a quarter of students were chronically absent from school last year.

In the final round of federal Covid relief funding, DOE received over $412 million to spend between 2021 and 2024. The DOE had to spend at least a quarter of the funds to address learning loss and support after-school and summer programs, but school leaders received a large degree of freedom on how to spend the remaining dollars.

Compared to other states, Dhammani said, Hawaii has done a good job of publishing  on the status of its federal funds, although the spending categories referenced in the monthly reports could be more detailed.

Some federal funds supported statewide initiatives, like free summer school classes, professional development for teachers and tutoring for middle school students. Complex areas also received nearly $170 million for individual school efforts to improve attendance and support academic and mental health needs.

For example, Kaneohe Elementary hired a social worker to support struggling families, while Keelikolani Middle School created an attendance arcade where students could play games before school and receive rewards for coming to class on time. 

“The funds were like a godsend,” said Keelikolani Middle School Principal Joe Passantino. Since 2021, the school has surpassed its pre-pandemic state test scores in both math and reading.

But while principals say federal funds helped students recover from the effects of online learning, it’s been harder to track which strategies were most effective, especially when statewide academic progress has slowed in recent years.

For example, Sun-Miyashiro is interested in how the department funded tutoring programs during the pandemic and if schools were able to reach students who were struggling the most.

“It would be great to have data linked with activities and then be able to show how that had a meaningful impact,” Sun-Miyashiro said.

With so many different uses for federal relief funds, it’s hard to determine which programs have resulted in the greatest success, Deputy Superintendent of Academics Heidi Armstrong said. In some cases, she added, investments in initiatives like new reading curriculum or regular screeners for students’ academics and mental health can benefit schools even after the federal funds expire.

“It’s very difficult to separate each one of those to say, this is what got us back to pre-pandemic levels, because there’s so many factors involved,” Armstrong said. “We are working very diligently to ensure that we continue on this trajectory.” 

What Happens When Pandmic Funds Run Out?

While tracking the impact of federal dollars has been difficult, school administrators say the funding has been critical in connecting students with additional staff and resources that didn’t exist before the pandemic. Some are now worried that they won’t be able to sustain vital programs unless the state steps in with additional support.

At Lanakila Elementary, math and reading scores have met or surpassed their pre-pandemic levels. Using federal relief funds, principal Kerry Higa hired five additional teachers who could provide more individualized support to students by working with them in small groups.

The additional staff positions alone can’t account for the improved scores, Higa said, but having more quality teachers on campus has gone a long way, especially as students struggled to communicate and express themselves as they returned to in-person learning.

But as federal funds expire this year, the school has been unable to keep one of its teachers on staff, Higa said. He’s worried that other statewide programs, like free summer school, could also come to an end and provide fewer opportunities for his students to learn outside of class.

DOE received just over $20 million from the Legislature to replace federal funds and  in 2025 but will need to request more money to sustain the program in the future. Over the past three years, DOE spent roughly $40 million in federal funding on summer programs.

The state may be able to fill in some funding gaps for programs like summer school and tutoring, Sun-Miyashiro said, but the department will need to make a strong case for continuing these initiatives during the 2025 legislative session.

Deborah Bond-Upson, president of Parents for Public Schools of Hawaii and interim director of the Hui for Excellence in Education, said she’s worried about what the end of federal funding could mean for students. But she’s interested in tracking how the pandemic-era investments in professional development and technology for schools will serve students in the coming years.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Training adults on how the brain learns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Using the time we do have differently’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Guilty of chasing the next greatest thing’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NORTHFIELD — Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan stepped in for Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday and greeted students on the first day of school, in an annual tradition

Flanagan, who visited a school in St. Anthony and later Greenvale Park Elementary in Northfield, is taking on a higher profile as Walz barnstorms the country as the vice presidential nominee for president.

Flanagan served Northfield students cheese pizza, which was a subtle plug for a signature achievement of the Walz-Flanagan administration and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-controlled Legislature, which passed universal free school meals in 2023.

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Flanagan’s visit comes less than a week after the state released Minnesota students’ math and reading scores, which Fewer than half of tested students in the 2023-2024 school year met state proficiency standards in reading and math, which is unchanged from the year prior.

The data indicate Minnesota students have not yet recovered from learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Flanagan told reporters on Tuesday that the test scores don’t reflect all the investments the Minnesota Legislature has made into education, particularly toward reading through the Read Act.

In 2023 the DFL-controlled Legislature passed historic education funding, including $75 million for the Read Act, which focuses on phonics, or the sounding out of words. This year the Legislature passed an additional $35 million to support teachers while they learn how to teach the Read Act curriculum.

“I am confident that those scores are going to go up, and as lieutenant governor I care tremendously about it. But as Siobhan’s mom, I really care about it,” Flanagan said. “I believe there are parents across the state who want to see achievement go up. So do I, and I think we’re on our way with the investments we’ve made in the last few years.”

The Department of Education last week in a statement said something similar regarding the stagnant test scores.

“Long-term key investments from the 2023 legislative session are currently being implemented, including the largest funding increase for K-12 education in state history,” the Department of Education said. “Once fully implemented, these investments will positively impact students for many years to come.”

In the meantime, Flanagan said that rising attendance rates are an important first step.

“Attendance is one of those things that we know will help close that gap… I am confident that what we have in place, having kids in school, our incredible educators — I think test scores will go up. And just encourage our families and encourage our students to get to school. It really, really matters,” Flanagan said.

According to data released last week, about three-quarters of students attended school regularly in 2023, up about 5 percentage points from the prior year. But attendance rates still remain significantly lower than in the years prior to the pandemic, when about 85% of students attended regularly.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

Virginia students’ reading and math assessments for the 2023-24 school year saw some improvement over last year after months of recovery efforts, according to data released by the Department of Education Tuesday. However, pass rates in other subjects are still behind results from the 2022-23 school year.

Pass rates for grades 3 through 8 in reading, math, and science Standards of Learning tests all showed increases statewide by at least 1%. Writing showed the highest increase — 17 percentage points — while history and social science saw little gain, less than a percentage point.

The Standards of Learning tests (SOLs) are used in Virginia to measure student learning and achievement in mathematics, reading, science, writing, and history and social science. Testing was suspended during 2020-21, when many schools around the state stopped in-person instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In 2023-24, roughly 71% of Virginia students passed the math tests compared to 82% before the pandemic. On reading tests, 77.5% of students overall passed compared to 73% before the pandemic.

The administration has regularly the results of the learning loss on prior Boards of Education that changed the state’s standards of school accreditation and required to be considered proficient in a certain subject, on student assessments. Democrats and previous board members have defended such decisions.

“Every single one of our data releases is a snapshot into a motion picture, and I’m pleased today that the motion picture will, in fact, show that a ship that was off course has been turned around, and that we are seeing progress,” said Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “but we will also say today that we have a long way to go.”

Last September, the administration, troubled by the significant learning loss in reading and math, dedicated $418 million through the 2025-26 school year to the problem. The administration launched “high-intensity” tutoring programs and the “ALL IN VA” plan to focus on attendance, literacy and tutoring.

Statewide, schools hired additional tutors, extended instruction time before and after school, and focused on using the state’s free personalized supplemental math and reading resources.

The data showed a 16% reduction in students chronically absent in 2023-24 compared to the previous year. Students are chronically absent if they have missed at least 18 days of instruction for any reason, including excused and unexcused absences.

Data shows pass rates statewide increased for economically disadvantaged students, English learners and students with disabilities over the previous two school years.

Mixed results between counties

However, school divisions have had mixed results with pass rates.

Fairfax County, the largest school division in Virginia, maintained similar pass rates in reading, math and science over the previous two school years, but experienced significant drops in writing, and history and social science by at least 20 percentage points each.

Craig County, one of the smaller school divisions in the commonwealth, saw increases in all five subject areas.

The administration also praised school divisions such as Bath and Brunswick County Public Schools.

Between 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, Bath saw a 19% increase in reading scores and Brunswick saw a 21% increase in grades 3-8 math pass rates.

With schools facing the threat of All In VA funding ending in two years, Kristy Somerville-Midgette, superintendent of Brunswick County Public Schools, recommended superintendents work with their school boards, and local government and “be creative” with their funding and “look for opportunities to best serve students.”

Levi Goren, a policy director at The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, said in a statement that the increases in pass rates are “great” and the success is likely connected to the recent increases in state support for students. Support for students facing “higher barriers,” such as students from low-income families, students with disabilities, and English language learners, is still needed, Goren added.

“While today’s scores were promising for some of these students, we know that one strong year of improvement cannot make up for the continued impact of years of insufficient funding,” Goren said. “Sustained increases in state funding would help lift test scores and other outcomes for students facing greater barriers.”

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. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

COLUMBIA — Fewer than half of South Carolina third- through eighth-grade students can do math as expected for their grade level, according to .

State education officials hope to improve scores with a new $10 million program to hire math tutors, improve training and pay for resources.

A similar program has helped improve reading scores in recent years, though across the board, test scores are “still not where we need to be, period,” said Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association.

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On average, the percentage of students who ended last school year reading on grade level was barely over half, according to the state Department of Education.

Students’ scores on the math portion of the required annual remain behind where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019, 45% of third- through eighth-graders statewide could perform grade-level math, compared to 2024, when 42% of students met expectations. The scores also worsen the older students get. In third grade, about 54% of students were ready to advance to the next grade level, while only 30% of eighth graders met that benchmark.

That leaves high school teachers trying to catch students up to speed, since math skills build each year, said East, a high school science teacher in Rock Hill.

Meanwhile, reading scores have surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, though they remain low. This year, 53% of students met expectations in reading, compared with 45% before the pandemic. State education officials have set a goal that 75% of students test on grade level in both subject areas, though there’s no longer a year for meeting that goal.

Statewide improvement in reading may have come from the Palmetto Literacy Project, East said.

Starting in 2019, a clause in the state budget directed the department to set aside up to $14 million each year to hire reading specialists, train teachers and provide more resources to schools with particularly low scores.

The department hopes to boost math scores using a similar program. With $10 million in this year’s budget, education officials plan to hire math-specific tutors, buy better textbooks and resources, and improve training for teachers at schools where at least one-third of students fall in the lowest category of scores.

“South Carolina’s mathematics scores have consistently lagged and remain stubbornly below even anemic pre-­pandemic levels,” the department wrote as the reason for the program when requesting the money.

Whether or not that program proves effective will depend on how the department spends the money and how long it continues, said Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association. Math scores are not likely to improve immediately as schools work to implement the program and students learn the skills, he said.

“Turning around math scores isn’t as easy as turning on a light switch,” Kelly said.

While virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic likely played a role in students’ low test scores, it’s not the whole story, East said.

In math, which remains below pre-pandemic numbers, part of the dip could come from residual effects of students not learning fundamentals online. But most students should have had the time to recover, East said.

“We’ve been back at school for two years now,” East said. “I don’t know that we should still see scores where they are.”

Another likely culprit is an ongoing shortage in teachers, she said. The state had more than 1,300 open positions for teachers, counselors, librarians and other education professionals in February, according from the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement. That was down from a of more than 1,600 vacant positions when the school year started.

As teachers take on bigger classes, students are more likely to miss out on one-on-one instruction, said Kelly, who’s also a high school teacher in Richland Two. Other classrooms may rely on a long-term substitute who doesn’t always know the subject material or how to teach it, he said.

“You have large pockets of students in this state that are either in overcrowded math classes or in classrooms without a certified teacher at all,” Kelly said.

Poorer districts are more likely to feel those effects. Fewer resources often means fewer certified teachers, fewer options for struggling students and larger class sizes, leading to lower test scores, East said.

Some districts react to low test scores by requiring more tests, but that should not be the case, Kelly said.

Testing often takes away time during which students could actually be learning skills, and the scores are not always an accurate reflection of how well a student is performing. Instead, schools should focus on proven ways to best teach the material, he said.

“The goal is not to reach an abstract number,” Kelly said. “The goal is to help each student reach their potential.”

Students in Fort Mill (York 4) posted the best scores in the state.

Across fourth through eighth grades, at least 75% of the district’s students could read on grade level, and 76% of third-graders met math expectations. The fast-growing school district just south of Charlotte also posts the state’s lowest poverty rate, with 21% of students living in poverty compared to a statewide average of 62%, according to state agency data.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

English-learning students’ scores on a state test designed to measure their mastery of the language fell sharply and have stayed low since 2018 — a drop that bilingual educators say might have less to do with students’ skills and more with sweeping design changes and the automated computer scoring system that were introduced that year.

English learners who used to speak to a teacher at their school as part of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System now sit in front of a computer and respond to prompts through a microphone. The Texas Education Agency uses software programmed to recognize and evaluate students’ speech.

Students’ scores dropped after the new test was introduced, a Texas Tribune analysis shows. In the previous four years, about half of all students in grades 4-12 who took the test got the highest score on the test’s speaking portion, which was required to be considered fully fluent in English. Since 2018, only about 10% of test takers have gotten the top score in speaking each year.

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Passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement, but the test scores can impact students. Bilingual educators say students who don’t test out of TELPAS often have to remain longer in remedial English courses, which might limit their elective options and keep their teachers from recommending them for advanced courses that would help make them better candidates when they apply for college.

The way the state education agency currently tests English learners’ skills frustrates some educators who say many of their students are already fully capable of communicating in English but might be getting low marks in the test because of the design changes.

“You’re putting [students] in an artificial environment, which already reduces the ability of students to give you natural language,” said Jennifer Phillips, an educator with two decades of experience teaching bilingual students in Texas. “It’s a flawed system.”

TELPAS scores also account for 3% of the grades the TEA gives school districts and campuses in its A-F accountability rating system. Though they only represent a small portion of their rating, TELPAS scores might be more significant for school districts at a time when they have grown increasingly worried about how the state evaluates their performance. Several districts have sued TEA to block the release of the last two years of ratings, arguing that recent changes to the metrics made it harder to get a good rating and could make them more susceptible to state intervention.

TEA’s use of an automated scoring engine to score portions of TELPAS has also come under scrutiny after the agency used the same tool to evaluate short-answer and essay questions in this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the state’s standardized test that all students in grades 4-12 take to measure their understanding of core subjects. of using an automated system to score STAAR and list it as one of their complaints in the districts’ latest lawsuit against the state.

Testing English learners’ skills

When students enter a public school in Texas, they are classified as “emergent bilingual” if they indicate they speak a language other than English at home and fail a preliminary English assessment. About a quarter of Texas students have that designation.

Federal law requires Texas to assess English learners’ progress regularly. Texas is one of only a handful of states that developed its own test instead of using the exam used in other parts of the country.

Each spring, about a million emergent bilingual students in Texas public schools take the TELPAS exam, which consists of four parts: listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Before 2018, teachers with TELPAS training would administer the test at students’ schools. Listening and reading evaluations were, and still remain, multiple-choice sections measuring student comprehension. For writing, teachers would gather and assess a sample of students’ work in the classroom throughout the school year. For speaking, teachers would talk to students in one-on-one evaluations or fill out a rubric based on their observations of students’ English fluency throughout the year.

When the TEA moved the test online, it changed the testing environment and scoring method. The change sought to standardize the test and make the results more reliable, an agency spokesperson said. The automated scoring technology helped deliver speaking assessment results more quickly. Last year, the automated scoring system started evaluating students’ written responses.

In each of the four assessment categories, students get a score of beginner, intermediate, advanced or advanced high. Students have to continue taking the test each year until they score advanced high in at least three categories; they may score advanced in the other one and still pass. Before this year, students had to score advanced high in every domain.

Several bilingual educators the Tribune spoke with for this story said the low test scores students have received since the test was changed do not reflect their actual performance in the classroom, adding that many English learners communicate better than their scores suggest. While English-learning students’ scores have since 2021, the TELPAS scores — particularly in speaking — have remained low since the test was changed.

“It is a little disheartening,” said Ericka Dillon, director of bilingual education and English as a Second Language courses at Northside ISD in the San Antonio area. The district has about 14,500 emergent bilingual students, a significant number of whom are proficient in English but struggle to reach advanced high on the TELPAS assessment, she said.

“They’re doing the best that they can, but they still won’t be able to meet that criteria,” Dillon said.

In response to a Tribune data analysis showing that the average number of passing TELPAS scores in speaking dropped after TEA redesigned the test and introduced the automated scoring system, an agency spokesperson said, “It’s not uncommon to see performance adjustments when student performance is evaluated in a standardized manner across the state.” The spokesperson also noted that speaking and writing are by nature more challenging than listening and reading.

The TEA has vigorously defended its automated scoring engine, rejecting comparisons of the technology to artificial intelligence. The agency has said humans oversee and train the system as well as monitor its results. The TEA said a technical advisory council has approved the technology, and when the program encounters a student response that its training does not know how to handle, it directs it to a human to score.

This year, the TEA said that at least 25% of the TELPAS writing and speaking assessments were re-routed to a human scorer to check the program’s work. That number oscillated between 17% and 23% in the previous six years, according to public records obtained by the Tribune.

Score changes after human reviews

One of the reasons educators are skeptical of TELPAS’ automated system is how scores sometimes change when they ask for a review. Humans rescore speaking and writing assessments.

Last year, 9% of the TELPAS speaking assessments that TEA reviewed got a higher score; that number was 13% the year before. The automated system initially scored more than 95% of the assessments that improved after a second look, public records show.

Spring Branch ISD officials said the percentage of assessments that improved after requesting a rescore was even higher at their district. They sent more than 800 speaking assessments for rescoring in 2022, and more than a third got a better score after they were reviewed. The next year, about half of their submissions improved after rescoring, officials said.

“If the evidence from our rescoring submissions is any indication, the system leaves a lot to be desired for its accuracy,” said Keith Haffey, executive director of assessment and compliance at Spring Branch ISD.

It’s unclear how many assessments would lead to a better grade after a second look since most results go unchallenged. The number of rescored assessments each year is less than 1% of the total TELPAS tests administered. Educators say they have to weigh costs and time constraints when deciding whether to request a rescore. Reviews are free if they result in a better score; if they don’t, schools have to pay $50 per rescoring request.

In addition, educators say it’s not easy to decide which results to challenge because they haven’t had access to students’ audio responses. This contrasts with STAAR results: Written student responses are readily available online to districts.

“If we can’t hear how they did on TELPAS, we can’t say if this is where they really are or not,” Dillon said.

The TEA says district testing coordinators can request listening sessions, but some educators said the agency’s director of student assessments told them only parents can request the files. A TEA spokesperson said that person misspoke.

In response to district feedback, the TEA spokesperson said districts and parents will have easier access to all TELPAS responses starting in the 2024-25 school year.

Not an “accurate reflection”

Edith Treviño, known affectionately as Dr. ET, used to be the ESL specialist for the TEA’s education service center in Edinburg. Now she runs a private consulting practice helping students pass TELPAS.

TreviĂąo said she worries that the automated scoring system penalizes students who are fluent in English but speak with an accent, mix in a few words from their native tongue or stray from using academic language.

“Children are not supposed to answer like regular people, according to TELPAS,” she said.

To score advanced high in the test’s speaking portion, students must respond to each prompt with answers that last 45 to 90 seconds. They have two chances to record a response and they need to use academic language fitting their grade level.

But TreviĂąo said the prompts are often simple and do not require long answers. In a recent , she said some questions were like asking students to identify an orange.

Because passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement and scores only account for a small portion of campus and district accountability ratings, some schools do not prioritize helping students prepare for the test. But the results can affect students’ educational journey.

Many school districts enroll English-learning students in ESL courses, which can prevent them from taking certain electives and advanced courses because of scheduling conflicts. Teachers or staff might also hesitate to recommend a student to advanced courses if they are still taking ESL courses, Phillips said. Those advanced courses, especially at the high school level, are crucial to being competitive in college admissions.

She said any school policies that keep English learners from participating in advanced courses would amount to language-based discrimination. Nevertheless, she said it’s a common practice she’s observed in her career as an educator and while studying for her doctorate in education.

“It’s not in the law, but it’s in practice,” Phillips said.

Not being able to test out of TELPAS can also impact students’ experience in school. Kids failing to pass the test could internalize the failure, which in turn makes them vulnerable to further academic struggles, Phillips said.

“What this does to children’s self-esteem is horrible,” TreviĂąo said, particularly for students who can speak English well but have test results that tell them they are not proficient.

Carlene Thomas, the former ESL coordinator for the TEA who now is the CEO of an education consulting company, said she would like to see the TEA use more sophisticated tools that enable more conversational student responses to ensure TELPAS is “meaningful in how students interact socially and with content material.”

She added that educators should also help students by giving them more opportunities to practice speaking English during class, relying less on direct translation and ensuring they understand the stakes and structure of the test.

But as of now, she said, “TELPAS is not giving us an accurate reflection of where our students are.”

The full program is now LIVE for the , happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more.

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Missouri students are showing progress on standardized tests administered by the state, with results in some categories approaching — and even exceeding — pre-pandemic levels.

But in other areas — most notably English language arts — students continue to struggle.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education revealed preliminary scores in the Missouri Assessment Program, or MAP, to the State Board of Education Tuesday.

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Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a board member from Pasadena Hills, said she was “a little deflated that we didn’t see more growth and progress.”

DESE is implementing programs to address low levels of literacy, an issue throughout the United States, with interventions based on the science of reading and .

Westbrooks-Hodge said the intervention has worked like triage care; it “stopped the bleed” and scores are static.

“We made lots of great investments in the last two years, and I think we’re going to see the fruit of that as our score starts to increase,” she said. “All of these interventions are working. They’re stabilizing our educational system, and now we can start layering growth on top of that.”

English language arts scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, according to data presented Tuesday, with 56% of students scoring in the “basic” or “below basic” range. This percentage has held steady since 2022.

Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner of quality schools, said it takes “continuous, sustained focused implementation with fidelity at the local level, up to five years, before we start to see results on large-scale measures.”

She noted that teacher shortages could be impacting the scores, as a battle of the 2023-24 school year.

When looking at scores across all subjects and grades, there is an observable improvement since 2021’s tests. That year, 24% of scores were in the “below basic” range. That’s fallen to 22% this year, still higher than the 19% below basic in the  last pre-pandemic tests in 2019. The number of scores in proficient and advanced ranges are one-percent less than 2019’s achievement.

Math scores are exceeding pre-pandemic levels, with a one-percent boost in the advanced category compared to 2019 when looking at grades 3-8. Sireno noted that middle-school math has exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

Sireno expects additional analysis, especially as educators look at local-level data.

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 .

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

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

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

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

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

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

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

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

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

ADULTS ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED TO PRIORITIZE STUDENT OUTCOMES

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

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

COORDINATING MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE IS A CHALLENGE

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

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

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

VESTED INTERESTS DOMINATE EDUCATION POLITICS

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

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

ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

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

SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT

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

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

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

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

ALT-GOVERNANCE (MAYORAL CONTROL, STATE TAKEOVERS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PORTFOLIO FRAMEWORK OR PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT MODEL

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

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

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

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

LESSONS AND RECURRENT TENSIONS IN GOVERNANCE REFORM DEBATES

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

1: DEMOCRATIC PROCEDURES ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN DEMOCRATIC OUTCOMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINAL THOUGHTS

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

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

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

When schools closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact was deep and long lasting. In Maryland schools, test scores fell to an all time low, particularly in math.

In 2021, counties received funds to provide high-dosage (intensive) tutoring to students to close gaps caused by school closures. This funding ensured that students consistently engaged in targeted, supplemental instruction at least two to three times per week for 30-45 minutes per session.

In fall 2021, the Reach Together Tutoring Program (RTTP), a partnership program of the George and Betsy Sherman Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County collaborated with Baltimore City Public Schools to provide high-dosage tutoring that helps students access and master rigorous, grade-level mathematical concepts.

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The partnership was not new. In fact, UMBC staff and students have long worked with educators to not only support professional development and community programming, but also to educate, develop, and place UMBC graduates in teaching positions in Baltimore through the Sherman Scholars Program. Our growing partnership with city schools, ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund) funding, and our access to college students, allowed us to scale our previous efforts.

The program supports students in second through eighth grade who are selected based on diagnostic assessment scores. RTTP participants scored in the bottom quartile, which equates to two or more grade levels below where they should be. Tutoring occurs during the school day utilizing the “personalized learning” block, in order to minimize disruption to the core curriculum.

What makes RTTP unique is the hiring of UMBC students as math coaches. Math coaches work with a small group of students two to three times a week during the academic year for approximately 24 weeks. Using an acceleration model, coaches focus on high-leverage foundational skills that align to grade-level content. They receive extensive preservice and ongoing training highlighting cultural competency, mathematical mindsets and student engagement.

Our mission is simple: “We will facilitate purposeful math experiences that enhance each student’s math identity and accelerate their learning trajectory.”

In 2021, we were in four Baltimore City Schools serving 355 students and had 85 UMBC math coaches. Fast forward to today and we just completed our third year of programming in nine Baltimore City schools (Arundel Elementary, Cherry Hill Elementary Middle School, Lakeland Elementary Middle School, Westport Academy, Park Heights Elementary, Dickey Hill Elementary Middle, Fallstaff Elementary Middle School, Bay Brook Elementary Middle and Curtis Bay Elementary) serving 644 students.

Since 2021, UMBC math coaches have completed 45,586 tutoring sessions. This spring we partnered with the city schools to increase capacity and serve more students through the with a focus on grades six-eight. We are looking forward to expanding to 10 schools in school year 2024-25.

Is it working? We partnered with faculty from UMBC’s Public Policy and Education departments to complete a two-year program evaluation. Results indicate that participants of RTTP made greater progress when looking at test score gains and percentile gains from beginning of year to end of year when compared to non participants. Student survey data indicates that 85% of students felt more confident in math after participation in RTTP, with one eighth grade student from Cherry Hill saying, “I could get help, and if I got it wrong, they didn’t put me down.”

But there’s more. RTTP has not only supported students in Baltimore City, but has created a lasting impact and shifted career trajectories for UMBC students. Math coaches are undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from all majors, races, genders, and ethnicities.

We increased from 85 math coaches in school year 2021-22 to over 165 in school year 2023-24, when more that 1,100 UMBC students applied to be a math coach. Candidates from the Sherman Scholars Program participate in RTTP as part of their academic learning experience, giving them a hands-on opportunity to engage with students prior to beginning their teacher internship year.

Over the last three years, we have had several math coaches decide that they wanted to become teachers. They earned a master of arts in teaching and are now teaching in schools where they tutored.

Rehema Mwaisela is one such scholar who, after her first year as a math coach in her junior year at UMBC, said, “Before I was math coach in Baltimore City, I thought I wanted to be a mathematician, or just keep with math in grad school, but now I know my place in math is empowering Baltimore City scholars as much as I can with mathematical knowledge.”

She now teaches at Westport Academy. RTTP has created an exciting space where community engaged scholarship and partnership intersect and the impact is complex and far-reaching.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on and .