No, this has naught to do with the next election. It’s about an immediate target here at Fordham: to generate and publish some fresh thinking, mostly from prominent conservatives and other sensible folk, about the future direction of American education.
No, this has naught to do with the next election. It’s about an immediate target here at Fordham: to generate and publish some fresh thinking, mostly from prominent conservatives and other sensible folk, about the future direction of American education. We call it Education 20/20, and it got off to an awesome start in the final third of 2018 with a line-up of seven superb thinker/writer/speakers.
All of their talks and subsequent discussions at Hoover’s lovely D.C. conference facility are available online and will in time be readable, as well. And the New Year will usher in six more events with a dozen stellar speakers, to be followed, in 2020, with a book and much more.
Allow me now, about a third of the way through this ambitious project, to recap some of what we’ve learned so far—and to suggest why you, too, may want to take this unfolding project seriously, not only because of the accumulated acumen and articulateness of this all-star cast, but also because of the reminder it supplies that smart, right-of-center folks—we sought the kind who don’t do ed policy every day—are eager to think anew about important and perplexing challenges.
The courageous Heather Mac Donald launched us in September with trenchant insights on the timely challenge of school discipline. As we await movement from the Trump/DeVos team on this issue, Heather reminds us that “desanctioning” unruly behavior in schools (as elsewhere) invites more of it and ultimately harms the perpetrators even more than the apparent victims. We’ve got the “school to prison pipeline” reversed, she says. Left unchecked, the lack of self-control that causes kids to act out in school is exactly what later lands them in the criminal justice system. It does nobody a favor to let bad deeds go unpunished.
October brought a double feature from the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz and AEI’s Nick Eberstadt.
Kay went after the softness of American parenting and how this rests on both misguided psychology and misunderstood sociology. Our penchant to encourage self-expression among the very young may ready them for classrooms that abound with endless choices and seek to foster creativity in all, but that leads us—and our kids—into a “cultural contradiction” as they grow up ill-prepared to get to work on time, accept bosses’ directions, and work civilly with others. Latter-day efforts to inculcate “soft skills” in school does little to solve the problem, while distracting teachers from the “hard skills” that are the main reason to attend school in the first place.
Acclaimed demographer Eberstadt challenged the assumption that millions of today’s men are outside the workforce (and the unemployment statistics) primarily because they are ill-educated—and the further assumption that beefing up education will solve that problem. No, he said. America’s distressing increase in the non-labor-force portion of the male population is attributable in large part to deteriorating families (cue Ian Rowe, below), rising welfare benefits (especially disability), and “institutional effects,” notably the after-effects of mass incarceration. Yes, Nick said, it’s important to improve the K–12 system, boost career and technical education, and get serious about work-training (and re-training) for adults. But we oughtn’t expect miracles.
Last month, we were joined by Naomi Schaefer Riley (also AEI) and Jonah Goldberg, (AEI and National Review). After giving due credit to school choice for boosting the education and life prospects of many disadvantaged youngsters, Naomi dug into what else is required if the very neediest kids—those in foster care and otherwise without viable parents of their own—are to be successfully educated and helped to grow into well-functioning members of society. Some of them need residential schools and other kinds of schools that pay attention to their character, emotional well-being, and personal behavior, as well as help in making choices and following up on them. How to make this work without succumbing to nanny-statism is no small challenge. Stand by for more on this from Naomi.
Jonah tackled the combined problem of ill-taught, ideologically slanted, and misunderstood history, woeful civic education, and the panoply of factors associated with deteriorating civil society and civic mindedness. “Reclaiming the American story”—warts and all, yes, but also replete with heroes, principles, and triumphs—would go a long way to rectifying the latter. “A decent, patriotic, and most importantly, honest educational system would not shy away from the sins of the past. But it would teach these sins to imbue and equip students—i.e., future citizens—that while there is always more work to do in pursuit of our ideas, those ideals are the very source of our progress and prosperity.”
Our post-Thanksgiving treat was a doubleheader with Ian Rowe of the Public Prep charter network and Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner, AEI, and decades of leadership of the Almanac of American Politics.
Ian provoked the crowd—and conventional thinking—by suggesting that the structure of the families in which children grow up, particularly the presence or absence of two married parents, has a huge impact on kids’ achievement, yet our many ways of slicing and dicing achievement data are essentially oblivious to it. He wants to see this changed—and goes on to suggest that some of the effects and correlations that we commonly associate with race or socioeconomic status may turn out to be better explained by one’s family situation. He suspects that careful attention to these relationships would lead to fresh thinking about possible interventions and alternative strategies for addressing lackluster learning.
Michael Barone furnished a bracing, erudite, and concise informal history of gifted education in the United States, how it has sometimes ebbed and surged with compelling national need, and how it faces such persistent obstacles as allegations of elitism and “they’ll do fine anyway.” Wary of hyper-centralization—and the accompanying politicization—of such issues, he ended on a cautiously optimistic note, owing to the spread of choices and freedoms in education that place more diverse offerings on the table and make it easier to match students’ needs and talents to schools that will do right by them.
We, too, end 2018 on a cautiously optimistic note, both for this great project and its terrific contributors, with so much more to come, commencing January 9 when Mona Charen and Ramesh Ponnuru take the stage—and for the privilege of living in a country that, for all its blemishes, unsolved problems, and present-day angst, enters the future with a great deal going for it and its fortunate inhabitants.
Natalie Wexler is a name you should know, if you don’t already. A long-time education journalist, she has tirelessly championed essential work, serving as the board chair for Judith Hochman’s The Writing Revolution, and writing extensively and persuasively about the benefits of content-rich curriculum, our shared education passion. I’m eagerly awaiting her forthcoming book, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System—and How to Fix It. I expect it will top the best education books of 2019. Wexler’s is an essential voice and an authority.
That said, I’ve got a small bone to pick with my esteemed colleague. In a column at Forbes, she characterized a recent dust-up over school choice between me and Diane Ravitch, which took place at last month’s Washington Post Live education event. I favor school choice; Ravitch opposes it, even though we both benefitted from it.
It was “good theater,” Wexler wrote, “but it obscures the fact that the vast majority of schools—especially at the elementary level—offer the same dangerously flawed approach,” the kind of content-free, “skills-and-strategies” reading instruction that Wexler and I both routinely decry. “And,” she added, “the systems the government has put in place to help parents make good choices have only made things worse. How much value does choice have if there are few good choices and it's hard to identify them?”
I certainly share Wexler’s frustration with schools of choice that merely serve up a second flavor of bad instead of offering the kind of knowledge-rich core curriculum that disadvantaged children most especially need to reach mature language proficiency and close the achievement gap. Where we disagree, however, is that I don’t see school choice as irrelevant or even a distraction from the push for a knowledge-rich curriculum. It’s integral to advancing those efforts.
Teaching elementary school in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school convinced me that E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s views on literacy are unimpeachably correct. His work described precisely what I saw every day in my fifth grade classroom: children whose lack of background knowledge and vocabulary contributed disproportionately to their reading comprehension struggles. I was so electrified by Hirsch’s insights, which no one in my district or grad school seemed aware of or much interested in, that I resolved to work for Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation and to spread his essential ideas. It was the missing piece in my teacher training and what students like mine most needed and were least likely to get. Fun fact: The person who introduced me to Hirsch was Diane Ravitch, who was on the Core Knowledge board at the time.
Roughly 40 percent of all Core Knowledge schools in the U.S. are traditional public schools; another 40 percent are charter schools. (The rest are private schools; “CK” is also popular among homeschoolers.) Given that a mere 7 percent of all schools are charters, this means charter schools are far more likely to adopt Core Knowledge than traditional district schools. A strong majority of all Core Knowledge schools—charter and private—are schools of choice. The same is even truer of schools that follow the classical education trivium. The phrase “grammar school” has become a synonym for elementary education, but true grammar schools in the classical education tradition (students pass first through the knowledge-heavy “grammar” phase, then the “logic” and “rhetoric” stages) are virtually unheard of among traditional public schools. If you want a knowledge-rich classical education for your child, your options are limited to homeschooling, one of 300 Christian classical schools, or a charter school like Great Hearts Academy that offers it.
About two-thirds of nearly 800 schools that have adopted Great Minds’ Wit and Wisdom, a superb K–8 ELA curriculum that emphasizes knowledge building, are traditional publics; one-third are schools of choice, with charters accounting for 30 percent of the total—another indication that, although comparatively small in number, leaders at schools of choice are disproportionately likely to have been persuaded by the arguments made by Wexler and—for nearly four decades—by Hirsch. These schools have voted with their curricula. Parents who are similarly persuaded have voted with their feet.
Within a few blocks from where I used to teach, there are seven schools in the highly successful Icahn Charter school network led by Jeffrey Litt, a Core Knowledge pioneer who was among the first school leaders in the nation to adopt the CK curriculum while a principal in a New York City Department of Education school. Another nearby network of South Bronx Classical Charter schools would not exist without school choice. I’ve made extensive observations at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools; while they are not Core Knowledge schools, their curriculum as a whole clearly demonstrates the premium they place on knowledge building, offering science every day, art, music, and more. Even Success Academy’s devotion to leveled reading and balanced literacy, which Wexler has called out, and which initially raised my eyebrows, shows they understand of the role of knowledge as a critical literacy building block: The texts put in front of children are rich, demanding, and knowledge-centric. None of these schools existed when I was a public school teacher; none of my students or their parents could choose the rich and rigorous curriculum they offer.
These schools and many others are a proof point that school choice is neither beside the point nor even a distraction from the critical evangelical work of convincing educators that all children, and particularly disadvantaged learners, benefit from access to rich, curricular content. Indeed, if more low-income families had true school choice—with dollars attached—it would likely be a boon to the network of Catholic Partnership schools led by Kathleen Porter-Magee, another long-time advocate of knowledge-rich education for disadvantaged children.
I’ll confess that I didn’t start out as a school choice advocate. When I left my classroom my views were a lot closer to Wexler’s. I was committed to the idea of advancing knowledge-rich curriculum as a reform lever, an idea that I’m pleased to see gaining traction. My views evolved after realizing that choice is simply a more effective means of increasing the number of low-income children with access to it. Candidly, I also lost my appetite to impose “ideas so good, we’re making them mandatory.” No matter what program, curriculum, or pedagogy you favor, the best antidote to any top-down, technocratic impulse you might harbor is to sit in a classroom, watching a teacher implement your favorite flavor of curriculum, but with no understanding, enthusiasm, or buy-in. At the risk of heresy, I’d rather my child’s teacher were an ardent disciple of a curriculum or pedagogy I don’t like rather than make a forced march through one I prefer, but which has been imposed on her unwillingly.
It would be lovely if practitioners and policy makers were as persuaded as Wexler is and I am that knowledge-building—not literacy “skills and strategies”—should be Job One for elementary education, particularly for low-SES learners. But schools of choice that implement a knowledge-rich curriculum well and willingly are a proof point. The more of them we have making a difference for kids, the more persuasive the case will be to educators, policymakers, and parents.
In education, 2018 brought some worthy new beginnings. Policymakers, wonks, and teachers alike realized that large-scale education reform is waning, and that a renewed focus on instruction and practice is needed. This reckoning runs through our most-read posts of the year, which discuss high quality curricula, teacher policies and preparation, classroom instruction, literacy education, the systemic flaws that allow these classroom-level problems to persist, and more. The first seven articles comprise our top posts written by Fordham staff, and the last three include our most-read guest-authored pieces.
The top seven Fordham-authored posts of 2018
1. Direct Instruction: The Rodney Dangerfield of curriculum, by Robert Pondiscio
In response to a meta-analysis on Direct Instruction, Robert Pondiscio examines why this curriculum—which research has proven effective for fifty years—gets no respect. This article was also number one on “The Top 10 Education Next Blog Entries of 2018.”
2. An open letter to my ed school dean, by Robert Pondiscio
Robert writes to his education school dean—modeled after a letter from Patricia C. James to her dean at Arkansas State University—lamenting how poorly his teacher preparation program prepared him to teach reading. This inspired further commentary from Chalkbeat, Eva Moskowitz on LinkedIn, Education Week, and Joanne Jacobs.
3. Why don’t districts do the easy things to improve student learning?, by Michael Petrilli
Mike Petrilli offers two simple initiatives that school districts should implement to boost achievement: adopt an aligned high quality curriculum and establish a more rigorous tenure approval process.
4. Education reform is off track. Here’s how to fix it., by Robert Pondiscio
Written early in the year, Robert attributes the underperformance of education reform to a surfeit of policy and dearth of interest in classroom practice. Late in the year, Mike echoed this idea in another Flypaper post that elicited responses in the policy world and among the general public.
5. Secretary DeVos has earned our respect—and a dignified return to private life, by Michael Petrilli
Following the midterm elections, Mike respectfully advises U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to step down from her post and focus her efforts elsewhere. This provoked multiple conversations on Twitter, including recommendations for possible replacements and a response from DeVos’s press secretary.
6. NAEP 2017: America’s “Lost Decade” of educational progress, by Michael Petrilli
Mike explores seven story lines in the stagnant National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results—complete with national, state, municipal, and district data disaggregated by subgroups.
7. Dubious move to reject Advanced Placement, by Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Checker Finn responds to eight D.C. private school heads who announced that their schools were eliminating Advanced Placement courses, calling it off-base, disingenuous and downright deceptive, considering that their students still can—and surely will—continue to sit for AP exams.
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Our commentary would be impoverished without the valuable and varied opinions of our guest bloggers.
The top three guest-authored posts of 2018
1. High school reimagined (and we truly mean reimagined), by Jessica Shopoff, M.Ed., and Chase Eskelsen, M.Ed.
In this Wonkathon-winning piece, Jessica Shopoff and Chase Eskelsen, members of the K12 Inc. Academic Policy and Public Affairs teams, outline a personalized learning model for high school that ensures that graduates will be ready for college and career.
2. Expanding the important national conversation about reading, by Susan Pimentel
Sue Pimentel, a co-founder of StandardsWork and Student Achievement Partners, builds off of Emily Hanford’s “Hard Words” documentary by compiling a list of best practices and classroom resources for improving elementary school literacy instruction.
3. To spark a Catholic school renaissance, we need to put our faith in autonomous school networks, by Kathleen Porter-Magee
KPM, as we know her, the Superintendent of Partnership Schools in New York City, discusses the ramifications of America’s epidemic of Catholic school closures and a possible remedy.
Prior survey studies have found that providing adults with accurate information can alter their perceptions or actions. Recall how Americans think teachers are underpaid until they’re told the actual salaries of teachers. This study by Albert Cheng and Paul Peterson in the Journal of Higher Education takes a similar tact. It examines whether providing adults with information about college costs and college returns (i.e., earnings) changes their future post-secondary aspirations for their child.
Analysts conduct a survey experiment using a nationally representative sample of around 4,200 U.S. adults and estimate how additional information impacts whether they prefer a four-year degree, two-year degree, or no further education for their child. “Other adults” in the survey are those without children or with children older than eighteen, and they are asked about a hypothetical child. They divide the sample into four groups of similar sizes and randomly assign them to one control and three treatment groups such that differences across groups should be attributable to differences in the amount and/or type of information received. The four groups are as follows: 1) a control group without the information intervention; 2) a group that receives information on both the net costs and returns of both two- and four-year degrees based on national averages; 3) the net costs only; and finally, 4) information on returns to a two- and four-year degree only. Unfortunately, one has to hunt down the online appendix of the journal article for the precise amounts that survey respondents are provided (which this reviewer did not do!), but the stem of the question is simple. It reads, “Thinking about your oldest child younger than eighteen years, would you want your child to go to a community college to earn a two-year degree, a university to earn a four-year degree, or neither?”
First, analysts find that about 79 percent of parents prefer their child attends a four-year university, while nearly 13 percent desire a two-year community college and 8 percent don’t wish their child to receive any post-secondary education. Other adults choose the four-year option less frequently by 11 percentage points and the two-year option more frequently by 8 percentage points. Despite these descriptive differences, the treatment effects for the parents and other adults were similar. Although parents’ aspirations moved somewhat toward the two-year option when told about the costs only, and other adults moved somewhat toward the four-year option when told about returns/earnings only, the impact of sharing information about both was not significantly different for parents or other adults compared to the treatment group.
When slicing results by household income, analysts find that 79 percent of high-income earners in the control group (i.e., those not told anything) preferred the four-year option, yet that same percentage for middle and low-income earners was 10 and 26 percentage points lower, respectively. Despite these “aspiration differences” by income, providing information on both costs and returns to respondents did not reduce this gap. In fact, it widened it at the upper levels, with middle-income respondents shifting away from the four-year option and high-income parents towards it. Differences by education showed similar patterns: Providing information on the costs of and returns to college had little impact on parents, who generally wanted their child to possess the same or similar level of education that they have.
The results might have differed had adults been provided with regional or local data on costs and earnings, as opposed to national figures. And responding for a “hypothetical” child is likely different than responding for a real one. Still, Cheng and Peterson rightly believe that it’s going to take a lot more to alter the college aspirations of adults for their children than simply providing them with a data point about costs and earnings. Their desires are likely embedded in enduring regional, social, and/or cultural contexts. Perhaps parents should take a cue from Grammy Award winner Al Yankovic (yes, that’s right) and allow your kids to dream their own dreams when they grow up.
SOURCE: Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson, “Experimental Estimates of Impacts of Cost-Earnings Information on Adult Aspirations for Children’s Postsecondary Education,” The Journal of Higher Education (August 2018).
One of America’s wealthiest jurisdictions, Montgomery County, Maryland, is experiencing rapid demographic changes. The D.C. suburb’s Latino population has nearly doubled since 2000, and now comprises almost 40 percent of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students. In light of these changes, University of Maryland researchers Andrew Conway and Amy Lewin recently examined the lives and future expectations of these new pupils.
They compiled data from a variety of local and national sources to present a fuller picture of MCPS’s Latino students and how their experiences compare to peers across the country. They also partnered with Identity, a Montgomery County non-profit that offers academic support and other counseling services to local Latino students and young adults. Identity administered a survey to its own members, written to explore the prevalence of these national patterns in the lives of these kids. The results paint a worrying portrait.
Much of the report is set in terms of students’ expectations. Having “hopeful and positive expectations for one’s own future” is correlated with a number of positive academic and social-emotional outcomes, the authors explain. However, Latino pupils are less likely to report such expectations as other demographic groups, and that hope tends to decrease with age. The Identity survey found that, although 87 percent of those in middle school feel positively about their futures, only 76 percent of high schoolers and 67 percent of older youths feel that way. Latino students also tend to report depression symptoms—such as hopelessness and lack of enjoyment—at higher rates than others.
They also routinely score worse academically than nearly any other demographic group. Recent NAEP results found only 22 percent of Maryland’s Latino fourth-graders are proficient in reading, while 55 percent of white students and 27 percent of black students reached that level. (Admittedly, nothing to brag about!) In Montgomery County, Latinos have the lowest on-time graduation rates at 79 percent, compared to 88 percent for black students and 95 percent for whites. And while large majorities of teens in the Identity survey express a desire to attend college, only 10 percent of Latinos in Montgomery County earn an associate’s degree within three years of graduating high school. Of those, most needed remedial English and math courses en route to those degrees.
Maybe most concerning is the Latino dropout rate, which is higher than for other groups and is rising. In 2017, the dropout rate for Latinos in Montgomery County was 14 percent—nearly 3 percentage points higher than in 2014, and 10 points higher than for white students.
The survey also delved into adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), events or circumstances that are known to increase the risk of disease, substance abuse, and low academic achievement. Montgomery County’s Latino students experienced ACEs more frequently than their national counterparts, with the greatest difference among those who live with someone who has a substance abuse disorder (10 percent). They were also much more likely to live in poverty.
The authors sought to provide the reader a comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing Latino students in Montgomery County, but their presentation bounces among national, state, county, and Identity-student statistics so frequently that it’s hard to grasp a clear picture for this region’s youth. The main takeaway—that Latino students’ excitement for their futures diminishes over time due to a variety of negative external forces—is intuitive and concerning, but can’t be fully supported without several more years of tracking the same cohort from middle school to graduation and beyond. Still, the results reported here should worry any educator or reformer who wants to see all students get their chance to succeed.
SOURCE: C. Andrew Conway and Amy Lewin, “The Promise of Latino Youth in Montgomery County.” University of Maryland School of Public Health, Department of Family Science and Identity (October 2018).
On this week’s podcast, Ashley Berner, assistant professor and deputy director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins, joins David Griffith and Adam Tyner to discuss pluralism in American education. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the latest data on school spending, as well as high school dropout and completion rates from the Institute of Education Sciences.
Stephen Q. Cornman et al., “Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: School Year 2015–16 (Fiscal Year 2016): First Look,” Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (December 2018).
Joel McFarland et al., “Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2018 Compendium Report,” Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (December 2018).
