The Education Gadfly Weekly

I’m a little dizzy from the head-spinning. The same week that we saw the bleak new NAEP results, I read Paul Peterson and Dany Shakeel’s deeply researched piece on “a half-century of student progress nationwide.”

The former abounds with gloom about the dire and declining state of U.S. educational achievement and the widening gaps between population groups. The latter is an upbeat rejoinder to the doomsayers of recent decades and a well-documented celebration of half a century of gains and gap-narrowings in our school-going population.

What’s going on here? How to make sense of it?

In the end, sense can be made. The essential point is that different years are involved. The Peterson-Shakeel analysis focuses on the period 1971–2017, which is to say it ends three years before the Covid-induced school shutdowns that commenced in spring 2020. By contrast, the NAEP data released the other day deal primarily with the two-year effects of those shutdowns on student learning between spring 2020 and spring 2022. So we’re looking at both apples and oranges, and each has an important tale to tell.

What’s more, the long-term NAEP data (which are one of several sources for Peterson and Shakeel) themselves show learning gains in the pre-Covid period. From the early 1970s through 2012, both reading and math (average) scores rose for both nine-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds. Modest declines ensued over the next eight years, thereafter plummeting between 2020 and 2022. But the big pre-Covid story, much as Shakeel and Peterson explain it, was upward progress. (Seventeen-year-olds are a different and sadder story. Their reading scores have been essentially flat for fifty years. Their math results rose during the 1980s but have been flat or down pretty much ever since.)

The NAEP results that splashed all over the media this past week dealt exclusively with what happened to nine-year-olds between 2020 and 2022, and there the big story was indeed decline, with the declines far steeper for kids who were already low achievers and among poor and minority youngsters.

Later in the fall, we’ll know lots more, as the “Main NAEP” results to be released then span both grades four and eight, include state-level (and some municipal) data. They’re also much more easily sliced and diced a hundred ways for analysis, in part because the student samples are much larger.

But Peterson and Shakeel performed an important service with their fifty-year analysis, even though that period ended five years ago. Their generally upbeat conclusions are definitely a counter to the gloom of A Nation at Risk and the “sky is falling” mindset that afflicts many of us in the ed reform space (myself usually included).

They drew upon multiple sources, not just both versions of NAEP, including the three international assessments known as TIMSS, PISA, and PIRLS, and the gains they report were not just in average scores but also in shrinking gaps among student groups. “Black, Hispanic, and Asian students,” they write, “are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school.” Which is to say, it’s not white kids dragging the national average upward even as their minority classmates exert downward pressure. It’s that all boats have risen, some faster than others.

Just as interesting, Peterson and Shakeel venture into a fascinating explanation of why math scores have risen more than reading. It’s not that kids have quit reading or that devices and games have replaced books and magazines (though I continue to believe those do contribute). It’s also that certain kinds of intelligence have been rising faster than others within the population. The faster-rising kind, which they (and the psychologists they cite) term “fluid reasoning,” is more compatible with prowess in math, while the kind of intelligence that supports reading (“crystallized knowledge”) has made far smaller gains.

As if that weren’t enough, they also challenge Sean Reardon’s much-cited assertion that the “income-achievement” gap has worsened over the years in the United States. “Overall,” they assert, “the evidence points in a direction opposite to Reardon’s findings…. We find disproportionately larger gains for students in the lowest income quartile in both math and reading at young ages,” though they acknowledge that the situation reverses by the end of high school, where “the students from the highest quartile of the income distribution make greater progress.” (They note that PISA data indicate otherwise for American fifteen-year-olds, with scores slipping for the top SES quartile and rising for the bottom quartile.)

Peterson and Shakeel conclude with a number of provocative speculations and hypotheses as to what’s been contributing to the gains, levelings, and gap-narrowings that they document, both the influence of changes in family and schooling and “broader social forces.”

We know that test scores alone cannot answer “why” questions. They’re frustratingly unhelpful on matters of causation. When smartly analyzed and compared (as Peggy Carr and her NCES team did with the NAEP data and Paul and Dany did with a boatload of statistics), they can reveal outcomes and trends that we might not otherwise notice, including some that contradict conventional wisdom and earlier analyses. But what accounts for those changes and what might alter trends in the future—that’s left for us to cogitate, speculate, and agitate about.

Watch for more NAEP data between now and the mid-terms. Then watch the political fur fly. For now, however, I want to lie down and let the dizziness pass.

New findings released last week from the NAEP long-term trend assessment (LTT) suggest an alarming downswing among U.S. nine-year-olds in both math and reading between 2020 and 2022. The results were jaw-dropping: Across the board and historic declines for both high-achieving and low-achieving students—at a size and scope never seen before. Black and Hispanic children took it on the chin, and although it was less talked about, students with disabilities bore the brunt of the effects. Yet as stark as the news was, the verdict on Covid-disrupted schooling remains incomplete, as the larger tranche of data from the “main NAEP,” which will include a state-by-state accounting along with TUDA results from two-dozen or so school districts, plus breakdowns for charter and private schools, won’t be released until next month. In the meantime, the handwringing—and in some cases, cheerleading (more on that below)—will continue about what all of this portends vis-à-vis student academic performance in the post-pandemic era.

The chief cheerleader is U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Immediately following the NAEP announcement, he spun a cheery tale in the opinion columns of USA Today. There, the nation’s top education officer did his Leslie Nielsen–best to discourage readers from dwelling on the sobering outlook:

While we use this new [LTT] data to help sharpen and focus our plans to accelerate student growth, we also know that many of our students are on track to make significant academic progress this school year.

Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics—not reflected in this week’s NAEP results—show that a substantial portion of students who were behind grade level in at least one subject last school year caught up in time for summer break this year. At the beginning of the 2021–22 school year, about half of students were behind grade level in at least one subject, according to school leaders. But by the end of the school year, that percentage declined to 36 percent.

Wow. Sounds like everything’s just fine. Nothing to see here. But what Cardona glossed over—save for a link that few readers are likely to pursue—is the source of this “recent data”: the 2022 School Pulse Panel, a June survey of educators reporting, among other things, that they think fewer kids are behind than before. One would hope that this is true, but a survey? Cardona expects the public to consider survey data on par with, if not above, NAEP’s long-term trend results? Really?

But Cardona was not alone. Prior to release of the NAEP results, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) convened a panel of policy experts to make sense of the available evidence on student achievement. To their credit, their report acknowledges the difficulty of gauging the academic impacts of school closures without the consistent administration of state and national exams. However, like Secretary Cardona, the authors felt compelled to add a happy veneer to their otherwise somber conclusions:

Reports from North Carolina, Illinois, and Ohio identify grade levels and subjects where learning delays are smaller for low-income or minority children than for white children. Results are unusually positive for special education students in North Carolina, where some districts maintained academic growth rates during remote learning that were comparable to rates of student progress before the pandemic. As testing becomes more systematic again, studies that capture the variation in school, state, and district results are going to be essential to understanding exceptions like these and making policies to reproduce them.

While the impulse to find bright spots is understandable, it could prove misleading and a disservice if these “exceptions” are not borne out by NAEP.

To be fair, data from NWEA and i-Ready, which were reviewed as part of CRPE’s report, are reputable and generally credible, provided they have a good apples-to-apples sample. NWEA’s data finds that growth in reading and math on its MAP Growth assessments is comparable to pre-pandemic levels, although kids are still far behind. According to NWEA, “These signs of rebounding show that the hard work of educators and students is paying off.” Moreover, the NWEA team claims that students in the elementary grades have been able to make up some lost ground, especially in math, while middle school students have not. Does this mean states and districts should focus their energy and attention on sixth, seventh, and eighth graders? If so, what about the third and fourth graders that just tanked the LTT?

This brings us to annual state tests, which were cancelled in 2020 and messy in 2021.

About a dozen states have thus far released standardized test scores for 2022 (with more coming later this year or early 2023). Some omit participation rates; still others are not disaggregating their numbers. This is not to say these results should be dismissed outright, especially in states that succeeded in testing a large proportion of their kids in 2021 and 2022. But the game of musical chairs played by states with their assessments over the years, along with the political incentive to promote good news, should underscore the need to trust but verify. Which of course has been a primary function of NAEP for the past two decades—since NCLB—and should make us keen to see the “main NAEP” results that include state-level data.

Families and educators alike have reported that the last couple of years have been the most stressful in memory, but honesty about student performance isn’t punitive toward schools or educators, as Cardona would have us believe. Indeed, his messaging on all of this regrettably seems to reflect a desire to minimize and wish away any bad news from the pandemic. Parents and students deserve better. Although it would be wise to reserve judgment about any assertion that students are on the rebound until after the additional NAEP results emerge in October, there’s no indication that the feckless rhetoric will stop anytime soon.

Persistent school choice critic Steve Dyer recently posted a “takedown” of Fordham’s latest school choice policy recommendations. His attacks mostly focus on Ohio’s voucher programs, and most of his criticism is tired and misleading enough that we’ve had to address it before. I won’t do so again here. But buried among his many spurious arguments is a “recommendation” worth drawing attention to:

All voucher recipients have to attend the local public school for 180 days prior to applying for the voucher. If you’re going to take money away from public schools so kids they’ve “failed” can “escape” to private schools, shouldn’t you actually give the district a chance to succeed first?

It’s hard to know where to start with a statement that so unashamedly puts the financial needs of a system over the rights and wellbeing of people, namely kids. It is similarly difficult to fathom just how out of touch Dyer seems to be with anyone who might have had a negative experience with the district schools he champions. So let’s take it piece by piece.

“All voucher recipients have to attend the local public school for 180 days prior to applying for a voucher.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, 180 days is a whole school year. I say this because it’s important to realize that when Dyer recommends that state law require kids to attend their local public school for 180 days before they can access a voucher, he’s talking about an entire year of their lives. It appears, given the rest of his piece, that he thinks this year will magically transform the wishes of any family who thinks that their child’s needs can best be met by a private school. But what happens if he’s wrong? Does Dyer have a plan to return to that family and that child the entire year’s worth of their lives he’s demanding? Doubtful.

To presume to know what every child in this state needs—and to presume that you know it better than their parents, to the point that you think you have the right to tell them where to send their kids to school—is the height of arrogance. But to make matters worse, it’s not all parents Dyer presumes to know better than. No, it’s only certain parents who are required to take up this trial offer: those who can’t afford to circumvent the system. Families who can fund private school tuition without assistance are apparently entitled to send their children to whatever school they prefer, no waiting period necessary. The same goes for parents who can sell their house and buy a new one in a completely different district. Families with greater resources are under no obligation to wait an entire year to earn the right to send their children to the school of their choice. But everyone else? Take a number.

“If you’re going to take money away from public schools…”

Just like every other time this argument rears its ugly head, it’s a clear indicator that the system is being prioritized over kids and families. When you view kids as dollar signs, families having the right to choose another school is a threat. It doesn’t matter why they choose to leave. All that matters is that they did, and their chosen schools are accused of “stealing” money that their previous schools are somehow entitled to just by virtue of existing.

The problem with this thinking, of course, is that kids aren’t dollar signs. No school, regardless of its governance structure, is entitled to students. And the assertion that choice programs “take money” from public schools is willfully misleading. Various studies from both Ohio and elsewhere show that school choice programs don’t hurt district achievement or funding. Ohio data show that per-pupil funding actually increased between 2000 and 2019 in districts where charters and private schools have historically been the most prevalent. And while complaints about losing money might have been an understandable technicality when the state funded voucher programs through deductions to districts’ state aid, even that is no longer the case. The previous state budget overhauled the school funding formula in favor of a new system that was touted as the “fair funding” model by the same districts and advocates who are still complaining it’s unfair. 

“…so kids they’ve ‘failed’ can ‘escape’ to private schools…”

While the misleading and systems-first arguments in Dyer’s piece are offensive on their own, the quotation marks he places here around the words “failed” and “escaped” are particularly galling. Just because he doesn’t seem to have any firsthand experience with failing schools, and just because he doesn’t seem to know any families who have been desperate to escape, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Implying that struggling schools or families who want better for their kids are some sort of made-up fantasy is laughable considering the data and media stories we have on record.

Consider the following examples: Youngstown City Schools has been low-performing for years and is one of several districts that are either under state oversight or have come close thanks to abysmal student outcomes. In Columbus, an attendance and data scrubbing scandal led to bogus bonuses and criminal charges. Dayton is so consistently bad at transporting their students to school that media reports about transportation hiccups are an almost annual occurrence. Last year, the Bedford City School District temporarily switched its high school students to remote learning because of fights between students. And Coventry Local Schools managed their finances so poorly that they were on state fiscal watch for nearly two decades before tipping into full fiscal emergency for another six years. 

The point isn’t to denigrate these schools. Because here’s the dirty little secret that anti-choice folks don’t want anyone to know: Most choice advocates actually like public schools. I attended them from first grade on. I taught in them as a high school English teacher. I know how important they are to communities and democracy, and I want them to succeed. But I’m under no illusions that they always do, or that even the highest-performing school in a district is the perfect fit for every single kid. What I want—and what most pro-choice folks also want—is for kids to get an excellent education, even if that means attending a different kind of school. I want all families, regardless of their income, to have the same power to choose schools for their children that wealthy families who move to suburbs or pay private school tuition have.

If traditional public school advocates like Dyer want to champion high-quality district schools, that’s great. But at least be honest about who has access to them (spoiler alert: not everyone) and the fact that high performers can’t and shouldn’t give cover to low performers.

“…shouldn’t you actually give the district a chance to succeed first?”

The most obvious issue with this statement is a pretty simple, unanswered question: Why? Why do parents have to give public schools a chance? Every answer I can think of places a school, a district, or the system at large above the needs and rights of kids and parents. Moreover, I can’t help but think about all the experiences I’ve had that make a statement like this blatantly insensitive.

I remember being a teacher, and sitting in the living room of a potential student during a home visit with my principal. I remember this student’s mother telling us, in no uncertain terms, that she was choosing to send her son to a charter school because the district school across the street was too dangerous. She knew this from a variety of sources—from friends and family members with students enrolled in the school, from news stories, from activity in and around campus that she’d witnessed with her own two eyes since she lived nearby. If I had subscribed to Dyer’s belief that every family should be required to give traditional public schools a chance, would I have had to dismiss her viewpoint and tell her to enroll her child anyway, safety concerns be damned?

I have a family member with special needs. Right now, my family has access to voucher programs that empower us to choose the school that can best meet her needs. From Dyer’s viewpoint, that’s unacceptable. The fact that his attacks typically focus on EdChoice, and not Ohio’s special needs scholarships, doesn’t matter. By challenging the right to allow all parents to choose, he puts in jeopardy programs designed to serve families like mine, families who just want what’s best for the kids they love.

I grew up in Akron. My earliest memories are of a creaky old house with awful green carpet that was located just a few blocks from the Summit County Juvenile Court building and a mere two and a half miles from the current location of LeBron James’s I Promise school. Although there were several district schools nearby, my parents knew enough about them to recognize that they weren’t good academically or otherwise. So instead of enrolling my older sister and me, they sent us to a private school until we could afford to move to a suburb that they picked solely because of its good schools. EdChoice didn’t exist at the time. My parents made it work by depositing their tax return into a separate bank account, and then using those funds throughout the year to pay the school’s monthly bill. It’s unlikely they could’ve made this work for much longer, particularly since I have a younger sister. We were lucky the stars aligned before I started first grade. Lots of other families aren’t as fortunate. The idea of Dyer sitting at my kitchen table and telling my parents—or any of the other parents who sacrifice mightily to get something better for their kids—that they were wrong for doing so fills me with unutterable rage.

***

There’s plenty of room for disagreement in education policy. There are lots of folks who want what’s best for kids, but have different ideas about how to make that dream a reality. But it’s hard to look at this “recommendation” and square it with the best interests of parents and their kids. That recommendation is a lot of things. It’s paternalistic privilege that seeks to tell certain families what to do, and then seeks to limit their opportunities when they don’t listen. It’s willful ignorance about the reality that many students face when they walk through the doors of their local public school. It’s blatant disregard and disrespect for anyone who can’t afford to buy their way into the wealthy, high-performing districts that claim they are open to all when they’re not. But a reasonable recommendation for how to make Ohio’s voucher programs “good?” Nah.

Though many of America’s single parents do a great job raising their kids and getting them off to an excellent start in school and in life, research has long demonstrated that, in general, children tend to do better in two-parent, married families. A new research brief from the Institute for Family Studies offers yet more evidence of this basic fact.

Analysts Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox are aggressively binary in their work: Traditional families consisting of two married parents and their biological children are compared against all other family structures, including single-parent, stepparent, and families built by adoption. They used data from two federal National Household Education Surveys nearly twenty-five years apart: the first dates from 1996, and surveyed the parents of more than 17,500 elementary and secondary students; the second was in 2019 and interviewed the parents of just under 16,000 students. The authors focused on four negative academic outcomes of interest: if a child repeated one or more grades, if a child had been suspended or expelled, if parents were contacted about their child’s schoolwork, and if parents were contacted about their child’s behavior in school. They then examined the frequency of occurrences over time and in each family type, and compared the numbers based on factors such as parent education level, race and ethnicity, and the ages and genders of students in both family structures.

Overall, the incidence of all four outcomes was lower in 2019 compared to 1996. Reports of suspensions and grade repetition were down by half or more, likely reflecting systemic efforts by schools to move away from such practices. The incidence of schools reaching out to parents about student behavior and schoolwork was also modestly lower. In both surveys, however, students from non-traditional families were still more likely to experience these outcomes than their peers from traditional ones.

Zill and Wilcox note that the proportion of U.S. students living in single-parent, step-parent, and other non-traditional families increased a bit between the 1996 and 2019 surveys—from 41 percent to 43.5 of the total. This jibes with other data showing that the previous explosive growth of family units such as those headed by single parents has slowed in recent years and may even be leveling off. The proportion of students from non-traditional families who were suspended or expelled from school fell by 39 percent, the proportion who repeated a grade declined by 47 percent, and the proportion whose parents were contacted due to their child’s difficulties with schoolwork and classroom behavior both went down by 16 percent. Despite all this, their relative risk for these negative outcomes (compared to two-parent family peers) increased or remained the same. In fact, the data indicate that family structure is at least as strong a predictor of school suspensions, grade repetition, and student misbehavior as race.

The data do not allow for examination of the mechanisms responsible for the stark division in outcomes nor for possible differentiation among two-parent versus single-parent non-traditional families. The analysts thus conclude that no matter how or how much the American school climate has changed over the years, the educational advantages of being raised “by one’s own married parents” have stayed steady.

SOURCE: Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox, “Strong Families, Better Student Performance: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same,” Institute for Family Studies (August 2022).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show Podcast, John Bailey, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss what schools are likely to do—and what they should do—if hit by more Covid waves this year. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study that examines whether private schools that participate in voucher programs “cream skim” high achieving students and/or push out more challenging ones.

Recommended Content:  

• Bree Dusseault: “School Mask, Vaccine Mandates Are Mostly Gone. But What if the Virus Comes Back?” (September 2022).

•  Amber’s article that she reviewed on the Research Minute: Joseph Waddington, Ron Zimmer, and Mark Berends, “Cream Skimming and Pushout of Students Participating in a Statewide Private School Voucher Program,” Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (August 2022).

Feedback Welcome!

Have ideas on our podcast? Send them to our podcast producers Nathaniel Grossman and Lilly Sibel at [email protected] and [email protected]

Cheers

• The joyful beginning of a new school year makes us appreciate the blessings of education. —Tish Harrison Warren
• Exemplar programs in Texas and Tennessee combat pandemic-era learning loss by offering students high-dosage, small group tutoring. —The 74
• Merit-based education, which demands excellence and rigor, allows talented students from all backgrounds to achieve their potential. —Asra Q. Nonami

Jeers

• School closures caused more learning loss and mental health crises in children than the pandemic itself. —Daily Beast
• The fecklessness of education leaders during the pandemic reversed decades of progress in NAEP scores. —Andrew Rotherham

• A new study suggests that there is no gap in access to effective teachers between high- and low-poverty schools. —Education Next
• Two decades of research have shown that private school voucher programs improve educational attainment but hurt academic achievement. —Brookings Institution
• Researchers have known the effectiveness of structured, phonics-based reading instruction for decades, even as whole-language and balanced-literacy programs proliferated in schools. —The New Yorker
• The increasing focus on equity in education has turned off families from diverse backgrounds, leading to a backlash from the Asian-American community. —Jay Caspian Kang
• Education is just a tool to signify employability and lacks any inherent social value (according to one professor). —Brian Caplan